‘Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94): A Chronology’ provides a timeline of the key events in Maconchy’s lifetime.

A career-long project for Emerson was the attempt to understand and seize upon the historical moment, or what he often called “the present hour,” in which he lived. But Emerson’s interest in “the Times” was also, fundamentally, an interest in time. This chapter examines “Emerson’s times” in this dual sense: his abiding investments, philosophical, social, and political, in the historical present – the time of now – and in its temporalities – the time of now. Emerson’s commitment to the present as the bedrock of historical experience and the sphere of ethical action was shaped by the new conceptions of time and the new temporal experiences afforded by the technological, scientific, and political developments of his era. Thus, if the “practical question” with regard to “the times” was, as Emerson states it in “Fate,” an immediate one – “how shall I live?” – that question was complicated by the heterochronicity of the times.

What is consciousness? Can we study consciousness scientifically or is consciousness beyond empirical science, as many philosophers have claimed throughout the ages? This chapter provides a short history of the topic, including philosophical and scientific milestones, and gives an overview of what is to come in subsequent chapters.

When discussing Asian religion, art, and philosophy, Emerson generally bestows praise and tends toward cosmopolitan, universalist sentiments. Old Asian ideas, especially from Persian, Indian, and Chinese traditions, reinforced his Transcendentalist sense of morality and, especially, his belief in “the infinitude of the private man.” In the contexts of geography and history, however, he gravitates toward nationalist, imperialist, and racist views. Here he betrays his vulnerability to some of the ruling ideas of geographical determinism and teleological historicism informing the ideology of manifest destiny. Yet, true to form for a writer who so famously abjured consistency, this basic distinction does not always hold. This chapter thus begins with an examination of Emerson’s discrepant Asias before analyzing how, despite this general dichotomy, he was sometimes able to subvert prevailing tendencies and introduce uncommon subtleties to his representation of Asia, its cultures, and its peoples.

Chapter 2 describes the history of archaeological research on the plateau, beginning with the efforts of missionaries, diplomats, and explorers to compile natural histories of the plateau, then moving to 20th-century research conducted by Chinese and Western scholars.

This chapter provides a loose, non-linear history of the term ‘workplace sexual harassment’, exploring the many ways it has been conceptualised, problematised and managed. First, it describes how the term ‘sexual harassment’ developed through advocacy for real-world change, from grassroots activism to legal scholarship. Second, it outlines theories of sexual harassment guiding empirical inquiry and understanding in social sciences. Third, it explores the ways that changing the context in which a term is used can also change its function. The chapter concludes by discussing implications for implementing these critical approaches to bring about change in the context of workplace sexual harassment in medicine.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman doctor. This chapter addresses medicine itself as a highly gendered institution, constructed around hegemonic masculinity. How a woman learns to perform gender as it is expected for a doctor involves a complex negotiation regarding her body. She must be both present in and absent from her body - one of the many features placing women doctors at increased sexual risk in the workplace. The chapter delves into the historical context of these challenges and their contemporary implications, highlighting the need for continued efforts to promote gender equity in the medical profession.

This book offers a selection of key texts mostly written by leading figures in the history of Spanish American political thought during the first century of independence. Political thinkers in the region had to grapple with rather unique and extraordinary circumstances after three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. The emergence of a significant number of new independent polities that adopted representative institutions in an era when absolutism still prevailed in Western Europe, their general adoption of republicanism (except for Mexico during the brief rule of Agustín de Iturbide in 1822–1823, and Maximilian in 1864–1867), and their complex demographic composition, all posed serious challenges for the formation and consolidation of national states in Spanish America. In dialogue with the major currents of thought in Western Europe and North America, Spanish American thinkers often reflected upon these and other related problems while being politically engaged, either in government or in opposition.

The Channel Islands (Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark) are situated off the coast of Normandy (France), west of the Cotentin peninsula. A brief look at a map shows that, from a geographical point of view, they are much closer to France than to England. As the original language in these islands is a form of Norman French, they have traditionally been regarded in dialectology as a French-speaking area. However, the exclusive interest of traditional dialectology in Channel Islands French is not an adequate reflection of the current linguistic situation. Today, English is clearly the dominant language in the Channel Islands. The number of speakers of Norman French is rather small and steadily decreasing. Over the past 200 years, English has gained more and more influence and has gradually replaced the local Norman French dialects. Indeed, there are clear indications that they will become extinct in the not-too-distant future.

Whether taken as literal phenomena or as loose semantic suggestions, ghosts make their mark on virtually every piece of Bowen’s writing. This chapter focuses on the more suggestive ghostliness that spans her oeuvre by way of the threat and realities of a haunting dispossession. Her treatment of dispossession uncannily exposes a relation between the social and the physical or the public and the private. Embodied, subjectively lived experience conjoins with the forces of history, ideas, and conventions. In forging these relationships, the always unsettling crises of modern dispossession at the heart of Bowen’s work articulate her astute theory of historical change and the problem of historical accountability in the aftermath of traumatic events. This essay proposes two ideas – claustrophobia and flight – for thinking about ghostly dispossession in her short stories and novels. The unviable past makes itself known through an unsettling claustrophobia, and those who have been dispossessed and find no workable alternative haunt in their turn, projecting ghostliness into the future via the urge to flee. No one escapes the effects of dispossession, making it, for Bowen, the condition of twentieth-century modernity.

The Introduction opens with a (personal) precursor to the writing of the book. It discusses the methodological, normative, and theoretical basis of the book. It offers an overview of the argument and the chapters, and outlines sources employed in the research.

Just as Elizabeth Bowen’s life was shaped by monumental and international conflicts, so war fundamentally shaped her short stories and novels. The First World War haunts Bowen’s debut novel, The Hotel; the Irish War of Independence transforms the very landscape of Ireland in The Last September; and the Second World War draws up numerous conflicts of allegiance and communication in The Heat of the Day and short stories such as ‘Mysterious Kôr’. Throughout these instances, war creates complicated feelings of simultaneity, where the past and future collapse into an inarticulable present, as can be felt in the futile performance of polite society among the Anglo-Irish in The Last September. As much as that suspension of time crushes any sense of futurity, it also opens the opportunity for reimagining the existing orders of the world; hence, war can constrain expression, as with the hedged communication in the short story ‘Careless Talk’, and afford sexual liberation for characters in ‘Mysterious Kôr’ and ‘Summer Night’. For Bowen, the tensions thrown up in war offer not a dialectic but a series of ruptures that can only be experienced, not resolved.