This chapter examines the early decades of the Union (1801–1829), focusing on the unresolved tensions surrounding Catholic emancipation and Ireland’s uneasy integration into the United Kingdom. Despite promises of equality, the persistence of penal laws excluding Catholics from political office fuelled discontent, with figures like Daniel O’Connell and Bishop James Warren Doyle arguing that such discrimination violated the principles of the British constitution. The chapter explores debates over Irish ‘character’, the rise of mass Catholic mobilisation through organisations like the Catholic Association, and the clash between reformers advocating gradual inclusion and conservatives defending Protestant supremacy. Key moments include the veto controversy, the influence of millenarian ‘Pastorini’ prophecies and the eventual passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829 - a victory tempered by the disenfranchisement of poorer voters. The chapter reveals how struggles over representation, religious identity and democratic participation shaped Ireland’s political landscape.

introducing the relevance of the book and its main aim

Pablo Neruda served as Consul General in Mexico from 1940 to 1943. This was a foundational period on his path toward becoming Latin America’s politically engaged poet par excellence, when his verse and public persona fused around a sharpened commitment to the working class and the struggles against fascism and imperialism. As a haven for left-wing exiles, Mexico City during World War II was a “key node” in global cultural Cold War debates about “the relationship between the intellectual to revolution,” according to Patrick Iber. Neruda found common cause with Mexico’s ideologically engaged muralists, including David Alfaro Siqueiros, and feuded with the more artistically independent poets, principally Octavio Paz (Nobel Prize, 1990). Years later, during an odyssey of political exile from his native Chile, Neruda returned to Mexico. There, in 1950, he published his magnum opus, Canto general, a sweeping epic about Latin America’s revolutionary historical destiny, considered the literary equivalent of Mexican muralism.

This chapter introduces one of most unusual madrigals in Strozzi’s Opus 1, Al Battitor di bronzo della sua crudelissima Dama. Giulio Strozzi’s sonnet takes its inspiration from one of the most practiced themes of ancient Greek and Latin poetry, that of the exclusus amator, the excluded lover. While many such poems focus on the door itself Strozzi’s poem brings to the fore, instead, the plight of the doorknocker itself, for it (and the madrigal’s music) will only find its repose after the beloved allows the lover to enter her home. It was in Venice that bronze objects, with their innate sensuality, reached their greatest heights. The Strozzis’ madrigal, then, celebrates one of the city’s highest art forms through a combination of literary wit and musical inventiveness.

What was Ireland during the nineteenth century? A kingdom, a colony, or a clandestine republic: the answer was in the eye of the beholder. The Irish parliament existed until 1800 but lacked executive independence and represented a political nation that was exclusively Protestant. Ireland became an integral component of the United Kingdom from 1801 yet retained configurations of colonial government that intermingled with British domestic structures, creating a constitutional apparatus that lacked conceptual clarity. While Ireland was not unique in terms of its ambiguous constitutional framework – the ‘state fragments’ within the Habsburg Empire that the German jurist, Georg Jellinek, analysed offer parallel examples and terminologies – the tensions arising created uncertainty at the heart of the nineteenth-century British world.1 The island was framed as a victim of unresponsive imperialism; at the same time, even sympathetic British observers such as John Stuart Mill believed that the Irish lacked the political maturity for independent statehood.2 Province or nation, kingdom or colony, the deceptively simple question of what Ireland ‘was’ in the nineteenth century remains deeply contested.3 By excavating the contested visions of government – from the dying embers of the parliament in Dublin to the origins of Home Rule – this book explores the ways in which observers and protagonists grappled with Ireland’s puzzling constitutional position, and how Irish ideas concerning the structures of government were articulated and changed over time.

This chapter examines the renewal of British–Miskitu relations in the 1830s and the actions of Belizean Superintendent Alexander MacDonald and his aide (later, Consul) Patrick Walker that entangled the British imperial government in the affairs of the Mosquito Kingdom, particularly in relation to its Central American neighbors and in the context of a growing interest in the Nicaragua Canal that prompted the British government to reestablish its official presence over the Mosquito Coast.

This chapter illuminates the deeper history of a Black concert music tradition that undergirded Price’s path. Part of a systemic response to de jure and de facto segregation, the Black concert music tradition became not only an alternative to the white mainstream; it also presented a multifunctional use of the concert stage: a space to perform old and new repertoires and educate audiences on Black music history. The intersection of Emancipation, establishment of colleges and universities for the formerly enslaved, Jim Crow laws, the institutionalization of music education, and the rise of a Black professional class laid the foundation for the development and cultivation of a community of Black composers, performers, teachers, and patrons – a community that Price actively participated in and contributed to.

This chapter analyses the Repeal movement led by Daniel O’Connell during the 1830s and 1840s, which attempted to undo the Act of Union and restore Ireland’s parliament. O’Connell framed Repeal as a constitutional restoration - a return to Grattan’s Parliament - but infused it with mass mobilization tactics honed during Catholic emancipation. The movement’s tensions are revealed through its ideological factions: O’Connell’s moderate "Old Ireland" favouring gradual reform within British frameworks, and the more radical "Young Ireland," influenced by classical republican ideals. The chapter explores how Young Irelanders like Thomas Davis conceptualised Irish self-government not just as legislative autonomy but as cultural and economic sovereignty, diverging from O’Connell’s pragmatic focus on institutional restoration. The catastrophic Famine (1845–52) deepened these divides, exposing the Union’s failures and radicalizing demands for self-rule. Ultimately, the chapter shows how Repeal became a crucible for competing visions of Irish representation - from O’Connell’s loyalist parliamentarianism to Young Ireland’s revolutionary separatism - laying groundwork for later republican and Home Rule movements.

This chapter addresses Pablo Neruda’s poetry as world literature. It discusses the prominence that models such as Franco Moretti’s assign to the novel and to Paris or other Western capitals as centers of canonization. It examines the circulation of Neruda’s poetry in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc in the late 1940s and early 1950s to conclude that it is inaccurate to claim that Latin American literature did not enter the international market until the 1960s when the novel received attention in the West. The conclusions argue that a study of the international circulation of literature that is not politically biased or Eurocentric requires an analysis of the translation and publication itineraries of poetry and beyond Europe and the Anglophone market.

This chapter explores the approach of the Italian Thomist and Kierkegaard scholar, Fr. Cornelio Fabro (1911–1995), to move contemporary scholarly discussions toward consensus regarding the dialogue between Thomism and continental philosophy, which centers on the question of the meaning of being (esse) and contingency. The central observation is that what is now taken as the canonical Thomist view of creation and freedom is indebted to Fabro’s research on the metaphysics of participation. For Fabro, the forgetfulness of being that Heidegger rightly identifies loses its way with the forgetfulness of the act of being. By distinguishing esse from existentia with Fabro’s notion of participation and act of being (actus essendi), Fabro’s Thomism avoids Cartesian dualism and phenomenological monism, which opens a constructive dialogue with continental thought. Briefly rehearsing Fabro’s metaphysical distinction between factical existence (existentia) and being (esse) illuminates Fabro’s critical evaluation of continental thought as a speculative scheme of necessary emanation or pure immanence. The chapter concludes that the best way to approach this question is not to limit it to the empirical realm of factical existence (existentia) but rather to open up the existential question to the metaphysics of creation ex nihilo.

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical approach of the book. Images are conceptualized as cultural artefacts that are both signs open for meaning making and tools open for social action. They are also dialogical and political artefacts that take part in knowledge production and circulation.

This essay focuses on Elicura Chihuailaf’s 1996 bilingual Mapuzugun/Spanish anthology of Neruda’s work. The translation and selection in the anthology titled Todos los cantos/Ti kum ul reveal a creative and ambitious rereading of Neruda’s virtues and flaws in understanding the Mapuche world. A close reading of Chihuailaf’s Todos los cantos/Ti kum ul shows how Neruda’s poetry can be reinterpreted in ways that allow for the presence of Mapuche voice and ethos. Chihuailaf’s rereading of Neruda’s work expands and redefines the idea of the “National Poet” in the twenty-first-century Chilean context.

Philosophical and conceptual understandings of time underpin Bowen’s writing, and often these are expressed through experiments with form and narrative. Focusing on Bowen’s novels, this chapter examines how her characters are shown in scalar relation to bigger historical moments or developments, even while the writer holds on to the primacy and singularity of individual experience. It discusses the relationship between history and affect or individual feeling through three interrelated narrative tropes: the temporality of loss, typically broached through themes of adolescence and innocence lost; textual time, or the ‘multitemporal’ qualities of words and letters; and time capsules, or the irruption of the past into the present or future, particularly as a felt experience of wartime. Reading Bowen in context not only emphasises the important issues of her time; it also illuminates the reader’s relationship to her time, and how one might feel and understand intimate attachments to the world in contemporary times.

In Bowen’s fiction, domestic architecture shapes the character and modus vivendi of those it houses. While Bowen admired the austerity of eighteenth-century architecture, exemplified in Bowen’s Court, her family’s Big House in County Cork, she admitted to a preference for the fanciful villas of the Kentish seaside where she lived as a child with her beloved mother. This chapter examines her ambivalence about the architectural styles that supplanted the august simplicity of Georgian design. Ambivalent, too, is her attitude to the housing estates that pullulated in the English suburbs. Although she deplores the desecration of tradition, she is also exhilarated by the ferment of modernisation. The chapter concludes with Bowen’s haunted houses, which engender their own inhabitants, whether living or undead.