The book presents a diverse range of critical and creative approaches to the archive on local, global, communal and activist-artistic fronts, and it is informed by archival methods that emerge from workshops, translation practice, medieval-modern poetic practice, creative writing, publishing history, as well as those of the exhibition and the installation. By placing creative practice and critical medievalist research about the archive into conversation, the book rethinks the boundaries of the medieval archive (both temporal and institutional) and argues for an expanded understanding of new scholarship with creative practice at its core.

Collected in this volume are essays by world-leading scholars, prize-winning poets and writers, as well as previously unpublished work by artists, which all examine archives as caches of knowledge. There are collaborative dialogues that approach bodies, bones and landscapes as domains that form new archives over time. The book also includes engagements in archival acts that revive or incite new exchanges with the materials of the medieval past – whether from the perspective of class, Queer Studies or Indigenous history – and challenge the ongoing and urgent issue of archival access.

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Through a comparison of case studies from multiple national backgrounds, Hosts, Hospitals and Hospitalities shows how the concept of hospitality shapes the way in which we relate with the Other in diverse – as well as changing – cultural, political, social and environmental contexts. By examining the issues of hospitality from a post-pandemic standpoint, which revised the roles of our private and public spaces in the aftermath of Covid-19, by dwelling on novel issues of climate emergency and by focusing on current developments in terms of migration and displacement, the book adds new light and significant theoretical and methodological perspectives to previous debates about hospitality.

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The book argues that contemporary fiction develops emergent mediations of neoliberal dynamics, with the affective crises the latter yield. It studies this affective crisis in relation to central themes as identity and climate crisis, and through prevalent contemporary genres as autofiction and coming-of-age narratives. The book explores a transnational corpus, including authors Heike Geissler, Ben Lerner, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Ling Ma, Lieke Marsman, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Niña Weijers and Alejandro Zambra, amongst others.

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The volume considers the role of storytelling and experimental, creative and often collaborative interventions across, between and beyond disciplines. Contributions include reflections on the uses of poetry in youth and climate justice work, conversational life stories as a research method in sociological studies of kinship formation, analysis of the potentials and pitfalls of centring researcher positionality and lived experience as a basis for scholarly analysis, relationality and the ethics of ethnographic work with radical political movements, speculative imaginings of the future of political organising and notions of rigour and care for the living and the dead in racialised archives.

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Cue Walter Benjamin’s Ark which re-reads the life and work of Walter Benjamin via the curious life of his only child. The focal point is Stefan’s dramatic voyage from England to Australia in 1940, a voyage rich in intellectual suggestion, shared as it was with obscure men with famous names such as Wittgenstein, Kafka, Marx and Wilde. Central to the book is the one substantive text that can be ascribed to Stefan: Benjamin’s meticulous transcription of Stefan’s utterances as an infant. This fascinating text has been largely overlooked, despite the insistence of Benjamin’s biographers that ‘it continued to play a role in Walter Benjamin’s writing until the end of his life’. This book thus seeks not only to bring into view the intriguing figure that is Stefan but also to identify him as that most crucial of Benjaminian spectres, namely, the secret ‘you’ or addressee of Benjamin’s writings.

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Contributors from different fields explore and advance debates in literary geography from diverse transnational perspectives through close readings of canonical and less familiar cultural and literary productions in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Japanese, in locales spanning Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. In this way, Space, Affect, Memory decentres the anglophone bias of established scholarly approaches in literary geography, probing terminologies and methodologies from different national traditions.

Finally, Space, Affect, Memory interweaves the visual arts by engaging with photography, performance and architecture. As a result, the volume offers a fresh, comparative perspective on the intermingling of space, affect and memory that lies at the heart of literary geography and comparative literature. These efforts converge in a shared attempt to pluralize the field (geographies) and to showcase the numerous possibilities of creative, transdisciplinary interaction between media, performance and representation, across cultures.

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Considering the interconnectedness of their narratives for the first time, the book explores unexamined patterns of dialogue among Coetzee, Kundera, Roth and Vargas Llosa while also contextualising their writing in the light of the European literary tradition inaugurated by Cervantes’s Don Quixote and continued by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Rather than building on conventional theoretical approaches to literary studies, Stefano Rossoni develops a fresh and engaging approach by looking at these two works not only as narrative texts but most importantly as theories of literature. In dialogue with critical contributions that examined men’s emotional illiteracy and struggle to develop a language for self-reflection, the book argues that the narratives of Coetzee, Kundera, Roth and Vargas Llosa engage with the tradition of the self-reflexive novel and its ramifications to reflect on masculinity as a socio-cultural construction. Ultimately, their writing reveals men’s novelistic self-reflexivity as a site of unintelligibility.

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This epistolary history provides a reflection on the question of correspondence and literature, particularly the subject of lost correspondence, gender, the question of address and the performance of identity. Simon Wortham frames the letters with an extensive critical biography about the life and writing of Robert Walser, whose work has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. As her side of the exchange no longer survives, the book concludes with a fictional reimagining of Mermet’s response to Walser’s letters. This creative part is carefully introduced by chapters on epistolary writing in a range of critical settings from modernism to literary theory and deconstruction, as well as exploring what is at stake in creative engagements with a literary legacy of this kind.

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The book also reassesses recent debates of authorship in European and Latin American literatures. It demonstrates that the outcomes of these debates need wider theoretical and methodological reflection that takes into account the historical development of authorship and changing understandings of fiction, performativity and new media. Individual chapters trace significant moments in the history of authorship from the early modernity to the present (from Shakespeare’s First Folio to Latin American experimental autofiction), and discuss the methodologies reinstating the author and authorship as the irreducible aspects of literary process.

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Shelley with Benjamin: A critical mosaic is an experiment in comparative reading. Born a century apart, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Benjamin are separated by time, language, temperament and genre – one a Romantic poet known for his revolutionary politics and delicate lyricism, the other a melancholy intellectual who pioneered a dialectical method of thinking in constellations. Yet, as the above montage of citations from their works demonstrates, their ideas are mutually illuminating: the mosaic is but one of several images that both use to describe how literature lives on through practices of citation, translation and critical commentary.

In a series of close readings that are by turns playful, erotic and violent, Mathelinda Nabugodi unveils affinities between two writers whose works are simultaneously interventions in literary history and blueprints for an emancipated future. In addition to offering fresh interpretations of both major and minor writings, she elucidates the personal and ethical stakes of literary criticism. Throughout the book, marginal annotations and interlinear interruptions disrupt the faux-objective and colourblind stance of standard academic prose in an attempt to reckon with the barbarism of our past and its legacy in the present.

The book will appeal to readers of Shelley and Benjamin as well as those with an interest in comparative literature, literary theory, romantic poetics, and creative critical writing.

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