In 1934, Pablo Neruda arrived in Barcelona as a Chilean diplomat, and in February 1935, he became the Chilean consul in Madrid. Living in Spain during the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War marked a turning point in Neruda’s poetry. The Spanish Civil War provoked a historical awakening in Neruda’s poetics – as exemplified in España en el corazón – that paved the way to his ambitious poetic project of Canto general, as he aimed to historicize and politicize his portrayal of Latin American ruins. This essay on how the Spanish Civil War marks Neruda’s poetics examines how the use of the apostrophe throughout España en el corazón reveals the dialogic nature of his poetic project, which intends both to speak to a Republican Spain, with its dead soldiers and poets, and to defy the fascist leaders of the war.

Rising dog ownership increases demand for dog-friendly public spaces. This need produces new kinds of interactions and relationships, and new sources of conflict and cooperation between park users. This chapter examines how the human–dog relationship mediates and modifies interpersonal relationship development and human friendship practices in public space. Drawing on 150+ hours of participant observation at dog parks, our analysis demonstrates the importance of public space to supporting “simple and single-stranded friendships” (Pahl & Spencer 2004). Through identifiable social patterns and rituals, the forced interactional work of dog-facilitated human–human interaction between regular users creates opportunities for meaningful relationship development, despite (and sometimes because of) incidences of dog-facilitated conflict also present in these spaces.

This chapter analyzes Pablo Neruda’s engagement with the English-speaking world. Neruda’s presence made an indelible mark on the cultural spheres in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries where English is used, notably through his English translations, international travels, and engagement with Anglophone literature. His Nobel Prize in 1971 solidified his status globally, yet his reception in the United States and United Kingdom was affected by Cold War politics. Neruda’s vast literary network, knowledge of Anglophone poetry, and cultural exchanges shaped his impact in the United States and United Kingdom, in particular. Exploring these aspects, supported by the poet’s own memoirs, literary studies, translations, and lasting influence in popular culture, highlights his legacy in the English-speaking realm. Neruda’s intercultural interactions therein emphasize the complex political atmosphere during many major events of the twentieth century in which Neruda played a crucial role and became well-known as both Chile’s greatest poet and a hero for the political Left.

Chapter 4 tackles the first stage of the social life of the image: its birth. Ways of understanding the intentions and motivations of image producers are presented followed by a discussion of the social position of image producers and its relevance to understanding images and visual culture. The method of qualitative interview is applied on a case example of a political caricature image.

The so-called dispersed Nerudiana, composed of interviews, speeches, prologues, notes, and letters, provides a necessary horizon to rescue, organize, and disseminate. Nerudian letters, in particular, are a privileged source that has not been cataloged or collected in a single corpus. This surprising daily life of a famous writer, a sort of parallel itinerary, lies vast and dispersed in libraries, private archives, and documentary repositories awaiting a systematic effort that allows the long-awaited “deployment of the self-portrait” (à la Boersner), the ultimate goal of historical-literary research. Without his correspondence, in short, his self-portrait is impoverished, leaving room for criticism, speculation, and political dithyramb.

Upon her death in 1973, obituary tributes praised Bowen’s output, without committing to calling her a major writer. Male obituarists cast her a comic writer who supported other writers, without herself being gifted with genius. Yet Bowen’s legacy has grown in the past several decades. John Banville has woven some of Bowen’s themes into his novels – the dilemma of the Anglo-Irish during the Second World War in The Paying Guests and a short radio play called ‘Bowen and Betjeman’ – and Bowen makes a cameo appearance in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Bowen’s love affair with Charles Ritchie provides the substance of Eibhear Walshe’s novel The Last Day at Bowen’s Court. Yet Bowen’s influence is even more discernible in essays and memoirs by Eavan Boland, Molly Keane, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, and A. S. Byatt. As time passes, her relevance increases, and the contexts in which she wrote continue to widen.

Elizabeth Bowen’s major novels display her lifelong preoccupation with disappointment, discord, and desire between mismatched lovers. Like their author, these characters seek genuine connection to remedy abandonment by beloved figures. This chapter uses ‘love’ in its most comprehensive sense, encompassing infatuation, sexual attraction, and unconsummated desire, as well as romantic and sexual attachment. Bowen’s keen awareness of social norms and customs shapes her plotting and foregrounds the complex interplay of private desires and public expectations. Three thematic strands dominate her portrayal of lovers: unrequited love, typically involving younger female protagonists and older, more experienced partners; transgressive love, for entanglements featuring characters who break taboos through their relationships; and illicit love, featuring secretive protagonists fearing exposure to public judgement. Across Bowen’s oeuvre, past lovers or previous relationships haunt the narrative present. Unrequited, transgressive, or illicit love might be buried or repressed, but ultimately it causes emotional disturbances for lovers in the present.

This chapter examines the period of Patrick Walker’s tenure as British consul general on the Mosquito Shore, which saw the beginning of the struggle over the Nicaragua Canal route through the clash over control of the harbor of San Juan del Norte, the eastern terminus of the proposed canal. It also examines the paradox that as Walker’s policies progressively stripped Miskitus of their role in governance, so also it became ever more important to project the legitimacy of the Mosquito Kingdom in the context of a growing interest in the transisthmian canal.

Chapter 5 introduces the main ways in which local history was written in the early Islamic centuries. As wide as possible a snapshot is offered, based on extant works and what we know about many now-lost works, of early Islamic local history-writing, with the works divided for the most part into four different models: conquest histories; biographical (or prosopographical) histories; chronologically organised histories of events; and histories that focus on topography or on the particular distinctions (faḍāʾil) of a town or region. The aim is not to provide a comprehensive list of known works, but rather to draw attention to the main ways local history was written/compiled and what kinds of topics local historians were interested in.

This essay explores the significance of modern French writers, especially Flaubert, Maupassant, and Proust, for Bowen’s thinking and writing. It traces the influence of these figures on her short stories, essays, and novels. Across her career, she reviewed, translated, and cited these and other French authors. In Maupassant, she found a way of mapping the relation between short story and novel onto the division between poetry and prose. From Flaubert, she borrowed a close attention to pacing and rhythm, as well as an interest in the more indirect ways that history might intervene in the novel. Most obviously, perhaps, Proustian notions of memory inflected her own plots and narrative structures, as well as her prose style. Modern French fiction offered Bowen a series of models – and foils – for her own developing theories of character, style, and form. These intertextual resonances reveal how Bowen situated herself in a broader European tradition, rather than British, Irish, or English alone.

In 1879, Archibald Dobbs promoted the idea of proportional representation (PR) in Irish elections as ‘the best method of ascertaining the depth and breadth of political opinion’. Dobbs was a barrister from a prominent Protestant family in Co. Antrim that claimed a rich heritage in national and local politics stretching back centuries.1 Part of his advocacy of PR was connected to an effort to stymie ‘agitators’ gaining electoral success. ‘[Charles Stewart] Parnell and the Obstructionists are the worst foes of the men who could be responsible statesmen, of the able members of the Home Rule party’, proclaimed Dobbs. He continued:I cannot take the point of view and attitude of the Home Rulers, so far as I know it, nor can I take the English point of view. But my present task is to endeavour to obtain a full and free and real representation for Ireland, believing as I do in the great fund of good stored up in the hearts of her people.2

This article traces the career trajectories, publishing strategies, and intertwining networks of Barbara Strozzi and two of her Venetian contemporaries: the Jewish salonniére and poet Sara Copia Sulam (1592?–1641) and the forced nun and polemicist Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652). All three figures were connected to the influential Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, a libertine circle of writers, critics, and opera librettists with interests including literature and music. Each woman pursued a career as a public intellectual in an early modern world that often chafed at women’s voices, and each broadcast their ideas by publishing on prominent presses. The experience of Copia Sulam, who was prominent as the Incogniti academy was beginning to coalesce and was forced from the public eye after meeting with a vicious backlash for her intellectual activities, could in the coming decades serve as a cautionary tale to Strozzi and Tarabotti, who had long and prolific careers that were nevertheless beset by controversy. Though the trajectories of these three women varied in significant ways, their shared literary networks and their use of the presses to craft a commanding public persona illuminate the editorial environment for women in seventeenth-century Venice.

This chapter explores the revolutionary political thought of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), or Fenians, who emerged in the 1850s as a radical alternative to constitutional nationalism. Rejecting parliamentary politics, the Fenians articulated a vision of Irish independence rooted in Rousseauian concepts of popular sovereignty and the ‘general will’, declaring themselves the provisional government of an Irish Republic. The chapter analyses how Fenianism, though often dismissed as lacking coherent political theory, developed a sophisticated critique of British rule by framing Ireland’s liberation as both a political revolt and a moral revolution. Unlike O’Connell’s loyalty to the Crown, the Fenians asserted that sovereignty inherently resided in the Irish people, making British rule illegitimate. Through examination of clandestine newspaper articles, proclamations, and memoirs, the chapter reveals how Fenianism combined militant separatism with democratic ideals, challenging prevailing models of representative government under the Union.