This chapter addresses Pablo Neruda’s poetry as world literature. It discusses the prominence that models such as Franco Moretti’s assign to the novel and to Paris or other Western capitals as centers of canonization. It examines the circulation of Neruda’s poetry in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc in the late 1940s and early 1950s to conclude that it is inaccurate to claim that Latin American literature did not enter the international market until the 1960s when the novel received attention in the West. The conclusions argue that a study of the international circulation of literature that is not politically biased or Eurocentric requires an analysis of the translation and publication itineraries of poetry and beyond Europe and the Anglophone market.

This chapter explores the approach of the Italian Thomist and Kierkegaard scholar, Fr. Cornelio Fabro (1911–1995), to move contemporary scholarly discussions toward consensus regarding the dialogue between Thomism and continental philosophy, which centers on the question of the meaning of being (esse) and contingency. The central observation is that what is now taken as the canonical Thomist view of creation and freedom is indebted to Fabro’s research on the metaphysics of participation. For Fabro, the forgetfulness of being that Heidegger rightly identifies loses its way with the forgetfulness of the act of being. By distinguishing esse from existentia with Fabro’s notion of participation and act of being (actus essendi), Fabro’s Thomism avoids Cartesian dualism and phenomenological monism, which opens a constructive dialogue with continental thought. Briefly rehearsing Fabro’s metaphysical distinction between factical existence (existentia) and being (esse) illuminates Fabro’s critical evaluation of continental thought as a speculative scheme of necessary emanation or pure immanence. The chapter concludes that the best way to approach this question is not to limit it to the empirical realm of factical existence (existentia) but rather to open up the existential question to the metaphysics of creation ex nihilo.

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical approach of the book. Images are conceptualized as cultural artefacts that are both signs open for meaning making and tools open for social action. They are also dialogical and political artefacts that take part in knowledge production and circulation.

This essay focuses on Elicura Chihuailaf’s 1996 bilingual Mapuzugun/Spanish anthology of Neruda’s work. The translation and selection in the anthology titled Todos los cantos/Ti kum ul reveal a creative and ambitious rereading of Neruda’s virtues and flaws in understanding the Mapuche world. A close reading of Chihuailaf’s Todos los cantos/Ti kum ul shows how Neruda’s poetry can be reinterpreted in ways that allow for the presence of Mapuche voice and ethos. Chihuailaf’s rereading of Neruda’s work expands and redefines the idea of the “National Poet” in the twenty-first-century Chilean context.

Philosophical and conceptual understandings of time underpin Bowen’s writing, and often these are expressed through experiments with form and narrative. Focusing on Bowen’s novels, this chapter examines how her characters are shown in scalar relation to bigger historical moments or developments, even while the writer holds on to the primacy and singularity of individual experience. It discusses the relationship between history and affect or individual feeling through three interrelated narrative tropes: the temporality of loss, typically broached through themes of adolescence and innocence lost; textual time, or the ‘multitemporal’ qualities of words and letters; and time capsules, or the irruption of the past into the present or future, particularly as a felt experience of wartime. Reading Bowen in context not only emphasises the important issues of her time; it also illuminates the reader’s relationship to her time, and how one might feel and understand intimate attachments to the world in contemporary times.

In Bowen’s fiction, domestic architecture shapes the character and modus vivendi of those it houses. While Bowen admired the austerity of eighteenth-century architecture, exemplified in Bowen’s Court, her family’s Big House in County Cork, she admitted to a preference for the fanciful villas of the Kentish seaside where she lived as a child with her beloved mother. This chapter examines her ambivalence about the architectural styles that supplanted the august simplicity of Georgian design. Ambivalent, too, is her attitude to the housing estates that pullulated in the English suburbs. Although she deplores the desecration of tradition, she is also exhilarated by the ferment of modernisation. The chapter concludes with Bowen’s haunted houses, which engender their own inhabitants, whether living or undead.

From the mid-twentieth century, Pablo Neruda was the most well-known Latin American poet in the Arab world. Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab published poems by Pablo Neruda in a collection of his own translations, Qasa’id Mukhtara min al-Shi‘r al-‘Alami al-Hadith (Selected Poems from Modern World Poetry) in 1955. In 1975, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942–2008) published “Dhahibun Ila al-Qasida – Ila Bablu Niruda” (“On the Way to the Poem – To Pablo Neruda”), a poem dedicated to Pablo Neruda (1904–1973). Years later, Darwish visited Neruda’s home in Isla Negra, Chile, in 1990, and thereafter composed another poem, which begins: “In Pablo Neruda’s home, on the Pacific / coast, I remembered Yannis Ritsos / at his house.” Drawing on the translation, circulation, and reception of Neruda in the Arab world, this essay will explore the relationship of Arab writers to Neruda and little-known Arab Latin American engagements within internationalist networks of Global South solidarity and nationalist politics.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by describing several linguistic and psychological aspects of word meaning, with emphasis on those that have received the most attention in cognitive neuroscience. Specific topics include the treatment of word meanings as public concepts for social coordination; the decomposition of word meanings into semantic features; the characterization of word meanings in terms of frames, prototypes, mental models, and background situations; the nature of word associations and co-occurrence patterns; the influence of context on interpretation; and the importance of crosslinguistic similarities and differences.

Chapter 7 concentrates on abstract words like democracy, luxury, and chance. These words are harder to characterize and investigate than concrete ones like bird, mug, and banana, but the pace of progress in understanding their cognitive and neural bases has dramatically increased in recent years. For instance, it’s now clear that compared to concrete words, abstract ones rely more on verbal associations, occur in a broader range of contexts, and are rated higher for certain types of semantic features (e.g., time, social interaction, emotion, and drive). Consistent with these differences, it’s well-established that abstract words rely more than concrete ones on a few very high-level cortical areas that play vital roles in language processing while also contributing to the GSN/DMN. And yet there’s also mounting evidence that, like concrete words, many abstract ones are anchored to some extent in systems for perception and action. In addition, an increasing amount of research has been exploring how different categories of abstract words (e.g., those for numbers, emotions, mental states, and moral judgments) are associated with different sets of partly shared and partly segregated brain regions.

St. Thomas and Thomists hold that the ground for having basic rights (including the right to life) is being a person. And a person can be defined as: an individual substance of a rational nature. This chapter sets out and defends this position, including its application to the beginning of human life, issues at the end of life, and capital punishment and killing in war. I argue that St. Thomas’s principles for determining when human life begins are correct, and that when applied to the embryological facts known today, show that human beings begin at fertilization. I set out St. Thomas’s position on capital punishment (where he holds that a human being can lose his inherent dignity) and discuss both criticisms and defenses of this position by later Thomists, indicating the centrality for this issue of the notions of dignity, the common good, and punishment.

This chapter explores the friendship practices of midlife men and women in long-term couple relationships in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with eighteen adults aged forty to fifty-nine, it examines how friendship is shaped by, and often subordinated to, the couple norm, an ideal that centers monogamous, cohabiting relationships. Although friendship is increasingly celebrated in cultural discourse, it remains routinely deprioritized in midlife. Friends offer emotional support, companionship, and moral guidance, yet their contributions are often undervalued or constrained by normative expectations. At times, emotionally significant friendships were perceived as disruptive to the primacy of the couple bond. The contemporary ideal of friendship as autonomous, equal, and elective, sits uneasily alongside the institutional authority of coupledom. This chapter argues that friendship and couple relationships are not discrete domains but are relationally entangled. By tracing how intimacy is organized through these entanglements, it calls for a critical rethinking of friendship’s role in contemporary personal life.

The reintroduction of multiparty elections threatened the survival of the Togolese regime, but they also represented an opportunity to remove potential enemies in neighbouring countries. In Togo, the transition to multiparty elections initiated a period of power contestation where the dictatorial regime of Gnassingbé Eyadema had to adapt, and by doing so, used cross-border mechanisms to its advantage. Chapter 8 shows the implications of cross-border voting in the international relations between Ghana and Togo when Rawlings and Eyadéma used elections in an attempt to topple each other in the 1990s. As a consequence, the chapter concludes on showing the far-reaching international consequences of the ways in which the local level scales up to the national and the transnational levels.

This Chapter examines whether and to what extent WTO members can be accountable for applying security measures before international adjudicators and how the invocation of security exceptions can impact the international courts’ or tribunals’ proceedings. The idea of balancing free trade and national security is bound to substantiate itself in a compression of the right to sovereignty, which can be assessed through the good faith review or the use of a necessity test. The investigation of the meaning and mechanisms of these tests and the scope of discretion that should be granted to the decisions of WTO members in their national security matters allows for establishing the framework for reviewing security exceptions.