Taking the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature as an exemplary instance of the canonisation of world literature, this chapter examines the portability of world thoughts through the medium of the anthology piece. Framing the discussion with definitions of canon and anthology, it focuses on the twentieth-century volume of the Longman Anthology to understand world literature's negotiation of the universal and the particular. With the help of examples drawn from the literary works showcased in volume F, the chapter offers an overview of debates in the field of world literary studies around questions of translatability, literary comparatism, the public value of arts and letters, and the language of literature as a mode of cross-cultural contact.

Public administration might be viewed as a potential victim of populist-inspired backsliding. This chapter argues that when considering how to respond to populism public administration needs to recognize that some of its practices may have created an opening for the populist charge. Public administration may be a victim but also may have been an unwitting harbinger of the populist surge. The public administration reforms in vogue over the last two decades helped to create the conditions for populism. Performance management, citizen consultation, and evidence-based policymaking were popular managerial tools, but the evidence presented in this chapter suggests they may have encouraged a loss of public trust due to the way they were put into practice. The threat of democratic backsliding, driven by populism, should stimulate public administration not to hunker down but to search for better ways of operating in order to rebuild public trust.There are some positive signs of new thinking and practice.

This chapter provides the conceptual foundations for discussing the process and impact of co-creation as a mode of governance as developed in subsequent chapters. To do this, the chapter traces the genealogy of the notion of co-creation, discussing how it has become increasingly central to social science research, and defining the concept in ways that distinguish it from similar and related concepts such as corporatism and collaborative governance. Building on this genealogical approach, the chapter also discusses how recently developed theories may contribute to our understanding of the concept of co-creation and support its practical application. Finally, yet critically, the chapter will justify our attempt to elevate the concept from its original narrow focus on service production to a concept that aspires to become a new governance paradigm supplementing and partially supplanting Classical Public Administration and New Public Management.

Over recent decades, government policy towards the arts in Ireland has awkwardly combined a commitment to expanding arts participation and audience engagement with the support and nurturing of creative talent; or, to put this tension less benignly, a desire for visible, quantifiable ‘output’ versus the inevitably jagged creative trajectories of individuals. This essay explores the discourse and debates concerning the public value of literature, and relatedly the practice of arts funding in Ireland, from 1980 to 2020. It focuses, in particular, on the role of the Arts Council of Ireland and the influence of related initiatives such as the Ireland Chair of Poetry and the Laureate for Irish Fiction over the period. And it examines a fault line of growing significance between public support for the arts as a form of social cohesion and a championing of the artist, or artists’ potential, as a disruptive force.