This address calls for a return to the original mission of religion: to serve humanity. It emphasizes that all religions stem from one divine truth and were revealed to guide people toward justice, peace and unity. Religion’s decline into conflict occurs when it is co-opted for self-interest and power. True religion defends the vulnerable and opposes tyranny, aligning itself with the poor and oppressed.

The text urges unity among faiths to overcome division and serve human dignity. It criticizes modern civilization for sidelining faith and exploiting human energy through consumerism, inequality and the idolization of wealth. Religion, it argues, must restore balance, cultivate human potential and oppose injustice, lies and pride, which drain societal energy.

Human freedom, faith and moderation are essential for social harmony. The human being is central: the engine of history, bearer of divine qualities and the true wealth of Lebanon. Society must nurture every person’s potential, without marginalization or exclusion.

Sadr advocates for inclusive development, justice and unity in Lebanon, framing the country’s diversity and human capital as sacred trusts. Only through sincere commitment to human dignity and shared responsibility can Lebanon fulfill its moral, spiritual and national purpose.

The Romantic Self is constituted by otherness, by relations that are in constant transformation. In the preceding pages, this issue has been addressed with a particular focus on the relationship between the self and nature. In this part of the book, we shall see that the same applies to the relationship between the self and history: the I cannot separate herself from, or impose herself on, the historical conditions in which she emerges; rather, these are part of the Romantic Self. In this chapter, in particular, I will show that the ‘defective’ essence of the Romantic Self hinders her to impose her sovereign will on the development of historical events. This is reflected in her incapacity to bring into unity the fragmentation of the modern age (described by Friedrich Schlegel through an opposition to the ancient epoch) and in the impossibility to interpret history as a manifestation of human progress. The absence of a unitary line in history challenges the hermeneutics of the present, too: on this, Schlegel’s genealogical perspective wants to give a solution.

This introduction presents a historical and conceptual overview of the monograph, particularly the longer history of discourses connecting Italian opera, Italy and italianità, and ideas surrounding the Old World and the New World. Milan and Liberal Italy (1861/70–1922) are introduced first in the context of Italy’s unification and the wider social and technological transformations that defined the Second Industrial Revolution. New York and Buenos Aires are then considered together, exploring their changing position in the global operatic circuit from the 1870s onwards and the theatrical infrastructure in both cities, before the methodological approach of the monograph and an overview of the individual chapters are outlined.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ lifelong preoccupation with time as a philosophical and compositional problem, tracing its evolution from early influences such as Oswald Spengler to the yagé-induced revelations of “space-time travel” and the radical temporality of the cut-up method. Tomasz Stompor argues that Burroughs’ literary experiments – from epistolary montage to newspaper-formatted layouts – challenge the linear, regulated time of modernity and propose alternative, nonlinear temporal regimes. Drawing on the Composite City vision from The Yage Letters, Spenglerian cyclical history, and Burroughs’ self-constructed calendar inspired by Mayan systems, the chapter demonstrates how Burroughs’ formal innovations enact temporal disruption. Through analysis of his cut-up trilogy, contributions to little magazines like My Own Mag, and the spatial logic of montage, Stompor positions Burroughs as a literary time-traveler whose work seeks to liberate the reader from linguistic and chronological control.

In Ngugi wa Thiong’os works, Agĩkũyũ cultural history is almost always perceived through its tensions and contestations with the British colonial enterprise. This is unsurprising because Ngugi is a product of these two cultures. In his early works, it is the powerful image of the mother that calls our attention to Ngugi’s rootedness in the Gĩkũyũ cultural foundation. Still, it is his mother, Wanjiku – herself a victim of dislocation that came with the chaos and violence of colonial occupation – who becomes the conduit to Ngugi’s new identity as a Western-educated colonial subject. Wanjiku is to Ngugi what Nyokabi, in Weep Not, Child, is to Njoroge: an adjuvant of assurance and hope during moments of crisis. One of these crises is a demand by modernity for Ngugi to shun the past in which his mother and all she represents reside. The past, however, resists complete erasure because its marginalisation enables the rise of a new and modern order. In wrestling with this crisis, Ngugi’s life of writing has been characterised by an unceasing search for a form that can create new cultural mythos. In this chapter, I argue that Ngugi’s unending search is now manifested in his new translation project.

This chapter continues the discussion of how English came to function as the language of African self-expression in the twentieth century and was ultimately liberated from its colonial legacies. The chapter starts by exploring the so-called language question, a long-running debate on the status and function of the English language in the making of African letters, which has perhaps been the most divisive issue among African writers in the second half of the twentieth century. The debate was not simply a feud on language use but the expression of a deep anxiety about what it has meant to produce a literature of decolonization in the language of the former colonizer. The second part of the chapter provides an account of the evolution and transformation of English in Africa among different social groups including the slave traders of Calabar, Creole elites in West Africa, and the elites produced by the colonial schools and university colleges that produced the first generation of African writers.

For most of its history in the twentieth century African literature has been haunted by the question of modernity. This chapter presents modernity as the overdetermining condition of literature in both colonialism and postcolonial society, examines how modernity came to exert its influence in the institution of African literature by hiding behind the mask of tradition, and treats modernity as both the cause and a symptom of the crisis associated with decolonial projects. This chapter is on the strategies developed by African writers to narrate this crisis: What does it mean to consider modernity as the overdetermining condition of African literature when the original impetus for this tradition of writing was the recuperation of precolonial histories and experiences? The chapter pays particular attention to the variety of forms in which the figure of the modern was represented in works that were not explicitly about modernity, most prominently Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, and Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine. These are novels where the referents are obviously precolonial while the ideas and the forms are about the nature and meaning of the modern.

The critical study of African literature has had a troubled relationship with different schools of European poststructuralism in general and postcolonial theory in particular. This chapter starts with a critique of the theoretical retreat from modernity that has been a signature gesture of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory since the 1990s. Poststructuralist theory attracted many critics of postcolonial literature at the end of the twentieth century because of its rejection of the universal theories of reason, history, and the human subject associated with modernity. What was the implication of this poststructuralist turn in the criticism of an Africa literary tradition that was bound up with the experience and expectation of modernity? The chapter discusses the tension between the experience and discourse of modernity, postcolonial criticism, and a set of African texts that complicated both modernist and postmodernist discourses. A central concern in this chapter is what happens when we read canonical African literary texts themselves as forms of theoretical intervention.

In foundational African narratives, time, decolonization, and modernity are bound together. This chapter looks at how, at its moment of emergence in the second half of the twentieth century, modern African fiction, whose aim was to rationalize African notions of time and account for both colonial history and what appeared to be failing projects of decolonization, was motivated by the desire to account for a temporal impasse: the fact that the old colonial order had disappeared but the future promised by the political class was yet to come. This temporal impasse explains the confluence of realism and modernism in postcolonial African fiction. In their themes, forms, and tone, the novels published in the 1960s set out to negotiate the empty space of a stalled decoloniality. Using Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God as a case study, the chapter reflects on the novel as a mode of mediating historical time conceived as both past and present, simultaneously preoccupied with the teleology of the temporality ushered in by colonialism even after decolonization.

The Epilogue draws out the broader implications for the rise of the Atlantic world in the early modern public sphere, demonstrating, first, that what happened in and across the ocean mattered to people at home, and, second, why managing news became a concern for authorities who gradually lost their information monopoly regarding developments across the Atlantic. It reflects on the historiographical repercussions for the fields of Atlantic history and the history of news – making fresh connections to the transoceanic exchange of people, commodities, values, and ideas.

This chapter explores how fashion journalism shaped the development of the realist novel in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on scholarship that explores the interdependence of these forms of writing, it notes that both fashion journalists and novelists including Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola seek to create what Roland Barthes described as the “reality effect” – in which the inclusion of particular details generates in the reader the sense that a text describes the real world. Ultimately, this chapter argues, the fantasy of fashion lies at the heart of the fantasy of realism as a way of representing the word, from fictional depictions of the values and mores of different social worlds to attempts to capture the experience of urban modernity. Hence fashion and femininity – though often dismissed or diminished by male realist novels – are at the heart of their literary innovations.

Though focusing chiefly on Weimar Germany, this chapter broadens its argument to Europe overall. Weimar culture’s vitality contained multidimensional antagonisms between secularizing reforms and their Christian-nationalist opposition. Complicating that enmity were the consequences of commercial entertainment cultures, which troubled socialists as much as conservative, Christian, and other rightwing critics. Such commentaries clustered around the political symbolics of the New Woman. If the latter’s proponents saw an ideal of happy personhood and emancipated living, the rightist enemies railed against change in the name of an imagined past of orderly families and settled gender inscriptions, often in idioms of angry, masculinist misogyny. Across interwar Europe during the 1920s, from Spengler, Huizinga, and Eliot through Ortega y Gasset to the Conservative Revolution, Schmitt, and Heidegger, conservative intellectuals fashioned a declensionist, deeply reactionary critique of the evolving present.

This chapter maps aesthetic modernism across Europe as a whole, showing its key generational clusters in their multiple transnational circuits of influence and exchange. It focuses on the major literary modernists and the avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism. It finds coherence in a range of shared thematics: outsiderliness; journeying; formal innovation; abandonment of narrative causality and linear time; estrangement and alienation; subjectivity and the unconscious; assertive and experimental sexualities. The gendered dynamics of insistent masculinity and women’s effacement again reappears. The collective generational esprit of the aesthetic modernists is carefully demonstrated via the various regional circuits: Scandinavian; northwest European; Balkan; Soviet-centered; German-speaking central-European. Cinematic modernism was a particular instance, emanating from Moscow across Berlin to Paris. Using Piscator and Brecht within a larger argument about Weimar Berlin, the chapter concludes by identifying a distinctive left modernism.

The 1920s saw hope as well as gloom. Coexistent temporalities comingled. Key themes overarched: (a) novel metropolitan life; (b) shifting class differences; (c) changes in the state; (d) gendering of social relations, social practices, and political action; (e) Europe’s relation to empire; (f) cultural life and ideas; (g) democracy’s uneven fortunes. The welfarist complex crossed regime differences (democracy versus dictatorship), embracing population and national health; a normative family; social services delivery; goals of national efficiency. Eugenicist ideas claimed an appealing coherence, whose refusal presumed key enabling factors: intact democracy; strong labor movements; liberal systems of law; and pluralist public spheres. By 1939–1940, that left only Sweden and Britain. Widening of democracy brought the welfarist field distinct cohorts of educated young men and freshly enfranchised young women. The 1880s generation passed 1914–1918 as young adults; the “war youth generation” missed the war but craved an equivalent; interwar cohorts joined the post-1918 world as it started collapsing. Those lives turned on an enabling modernity. They knitted together the “modernist wish.”

Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.