This chapter illustrates how gender is integral to Pater’s aesthetic philosophy and its subversive potential. It explains that renewal and rebirth were strongly gendered concepts in the Victorian period, showing that Pater’s understanding of sex and gender form a vital basis for the aesthetic philosophy he constructs across his literary oeuvre, a basis that revolves around metaphors of pregnancy and childbirth. It then develops an examination of how Pater reworks traditional Victorian gender categories to his ideas of renaissance and aestheticism in two sections: first, it shows how Pater’s concept of the renaissance is defined by a consistent metaphor of female reproductive biology, with attention to his figures of Demeter, Persephone, and Mona Lisa; second, it shows how Pater’s male figures create aesthetic meaning for these matrilineal cycles, with attention to Plato.

This chapter explores multi-body scattering in quantum integrable models, emphasizing the emergence of Factorized Scattering Theory. The presence of an extensive set of conservation laws ensures the non-diffractive nature of scattering, leading to a distinctive form of the asymptotic wave function – known as the Bethe wave function – as a linear superposition of plane waves. Elementary scattering events, such as reflection and transmission, are described by Yang’s scattering operators and the two-body S-matrix. The multi-body S-matrix is then expressed as an ordered product of two-body S-matrices, with order-independence guaranteed by the Yang–Baxter equation. To illustrate these ideas, the Lieb–Liniger model for distinguishable particles is introduced. The chapter also examines general symmetry constraints on the Bethe wave function imposed by quantum statistics.

Written in 1940, Maududi’s book Pardah was immediately controversial and remains so to date. Here Maududi made an argument for the segregation of the sexes that included, but was not limited to, the requirement of veiling by women. Refuting progressive arguments explicitly and drawing upon mostly American scholarship in the fields of medicine and biology, Maududi linked the end of gender segregation to capitalism, the commodification of women’s labour and a wider civilizational decline to argue that gender equality should not mean substitutability.

Australian Aboriginal English (henceforth ‘AE’) is an enregistered contact-based variety spoken by over 80 per cent of First Nations people in Australia. AE has been observed to differ systematically from standardised Australian English across levels of linguistic structure, and is usually placed on a continuum ranging from ‘light’ (acrolectal) varieties to ‘heavy’ (basilectal) varieties. The ‘light’ varieties are closest to standardised Australian English; the ‘heavy’ varieties are sometimes closer to Kriol, an English-lexified creole language spoken across northern Australia. Across the continuum, AE is distinctive for its group focus and its cultural connection with storytelling. This chapter outlines some of the distinctive linguistic features of AE, embracing a culturally appropriate methodology in which a corpus of data from group sessions has been collected under First Nations leadership. The recordings capture speakers in their home settings mostly in ‘Nyungar country’, in the Southwest of Western Australia, and are based on ‘yarning’, a First Nations cultural form of storytelling and conversation. We discuss the ways that the yarns collected in our corpus have allowed us to hear the voices of those seldom included in linguistic research and how hearing these yarns is allowing us to tell a different story.

This chapter explores two subfields of nineteenth-century horticultural practice – plant miniaturization and plant assimilation – to demonstrate indirect approaches to addressing botanical agency. Given differences of lifespan, size, cognition, and communication, as well as the distance of time, Victorian writing requires this indirect approach. In the case of plant miniaturization (bonsai), described admiringly in British travel narratives but bemoaned by champions of native plant life from William Wordsworth to H. Rider Haggard, writerly attention or disregard to plant suffering illuminates broader concerns of plant emotion and subjectivity. In the case of plant assimilation or its amplified parallel, plant invasiveness, human framings of plant reproduction point out the cultural constraints on plant life. When named plants reproduce across the page as well as through the garden bed, their taxonomic and vernacular incursions into nineteenth-century poetry and prose show a further assertion of expanded plant influence on the Victorian reading mind.

This chapter revisits the construction of the Bethe wave function for the Lieb–Liniger model with spin degrees of freedom, which has traditionally followed a two-step approach: independent determination of coordinate and spin wave functions, later combined to enforce correct particle statistics. While this procedure is effective under the assumption that the hamiltonian is spin-independent, it becomes inadequate when spin-dependent interactions are present. Two key challenges arise: the need for a complete wave function without splitting it into separate coordinate and spin components, and the treatment of integrable systems with spin-dependent hamiltonians. To address these, the chapter introduces an efficient algebraic method based on the Faddeev–Zamolodchikov algebra, which provides a unified framework for handling coordinate and spin variables in integrable models with factorized scattering. This algebraic approach enables direct construction of the full wave function, offering a natural extension to systems involving both bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom. The resulting spin chain representation of the transfer matrix not only simplifies the analysis but also yields a deeper understanding of the underlying algebraic structure governing these quantum systems.

The verses of the Quran that enjoin pardah are translated as follows:

Maconchy made one of the most significant contributions to the string quartet by a British twentieth-century composer and always regarded her thirteen quartets as being the pulsing heart of her ‘impassioned argument’ artistry. Why was Maconchy so drawn to the string quartet, and in what ways did she stretch the medium to new heights?

Rhiannon Mathias reveals how Maconchy’s early encounters with the music of Vaughan Williams, Bartók and Janáček helped her to forge her own original and distinctive compositional voice and examines the new frontiers that she explored in her string quartets.

The current chapter describes the history and development of English in (what is today) Kenya and Tanzania from the earliest linguistic influences of colonial powers to the latest nation-specific developments in language policy and lexicon. Colonial history and national language policy in Tanzania and Kenya have resulted in Kiswahili becoming the national lingua franca, though to different degrees, and have so far impeded the development of a national variety of English in the general triglossic ecology of local languages, Kiswahili, and English. The African language substratum, almost completely Bantu in Tanzania but one-third Nilo-Saharan in Kenya, influences forms of English. In general, regional, national and subnational usage features can be distinguished, i.e. many (sub-)national features in pronunciation, some national and cultural features in the lexicon, and mainly regional (or universal L2 features) in grammar. Recent developments can be illustrated by examples from digital sources, especially online newspapers and social media.

The city-state of Singapore is officially quadrilingual (Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English) and home to a diverse population. Colonised by Britain in 1819, English has since had a special place on the island. Initially confined to the elite, it soon became a desired commodity, learnt and acquired by different groups at different times, always in conjunction with the other languages with which it co-exists. As Singapore embarked on its path towards independence, English became a compulsory subject in education, and, in 1987, was made the sole medium of instruction. These developments resulted in large-scale language shift, with English now the majority language in Singaporean homes (2020 census). The local vernacular Singlish has its origin in this high-contact situation. It features influences primarily from Malay and southern Chinese. While it is regarded by policy-makers as undesirable, Singlish enjoys some acceptance in the population, not least as a marker of local identity.