This chapter accounts for Emerson’s complex, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, relationship to religion and religious experience. While Emerson definitively left the Christian ministry in the early 1830s – turning his back on eight generations of his forefathers who had all become ministers – he never abandoned a profound interest in broader forms of spirituality, including those outside the pale of Christendom. If reason and faith were to be found “in the woods” (and not the church), as his inaugural debut Nature (1836) provocatively claimed, some critics have read Emerson as a secularist (or at the very least a naturalist), epitomizing larger dynamics of nineteenth-century dis- and re-enchantment. This chapter aims for a more nuanced (and multi-hued) view, arguing that Emerson believed the “spiritual laws” of the cosmos could be explained by the twinned activities of science and poetics as forms of social praxis, a communal making of beauty and truth.

The Introduction observes that a significant strand of twenty-first-century fiction is attempting to connect the human to other-than-human scales. I suggest that this fiction performs epistemic and ethical work because it foregrounds relations of biological and ecological interdependence. I situate my study in the context of scale theory and outline the eco-political and symbiopolitical stakes of scalar rhetoric. I then highlight the different ways in which multi-scalar poetics stimulate ontological and ethical questioning, produce new conceptions of self, agency, and environment, and ultimately enable ecological response-ability. Scale-switching, I argue, is not only a significant writing practice but a necessary reading methodology. I then introduce the three main devices analysed in the book: critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis, and scalar irony.

Did Victorian literature prompt political change? This chapter examines Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Cry of the Children,” both credited with bringing mass awareness to exploitative labor. But what part did they play in actually changing Victorian society? Levine argues that a single work of art, then as now, does not accomplish change unless it takes part in campaigns that are organized around three social forms: large shows of public support, sustained pressure over time, and specific, well-articulated goals. Analyzing the relations between literary and activist forms not only throws light on Victorian culture but can also help literary scholars now to engage in effective political and social struggle.

In this chapter, I analyze a genre of travel writing on Kuwait that has surged over the past decade. I specifically explore a series of self-published travelogues written by Western, white women who have previously taught in K-12 schools and institutions of higher education in Kuwait. These narratives, which are couched in white supremacist and eugenicist ideologies, offer insights into discourses of racialization and white superiority in Kuwait. I use these travelogues as a starting point to think about whiteness in Kuwait and its connection to global white supremacy. I argue that one needs to read these self-published travelogues as ethnographic data to understand how gendered race/whiteness (and white supremacy), as deployed in the self-reported experiences of Western, white traveloguers, plays out in various educational settings across Kuwait, a country that is not considered by anthropologists to be a fruitful site for ethnographic or racial inquiry.

This chapter probes the relation between realism and the georgic in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The georgic is generally not associated with that period, and realism was allegedly on the decline. Yet, in focusing on an agricultural setting in rural Bengal, Lal Behari Day’s novel Govinda Samanta, or Bengal Peasant Life (1874) vivifies the connection between the two in ways that enhance both our understanding of the modes of colonial critique as well as the dispersed evolution of literary genres.

While researching and defining the plausibility or implausibility of something, the first thing to observe is it in itself. Then, we proceed to analyse it in comparison with other things. It can only be declared worth accepting if it proves better on both counts. From this perspective of research and investigation, we have completed the first phase of inquiry. We now need to undertake the second phase. In this phase of the study, we shall start by comparing Islam with other religions and then compare it with laws of the modern period to investigate how they relate to the Islamic norms. If they permit war, then the question is whether their objectives and methods [English term in text; Urdu manāhij] are better or worse than those of Islam. If they prohibit war, are the teachings of these schools in harmony with human nature, or do the teachings of Islam do that?

The importance of history in the emergence and evolution of varieties of English around the world cannot be overstated. From religious missionaries to colonial administrations, the particular mix of peoples, languages and cultures was central to the type of evolutionary trajectory English took. This chapter offers a historical account of the evolution of English in Cameroon under missionary, colonial (German, French and British) and postcolonial conditions. It identifies some of the crucial factors that enabled it to survive even when the territory was ruled by non-English colonisers like the Germans and the French. Using written documents produced during colonialism, the current chapter traces the impact of the colonial system on contemporary Cameroonian society and the variety of English spoken there with focus on processes of cultural conceptualisation and hybridised patterns of social interaction. This is done via the lenses of two recent theoretical frameworks, namely cognitive contact linguistics and postcolonial pragmatics. The chapter also identifies some distinctive structural features of contemporary Cameroon English, contrasting some of them to West African and East African Englishes.

In this chapter, we assess the international law regulation of the newest forms of submarines, underwater maritime autonomous vehicles (UMAVs) and ask what changes for States’ rights and duties when an autonomous vehicle operates uncrewed and underwater. A core issue has been whether UMAVs are ships or not and we address differences emerging for floats and gliders particularly. Whether uncrewed submarines are ships or not has implications for navigational rights and duties. We also consider questions emerging under the law of armed conflict and distinctions for autonomous maritime systems (such as mines and torpedos). While State-owned and operated UMAVs are a primary focus, we also consider the international laws applying to the use of UMAVs by terrorists or criminals seeking to smuggle goods. This chapter concludes Part II of the book and brings together the key questions that remain to be answered in regulating submarines in international law.