This chapter provides a detailed description of the socio-historical background of English in Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Is lands discussing the spread of English from the first contact with English explorers and traders to the impact of English after political (semi-)independence. It further includes the first real-time study on language variation and change from the Cook Islands. Three Cook Island women of three generations were recorded twice within 10 years. Comparing intra- and inter-speaker variation in terms of lexis, grammar and accent features, the study shows differences between the three individuals, which opens up a debate on the role of the individual in language change and the future of L2 Englishes in the South Pacific. The chapter confirms that empirical diachronic research on English in the South Pacific yields insights into variety formation.

Victorian literature translated the systemic organization of extraction-based globalization into aesthetic structure. This chapter shows how literary forms like the multiplot novel and lyric poem strained and changed shape to account for the world-spanning mechanisms of imperialism, colonialism, and an extraction-based fossil capitalism that reshaped “the environment” across the nineteenth-century British imperium. Describing a “supply-chain sublime,” it shows how the improvement and development valorized by John Stuart Mill (and before him, John Locke) had material corollaries in scarred and abandoned zones that rarely focalize canonical works. Seen in this context, exhibits like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) recode extractive globalization into signals we can detect, but only with an “environmental” reading practice that construes ecological matters to inhere in sociopolitical conditions, and that sees environmental issues as finally moral ones too.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Walter Pater’s elusive personal life and his works. Addressing how the dynamics between the two have been a touchstone in criticism of Pater, it asks how we can reasonably read the autobiographical and self-reflexive dimensions of Pater’s writings. It illustrates how writers who encountered Pater – from Oscar Wilde to Edmund Gosse – reflected on the difficulties of knowing him beneath his courteous exterior. It considers how Pater himself figured personal life of writers and artists of whom he wrote. Addressing Pater’s ‘tact’ and ‘reserve’, quoting from the unpublished manuscript ‘The Aesthetic Life’, it considers Oxford Hellenism and the revelation of Pater’s involvement with William Money Hardinge.

This chapter provides an overview of Indian South African English, which remains an important ethnolect within South Africa, since language shift has resulted in the Indian population having English as its L1 (with the exception of new post-1994 migrants from India). Yet SAIE remains culturally distinct and in turning into an L1, SAIE has not jettisoned the L2 features of three to four decades ago, when shift was at its peak. This position aligns SAIE with Irish English as “language shift varieties”. The L2-features-turned-L1 illustrated in this chapter do not occur as frequently as in the 1970s and 1980s. Many speakers are now polystylistic (in either a general South African English or even an acrolectal standard variety tied slightly more to international than White South African English). However, the former L2 features do surface in the most informal end of the stylistic continuum, especially in in-group speech, as illustrated in this chapter.

The Victorians carried a powerful sense of British environmental norms and values into the lands they colonized. Literature from the settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand testifies to those inherited expectations and their collision with unfamiliar local conditions, while also gesturing (if only implicitly) to Indigenous environmental knowledges. Despite often being dismissed by later critics as derivative or inauthentic, such works played a prominent role in mediating diverse conceptions of the environment within an imperial system otherwise keyed towards its transformation and exploitation. Writing about forests in New Zealand highlights literature’s capacity to articulate and assess diverse conceptions of environmental value. Accounts of aridity and drought in Australia demonstrate the role played by literature in comprehending unfamiliar and unpredictable climates. The poetry of Mohawk and Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson points to the need for non-Indigenous critics to become more cognizant of literary expressions of Indigenous environmental knowledge.

This chapter provides approaches to reading Pater’s works for their remarkable literary style, with particular attention to his essay on ‘Style’ (1889) and passages from works including ‘The Child in the House’ (1878) and the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). It begins by illustrating how Pater’s creation of atmospheres is intrinsic to his style as, to borrow his phrase, ‘a literary artist’. This style was focal in criticism of his works from very first reviews of The Renaissance. It identifies and analyses his characteristic vocabulary and its sensory effects, discussing Pater’s endeavours to locate the subjective origins of writing style in his essays before turning to analyse the unconventional phrasing that defined his sentences.

This chapter argues that the discussion of pollution in Victorian environmental writing was often cross-wired with an oppressive and dehumanizing moral rhetoric. The confusion of the moral and material valences of words like “pollution,” “impurity,” “contamination,” and “filth” meant that, in practice, the very persons and communities that were suffering the most at the hands of extractive capitalism were imagined to be the cause of environmental breakdown, rather than its most grievously suffering casualties. In this way, the profound human cost of industrialism and the profit logic could be obscured under a victim-blaming rhetoric of social respectability, sexual purity, and moral righteousness. Drawing on key passages by Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the chapter shows some of the ways in which this troubling conflation of the moral and material was both critiqued and reinforced in the literature of the period.

After sketching two indicative moments from Emerson’s 1867 westward lecturing trip – his visit to the Santee Sioux in Minnesota and his visit to a group of Hegelian philosophers in St. Louis – this Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson gives an overview of the volume contributors’ main thematic emphases. These are Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism, and Asia; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism; and his late style and legacy. While many readers of Emerson are most familiar with the iconic picture of him as the Sage of Concord, this introduction paints a picture of a transitional and transnational Emerson who tirelessly lectured across the United States throughout his lifetime, who can be placed in his contemporaneous transatlantic currents of Romantic literature, religion, philosophy, or science, and who nonetheless looks forward to modernist poetic, aesthetic, or musical innovations.

This chapter explores the linguistic consequences of language contact between English and Afrikaans in South Africa, focusing on the English spoken by Afrikaans speakers in South Africa. Against the backdrop of two centuries of language contact and bilingualism, the multifaceted nature of interactions in diverse social settings are investigated, and the linguistic outcomes of these settings are outlined. The chapter highlights the bidirectional influence between Afrikaans and English, with evidence of influence mainly from Afrikaans to Afrikaans South African English (ASAE), but the reciprocal influence between ASAE and other vernaculars is also highlighted. The linguistic review describes ASAE pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and stylistic features, by offering evidence from corpora, dictionaries and important works on the two ethnic subvarieties of ASAE. Overall, strong similarities with White South African English are found, but some differences reveal the influence from Afrikaans. For phonological features, there are quantity rather than quality differences for the tense-lax vowel contrast and hiatus breaking through [h] that distinguish ASAE from WSAE. For lexicogrammar, ASAE is observed to model its use of lexemes, collocational patterns and more abstract grammatical patterns, on Afrikaans constructions. The likelihood that White South African English speakers are not directly influenced by Afrikaans itself but rather by ASAE is considered as a topic for further study.

This chapter explores the category of the “EcoGothic” that has emerged out of the attempt by Gothic Studies to confront the reality of the climate crisis and ideas of the Anthropocene. The Gothic is often presented as a privileged mode, given its interest in affective states of fear and horror and its ability to operate at different scales from domestic realism. It can evoke apocalypse and planetary transformations, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to John Ruskin’s late lectures on storm clouds. The chapter proposes the EcoGothic be considered less as a set of objects or texts than a method of apprehension of many kinds of Victorian cultural objects. Authors discussed include Edmund Burke, Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, M. P. Shiel, H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and others.