The Roman economy was based on agricultural production that fed large cities such its capital Rome. One of the key elements was the transport connection of those small farms and villae to local and interprovincial markets reaching destinies in a short time and with relatively low costs: This chapter attempts to explain how Romans managed to do so.

Barred from many employments, Jewish artists entered the music industry and produced a twentieth-century canon of Tin Pan Alley hits, show tunes, and jazz standards combining light opera, sophistication, and Black music. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical Show Boat (1936) set a new paradigm: its “Ol’ Man River” blends minstrelsy, classical music, and spirituals. George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928) fused European influences with blues, foxtrot, ragtime, and jazz. His “I Got Rhythm” (1930) is among history’s most influential jazz compositions, and his jazz opera Porgy and Bess (1935) boldly depicts Black experience. Gershwin’s union of lowbrow-highbrow, Jewish and African American music created a radical multicultural art. Although recent scholars accuse Gershwin, Kern, and others of cultural exploitation, many Black jazz artists embraced their music. Even Duke Ellington, who denounced Porgy and Bess, eventually recorded it and imitated Gershwin’s chord progressions and rhythms.

How should mental disorders be classified – do we need a categorical system, a dimensional system, or both?

Climate change has unequal effects on people in different parts of the world. Small Island Developing States face real and existential threats to their land and way of life on account of a crisis in which they have had little or no role to play, and with limited opportunity to take corrective action (Burkett 2015). Countries in Asia continue to be plastic havens for Europe, which for years has exploited weaker regulation in these regions. This has turned lands and oceans in Asia into toxic wastelands, while European countries continue to consume resources in an irresponsible and unabated fashion (Ellis-Petersen 2019). In 2023, we see the continued exploitation of critical minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there is a mineral race between the United States, Europe, and China (Kara 2023). This continued extraction has resulted in violence, war, and poverty and is often argued to be the result of a ‘failed state’ or ‘poor governance’ (Peša 2022).

However, this only tells a partial story. The existence of such extraction is on account of the ways in which people and communities have been marginalized as a result of a wide variety of economic, political, social, and structural factors on a global scale (Harlan et al. 2015). In fact, as Sultana argues, the root cause of much of the climate emergency that we are experiencing is on account of historical as well as ongoing exploitation of formerly colonized lands (Sultana 2022).

The Elizabethan output of Thomas Lodge provides a useful case study for the topic of ‘bad’ or ‘drab’ poetry. Whereas it was mostly ignored (if not openly scorned) by subsequent critics, this essay contends that it was a product of late sixteenth-century literary culture: places, and associated networks that nurtured it (grammar school, university, inns of court, private households); the pressures placed on professional writers, such as Lodge, to produce works for the competitive marketplace of print; and the transition from ‘mid-Tudor’ to ‘high Elizabethan’ tastes and styles. Examining such critically neglected works casts light on a groundbreaking, and prolific, period of English writing, and the imitation, innovation, and rivalries that fuelled it. The essay breaks into two main sections: the first introduces Lodge in the context of his literary milieus and networks; the second focuses on Phillis (1593), as the volume of poetry which has attracted the most critical attention (mainly accusing Lodge of plagiarism), but one which also has suggestive resonances with Shakespeare's sonnets.

Born in 1558 to a leading London merchant's family, Lodge's formative years were spent in a series of locations which almost certainly cultivated his literary sensibilities and ambitions. His father (also Thomas) was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1563, before the end of his tenure as Lord Mayor of London. The younger Thomas subsequently spent some of ‘his infancie […] incorporated’ into the household of Henry Stanley, Lord Strange, later Fourth Earl of Derby, a period which he remembers with gratitude in A Fig for Momus (1595).

The critical study of African literature has had a troubled relationship with different schools of European poststructuralism in general and postcolonial theory in particular. This chapter starts with a critique of the theoretical retreat from modernity that has been a signature gesture of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory since the 1990s. Poststructuralist theory attracted many critics of postcolonial literature at the end of the twentieth century because of its rejection of the universal theories of reason, history, and the human subject associated with modernity. What was the implication of this poststructuralist turn in the criticism of an Africa literary tradition that was bound up with the experience and expectation of modernity? The chapter discusses the tension between the experience and discourse of modernity, postcolonial criticism, and a set of African texts that complicated both modernist and postmodernist discourses. A central concern in this chapter is what happens when we read canonical African literary texts themselves as forms of theoretical intervention.

In foundational African narratives, time, decolonization, and modernity are bound together. This chapter looks at how, at its moment of emergence in the second half of the twentieth century, modern African fiction, whose aim was to rationalize African notions of time and account for both colonial history and what appeared to be failing projects of decolonization, was motivated by the desire to account for a temporal impasse: the fact that the old colonial order had disappeared but the future promised by the political class was yet to come. This temporal impasse explains the confluence of realism and modernism in postcolonial African fiction. In their themes, forms, and tone, the novels published in the 1960s set out to negotiate the empty space of a stalled decoloniality. Using Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God as a case study, the chapter reflects on the novel as a mode of mediating historical time conceived as both past and present, simultaneously preoccupied with the teleology of the temporality ushered in by colonialism even after decolonization.