Taking as its occasion the Hindi verse of Suryakānt Tripathi “Nirala,” this chapter delineates how the two-way traffic of translating romanticism in South Asia brings us to rethink the concept. In Hindi, romanticism was first designated swaćhandatāwād and then ćhāyāwād. The first term signifies a speaking in “one’s own meter,” and a speaking of “one’s own desire”; it has obvious and important resonances with the ideology of national self-determination in South Asia, which too was called swaćhandatāwād. The second term, which gestures to a “shadow-voice,” emerges from within swaćhandatāwād as an immanent critique of the notion of self-identity inherent in the discourse of “one’s own.” In translating both these renderings of romanticism back into English we must find a way to think their contradictory coincidence, and the way that Nirala’s verse offers us, also leads us to a rethinking of romanticism’s longer, transnational history.

This chapter traces an English Romantic poetics of heteromasculinist expression, a key example where heterosexual love dictates which works are worth reading globally as serious literature, to late eighteenth-century translators who “straightened” the famous Persian poet Shamsoddin Mohammad Hafiz Shirazi (ca. 1325–89) into a model of world literature. From Sir William Jones’s A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771) to Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát (1859), English translations that equate classical Persian poets with Anacreon (570–488 BC) – the Greek lyricist renowned for his bawdy drinking songs dedicated to beautiful male youths – transmitted to Romantic lyricism queer practices of imitative poetry-writing. Such contrasting social-literary relations counteract the heteronormativity universalized by colonial (mis)translators in homophilic collaboration with their Indo-Persian instructors. A salient example is the Lucknow-born Muslim nobleman Mirza Abu Talib Khan (1752–1806), whose Hafiz-style “Ode to London” shows how contentious were the (homo)erotic Romantic poetics of untranslatable genders for reading world literature straightly.

Building on the discussion started in Chapter 1 of how invisible agents can shape young women’s lives, Chapter 2 focuses on how young women engage with Pentecostalism to realise auspicious futures. Calabar is well-known for its numerous churches, which render the city a highly competitive and cacophonous religious marketplace. The chapter details how young women, simultaneously enticed by and fearful of novel charismatic practices, must learn to navigate the city’s plural church landscape. Ever curious, young women are often left wondering whether, by attending certain ministries, they are unwittingly harming their attempts to realise the destinies they believe God has planned for them. Drawing on local discourses of ‘spiritual confusion’ and ‘fake pastors’, the chapter highlights how unknown forces might cause deep-seated anxieties in young women as they attempt to grow up but that doubts over what cannot be seen do not stop young women from participating in what they themselves see as questionable Christian practices.

Ecocriticism is a field of literary and cultural studies that has deep roots, long pre-dating the concept of the Anthropocene in the late twentieth century. There has never been a time when human beings have failed to contemplate our connectedness and disconnectedness with the Earth, but the naming of the discipline in 1978 and its rapid development during the final decades of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first century are clearly a response to the sense of urgency spurred by recognition of human impacts on the biosphere, the hallmark of the Anthropocene. This chapter attempts to chart what it suggests are the five major phases (or “waves”) of ecocriticism from 1980 to the present, focusing not only on North American trends but also pointing to comparable patterns in other regions throughout the world. While most ecocritics do not refer explicitly to the Anthropocene, several scholars – such as Stephanie LeMenager, Serpil Oppermann, and Louise Economides – have written articles and books emphasizing the role of ecocriticism and the humanities more generally in responding to the social and ecological impacts of the Anthropocene.

The early 2000s saw not only the War on Terror but also the radical transformation of the shape and character of the RAChD. In 2000, the Department’s regular chaplains were male, Christian and part of an organisation that remained confessionally divided. However, and in the space of a decade, its two branches were merged in a process of Convergence; a new (if rather hazy) model of ‘all souls’ ministry was embraced; its base of sending Churches was broadened to embrace Pentecostalism; female chaplains were commissioned; and a new category of tri-service Civilian Chaplains to the Military (representing the Sikh, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist and Jewish faiths) had been created and incorporated. However, and though buoyed by ecumenical currents and driven by the principles of the McGill Report, this transition was not pain free. Convergence was widely resisted in Catholic circles, while the impetus behind the creation of the Civilian Chaplains to the Military was provided by an unrelenting governmental equality, diversity and inclusion agenda. Nevertheless, these changes were remarkable, accomplished as they were against a background of severe operational demands and organisational strain.

Language teacher educators play a key role in educating both pre-service and in-service teachers, as well as engaging in intensive supervisory practices for graduate students. However, this demanding work can lead to a continuous reconstruction of their identity. This chapter adopts narrative inquiry through a series of natural conversations as the methodology for generating and analyzing data to explore the identity reconstruction process of a teacher educator who has been teaching for about 25 years in the Turkish context. As she has been involved in supervision for about seven years, the particular teacher educator was purposefully invited to contribute to the research. The concomitant undertaking of educating and supervising appears to impose several challenges and opportunities to reconstruct her identity as a Language Teacher Educator (LTE). This identity reconstruction emerged after undergoing emotion labor, involving transient conflicts and tensions with colleagues in the faculty and some supervisees.

Taking the concept of the Anthropocene seriously has changed environmental writing. The Anthropocene concept shifts understanding of the environment from a primal nature to a second nature permeated by human activity. Recognizing new patterns in the atmosphere, distribution of species, water temperature, weather patterns, and even the stability of the earth’s crust, authors tell new stories. Narrative structures as basic as Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey have changed. A contrast between two environments is vital to the hero’s journey, and a transformation of the hero occurs with the passage between them. A familiar domestic world contrasts with a dangerous forest or labyrinthine subterranean zone; the differences between home and the wilderness or another foreign terrain then require the hero to redefine himself. In the Anthropocene, however, nearby and distant lands all reveal the touch of the human hand, and the hero’s prospects for transformation are not triggered by contact with otherworldliness. Instead, the hero of the prototypical genre of the Anthropocene (climate fiction) discovers within himself a latent barbarism together with a counterintuitive sense of awe.

This chapter explores the experiences of hundreds of Kenyan students who travelled to the Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria and other communist states during the late 1950s and 1960s and the politics surrounding them. Initiated for similar reasons as Mboya’s own airlift of students to the United States and expanded in a deliberate effort to compete with Mboya’s programme, the support of students for study in Eastern and Central Europe was a major part of Odinga’s efforts to build his own political base and to address Kenya’s urgent educational needs. After independence in 1963, and with Odinga increasingly in conflict with both Mboya and Kenyatta, these students became a source of considerable political controversy. The fact that some of the students had been sent for military training under agreements struck by nationalist leaders before independent Kenya’s military deals with Britain were finalised meant that returning graduates became the subject of Cold War–inspired rumours of coup plots to support Odinga. With Odinga forced out of the ruling party and government in 1966, the graduates from Eastern and Central Europe were frozen out of senior roles in government.

To consider Romanticism, world literature, and empire together entails reexamining the position of authors like Byron not only within the British Empire but also within other imperial formations, such as the Ottoman Empire. Focusing on Byron’s Ottoman Turkish reception, where he seems to exert no influence on local literary-cultural sensibilities, this chapter explores possibilities of envisioning a world literature that does not reproduce Western capitalist value systems. Byron’s “insignificant” presence in the Ottoman Turkish textual-visual landscape undermines the Eurocentric romanticization of the cultural capital attributed to Western icons among non-Anglophone audiences; simultaneously, it fuels a critical reflection on the empire-empire nexus that complicates the conventional geocultural hierarchies (e.g., East versus West, Orient versus Occident, etc.) shaping the contours of world literature.

The Second World War was a global experience, yet histories of the home front remain confined to individual nations and national mythologies. This chapter argues instead that most home fronts were transnationally constructed between the 1920s and 1945, as planners in each nation systematically investigated how allies and enemies were mobilizing their civilian populations for “total war.” Despite differences in political regimes, home fronts came to resemble each other in food rationing, civil defense, labor mobilization, neighborhood associations, mobilization of women and youth, mass evacuations, and war savings campaigns. Japanese military and civil officials were particularly active in investigating European and US home-front policies during the First World War. Their observations contributed to the construction of a “dual-use home front.” During the interwar decades, the Japanese state mobilized the populace for economic development and social stability. But its top-down organizations could just as easily be redeployed for war, as they were in the conflicts with China and the Western Allies (1937–1945).

This chapter recovers the work of Charles Phillips, a barrister known for his florid rhetorical style. It looks at his argument with the Edinburgh Review about the proper nature of ‘legitimate eloquence’ within the context of wider tensions in post-Napoleonic Britain around the democratisation of public speech. Oratory was now considered potentially radical, even anarchic, which gave a greater urgency to defining and policing Irish speech.

This chapter considers the evolution of English policy towards Ireland from the sixteenth century onwards. It argues how, at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the important reign of James VI and I, there was a renewed emphasis on religion, specifically Protestant evangelisation, as a key part of colonial projects, with Ireland part of wider trends in developing English imperialism. This resulted in policies of ‘converting and civilising’, with concepts of civility becoming inextricable with the Protestant religion. This was made visible in the planning and requirements of plantation schemes such as Ulster, which is contrasted with earlier schemes’ more lax religious requirements. The stress on religion, in turn, generated Irish Catholic resistance, which also drew on religious arguments, justifications and imagery in resisting the dispossession, displacement and loss of power that plantations represented. The Catholic clergy were crucial actors in articulating this religiously inflected opposition. The effect of both plantation and challenges to it was the increasing voicing of grievances, across a range of issues, in religious terms and through religious categories.