In eastern North America, Indigenous peoples domesticated several crops that are now extinct. We present experimental data that alters our understanding of the domestication of one of these—goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri). Ancient domesticated goosefoot has been recognized on the basis of seed morphology, especially a decrease in the thickness of the seed coat (testa). Nondomesticated goosefoot also sometimes produces seeds that look similar or even identical to domesticated ones, but researchers believed that such seeds were rare (1%–3%). We conducted a common garden experiment and a series of carbonization experiments to better understand the determinants of seed polymorphism in archaeobotanical assemblages. We found that goosefoot produces much higher percentages of thin-testa seeds (mean 50% in our experiment, 15%–34% in free-living parent populations) than previously reported. We also found that cultivated plants produce more thin-testa seeds than their free-living parents, demonstrating that this trait is plastic in response to a garden environment. The carbonization experiments suggest that thin-testa seeds preserve under a larger window of conditions than thick-testa seeds, contrary to our expectations. These results suggest that (1) carbonized, phenotypically mixed assemblages should be interpreted cautiously, and (2) developmental plasticity and genetic assimilation played a role in the domestication of goosefoot.

Raymond Williams influentially claimed that the history of the English novel could be organized through the problem of the “knowable community.” This keyword entry rehearses, clarifies, and extends the idea of the “knowable” in Williams's theory of the novel. I argue that the dialectical (neither entirely subjective nor entirely objective) dimension of the concept has been overlooked, with attendant consequences for the important transition between George Eliot and Thomas Hardy in Williams's account.

Two new species of Microlaimidae: Microlaimus paraaffinis sp. nov. and Pseudomicrolaimus major sp. nov. are described from Yangma Island, the Yellow Sea. M. paraaffinis sp. nov. is characterized by body length 662–785 μm, six inner and six outer labial sensilla papilliform, four short cephalic setae 3–4 μm in length, amphidial fovea cryptocircular at level of buccal cavity, spicules L-shaped with equal thickness, gubernaculum boat shaped, tail conico-cylindrical with short cylindrical portion. P. major sp. nov. is characterized by large body size, six inner labial sensilla papilliform, six outer labial sensilla and four cephalic sensilla setiform, eight subcephalic setae present, amphidial fovea cryptospiral, anterior pharynx region at the buccal cavity widened, posterior pharynx region with oval-shaped bulb, spicules curved with proximal portion enlarged, gubernaculum boat shaped, tail short and conical. Pictorial key to genus Pseudomicrolaimus is given.

We prove a contact non-squeezing phenomenon on homotopy spheres that are fillable by Liouville domains with large symplectic homology: there exists a smoothly embedded ball in such a sphere that cannot be made arbitrarily small by a contact isotopy. These homotopy spheres include examples that are diffeomorphic to standard spheres and whose contact structures are homotopic to standard contact structures. As the main tool, we construct a new version of symplectic homology, called selective symplectic homology, that is associated to a Liouville domain and an open subset of its boundary. The selective symplectic homology is obtained as the direct limit of Floer homology groups for Hamiltonians whose slopes tend to $+\infty$ on the open subset but remain close to $0$ and positive on the rest of the boundary.

This keyword essay on "women" responds to heated debates surrounding the term “pregnant person” in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision and argues for the continued usefulness of “women” to Victorian studies. While “pregnant person” allows institutions and thinkers to signal their recognition that the population requiring reproductive services includes trans men and nonbinary people, the curtailment of reproductive rights is often fueled by misogyny, which cannot be conceptualized without “women” as a category. Here, we are witnessing the reemergence of a field of discursive tension: between the coalitional power of the term “women” as used by feminists, on one hand, and the feminist goal to normalize inclusive language to honor and make visible marginalized experiences, on the other. We want to highlight that, first, such categories need not be mutually exclusive and that, second, the category “women” remains relevant to Victorian studies. We advocate not for the ascendancy of the term “women,” nor its dominance over other, crucial terms such as “trans” and “queer,” but simply for keeping “women” in play. Doing so makes space for strategic forms of coalition, historically precise scholarship, the recognition of trans women's identities, and intersectional analyses.

Talk of meaning and meaningfulness, ubiquitous today, only emerges in the nineteenth century. This emergence remains to be explained and calls into question accounts of modernity that treat “meaning” as a stable, timeless concept.

Investment managers connected to plans sponsors are more likely to be hired than not-connected managers. The magnitude of the selection effect is comparable to that of prior performance. Ex post, connections do not result in higher post-hiring returns. Relationships are thus conducive to asset gathering by investment managers but do not generate commensurate pecuniary benefits for plan sponsors.

We investigate what it means for a (Hausdorff, second-countable) topological group to be computable. We compare several potential definitions based on classical notions in the literature. We relate these notions with the well-established definitions of effective presentability for discrete and profinite groups, and compare our results with similar results in computable topology.

Human life under Queen Victoria was built on—or, more accurately, with—vegetables, from sugarcane, tea, and spices to cotton and indigo, tobacco and opium poppies. While the intricate and multiple economies of some of these vegetable staples have been explored in considerable detail, the highly uneven power dynamics of the Victorians’ complex, drawn-out encounters with the vegetable world mostly continue to be glossed over in simplistic terms of human appropriation and control. This essay proposes “vegetable” as a heuristic for critically engaging plants and other nonanimal growy things as sources of action in Victorianist scholarship. Drawing on thinking from the interdisciplinary field of critical plant studies, I argue that human life and ideas cannot be thought apart from vegetable materialities, especially during the Victorian period. The high degree to which human history was entangled in the vegetable world, I suggest, renders a “vegetable” heuristic indispensable to Victorianist scholarship, especially in the struggle to come to terms with its imperial inheritance.

The Dürr-i meknūn (The Hidden Pearl) is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic works of fifteenth-century Ottoman literature. It consists of a digest of Islamic cosmology and cosmography engaging with a wide array of subjects, beginning with the Creation and concluding with the Last Judgement. The Dürr-i meknūn has long been attributed to the mystic and scholar Ahmed Bīcān and has accordingly been dated to between 1453 and 1466. However, building on the most recent research, which shows that Ahmed Bīcān could not possibly have penned the Dürr and that the text is in fact anonymous, this article provides a critical reading and new dating of the text by focusing on the apocalyptic prophecies found in Chapter 16. Using a novel methodology that integrates contextual and historical reading, with computations of Arabic gematria, my analysis demonstrates that the Dürr was composed in 1472–73, in anticipation of the Ottoman–Akkoyunlu confrontation at the Battle of Başkent, when fears were running high that the end of Ottoman rule was at hand.

This essay argues that “experience” is an essential keyword for Victorian studies. The concept spiked in interest in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Causes for this spike include the division of humanistic knowledge into the modern disciplines, and the pressure that idealist philosophy put on British empiricist thought. Shadworth Hodgson's 1898 The Metaphysic of Experience is featured both as a text exemplifying the paradoxes of Victorian experience-talk and as an invitation to further study.

This essay focuses on the proliferation of diverse spiritualities in Victorian Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, including Theosophy, neopaganism, spiritualism, and emerging occult practices. It makes the case that this proliferation of spiritual thought emerged not in opposition to, but rather in harmony with, the ascendancy of scientific naturalist frameworks in the wake of Darwinism, and that the flexibility of “spirituality” as a concept serves a crucial function for understanding this late Victorian religious landscape. As a (very brief) case study, it examines the fusion of the spiritual and scientific in Marie Corelli's late Victorian bestseller, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). Her work, I suggest, highlights the key role of new popular genres of speculative fiction in navigating the boundaries between spirit and matter at the fin de siècle.

In this essay, I argue for the importance of employing the concept of the urban when analyzing Victorian Britain, given the status of the British Isles as the most urbanized place on the planet during the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the introduction of the word “journalism” to the British reader in the early 1800s demonstrates the growing importance of the so-called Fourth Estate and the newspaper press in British media history. The word is borrowed from the French journalisme, which had been introduced into France much earlier.

This entry posits the life-size as a form of “technology” for collapsing time and space and closes by suggesting some ways in which literary authors were inspired by the proliferation of life-size forms in culture.

This essay focuses on “abstraction” as an underresearched keyword in Victorian studies. I argue that the productive ambiguity of abstraction indexes contradictions and tensions in capitalist modernity, statistical thinking, and interdisciplinary mediations that trace significant parts of their histories to the nineteenth century and still heavily inform our current Victorian scholarships.

Diagnostic systems are not conducive to compassionate health-bringing psychiatric treatment. The systems were built around the fallacy that the politics of biomedicine could be reliably applied to the emergent properties of human psychological suffering and enable diagnosis-specific treatment packages. The resulting industrialised medicine, which reified people, failed to facilitate the compassion needed for healing. This article outlines an approach to psychiatric practice that involves understanding children's suffering and vulnerabilities in terms of their attachment strategies and adaptation to their context and takes a mindful approach to developing compassionate collaborative treatment goals (intelligent kindness). A shift towards mindful psychiatric medicine would encourage politicians to serve the people by addressing the contexts associated with human suffering and what makes people vulnerable, especially social inequalities. Healthy societies in which the psychiatric dis-ease of the population is adequately addressed will not be built with limited biomedical understanding of dis-ease.

English has been extensively integrated into various commercial contexts in Japan, infiltrating brand names, clothing, products, packaging (Dougill, 2008), shop signs (Backhaus, 2006; Inoue, 2005; MacGregor, 2003a), advertising copy (Seargeant, 2011; Takashi, 1990a, 1990b), television commercials (MacGregor, 2003b; Stanlaw, 1992), television programs (Jinnouchi, 2007), and Japanese popular music (Moody, 2001; Moody, 2006; Pennycook, 2003; Stanlaw, 2021). Scholars attribute this phenomenon to English's attention-catching effects (Bhatia, 2009) and its ability to stand out amidst predominantly Japanese scripts (Takashi, 1990b). While some argue that English is primarily used for decorative purposes, conveying positive imagery without necessarily prioritising communication (Dougill, 2008; Haarmann, 1989; Seaton, 2001), others contend that marketers capitalise on the public's superficial knowledge of basic English to achieve both decorative and communicative goals (Daulton, 2008). Previous studies have focused on English-based loanwords in the Japanese language system, overlooking the creative use of English wordplay in Japanese advertising texts (Inagawa, 2015; Scherling, 2016). This study aims to fill this gap by examining five instances of English wordplay in Japanese commercial texts that go beyond basic usage.