In Victorian studies, the term “extraction” helps us express the nineteenth-century emergence of a society fully reliant on finite underground materials and thereby describe the material and value relations at the heart of imperialism and at the heart of the provincial-metropole dynamic. Much of the recent attention to extraction in Victorian studies and beyond returns us to the sites of removal, to the extraction zones or sacrifice zones left behind when commodities of value are withdrawn, tallied, and sold. In Victorian literature, England's coal mines, copper mines, quarries, and other sites of extraction left a hefty footprint, but so did the British extractive industry that was increasingly moving to the colonial frontier. Written in the aftermath of the emergence of the first fossil-fuel-based society, Victorian literature is a crucial archive for understanding extractivism and how it was both normalized and challenged across the British imperial world.

This paper analyses aspects of generalized method of moments (GMM) inference in moment equality models in settings where standard regularity conditions may break down. Explicit analytic formulations for the asymptotic distributions of estimable functions of the GMM estimator and statistics based on the GMM criterion function are derived under relatively mild assumptions. The moment Jacobian is allowed to be rank deficient, so first order identification may fail, the values of the Jacobian singular values are not constrained, thereby allowing for varying levels of identification strength, the long-run variance of the moment conditions can be singular, and the GMM criterion function weighting matrix may also be chosen sub-optimally. The large-sample properties are derived without imposing a specific structure on the functional form of the moment conditions. Closed-form expressions for the distributions are presented that can be evaluated using standard software without recourse to bootstrap or simulation methods. The practical operation of the results is illustrated via examples involving instrumental variables estimation of a structural equation with endogenous regressors and a common CH features model.

We define a one-dimensional family of Bridgeland stability conditions on $\mathbb {P}^n$, named “Euler” stability condition. We conjecture that the “Euler” stability condition converges to Gieseker stability for coherent sheaves. Here, we focus on ${\mathbb P}^3$, first identifying Euler stability conditions with double-tilt stability conditions, and then we consider moduli of one-dimensional sheaves, proving some asymptotic results, boundedness for walls, and then explicitly computing walls and wall-crossings for sheaves supported on rational curves of degrees $3$ and $4$.

Between 1975 and 1979 the genocidal regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) in Cambodia targeted minorities including the Cham Muslim population. To hold the regime to account for its crimes against the Cambodian people, the Cambodian government in 2001 formed the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Using transcripts of testimonies and judgements from the ECCC, this article examines Gender-Based Violence (GBV) among the Cham Muslim population. The study shows that Alexander Hinton's arguments to explain GBV using cultural frameworks are insufficient in this case. Indeed, Nicole Rafter has proven it is important to take into account the broader genocidal context to the violence. This article argues that ECCC documentation proves that GBV cannot be explained by cultural contexts alone and instead needs to be understood as a means to destroy the Cham and Cham culture.

Translations are often imagined, through spatial metaphors, to expand fields of interest, to broaden national literatures, or to bridge diverse cultural traditions. This essay considers a few nineteenth-century views on translation to show how intellectual expansions are indelibly linked to material ones, and to suggest a more complex critical perspective on the layers of historicity and self-interest involved in translations.

The ideal of the British New Woman, variously representing feminist, activist, fashion reformer, and writer, has been the subject of renewed critical interest since the late twentieth century. Although symptomatic of its situation in the fin de siècle, which “names those things that were never quite assimilated into the high-Victorian moment,” since the 1980s the New Woman has transcended its polemical Victorian conceptualization to represent “prequels to modernism as well as sequels to Victorianism.” As Sally Ledger has argued, the New Woman, despite being largely a “discursive phenomenon,” was nonetheless historically significant and central to late Victorian literary culture.

This keyword introduces readers to the theory of ethics of care, arguing that it is both a historically appropriate metric for Victorian studies and a theoretical form grounded in the experience of marginalized subjects. Moreover, care is a way of thinking that encourages us to interrogate our own scholarship.

This keywords entry proposes that critical infrastructure studies allows us to better understand the cultural lives of nineteenth-century theatrical repertoires and asks: How would conceptualizing theatrical repertoire as an imaginative infrastructure help us understand its cultural legacies in our own day? Nineteenth-century theatrical repertoires functioned in analogous ways to material-technical infrastructure: on one hand, providing routine and taken-for-granted conditions of performance; on the other, encoding asymmetric patterns of belonging and inclusion, proximity and distance, that we see reinforced by infrastructure. Repertoire is thus recast as a means of actively communicating and managing meaning on an enormous scale.

Informal empire is less a settled concept than a vexing category. Scholars disagree on the complicity of individuals, the extent of government oversight, and even whether informal empire is in fact imperial. I argue that informal empire is best approached through the lens of paradox. It is a system with no centralized authority yet which gave Britain a powerful role in the formation of Latin America. It relied on the continuing independence of Latin American nations and yet compromised their sovereignty. It often fostered the economic progress of the new nations and yet strangled their development. It grew out of the labor of thousands of individual migrants and travelers, and yet many of these people had no sense that they were involved in something called empire. What informal empire means is still very much up for debate. However, what it does for scholars of the nineteenth century is quite clear: it calls us to the study of imperialism in new ways, asking us to expand our gaze beyond the usual sites, to more openly conceptualize power relations, and—using all the particular powers of literary study we possess—to be attuned to the strangeness and paradox of imperialism.

We introduce a homotopy-theoretic interpretation of intuitionistic first-order logic based on ideas from Homotopy Type Theory. We provide a categorical formulation of this interpretation using the framework of Grothendieck fibrations. We then use this formulation to prove the central property of this interpretation, namely homotopy invariance. To do this, we use the result from [8] that any Grothendieck fibration of the kind being considered can automatically be upgraded to a two-dimensional fibration, after which the invariance property is reduced to an abstract theorem concerning pseudonatural transformations of morphisms into two-dimensional fibrations.

The construction of a spectral cocycle from the case of one-dimensional substitution flows [A. I. Bufetov and B. Solomyak. A spectral cocycle for substitution systems and translation flows. J. Anal. Math. 141(1) (2020), 165–205] is extended to the setting of pseudo-self-similar tilings in ${\mathbb R}^d$, allowing expanding similarities with rotations. The pointwise upper Lyapunov exponent of this cocycle is used to bound the local dimension of spectral measures of deformed tilings. The deformations are considered, following the work of Treviño [Quantitative weak mixing for random substitution tilings. Israel J. Math., to appear], in the simpler, non-random setting. We review some of the results of Treviño in this special case and illustrate them on concrete examples.

The word “conscience” appears frequently in Victorian writings across realms of discourse, in which it assumed an edge of ambivalence and energy difficult for us to perceive in the twenty-first century. While conscience today may seem a residual concept, recent critical strains in Victorian studies have suggested the possibilities bound up in examining anew this complex and multivalent word. Turning particularly to the writings of Charles Darwin and George Eliot reveals a self-conscious awareness not only of how the fluctuating meanings of conscience capture broader social shifts, but the ways these shifts are registered and enacted in language.

As a solution to soft material manipulation, dual-arm robots that are capable of multi-point grasping have become the latest trend due to their higher capability and efficiency. To explore further development in soft material manipulation and go beyond the hardware limit of dual arms, in this paper the robot platform “Quad-SCARA” that consists of four Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) is developed and introduced. With the base of hardware platform, a novel collision avoidance system designed for the motion planning of Quad-SCARA in multi-point grasping state is proposed. This system is inspired by the idea of “Buffered Voronoi Cell (BVC),” an algorithm originally proposed for multi-agent collision avoidance. After appropriate adaptation and new proposition in implementation of BVC, the experiments of folding and spreading a handkerchief are performed, and the results in simulation and robot experiments are presented and discussed for the validation and evaluation of entire system.

The Victorian period was notorious for its oblique representations of sexual violence. This article argues that rape is a necessary word and concept for Victorian studies and, we contend, a keyword for a growing subfield of literary and cultural scholarship, humanistic rape studies. Without rape as a stable signifier of specific acts, we find ourselves transported back to the nineteenth century, fumbling like Tess Durbeyfield for language that adequately describes what happened. Rape remains an indispensable domain of nineteenth-century literary studies precisely because it is a thoroughly historically contingent phenomenon. It is part of the power of rape, of its current structural pervasiveness, that it is capable of shaping people's expectations to such an extent that it suggests itself as a timeless, eternally recurring fact of life, when it actually amounts to an intensely situated set of behaviors, many of which crystallized into their current forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, propelled by changing labor conditions, European imperialism, and shifting family and romantic configurations. Literary scholarship, especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, has traditionally attempted to tether representations of gender-based violence to “objective,” transhistorical frameworks such as “the law” and psychology, a move we wish to counter here.

Despite neo-Victorianism's theoretical awareness of how colonial structures continue to infuse imaginations of the long nineteenth century, and how neo-Victorian culture might challenge both Victorian and contemporary ideological structures, common practices of neo-Victorian scholarship too often remain constricted in their geographical and conceptual breadth. In thinking about the structural convergences and challenges between Victorian studies and neo-Victorian studies, this keyword entry emphasizes texts and cultural traditions that have rarely been the purview of the neo-Victorian. Informed by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong's analysis of race as a central function in Victorian studies, it charts alternative neo-Victorian genealogies in anglophone African and Black British literatures and cultures. On this basis, it asks how conceptions of the neo-Victorian will need to change if the field is to take seriously its anticolonial potential.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a deleterious impact on the lives of nurses who work in long-term care; however, the moral conditions of their work have been largely unexamined. The purpose of this qualitative study, therefore, was to explore registered practical nurses’ (RPNs) experiences of the moral habitability of long-term care environments in Ontario, Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Four themes were identified: (1) Striving to meet responsibilities in a failed system; (2) bearing the moral and emotional weight of residents’ isolation and dying in a context of strict public health measures; (3) knowing the realities of the work, yet failing to be heard, recognized, or supported by management; and (4) struggling to find a means of preservation for themselves and the profession. Attention to the moral habitability of RPNs’ work environments is necessary to achieve a high-quality, ethically attuned, and sustainable nursing workforce in long-term care.