Chapters Four through Nine portray the most well-known theories of consciousness. Each portrayal was written by an eminent proponent of that particular theory, and thus the portrayals provide accurate and unbiased information. Chapter Four introduces the topic, provides the tools for analyzing the theories logically, and shows that a theory needs to jointly address conscious and non-conscious brain activity which, as it turns out, many theories do not do. The chapter features the learning and consciousness theory (SOMA).

The Victorians carried a powerful sense of British environmental norms and values into the lands they colonized. Literature from the settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand testifies to those inherited expectations and their collision with unfamiliar local conditions, while also gesturing (if only implicitly) to Indigenous environmental knowledges. Despite often being dismissed by later critics as derivative or inauthentic, such works played a prominent role in mediating diverse conceptions of the environment within an imperial system otherwise keyed towards its transformation and exploitation. Writing about forests in New Zealand highlights literature’s capacity to articulate and assess diverse conceptions of environmental value. Accounts of aridity and drought in Australia demonstrate the role played by literature in comprehending unfamiliar and unpredictable climates. The poetry of Mohawk and Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson points to the need for non-Indigenous critics to become more cognizant of literary expressions of Indigenous environmental knowledge.

Chapter 5 compares two novels that portray the self as a multi-scalar collective. Reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) alongside Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999), I show that both novels represent the self as a space of cohabitation and co-evolution, where symbiotic relations embed the temporality of human characters within other timescales. I read these plots as symbiopolitical experiments that question the ‘dis-embedding’ of life performed by biocapitalism. Because it resists the separation of self from non-self, the symbiotic subject destabilises the type of immunological politics theorised by Roberto Esposito and Frédéric Neyrat, where fantasies of biological and social immunity are built upon defensive boundaries. In these novels, such immunitary fantasies are undermined by metaleptic poetics, where the self is both co-written by others within and forced to position itself within the narrative of its own species. These strange loops open up the narrative of the self to the necessity of symbiopolitical relations.

The Mercury Theatre, at 2a Ladbroke Road in London’s Notting Hill, was originally built as a school in 1851, that mid century year of British national and imperial pride and optimism, celebrated in Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition. Architect John Tarring (1806–1875) designed the original school for the Congregationalists as well as their adjacent Horbury Chapel (now the Kensington Temple, an Elim Pentecostal church). When the school closed, the building was utilised as a church hall (known as the Horbury Hall); in the 1920s, as the Horbury Rooms, the building was occupied by the Kensington Local Pensions Committee; and subsequently the premises were used by Abrasha Lozoff (1887–1936) as the Russian-Canadian sculptor’s studio. In 1927, Horbury Hall was purchased by Ashley Dukes (1885–1959), the successful playwright, drama critic and impresario, who was an active presence in British theatre for over half a century. Dukes met the Polish dancer Cyvia Myriam Ramberg (1888–1982), who, using the French form of her name, was later known as Marie Rambert, founder of the celebrated Ballet Rambert. Dukes and Rambert were married in 1918. Dukes purchased the Notting Hill site and initiated its conversion from church hall to (eventually) a small theatre which became the home of the Ballet Club later to transmogrify into the Ballet Rambert. Dukes’s improvements to what would become known as the Mercury Theatre included a partition within the principal open space to create a room for dance classes on one side and a small theatre on the other.

This chapter provides approaches to reading Pater’s works for their remarkable literary style, with particular attention to his essay on ‘Style’ (1889) and passages from works including ‘The Child in the House’ (1878) and the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). It begins by illustrating how Pater’s creation of atmospheres is intrinsic to his style as, to borrow his phrase, ‘a literary artist’. This style was focal in criticism of his works from very first reviews of The Renaissance. It identifies and analyses his characteristic vocabulary and its sensory effects, discussing Pater’s endeavours to locate the subjective origins of writing style in his essays before turning to analyse the unconventional phrasing that defined his sentences.

This chapter argues that the discussion of pollution in Victorian environmental writing was often cross-wired with an oppressive and dehumanizing moral rhetoric. The confusion of the moral and material valences of words like “pollution,” “impurity,” “contamination,” and “filth” meant that, in practice, the very persons and communities that were suffering the most at the hands of extractive capitalism were imagined to be the cause of environmental breakdown, rather than its most grievously suffering casualties. In this way, the profound human cost of industrialism and the profit logic could be obscured under a victim-blaming rhetoric of social respectability, sexual purity, and moral righteousness. Drawing on key passages by Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the chapter shows some of the ways in which this troubling conflation of the moral and material was both critiqued and reinforced in the literature of the period.

We provide an in-depth analysis of the theories portrayed in the previous chapters. As it turns out, all theories except illusionist theories are monofactorial theories, proposing that one thing is crucial for consciousness, such as a workspace. The monofactorial nature of such theories is the main reason why the theories face the challenges that we outlined. A further consequence is that consciousness is epiphenomenal according to these theories, i.e. consciousness has no impact on actions, feelings, or anything physical. Epiphenomenalism is hard to reconcile with empirical science. We argue that these problems are avoided by a multifactorial framework, in which consciousness is treated as a supra-ordinate term picking out a specific constellation of interacting mechanisms. On this view, progress hinges on identifying the computational or biological problem(s) that this constellation solves.

Literature shows the way, public opinion follows the lead and, finally, collective morality, social customs and state law all give way. Such a change becomes inevitable, especially when all the propaganda devices and techniques besides philosophy, history, ethics, science, literature, art, etc., have worked together persistently for a hundred and fifty years or so to mould man’s way of thinking after a particular pattern. Then, it is unlikely that the law of the land remains unaffected by the changing public opinion in a country where government and social institutions are run on democratic principles.

Music festivals have long been a significant forum in which to introduce new repertoire. In the United Kingdom well established events such as the Three Choirs, Norfolk and Norwich festivals or the London Proms season offered a synthesis of well-known works and premieres. The changing environment for the Arts in post-war Britain witnessed an expansion of festival activity. These initiatives were supported partly by the Arts Council and were encouraged by a desire to make music, old and new, accessible to a world starved by conflict. Elizabeth Maconchy takes an important role in the story of the festival. Her impressionistic orchestral suite The Land, the impact of war upon performance of her work, her experimental forays into opera, a fascination for narrative inspired by her own Celtic background and that of other countries, and her commitment to community music-making reveal much about her extensive contribution to twentieth-century festival culture.

Chapter 3, ‘The Amazon as a Place for Global Extractivism: Rethinking Extractivism and Infrastructure in Extractive Frontiers,” explores the governance of extractivism in the Amazon by reflecting on IIRSA infrastructure development and how it relates to extractive activities. The analysis of the entanglements between mega-infrastructures and extractive industries also allows a deeper understanding of extractivism. From a scalar dimension, the Amazon becomes an example of global extractivism, a place where infrastructure and extraction coalesce to feed the global economy and the endless transnational circulation of commodities. From material/immaterial dimensions, infrastructure might be a kind of extractivism in itself when its main goal is profit-making from construction, detached from real prospects for connectivity. In turn, its immaterial dimension refers to how extractive logics permeate infrastructure activities, such as the monetarizing of the knowledge and needs of locals to justify the projects’ socio-economic viability. Considering the re-dimensioning of extractivism, the Chapter provides reflections on how it promotes international economic integration while limiting environmental integration in the Amazon. This raises crucial insights on the proper ways to govern internationally extractive activities.

This chapter addresses the long-standing challenge of constructing the Bethe wave function in large but finite volumes via the diagonalization of the transfer matrix within the spin representation. While the coordinate Bethe ansatz provides effective tools for specific models, it becomes increasingly cumbersome in systems with internal degrees of freedom, such as the Lieb–Liniger model. The algebraic Bethe ansatz offers a more general and systematic framework, particularly well suited for handling nested structures. Spin chains serve as a natural setting for this formalism, offering both mathematical richness and physical relevance as models of interacting quantum spins. Starting from the Heisenberg spin chain, the chapter introduces the algebraic structure underpinning the method, including the R-matrix formulation, quantum group symmetries, and the construction of the transfer matrix. To connect the algebraic formalism with thermodynamic behavior, the chapter explores the string hypothesis, which organizes solutions to the Bethe equations into regular complex patterns. This leads naturally to the Bethe–Takahashi equations, which govern the thermodynamic limit of integrable spin chains. These tools enable a tractable analysis of excited states and physical observables, establishing a foundation for applying the algebraic Bethe ansatz to a broader class of quantum integrable systems.

The generalized Bethe hypothesis, though conceptually powerful, becomes increasingly unwieldy when approached through direct state-by-state analysis, particularly for systems with multiple excitations. While one- and two-particle states allow straightforward generalizations, a universal proof valid for arbitrary permutation modules remains a central challenge. This chapter introduces the transfer matrix method as a systematic and elegant framework to address this issue. Based on the spin chain realization of permutation modules, the method facilitates the analysis of a broad class of integrable systems and serves as a powerful computational tool. A particularly appealing feature is the diagonal form of the transfer matrix on the common eigenspace of scattering operators. For the case gl2, the inhomogeneous spin chain transfer matrix is diagonalized using Lieb’s method, thereby confirming the generalized Bethe hypothesis in this setting. In addition, representation theory is applied to classify spin chain states according to their transformation properties under the global symmetry algebra, highlighting the rich algebraic structure underlying the solvability of these models.

After sketching two indicative moments from Emerson’s 1867 westward lecturing trip – his visit to the Santee Sioux in Minnesota and his visit to a group of Hegelian philosophers in St. Louis – this Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson gives an overview of the volume contributors’ main thematic emphases. These are Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism, and Asia; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism; and his late style and legacy. While many readers of Emerson are most familiar with the iconic picture of him as the Sage of Concord, this introduction paints a picture of a transitional and transnational Emerson who tirelessly lectured across the United States throughout his lifetime, who can be placed in his contemporaneous transatlantic currents of Romantic literature, religion, philosophy, or science, and who nonetheless looks forward to modernist poetic, aesthetic, or musical innovations.

This chapter explores the linguistic consequences of language contact between English and Afrikaans in South Africa, focusing on the English spoken by Afrikaans speakers in South Africa. Against the backdrop of two centuries of language contact and bilingualism, the multifaceted nature of interactions in diverse social settings are investigated, and the linguistic outcomes of these settings are outlined. The chapter highlights the bidirectional influence between Afrikaans and English, with evidence of influence mainly from Afrikaans to Afrikaans South African English (ASAE), but the reciprocal influence between ASAE and other vernaculars is also highlighted. The linguistic review describes ASAE pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and stylistic features, by offering evidence from corpora, dictionaries and important works on the two ethnic subvarieties of ASAE. Overall, strong similarities with White South African English are found, but some differences reveal the influence from Afrikaans. For phonological features, there are quantity rather than quality differences for the tense-lax vowel contrast and hiatus breaking through [h] that distinguish ASAE from WSAE. For lexicogrammar, ASAE is observed to model its use of lexemes, collocational patterns and more abstract grammatical patterns, on Afrikaans constructions. The likelihood that White South African English speakers are not directly influenced by Afrikaans itself but rather by ASAE is considered as a topic for further study.

This chapter explores the category of the “EcoGothic” that has emerged out of the attempt by Gothic Studies to confront the reality of the climate crisis and ideas of the Anthropocene. The Gothic is often presented as a privileged mode, given its interest in affective states of fear and horror and its ability to operate at different scales from domestic realism. It can evoke apocalypse and planetary transformations, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to John Ruskin’s late lectures on storm clouds. The chapter proposes the EcoGothic be considered less as a set of objects or texts than a method of apprehension of many kinds of Victorian cultural objects. Authors discussed include Edmund Burke, Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, M. P. Shiel, H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and others.