Moving between an analysis of the canon as a critical mechanism and a focus on the physical limits and definition of Latin literature, the chapter reviews the very discourse of the canon and its impact on the field. The ‘canonised’ nature of Classics determines not just a hierarchy of texts and methodologies worthier of being taught and researched but also informs the very approach to non-canonical or ‘para-canonical’ texts. Any canon, in other words, is not just about what we study, it is also about how we study it. Opening up the canon is a dynamic and self-reinforcing process and one which involves both readers who embody difference (social, racial, gender etc.) accessing and studying an expanded and evolving canon, and texts that embody difference (peripheral, post-classical, marginal etc.) being ‘read into’ the canon by an increasingly diverse readership. Interrogating our canon of Latin literature, this chapter argues, implies a fundamental repositioning of one’s scholarly stance not just towards non-canonical texts but also towards canonical authors.

This chapter considers how Fantasy has been shaped by and shaped modern understandings that privilege facts, realism and scientific knowledge. It argues that while Fantasy has often been belittled by discourses that seek to define what is true, right and possible, fantasies have engaged in good faith with such discourses while serving as valuable means for negotiating their limitations. The chapter begins by discussing Enlightenment and its oversights, before pivoting to discuss how Fantasy was side-lined by discourses of genius that exalted authors and demeaned audiences, setting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Francis Jeffrey against more sympathetic appraisals by Joseph Addison, Charles Lamb and George MacDonald. The back half of the chapter explores how Fantasy engages critically with dominant rationalist and realist understandings that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, considering works including Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the animated series Arcane, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep.

This chapter explores some of the practices, interactions, and preferences of readers and fans as part of their lived comics cultures. Engagement with the medium has taken various forms, from casual readership and sharing titles among friendship groups in childhood, through to being a collector. Beyond simply involving reading comics, fandom can incorporate a range of other activities as part of an enhanced commitment to the medium, and various activities are touched upon. Further, it looks at how readers, both historically and today, have accessed their comics in varied formats and across many genres in Britain and the USA, linking their lived experience with production. In looking into these issues, the chapter engages with the work of various publishers, genres, and titles. It also engages with how reading comics and participating in fandom intersects with both age and gender, which this chapter adopts as lenses to look at constructions of childhood and comics reading. A final aspect of the chapter relates to how fan and reader interactions in these spaces and participation in activities often vary according to gender. Indeed, it can be argued that comics reading and collecting has been heavily gendered regarding both production and reception.

Two intimately related topics are explored here. First is a focus on the different addresses Plato conceives of in writing the Laws. The limitations in understanding of his ‘naïve’ audiences are what are most strongly emphasized: in the first instance the elderly and insular interlocutors Cleinias and Megillus, but by implication the citizens of the community Cleinias is imagined as helping to construct, and first time readers of the dialogue itself. Those limitations will be registered by more ‘practised’ readers. For that more practised readership, some more challenging passages of writing are supplied, with sufficiently indicative reminiscences of more intellectually demanding treatments of subject matter and styles of argument familiar elsewhere in the dialogues. Second is the dominant religious framework within which the Laws mostly operates, which acts as prime vehicle for its philosophical limitation. I illustrate this principally by examination of a passage in Book 4 which includes a myth about the primeval god Cronos, but also by discussion of the strenuously argued cosmic theology of Book 10.

This essay explores the ways in which the genre of medieval lyric illuminates womenߣs literary culture. Lyrics offer insights into attitudes to women and creative engagements with gender; sacred lyrics find special inspiration in the figure of the Virgin Mary. As Fuller shows, straightforward readings are likely to be simplistic: lyrics may both speak vividly to female readers and seem distanced from the lives of actual women; the context of virginity may be as relevant to male as female religious readers; and lyrics may address complex theological questions. Romance conventions are taken up in secular lyrics, as are conventions familiar from fabliau and anti-feminist satire: women speakers are repeatedly used to voice male stereotypes. Finally, the essay demonstrates the challenges of reading the womanߣs voice in relation to the ߢFindernߣ manuscript, a fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century provincial miscellany which includes the names of five women, who, it has been argued, composed and copied a number of the lyrics written in it. Fuller demonstrates that the manuscript raises complex questions concerning the relationship between art and life which resonate across the genre.

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.

Regional literature plays a bigger part in the ‘national story’ than is generally acknowledged in Australia; indeed, paying attention to regional writing intervenes in prevailing ways of thinking about national literary history. Regional literature does not sit inside a broader national frame, but instead intersects in dynamic ways in the production of Australian regions that map across local, national and even global coordinates. This chapter engages with the regional novel in Australia as an historic, contemporary and future-making force with diverse community investment. It maps the rich history of regional writing in Australia and assembles an account of regional literary scholarship, from the literary history of the Western Australian Wheatbelt, to Queensland’s mining towns, to Tasmania and the Northern Territory, to Gippsland and the Mallee in Victoria. It considers the scope of different studies of regional literature, and the ways in which regional literature has been conceived and received. While regional literary histories have often sought to highlight neglected or little-known literary works, some have also perpetuated narrow narratives of place through traditional definitions of what counts as regional writing. This chapter advocates an expanded view of the regional novel from the nineteenth century to today, acknowledging the ancient histories of storytelling and extending the coordinates of what ‘counts’ as regional. It seeks to affirm the influence of works of genre fiction which frequently have clearly defined regional settings but are not always included in national histories of literature. Broadening definitions of the regional novel allows a more inclusive account of Australian writing, bringing into visibility more diverse Australian places and texts.

A central concern of Plutarch’s works is what constitutes a good and honorable life, and they commonly claim to “improve” the character and behaviour of their elite readers, especially in politics and leadership. This chapter assesses this educational approach across the whole corpus, paying particular attention to works of literary criticism, works of practical morality, political texts, and the Parallel Lives. It highlights, among other themes, the importance both of comparison (syncrisis) and of examples (paradeigmata) drawn from history, literature, or everyday life to stimulate reflection. Though profoundly influenced by Plato, Plutarch is particularly concerned with the practical application of philosophical principles to real-life situations, whether faced by the statesmen of the past or by his own readers. Indeed, rather than preaching simplistic lessons, many of Plutarch’s texts bring out how complex moral judgments can be in practice and invite readers to think deeply about morality, literature, and politics.

This chapter handles the most extensive anatomical text to survive from antiquity, Galen’s Anatomical Procedures. It queries the innovations of the text and Galen’s motives in writing it. After introducing the unique character of the treatise and addressing the question of its illustration, the chapter approaches the text from three angles. First, it examines its composition, explaining Galen’s authorial process and the motivations for his rewrite of the original version. Next, it broaches its purpose, arguing that Galen intends it to stand alone as an instructional guide, thus subverting the contemporary educational norms of in-person instruction. Third, the chapter turns to the consideration of the audience of the text, both as Galen explicitly envisions it and as his implicit expectations reveal it; this includes discussion of the motivations, educational background, technical skills, and financial position Galen imagines for his readers. Finally, the chapter ends with a conclusion of the argument of the book as a whole.

Chapter 10 focuses on the standardisation of vowel diacritic spelling, and especially groups of graphemes indicating vowel quality and vowel quantity. Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, <ea˃ and <oa˃, indicating vowel quality, as well as <dg> and <g>, <tch> and <ch>, and <k> and <ck>, for vowel quantity, shifted from an early distribution principle to a new, modern standard. The results show a modern development that lasted throughout most of the sixteenth century, both in the two digraphs and in the consonantal alternants. By the seventeenth century, the uses of vowel diacritic spelling appear to have crystallised despite later ongoing vocalic developments in Early Modern English. The changes in the sets of graphemes investigated occurred uniformly across two generations, both at vocabulary level, encompassing high-frequency and low-frequency words concurrently, and also across most of the spelling units analysed. As for all the other case studies, my results indicate that there may have been a pragmatic agent behind the modern developments in vowel diacritic spelling.

This chapter demonstrates how and why the little Herball became such an amazing commercial success, and it raises the possibility that the audience for English herbals did not rise and fall with the expensive texts preferred by elite scholarly readers or gentry. The publishing history of the little Herball reveals that the purchasing preferences of Tudor London’s middling readers, as well as the regulatory constraints upon bookmaking and bookselling, created the economic conditions that later enabled the large, illustrated folio herbals of Turner, Gerard, and Parkinson to come into being. In other words, these large books with named authors on their title pages were a secondary development in the tradition of the printed English herbal, suggesting that the “author-function” that governed a text’s authoritative value was initially irrelevant to English readers. The association between herbals and particular botanical authorities did not result from readers’ perceptions of their accuracy but can be traced to commercial concerns: their publishers’ desire to sell an old and profitable text in innovative new ways.

To reveal the sophisticated and nuanced calculus of English stationers, this chapter explores the recursive relationship between readers’ responses to printed herbals and the activities of the publishers who catered to them, as well as the shifting regulatory mechanisms that enabled stationers to navigate the amount of financial risk that herbal publication increasingly asked of them.

This chapter uses contemporary readers’ marks in anonymous English herbals to argue that Renaissance readers used printed texts as opportunities to record their own experiences of native plants and medical experiments, pushing back against a pervasive view of early herbal readers as credulous and unsophisticated. Printed books like The Grete Herball (1526), the first illustrated printed herbal in England, were the products of publishers who were evaluating the market for particular texts in print and who tested new affordances and marketing strategies on their readers as they published and republished old herbals. Some publishers, like Thomas Gibson, saw in their editions of the herbals an opportunity to endorse medical practitioners’ authority over the body.

In her 1949 article ‘We Want Books – But Do We Encourage Our Writers?’, Jamaican writer Una Marson alludes to the lack of exposure of Caribbean writers to potential readers and bemoans the lack of interest in reading. She also implies that Caribbean writers might be scarce or unproductive because they lack financial support. As the second decade of the twenty-first century closes, it is clear that the cultivation of a Caribbean reading audience as well as a market for Caribbean literature has gathered momentum since 1949. This essay considers the role of literary prizes and festivals in stimulating new writing, in growing a global audience for Caribbean literature and in supporting the careers of Caribbean writers in the region and in the Caribbean diaspora.