The interplay of life, form, and power is central to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay, “Experience.” It also comes to mark his mature articulations of metaphysics and philosophy, nature and history, and politics and ethics in essays like “Power,” “Success,” or his lecture “Powers of the Mind.” Power is a key theme across Emerson’s relentlessly eclectic thinking – from the creative potentialities of the imagination and the intellect, and the deforming forces of love and loss, to the conditions that embolden individual selves to mastery, invention, and success. The impulsive, circulatory, transitory, depersonalizing, and yet aggrandizing modes of power that emerge in Emerson’s thinking – the powers of the heart and the powers of the mind – point to a vitality that not only appears as the content of his essays and lectures but is at once stylistically performed by them.

British colonial invasion of the Australian continent has had a substantial and often devastating impact on the lives and livelihoods of the original inhabitants. The story of survival is therefore partly one of linguistic adaptation and innovation. For as invasion, displacement and forced relocation rolled across the continent, the language ecologies were also invaded, disturbed and displaced. English has been inserted into the linguistic landscape and contact with its speakers has seeded many new varieties. This chapter surveys the literature that captures this spectacular proliferation of English-influenced varieties; their linguistic structures and the sociolinguistic contexts that make them unique. The chapter ends by focusing on one of the key issues in the study of contact Englishes in Australia: the relationship between individual and community multilingualism.

This chapter begins by describing the pre-history of southern China and the origins of colonial Hong Kong. It then proceeds to a discussion of English in the late nineteenth century and the formation of an English-speaking Chinese elite in colonial Hong Kong. Since the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the government has promoted a policy of “trilingualism” (Cantonese, English, and Putonghua) and “biliteracy” (written Chinese and English). Recently, the national government has moved to assert tighter control over the territory, and there has been increasing importance placed on the learning and use of the national language, Putonghua. At present, English continues to be widely used in key domains of Hong Kong society, including government, law and many areas of employment. This is likely to continue in the future, despite Hong Kong’s increasing integration economically, politically, socially, and linguistically into mainland China.

This chapter first discusses the label ‘English as a second and foreign language’ and then gives a brief selective account of how English arrived in Africa and Asia and how it was initially taught and to whom. The work of three influential language teachers who worked in Asia – Palmer in Japan, Faucett in China and West in Bengal - is reviewed. The chapter then illustrates how local varieties of English have developed in postcolonial settings and how the use of English as a lingua franca has increased in countries that were not colonies of Britain or the United States. The current relevance of the terms English as a second or as a foreign language is questioned as it is argued that English now comprises a multitude of new varieties and plays a major role as the international lingua franca.

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English in Ghana. The absence of a sizable number of settlers, different language and education policies and sociodemographic developments have shaped the variety considerably. Real-time analyses of sociolinguistic and structural developments in the nativisation phase have become possible with the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana), a 600,000-word corpus of Ghanaian English from the early stages of the nativisation phase. The Ghanaian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) represents the late stages. Many lexical innovations were already deeply entrenched in the older data and Ghanaian English noun phrases have become more complex in line with predictions made by the Dynamic Model. The paper is rounded off with an outline of new diachronic approaches to Ghanaian English based on a corpus of material from the archives of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and an idea for a diachronic corpus of African newspapers.

This chapter traces the historical development of English in South Korea, which despite its long isolation and late contact with the language has turned into a fervent adopter of English as linguistic, symbolic, and economic capital. Particular focus lies on the history of English in the South Korean education system and the outcomes of the contact between Korean and English (i.e., Englishized Korean and Korean(ized) English). The United States Army Military Government in Korea (1945–1948) set the foundation for the compelling status of English in South Korea and the current chapter presents a case study of the language ideologies represented in three Korean English textbooks published during this period. While rudimentary notions of the ideologies of necessitation and externalization can already be found in the examined textbooks from the 1940s, all of the material was firmly grounded in the Korean context and clearly reflected the pro-American sentiments of the era.

Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It dis

This chapter looks at the poetic herbarium through the concept of vegetal ontology, addressing works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and especially Emily Dickinson. The epistolary herbaria is a collaborative affair; “a flower in a letter,” like the tendencies of the plants themselves, seeded itself among various writers from across national frontiers. Not only were the form and the content of the messages vegetal but so also was the act of sending, disseminating the herbarium as so many seeds or spores, preceded by lovingly tending to, gathering and preserving flowers. In her work, Dickinson restages the elemental and cosmic clash of viriditas – “greenness,” or the self-refreshing power of finite existence that reaches its apotheosis in plants – and ariditas – “dryness,” or the scorching heat of sin understood in the extra-moral sense of everything that contravenes life and its renewal. Dickinson’s approach is at the same time allegorical and literal, plants providing her with a way of dealing with the inexorability of death. Analogous practices and preferences, like genres and authors, developed across nationalities, geographies, and time periods.

The modern nation of Papua New Guinea is a colonial construct where English and its pidgin-creole daughter language, Tok Pisin, share an intertwined history and contemporary linguistic ecology, each with its official and unofficial roles and each influencing the other. Today at least half of all Papua New Guineans use Tok Pisin and/or English for day-to-day communication in this country with more than 840 distinct languages. Tok Pisin is the dominant medium of oral and informal communication, even as English remains the dominant medium of written and formal communication. The morphology and syntax of Tok Pisin show characteristics that are typical for the languages of its first speakers. Its lexicon is mainly English, but high-frequency words of German, Kuanua, and Chinese Pidgin origin are indicative of a complicated history. Papua New Guinea English has been heavily influenced by Tok Pisin.

This chapter surveys the history of China from the time of first contact with British traders in the early seventeenth century until the present. It traces the story of English through the era of pidgin English, to English language education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and recent policies in the People’s Republic of China. Since the opening of China in the late 1970s, English has been officially promoted as a key to modernisation. Today, official attitudes to the language seem to be less enthusiastic than the recent past, but, despite this, the popularity of learning English appears to be undiminished among China’s growing middle classes.

This chapter examines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seemingly contradictory relation to European Romanticism. Focusing on the concepts of genius, idealism, and originality in key works (Nature, English Traits, and Representative Men), it argues that Emerson’s admiration for English and German Romantic writings was not at odds with his call for cultural independence. Because Emerson understood the genius to be a teacher who empowers his students to reject him, he could imagine any reliance on Coleridge, Wordsworth, or Carlyle as ultimately enabling independence. The philosophical idealism essential to Emerson’s call for cultural independence, moreover, was a mode of perception that defied national categorization and so did not threaten the distinctive American culture he hoped to inaugurate. In his later writings, Emerson also came to clarify a concept of originality that involved the adaptation of inherited forms rather than the invention of new ones. Because borrowing became a precondition for innovation, intellectual debts did not undermine autonomy.

This chapter focuses on how Pater looked at the natural world and art. It discusses how he practiced and thought about the very act of looking. For him, this was both an acutely personal act, and something demanding recognition that the object being looked at has its own specificity – material, historical, and contextual. This chapter asks what qualities he retained as visual touchstones across the broad historical timespan, from the Greeks to the present day, that he addressed; and through the variety of different modes in which he captured the objects of sight – essays, reviews, fiction, and imaginary ‘portraits’ of figures from the past. It shows that all are unified by Pater’s habits of looking, including how he saw colour, and by the process of translation into verbal language, with attention to works including ‘Emerald Uthwart’ and Marius the Epicurean.