In this chapter we will introduce the FEM as a technique of solving differential equations governing a single variable (or dependent variable). Once we understand how the method works, it can be extended to problems governed by coupled PDEs among several unknowns. In particular, equations governing steady-state heat transfer in one- and two-dimensional problems are used as the “model” equations to introduce the FEM.

Russia’s superwealthy and politically influential elites – or oligarchs – were created during the privatization of the 1990s. After Putin came to power in 2000, he subordinated the oligarchs to the state: The oligarchs could keep their fortunes as long as they supported the Kremlin’s priorities. Under Putin, state procurement became the new engine of oligarchic enrichment. Three types of oligarchs can be distinguished today: Putin’s friends, the silovarchs, and the outsiders. As a whole, the oligarchs seek more predictability from the Kremlin and more security for their assets – but they do not necessarily desire democracy or the rule of law proper. The oligarchs cannot force the Kremlin to guarantee their property rights due to the internal divisions among themselves, as well as the Kremlin’s complete control of coercion. While several oligarchs have also attempted to push for democratization, they have mostly failed. Internationally, the oligarchs present the West with several challenges, including the projection of Russia’s political influence abroad and Russian money-laundering in the West. Finally, a comparative and historical perspective suggests that oligarchs have good reasons to fear democracy, but this fear can be overcome. Yet, in the Russian context, the gap between the oligarchs and the population at large will remain dramatic.

Because this book is concerned with the numerical solutions to problems of heat transfer and fluid mechanics, it is useful to summarize the governing equations of these two fields, which are closely related. Subject areas as diverse as aerodynamics, biology, combustion, geology and geophysics, manufacturing, and meteorology can be studied using the equations governing heat transfer and fluid mechanics (for detailed discussion of the underlying physics and derivation of the equations

This chapter examines the workings of Russia’s superpresidency. It explains how Russia’s executive branch of government arose out of the politics of the early 1990s, and it shows the ways that it has evolved since then. Russia’s constitution grants the president a wide range of responsibilities and prerogatives, many more than we usually associate with a presidential system of checks and balances. This chapter elaborates the formal powers of the president and explains what makes a “superpresidency” different from other types of political executives. The constitutional powers allocated to the president are only one part of how authority functions in Russia, however. The personal characteristics of the individuals who have occupied the office, their leadership style, and the political context in which they operate have also all shaped how the superpresidency works in practice. This chapter introduces the concept of Vladimir Putin’s “vertical of power” in order to understand how decisionmaking authority has been consolidated in the office of the president over the past twenty years. Finally, we will see how Putin has managed to circumvent presidential term limits to extend his time in office. It concludes by highlighting the sources of stability and fragility within the superpresidency. With a very powerful executive and a strong vertical of power, Russia’s political system has become highly personalized around the figure of the president. Consequently, the stability of this system will depend in large part on the president’s ability to maintain the support of political elites and Russian citizens as he fights a costly war and needs to respond to increasingly painful sanctions.

In the nineteenth century many poets viewed their craft as analogous to science, employing similar methods to reach similar conclusions. Victorian poets engaged with science on a number of different levels: they wrote about scientific ideas, employed scientific methods like empirical observation and induction, and sought to verify scientific truths. They also were keenly aware of what poetry could offer that science did not: an insight into human nature and moral truths. In response to scientific theories that upended accepted beliefs about the world and humanity’s place within it – geological uniformitarianism, evolution and natural selection, sexual selection and the coming heat death of the universe – poets like Alfred Tennyson, George Meredith, Constance Naden and May Kendall conducted poetic experiments in human nature, testing the impact of groundbreaking scientific theories on human society and behaviour. In so doing, they advocate for productive exchange between science and poetry, but also champion poetry’s unique remit.

In this essay, I consider the publication context of Northanger Abbey, focusing in particular on the pressures exerted by the literary marketplace, and Austen’s alertness to it, on that novel. Beginning with a discussion of Austen’s interactions with the two publishing firms which failed to publish her works, Cadell & Davies and Crosby & Co., I then consider the changes in places, manners, books and opinions that occurred between the novel’s first conception in 1798–9 and its final publication in December of 1817. Placing Northanger Abbey’s literary allusions and general intertextuality in the context of the changes in the literary marketplace through the three decades of its production, I suggest that some of the novel’s tonal oddities, and its relative unpopularity with contemporary readers and reviewers are a direct result of Benjamin Crosby’s decision not to publish the novel then known as ‘Susan’ in 1803.

Salman Rushdie (b. 1947 in India) entered the literary field with his novel Grimus in 1975. In that science fiction fantasy novel he developed the idea of all-purpose quotes, philosophical phrases that would be suitable for all situations. With such quotes, people could bring meaning to their lives, for ‘the all-purpose quote increases our awareness of the interrelations of life’. With this idea, Rushdie began an œuvre that would be constantly aware of the contextuality of writing.

In this essay I will discuss the way Rushdie emphasises the significance of contextuality. Although Rushdie writes in the fashion of magical realism – that is, mixing the realist with the magical – his works are always (with the exception of Grimus and the children’s books Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010)) keenly embedded in historical or contemporary contexts. Furthermore, Rushdie, a history graduate from Cambridge, frequently also provides metatextual and metacontextual commentary on the contexts he writes about.

The focus of the essay will be on three of Rushdie’s novels that were published after Grimus but before the Satanic Verses affair: Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988) itself. Together with The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), these books form what can be called Rushdie’s ‘India cycle’, although the Indian subcontinental context is in many ways relevant also for his other novels. My analysis of Rushdie’s novels will consider, among other things, the political history of India and Pakistan, communal violence, religious sectarianism and popular culture. Theoretically, I will be using a postcolonial framework, within which Rushdie’s works hold a particularly central place for subcontinental writing, with Midnight’s Children as the key novel.

This essay offers a feminist reading of Caribbean poet Grace Nichols whose gender politics are a sine qua non of her poetical discourse. For her, to speak of black women does not at all imply the exclusion of other women and her poetry constantly celebrates the diversity of women’s experiences and offers a cutting critique of normative gender stereotypes. Collections such as i is a long memoried woman, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems and Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman explore alternative ways of understanding the workings of gender for women and they give voice to a heroine persona who is more often than not presented as an anti-heroine (her anti-woman). In talking about the body and body image, for example, Nichols forthrightly challenges conventional views of fatness in order to generate perspectives that can enhance rather than harm women’s self-esteem. Her images sometimes associate the body with fruits and other positive elements of nature, renewing the language of eroticism as a source of empowerment and affirmation for women. The essay highlights the fact that, although Nichols’s poetry has a serious political message for contemporary readers, her characteristic use of humour nevertheless ensures that it is through a poetics of fun and joy that she resists gender stereotyping, celebrates freedom and offers hope for a world where respect for everyone is possible.

This essay focuses on Henry V in order to refine our understanding of Shakespeare’s distinctive contribution to the history play in the 1590s. In particular, I argue that Shakespeare enlists the imaginative powers of the audience to bring history to life, and that, to this end, he parallels the mystery of successful performance with the mysticism surrounding kingship. Just as the natural body of the king is transformed into the mystical body of the monarch, the stage action expands into historical events of epic proportions. This is predicated on the joint emphasis on play, performance and theatricality, which may have been suggested by the former Prince Hal’s preference for games and gambles. The player thus plays a king who plays dangerous games. And if it is potentially treasonous to impersonate royalty on stage, the audience must take at least part of the blame, as history comes to life in their imagination. The result is dynamic, and even though the ultimate trajectory of the play may be an exploration, or even a celebration, of English history and national identity, its emotional centre is the playhouse, so that its political impact depends on performance.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the widely acknowledged ur-text that launched the anglophone African novel on to the international literature scene. Although this novel succeeded in challenging imperial cultural stereotypes of Africa through strategically represented Igbo characters and community, who come metonymically to figure the wider continent, it also established the trend where romantic love is relegated to the background of other more prioritised concerns. However, since eros is so significant a part of human relationships, the novel does not elide romance entirely. Instead, romantic love interludes are presented as brief counterpoints to the ‘utilitarian’ marriage which forms a more substantial narrative focus. The love story of the tragic hero, Okonkwo, and his second wife, Ekwefi, is at odds with social conventions which do not dictate that love should constitute the rationale for marriage. Economic considerations prevent Ekwefi and Okonkwo from marrying when they fall in love, but do not preclude them from marrying later when passionate desire causes Ekwefi to leave her first husband for Okonkwo. This love story, which ends in polygynous marriage, contrasts with the love-marriage plot as it has developed in Anglo-American literary history. In the western version of the love-marriage plot, which has acquired a global normativity through globalised media and culture, love is an essential condition for marriage. Because love is also culturally understood as mutually exclusive, the western love-marriage is necessarily monogamous. Achebe’s first novel implicitly suggests the cultural specificity of the globally dominant love-marriage plot with its own opening up of a wider range of connections between love and marriage.

When preparing Marina for publication, T. S. Eliot decided to leave the poem’s epigraph unattributed; at the same time, in his correspondence, he explained that it came from Seneca. The question, however, of why the epigraph was derived from Seneca’s Hercules Furens – instead of from Euripides’ The Madness of Heracles, as would have been more usual at the time – requires clarification, as does the question of why the reference to Seneca, suppressed in the published text, was stressed in Eliot’s letters. Both questions are related to Eliot’s sense of literary tradition and of its ancient roots. This essay suggests that Eliot’s decision to omit the attribution resulted from his awareness of the decline of classics in schools and universities and it considers his predilection for Seneca in the light of reviews of classical translations in which Eliot effectively proposes a correction to the Victorian version of classical antiquity. Specifically, it reads Eliot’s review of H. D.’s translations of Euripides – an unpublished review written in the year the Gallipoli campaign ended and the Battles of the Somme and Verdun were fought – as postulating the need for a new tradition and a new language to express the era’s permeating sense of shock and despair. Emotions that were similar in their intensity to those he had experienced in the war years affected Eliot in the late 1920s, but now he had a new language through which to express them, as shown in 1930 by Marina. Heightened by their echoes of Hercules Furens, these feelings are articulated through the poetic technique which Eliot developed under the influence of scholarly treatises on the Elizabethan Seneca – a classic who, over time, also proved more congenial than Euripides to the modern literary tradition with which Eliot concerned himself as early as 1916.