Chapter 4 deals with the philosophical meaning of dialogue as a form of writing and thinking. I take as my starting point the apparent paradox of Plato’s written critique of writing in the Phaedrus and explain how Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger resolve this question. For all three of them (inspired by Friedländer on this point), dialogical writing overcomes the deficiencies inherent to writing. I argue that for all three of them, dialogical writing and dialogical thinking reflect the practical embeddedness of philosophical inquiry: for Strauss, it is the political situatedness of the philosopher that has priority; for Gadamer, it is our ethical facticity; for Krüger, it is the fundamental attunements (Stimmungen) of philosophy. The chapter also explains how these three trajectories propose three different interpretations of the meaning of Socratic and Platonic irony, which is a key feature of Plato’s dialogical compositions.

The fragments on the ancients and the moderns are continued. Arguments are presented for and against the role played by the ancients in establishing a modern culture of genius and taste. The effect of writing on oral poetry is discussed together with the invention of paper, printing, and copper engraving. These had an important effect on poetic expression and public culture, and the advantages and disadvantages are weighed. The Middle Ages ended with the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, changes in the financial system, in war, and class relationships. German literature is discussed in relation to other European traditions, and its shortcomings and merits are considered. In conclusion, it is argued that comparison of the national poetic traditions is difficult, perhaps futile, and that every nation should value its own tradition.

Chapter 1 explores travel writing about Wales to show how, as Britishness became an increasingly important cultural category, so too did written accounts of “ancient Britain” become more invested in representing Wales not only as beautiful, but also as infinitely productive. Early and mid-century writers like Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson cast Wales as sublimely foreboding and suffused with a masculine classical cultural heritage, but later writers reimagined the country as exemplifying a timeless and quintessentially British type of beauty: namely, the aesthetic they named the picturesque. Later, Welsh writers like Richard Llwyd drew attention to the erasures and contradictions inherent to picturesque view-making, articulating an incipient critique of imperialist landscape aesthetics.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

This chapter accounts for the recurring fixation in African literary discourse on the continuities between African orality and written African literatures. It highlights the astonishing range of the African oral heritage and underscores its deployment in modern African writing as literary nationalism and resistance to cultural imperialism or as facets of Indigenous formalist experimentations. The chapter pays particular attention to the debates that illuminate the implications of the transposition of orality to writing and sets in relief the scholars who have played pivotal roles in that discourse; it equally annotates several representative texts to underscore the quality of orality and the implications of its transposition into writing. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the current state of African orality and envisioning its future in written African literature.

This chapter revisits the enduring question of orality in relation to writing in the rendition of modern African literature since the advent of Western colonization. It argues that rather than affirming an artificial binary between orality and writing in the evaluation of African literature, a paradigm of complementarity is advocated. The discussion articulates with Eileen Julien’s formulation on the integrality of orality in written literature as a global phenomenon. The chapter additionally affirms a natural expressive process that begins with oral communication and orbits at scribal representation. It argues that literary traditions are invented following this complex of natural impulses that find primal expression in speech and on lithic natural surfaces. Invariably, instead of rendering writing as the transcendence of orality, both are conceived of as vital constitutive elements of language deployed in the production of literary traditions. Drawing on classical and contemporary African texts, the chapter offers a critical discussion in demonstration of the convergent values of orality and writing in the continual making and remaking of modern African literature.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, young and mostly urban Egyptian men and boys started writing in new ways. Inspired by the recent emergence of mass-circulated print fiction in both books and periodicals, they became infatuated with writing fiction. Their writerly endeavours often clashed with the textual preferences of their fathers, and represented a major shift in the understanding of what written texts are for, and who can write them.

Laws that prohibited enslaved people from learning to read and write first appeared in the South in the decades before the Revolution. Newspapers were expanding, and literacy rates among white colonists were rising. The first such clause, designed to forbid writing, appeared in South Carolina’s slave statute of 1740, enacted in response to the 1739 Stono Uprising. As enslaved populations grew, other colonies followed this example and expanded on it, establishing a pattern of hostility to all forms of Black literacy and education that persisted beyond emancipation and far into modern American life. Though strict enforcement was impossible, these laws had a huge impact. They created a virtual “Blackout” for generations of enslaved African Americans, and they fostered an abiding Southern suspicion of education and book learning. Historians often overlook the scope and importance of this mass deprivation, emphasizing instead the physical brutality and hardships inflicted by the slavery regime.

This chapter focuses on digital collaboration when learning an additional language (L2), a specific type of learner–learner interaction. In CALL contexts, collaboration has almost exclusively been researched in connection with writing, which will be the focus of this chapter. The chapter first provides a definition of collaboration versus cooperation and then a literature review of digital collaboration, mainly in writing contexts. We conclude with a list of strategies for promoting collaboration and suggestions for future collaboration contexts and research.

Literacy is the ability to make use of visible language, and it is fundamental to language education. This chapter focuses on what teachers should know about digital technologies but begins with broad background and context related to multiliteracies, metaphors, and cultural dimensions of technology use. It then focuses on four key areas where teachers play an important role in the development of their students’ language and literacy abilities via technology: autonomy, mobility, creativity, and communities. It then discusses two controversial areas of current pedagogical research and practice: artificial intelligence and machine translation. It concludes with a call for greater attention to two additional areas highly relevant to language development: literacies related to film and digital communication in the context of study abroad.

Like reading, writing is an essential part of academic studies and professional work. Through writing, we form and communicate clear thoughts so that we can collaborate with each other and refine critical understandings. In the Australian Curriculum, writing is about students using expressive language and composing different types of texts for a range of purposes as an integral part of learning in all curriculum areas. Different text types include ‘spoken, written, visual and multimodal texts’, while students can also create ‘formal and informal’ written, visual and multimodal texts for presentation.

Chapter 3 emphasises the importance of developing skills among pupils progressively throughout language learning and discusses how each skill complements the others to improve overall communicative competence. Practical advice on how to develop each individual skill is given, as well as how to create multi-skill and multi-task activities. Tasks designed to give student teachers practice in developing these individual skills are included. The development of reading skills is given particular attention, as this is an area which can affect the others if not given due care and consideration.

Our goal in writing this book was to address a notable gap in the availability of essential resources dedicated to this critical content area. Despite its foundational importance, no existing text offers a focused, in-depth exploration of language and literacy knowledge tailored for pre-service and in-service teachers working in Foundation to Year 10. The 2008 Bradley Review highlighted a deficiency in teachers’ language and literacy awareness and proficiency, a concern that was addressed by the introduction of the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE) in 2016. Consequently, initial teacher education programs have initiated courses and support services in English language and literacy to bolster teachers’ personal knowledge and skills, enabling them to pass the LANTITE’s literacy component.

The epilogue briefly considers Ovid’s exile poetry from an environmental and place-based perspective. Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetry does not need to rely on a positive attachment to a local land. His exile poetry is about and is marked by place, shaped by the location from which Ovid is estranged and the location in which he writes. Moreover, local place matters to Ovid as a particular more-than-human environment. Tomis is represented as an environment with its own specific geography, climate, and ecologies. Ovid further explores ecological themes by emphasizing the physical effects Tomis has on his body, through motifs of cold and sickness. The epilogue also uses Ovid’s exilic work to clarify the theoretical foundations of the environmental poetics identified in Vergil and Horace. Through his provocative play with intertextuality and fictionality, Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetics can rely not on realistic description or extratextual reference, but rather on the poetic imagination.