The Introduction establishes the scope, methods, and aims of the book and explores the treatment of the devil in contemporary scholarship on early Christian thought. This chapter also introduces the book’s interlocutors: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Macrina the Younger and provides an account of ‘the Cappadocians’ as a group of apprentices in a workshop on spiritual warfare. The Introduction closes with an outline of the book’s argument.

Chapter 2 looks in detail at some of the ways in which Keats directly addresses the question of letter-writing. It proposes that a careful analysis of key letters can bring to light a Keatsian epistolary poetics. Keats is particularly alert both to the materiality and to the practical aspects of epistolarity, and his letters are characterized by frequent moments in which his interest in what letters are and how they work is foregrounded. He is specifically interested in how letters are constructed and in the tools and materials that form them, as well as more generally in the practical circumstances or contingencies by which they are determined and circumscribed. The chapter proposes that in their inventive and often playful explorations of epistolarity, Keats’s letters display an impulse to push against the generic and formal limits of the mode.

This chapter addresses the crucial interpretative issue of the relationship between performance and text in Pindar’s odes. What elements do we have to reconstruct the circumstances of their first performances? How important are these elements for the interpretation of the poems? In what manner was the wording of the texts themselves meant to reflect and interact with the extra-textual elements pertaining to the performance?The first parts of the chapter focus on the less studied fragments of Pindar’s cultic poetry, offering both a survey of the evidence and some novel interpretative contributions. The following sections move to the examination of the epinicians and the enkomia, as well as the question of the reperformances of his poems. The analysis of the whole corpus highlights the productive tension between the emphasis on performance and the emphasis on the text’s capability to transcend it, arguing that this is one of the key defining traits of Pindaric poetry.

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.

The central questions of an empirical epistemology and methodology for semantics are the following: (i) Which observable properties of communicative behavior can serve as valid data in semantic research? (ii) How and under what constraints can evidence of these observable properties be gathered in a fashion that permits valid analyses? (iii) Which analytical techniques are appropriate and optimal for bringing a particular dataset to bear on a particular research question? The present chapter addresses (ii). I discuss the tools – the methods – the researcher has at their disposal for collecting data from one or more of the sources of evidence discussed in Chapter 4.

Chapter 6 moves the discussion on from the overview of local history-writing in Chapter 5 and takes a different perspective by considering whether pre-modern Muslims conceptualised local history-writing as something distinct from other ways of writing history. It deals with the ways history was (relatively rarely) fitted into ideas about the classification of knowledge, with works dedicated to explaining and justifying history’s importance as a discipline, with the evidence for whether local historians saw themselves as working within a larger tradition, and with what evidence there is for readers’ appreciations of local history as a distinct type of history-writing. The chapter ends by identifying some works of local history as having been particularly influential, including al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī’s history of Nishapur and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s history of Baghdad.

In this chapter, we delve deeper into the realm of stories, or narratives. This endeavor is particularly worthwhile if we acknowledge that our knowledge of the world is largely shaped by narratives. We discuss several functions of narrative which are relevant to our study of sustainability leadership, in and through governance. Narratives create meaning, they define problems, solution and methods and they connect values, feelings and ideas. Even more fundamentally, narratives create community, which involves patterns of openness and closure, of inclusion and exclusion. We develop a succinct theory of interpretation to extend our understanding of stories and their roles in governance and community, with special emphasis on the concepts of genre, audience and medium, the structuring of time through stories and the position of stories that select other stories and keep them in place: master narratives.

Chapter 6 tackles the environment in which the social life of the image takes place. The image interpretation is situated within the immediate material environment where the image appears, which includes the medium, genre, and placement of the image. Then the interpretation takes into account the broader time and space surrounding the image, which includes the extended historical, social, cultural, and political context that the image exists within. The method of photo documentation is presented and applied on the case example of graffiti images.

This chapter argues that any critical or historical study of life-narrative, memoir, or autobiography by “gay Latino male” writers in the United States must attend to questions or problems unique to the intersecting fields of queer and Latinx literary studies. At the level of genre, such an analysis must address the decades-long influence of testimonio theory coursing through both Latin American and Latina/o/x literary studies as a destabilizing element in any discussion of genre as a tool for understanding literature, or “the literary” per se, especially in its grounding relationship to any claim to historical knowledge, through the modes of either fiction or nonfiction. At the level of gender, such an analysis must address the recent emergence of the self-interrogating mark of the “x” in Latinx (in the mid-2020s perhaps ceding finally to the “e” in Latine) as the refusal to accept the binary logic of gender as imbedded in the orthography and grammar of conventional Spanish. These considerations destabilize but do not disable the possibility of curating a collection of texts that have since the mid-twentieth century comprised an archive of “Gay Latino American Autobiography.”

This Introduction frames the volume’s contents by parsing the two closely aligned categories “gay” and “autobiography.” It suggests that the notion of genre is key to unpacking the political and conceptual possibilities and difficulties inherent in these categories. Drawing on social semiotic and pragmatic accounts of genre, according to which genres are important not so much for what they are as for what they do, the Introduction suggests that gay autobiography constitutes a vital resource in which what it means to be gay has been and continues to be negotiated. Relating the emergence of both secular autobiography and gay identity to Foucault’s argument about modern liberal society’s deployment of biopower, the Introduction argues that although gay autobiography characteristically takes the form of a confession that indicates our ensnarement in biopower’s categories, it also importantly acts as a counterdiscursive connection between writers and communities of readers. The Introduction then summarizes the volume’s chapters, indicating the ways in which they engage with these general points of discussion as well as attending to the specificities of their analyses.

This chapter argues that contemporary memoirs by gay men about transactional sex challenge assumptions that commercial and noncommercial sex divide into separate spheres, and that sex can be cleanly differentiated from other, mundane practices. While these memoirs contain many unambiguous depictions of transactional sex, they also depict moments where transactional arrangements yield intimacies that are far more difficult to categorize. In addition, they raise questions regarding where the “sex” in the sex trade both ends and begins.

The introduction sets out the book’s main arguments and interventions, methodology, and structure. It details how the book applies the concept of ‘active reading’ to classical translation while challenging the idea that translators had a unified political agenda that reflected that of their patrons. It also outlines how the book reinforces the centrality of the concept of counsel and the agency of translators in producing diverse interpretations and applications of ancient Greek and Roman texts. It draws on the concept of the public sphere to conceptualize the shared political import of classical translations. The book’s innovative methodology combines literary-textual, book historical, and historical-contextual approaches and expands the canon to bring out the full range of applications and interventions of early modern translations of the classics while connecting them to larger developments. It ends by explaining the organization of the book according to the main genres of ancient Greek and Roman prose in translation between 1530 and 1580: moral philosophy, history and biography, military manuals, and oratory.

In this chapter, we outline the unique advantages of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to describe spoken and written discourse in texts and provide a strong foundation for English language learners to produce their own stretches of spoken and written discourse. We also provide practical applications of SFL theory through example activities based on a genre-based approach to language teaching using a teaching-learning cycle, which builds on Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development and Bruner’s notion of scaffolding. SFL is a comprehensive and at the same time fully appliable linguistics. Learning a second language involves making meanings about the world, making meanings to interact with others in the world, and creating cohesive and coherent texts, all at the same time. Making choices from the language system is fundamental. By combining a social semiotic view of language with socially oriented theories of language learning involving semiotic mediation through scaffolding, second language teachers can be explicit about the linguistic properties of texts in context and offer the right kinds of support and guidance through cycles of language learning and teaching.

Experimental writing challenges familiar ways of the representation of reality through a literary text. This chapter interrogates the notion of experimental writing and considers its place among African literary genres. The chapter then zooms in on experimental writing in African languages, with a case study of two contemporary Swahili writers, Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944–2020) and William Mkufya (1953–). Both writers have interrogated in their writing the nature of African postcolonial reality and considered possibilities of altering that reality, through reparation and reconstruction, but also through a full-fledged recasting and redefinition of the intellectual frameworks that support contemporary African life. Both authors use Swahili, but they load language and style with a multitude of new meanings. In effect, language becomes an abstract and flexible structure capable of thorough transformation to conceive of and express a radically new reality. The same applies to the adoption and adaptation of literary genres. Genres lose their typical literary and ideological determinations. The experimental writing of these authors challenges literary realism in African literature and creates a “novel genre” to articulate texts of a futurist and truly emancipatory African philosophy.

This chapter offers a brief overview of the field of emotion studies and surveys its contribution to the study of Arthurian literature. It then expands on the role of emotion – both as a critical category and as a narrative focus – in the development of the Arthurian canon, focusing on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a late exemplar of the development of the courtly romance over time. Ultimately, it considers what emotions may tell us about the narrative intent and structures of the Middle English romance and, more broadly, what the study of Arthurian emotions has to offer to the field of emotion studies.

African prison writings began to emerge as a recognizable literary genre in the early twentieth century during colonial rule when imprisonment became widespread and institutionalized. Thus, the initial development of African prison writings is a manifestation of and a confrontation with European colonial modernity, which used the carceral system as a coercive instrument against restive populations. The further transmutations of this genre are inseparable from political developments on the continent. Although a few prison writings were written by white prisoners, it was when Western-educated blacks were incarcerated for anticolonial agitations that African prison writing emerged in the form of resistance literature. Ironically, many postcolonial African regimes imprisoned an evolving black intelligentsia and dissenters. They in turn wrote about their imprisonment and expressed their disillusionment with the excesses of African nationalist leaders, most of whom had experienced imprisonment by colonial authorities. Currently, prison literature has diverged from its early anticolonial and antipostcolonial political focus. It now includes writings by and about prisoners inspired by neoliberal notions of human rights and the idea that self-introspection manifested in confessional writing is therapeutic and can reduce recidivism. This chapter explores the origin, entrenchment, and the current spread of African prison writings.

The introduction situates political writing and publishing as vital tools in articulating, disseminating, and shaping political movements and ideas in modern Britain. It explores the diversity of political genres, from elite forms such as parliamentary novels and newspaper obituaries to grassroots expressions such as punk fanzines and coalfield women’s writing. It highlights how ‘high political’ and subaltern voices respectively engaged with political writing, sometimes to reinforce dominant narratives and at other times to challenge or subvert them. It examines the gendered politics of authorship, particularly how women and marginalised groups used writing to claim authority and reshape the boundaries of political discourse. Attention is given to the role of literature and publishing in mediating the intersections of culture and politics, from fascist propaganda and socialist poetry to the intellectual infrastructure of devolved Scotland and Northern Ireland. By contextualizing political writing within broader historical and cultural transformations, the introduction positions the chapters of the book as a series of ‘core samples’ that reveal the relationships between genre, ideology, and activism.

In this chapter, we focus on the meso- and micro-levels of social organisation, below the macro-levels discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. We first discuss social network theory, including crucial concepts such as ties, density and multiplexity, and explain the relationship with innovation diffusion and norm enforcement. We then explore to what extent social network theory can be applied to historical situations, distinguishing between functional and emotional ties. Examples and case studies of historical network studies are taken from English and Afrikaans. The chapter also discusses related models such as coalitions and communities, in particular, communities of practice, text communities and discourse communities. The final part of the chapter addresses individual variation and style shifting on the basis of examples from English and German data.

Different texts have different characteristics. In this chapter, we first explore the concepts of register, genre and style, which are, in the tradition of Biber, linked to communicative functions and situational characteristics. The co-occurrence of register features and dimensions are introduced as the linguistic indicators of communicative functions. A particularly useful approach to register centres around keyness, which we demonstrate with historical Portuguese data. We then introduce discourse traditions as a historical-linguistic concept closely related to genre and register. We use French literary examples to explain stylistic differences and the link with the Labovian distinction between indicators, markers and stereotypes. This leads to a discussion of indexicality and indexical fields more generally, for which we draw on ancient Greek plays. The chapter continues the discussion of the literary representation of language variation on the basis of English texts comprising dialect, and explains the important concept of enregisterment.