The chapter reconstructs the biographical and political background to the most widely known project of the brothers Grimm, the Children’s and Household Tales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began the collection when they were in their twenties and Jacob worked as a civil servant in Kassel, partly under French rule. By surveying the larger repertoire of genres preferred by leading nationalists reacting to Napoleon’s occupation, such as propagandistic pamphlets and war songs but also collections of folk narratives, the chapter uncovers the specific ideological function of the folktale collection as literary proof of cultural nationhood. Influenced by the volatile geopolitical situation during the Napoleonic wars, the brothers believed that the state should coincide with the German nation as defined by linguistic and cultural criteria, and they thought that the independent existence of this cultural unit was authentically demonstrated by collections of materials such as their folktales. Nationalism emerged as an ideology crucially dependent on scholarly documentation, which the brothers thought they could supply.

Timon of Athens shows how basing one’s behavior on a shame ethic ultimately motivates killing everyone, even at the cost of one’s own life. Timon, whose self-esteem and pride were dependent on giving lavish dinner parties and gifts to his friends, feels overwhelmingly shamed and unloved when those same friends refuse to offer him the slightest help when he is unable to pay his bills – in response to which he declares war on all of Athens, enlisting Alcibiades to carry out this mass slaughter. This is a pattern demonstrated by the most violent prison inmates, who say they have “declared war on the whole world,” as well as by the “suicide bombers” of modern-day terrorism, mass murderers who commit “suicide by cop,” and so on.

Between 2009 and 2010, a Korean ethnic school in Kyoto in Japan was attacked by racist groups. As an attorney representing the school in the case, the author of this chapter was able to win a historic Supreme Court decision that affirmed the illegality of racial discrimination and ordered payment to the school of a large award for damages in 2014. This was the first ruling to acknowledge the illegality of hate speech in Japan. It triggered a national debate about establishing a new law against hate speech and hate crimes, and in June 2016 the Hate Speech Elimination Act, the first to address the issue, was enacted. To examine the impact of this law, the chapter first outlines the facts of and background to the case, clarifying issues about racism in Japan, then goes on to analyse the historical and social roots of that racism to assess whether or not the law is effective in combating it. The chapter concludes with a look at what has gone on in Japan since the Act came into force and what more might be needed to tackle the crisis.

Opening with a dramatic encounter between two angry lords and their opposing retinues of loyal men, Chapter 3 explores the role played by anger in medieval English legal and literary culture. Following a brief introduction to the field of the history of emotion, the chapter explores the etymology of several anger-related words in Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle English. Using John Gower’s Mirour de l’Homme, the chapter demonstrates the complexities of medieval English understandings of the passion of anger. Moving from literature to legal texts, the chapter then explores the language used in the plea rolls to describe sudden anger, long-standing hatred, and other emotion-filled states. The chapter closes with another Gower tale in which the sin of incest is treated as secondary to the damnable sin of uncontrolled wrath.

Having encountered the manifold ways in which anger and related passions are employed in the plea rolls in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 then situates those legal texts within their broader cultural context, including the notion of the Last Judgement as the dies irae, or day of ire. Acknowledging that anger could be viewed in some contexts as a commendable emotion, the chapter then turns to the many reasons why confessors’ manuals and popular literary texts cautioned against cultivating anger in one’s personal life. For example, the chapter explains how anger was perceived to separate a person from his or her capacity to reason and how anger might escalate from thoughts to words to violent actions if allowed to develop into habit. The chapter then closes with some reflections on the nature of provocation in the medieval English felony context.