Queer ecology studies addresses the desires and attractions that characterize relations among and eco-politics of humans and other organic elements of their environment. Scholarship in the field has predominantly addressed how the natural environment creates a space for people’s transgressions of normative erotic and sexual practices. In a bionetwork formulation, however, no pure nature can exist out there for humans or any other organisms because one is always a constituent element of an ecological web. Many Victorians addressed the issue of animal rights, including Francis Power Cobbe, Ouida, and Henry Salt. Some authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and E. M. Forster evoked pastoral contexts for same-sex male intimacy while others such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad found adventure literature conducive to such considerations. This chapter, however, focuses on works by Walter Pater and William Sharp that address cross-species engagement as a form of aesthetic pleasure. Through philosophy and formal techniques, they engage biocentric notions of attraction and intimacy that destabilize anthropocentricism and the classificatory boundaries of the scientific and legal discourses that came to dominate the sexual and gendered landscapes.

This chapter contains excerpts from Maududi’s immensely influential text Al Jihad fil Islam. Refuting colonial pressures to decry violent resistance, Maududi built a philosophical and historial argument regarding the specific conditions, modes and methods of war permissible in Islam. Several abridged English translations exist but are highly selective in foregrounding parts that press the necessity of violence in particular contexts. Many were published by activists who were attracted by the unapologetic tone of Maududi’s justifications of violence as part of a political struggle. However, Maududi had constructed a much more complicated argument, with comparisons across religious traditions (Buddhist, Hindu, Judaic, Christian), as well as empires in different times and regions (Roman, Sassanid, Islamic and Modern European) to frame his reading of the ethics and norms of war in the Islamic tradition. This text also contains the first articulation of some key ideas and concepts that Maududi continued to develop over the course of his career. Methodologically, too, it signposts his use of broad historical generalizations, as well as a systematic breakdown of arguments that remained central to his thinking.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s most famous work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, to provide an expansive context in which to understand its significance in intellectual, literary and art history. It begins by locating it: explaining the concept behind Pater’s collection of eleven essays in terms of publication history and the periodical press, and exploring the ways in which these essays combine silent citation with originality. Its sections concentrate on: (1) how and why Pater redefines the ‘renaissance’ from the ways in which it was conceived in the nineteenth century; (2) Pater’s definition of subjective aesthetic criticism, which reverses Matthew Arnold’s critical position, with particular attention to the Preface and Conclusion; (3) the centrality of desire and passion in text; (4) Pater’s subject-positioning between the ‘Old Masters’, modernity and his reader.

A career-long project for Emerson was the attempt to understand and seize upon the historical moment, or what he often called “the present hour,” in which he lived. But Emerson’s interest in “the Times” was also, fundamentally, an interest in time. This chapter examines “Emerson’s times” in this dual sense: his abiding investments, philosophical, social, and political, in the historical present – the time of now – and in its temporalities – the time of now. Emerson’s commitment to the present as the bedrock of historical experience and the sphere of ethical action was shaped by the new conceptions of time and the new temporal experiences afforded by the technological, scientific, and political developments of his era. Thus, if the “practical question” with regard to “the times” was, as Emerson states it in “Fate,” an immediate one – “how shall I live?” – that question was complicated by the heterochronicity of the times.

We present here the historical development of English across Micronesia, as well as a brief description of the Englishes spoken in the seven nations and territories that occupy this part of the Northern Pacific Ocean: the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, the Northern Mariana Islands and Palau. The area has a complex colonial history, with Spain, Germany, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand all implicated at different times, in different places and in different ways. The impact of English, therefore, is variable across Micronesia. We begin, therefore, by plotting a history of English across the region before presenting descriptions of the phonology, morphosyntax and lexis of the Englishes of Micronesia, balancing a focus on individual varieties, on the one hand, with an attempt at a unified account on the other, considering what the varieties share and what keeps them distinct.

What happens when we shift our critical attention away from bourgeois subjectivity and the development of the modern individual toward the land and its centrality within British realism? In readings of a diverse range of works from Cobbett’s Rural Rides and Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels to the emigration novel and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, this chapter focuses on three key forms of land use, all of which undergo major transformations over the course of the long nineteenth century: the farm, the common, and the wild. From this perspective, it argues, a new narrative about the environment emerges that brings to the fore the integral relations among labor, land, and nature that Victorian literature narrates and that are very much on the agenda today as we grapple with the legacy of these changes and their ongoing consequences for the myriad political-environmental crises we now face.

This introductory chapter briefly charts Pater’s difficulties and importance as a literary theorist and philosophical thinker, with directions for thinking critically about his works and life. It is organised in three sections: (1) Pater in Context outlines how Pater’s relationship with, and writing about, the late-Victorian period is singular with the period refracted through his aestheticism; (2) Pater, ‘himself’ explains the difficulties of looking for Pater in his writings; (3) Pater Today looks at his late-twentieth century critical history and Pater studies today.

This chapter strives to provide an account of what I call the Boasian intervention on race and racism that both acknowledges its importance and innovations as a (liberal) anti-racist project and critically highlights contradictory aspects of that project, particularly with regard to its analysis and representation of racism and whiteness in the United States. The first part summarizes how Franz Boas and his students contested discourses of biological determinism and scientific racism via transformations in discourses of race and culture. The second, more extensive, part focuses largely on selected works of Boas and Ruth Benedict and critically examines how their reinvention of race and representations of “race problems” in the US had different implications for European immigrants, who could become absorbed into the whiteness of American identity, and people of color, who could not.

This chapter asks what it was that marked the young Pater’s philosophy out as so radical and potentially dangerous in the 1870s. It addresses how his singular attitude to referencing, originality, and artistry in philosophy put him at odds with his contemporaries at Oxford. In its sections, it addresses (1) Pater’s reading of philosophy, and the importance of this reading to his intellectual development; (2) the ways in which Pater’s treatment of philosophy is part of his wider commitment to interdisciplinarity, and how his engagements with philosophers and their ideas shape diverse and perhaps unexpected aspects of his writings; and (3) the philosophical significance of Pater’s own aestheticism.

The extensive collections of manuscript and printed scores, cuttings and correspondence spanning Elizabeth Maconchy’s career have in recent years enjoyed increasing attention from academics and musicians alike. The performances of her music and the exciting academic scholarship resulting from her archives are testament to an exceptional and important collection charting a unique career. The Maconchy archives are preserved across a number of repositories. The majority of Maconchy’s surviving music manuscripts (MS) are held on deposit at the Library at St Hilda’s College, the University of Oxford. Following the transfer of the material from the Maconchy family home to the College archives in 1994 the challenging task of boxing, listing, intellectually grouping MS scores by genre (choral works, songs for children, solo instruments, etc.) so that they would be easily searchable and accessible needed to be undertaken. The collection at St Hilda’s is a rich, varied, and large one. The MS and printed scores alone are contained within some ninety-three boxes. Librarian Maria Croghan and Archivist Elizabeth Boardman had the foresight to seek the expertise of musicologist Jennifer Doctor in overseeing this project. Doctor worked on producing an early database of the scores and began to arrange them by genre and then by piece.

Despite the intermittent nature of Elizabeth Maconchy’s orchestral writing, her lifelong commitment to the art demonstrates an extraordinary level of variety, which maintains an ongoing technical focus on specific issues: dialogues between instruments (through a concentration on counterpoint and forms of concerto grosso), a general economy of thematic material (particularly with the repetition and continuing development of single motifs and intervals), the use of short and condensed formal structures, a commitment to tonality and rhythmic energy, and an increasing concern with sonority. This chapter frames Maconchy’s orchestral works in the context of Charles Stanford’s Anglo-Irish formalist legacy. The question of ‘evolution or revolution’ is a recurring one in early twentieth-century British music history, and while Maconchy’s compositional development through empirical experimentation (a form of gradual evolution) is in line with a great many British composers of the era, the commentary on European ‘revolutionary’ modernism(s) that her orchestral works provide is a prodigious one.

In this chapter, I detail the racial logics of the Anthropocene in its current discursive formation, focusing on three related critiques of the term. First, I show how the Anthropocene logic is derived from the categorization impulse of the geosciences, an epistemic push that has close ties to histories of racial science. A critical reading of geology has shown that the categorization of strata performs a similar pedagogy to the “family tree of man.” Second, this categorization is framed by the progressive narrative of modernity. In the Anthropocene, as an often apocalyptic narrative, the whiteness of historical time shows through and privileges a “colorblind” lens for the Anthropocene. Third, the objective description of the Anthropocene presents a universalizing narrative, one that has trouble detailing the differential experiences of environmental impacts. This universality reifies race into the oncoming environmental crisis even as it attempts to celebrate a world without divisions and differences. Finally, I draw from the critiques of the Anthropocene to highlight the multiple stories that are being told of the geophysical, ecological, and societal changes.

The aircraft at the end of the World War were generally open-cockpit biplanes made of wooden framework and covered by doped fabric. The wings were held in place by a number of struts and wires. The landing gear was fixed. By 1930 this gave way to the use of metal construction on both frames and exteriors, the monoplane consisting of a single cantilever wing, retractable landing gear, and vastly improved streamlining characteristics. Yet, there was considerable debate within the aviation industry as to which innovations were most desirable. As a consequence, decisions were made by engineers that were later proven faulty or short-sighted. Once again, the desires of the airline industry differed from those of the Air Corps, and the former’s quest for reliability, durability, range, and heavy load-carrying capacity tended to favor bombardment aircraft to the detriment of pursuit.

Sri Lankan English is a postcolonial English in South Asia with its origins dating back to the end of the eighteenth century. Its evolution is reflected in a plethora of unique English-language structures and distinct quantitative preferences. Against the background of its historical development, this chapter provides an overview of the local features of Sri Lankan English in its sound system, lexis, syntax and semantics, but also points out that Sri Lankan English features traces of pragmatic nativisation. The documentation of the structural and pragmatic emancipation of Sri Lankan English from its historical input variety of British English is framed by sociolinguistic findings about speaker groups and domains associated with English as well as about attitudes towards different varieties of English. Together with a global account of Sri Lankan English from both formal and sociolinguistic perspectives, this chapter considers potential epicentral constellations among South Asian Englishes.

The current chapter provides a historical sociolinguistic overview of English in Zimbabwe. It challenges anachronistic descriptive taxonomies that in colonial times aligned ‘L1 English’ with the variety spoken by white English-speaking monolinguals and ‘L2 English’ with black multilinguals for whom English might be a second, third or even fourth spoken language and stereotypically, assumed to be marked by pronunciation and grammatical features from the background language(s). This chapter describes varieties of English in the Zimbabwe setting at the levels of morphosyntax, phonology, lexis and discourse in both spoken and written contexts, drawing both upon the research literature and the author’s own corpus of conversational and interview speech of Zimbabweans of a range of ages, ethnicities, educational, socio-economic and language backgrounds. The chapter presents English in Zimbabwe as a collection of varieties and repertoires, performed contingently depending upon such factors as ethnicity and race, time, audience, ideology, rural-urban divide, socio-economic conditions and education.