With today’s global media attention on climate crises and resource-centered violence, scholars are keenly invested in understanding how we have reached such a dire situation and what it is that has kept us from acting effectively to improve it. With Britain one of the first among the most powerful, assertive, and technologically advanced nations to develop a culture relying on self-worth defined by bourgeois affluence, the Victorian era marks the crucial historical period from which arose our current inability to act decisively as a collective in the face of global environmental destruction. But it also began the first local environmentalist groups, offered literature directly contesting environmental degradation, and created legal legislation regarding the rights of nonhuman animals. Meanwhile, as demonstrated by Indigenous author Kahgegagahbowh (aka George Copway), from the colony of Upper Canada, many who did not identify as British contributed to the shaping of the Victorian Age and its ecological zeitgeist.

There has been unbroken Anglophone settlement of the Falkland Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, since 1833. The current chapter begins with an overview of the islands’ settlement and socio-economic history, taking into consideration migration from the English South-West and the Scottish Highlands, contact in the nineteenth century with Spanish-speaking gauchos, twentieth century population decline and the aftermath of the brief 1982 conflict with Argentina, since which both the population and the economy of the islands have picked up in sociolinguistically consequential ways. The chapter then provides a detailed overview of the phonology, morphosyntax and lexis of contemporary Falkland Island English, based on a near-million word corpus of spoken conversational data collected by Andrea Sudbury in the late 1990s and Hannah Hedegard in early 2020. This description represents, therefore, an update from earlier accounts (e.g. Britain and Sudbury 2010, 2013; Sudbury 2000, 2001, 2004), given our analysis of a very recently collected new corpus.

Before his rehabilitation got under way in the late 1970s, had Emerson really been the object of “repression” by the American philosophical establishment? The validity of the historical claim put forward by Stanley Cavell has always seemed doubtful. In point of fact, Emerson turns out to have, from his day to ours, a largely unbroken chain of legitimate heirs among American philosophers. This chapter, which builds on previous scholarly efforts to correct and complete the record, notably by historians of pragmatism, continues the work of recovering the Emersonian legacy in American philosophy. The multiform nature of that legacy, which extends to pedagogical theory and classroom practice in American schools, raises important questions for historiographers as they deal with changes in cultural and institutional reception over time. Of particular importance is the question raised by Cavell’s own contribution to Emerson studies: what is philosophy’s relation to the broader literary culture?

This chapter considers Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and William Morris’s New from Nowhere (1890) through the lens of the commons and what counts as “common sense.” Taking its cue from a question Morris poses about art’s role in radical social transformation, the chapter asks if the recent environmental turn in Victorian studies is interested in piecemeal or systemic change. Considering both modes of change, the chapter proposes a “poetry of the commons,” grounded in Carroll’s and Morris’s very different approaches to both the commons and common sense, as an alternative to the market economy and as more accurate approximation of how the commons traditionally worked. Accordingly, Alice and News can be seen as laying the foundations for something like “commons sense” and a practice and poetry of the commons adequate to the demands of the climate crisis.

This chapter provides an account of the types of contact and spread associated with the growth of English beyond the United Kingdom. It describes the main linguistic outcomes of these contacts, including pidgins, creoles, English as a second language (ESL), English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English as Lingua Franca (ELF), Immigrant Englishes and hybridities arising from code-switching and electronic and social media. It also gives an account of how different scholars have tried to make sense of the immense variety within ‘the English language complex’. Particular attention is paid to Kachru’s Three Circles model, Schneider’s Dynamic Model and its current refinements, Mair’s World System for Englishes, Mesthrie’s Contact-Contingency model, and insights from Corpus Linguistics, Language Contact and Language Ecology.

The colonial period, roughly between 1600 and 1900, saw an unprecedented movement of speakers of English to locations overseas. The reasons for this movement vary considerably, from deportation of prisoners and political opponents to voluntary emigration by groups with economic motives, sometimes mixed with religious ones. The rise of first language overseas varieties depends heavily on the founder generation and the sociolinguistic scenarios they found themselves in. In addition, many countries have second language varieties which in general have arisen through an English-oriented educational system and, previously, through contact in colonies with English speakers.

This chapter provides a description of two language varieties spoken in Hawai‘i: Pidgin, an English-based creole, known exonymically as Hawai‘i Creole, and Hawai‘i English, the regional variety of English spoken in Hawai‘i. While Pidgin and Hawai‘i English are treated here as separate entities, we also acknowledge the continuum between them. Our description of linguistic variation in both varieties is based on analysis of speech from informal interviews. We present findings from work that examines variation in linguistic forms, including postvocalic /r/, and we focus especially on variation among vowels. The acoustic analysis of over 8,000 tokens of monophthongs has allowed us to examine and discuss how the vowels of Hawai‘i English and Pidgin have changed over time.

Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

This chapter considers Pater’s public persona. It addresses how his position as a university academic, public lecturer and intellectual, and subject of (mis)representation in parodies such as The New Republic by W. H. Mallock, shaped his life and reputation. It places the evolution of Pater’s public life in the context of late-Victorian culture and society, including attention to Oxford’s secularisation and curriculum changes, journalistic practices, and career setbacks. In doing so, this chapter shows Pater’s ambition as an intellectual and how this shaped his career and writing.

This chapter argues that the origins of the Capitalocene, which locates the roots of planetary crisis in capitalistic accumulation and exploitation, can be found in the nineteenth century. The Victorian period not only witnessed the rise of fossil-fueled modernity – an acceleration of global industrialization fueled by coal and colonialism – but also produced searing critiques of capitalism in some of its most enduring literature. Central to my analysis is Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), a fictional admonition of Cecil Rhodes and his British South African Company. This chapter reads Trooper Peter alongside The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (1926) to illuminate Schreiner’s critique of colonial capitalism and Rhodes’s expansionism. Schreiner rebukes capitalism’s frontier process and challenges hierarchical constructions of nature and humanity, exposing capitalism’s normalization of racial and sexual exploitation, while also imagining alternative modes of more-than-human solidarity.

This chapter explores Emerson’s lifelong ambivalence about the development of new scientific disciplines and the goals of empirical research. Beginning with his famous epiphany at the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in 1833, Emerson’s writing career reflects both intense fascination with and wariness about the trajectories of professional science. With obvious enthusiasm, he tracked developments in astronomy, chemistry, comparative anatomy, embryology, entomology, geology, hydraulics, optics, meteorology, molecular physics, physiology, and zoology. But Emerson’s insistence that empirical observation should align with philosophical intuition, for instance, also generates critiques of the pragmatic instrumentalism and gradual pace with which those emerging fields assembled accretive models of the physical world. Tracing this tension in his thought, driven by an effort to unify increasingly disparate modes of empirical inquiry, reveals Emerson’s unsettled negotiation with the transformative potential he finds in modern science.

This chapter presents an overview of various issues related to English in Pakistan. A timeline of the language and education policy for English highlights notable events from the day of independence to the twenty-first century. Pakistani English is mostly used in the written medium though spoken and spoken-like written mediums on the internet are also emerging. The review of attitudinal research shows that generally students and other concerned groups of the society have a pragmatic view of accepting English. In terms of language features, Pakistani English has developed many distinctive features at various linguistic levels. There is also extensive language contact happening between English and regional languages, where both sides borrow from each other. Lastly, the review of various aspects of English in Pakistan presented in this paper shows that English might be in a stable state in Pakistan, at least for now.

There are similarities in the historical development of English in Brunei and Malaysia, two countries that share many socio-cultural and linguistic traits; yet at the same time, differences in the educational policies that have been adopted have seen English promoted more consistently in Brunei, while support for English-medium education in Malaysia has fluctuated in recent decades, and this has resulted in a substantial divergence in the current status of English in the two countries. This chapter describes the historical development of English in Brunei and Malaysia, traces changes in educational policy over the past few decades, discusses the current status of English, provides an overview of some of the features of Brunei English and Malaysian English, gives a snapshot of local literature in English, and finally offers a brief prognosis for the future of English in the two countries.

Namibia has long been a stepchild of World Englishes research despite an increasing influence of English in the country. The current chapter is one of the first to introduce Namibian English (NamE) to a wider collection of World Englishes. It outlines its unprecedented emergence and development and offers an overview of the latest research findings on language attitudes and use, identity conceptions related to the English language, as well as local characteristics of NamE. Most importantly, the chapter highlights two aspects of NamE. First of all, it outlines NamE’s heterogeneous character, i.e. the existence of a number of subvarieties of NamE. Second, the chapter emphasizes its independent character and claims that it should be treated as a variety of English in its own right and not just an offshoot of South African English. Even though the last ten years have produced an impressive surge of interest into the variety and thus important research findings, research on NamE is still in its infancy. The current contribution is, hopefully, the starting point for a more thorough integration into the World Englishes paradigm.

With arguably the largest number of speakers of any postcolonial variety of English and a history stretching over four centuries, Indian English has received more attention in the literature than many other varieties. This chapter will track its emergence and development from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, from early English-speaking travelers and the earliest English trading ventures via the gradual extension of British colonial power over the subcontinent and its linguistic consequences, to the diffusion of English to ever greater sections of society at the start of the twenty-first century. Regarding the structure of Indian English, this chapter will take advantage of the large body of corpus-based research which has probed into the actual frequency and distribution of a wide range of Indian English features, allowing for a more empirical approach towards Indian English, encompassing its phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon and (discourse) pragmatics.