Considerable evidence supports Nicola LeFanu’s claim that her mother “never felt part of the ‘English pastoral school’”, given that a great deal of Elizabeth Maconchy’s music is motivically tight, non-rhapsodic, rhythmically punchy, and dissonant, thus mitigating against associations with the fluid rhythms, long-breathed phrases, and modally derived triadic harmonies associated with pastoral music. However, there are other facets to twentieth-century English pastoralism beyond these, and to contemporaneous British artists’ treatment of the broader pastoral topic. While Maconchy’s engagement with pastoralism was both limited and idiosyncratic, it did exist. The following brief survey of how Maconchy studied, conceived of, and applied pastoralist principles and traits within a small selection of works – including her cantata The Land (1930), the Quintet for Oboe and Strings (1932), and Variations on a Theme from Vaughan Williams’s Job (1957) – provides an new point of access for understanding her distinctive compositional voice.

This extensive introduction presents Maududi’s anti-colonial concerns, cosmopolitan sources and conceptual innovations, while also providing an overview of existing scholarship on his thought. Will be of particular interest to scholars of political theory, history, politics, Islamic studies and South Asian studies.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Maconchy’s children’s operas, situating them alongside other works she composed especially for children and young audiences. Much like Benjamin Britten, Maconchy saw the inherent value, intellect, and presence of self in children and youth, and thus did not patronise them in her compositions. Children’s opera can essentially be subdivided into three categories of works: those written about, those written for, and those written with children as the primary audience, subject, or participants. Broadly speaking, children’s operas may coalesce any of the three sets, resulting in an opera that is for an audience of children, about a child- or childhood-focused theme, and performed by a cast or cast members who are children. Justin Vickers examines Maconchy’s children’s operas as an integral facet of her compositional output not to be overlooked, and the milieu proved to be a catalyst for Maconchy’s abundant well of musical creativity. Moreover, these works may be positioned in the broader educational initiatives in music and the arts throughout the British Isles.

To clearly distinguish the second type of evil, against which Islam calls its followers to raise their swords, from the first type and to make its nature more explicit, God describes it with the terms fitnah and fasād. Therefore, all the verses that permit or prescribe fighting against evil or command its removal through the use of force invariably employ the terms fitnah and fasād instead of munkar, evil.

Chapters Four through Nine portray the most well-known theories of consciousness. Each portrayal was written by an eminent proponent of that particular theory, and thus the portrayals provide accurate and unbiased information. Chapter Four introduces the topic, provides the tools for analyzing the theories logically, and shows that a theory needs to jointly address conscious and non-conscious brain activity which, as it turns out, many theories do not do. The chapter features the learning and consciousness theory (SOMA).

The Victorians carried a powerful sense of British environmental norms and values into the lands they colonized. Literature from the settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand testifies to those inherited expectations and their collision with unfamiliar local conditions, while also gesturing (if only implicitly) to Indigenous environmental knowledges. Despite often being dismissed by later critics as derivative or inauthentic, such works played a prominent role in mediating diverse conceptions of the environment within an imperial system otherwise keyed towards its transformation and exploitation. Writing about forests in New Zealand highlights literature’s capacity to articulate and assess diverse conceptions of environmental value. Accounts of aridity and drought in Australia demonstrate the role played by literature in comprehending unfamiliar and unpredictable climates. The poetry of Mohawk and Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson points to the need for non-Indigenous critics to become more cognizant of literary expressions of Indigenous environmental knowledge.

Chapter 5 compares two novels that portray the self as a multi-scalar collective. Reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) alongside Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999), I show that both novels represent the self as a space of cohabitation and co-evolution, where symbiotic relations embed the temporality of human characters within other timescales. I read these plots as symbiopolitical experiments that question the ‘dis-embedding’ of life performed by biocapitalism. Because it resists the separation of self from non-self, the symbiotic subject destabilises the type of immunological politics theorised by Roberto Esposito and Frédéric Neyrat, where fantasies of biological and social immunity are built upon defensive boundaries. In these novels, such immunitary fantasies are undermined by metaleptic poetics, where the self is both co-written by others within and forced to position itself within the narrative of its own species. These strange loops open up the narrative of the self to the necessity of symbiopolitical relations.

The Mercury Theatre, at 2a Ladbroke Road in London’s Notting Hill, was originally built as a school in 1851, that mid century year of British national and imperial pride and optimism, celebrated in Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition. Architect John Tarring (1806–1875) designed the original school for the Congregationalists as well as their adjacent Horbury Chapel (now the Kensington Temple, an Elim Pentecostal church). When the school closed, the building was utilised as a church hall (known as the Horbury Hall); in the 1920s, as the Horbury Rooms, the building was occupied by the Kensington Local Pensions Committee; and subsequently the premises were used by Abrasha Lozoff (1887–1936) as the Russian-Canadian sculptor’s studio. In 1927, Horbury Hall was purchased by Ashley Dukes (1885–1959), the successful playwright, drama critic and impresario, who was an active presence in British theatre for over half a century. Dukes met the Polish dancer Cyvia Myriam Ramberg (1888–1982), who, using the French form of her name, was later known as Marie Rambert, founder of the celebrated Ballet Rambert. Dukes and Rambert were married in 1918. Dukes purchased the Notting Hill site and initiated its conversion from church hall to (eventually) a small theatre which became the home of the Ballet Club later to transmogrify into the Ballet Rambert. Dukes’s improvements to what would become known as the Mercury Theatre included a partition within the principal open space to create a room for dance classes on one side and a small theatre on the other.

This chapter provides approaches to reading Pater’s works for their remarkable literary style, with particular attention to his essay on ‘Style’ (1889) and passages from works including ‘The Child in the House’ (1878) and the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). It begins by illustrating how Pater’s creation of atmospheres is intrinsic to his style as, to borrow his phrase, ‘a literary artist’. This style was focal in criticism of his works from very first reviews of The Renaissance. It identifies and analyses his characteristic vocabulary and its sensory effects, discussing Pater’s endeavours to locate the subjective origins of writing style in his essays before turning to analyse the unconventional phrasing that defined his sentences.

This chapter argues that the discussion of pollution in Victorian environmental writing was often cross-wired with an oppressive and dehumanizing moral rhetoric. The confusion of the moral and material valences of words like “pollution,” “impurity,” “contamination,” and “filth” meant that, in practice, the very persons and communities that were suffering the most at the hands of extractive capitalism were imagined to be the cause of environmental breakdown, rather than its most grievously suffering casualties. In this way, the profound human cost of industrialism and the profit logic could be obscured under a victim-blaming rhetoric of social respectability, sexual purity, and moral righteousness. Drawing on key passages by Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the chapter shows some of the ways in which this troubling conflation of the moral and material was both critiqued and reinforced in the literature of the period.

We provide an in-depth analysis of the theories portrayed in the previous chapters. As it turns out, all theories except illusionist theories are monofactorial theories, proposing that one thing is crucial for consciousness, such as a workspace. The monofactorial nature of such theories is the main reason why the theories face the challenges that we outlined. A further consequence is that consciousness is epiphenomenal according to these theories, i.e. consciousness has no impact on actions, feelings, or anything physical. Epiphenomenalism is hard to reconcile with empirical science. We argue that these problems are avoided by a multifactorial framework, in which consciousness is treated as a supra-ordinate term picking out a specific constellation of interacting mechanisms. On this view, progress hinges on identifying the computational or biological problem(s) that this constellation solves.

Literature shows the way, public opinion follows the lead and, finally, collective morality, social customs and state law all give way. Such a change becomes inevitable, especially when all the propaganda devices and techniques besides philosophy, history, ethics, science, literature, art, etc., have worked together persistently for a hundred and fifty years or so to mould man’s way of thinking after a particular pattern. Then, it is unlikely that the law of the land remains unaffected by the changing public opinion in a country where government and social institutions are run on democratic principles.

Music festivals have long been a significant forum in which to introduce new repertoire. In the United Kingdom well established events such as the Three Choirs, Norfolk and Norwich festivals or the London Proms season offered a synthesis of well-known works and premieres. The changing environment for the Arts in post-war Britain witnessed an expansion of festival activity. These initiatives were supported partly by the Arts Council and were encouraged by a desire to make music, old and new, accessible to a world starved by conflict. Elizabeth Maconchy takes an important role in the story of the festival. Her impressionistic orchestral suite The Land, the impact of war upon performance of her work, her experimental forays into opera, a fascination for narrative inspired by her own Celtic background and that of other countries, and her commitment to community music-making reveal much about her extensive contribution to twentieth-century festival culture.

Chapter 3, ‘The Amazon as a Place for Global Extractivism: Rethinking Extractivism and Infrastructure in Extractive Frontiers,” explores the governance of extractivism in the Amazon by reflecting on IIRSA infrastructure development and how it relates to extractive activities. The analysis of the entanglements between mega-infrastructures and extractive industries also allows a deeper understanding of extractivism. From a scalar dimension, the Amazon becomes an example of global extractivism, a place where infrastructure and extraction coalesce to feed the global economy and the endless transnational circulation of commodities. From material/immaterial dimensions, infrastructure might be a kind of extractivism in itself when its main goal is profit-making from construction, detached from real prospects for connectivity. In turn, its immaterial dimension refers to how extractive logics permeate infrastructure activities, such as the monetarizing of the knowledge and needs of locals to justify the projects’ socio-economic viability. Considering the re-dimensioning of extractivism, the Chapter provides reflections on how it promotes international economic integration while limiting environmental integration in the Amazon. This raises crucial insights on the proper ways to govern internationally extractive activities.