This chapter considers concert-going audiences in mid twentieth-century England, with a focus on the conditions Maconchy faced. Structured along the phases of her career, the chapter traces the evolving socio-cultural and historical factors that shaped audience reception of her work. The account reveals how gender biases, geographical isolation, and the limited infrastructure for contemporary music hindered her visibility and accessibility. It discusses how her music was often mischaracterized as complex and inaccessible, overshadowing its emotional expressiveness. Despite obstacles, including her tuberculosis and motherhood, Maconchy established a loyal audience, particularly among women’s networks, broadcasting and small concert series, though her broader appeal remained constrained by societal biases. The chapter ultimately illustrates how the interplay of audience composition, media influence, and institutional support contributed to the reception of Maconchy’s music, emphasizing the ongoing struggle for recognition faced by women composers in a male-dominated field.

In this chapter it will be focused on the topic about why and how Béla Bartók’s music was an important compositional point of reference for Elizabeth Maconchy, especially for her string quartets. The reception of Bartók’s music signalled her interest in the ‘ultra modern’ music of her time, something which was hardly the norm. Maconchy absorbed Bartók’s tendency towards objectivity and constructivism (in the sense of a constructive compositional practice consisting of short and concise elements), which he developed around 1926, when he explicitly distanced himself from the conventions, style and diction of nineteenth-century music, claiming that his music became more simple and more contrapuntal. Maconchy followed exactly this path, as, especially in her string quartets, she developed the monothematic technique, imitation and variation, and the contrapuntal combination of linear parts – similar to a conversation – in which four voices repeatedly recite almost the same arguments.

Chapter 6 analyses the ironies of multi-scalar focalisation. I read Margaret Atwood’s ‘Torching the Dusties’ (2014), T. C. Boyle’s The Terranauts (2016), and Ali Smith’s Winter (2017) as ironic exercises in ‘bringing the biosphere home’ which satirise their focalisers’ limited perception. The difficulty of biosphere perception is highlighted in each of these texts through visual hallucinations and blind spots, which represent ethical failure. These stories respond satirically to the difficulty of perceiving a planetary ecological crisis, and question the idea of enlightenment as a step towards environmental responsibility. This fiction does not work didactically, but neither does it endorse the cynical perspective. Instead, it explores an ironic mode of multi-scalar attention which holds together incompatible perspectives. This leads me to define scalar irony as an epistemic and ethical tool which offers a way forward for Anthropocene response-ability.

Victorian literature translated the systemic organization of extraction-based globalization into aesthetic structure. This chapter shows how literary forms like the multiplot novel and lyric poem strained and changed shape to account for the world-spanning mechanisms of imperialism, colonialism, and an extraction-based fossil capitalism that reshaped “the environment” across the nineteenth-century British imperium. Describing a “supply-chain sublime,” it shows how the improvement and development valorized by John Stuart Mill (and before him, John Locke) had material corollaries in scarred and abandoned zones that rarely focalize canonical works. Seen in this context, exhibits like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) recode extractive globalization into signals we can detect, but only with an “environmental” reading practice that construes ecological matters to inhere in sociopolitical conditions, and that sees environmental issues as finally moral ones too.

What is consciousness? Can we study consciousness scientifically or is consciousness beyond empirical science, as many philosophers have claimed throughout the ages? This chapter provides a short history of the topic, including philosophical and scientific milestones, and gives an overview of what is to come in subsequent chapters.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Walter Pater’s elusive personal life and his works. Addressing how the dynamics between the two have been a touchstone in criticism of Pater, it asks how we can reasonably read the autobiographical and self-reflexive dimensions of Pater’s writings. It illustrates how writers who encountered Pater – from Oscar Wilde to Edmund Gosse – reflected on the difficulties of knowing him beneath his courteous exterior. It considers how Pater himself figured personal life of writers and artists of whom he wrote. Addressing Pater’s ‘tact’ and ‘reserve’, quoting from the unpublished manuscript ‘The Aesthetic Life’, it considers Oxford Hellenism and the revelation of Pater’s involvement with William Money Hardinge.

Beginning with the broadcast première of The Land in 1930, BBC Radio played an important role in the dissemination of Maconchy’s music throughout her life. Yet, despite friendships with individual BBC staff, Maconchy’s relationship with the BBC was not always a happy one, as records in the BBC’s Written Archive Centre show. Maconchy wrote regularly to BBC staff, suggesting music for broadcast, and expressing her frustration that her music was not heard more regularly on the radio. Meanwhile other documents, which Maconchy would never have seen, show how her work was assessed by her contemporaries, in considering its suitability for broadcast. Drawing on these records and the history of the BBC itself, this article shows how often decisions about broadcasts of Maconchy’s music were a result of wider BBC policy, which included a considerable uncertainty about the place of new music in its schedules.

Though primarily recognized for her string quartets, Elizabeth Maconchy produced significant choral works throughout her career. In an effort to capture the breadth of her choral compositions, this chapter focuses on two choral pieces that serve as case studies to examine her mature style of text setting. And Death Shall Have No Dominion (1969) was commissioned for the Three Choirs Festival at Worcester Cathedral. Maconchy effectively used the cathedral’s acoustics to transform the piece and the poetry. In Héloïse and Abelard (1978), Maconchy crafted both the libretto and music, interweaving medieval Latin hymns in a dramatic work. She fused oratorio, opera, and cantata to create a work that foregrounds Héloïse as a woman, mother, and abbess. These pieces highlight Maconchy’s ability to remain true to her compositional voice, while honoring the spaces that she performed and stories that she told.

This chapter sets out the rationale for and provides an overview of the content of Submarines in International Law. It discusses a definition of submarines and describes a legal taxonomy of submarines; explaining how submarines may be categorized in a way that is legally relevant by considering the owner/operator, the purpose, their mode of power, and weaponry aboard. A critical consideration in addressing the international laws regulating submarine operations is the sovereign immunity that may apply and legal consequences of that immunity. Whether a submarine is nuclear powered or nuclear armed may also hold legal relevance. It is also important to acknowledge the growing private use of submarines for diverse reasons: criminal activity, research and for leisure. These uses are also regulated under international law and the chapter explains the different bodies of international law that are canvased in the book.

This chapter analyses submarines activities against requirements under the law on the use of force (jus ad bellum). Key actions at issue in this regard are the submerged passage of a foreign-flagged submarine in the territorial waters of a coastal State, as well as coastal State responses against a submerged submarine. We examine when submarine activities may constitute a prohibited threat of the use of force, as well as an unlawful use of force, in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. Military submarines may be deployed lawfully in response to an armed attack, provided the requirements of the right of self-defence are met. Submarines may also exercise a lawful right of unit self-defence where that response is necessary and proportionate. Responses of coastal States against submarine operations are also assessed within the law on the use of force.

The chapter provides an overview of the genre landscape of Maconchy’s work. Taking as its starting point the string quartets that have historically been the focus of interest in Maconchy, it traverses that landscape across the range of other chamber (and few keyboard works), her orchestral music, works for music theatre and vocal music, both solo and choral. The chapter points out noteworthy features of her oeuvre: her proclivity for works with a concertante element, in chamber as in orchestral music; works straddling the line between chamber and orchestral music; the increasing individuation of titles in her later work; the many works with a diminution in the title. It also briefly touches upon the uneven treatment of her works by the record industry and scholarship, with the string quartets and, to a lesser degree, other chamber music at one end and the many vocal works at the other.

This chapter focuses on blackface in Argentina, and on the larger implications embedded within the practice in that specific nation. The particularities of its use in the Argentine context are significant because of the country’s powerful nation-building mythology, which holds there are no Black people in the nation. Numerous scholarly investigations have demonstrated the consistent and sustained presence of Africans and Afrodescendants throughout the country’s history.

Maududi’s ideas on Islamic economics have also been very influential across the Muslim world, and some argue that he should be recognized as the father of the contemporary Islamic finance sector, valued at roughly $3.5 trillion today. Arshad Zaman has rightly argued that Maududi’s insistence on using the term ma‘ashiyyat, which carries the meaning of ’provision of livelihood’, rather than iqtisādiyyat, which is more readily translated as ’economics’, is significant . Maududi was making an explicit statement against the centrality of wealth acquisition and generation associated with the term iqtisādiyyat. This collection of essays was first published in 1969, and the writings included range over the thirty years preceding its publication.