Anne Lister’s cash-flow problems meant that investments on the Shibden estate had to in part rely on Ann Walker’s comparative wealth. But Ann was upset by this and cried. Why should she be expected to cover so much expense for Shibden (like a carriage and male servants’ formal livery)? Anne’s diary might note that ‘the less I pother my head about her the better’; but her account book told a different story, with Anne still dependent on borrowing money from Ann.

This chapter investigates the outer limits of the Book of Nature: the medieval concept that the world is meant to be read and interpreted by humans in the manner of a book. Authors who invoked the Book of Nature presented the act of metaphorically “reading” the natural world as a way of shoring up human identity against its conceptual outside, with non-human animals imagined as letters inked onto the world’s pages. Drawing on a corpus of allegorical, encyclopedic, and literary texts, the chapter argues that this image was also haunted by a more subversive possibility: that species identity could become as confusing as a real medieval handwritten text, full of blottings and ill-formed letters that threaten to leave the relationship between speech and species in a state of irresolution. Like written letters, non-human animals could produce meanings in the human mind – but also like letters, they could just as easily descend back into their latent status as meaningless shapes.

This chapter explores how Carpentier’s activities as a musicologist and music critic extended beyond Cuba and influenced composers, cultural brokers and music scholars throughout the continent. His theorization of a Latin American identity inspired by ideas of creolization and eclectic experimentation provided composers and music critics with useful concepts that helped them reframe their new music as universal through the local while sidestepping the musical “postcard nationalism” that was associated with populist movements after World War II. I examine the legacy of one of Carpentier’s most significant contributions, La música en Cuba (1946), and his relationship to Cuban composers in the decades that followed. I focus on the writings and compositions of scholars and composers who relied on Carpentier’s works to better understand their own musical traditions and compositions, such as Carlos Sandroni, Juan Blanco and Leo Brouwer, who syncretized Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso with Western postmodernist discourse.

This chapter maps Allen Ginsberg’s magnificent epic which dissects the US in the Vietnam era. It shared the National Book Award in 1973. Anchored by “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” the volume’s pivotal poem, it boasts the key line, “I here declare the end of the war,” and includes seventy-five other poems, among them elegies for Neal Cassady and Che Guevara. The chapter shows how Ginsberg links fragments – newspaper headlines, radio broadcasts, lyrics from popular songs and more – into a coherent lament for America itself. It also dissects the journal the poet kept while traveling across the nation and that provided him with the raw material for The Fall of America.

This introductory chapter provides a rationale for the study of Allen Ginsberg and his poetry while outlining the major themes, issues, and motivations of the volume. Ginsberg is an essential figure in twentieth-century US poetics. His work is an important part of the larger turn from “closed” to “open” verse forms in the postwar period, and his role as perhaps the major countercultural figure in the 1960s and 1970s meant that his work garnered an international audience. The goal of this volume is to provide readers with the context necessary to understand how Ginsberg’s life and interests shaped his work; how his work, in its turn, entered the greater poetic discourse of the time; and finally, how Ginsberg sought to influence not just American but indeed global political and cultural realities of the postwar period. Taking a broadly chronological approach, this volume charts the wide variety of contexts crucial to understanding not just Ginsberg, his writing, and his career, but many of the larger trends of the long twentieth century as well.

With a general election in January, Anne Lister needed to keep a sharp eye on her enfranchised tenants. Especially in the new Halifax constituency, every vote counted. She extracted every single Halifax vote that she could. Her Blue candidate, Wortley, won by just one single vote. The reaction of the Whig and the Radical mob was quite violent. Later it became known as ‘the window-breaking election’. There were protests about the legality of the tactics used by Wortley’s supporters. Anne and Ann, up at Shibden, were not immune. The West Riding newspapers printed among their marriage announcements that of Captain Tom Lister to Miss Ann Walker. Anne took this public lampooning in her stride; but Ann found it more difficult.Meanwhile, Anne continued with her coalmining developments at Shibden. High up, isolated Walker pit (named in honour of Ann) would always be small-scale; below Shibden, however, Anne planned her larger and more ambitious Listerwick pit. And she did not stop there: she wanted to obtain a licence for Northgate, the imposing house in Halifax she had inherited. She wanted to run it as a profitable town-centre inn (then known as a ’casino’).

This chapter explores Ginsberg’s poetic adaptations of Mahayana Buddhist ethical teachings known as the Six Perfections. It considers: 1) how Buddhism began (for Allen Ginsberg) and what wisdom within it drew him to develop his poetic sensitivities; 2) how generosity of spirit implicit within a Buddhist ethical framework (known as the Six Paramitas) relates to the continuous syncretism within his work; 3) how liberal openness in his work is essentially a practice of patience; 4) how Buddhist non-Manichean critique became, increasingly, the central ethical constraint of the writing; 5) how joyful humor makes Ginsberg’s evangelism tolerable to secular liberals; and 6) what it means to say that concentration is a form of consecration in Ginsberg’s work.

The Alejo Carpentier Foundation was created in 1993 with the purpose of preserving materials and offering researchers the patrimony left by the author, as well as publishing his work in Cuba and abroad. Regarding the dissemination of the author’s works, the institution, which owns the copyrights for the novelist, has maintained and extended its relations with publishing houses from numerous countries that make his oeuvre known in diverse world languages. The Foundation supports in many ways the study of Carpentier’s life and works (publications in different media outlets, scholarships, consultations, courses, and international colloquiums), but, above all, it facilitates research of a considerable fund of first rate documentation, which is structured as active literature (the editions of his works in multiple languages), secondary literature (the many studies on his work), his personal library and the Carpentier Papers archive. The above is discussed in this chapter following a chronological sequence.