This chapter discusses Pater’s relationship with the aesthetic movement and its central principle of ‘art for art’s sake’, suggesting that he provided a philosophical basis for some key assumptions of the movement, spontaneously practised but not theorised before him. It illustrates how Pater’s first articulation of ‘art for art’s sake’ responds to the burgeoning aesthetic movement illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting, the art furniture industry led by William Morris from the 1860s, and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry, and in sharp response to the purism of John Ruskin. It goes on to trace the history of aestheticism back to philosophers including Immanuel Kant and the poet John Keats, and illustrates Pater’s understanding of this history via close reading of his essays including ‘Coleridge’ (1866) and ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877), with attention to the controversies around the movement, and Pater’s involvement.

Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.

This chapter explores Maconchy’s eclectic text selection for her solo vocal works and the individual style in which she brought those texts to life. Her compositional life is described in three distinct stages, detailing her approach to text selection and setting as it developed throughout her career. It begins in her student years, when Maconchy was studying under Vaughan Williams and drew her inspiration from poets like Shakespeare, Keats, and Rossetti. We then see how her songs evolved from simple text settings to more complex, dramatic works, in which Maconchy evidences a unique ability to enhance the meaning of poetry through music. Finally, her later compositions showcase her mastery of harmonic complexity and emotional depth, influenced by her Irish heritage, political engagement, and her optimism. This chapter celebrates Maconchy’s innovative approach to text setting and vocal writing has made her a significant yet underappreciated figure in the English song repertoire.

This chapter examines literary representations of changes in agriculture across the nineteenth century. Beginning with an overview of British farming in the early 1800s, it maps the rise of what Greg Garrard has termed “rural capitalism.” With reference to writers, including Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy, the piece examines how realist writing represented shifts in domestic agriculture. Moving to focus on Australia, while drawing on the work of the novelists Louisa Atkinson and Anthony Trollope, the chapter goes on to discuss Britain’s growing dependency on its colonies to provide a stable food supply. It addresses how Atkinson and Trollope were among those writers who captured the devastating changes that agriculture wreaked upon the landscape and climate, along with their warnings about the transposition of European farming methods to a radically different climate.

All theories up to now relate consciousness to neural processes, circuits, etc. Quantum theories, such as orchestrated objective reduction (OrchOR), propose that proto-conscious events occur in the entire universe and full consciousness occurs only at the subcellular level in the microtubules of neurons. We outline challenges with this approach.

This chapter surveys Pater’s ‘widely diffused’ contributions to early twentieth-century modernist poetry, prose, and aesthetic discourse. It provides insights into Pater’s influence on modernist writers including W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot, addressing the unevenness of his reception among Anglo-American modernists and the source of the ambivalence that often defined this. Its first section concentrates on how Pater’s literary impressionism anticipated modernist interiority and so can be seen reflected in works including Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Its second section turns to the rejection of Pater by T. S. Eliot – and how Pater nevertheless haunts his works.

The current chapter explores English in Japan from four perspectives: (i) Japan’s sociopolitical history, which explains how English first entered the country in the early seventeenth century; (ii) Japan’s history of English language education, which presents a vexed problem; (iii) English loanwords that have entered the Japanese lexicon and which are divided into “pure” and “creative” borrowings; and (iv) the English used by Japanese speakers. The conclusion draws attention to the creativity of L2 users.

This chapter presents biological anthropology’s contribution to racial science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to the anthropological study of documented skeletal collections. Examples of research before and after the discipline’s turn away from racial typology illustrate that the process did not occur in a linear fashion. The chapter ends with an overview of contemporary approaches to studying the lived experiences of people whose remains are in documented skeletal collections.

Transportation has always been a key driver in economic development, and the airplane offered a dramatic leap in the speed of moving goods and services about the country and indeed the world. Following the World War, the aviation industry was in its infancy and progress in technological development was initially slow. That pace accelerated by the late 1920s as airliners grew in size, speed, range, safety, and reliability. There was a symbiotic relationship between the needs and desires of the commercial airline industry and the military air arms. In addition, air racing was a major spur to aviation growth, leading to dramatic advances in both engine and airframe development. This combination of airline needs and air racing was beneficial to all types of military aircraft, but especially bombardment aircraft.

How did Victorian authors conceive of the rise of an extraction-based society? This chapter looks to the literary archive for early impressions of industrial mining’s wider social significance. Thanks to the new role of fossil fuels in nineteenth-century industry, the Victorian period saw a massive acceleration of mining in terms of the depths plumbed and volumes extracted. Mining operations in Britain and overseas were becoming a source of wide public attention at this time as the economy and culture shifted toward those of an extraction-based society, one grounded in the extraction of finite underground materials. This chapter explores the depiction of extraction in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 protest poem “The Cry of the Children,” Joseph Skipsey’s 1878 poem “Mother Wept,” Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations, and William Jevons’s 1865 study The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines.

Across the nineteenth century, from Lord Byron to Rudyard Kipling, the dominant blue ecology conceived of the ocean as infinite, unfathomable, and thus impervious to human activity. Humans could not threaten it; rather, it threatened them – a relation Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson emblematized with the figure of shipwreck. As Thomas Henry Huxley, George Henry Lewes, and other scientists disseminated their discoveries about the marine environment, however, its imagined unknowability and indestructability were put into question. Herman Melville documented the extractive enterprise of whaling; Philip Henry Gosse mourned tidepools ravaged by day trippers with a penchant for natural history. Writing about the tidal reaches of the River Thames, Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew documented two-way traffic between land and water, human and ocean. A new understanding took shape that, in its depiction of the ocean as both affected by and affecting humanity, anticipates our own blue ecology.

Biological theories claim that consciousness occurs in specific neural circuits. Based on a wealth of neural data, the dendritic integration theory (DIT) claims that consciousness occurs when information in the dendrites of neurons is gated to higher-level neurons under the control of the thalamus. Based on patient studies, the felt uncertainty theory (FUT) claims that consciousness is not related to sensation and cognition but to emotions. We will also introduce the ‘other systems argument’, which holds that biological theories may not generalize to other kinds of systems.

Chapter 4 discusses the ethical potential of fictional trans-scalar encounters. Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) confront human characters with unfamiliar scales of existence: the slow time of trees, the multitudinous identity of forest or flock, the accelerating time of climate change, and the geographical patterns of collective migration. Both novels highlight disjunctions between scales as a key obstacle to environmental response-ability, by contrasting a sacrificed location with globalisation’s discourse of prosperity. These stories also highlight the fractures between individual and species-scale behaviour, and the difficulty of relating to the self as species. These fault lines lead me to ask whether allegorical narrative might in itself constitute a hindrance to trans-scalar ethics by smoothing out disjunctions and scale effects. I suggest that metalepsis acts as a counterweight to allegory in these novels. By construing trans-scalar encounters as frame-breaking events, metalepsis opens up the possibility of ethical relation.