This chapter focuses on Pater as a classicist, placing his writings on the classical world and mythology in the context of the changing face of classical education at his contemporary Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett. It illustrates that Pater was sympathetic to dominant understandings of the classical world, but, beginning in the mid-1870s, began to explore darker and more subversive aspects of ancient Greek culture, including the myths of Demeter and Dionysus. It provides guidance on how to read and understand Pater’s representation of the classical world, in the context of classical education at Oxford, with examples from works including ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ (1880) and Plato and Platonism (1893).

In Troilus and Cressida, William Shakespeare invokes the trope of the speaking face, or the speaking body. But where Criseyde's face speaks silently and evocatively in a way that is utterly captivating to Troilus, Shakespeare's Ulysses 'reads' Cressida far more negatively. The examples from Geoffrey Chaucer and Shakespeare are very diverse, but all point to the inevitable ventriloquism in which authors make their characters speak, whether through spoken or unspoken words or through body language. In contrast to Chaucer's Troilus, and Giovanni Boccaccio's Criseida, Criseyde's expression is more complex. The rightly famous account of Criseyde's expression is of a different order from the other appearances of her face in the poem. Jill Mann invokes Criseyde's expressive face as one of the many means by which Chaucer produces the idea of a large 'reservoir of thoughts and feeling.

This chapter discusses the origins of modern climate science in nineteenth-century projects of empire, and shows how literature both promoted and contested the imperial impulses of emerging climate science. The chapter examines, first, how imperialism – the enlargement of a single country’s jurisdiction across large tracts of land and sea – facilitated scientific methods and data. It then turns to literary justifications of imperial and scientific expansion, with accounts of the Arctic expeditions of John Franklin – Franklin’s narratives, the poetry of Eleanor Anne Porden (who became Franklin’s wife), elegies, and ballads – providing a case study. Staying with the mythologization of the explorer as a conqueror of climate, the chapter takes up the question of climate determinism (the idea of climate’s agency in shaping physiology and psychology, and the attendant myth of British colonizers’ resistance to such agency). Yet, from Richard Burton’s travels to Rudyard Kipling’s fiction, Victorian literature reveals, sometimes unwittingly, that the imperial explorer did not remain untouched by climate.

Moynagh Sullivan argues that Robinson’s powerful literary mapping of Connemara avoids gendering the Irish landscape as feminine, resisting the dominant trope in twentieth-century Irish writing and film in which the countryside stands in for woman and often mother. Sullivan investigates Robinson’s mapping of Connemara and the Aran Islands alongside the work of artist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger – who also, similar to Robinson, maps psychic dimensions at the edge of consciousness – in order to illuminate the central encounter at the heart of Robinson’s map-making: a walk-art-text practice.

Kelly Sullivan looks into Robinson’s monumental works Stones of Aran and asks whether it is possible to collect all the contradictions of the human world – geology, biology, personal history, myth and politics – into ‘a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground’? Sullivan contends that the driving imperative of both Pilgrimage and Labyrinth form an aesthetics of ‘not-knowing’ coupled with authorial self-doubt about representing place.

Gerry Smyth considers the question of ‘listening’ as it relates to two philosophical systems: the phenomenology of listening associated with Jean-Luc Nancy and the existentialist listening associated with Martin Heidegger. Smyth argues that each of these systems connotes metaphysical and ethical approaches to listening, which are of particular relevance to Robinson in his various roles as cartographer, environmentalist, scientist, folklorist and dweller in the landscape.

Derek Gladwin investigates how Collins, who is considered one of the most articulate contemporary documentary film-makers in Ireland, depicts Robinson as a mediator between landscape and culture through his own mapping enterprise. Gladwin suggests that Collins and Robinson share a similar desire in their own forms of documentation to examine the subject of Connemara in order to create a place-based art form that magnifies the landscape while reducing the primacy of the ‘maker’ in the process. Gladwin argues that Collins’s film Tim Robinson: Connemara is not only a documentary about the cultural imagination associated with Robinson’s production of map-making and topographic writing, but also about his process of capturing the essence of place, a process that comes back full circle to Collins primary aim in the documentary.

Christine Cusick's essay ‘“And now intellect, discovering its own effects”: Tim Robinson as Narrative Scholar’ argues that scholarship rooted in both experience and academic discourse requires that we examine our assumptions about the sources of knowledge and about our hermeneutic relationship with this knowledge. In doing so, Cusick offers close readings of Robinson's writing as a way to interpret his praxis of narrative scholarship.

Eóin Flannery situates Robinson’s visual and verbal works within contemporary environmental and postcolonial contexts by arguing that his career and body of work are exemplary engagements with the diverse scales of environmental change, degradation and belonging across Irish history. Making reference to each of Robinson’s publications on Aran and Connemara, as well as to his essays, Flannery highlights how Robinson’s work restores a sustainable and ethical relationship with place in the Irish context: place as a historically rooted and valued, while also marked by conscious interactions with the cultural histories of that locale.

Nessa Cronin argues that Robinson’s overall work can be regarded as a practice of deep mapping. With a focus on two sets of artworks from his early career (Moonfield and To the Centre), as well as short prose writings and essays in The View from the Horizon, Setting Foot On the Shores of Connemara, and My Time in Space, Cronin’s essay explores the fragmentary connection that Robinson draws between these two stages of his life and career.

Jerry White explores some of the possible connections between Robinson and the debates in the 1970s about the Irish language movement. White examines the very beginnings of Robinson’s mapping career, drawing on both the historical narrative of Gluaiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta (the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement) and early editions of Robinson's work and documents pertaining to this early Irish language movement through figures such as the film-maker Bob Quinn and the political journalist Desmond Fennell.