Chapter 14 covers omnichannel customer journeys. Research has found that the initial digital disruption that occurred as e-commerce started has now settled so that most retailers are working in several different sales channels. It has further been found that even within the same category, customer journeys can be retail specific. The effort to understand the customer journey is called customer mapping. The most generic omnichannel customer journey is webrooming; that is, customer start the purchase journey online by scrolling a social media feed and possibly searching online before fulfilling the purchase in a physical store. The various contacts customers have with the brand are called touchpoints, and it has been shown that different touchpoints serve different purposes. Also, online shopping is a visual process. However, there is a large difference with regards to the visual processes between offline and online shopping. The difference is that in the physical store, the shopper is browsing while walking around the store. Online browsing is done by clicking on links or by typing in a search field. Since the design of the physical store – with its displays, signage, and planograms – is focused on capturing the shopper’s attention, this step can be disregarded in online shopping. Many times, this means that the way products are displayed must be flipped online as compared to offline.

Chapter 2 reviews Plath’s metaphorical employment of the witch-martyr figure within the political and religious framework of the Cold War. The chapter outlines Plath’s subversion of the religious vocabulary and themes in her poems, like ‘Lady Lazarus’, particularly its draft, and her parallelling doctors and priests in short stories, such as ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ to critique the rhetoric of the Cold War. The chapter gives evidence that Plath employs the female body as a site of modern political and medical institutional violence, seeking inspiration from the power imbalance of the early modern witch trials and Joan of Arc’s martyrdom. The close examination of Plath’s drafts of ‘Fever 103°’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ concludes the chapter on Plath’s Cold War poetics. It argues that the anticlerical and anti-authoritarian language of her poetry reimagines witch prosecutions, martyrdom, and inquisition in periods of political torture and nuclear warfare.

This chapter argues that the wellspring of theatre can be found in childhood pretend play – a universal human phenomenon that leaves us all capable of theatrical behavior, whether as performers who enact make-believe “realities” or as audience members who imaginatively engage in others’ make-believe. Such play is likely associated with an evolutionary adaptation for advanced symbolic thinking. Theatre might be a by-product of pretend play, carried over into adult life, but it might be an exaptation in which childhood pretend play has been co-opted for the new evolutionary purpose of allowing performers and audiences to explore “what-if” situations in ways that compel attention through the performers’ presence and artistry, and the empathy given to their enacted characters by the audience. The universality of pretend play suggests this behavioral trait evolved more than 50,000 years ago, at which point humans had begun their globalizing expansion from Africa.

Europe’s recovery and reconfirmation were brought about by a growing and increasingly urbanized population as well as by technological advancements and the “Columbian Exchange” that gave Europe access to American riches. Even as the balance of economic power shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the humanistic ideology first developed in Italy spread throughout the region and stimulated the emergence of new theatre forms. The theory and practice of commedia erudita (developed from the study of Roman comedy) and commedia dell’arte (Europe’s first fully professional theatre form) were brought together in the spoken theatre that filled new niches for urban commercial theatre in the leading cities of Spain, England, and France. The study of Greek tragedy, meanwhile, prompted the emergence of opera in Italy, even as royal courts in France and England glorified themselves with ballet and court masques, respectively.

In the wake of Tamerlane, three Islamic dynasties carved out empires: the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals. Much of their growth came between 1450 and 1650, as Eurasia recovered from the disastrous fourteenth century. Despite their similarities, however, the theatre forms that emerged in these empires were quite different, for the empires had distinctive societal and theatrical contexts. They apparently shared a tradition of improvisational comedy. But beyond that, Ottoman theatre was dominated by the karagöz shadow theatre that emerged in the conquered Byzantine capital. Safavid Iran, newly converted to the Shiite branch of Islam, saw the development of religious storytelling and processional theatre, which would come together in the devotional form of taʽziyeh. Mughal India provided the richest harvest of new theatre forms, thanks both to political stability and to bhakti religiosity, although South Asian theatrical innovation also took place in areas beyond Mughal control.

This chapter considers the treatment of a few topics, which are relevant to the general purposes of the book, but whose inclusion in previous chapters would have diverted the discussion of the main topics of interest therein. Two topics are explicitly considered, which are relevant to a useful partition of the Dyson equation and to the Keldysh formalism.

What is the first-line treatment for a patient with comorbid treatment-resistant schizophrenia and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) (schizo-obsessive disorder)?

This chapter examines a literary critical ‘methodological moment’ from the middle of the nineteenth century to modernism. It argues that the re-emergence of the scientific method in this period was key to the normal scientific study of poetry. By returning to a series of forgotten critical debates about the relevance of the scientific method to the study of poetry, the chapter demonstrates how the nineteenth-century revival of method introduced a technical vocabulary into twentieth-century poetics, an epistemologically and politically charged discourse that centred on concepts of method, hypothesis and scientific law. The second half of this chapter goes on to examine published and unpublished poetry by George Oppen to show how he offered a new way of conceptualising the relationship between poetry and the scientific method. It suggests that Oppen turned to mathematics and set theory to create a new nominalist method that could create rather than explain. However, it is also argued that Oppen’s employment of the mathematical method actually ends up illustrating the epistemological power of poetic artifice: its ability to create the sights and sounds of the invisible but not inexistent multitude that Oppen’s poetry sought to bring into being.

The Epilogue assesses the aftermath of Britain’s decision to abolish the death penalty in the Caribbean Dependent Territories. It examines the mostly critical reactions of political leaders in the Caribbean and the events that led to abolition through local action in Hong Kong in 1993 and Bermuda in 1999. In the case of Hong Kong, Britain was ambivalent about the decision, which was influenced by the pending handover to China in 1997. By contrast, Britain’s new Labour government claimed it would impose abolition on Bermuda through Westminster legislation if local authorities did not act. Even so, abolition was a local initiative led by the Progressive Labour Party, which had opposed the death penalty since the 1970s. The Epilogue also considers the fate of the last condemned prisoners in British Dependent Territories, who were reprieved in the early 1990s and eventually released in the 2010s, and the legacy of colonial capital punishment on British death penalty policy.

Chapter 7 introduces the cultural and political context of post-war Britain in which the rise of English nationalism, immigration from the Commonwealth countries, Cold War anxieties, and the development of the Neo-Pagan Wicca religion contributed to the association of witchcraft with the dark other. The chapter reviews Plath’s short stories and poems written about a small English village community and beekeeping during the early 1960s, arguing that she engages with contemporary concerns of exclusionary politics and the racist and colonial rhetoric of witchcraft. Her bee metaphor interrogates the binary between self and otherness and ideas about magical and racialised power. The chapter concludes that in comparing the bees to diabolical flying women, Plath simultaneously challenges and reinforces the identification of the dark other with fearful magical power.

The Conclusion begins by setting the poetic bilingualisms treated in this book alongside the kinds of everyday bilingualism overheard on the streets of any city, from antiquity to the present day, in which two or more cultures meet, clash, and coalesce. There too, inequalities of language status will often be in play; but the inequalities explored here are negotiated in a distinctive way across time, and between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ literary languages or codes. Issues of education and of access to the so-called learned tongues are reviewed; attention is drawn to the sometimes oppressive effect of the word ‘the’ in monolithic master narratives of ‘the’ classical tradition. In retrospect, the book is argued to have been less about achieved classicism than about classicism as process, about a plurality of classical traditions generated anew by every cross-linguistic and transcultural event mobilized by every poet and every reader. Things end with a closural – but also open-ended – catalogue of some of the book’s recurrent questions, preoccupations, themes, and tropes.

Chapter 7 presents the first analysis of the abolition of the death penalty in Britain’s Caribbean Dependent Territories in 1991 based on recently declassified government records. The decision to impose abolition reflected the broad changes in crime and governance in the Caribbean over the preceding decade and the new diplomatic significance of British death penalty policy, but in the short term it was entangled with a scheduled execution in Anguilla and a dozen more capital cases that were pending in other Caribbean Dependent Territories and Bermuda. Britain was forced to abolish the death penalty in part because the likelihood of an execution seemed higher than in many years. The appointment of Douglas Hurd, an abolitionist, as Foreign Secretary was also important, but even so the change of policy was motivated by politics rather than principle. Abolition had been forced on the government as the only sure way to prevent executions that – it had become clear – posed intolerable risks to British interests, but Britain was still far from adopting a consistent abolitionist foreign policy.

Another central concept or entity which Leroi-Gourhan drew from Bergson was Homo faber. In a brief but influential passage of Creative Evolution, Bergson posited that fabrication, making with materials, was a defining human trait. Intelligence was not for contemplation but rather for action, for producing artificial objects and tools. This Homo faber and its creative intelligence received mixed reactions. While the emphasis on techniques and their role in human history was welcomed by historian Henri Berr and by Marcel Mauss, the latter also stressed their fundamentally collective and rational dimensions, rather than individual or organic ones. At the same time, many prehistorians and philosophers of the time readily assumed an evolutionary sequence from primitive Homo faber to developed Homo sapiens. Until the 1950s, Leroi-Gourhan too held such views, considering the most ancient remains of technical activities (stone tool manufacture and use) too crude to be of much informative value.