Jennifer Lorden reveals the importance of deeply felt religious devotion centuries before it is commonly said to arise. Her groundbreaking study establishes the hybrid poetics that embodied its form for medieval readers, while obscuring it from modern scholars. Working across the divide between Old and Middle English, she shows how conventions of earlier English poetry recombine with new literary conventions after the Norman Conquest. These new conventions – for example, love lyric repurposed as devotional song – created hybrid aesthetics more familiar to modern scholars. She argues that this aesthetic, as much as changing devotional practice, rendered later affective piety recognizable in a way that earlier affective devotional conventions were not. Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry reconsiders the roots and branches of poetic topoi, revising commonplaces of literary and religious history. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This chapter focuses on the cantonment of Rawalpindi and its associated hill station of Murree, where we see working-class and elite ideas about family, respectability, sexuality, and race collide. Across British India, men, women, and children of different classes and races were thrown together in army cantonments. Military policy coded the physical spaces that comprised the cantonment – the Army barracks and civil lines, mess halls and married soldiers’ quarters, bazaars, and red-light districts – as sites of potential dissolution, destructive to British prestige. Thousands of soldiers, officers, camp followers, and army wives passed through these installations. As they did so, they created domestic worlds within militarized spaces. Domestication of military space did not, however, assuage official fears about the destructive potential of a population of non-elite whites, but rather expanded those fears to encompass not only single men but also families and children.

The widespread adoption of social media, mobile phones, and online dating apps has drawn more attention toward the importance of media technologies in romantic relationships. However, most observed relational functions and effects of digital media are not novel. Rather, they have been documented previously with traditional media such as books, letters, radio, newspapers, recorded music, television, and the telephone. Romantic relational phenomena manifest across both traditional and digital media due to similar affordances. This chapter provides an overview of research on traditional media across relational processes (mate seeking, relationship initiation, relationship escalation, relationship maintenance, relationship disruption, and relationship dissolution), identifying key social affordances, and introducing relevant theories. We discuss how people use media in relationships, how media consumption affects our relationships, and how people foster relationships with media characters (i.e., parasocial relationships).

Chapter 2 contains a detailed overview of Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory. Special attention is given to identifying their respective strengths and weaknesses, particularly with regard to questions about the semantics–pragmatics interface. This will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand and pave the way for a genuine integration of the two theories.

This chapter revisits some of the individuals and families we have encountered throughout the text, following these families past their time in India. Thinking about the forces that compelled families and individuals to make these choices, or foreclosed possibilities, provides an answer to the question of what happened to popular and historical memory of the working-class Raj. Back in Britain, men and women who had enjoyed an elevated social status could find it difficult to reintegrate into their communities of origin, which reinforced conformity rather than difference. As a result, returning Britons purposefully forgot tales of Indian service and elite pretensions in efforts to manage family relations. In contrast, those men and women who settled with their families in India or other parts of the empire – or who chose to abandon their families of origin – had a greater incentive to embrace a new class status and create family histories celebrating their climb up the social ranks of the British Empire.

Having a satisfying romantic relationship and satisfying employment is important to most people but maintaining the balance between these two domains is not easy. Both roles require a significant investment of time, effort, and cognitive and emotional resources. There is an increased realization in academia that the separation between studying relationships and studying work is artificial and does not represent the many intersections of these roles. In this chapter, we discuss how work and romantic relationships can interact with each other and impact individuals’ outcomes. We first cover workplace romantic relationships, workplace sexual harassment, and organizations’ attempt to regulate romantic relationships at work. Then, we continue with reviewing the positive and negative associations of work and romantic relationship. Lastly, we introduce an economic perspective to examining romantic relationships and consider the workplace as a local marriage market.

Jennifer Lorden reveals the importance of deeply felt religious devotion centuries before it is commonly said to arise. Her groundbreaking study establishes the hybrid poetics that embodied its form for medieval readers, while obscuring it from modern scholars. Working across the divide between Old and Middle English, she shows how conventions of earlier English poetry recombine with new literary conventions after the Norman Conquest. These new conventions – for example, love lyric repurposed as devotional song – created hybrid aesthetics more familiar to modern scholars. She argues that this aesthetic, as much as changing devotional practice, rendered later affective piety recognizable in a way that earlier affective devotional conventions were not. Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry reconsiders the roots and branches of poetic topoi, revising commonplaces of literary and religious history. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Jennifer Lorden reveals the importance of deeply felt religious devotion centuries before it is commonly said to arise. Her groundbreaking study establishes the hybrid poetics that embodied its form for medieval readers, while obscuring it from modern scholars. Working across the divide between Old and Middle English, she shows how conventions of earlier English poetry recombine with new literary conventions after the Norman Conquest. These new conventions – for example, love lyric repurposed as devotional song – created hybrid aesthetics more familiar to modern scholars. She argues that this aesthetic, as much as changing devotional practice, rendered later affective piety recognizable in a way that earlier affective devotional conventions were not. Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry reconsiders the roots and branches of poetic topoi, revising commonplaces of literary and religious history. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This chapter explores the form and practice of correspondence between Britain and India, uncovering the social and affective worlds of British non-elite families. Many of these correspondents had low levels of literacy and did not write for private audiences, but relied on others to read and transcribe their correspondence. Intimate details of private lives became public knowledge. Letters transported information about India back to Britain and spread it throughout communities of origin, far beyond the reach of a single letter. Correspondents based in India maintained ties to their communities at home as they consumed everything from family gossip to political news. Correspondence was central to maintaining the economic health of a family. But the same mechanisms that sustained families and communities could disrupt them as well. Scorned spouses shared their grievances with neighbors. Mothers relied on daughters to convey their intimate feelings to their husbands. The form of correspondence and the practicalities of writing across long distances determined how relationships were sustained or disrupted, how information about the empire was disseminated, and how the empire shaped family life.

Chapter 5 concludes that combining Construction Grammar with Relevance Theory is advantageous. Merging these two frameworks amplifies their respective strengths, resulting in more precise and accurate descriptions of language use as well as a deeper understanding of the cognitive processes involved in verbal communication. It is shown how English modals serve as an effective testing ground of the new theoretical model that arises from this integration (Leclercq, 2023), and future research prospects are suggested.

Falling in love is free…or is it? Although our “heart” and emotions may be unconnected to how much money or education we have or where we live, the process of initiating and maintaining a romantic relationship is most definitely connected to socioeconomic status (SES) and place. This chapter reviews the literature from the past fifteen years on the role of social class in four stages of romantic relationships: dating, cohabitation, marriage, and divorce. The existing research reveals several patterns. First, social class impacts all stages of a relationship, which contributes to perpetuating social class inequities throughout generations. Second, heteronormative assumptions dominate the existing literature with little focus on LGBTQ+ relationships. Moreover, gender appears to overshadow any impact of social class – in other words, women and men are bound by gender role expectations in relationships regardless of SES. Finally, and most importantly, research shows that most individuals, regardless of social class, hope to find a life partner and start a family. What social class “buys” an individual in terms of romance is ease…ease to date, marry, and divorce.