This chapter focuses on race in Pater’s works, contextualising these within the racial politics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western aesthetic discourse, especially in the work of two of Pater’s major intellectual influences, the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who profoundly shaped the cultural context of discussions of art and beauty in the West. It analyses how Pater’s writings on classical Greek sculptures and the ancient Greek god Apollo responded to this earlier cultural history, focusing on his early essay “Winckelmann” (1873) and his later short story “Apollo in Picardy” (1893). The final section examines “A Study of Dionysus” (1876) and “Denys l’Auxerrois” (1886), works where Pater portrays the wine-god, traditionally depicted as the embodiment of Oriental excess, violence, and irrationality, in a manner that affirms marginalised forms of knowledge and ways of perceiving the world associated with “Orientalised” racial groups.

This chapter argues that to truly understand Emerson, we need to see and hear him at the lectern. It sketches Emerson’s place within the performance culture and popular lecture circuit of antebellum America and contends that we should regard his works as a form of “voiced essay.” The chapter brings to life Emerson’s dramatic, modulated style as a performer of his own work, showing how his writing simulates these spoken elements at the levels of both style and theme, and inviting readers to become active listeners. The “voiced essay” ultimately dissolves strict boundaries between orality and writing, energizing a new form of social engagement. By encouraging readers to hear Emerson as a figure with a strikingly modern grasp of media forms and the synergy between orality and textuality, the chapter underscores Emerson’s ongoing relevance to debates about performance, intellectual virality, authority, and the transmission of ideas.

This chapter considers the place of democracy in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By conceptualizing democracy, in pragmatist fashion, as a “way of life,” Emerson can be shown to have engaged democracy throughout his career in several different dimensions, both within and beyond official, state, or legal power relations. While Emerson participated in a discourse that was skeptical of the social dynamics of democracy in mass society, he simultaneously upheld his commitment to a philosophy of history that recognized in what he called “the democratic element” a driving force toward greater justice and equality. Democracy furthermore provided the key through which Emerson interpreted his own practice and poetics as a freelance lecturer. Emerson’s commitment to a transcendentally conceived notion of justice at times came into conflict with democracy’s requirements of negotiation and compromise, particularly in the context of radical abolitionism and the Civil War. As this chapter argues, Emerson tirelessly strove to resolve this conflict.

When discussing Asian religion, art, and philosophy, Emerson generally bestows praise and tends toward cosmopolitan, universalist sentiments. Old Asian ideas, especially from Persian, Indian, and Chinese traditions, reinforced his Transcendentalist sense of morality and, especially, his belief in “the infinitude of the private man.” In the contexts of geography and history, however, he gravitates toward nationalist, imperialist, and racist views. Here he betrays his vulnerability to some of the ruling ideas of geographical determinism and teleological historicism informing the ideology of manifest destiny. Yet, true to form for a writer who so famously abjured consistency, this basic distinction does not always hold. This chapter thus begins with an examination of Emerson’s discrepant Asias before analyzing how, despite this general dichotomy, he was sometimes able to subvert prevailing tendencies and introduce uncommon subtleties to his representation of Asia, its cultures, and its peoples.

This chapter presents English in the Philippines, its evolution from a transported language to its many forms today as Englishes within and beyond Philippine borders. With this within-and-beyond approach to Philippine Englishes (PhEs), a blend of old and new histories is hopefully reached to underscore an important point, namely that English in the Philippines is not fixed nor unaffected by history. English arrived in 1898 with the establishment of the American colonial government. Due to the widespread public education system introduced by the Americans, English leapt from foundation stage to stabilization in a few decades, and proceeded to its present state as differentiated forms. In this chapter, illustrations of Englishes in the everyday realities of multilingual and translingual Filipinos are presented. However, PhEs also spill over borders. In labor migration contexts, PhEs are disentangled in the phenomenal movement of Filipino migrant workers across the globe. In presenting PhEs, we invoke multi/translingual complexities and processes associated with mobility, as we flesh out a more complex and contingent historicizing of Englishes within and beyond the Philippines.

Poetry and poethood have long been intertwined with floral imagery starting with the ancient Greek idea of poems as flowers (anthoi), with the anthology (anthologia), the garland (stephanos), and, later the florilegium, being a gathering or collection of poets’ or writers’ finest flowers. Victorian poetry is an efflorescence of such ideas, its book titles frequently designating verse collections by one or more poets as a sheaf, posy, bouquet, nosegay, or as an idyllic garden retreat. Botanical images and metaphors of seeds, flowers, leaves, and shoots regularly occur as markers of the poet’s vocation, especially in prefatory poems and poetic dedications, while the lyric poem is often identified as a flower and a floral gift. Drawing on a large range of poetic examples, this chapter includes discussion of poems by Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Mark André Raffalovich, Thomas Hardy, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, A. E. Housman, and Michael Field.

This chapter accounts for Emerson’s complex, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, relationship to religion and religious experience. While Emerson definitively left the Christian ministry in the early 1830s – turning his back on eight generations of his forefathers who had all become ministers – he never abandoned a profound interest in broader forms of spirituality, including those outside the pale of Christendom. If reason and faith were to be found “in the woods” (and not the church), as his inaugural debut Nature (1836) provocatively claimed, some critics have read Emerson as a secularist (or at the very least a naturalist), epitomizing larger dynamics of nineteenth-century dis- and re-enchantment. This chapter aims for a more nuanced (and multi-hued) view, arguing that Emerson believed the “spiritual laws” of the cosmos could be explained by the twinned activities of science and poetics as forms of social praxis, a communal making of beauty and truth.

Did Victorian literature prompt political change? This chapter examines Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Cry of the Children,” both credited with bringing mass awareness to exploitative labor. But what part did they play in actually changing Victorian society? Levine argues that a single work of art, then as now, does not accomplish change unless it takes part in campaigns that are organized around three social forms: large shows of public support, sustained pressure over time, and specific, well-articulated goals. Analyzing the relations between literary and activist forms not only throws light on Victorian culture but can also help literary scholars now to engage in effective political and social struggle.

This chapter probes the relation between realism and the georgic in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The georgic is generally not associated with that period, and realism was allegedly on the decline. Yet, in focusing on an agricultural setting in rural Bengal, Lal Behari Day’s novel Govinda Samanta, or Bengal Peasant Life (1874) vivifies the connection between the two in ways that enhance both our understanding of the modes of colonial critique as well as the dispersed evolution of literary genres.

The importance of history in the emergence and evolution of varieties of English around the world cannot be overstated. From religious missionaries to colonial administrations, the particular mix of peoples, languages and cultures was central to the type of evolutionary trajectory English took. This chapter offers a historical account of the evolution of English in Cameroon under missionary, colonial (German, French and British) and postcolonial conditions. It identifies some of the crucial factors that enabled it to survive even when the territory was ruled by non-English colonisers like the Germans and the French. Using written documents produced during colonialism, the current chapter traces the impact of the colonial system on contemporary Cameroonian society and the variety of English spoken there with focus on processes of cultural conceptualisation and hybridised patterns of social interaction. This is done via the lenses of two recent theoretical frameworks, namely cognitive contact linguistics and postcolonial pragmatics. The chapter also identifies some distinctive structural features of contemporary Cameroon English, contrasting some of them to West African and East African Englishes.

David LaRocca’s chapter resituates Emerson’s 1856 book English Traits within Emerson’s transatlanticism, as well as within his intellectual, cultural, and historical moment. In particular, it analyzes and contextualizes Emerson’s comments on race in English Traits in relation to the formation of British and American national mythologies. As LaRocca argues, in contrast to less generous critics, Emerson is indeed egalitarian, his philosophy of the fluidity of identity brings him to a stance against definite identity distinctions, and English Traits does not praise Saxon whiteness but poetico-sociologically investigates the nation of England. What is more, Emerson’s interest was, in part, personal. He made English Traits a public statement that justified questions about his family tree and, in a larger domain, the way that New England was formed and informed by England, even while he pursued a broader view of human history – of whatever vintage – as inseparable from natural history.

This chapter looks at nineteenth-century visual arts with an ecological eye. The first section considers distance: the air, haze, clouds, and atmosphere in a painting. Next, closely observed detail in images, often influenced by John Ruskin’s beliefs, is related to the importance of close attentiveness, as well as to the global networks in the study and transport of plants. It then considers the use of visual material in publicizing environmental harms and in bringing home their emotional impact, as well as considering the long-term, as yet invisible effects of climate change on landscapes. Finally, it looks at the role of visual art in providing aesthetic escapism, whatever the realities of pollution and urbanization, as with James McNeill Whistler’s misty Thames views, or with nostalgic pastoral. All sections ask what environmental futures these images contain. The chapter highlights four images: John Constable’s View on the Stour Near Dedham (1823); Albert Goodwin’s A Sunset in the Manufacturing Districts (1884); Henry Warren, The Black Country Near Bilston (1869); and George Vicat Cole, At Arundel, Sussex (1887).