This chapter examines Pablo Neruda’s participation in a translation program implemented in Romania during the Cold War years. In the 1950s and 1960s, Neruda established a literary-political connection with the Writers’ Union and accepted the invitation to translate the anthology 44 poetas rumanos (1967). His translations relied on French translations, as he did not know Romanian. With 44 poetas, both unknown poets and known poets, such as Hélène Vacaresco, Benjamin Fondane, and Ilarie Voronca, were read in Spanish for the first time. The collective nature of the project led to the exclusion of 44 poetas from Nerudiana dispersa II (2002). Through an examination of translations, letters, memoirs, and archival material, this chapter argues that the inclusion of 44 poetas in Neruda’s complete works would contribute to a nuanced exploration of his view on translation and his role as an agent of international literary transfer.

This chapter explores the intense debate over the proposed parliamentary union between Ireland and Britain in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion. It examines competing visions of representative government, with unionists advocating for Ireland’s integration into a larger British polity to secure stability and prosperity, while anti-unionists defended the autonomy of the Irish Parliament as a symbol of national liberty. Key themes include the clash over sovereignty, the role of Catholic emancipation in the union debate, and the economic implications of integration. The chapter also analyses the pamphlet war that erupted, revealing how public opinion was mobilized through arguments about political equality, economic benefits and sovereignty. Ultimately, the Union’s passage in 1801, marked by political manipulation and broken promises, set the stage for Ireland’s turbulent relationship with Britain in the nineteenth century, framing subsequent struggles over governance and representation.

There is an autobiographical turn in Elizabeth Bowen’s writing in the 1940s and 1950s, which can be traced to the aftermath of the Second World War and the postwar losses that she experienced with the death of her husband and the selling and razing of her ancestral home. Rather than writing a straightforward autobiography, Bowen filters her personal writing into semi-autobiographical fictional characters and into other life-writing genres such as essays, family histories, and travel books. In two such works, a family history, Bowen’s Court, and a travel book, A Time in Rome , Bowen refuses to present identity as an independent, self-directed entity. Instead, she focuses on architecture and the built environment in order to show how houses, hotels, streets, and monuments shape her sense of self into shifting forms. These spaces are never neutral containers. In gothic fashion, Bowen’s places and spaces exert an influence of their own, not merely revealing the shape of the self, but forming it in their own image. Writing about these places after the Second World War, Bowen creates an autobiography of ruins, describing what happens when we lose the spaces that once defined our sense of self.

Widely considered to be a quintessential avant-gardist work, Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1925–35) also emerges from historical, political, and personal events that inform and act as reference points throughout the book. Contrary to prevailing interpretations of this classic book of poetry, his battle with poetic language and vanguardist aesthetic stances coexists with a realist aesthetic that highlights the sociohistorical and individual circumstances in which he is immersed. Written mostly overseas, where he served as low-level consul, the combination of the avant-gardist techniques depicts the poetic subject’s alienation from nature and society. Neruda represents the speaker as using a hermetic poetic language as a way of divulging his own estrangement. He begins to overcome this stage thanks to his relationships with women, his increasing political awareness, and his use of nature as positive force in his poetry and life.

This chapter examines the early decades of the Union (1801–1829), focusing on the unresolved tensions surrounding Catholic emancipation and Ireland’s uneasy integration into the United Kingdom. Despite promises of equality, the persistence of penal laws excluding Catholics from political office fuelled discontent, with figures like Daniel O’Connell and Bishop James Warren Doyle arguing that such discrimination violated the principles of the British constitution. The chapter explores debates over Irish ‘character’, the rise of mass Catholic mobilisation through organisations like the Catholic Association, and the clash between reformers advocating gradual inclusion and conservatives defending Protestant supremacy. Key moments include the veto controversy, the influence of millenarian ‘Pastorini’ prophecies and the eventual passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829 - a victory tempered by the disenfranchisement of poorer voters. The chapter reveals how struggles over representation, religious identity and democratic participation shaped Ireland’s political landscape.

introducing the relevance of the book and its main aim

Pablo Neruda served as Consul General in Mexico from 1940 to 1943. This was a foundational period on his path toward becoming Latin America’s politically engaged poet par excellence, when his verse and public persona fused around a sharpened commitment to the working class and the struggles against fascism and imperialism. As a haven for left-wing exiles, Mexico City during World War II was a “key node” in global cultural Cold War debates about “the relationship between the intellectual to revolution,” according to Patrick Iber. Neruda found common cause with Mexico’s ideologically engaged muralists, including David Alfaro Siqueiros, and feuded with the more artistically independent poets, principally Octavio Paz (Nobel Prize, 1990). Years later, during an odyssey of political exile from his native Chile, Neruda returned to Mexico. There, in 1950, he published his magnum opus, Canto general, a sweeping epic about Latin America’s revolutionary historical destiny, considered the literary equivalent of Mexican muralism.

This chapter introduces one of most unusual madrigals in Strozzi’s Opus 1, Al Battitor di bronzo della sua crudelissima Dama. Giulio Strozzi’s sonnet takes its inspiration from one of the most practiced themes of ancient Greek and Latin poetry, that of the exclusus amator, the excluded lover. While many such poems focus on the door itself Strozzi’s poem brings to the fore, instead, the plight of the doorknocker itself, for it (and the madrigal’s music) will only find its repose after the beloved allows the lover to enter her home. It was in Venice that bronze objects, with their innate sensuality, reached their greatest heights. The Strozzis’ madrigal, then, celebrates one of the city’s highest art forms through a combination of literary wit and musical inventiveness.

What was Ireland during the nineteenth century? A kingdom, a colony, or a clandestine republic: the answer was in the eye of the beholder. The Irish parliament existed until 1800 but lacked executive independence and represented a political nation that was exclusively Protestant. Ireland became an integral component of the United Kingdom from 1801 yet retained configurations of colonial government that intermingled with British domestic structures, creating a constitutional apparatus that lacked conceptual clarity. While Ireland was not unique in terms of its ambiguous constitutional framework – the ‘state fragments’ within the Habsburg Empire that the German jurist, Georg Jellinek, analysed offer parallel examples and terminologies – the tensions arising created uncertainty at the heart of the nineteenth-century British world.1 The island was framed as a victim of unresponsive imperialism; at the same time, even sympathetic British observers such as John Stuart Mill believed that the Irish lacked the political maturity for independent statehood.2 Province or nation, kingdom or colony, the deceptively simple question of what Ireland ‘was’ in the nineteenth century remains deeply contested.3 By excavating the contested visions of government – from the dying embers of the parliament in Dublin to the origins of Home Rule – this book explores the ways in which observers and protagonists grappled with Ireland’s puzzling constitutional position, and how Irish ideas concerning the structures of government were articulated and changed over time.

This chapter examines the renewal of British–Miskitu relations in the 1830s and the actions of Belizean Superintendent Alexander MacDonald and his aide (later, Consul) Patrick Walker that entangled the British imperial government in the affairs of the Mosquito Kingdom, particularly in relation to its Central American neighbors and in the context of a growing interest in the Nicaragua Canal that prompted the British government to reestablish its official presence over the Mosquito Coast.

This chapter illuminates the deeper history of a Black concert music tradition that undergirded Price’s path. Part of a systemic response to de jure and de facto segregation, the Black concert music tradition became not only an alternative to the white mainstream; it also presented a multifunctional use of the concert stage: a space to perform old and new repertoires and educate audiences on Black music history. The intersection of Emancipation, establishment of colleges and universities for the formerly enslaved, Jim Crow laws, the institutionalization of music education, and the rise of a Black professional class laid the foundation for the development and cultivation of a community of Black composers, performers, teachers, and patrons – a community that Price actively participated in and contributed to.

This chapter analyses the Repeal movement led by Daniel O’Connell during the 1830s and 1840s, which attempted to undo the Act of Union and restore Ireland’s parliament. O’Connell framed Repeal as a constitutional restoration - a return to Grattan’s Parliament - but infused it with mass mobilization tactics honed during Catholic emancipation. The movement’s tensions are revealed through its ideological factions: O’Connell’s moderate "Old Ireland" favouring gradual reform within British frameworks, and the more radical "Young Ireland," influenced by classical republican ideals. The chapter explores how Young Irelanders like Thomas Davis conceptualised Irish self-government not just as legislative autonomy but as cultural and economic sovereignty, diverging from O’Connell’s pragmatic focus on institutional restoration. The catastrophic Famine (1845–52) deepened these divides, exposing the Union’s failures and radicalizing demands for self-rule. Ultimately, the chapter shows how Repeal became a crucible for competing visions of Irish representation - from O’Connell’s loyalist parliamentarianism to Young Ireland’s revolutionary separatism - laying groundwork for later republican and Home Rule movements.