“My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” (1937) is one of Price’s most well-known concert spirituals due to Marian Anderson’s historic performance of the piece on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Its continued inclusion in programs, especially by African American concert singers (such as Leontyne Price and Roberta Alexander, for example), has helped secure the work as an important contribution to the repertory of American art song. However, the song’s significance extends beyond its high-profile performances and sheds light on the significant legacy of the concert spiritual genre. This chapter’s analysis of several concert spirituals by Price reflects her embrace of and impact on this genre’s conventions and musical legacy.

This chapter explores the cultural reception of Pablo Neruda in China and Japan. Between 1949 and 1979, Neruda was among the most translated foreign writers in China, playing an essential role as a cultural diplomat for the Chinese government. In addition, he established a friendship with the poet Ai Qing (1910–1996), and their memory is still remembered through Ai Qing’s son Ai Weiwei (1957–), one of the most famous Chinese artists and activists today. Compared with his popularity in China, Neruda never received much critical attention in Japan. After World War II, the US occupation forced Japan to unwillingly become the centerpiece for America’s Cold War strategy in East Asia. Although the country never embraced communism as a significant political force, the essay argues that contemporary Japanese artists such as Taeko Tomiyama (1921–2021) and Nobu Takehisa (1940–) found inspiration in Neruda’s work regarding literature, art, politics, and nature in Latin America.

Written in February 2025, well after the completion of the monograph, the epilogue reflects on the fall of the Assad regime as a historic rupture while acknowledging the uncertainty of Syria’s post-revolutionary trajectory. While revolutionary ideals have been reaffirmed in historical narratives, their translation into governance, justice, and political inclusion remains unresolved. New actors now compete to define Syria’s future, shaping its ideological and institutional landscape. The chapter highlights how discursive battles over key political concepts – such as democracy, secularism, and governance – mirror a broader crisis of democracy, where increasingly questioned. It argues that the post-Assad moment has not ended Syria’s struggle for meaning but has transformed it into a contest over the principles that will shape the new order. The epilogue concludes that while something undeniably good has happened – the fall of a brutal dictatorship – the revolution’s aspirations remain incomplete. The task ahead is not to declare its success but to create the conditions in which its meaning continues to unfold.

The history of development and structure of various musical compositions and adaptations from 1969 onward of aspects of Pablo Neruda’s Canto general is examined in three exemplary cases: Aparcoa’s “musical poetic work,” first performed in 1970; the Canto general oratorio composed in 1972–80 by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis; and the “Alturas” (“Heights of Macchu Picchu”) work by Los Jaivas, composed in 1980–81. These musical compositions and adaptations, as well as their performance, broaden out the ways in which new generations interpret and frame Neruda’s life and works. They are also aspects of Neruda’s “cultural afterlife,” while being new creations, as words, within the sphere of music.

Metametaphysical reflection is nothing new. Avant la lettre, Aristotle’s attempt to lay out a science of “being qua being” and its first principles – the scientific discipline that came to be called “metaphysics” – involved an attempt to justify his methodology as well as to develop responses to skeptics. Contemporary metametaphysics has revived some of these discussions. Whereas all metaphysicians roughly agree on the sorts of problems that count as “metaphysics,” and generically that the subject matter concerns the nature and structure of reality, not all metaphysicians agree about what constitutes the form of an answer to such problems. Some contemporary metaphysicians focus on existence questions – listing what exists – whereas others focus on “grounding” or dependence relations of some kind – what depends on what or is fundamental. These differences tend to appear in responses to skeptical challenges to metaphysics.

In ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, Elizabeth Bowen addresses the visual angle an author may choose to adopt as a problem in writerly technique: ‘Where is the camera-eye to be located?’ As she was a self-described ‘visual writer’, it follows that an exploration of her visuality offers a useful lens to perceive her work. Talk of lenses leads to thoughts of eyes, glasses, and photography, all of which feature prominently in her fiction. Bowen’s visuality also manifests itself across technical, aesthetic, and thematic levels, through linguistic choice, and in the rendering of perception. Through a selection of novels and short stories, this essay considers Bowen’s visuality under two lens-based categories – the human ‘roving eye’ and the photograph, index of the mechanical ‘camera eye’ – in an effort to apprehend, at least in part, her literary focus, and how she registers, records, and frames impressions and experiences.

Food security is a common term within the region, but its meaning is unclear. This chapter argues that the term is a means to demarcate the Gulf’s access to food from the rest of the region; it submits it as a form of biopolitics that rationalises circulation, access and consumption. It shows how food imports are central to economic growth and development and how this is managed by governments. It also argues that food security is a basis for political legitimacy and the identification of problem and solution is a performative act.

Bowen was not a committed feminist, but she did have a proximity to feminist thinkers and a belief in women’s civic responsibility. She insists in her essay, ‘Woman’s Place in the Affairs of Man’, ‘I am not, and never shall be, a feminist.’ A less strident formulation in Bowen’s first novel seems to better capture the ambiguous but affectionate character of Bowen’s attitude towards women throughout her oeuvre: ‘I am not a Feminist’, says Mrs Kerr in The Hotel, ‘but I do like being a woman’. Bowen certainly liked being and being with women, both in her life and in her writing. She was an acute social, sometimes sociological, observer of women and of their relationships to one another, sometimes in ways that echo and anticipate the insights of feminist thinkers. This chapter focuses Bowen’s observations about women in her essays before moving on to her penultimate novel, The Little Girls.

Ellen Rosand provides an overview of Strozzi in the fifty years since her groundbreaking article, “Barbara Strozzi, virtuossisima cantatrice: The Composer’s Voice” was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1976. In it she explores the many performances and recordings of Strozzi’s music, discoveries about Strozzi’s life, discussion of her music, the iconography associated with the composer (in particular the portrait by Bernardo Strozzi that Ellen and David Rosand identified), as well as her image in popular literature, on radio and in film, all of which have given us not only a much richer and fuller sense of who she was, but a greater appreciation of her the quality of her music.