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This chapter focuses on changes in society in the post-Victorian era as depicted in Irish novels. Topics covered include love and marriage, the changing frame of mind involving relations between men and women and the social representation of the male and female, and the competing ideas of Victorianism and modernity.

The chapter begins with Carlyle’s landmark translation of Wilhelm Meister and its preface, which singles Mignon out for lyrical praise. It then passes to Walter Scott’s romance Peveril of the Peak, published in the same decade, where the character Fenella is explicitly based on Mignon. Three of Bulwer Lytton’s experiments in the Bildungsroman, all of which have characters belonging to the Mignon family, and which exhibit a combination of high moral tone and exotic fantasy, represent the next phase of Mignon’s naturalization in Britain. Subsequently, the interest of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes in Goethe’s novel, first displayed publicly in the 1850s, forms the prelude to a discussion of Caterina (in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’) and Mirah (in Daniel Deronda) as complex responses to Mignon’s story. The later spread of the Mignon craze to England is charted via a number of popular novels by women writers.

This chapter, which describes the popular dimension of French literary culture, presents a short history of the popular novel since mass literacy and how new technologies have democratised reading in the mid-nineteenth century. It shows how popular reading tastes have been depicted, judged and shaped by public discourses, from parliamentary debates to state and Church policies, marketing pitches, theoretical interventions and readers' own commentaries. The chapter underlines the diversity of novels classified as ‘popular’. It also argues for the cognitive and affective complexity of ‘mimetic’ readings and for the need, in any account of French literature, to pay proper attention to the stories read by the majority.

This chapter talks about what were considered bad books for bad readers. At the turn of the century, it was certainly not high-minded literary works that predominated in the Arabic literary marketplace. Rather, the market privileged thrilling and emotional works, the vast majority of which were in translation and which prioritized titillation and “scandal” over moral, civic, or religious progress. The new popular novels were accused of more than just portraying unrealistic foreign situations; more dangerously, they were seen as promoting unhealthy reading practices and cultivating excessive, nonrational emotions. Commentators worried about the prominent place of “bad books for bad readers” in the national literary market, and bad readers were above all figured as women readers. Bad books spoke to and — more frequently — about women. Translations redeployed excess popular emotion as political, and they do so in such a way as to test gendered national discourses, complicating some of the very New Woman ideas that elite writers were putting forth. The chapter reinserts these popular translated novels and their major figures — the oppressed wife, the bad female example, and the good criminal — into the national conversation and shows how they make social and political claims.

By the twenty-first century, seventy odd years into Pakistan’s existence, the cobbled ideals of nationhood and state implode into a radically reimagined Muslimness enabled and legitimized within a number of popular novels and television serials authored by bestselling writers, Umera Ahmad, Nimra Ahmad, and Farhat Ishtiaq. Among them, the “new” Muslim, predominantly signified by young women, is the contemporary reincarnation of a salafī, an early convert and companion of the Prophet Muhammad. In these religio-populist novels, the true Muslim protagonist actively rejects those outside the fold of Islam—minorities, for example—renounces all that is Western—clothing, occupations—while reinventing the self in the image of the early Meccan community of converts to Islam. This exclusionary, often violent discursive formation marks the coming-of-age of a widespread religious populism in the domain of vernacular literature.

Revolutionary popular novels that took revolutionary history as their subject matter appeared in the mid-1950s and became one of the most important genres in modern Chinese literature, garnering a large reading public. Tracks in the Snowy Forest, the most representative of these novels, employed three main elements from traditional fiction, namely “heroes, youths, and gods” to represent the modern concept of Chinese revolution, thereby using old bottles to contain new wine. Careful analysis of these novels demonstrates the complex, intricate relationship between revolution and tradition in modern China.

This chapter introduces a link between late-romantic European opera and the mass entertainment of film, powered not least by the emigration to America in the 1930s of some key Jewish composers, who were escaping Nazism. Rather than being the graveyard of German musical idealism, Hollywood's linkage of film with music proves to have “realized” the programmatic and bodily and visualized character of late-romantic music, while often directly thematizing musical experience (not the least of which is late-romantic music, like that of Tchaikovsky). The link between late-romantic music by Korngold or Max Steiner and cinematic narrative in the period is explored in relation to the phenomenon of film versions of popular novels, like Gone with the Wind, but also of Now, Voyager or King's Row.

This chapter proposes a new understanding of how a Spanish readership learned to empathize with an enslaved population overseas. Years before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel changed the terms of antitrade rhetoric, a wildly popular novel by Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco familiarized Spaniards with the runaway Cuban slave “el negro Tomás.” Sequels to Izco’s novel, published after Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, merged the Hispanic character with Stowe’s American hero. Previous scholarship has noted the global impact of Stowe’s novel but has overlooked Spain, the only nation with a transatlantic trade and one of the few remaining Atlantic powers with slavery in its plantation colonies. This chapter presents a close reading of the Spanish Negro Tomás and analyzes the theatrical adaptations of Stowe’s novel for the Spanish stage, arguing that in drama, Spanish slave traders became the new villains imperiling not slaves’ well-being, but the Spanish hold on Cuba.

This follows the chronology from the Hollywood chapter to the present but shapes and themes the huge amount of available material by following the topic of women pirates (from previous chapters) through the many films and novels in the later-twentieth and twenty-first centuries about the two eighteenth-century originals, Mary Read and Ann Bonny, who are also treated enthusiastically and credulously by the (popular) academic historians of piracy, who recycle the same romances that are the stock in trade of the historical novelists.