Travelling and staying on the ‘continent’ has shaped writers’ ideas of Europe and of Britain’s place within Europe; it has also impacted their work and its reception. British writers have crossed the Channel for a multitude of reasons, including health and recreation, education, or the wish to escape from their own country and its conventions and laws. This chapter highlights two periods of high mobility and exchange during times of prolonged peace between Britain and other European powers: the early and mid-Victorian years, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Case studies show how writers’ relationship with Europe is marked not only by their Englishness, but always also by personal circumstances: focusing on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Howitt attends to women’s places in Victorian literature; for the contemporary period, Julian Barnes and Adam Thorpe are discussed as well-known commentators on France and French culture. The chapter asks what attracted and continues to attract writers to Europe, and in what ways they and their work relate to European cultures and languages.

My hypothesis is that the beginning of the twenty-first century marked the emergence of a ’therapeutic’ way of writing and reading. Literature is viewed as a way of bringing literature and medicine closer together and extending a more general view on literary forms of attention and the ethics of care. With the example of French and Francophone literature, I suggest a relational turn defines the contemporary literature: literature is considered as a relationship – between the author and herself, between the author and her relatives, between the author and her readers, and between the readers themselves. Literature is a means of producing awareness and attention, that is to say, to point out, to make visible, to give importance to people or to situations that society and the economy do not make visible or invisible.

This chapter uses Don Delillo’s novel Zero K to consider the historical and structural relationship between bioethics and biocapitalism, particularly in the development of consent forms and contract labour. In this way, the essay examines the role human capital theory and transhumanism have played in influencing definitions of human nature and the bioethical frameworks predicated on these definitions. Using the techniques of literary narrative bioethics and feminist relational bioethics, the essay carefully interprets Zero K’s treatment of cryonics as a bioethical dilemma too often contained and constrained by historical and ideological conceptions of consent, which the novel seeks to critique. Ultimately, the chapter offers a form of posthuman literary narrative bioethics as an alternative methodology.

This chapter examines the rise of trauma theory as a prevalent cultural and critical concept in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Key critiques of the concept – both in terms of its clinical and cultural dominance – are considered, particularly of its Western biases, and of the self-reinforcing bodies of trauma literature and criticism. The second half of the chapter considers a range of American trauma texts, with a particular focus on the work of Toni Morrison. These novels are examined for their complicated relationship to dominant theories of trauma representation, and for the way trauma texts increasingly respond to broader contemporary cultural and social concerns, including global warming.

Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel, Loaded (1995), was hailed as a profound example of the short-lived ‘grunge’ genre in Australia in the late twentieth century, but his work since that point is not typically viewed in that context, nor is that genre generally considered to have continued or evolved since the 1990s. This chapter returns to Tsiolkas’s grunge roots and demonstrates the continuation and evolution of the grunge genre across Tsiolkas’s oeuvre as well as its influence on the work of other contemporary Australian writers. Through comparative discussions of several practitioners of grunge, this chapter examines Tsiolkas’s influence on and development of a critical genre in Australian literary history, arguing that the evolution of Tsiolkas’s grunge and his influence on other grunge writers depends on a simultaneous absorption in and disruption of the myths and identities of the nation in its contemporary literature.

The conclusion starts with a look back at literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s defense of comics during a nationwide campaign that led to the self-censorship of the so-called Comics Code. Half a century later, the rise of the graphic novel has dispelled most of the prejudices against comics but often at the price of an unduly narrow understanding of the medium. Critiquing the blindspots of existing scholarship on the graphic novel, the author discusses how the digital humanities can contribute to a more expansive conception of this genre. Drawing on important interventions by Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, this chapter emphasizes the need to analyze the interplay of socioeconomic factors and formal elements. Thus, the conclusion looks at the technical and methodological limitations that characterize the digital humanities at present and envisions future directions for research at the intersection of literary and visual studies.

The chapter continues the emphasis on color and considers its relationship to temporal settings. As James F. English has shown, popular and prestigious fiction have diverged over the last half century, with the latter effecting a historical turn. Section 3.1 establishes a similar development for graphic novels, yet in contrast to contemporary novels, this historical turn remains limited to the subgenres of the graphic memoir and graphic journalism. Section 3.2 turns to Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the contemporary as a historicizing account of the present and looks at graphic novels that span past, present, and future settings. Where a focus on historical settings highlights a shift towards graphic nonfiction, the discussion of combined temporal settings argues for the continued vitality of popular subgenres within the graphic novel. Section 3.3 examines the evolving relationship between color printing and temporal settings.

This chapter examines contemporary and emerging developments in the literatures of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It argues that two particular genres have recently taken root: stories about people previously overlooked by mainstream accounts of the era; and stories that approach the Civil War and Reconstruction as a source of philosophical meaning. The chapter explores the major iterations of these burgeoning genres and documents their ongoing evolution in texts such as George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet, Gary Ross’s Free State of Jones, and James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird.

While US military and economic interventions in the Caribbean as well as the protectorates of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands link these regions, categorizing the writing of Caribbean immigrants to the US is less clear. Contemporary Caribbean-American writing remains an amorphous category bounded by issues of language and ethnicity. Higher education and publishing practices frequently group Caribbean writers by their linguistic heritage or former European colonizer than by their status as migrants to the US. In addition, racial or ethnic identities mean that some writers are subsumed under an established racial category, like African American, while writers with Asian ancestry fit uneasily within established frameworks for Asian American literature. Despite these divisions, Caribbean-American writing shares many commonalities including critiquing US neo-imperialism, addressing the racism experienced by immigrants, and innovative uses of form and genre.

Today, colonial literary models are joined by mid-twentieth-century anticolonial and postcolonial models, and combine to constitute a rich archive from which Caribbean writers can draw in order to make sense of the region’s position within global capitalism. The texts considered in this essay demonstrate contemporary writing’s sustained commitment to rewriting the earlier texts that have shaped the region’s writing from the beginning, but now in a manner that self-reflexively considers its own regional literary canons in autointertextual ways. This chapter shows how contemporary writing develops trans-textual and trans-historical networks across generations and histories in order to engage with the possibilities for reconciling colonial and postcolonial history, in ways that can make sense of the present. Moreover, this essay also highlights how it does this through formal experiments with Caribbean literature’s own genealogical entanglements.