The history of development and structure of various musical compositions and adaptations from 1969 onward of aspects of Pablo Neruda’s Canto general is examined in three exemplary cases: Aparcoa’s “musical poetic work,” first performed in 1970; the Canto general oratorio composed in 1972–80 by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis; and the “Alturas” (“Heights of Macchu Picchu”) work by Los Jaivas, composed in 1980–81. These musical compositions and adaptations, as well as their performance, broaden out the ways in which new generations interpret and frame Neruda’s life and works. They are also aspects of Neruda’s “cultural afterlife,” while being new creations, as words, within the sphere of music.

Metametaphysical reflection is nothing new. Avant la lettre, Aristotle’s attempt to lay out a science of “being qua being” and its first principles – the scientific discipline that came to be called “metaphysics” – involved an attempt to justify his methodology as well as to develop responses to skeptics. Contemporary metametaphysics has revived some of these discussions. Whereas all metaphysicians roughly agree on the sorts of problems that count as “metaphysics,” and generically that the subject matter concerns the nature and structure of reality, not all metaphysicians agree about what constitutes the form of an answer to such problems. Some contemporary metaphysicians focus on existence questions – listing what exists – whereas others focus on “grounding” or dependence relations of some kind – what depends on what or is fundamental. These differences tend to appear in responses to skeptical challenges to metaphysics.

In ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, Elizabeth Bowen addresses the visual angle an author may choose to adopt as a problem in writerly technique: ‘Where is the camera-eye to be located?’ As she was a self-described ‘visual writer’, it follows that an exploration of her visuality offers a useful lens to perceive her work. Talk of lenses leads to thoughts of eyes, glasses, and photography, all of which feature prominently in her fiction. Bowen’s visuality also manifests itself across technical, aesthetic, and thematic levels, through linguistic choice, and in the rendering of perception. Through a selection of novels and short stories, this essay considers Bowen’s visuality under two lens-based categories – the human ‘roving eye’ and the photograph, index of the mechanical ‘camera eye’ – in an effort to apprehend, at least in part, her literary focus, and how she registers, records, and frames impressions and experiences.

Food security is a common term within the region, but its meaning is unclear. This chapter argues that the term is a means to demarcate the Gulf’s access to food from the rest of the region; it submits it as a form of biopolitics that rationalises circulation, access and consumption. It shows how food imports are central to economic growth and development and how this is managed by governments. It also argues that food security is a basis for political legitimacy and the identification of problem and solution is a performative act.

Bowen was not a committed feminist, but she did have a proximity to feminist thinkers and a belief in women’s civic responsibility. She insists in her essay, ‘Woman’s Place in the Affairs of Man’, ‘I am not, and never shall be, a feminist.’ A less strident formulation in Bowen’s first novel seems to better capture the ambiguous but affectionate character of Bowen’s attitude towards women throughout her oeuvre: ‘I am not a Feminist’, says Mrs Kerr in The Hotel, ‘but I do like being a woman’. Bowen certainly liked being and being with women, both in her life and in her writing. She was an acute social, sometimes sociological, observer of women and of their relationships to one another, sometimes in ways that echo and anticipate the insights of feminist thinkers. This chapter focuses Bowen’s observations about women in her essays before moving on to her penultimate novel, The Little Girls.

Ellen Rosand provides an overview of Strozzi in the fifty years since her groundbreaking article, “Barbara Strozzi, virtuossisima cantatrice: The Composer’s Voice” was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1976. In it she explores the many performances and recordings of Strozzi’s music, discoveries about Strozzi’s life, discussion of her music, the iconography associated with the composer (in particular the portrait by Bernardo Strozzi that Ellen and David Rosand identified), as well as her image in popular literature, on radio and in film, all of which have given us not only a much richer and fuller sense of who she was, but a greater appreciation of her the quality of her music.

Chapter 8 tackles the development an image can go through in its social life. This include processes of image circulation, virality, travel, and transformation, which have a significant influence on how meanings of images are negotiated and changed. Longitudinal research methods are presented and applied on the case example of news photographs.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bowen’s relationship to audiovisual art forms. Given Bowen’s own relative lack of interest in film, one may wonder why adaptation should be included in an overall analysis of her work and its impact. One argument is largely commercial: be it through television, film, or radio, dramatisations of Bowen’s works contribute to increased public scrutiny of her fiction. For those already familiar with Bowen’s fiction, adaptations revitalise readings of her fiction. How her texts correspond to traditions and tropes of other media tells us much about the interplay of genres – from novel of manners and social satire to spy story or historical fiction – as they manifest themselves in the traditions of those media. Ultimately, an adaptation is also an interpretation and analysis of its source text. This examination of adaptations focuses on The Last September and The Heat of the Day, two of Bowen’s most-read works. These adaptations are the best known and most accessible audiovisual adaptations of her fiction.