In recent years, as material culture has become more central to the study of all aspects of the ancient Mediterranean and new materialism has gained greater traction across a variety of academic disciplines, growing numbers of scholars have begun to explore how material objects and notions of materiality feature in Pindar’s work. This chapter offers an introduction to some of the main tendencies of such work. It discusses Pindar’s propensity to speak about his songs in terms normally applied to material crafts, such as weaving or carpentry; the role of tools and instruments in Pindar’s conception of composition and creation, both as applied to song and in a broader sense; the materials of the built environment; Pindar’s relationship with the contexts of his musical performances, real and imaginary; and the earth itself as a significant facet of Pindar’s conception of the material world.

This chapter discusses the dazzling array of creativity that is language and metaphor in Pindar, in terms of its impact on us as its consumers and in terms of the questions that aspects of lyric diction and style ask of us. The discussion reaffirms the importance of close reading from the inside out as the key to appreciating the nature and challenge of Pindaric lyric. It assesses the powers and risks that come with lyric language in detail and across time, as readers and audiences are stopped in their tracks. The chapter discusses the experiential potential of a representative selection of examples taken from across the corpus, in three sections. Section 1, ‘Options’, investigates how Pindaric lyric fosters both a freedom of expression and an encouragement to audiences and readers to keep their minds open in response. Section 2, ‘Colours of Desire’, explores the sustained intensificatory effects of marked imagery in one extended example from Olympian 6. Section 3, ‘Access and Appropriateness’, explores how the hyperbolic nature of lyric imagery may raise further questions about our commitments to the sentiments that Pindaric lyric finds itself able to project.

While Sancho discussed slavery in his letters decades before British opposition to that institution coalesced and became institutionally codified, he undeniably took a firmly anti-slavery and anti-racist stance in his manuscript correspondence. He used his familiar letters to critique and oppose slavery as a practice and an institution as well as to reject and undermine the validity of emerging concepts of “race” in an effort to oppose their effects in the world. Three core strategies emerge: first, satirizing and critiquing the metaphorical mapping of moral character onto skin color in the service of white supremacy; second, reappropriating and resignifying animal metaphors and racial tropes to undermine their efficacy in subjugating humans and non-humans alike within a slaving society; and third, recovering self-determination and agency for Black subjects by asserting ownership over his own body through the manual labor of writing.

Pindar’s epinician odes feature narrations of mythical events and references to the realm of myth. There has been a long-standing controversy about how to understand the function of myth within, and its relevance to, these songs, with regard to both their semantic coherence and their relation to festal contexts. Starting from general observations and a brief survey of the main narrations, this chapter explores how Pindar’s use of myth can be conceived as contributing to the praise of the victor, the primary aim of the epinician genre. This investigation focuses on direct comparisons between victors and mythical figures, the victor’s genealogy and place of origin, aetiological references to the past, depictions of the mindset of heroes, metaphorical parallelisms between past and present with regard to both the victory and the odes’ performance, and the intertextual dimension. These uses of myth operate less by directly equating agonistic present and mythical past and more by implying a parallel through indirect means, in either case with the aim of situating, and thereby giving meaning to, the agonistic victory within, and often as the pinnacle of, the history of human civilization.

Poetry and poethood have long been intertwined with floral imagery starting with the ancient Greek idea of poems as flowers (anthoi), with the anthology (anthologia), the garland (stephanos), and, later the florilegium, being a gathering or collection of poets’ or writers’ finest flowers. Victorian poetry is an efflorescence of such ideas, its book titles frequently designating verse collections by one or more poets as a sheaf, posy, bouquet, nosegay, or as an idyllic garden retreat. Botanical images and metaphors of seeds, flowers, leaves, and shoots regularly occur as markers of the poet’s vocation, especially in prefatory poems and poetic dedications, while the lyric poem is often identified as a flower and a floral gift. Drawing on a large range of poetic examples, this chapter includes discussion of poems by Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Mark André Raffalovich, Thomas Hardy, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, A. E. Housman, and Michael Field.

One: I begin with an account of Stephen Gregory’s prizewinning horror novel The Cormorant, which synthesises much of the history of representing the cormorant as evil. I then trace this tradition across time, looking closely at the origins of the Satanic cormorant in medieval and early modern European theology, art and literature, notably in paintings by Bellini, Mantegna and Carpaccio, and I address Milton’s choice in Paradise Lost to bring Satan into Eden in the form of a cormorant. I describe the long-term impact of Milton’s Satanic cormorant in literary prose from Jane Eyre to Dracula and in scientific writing from Willughby to Bewick, and finally I provide a reading of a poem by Denise Levertov in which the cormorant is characterised as an avian Nazi. In the process, I reflect on the nature of metaphor and the apparent inevitability of anthropocentrism in writing about nonhuman animals.

In this chapter, we explore the creation of meaning through metaphor. We pay special attention to the expansion of meaning through metaphors establishing connections between semantic domains, explaining one phenomenon in terms of others, while carefully articulating the trade-offs always involved. Metaphors, just as narratives, can travel, sometimes conspicuously without their narratives, sometimes accompanied. They can gain and lose strength, and they can encounter resistance. We then consider the importance of metaphoric understandings of leadership, community, environment and good governance, concepts central to the understanding of sustainability leadership.

In this chapter, multiple anti-oppressive and liberative lenses are reviewed and discussed as application to anti-oppressive decolonial clinical social work supervision and leadership practice. This chapter both review of the theory or practice lens and an emphasis on application to practice. By design subsequent chapters will overlap, deep dive, and offer multiple practice views of several concepts offered in this chapter.

This chapter opens with the pivotal scene in Goethe’s bestselling novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, when Werther reads Ossian to Charlotte. In describing this moment, Goethe reproduces Ossian’s patterns of rhythm and syntax in his own prose. The effect suggests that Werther and Charlotte share an embodied responsiveness to their reading. Goethe here seems to be drawing upon contemporary theories of universal rhythm and debates about prosody. The idea that poetic rhythm is a sensuous experience that can be shared between readers is then pushed to the extreme in the Roman Elegies, in which he playfully compares prosody to sex. The final section of this chapter focuses on Elective Affinities and shows how the novel’s comparison between chemical bonds and bonds of human affection extends also to a comparison between human relationships and the relational structures of language and metaphor.

This chapter takes a new look at Ennius’ Andromacha and particularly at her self-description as arce et urbe orba sum (23 TrRF II). Scholarship has well explicated how the formulaic words arce et urbe characterize Andromacha, to quote Jocelyn, as “a stateless person in terms of Roman law” (Jocelyn 1967). But scholarly focus on the religious formula has obscured the equally poignant allusion encoded in her choice of verb. Orbus is a word whose primary definition is of a child deprived of their parents or, conversely, of a parent who has lost a child. This chapter explores how Ennius boldly harnesses these familial connotations to create an arresting metaphor that totalizes Andromache’s loss. In doing so, he subtly genders Andromacha’s meditation on the loss of her recent past as well as significantly prefiguring the greater loss that the audience (but not yet Andromacha) knows is coming by the tragedy’s end, the tossing of Astyanax from the arx of Troy.