Across the nineteenth century, from Lord Byron to Rudyard Kipling, the dominant blue ecology conceived of the ocean as infinite, unfathomable, and thus impervious to human activity. Humans could not threaten it; rather, it threatened them – a relation Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson emblematized with the figure of shipwreck. As Thomas Henry Huxley, George Henry Lewes, and other scientists disseminated their discoveries about the marine environment, however, its imagined unknowability and indestructability were put into question. Herman Melville documented the extractive enterprise of whaling; Philip Henry Gosse mourned tidepools ravaged by day trippers with a penchant for natural history. Writing about the tidal reaches of the River Thames, Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew documented two-way traffic between land and water, human and ocean. A new understanding took shape that, in its depiction of the ocean as both affected by and affecting humanity, anticipates our own blue ecology.

Biological theories claim that consciousness occurs in specific neural circuits. Based on a wealth of neural data, the dendritic integration theory (DIT) claims that consciousness occurs when information in the dendrites of neurons is gated to higher-level neurons under the control of the thalamus. Based on patient studies, the felt uncertainty theory (FUT) claims that consciousness is not related to sensation and cognition but to emotions. We will also introduce the ‘other systems argument’, which holds that biological theories may not generalize to other kinds of systems.

Chapter 4 discusses the ethical potential of fictional trans-scalar encounters. Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) confront human characters with unfamiliar scales of existence: the slow time of trees, the multitudinous identity of forest or flock, the accelerating time of climate change, and the geographical patterns of collective migration. Both novels highlight disjunctions between scales as a key obstacle to environmental response-ability, by contrasting a sacrificed location with globalisation’s discourse of prosperity. These stories also highlight the fractures between individual and species-scale behaviour, and the difficulty of relating to the self as species. These fault lines lead me to ask whether allegorical narrative might in itself constitute a hindrance to trans-scalar ethics by smoothing out disjunctions and scale effects. I suggest that metalepsis acts as a counterweight to allegory in these novels. By construing trans-scalar encounters as frame-breaking events, metalepsis opens up the possibility of ethical relation.

This chapter addresses Pater’s vexed relationship with the decadent movement. It asks whether Pater is a decadent writer and considers the extent to which he illustrates, is appropriated into, and resists decadence. It is organised in three sections: (1) setting out the origins and definitions of decadence, with examples from mid-nineteenth century France; (2) explaining how Pater’s Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) picked up on key features of French decadence and the ways in which the similarities were exploited by Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons; (3) addressing how decadence figures in Pater’s later works as an ethical problem, with reference to Marius the Epicurean (1885).

To analyze integrable multiparticle systems in the thermodynamic limit, one typically confines the system to a large periodic box, ensuring that the Bethe wave function resides in the asymptotic regime of free motion. The resulting periodic boundary conditions give rise to a system of coupled nonlinear equations for particle momenta, known as the Bethe equations. Solving these equations requires constructing common eigenvectors for a family of commuting operators acting on the Hilbert space of an auxiliary spin chain. This approach, known as the coordinate Bethe ansatz, is grounded in the generalized Bethe hypothesis, which posits the coordinate-space structure of eigenstates. This chapter introduces the formalism of the coordinate Bethe ansatz and its algebraic underpinnings, including the role of the Bethe–Yang equation, permutation modules, and Specht modules. The chapter concludes by applying this framework to the Lieb–Liniger model for spin-1/2 particles, setting the stage for more advanced developments.

This Introduction Chapter provides the background and empirical and theoretical justifications for the study. It explains the global relevance of the Amazon and the current drivers of environmental degradation in the basin. It also discusses three notions that guide the analysis through the chapters: polycentric governance, plurinational governance, and pluriversal governance.

Arguments that are put forward against pardah are not merely negative in nature but have a positive and affirmative basis. These arguments are founded not just on a dislike for restricting women’s mobility and veiling as an unnecessary imprisonment, both of which should be done away with. Proponents of these arguments have in mind a totally different way of life for women. They also have an altogether different concept of the relationships between the male and the female. They want women to follow one particular way and not the other. Thus, their main objection against pardah is that if the woman remains confined to the house and veiled, she cannot follow that particular way, nor can she do anything else that is expected of her.

This chapter is concerned with the question of what whiteness means today. Looking both at history and at Christian nationalism allows us to see that for much of its history, whiteness in the US meant respectable family values. European immigrants were promised the privilege of whiteness for the cost of assimilation, for leaving ethnic markers of clothing and language behind and assimilating into white cultural norms around family and gender roles. While today we tend to discuss respectability politics around people of color attempting to challenge racial stereotypes by practicing white middle-class norms, this discussion shows that Christian nationalism also functions to defend respectability in the form of sexual and familial norms. This commitment to defending respectability is a product of the history of US nationalism and perpetuates a politics of whiteness without ever needing to explicitly say so.

This chapter examines the representation of the common tree rhododendron in two nineteenth-century collections of botanical illustrations. The first is an engraving from Exotic Flora (1823–7), a book series compiled by English botanist William Jackson Hooker. The second is a watercolor from Specimens of Flowering Plants (c. 1830s–40s), an album that was commissioned by British Captain Frederick Parr from five Indian artists in the state of Madras (Tamil Nadu). When compared with one another, these two works not only reflect the importance of images to colonial plant science, but also raise questions about the power of botanical illustration to visualize the complexities of a large environment. Placing these books into dialogue with one another allows us to reevaluate the environmental affordances of botanical illustration as a genre, while also demonstrating how emerging theories from critical plant studies can enrich our understanding of Anglo-Indian scientific exchanges in the nineteenth century.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s short fiction, which took the form, to use Pater’s phrase, of ‘imaginary portraiture’. It positions these works in the context of Pater’s evolving imaginative writing, the publishing industry, and their influence on writers including Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. It illustrates how this concept of the imaginary portrait appears in works and titles of other contemporary authors published, like Pater, by Macmillan. It then explores the basis of Pater’s portrait stories, each of which focuses on an individual figure, usually a young male, destined for a tragic early death and set in Europe. In doing so, it provides examples from a range of works including ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ and ‘The Child in the House’.

This chapter introduces an alternative framework for solving spectral problems in classical and quantum integrable systems via separation of variables, grounded in the Hamilton–Jacobi theory. The method is first outlined in the classical context and then extended to quantum integrable spin chains with glell symmetry and associated Yangians.

A key objective is to construct separated representations for the spectrum, reducing multidimensional eigenvalue problems to a set of one-dimensional ones solvable through algebraic and representation-theoretic techniques. This approach proves especially effective in cases where the completeness of the Bethe ansatz is unclear, offering complementary insights.

Focusing on the classical glell magnets, the chapter details the construction of separated variables using the Baker–Akhiezer function and its role in identifying canonical coordinates on the spectral curve. In the quantum case, complete diagonalization of the gl2 spin chain is achieved through separation of variables.

For higher-rank models and generic local representations of glell, the full construction remains an open and active area of research. The chapter closes with an overview of current developments and challenges in advancing this method.