Overseas varieties of English emerged during the colonial period (c. 1600-1900) with features arising which stem partly from dialect input of the early settlers and partly from contact among dialect speakers and with indigenous groups along with some features which represent independent developments in new varieties. The external settings at the overseas locations also played a key role here. There are basic distinctions, such as that between settler and non-settler varieties which, despite certain caveats, still retain their validity in the field of variety studies. The internal developments in forms of English at overseas locations reveal patterns which allow of certain generalisations which help to recognise the developmental trajectories in the past and current pathways of change. Furthermore, new sources for the study of vernacular varieties have become available and yield new insights into variety formation during the colonial period.

This chapter argues that large-scale biological and energy systems were an important environmental concept in Victorian literature. It traces two intertwined cultural narratives. On the one hand, the transition to a fossil energy economy raised fears of coal exhaustion that were echoed by narratives of entropy: In both geology and the thermodynamic physical sciences it was proposed that the eventual exhaustion of energy sources would lead to the end of civilization or even human life. On the other hand, narratives of biological degeneration and atavism arose from a certain interpretation of evolutionary theory; some writers claimed to see unhealthy symptoms of species decline in “degenerate” artists and criminals. We can see how these cultural narratives functioned as environmental concepts in Victorian literary genres of science fiction and decadence, through texts such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In 1873, Sir Walter Buller published A History of the Birds of New Zealand, with a second expanded edition in 1888, both with the highly praised chromolithographic plates by J. G. Keulemans. This chapter explores the politics of extinction in colonial New Zealand through the lens of Keulemans’s ornithological illustrations and Buller’s scientific rhetoric. Buller believed that the extinction of native species was an inevitable consequence of colonization, itself an unambiguous embodiment of progress. This displacement theory of extinction was not, however, confined to the field of natural history but was frequently articulated by a range of voices in colonial New Zealand. By naturalizing colonization, displacement theory erased the agency of colonists, allowing them to justify the consequences of violent dispossession as ordained by nature and legitimizing the resulting disempowerment – if not erasure – of the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s two novels: Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Gaston de Latour (1888, 1896), illustrating how they stand at the heart of his work as aesthetic writer and of new currents in nineteenth-century fiction. It shows that, together, these novels aimed to provide a personal overview of European history in epochs of transition: the transition from paganism to Christianity in the case of Marius, and the Reformation for the unfinished Gaston. The chapter positions these novels in the context of their contemporary debates around the future of the novel, including attention to Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) and Emile Zola’s naturalism. The discussion then focuses on Marius as a historical novel, which interweaves history with fiction and intellectual commentary, a decadent novel engaged in the core themes of contemporary French decadence, and a cosmopolitan novel engaged in acts of translation from Latin to English.

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 focuses on Pater’s unstable and evolving view of Christianity. It discusses the significance of his failed attempts to be ordained into the Church of England, his rejection of religious and moral dogmatism, disavowal of spiritual after life, and paganism. Although these aspects have led critics to disregard Pater’s investment in the Church, this chapter illustrates the sensuous appeal of religious practice and how Pater valued religion for its truth-content, even if he was at different stages in his life very uncertain about what that might mean. Putting his attitude to religion in a wide-ranging context, including the works of William James, John Ruskin, and John Henry Newman, it explores the appearance of ritual, religious symbolism, and belief in works including ‘Emerald Uthwart’, ‘Pascal’, and Marius the Epicurean.

This chapter discusses Pater’s relationship with the aesthetic movement and its central principle of ‘art for art’s sake’, suggesting that he provided a philosophical basis for some key assumptions of the movement, spontaneously practised but not theorised before him. It illustrates how Pater’s first articulation of ‘art for art’s sake’ responds to the burgeoning aesthetic movement illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting, the art furniture industry led by William Morris from the 1860s, and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry, and in sharp response to the purism of John Ruskin. It goes on to trace the history of aestheticism back to philosophers including Immanuel Kant and the poet John Keats, and illustrates Pater’s understanding of this history via close reading of his essays including ‘Coleridge’ (1866) and ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877), with attention to the controversies around the movement, and Pater’s involvement.

Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.

This chapter examines literary representations of changes in agriculture across the nineteenth century. Beginning with an overview of British farming in the early 1800s, it maps the rise of what Greg Garrard has termed “rural capitalism.” With reference to writers, including Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy, the piece examines how realist writing represented shifts in domestic agriculture. Moving to focus on Australia, while drawing on the work of the novelists Louisa Atkinson and Anthony Trollope, the chapter goes on to discuss Britain’s growing dependency on its colonies to provide a stable food supply. It addresses how Atkinson and Trollope were among those writers who captured the devastating changes that agriculture wreaked upon the landscape and climate, along with their warnings about the transposition of European farming methods to a radically different climate.

This chapter surveys Pater’s ‘widely diffused’ contributions to early twentieth-century modernist poetry, prose, and aesthetic discourse. It provides insights into Pater’s influence on modernist writers including W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot, addressing the unevenness of his reception among Anglo-American modernists and the source of the ambivalence that often defined this. Its first section concentrates on how Pater’s literary impressionism anticipated modernist interiority and so can be seen reflected in works including Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Its second section turns to the rejection of Pater by T. S. Eliot – and how Pater nevertheless haunts his works.

The current chapter explores English in Japan from four perspectives: (i) Japan’s sociopolitical history, which explains how English first entered the country in the early seventeenth century; (ii) Japan’s history of English language education, which presents a vexed problem; (iii) English loanwords that have entered the Japanese lexicon and which are divided into “pure” and “creative” borrowings; and (iv) the English used by Japanese speakers. The conclusion draws attention to the creativity of L2 users.