This chapter chronicles the beginnings of American (anthropological) linguistics: in the ‘Introduction’ to his Handbook, Boas provided a framework for analyzing each language in its own terms, and in Language, Sapir set out a broad view of language, culture, psychology, etc.

In the 1930s linguistics developed as a science (Whitney) that favored well-defined methods of analysis of empirical data. Bloomfield provided a set of postulates for autonomous, descriptive linguistics and published his well-regarded Language. In the 1940s, the (post-)Bloomfieldians emphasized distribution in phonemic analysis; later they studied morphophonemics, with debates about item-and-arrangement vs. item-and-process (Hockett), and linguists’ descriptions as ‘fact’ or ‘fiction’ (Swadesh). For syntax, they favored hierarchical ‘immediate constituents’ (Bloch) over slot-and-filler (Pike), while Harris (1951) eliminated meaning and searched for substitution classes. However, some said he had no regard for ‘reality.’ Others rejected Trager and Smith’s (1951) one phonemic analysis of all English dialects as too concerned with ‘methods.’

The 1950s also brought diversity: e.g., glottochronology/lexicostatistics (Swadesh); the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; psycholinguistics (Carroll); semantic functions of intonation (Bolinger); connections with other disciplines (Pike).

In 1957, Harris discussed kernel sentences and grammatical transformations, and Chomsky published Syntactic Structures — which launched a new phase in American linguistics.

Part 1 (by Peyraube and Chappell): In China reflections on language date back to the fifth century BCE. Interest in language was first metaphysical in nature, focusing on the correspondence between reality and names. Later there were studies about phonology, lexical dialectology, and the prosody of rhymes. Chinese scholars concentrated on the writing system, and the classification and semantic value of the Chinese characters (dictionaries of rhymes). From the twelfth to the thirteenth century CE, grammatical analyses developed, dealing with “empty particles.” Later, philological work compared vernacular registers and older forms of the language (Classical Chinese). Remarkably, there was no interest in China regarding works on the Chinese language composed by western missionaries and sinologists from the sixteenth century onward. These grammars, which describe various dialects and registers, first followed European models. Only in the nineteenth century did better reasoned descriptions of Chinese appear.(by Vovin): This is concerned with the adaptation of the Chinese script to Korean and then of the Korean script to Japanese; it also considers the development of an alphabetic writing system in Korea. The philological Japanese tradition (lexicography and commentaries on Old Japanese texts) is also discussed.

When, after the Muslin conquest, new vernaculars emerged which differed from the language of the Qurʾān, exegetic commentaries became necessary. Grammarians aimed at explaining features in this diglossia within a formal framework. Sībawayhi (eighth century) wrote a fully developed grammar of Arabic which became a highly influential model and included, especially, words analysed in terms of roots, a dependency type of syntax, verb-agent vs. topic-comment sentences.With the spread of Islam, Arabic acquired large numbers of speakers, and grammars of indigenous languages were written — with adaptations — using the Arabic model.

The aim of the Syriac (literary Aramaic) tradition was the preservation/explanation of the Christian Bible. Three genres are represented: masorah, lexicons, and grammars. The latter were influenced by Greek and Arabic models, but Syriac grammarians did not simply imitate them.

Different literary strategies tied to the peculiarities of the city itself have been used to write Mexico City. This is a roughly chronological attempt to understand the dialog between the materiality of the city and the mirrors literature has held to it. We first focus on distance as obstacle to reach Mexico City––both for Aztecs and later for the conquistadors–– but also allowing authors to encompass the whole city. Distance is embodied in the gaze of the traveler who discovers the city anew as does, for instance, Frances Calderón de la Barca. As the texts of these visitors prove, the city is not only extensional, it is always conditioned by the past, modeling, and shaping the present. Offering a total view of the city became more challenging as the 20th Century progressed. This however is achieved in the novel, from Federico Gamboa to Carlos Fuentes. After the 60’s, fiction tends more and more to partial accounts of the metropolis and non-fiction privileges moments when the city beats in unison, as exemplified by Elena Poniatowska´s work. Mexico City has been portrayed as an urban tsunami. Extensive areas remain largely absent from the citys literature and cultural production.

Alan Yates was a mid-century Australian crime-writing sensation, writing more than 300 books over a career that spanned the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. Writing under the pseudonym of ‘Carter Brown’, he was published in thirty-five countries, including the United States, where his books were released by the Signet imprint of the prestigious New American Library, and his work was translated into twenty-seven languages. Yet he is now largely forgotten and, despite his impressive sales, received little recognition in Australia even at the height of his success. The lack of critical recognition afforded to Yates’s efforts largely flows from the fact that he wrote faux American mysteries and private detective fiction for Horwitz Publications, one of the largest and most dynamic of a group of Sydney pulp publishers that emerged in Australia after 1945. Yates’s career is an excellent lens through which to examine Australian pulp publishing’s operations in the context of other successful pulp authors, including its interactions with international publishing markets, as well as the author’s complex relationship with mainstream publishing, literary fashions and notions of authorial reputation in mid-century Australia.

This chapter follows microcosmic worlds figured in the skyscraper across three “Chicago Schools”: in architecture, in urban sociology, and in political economy. Three novels map three historical phases: Frank Norris’s The Pit (1902), the financialization of wheat in Chicago’s early skyscrapers; Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), the “color line” and the public sphere on Chicago’s South Side; and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), the landscapes of oil and steel in Dubai. In each the skyscraper appears fleetingly on the horizon, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye as it shifts scales from stage to prop. The three corresponding “Chicago Schools” are: the architects of early skyscrapers assembled around the slogan “form follows function”; the group of urban sociologists that included St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, authors of Black Metropolis (1945); and the economists who supplied the neoliberal precepts by which oil wealth was converted into speculative real estate in Dubai and elsewhere. The article concludes with a coda that records, with reference to the work of urban sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod and the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, the stark divisions of labor that haunt these three “Chicagos” and their skyscrapers, from Lake Michigan to the Persian Gulf.

This chapter considers how Australian children’s and young adult literature published from the late twentieth century complicates early depictions of Anglo-Australian young people as uniquely connected with rural adventures and larrikinism through the exploration of urban Australian lives and multiculturalism. It pairs six novels as exemplars of three key moments of transition in Australian children’s literature in the past half century. First, it discusses Ivan Southall’s Josh (1971) as indicative of the abandonment of the bush as a central concern in the genre, situating it in relation to John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993), which depicts rural Australia as under threat, rather than as a threat to children, as was typical in depictions of the bush in colonial children’s literature. Second, it examines the turn towards representations of ethnic diversity in Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992), a narrative of European assimilation, and Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005), which responded to post-9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment. Finally, it considers two novels published in 1998 that signal the long road to the depiction of fully realised Indigenous characters: Phillip Gwynne’s Deadly, Unna? (1998) and Melissa Lucashenko’s Killing Darcy (1998).

Australian women writers have always been among the most internationally successful producers of anglophone romantic fiction. This chapter explores Australian romance novels from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century to consider how Australian women writers thought and wrote about romantic love, marriage and gender relations. It argues that early Australian romances display unexpectedly unromantic misgivings about love and marriage for women, and that Australian women writers used the genre to argue that love, marriage and domesticity are not enough to make women happy and provide them with fulfilling lives. The novels of Rosa Praed and Marie Bjelke Petersen, among others, suggest that, in addition to love and a life partner, Australian women need the opportunity of meaningful work and a higher purpose to make marriage successful and to find satisfaction in their lives.

This chapter considers ways in which the Australian novel emerged in the early nineteenth century through a cross-pollination of different genres and narrative styles that moved across national boundaries. It discusses the institutional assumptions that have informed the construction of national literatures more generally, while examining the intermixture of fact and fiction that gave impetus to the formation of the Australian novel. It discusses in particular how Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton and James Tucker’s Ralph Rashleigh reimagine the traditional cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Europe, creating an idiom of mock epic that speaks to a new world of political radicalism and moral ambivalence. Such ambiguities are also traced in John Lang’s The Forger’s Wife and Lady Mary Fox’s Account of an Expedition to the Interior of New Holland, with the latter indicating how the eighteenth-century philosophical novel continued to shape nineteenth-century Australian fiction. This mixture of influences is also considered in relation to novels by Charles Rowcroft, Alexander Harris, Louisa Atkinson, Anna Maria Bunn and others, suggesting that early Australian fiction encompasses a greater geographical and intellectual range than is commonly assumed. The essay concludes that the early Australian novel should properly be understood as a compelling and significant part of World Literature.

Colonial adventure fiction provided settler Australia with many of its foundational narratives, but they weren’t always about triumph and domination, and the energies they released into the colonies could be unruly and difficult to contain. Restlessness and movement become important here: colonial adventure novels are what Barbara Fuchs has called ‘itinerant texts’. This chapter begins with bushrangers, from the early feral bushranger narrative Michael Howe (1819) to Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1882–3) – where the protagonist’s rejection of a settled working life is almost pathological. Convict adventure novels such as James Tucker’s extraordinary Ralph Rashleigh (c.1845) and Marcus Clarke’s epic transportation melodrama His Natural Life (1874) take their characters on a gruelling detour into the Global South from which they never return. We then look at the challenges of the kangaroo hunt novel, from early Bildungsromans like Sarah Porter’s Alfred Dudley (1830) to Alfred Ferres’s His First Kangaroo (1896). These are picaresque narratives, chronicling a sequence of adventures that end only when settlement is finally achieved. Settlement is also the final destination of the squatter novel, where colonial adventure is built around speculation and the often violent business of land acquisition: from Thomas McCombie’s hallucinatory Adventures of a Colonist (1845) to the rambling squatter novels of Boldrewood and Henry Kingsley. Finally, this chapter examines some explorer narratives, looking at early examples of this genre and then turning to the wild travels undertaken in Lemurian adventure novels at the end of the nineteenth century, such as J. D. Hennessey’s An Australian Bush Track (1896). By this time, Australia is the last destination for a genre of colonial adventure that seems to have exhausted its potential elsewhere.

In a review article for the West Australian in 1939, a literary critic known as ‘Norbar’ proclaimed that in the recent past, the ‘most outstanding of Australian novels ... have been novels of city life’. This was a welcome development, Norbar maintained, a sign that Australia had ‘ceased to be a mere colonial appendage to Europe ... and [was] rapidly becoming an expanding industrial nation of the south’. Much of this ‘outstanding’ literature was produced by women (Modjeska; Sheridan). In quick succession, Eleanor Dark, Dymphna Cusack, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw published novels set in contemporary Sydney, capturing the city in a period of rapid development as it attempted to move from colonial chaos to modern rationality. In these novels, women’s position in urban space is unstably located at the nexus of participation and exclusion, reflecting the writers’ status as both insiders (as white settlers) and outsiders (as women) in the colonial-capitalist-patriarchal project of Australian urban modernity. This chapter shows how the architectonics of the novel and topography of the city interacted at a time in Australia when both forms were emerging into modernity.