This chapter draws on Margaret Atwood’s interviews and archives to show how she is concerned to explore in her late fiction and poetry the idea of the soul as “the better story” about human and nonhuman animal life. I show how Atwood critiques not only Christian Nationalism but also, in Oryx and Crake, a materialist understanding of life. As a response to each of these extremes, Atwood turns to the soul, particularly in The Testaments and in Dearly, showing how that idea and the experienced presence of the souls of the dead can motivate endurance and hope in the face of oppressive formations of Christianity and a materialist sense of nothingness after death. Drawing on Atwood’s drafts of The Testaments, I trace how the novel became more spiritually serious as it developed and how the spiritual poetry of Dearly works together with scenes of spiritual support in Atwood’s novel.

This chapter explores Wassily Leontief’s Input-Output model, focusing on its role in analyzing inter-industry relationships. It introduces the transaction table and Leontief’s linear equations, with an emphasis on the closed model, the conditions for non-trivial solutions to exist, and the interpretation of prices and quantities. The chapter concludes with a brief presentation of Leontief’s dynamic system. The final section highlights unresolved challenges, such as the difficulty of modelling economic dynamics beyond proportional growth, underscoring the need for further development in this area of analysis. It is precisely these challenges that the Structural Economic Dynamics approach seeks to overcome.

This chapter offers a close reading of Chapter 1 of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. It begins by examining the opening images of a clock and moonlight as representing the mechanistic world of Heinrich’s father and the imaginative world of his mother. It analyzes Heinrich’s first dream that leads him into an underground cave until he emerges to find a blue flower with a human face at its centre. The second half of the chapter discusses the debate Heinrich has with his father over the value of dreams, concluding with an analysis of the dream Heinrich’s father remembers from his youth.

“Travelers (1936–1971)” offers the first comprehensive account of Argentine visits to the Falkland/Malvinas Islands between 1936 and 1971, a period in which such journeys were rare and logistically complex. Drawing on a wide range of travel chronicles – books, articles, interviews, films, and lectures – it reconstructs how Argentine visitors represented the islanders and their way of life to mainland audiences. These first-person accounts shaped what Argentines knew, or believed they knew, about a largely unfamiliar population at a time when interest in the “Malvinas issue” was steadily growing. The chapter examines the motivations behind these trips, the backgrounds of the travelers, and the narratives they produced, revealing a spectrum of perspectives often marked by nationalist assumptions. Despite their differences, the chronicles generally sought to humanize and explain a distant community, filling an information gap left by school curricula and press coverage. Some gained national visibility and entered public debate, influencing how generations of Argentines imagined the islanders – their origins, loyalties, and aspirations. By critically examining these sources, the chapter shows how Argentine representations of the Falklands community were shaped as much by direct observation as by excpectation and belief.

While the emergence of the far right is not a recent development and has extended globally, Latin America has only recently begun to witness the rise of far-right leaders and parties. This relative novelty has led to a scarcity of comparative research on the phenomenon, limiting our understanding of the similarities and differences among far-right actors within Latin America and between them and their counterparts globally. To address this research gap, the introductory chapter presents a comprehensive analytical framework. It synthesizes the ongoing debate surrounding the concept of the far right and offers practical guidelines for its examination within the Latin American context and beyond. Additionally, the chapter explains the rationale behind the case selection for this edited volume, provides information on the electoral strength of far-right actors in the region, and offers preliminary insights into the contributions included in the book. Furthermore, the chapter discusses various factors contributing to the electoral rise of far-right forces across Latin America, despite their diverse ideological and organizational trajectories.

This chapter offers a close reading of Part II of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The second part of the novel introduces the reader to a sightly later period in Heinrich’s life, after the tragic event of Mathilde’s death. Heinrich is now a wandering Pilgrim who has returned to a dream-like version of his homeland in Thuringia. He has a vision of Mathilde and their child that awakens his wish to be reunited with his beloved. Heinrich meets Cyane, who, he learns, was his sister in a previous life. Cyane then introduces Heinrich to Doctor Sylvester, and the two engage in conversation about nature, evil, virtue, and conscience.

The riddle of Black internationalism applied in a 1940s context is that the phrase can have a double or veiled meaning: totalitarian or liberationist. If Black internationalism of the 1940s presumes African, American Negro, or Black nationalism and a resurgent race and color consciousness from the 1930s, insights into solving the riddle come through the work and texts of poets of the people. This theme of people is epitomized in Walker’s “For My People.” But other poets reflected a common interest among peoples across the Black diaspora: the struggle against injustice by the oppressed against the oppressor. Reorienting reality to people as the soul of a nation in the belly of Western civilization derives not only from the vernacular, folk speech and Negro dialect, but also the common language of people: demotic. Hence, people’s poets create poetic forms of people and a poetics inscribing demotic rhythms of people.

The first part of this chapter’s title paraphrases the key sentence from a sermon in which a Presbyterian minister compared southern Protestants to the ancient Hebrews in their Babylonian exile, and in particular to Daniel, who kept his windows – and mind – open towards the Promised Land. Applied to minorities in interwar Ireland, it was both an exhortation and a statement: Irish Protestants and Jews looked beyond Ireland’s shores for their inspiration, like exiles groaning for a promised land. Inherently transnational groups such as Jews and Irish Protestants generated explicitly internationalist politics, accompanied by a rhetoric of social reform at home, often by means of ecumenical endeavour. While both internationalism and social reform were inspired by the then widespread revulsion against the First World War, for most people there was a persistent attachment to the British Empire and a desire to express it without provoking a republican backlash. The chapter’s last part examines minority internationalism as it engaged with the ultimate secular utopia of their day – the Soviet Union – or, rather, the way it was perceived and represented by admirers like Sean O’Casey and Rosamond Jacob.

This chapter starts with definitions of hunger. Hunger is defined as a mental state of positive anticipation that food will be good to eat now. Hunger is argued to come in two basic forms, specific hunger, which is for a specific food (e.g., a Mars bar) or food category (e.g., chocolate), and general hunger, which is for any palatable food in general. The chapter also contains a brief sociocultural history of hunger, from ancient cave paintings, to the Middle Ages and the land of Cockaigne, to modern times, and preoccupation with food shortage and abundance in art and literature. A brief scientific history of hunger is also included, starting with Greek, Roman and Islamic understandings, and the evolution of contemporary scientific thinking in the seventeenth century, with Brillat-Savarin, and ending with the emergence of the pioneers – Cannon and Pavlov.

It is a staple of traditional ethical theories that they contain an injunction against causing harm. Indeed, many people hold this to be the most basic principle of morality – “First do no harm”. However, what about harms caused by the market? In this book we are interested in developing the thought that the market is different in the sense that there is room for moral leeway because of the social benefits that markets bring in their wake. In this chapter, we explore the limits of that claim; exactly how different is the market? One important way of doing so is by thinking about the harm caused by markets and the moral significance of that harm. What should we make of market harms? Beyond the most egregious kinds of harms, and conditional upon the establishment and maintenance of various ameliorative practices to soften their negative effects, we argue that society ought to accommodate and accept a large range of harmful behaviours that we wouldn’t normally accept in many other spheres of society.

“Islanders (1960–1971)” situates the Falklands within the broader global context of decolonization, a process that profoundly reshaped the British Empire after World War II, particularly following the Suez Crisis. By the 1960s, Britain could no longer excercise authority as it once had, a shift that directly affected its policies toward the Islands. The chapter examines how islanders experienced three converging challenges during this decade: economic instability, political uncertainty, and the prospect of integration with Argentina. It argues that these pressures marked a pivotal moment in the islanders’ perception of their future, generating a growing sense of vulnerability. Economically, the decline in wool prices cast doubt on the long-term viability of the Islands’ main industry. Politically, the United Nations’ recognition of a sovereignty dispute between the United Kingdom and Argentina forced a reassessment of British policy, confronting islanders with an unfamiliar and unsettling diplomatic landscape. The chapter also revisits episodes such as the unauthorized landings by Argentine civilians, usually examined from the Argentine perspective but here analyzed through islanders’ experiences. Finally, it explores islanders’ views of Argentina and its people, revealing perceptions shaped by distance, anxiety, and often limited, distorted information.

The book’s insights require recognizing the strengths of lower-income people, though constrained and facing a wide variety of adaptation challenges. Because successful adaptations require government commitment, leaders must not evade their accountability to address problems of migration, land dispossession, and health risks. The weak healthcare effort, from medical services to vaccinations and nutrition, requires greater investment. Administrative effectiveness is important, but adaptation fairness is also crucial. No one should assume that people will be environmentally responsible when incomes are jeopardized without incentives to adjust their behavior. It is an additional challenge if vulnerable people must migrate apart from state resettlement programs. Tradeoffs across sectors pose challenges when efforts to address one sector’s threat undermine another. Addressing growing problems of energy shortages and fossil-fuel pollution cannot rely on solar and wind energy to avoid reliance on controversial hydro and nuclear power. High wealth concentration must be assessed in terms of both the risks and opportunities they present to sound adaptations. Southeast Asian countries’ advantages of strong connections within and beyond the region depend on geopolitical neutrality despite provocations.