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Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.

Otherworlds are a recurrent feature in medieval literary texts and are usually characterized by a set of distinctive features. This study highlights the potentially anachronistic implications of using the term ‘otherworld’ in a medieval context, noting the absence of any analogous lexical item in the languages of medieval Britain and Ireland. It argues that medieval otherworlds are not defined primarily on semantic or ontological grounds, but by a rich lexicon of distinctive motifs which came to be associated with supernatural realms. The intensity and creativity with which otherworlds were imagined in medieval narratives made them particularly ripe for exploitation by the authors of more historically minded works. The structure of the book reflects this emphasis: it takes the literary properties of these depictions as its starting point and moves from these to the historical applications of such fictional descriptions. In doing so, it inverts a traditional view of medieval literary otherworlds which sees them as passive reflections of pre-Christian Celtic beliefs. Accounts of fantastical realms are often used to very serious purpose by medieval authors. They overlap in striking ways with afterlife depictions; they often comment on political realities in the historical world; sometimes they even reimagine real-world locations, like the islands of Britain and Ireland, as otherworlds.

Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England offers a new history of Middle English romance, the most popular genre of secular literature in the English Middle Ages. This book argues that many of the romances composed in England from 1350–1500 arose in response to the specific socioeconomic concerns of the gentry, the class of English landowners who lacked titles of nobility and hence occupied the lower rungs of the aristocracy. The end of the fourteenth century in England witnessed power devolving to the gentry, who became one of the dominant political and economic forces in provincial society. As this book demonstrates, this social change also affected England’s literary culture, particularly the composition and readership of romance. Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England identifies a series of new topoi in Middle English that responded to the gentry’s economic interests. But beyond social history and literary criticism, it also speaks to manuscript studies, showing that most of the codices of the “gentry romances” were produced by those in the immediate employ of the gentry.

This book addresses the scope and significance of the secular literary culture of the Wars of the Roses, and especially of its distinctive prose romances. The book argues that the pervasive textual presence of treason c.1437–97 suggests a way of conceptualizing the understudied space between the Lancastrian literary culture of the early fifteenth century and the Tudor literary cultures of the early and mid-sixteenth century. Drawing upon theories of political discourse and interpellation, of the power of language to shape social identities, this book explores how treason is both a source of anxieties about community and identity and a way of responding to those concerns. Despite the context of civil war, treason is an understudied theme even with regards to Thomas Malory’s celebrated prose romance, the Morte Darthur. The book accordingly provides a double contribution to Malory criticism by addressing the Morte Darthur’s engagement with treason, and by reading the Morte in the hitherto neglected context of the prose romances and other secular literature written by Malory’s English contemporaries. This book also offers new insights into the nature and possibilities of the medieval romance genre and sheds light on understudied texts such as the prose Siege of Thebes and Siege of Troy, and the romances that William Caxton translated from French. More broadly, this book contributes to reconsiderations of the relationship between medieval and early modern English culture by focusing on a comparatively neglected sixty-year interval—the interval that is customarily the ‘no man’s land’ between well- but separately studied periods.