Chapter 5 proposes that friendship is one of the founding principles of, and one of the main reasons for writing, familial letters. It focuses on the exchange of letters between Keats and his friend the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, suggesting that the exchange itself sustained but also threatened the friendship because of its engagement with a paradoxical logic of reciprocity that governs both friendship and letter-writing. The chapter pays particular attention to the inherent contingency of epistolary friendship – friendship that is supplemented or sustained by epistolary contact – in the case of Keats’s mutually flattering but sometimes difficult relationship with a man who shared the poet’s sense of artistic ambition while lacking his talent and genius. As a form of gift exchange, the interchange of letters between two friends may be said to be governed by the economics of an implicit but difficult and ultimately paradoxical reciprocity.

The Conclusion urges us to consider practices that lead to becoming ‘valuable people’ as something that goes beyond overcoming stigma to changing the evaluations that define what is good. It brings the discussions about values together with a final example of how my interlocutors pursued valued inclusion, by embracing a biomedical model of personhood where people are judged on their minds rather than on their bodies. This draws attention to the wider relevance of questions of entitlement, distribution, and values: wherever my interlocutors went, discussions of values followed.

This chapter will introduce the reader to the study of third (L3) or further (Ln) acquisition. The circumstances surrounding the acquisition of language beyond the second conspire to make this a unique context, distinct from L2 acquisition. The L3 learner has at least partial knowledge of more than one grammar, previous experience with nonnative language learning and, in most cases, at least some metalinguistic knowledge. All these factors significantly condition both the starting point and the trajectory of L3/Ln language acquisition in ways that cannot be predicted from our understanding of L1 and L2 acquisition and reflect qualitative as well as quantitative changes in going from two to three or more languages. In this chapter, the reader will find an introduction to the basic concepts and themes of L3/Ln acquisition research, an overview of L3/Ln theories from a cognitive perspective – modeling the acquisition of both morphosyntax and phonology – an in-depth discussion of the role of previously acquired languages, and a brief introduction to some of the most recent work on L3 processing, including studies using electroencephalography (EEG) and semiartificial languages to address long-standing questions in the field while overcoming some of the most common methodological and logistic issues facing the L3/Ln researcher.

Vygotsky introduced the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in the 1930’s. ZPD activity involves semiotic mediation of mind and is a unit of analysis in sociocultural theory (SCT) and activity theory. ZPD activity reveals a learner’s potential future development. Higher cognitive development, including second language acquisition (SLA), involves social processes as learning-leads-development in ZPD activity, where developmentally appropriate support (from other persons or from semiotic tools) enables functioning beyond a learner’s independent skills. Too much support, beyond a learner’s ability to understand, is outside of the ZPD and does not reveal developmental trajectories. Early L2 research on ZPD activity focused on identifying ZPDs using discourse analytic approaches. Promoting ZPD activity is at the core of concept-based language instruction (C-BLI) and dynamic assessment (DA), two interventionist pedagogical approaches. Process-oriented research most effectively reveals ZPD activity. Instead of mentioning ZPD activity, SCT researchers may discuss mediation; ZPDs may also be evident in non-SCT process-oriented studies. Examples of research relevant to ZPD activity include work focused on identifying and understanding ZPD activity, studies on explicit instruction (C-BLI) and instructional assessment (DA), and process-oriented studies on interaction between people and other persons or semiotic tools, including digital tools.

Complex fluids can be found all around us, from molten plastics to mayonnaise, and understanding their highly nonlinear dynamics is the subject of much research.

This text introduces a common theoretical framework for understanding and predicting the flow behavior of complex fluids. This framework allows for results including a qualitative understanding of the relationship between a fluid’s behavior at the microscale of particles or macromolecules, and its macroscopic, viscoelastic properties. The author uses a microstructural approach to derive constitutive theories that remain simple enough to allow computational predictions of complicated macroscale flows.

Readers develop their intuition to learn how to approach the description of materials not covered in the book, as well as limits such as higher concentrations that require computational methods for microstructural analysis.

This monograph’s unique breadth and depth make it a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in fluid mechanics.

Supernatural politics is a theme that runs through the preceding chapters. It is intended to show how efforts to indigenize Communism by the CCP drew consciously and unconsciously on traditional religious culture, even though this was only ever one mode of political legitimation. It is hard to measure its effectiveness in promoting the legitimacy of the regime, although it certainly served to mystify the workings of power. Through an assessment of the CCP’s reliance on repression, its failure to forge a new-style religious policy based on the united front, its organizational incoherence, divisions among its grassroots cadres, popular resistance in defence of folk religion, its policies to improve health and popularize science, it concludes that the project to roll back the influence of the recognized religions and eliminate ‘feudal superstition’ had only limited success. Judged from the perspective of religion, the party-state is shown to be much weaker than is often assumed.

The introduction examines the CCP’s hope to break with a Soviet-style anti-religious policy. It examines policies towards the five religions that it recognized – Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism (Islam is not discussed), as well as towards the folk religion of the vast majority of Chinese which the Party did not recognize as a religion and dismissed as feudal superstition. The CCP’s initial aim was to create a united front with patriotic religion leaders. However, this came under attack from those who increasingly saw religion as an obstacle to socialist advance. Through propaganda, campaigns and scientific education, the regime aimed to eradicate popular belief in supernatural agency. At the same time, it sought to bolster its legitimacy through what is called ‘supernatural politics’, i.e. the use of supernatural imagery and Confucian values to communicate its messages. This led to tensions within the ruling ideology. The introduction uses the steady move towards repression of religion to reflect on the unhappy relationship of Marxism to religion in general.

The Introduction situates the book’s contribution in relation to the historiographies of madness, medicine, emotion, selfhood, and personhood. While mania and melancholy have enjoyed perennial scholarly interest, the same cannot be said of early modern frenzy. The Introduction offers some thoughts as to why frenzy has been neglected, and reflects on some of the conceptual and methodological difficulties which accompany its study. It explains the book’s scope (and limits), and offers short summaries of its six chapters. Sketching out the book’s central claim – that frenzy had devastating effects on personhood, and that these effects drove its early modern observers to unpick the tangle of mind, soul, and brain – it engages with recent claims about the emergence of a distinctively modern ‘cerebral self’. It sets out to test the claim that the possession of certain ‘psychological features, such as memory, consciousness, and self-awareness’ was not constitutive of ‘personhood’ until the end of the seventeenth century.

Scott’s struggles to maintain authorial control against the incursions of Merrilies’s witchlike powers compels him to consciously assume the more distanced role of an antiquarian collecting stories of female enthusiasm in subsequent novels, offering up prognoses of mental instability for the witches in The Antiquary, The Pirate and Ivanhoe. This chapter also introduces an entirely new and different witch figure: Rebecca, a lovely young Jewish healer whose potential marriage to Ivanhoe is challenged by racial prejudice and misogynistic suspicions that brand her as a witch. Although Rebecca is rescued from her trial as a witch, she does not receive the happy ending she deserves. Scott writes her out of the narrative in the end when she and her father decide to leave England. Yet Ivanhoe’s choice of a bride – the mild and dutiful Rowena – pales by comparison to Rebecca, inviting readers to envision an alternative ending: the union of Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and the socially transformative potential of this marriage between a Christian and a Jew, the story’s hero, and a purported witch.

The Introduction situates Romanticism Bewitched within current historicist scholarship on gender and witchcraft, feminist political theory and recent scholarship on misogyny and women’s anger. In addition, it traces the trajectory of witchcraft belief from the seventeenth century down to the Romantic era, exploring the eighteenth-century fascination with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the gendered politics of representations of Lady Macbeth. During the Romantic period, Siddons’s powers of enchantment in that role, and the effect it had on her audience, is an example of how the figure of the Romantic witch opened a space to imagine and explore the constructive and destructive uses of female magic. While some Romantic witches confirmed the worst fears regarding female magic and its pernicious influence, other Romantic witches invited more positive reactions, ranging from sympathy to the deep admiration bordering on awe that Siddons inspired.