Propaganda and storytelling are key themes of this chapter. It examines the important roles of providence and martyrdom in constructing stories of the Irish rebellion and beyond, whether in the depositions or other accounts, including print. Both themes were important in building the rebellion and subsequent warfare as a confessional conflict, with providence and martyrology used for polemical purposes: to demonise the enemy, demonstrate divine favour for one’s cause and support co-religionists in their struggles. This played a crucial role in articulating the period as one of religious conflict above all, as violence, suffering and other ills were narrated and understood through recognisable confessional vocabulary, imagery and tropes. The chapter also considers the importance of martyrdom and martyrology in the emerging imperial context, with victims of violence in colonies – including Ireland – described in martyrological terms that contributed to justifying empire and disguising the violent intent and reality of imperial ventures.

The chapter provides an introduction to the sociocultural analysis of second language (L2) acquisition as a process of socialization by and through the learning of an additional language. It offers a discussion of socio-cultural institutions and communities involved in L2 learning as well as a description of the development of language repertoire in additional language learning as a social accomplishment. The chapter opens on a summary of the controversy that arose in the early 2000s between the cognitive and the socially-oriented Second Language Acquisition (SLA) paradigms. Bypassing this divisive debate, the chapter focusses on the diversity of approaches to additional language learning within the sociocultural paradigm. Key concepts of sociocultural SLA research such as social integration, agency, identity and power relations as well as affordance and language repertoire are defined. A framework of analysis for the learner’s language repertoire is presented. Finally, the chapter recalls issues in the study of naturalistic SLA as a privileged area of research in light of the sociocultural paradigm. Longitudinal data from one migrant worker are analysed to illustrate the social and linguistic development of his language repertoire. In conclusion, the chapter charts some pending issues for the sociocultural analysis of L2 socialization.

This chapter explores the category of the “EcoGothic” that has emerged out of the attempt by Gothic Studies to confront the reality of the climate crisis and ideas of the Anthropocene. The Gothic is often presented as a privileged mode, given its interest in affective states of fear and horror and its ability to operate at different scales from domestic realism. It can evoke apocalypse and planetary transformations, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to John Ruskin’s late lectures on storm clouds. The chapter proposes the EcoGothic be considered less as a set of objects or texts than a method of apprehension of many kinds of Victorian cultural objects. Authors discussed include Edmund Burke, Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, M. P. Shiel, H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and others.

The Introduction observes that a significant strand of twenty-first-century fiction is attempting to connect the human to other-than-human scales. I suggest that this fiction performs epistemic and ethical work because it foregrounds relations of biological and ecological interdependence. I situate my study in the context of scale theory and outline the eco-political and symbiopolitical stakes of scalar rhetoric. I then highlight the different ways in which multi-scalar poetics stimulate ontological and ethical questioning, produce new conceptions of self, agency, and environment, and ultimately enable ecological response-ability. Scale-switching, I argue, is not only a significant writing practice but a necessary reading methodology. I then introduce the three main devices analysed in the book: critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis, and scalar irony.

What is a legal culture, and how do we understand and describe it? Historians have done a good job, over the past century, of describing legal institutions. They have been less successful at understanding legal cultures. Yet the eastern Roman Empire is suffused with attempts to articulate understandings of state power and capacity in the language of law. The current "institutional" approach does very little to explain why law was meaningful to subjects of empire: it merely attempts to explain "how it worked," hypothesizing that decent functioning incentivizes the use of the system. This is problematic: it relies anachronistically on a positivist understanding of law. Instead, law is shown to be implicated in multiple acts of community self-definition, in public rituals, and in popular consciousness. This raises the questions: why did legality play such an important role in the provincial imagination? And with what effects on the state itself?

Chapter 5 (Sex and the Bad Faith Argument): In this chapter, I focus on the shifting relationship that ancient authors imagined between sex and the worship of other gods. Within the Hebrew Bible, I argue, sex precedes such “transgressive” worship and leads to it causally, whereas in the literature of the late Second Temple and tannaitic periods pagan worship precedes sex and is performed only as a means to achieve sex.

In Chapter 3 knowledge from sociocultural psychology is integrated with other disciplines within psychology such as cognitive, social, and neuro psychology, and outside psychology such as sociology, visual studies, and philosophy, to tackle the power of images to influence our seeing, thinking, feeling, and remembering.

In this concluding chapter, we give community strategy its due place in sustainability governance and recapitulate key insights from the previous chapters. Narrative appears in a variety of roles yet is unlikely to do its work as a catalyst of community action if it does not take its place within strategy. Such institutionalization does come with risk, including ossification and the introduction of blind spots. We coin a new leadership function, tightly coupled with the role of strategist: The management of goal dependencies and reality effects associated with community strategy. Strategy appears appropriate as a topic to conclude our interpretive account of sustainability leadership as it is, in part, a narrative itself and as the building of strategic capacity in a community is the culminating point of leadership work, requiring other features of good sustainability to be in place.

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.

Philosophical and conceptual understandings of time underpin Bowen’s writing, and often these are expressed through experiments with form and narrative. Focusing on Bowen’s novels, this chapter examines how her characters are shown in scalar relation to bigger historical moments or developments, even while the writer holds on to the primacy and singularity of individual experience. It discusses the relationship between history and affect or individual feeling through three interrelated narrative tropes: the temporality of loss, typically broached through themes of adolescence and innocence lost; textual time, or the ‘multitemporal’ qualities of words and letters; and time capsules, or the irruption of the past into the present or future, particularly as a felt experience of wartime. Reading Bowen in context not only emphasises the important issues of her time; it also illuminates the reader’s relationship to her time, and how one might feel and understand intimate attachments to the world in contemporary times.

This chapter situates trans autobiography in the history of American gay autobiography. I trace an incomplete lineage of popular United States transgender autobiographies from Christine Jorgensen to Janet Mock – a roughly seventy-year chronology. Referring to autobiographies both canonical and lesser-known, I document trends in trans self-narration, consider the ways in which trans autobiographers variably give accounts of what it means to be or to have a gender, and suggest the ways in which the genre of trans autobiography, though calcified around specific notions of medico-juridical legibility, might in fact move beyond the inherently and paradoxically restrictive genre restrictions that seem to inhere in its production. Trans gender autobiography emerged from, I argue, both the medical imperative for narrative accounts of transness and autobiographers’ desires to serve as sources of helpful and hopeful information for trans and non-trans people alike.