This chapter surveys the origins and history of English in the South Atlantic Ocean, on Tristan da Cunha, St Helena and the Falkland Islands, from the late sixteenth century to the present day. Their evolution is a showcase scenario of contact and koinéization in that a substantial stock of British settlers had permanent contact with speakers of other languages or forms of English as a Second Language. There were concomitant cases of dialect contact, input from restructured varieties (possibly Portuguese Creoles), African languages, as well as interaction as a group of St Helenians cross-migrated to Tristan da Cunha. The community’s founders found themselves in tabula rasa conditions and had no contact with pre-existing varieties. The varieties formed ab ovo via direct contact of the inputs brought to the islands, enabling the reconstruction of social factors and population dynamics at work during the development of overseas Englishes.

This chapter provides a detailed description of the socio-historical background of English in Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Is lands discussing the spread of English from the first contact with English explorers and traders to the impact of English after political (semi-)independence. It further includes the first real-time study on language variation and change from the Cook Islands. Three Cook Island women of three generations were recorded twice within 10 years. Comparing intra- and inter-speaker variation in terms of lexis, grammar and accent features, the study shows differences between the three individuals, which opens up a debate on the role of the individual in language change and the future of L2 Englishes in the South Pacific. The chapter confirms that empirical diachronic research on English in the South Pacific yields insights into variety formation.

This chapter considers concert-going audiences in mid twentieth-century England, with a focus on the conditions Maconchy faced. Structured along the phases of her career, the chapter traces the evolving socio-cultural and historical factors that shaped audience reception of her work. The account reveals how gender biases, geographical isolation, and the limited infrastructure for contemporary music hindered her visibility and accessibility. It discusses how her music was often mischaracterized as complex and inaccessible, overshadowing its emotional expressiveness. Despite obstacles, including her tuberculosis and motherhood, Maconchy established a loyal audience, particularly among women’s networks, broadcasting and small concert series, though her broader appeal remained constrained by societal biases. The chapter ultimately illustrates how the interplay of audience composition, media influence, and institutional support contributed to the reception of Maconchy’s music, emphasizing the ongoing struggle for recognition faced by women composers in a male-dominated field.

In this chapter it will be focused on the topic about why and how Béla Bartók’s music was an important compositional point of reference for Elizabeth Maconchy, especially for her string quartets. The reception of Bartók’s music signalled her interest in the ‘ultra modern’ music of her time, something which was hardly the norm. Maconchy absorbed Bartók’s tendency towards objectivity and constructivism (in the sense of a constructive compositional practice consisting of short and concise elements), which he developed around 1926, when he explicitly distanced himself from the conventions, style and diction of nineteenth-century music, claiming that his music became more simple and more contrapuntal. Maconchy followed exactly this path, as, especially in her string quartets, she developed the monothematic technique, imitation and variation, and the contrapuntal combination of linear parts – similar to a conversation – in which four voices repeatedly recite almost the same arguments.

Chapter 6 analyses the ironies of multi-scalar focalisation. I read Margaret Atwood’s ‘Torching the Dusties’ (2014), T. C. Boyle’s The Terranauts (2016), and Ali Smith’s Winter (2017) as ironic exercises in ‘bringing the biosphere home’ which satirise their focalisers’ limited perception. The difficulty of biosphere perception is highlighted in each of these texts through visual hallucinations and blind spots, which represent ethical failure. These stories respond satirically to the difficulty of perceiving a planetary ecological crisis, and question the idea of enlightenment as a step towards environmental responsibility. This fiction does not work didactically, but neither does it endorse the cynical perspective. Instead, it explores an ironic mode of multi-scalar attention which holds together incompatible perspectives. This leads me to define scalar irony as an epistemic and ethical tool which offers a way forward for Anthropocene response-ability.

Victorian literature translated the systemic organization of extraction-based globalization into aesthetic structure. This chapter shows how literary forms like the multiplot novel and lyric poem strained and changed shape to account for the world-spanning mechanisms of imperialism, colonialism, and an extraction-based fossil capitalism that reshaped “the environment” across the nineteenth-century British imperium. Describing a “supply-chain sublime,” it shows how the improvement and development valorized by John Stuart Mill (and before him, John Locke) had material corollaries in scarred and abandoned zones that rarely focalize canonical works. Seen in this context, exhibits like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) recode extractive globalization into signals we can detect, but only with an “environmental” reading practice that construes ecological matters to inhere in sociopolitical conditions, and that sees environmental issues as finally moral ones too.

What is consciousness? Can we study consciousness scientifically or is consciousness beyond empirical science, as many philosophers have claimed throughout the ages? This chapter provides a short history of the topic, including philosophical and scientific milestones, and gives an overview of what is to come in subsequent chapters.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Walter Pater’s elusive personal life and his works. Addressing how the dynamics between the two have been a touchstone in criticism of Pater, it asks how we can reasonably read the autobiographical and self-reflexive dimensions of Pater’s writings. It illustrates how writers who encountered Pater – from Oscar Wilde to Edmund Gosse – reflected on the difficulties of knowing him beneath his courteous exterior. It considers how Pater himself figured personal life of writers and artists of whom he wrote. Addressing Pater’s ‘tact’ and ‘reserve’, quoting from the unpublished manuscript ‘The Aesthetic Life’, it considers Oxford Hellenism and the revelation of Pater’s involvement with William Money Hardinge.

Beginning with the broadcast première of The Land in 1930, BBC Radio played an important role in the dissemination of Maconchy’s music throughout her life. Yet, despite friendships with individual BBC staff, Maconchy’s relationship with the BBC was not always a happy one, as records in the BBC’s Written Archive Centre show. Maconchy wrote regularly to BBC staff, suggesting music for broadcast, and expressing her frustration that her music was not heard more regularly on the radio. Meanwhile other documents, which Maconchy would never have seen, show how her work was assessed by her contemporaries, in considering its suitability for broadcast. Drawing on these records and the history of the BBC itself, this article shows how often decisions about broadcasts of Maconchy’s music were a result of wider BBC policy, which included a considerable uncertainty about the place of new music in its schedules.

Though primarily recognized for her string quartets, Elizabeth Maconchy produced significant choral works throughout her career. In an effort to capture the breadth of her choral compositions, this chapter focuses on two choral pieces that serve as case studies to examine her mature style of text setting. And Death Shall Have No Dominion (1969) was commissioned for the Three Choirs Festival at Worcester Cathedral. Maconchy effectively used the cathedral’s acoustics to transform the piece and the poetry. In Héloïse and Abelard (1978), Maconchy crafted both the libretto and music, interweaving medieval Latin hymns in a dramatic work. She fused oratorio, opera, and cantata to create a work that foregrounds Héloïse as a woman, mother, and abbess. These pieces highlight Maconchy’s ability to remain true to her compositional voice, while honoring the spaces that she performed and stories that she told.