In the course of its three versions (October 1926 – February 1927 and November 1927 – January 1928), Lady Chatterley’s Lover gradually morphed into a more mythic casting of the state of the world and its future. The third version is bathed in the afterglow of Lawrence’s Etruscan essays of mid-1927, Sketches of Etruscan Places, and partly conditioned by his short stories and essays of 1927. For Lawrence, it was a matter of developing his imaginative vectors – the obdurate industrial and social circumstances of the Midlands on the one hand, which a visit home in 1926 had tempted him to come to grips with, and a future of tenderness on the other – and then deploying them to see what they might yield in the performative writing event. Realism, a response to the working-class settings, slowly gave way to celebration of the ‘eternity of the naïve moment’, coming from before Plato and available in the present if only love-idealism and sentiment could be overthrown.

After finishing Sons and Lovers Lawrence wrote a ‘Foreword’ in which he tried, in an elusive, oracular mode, to clarify, for his own and Edward Garnett’s benefit, the broader cultural, almost cosmological directions that he understood the novel to have pinpointed. This document initiated a series of remarkable philosophical excursuses on Lawrence’s part in the 1910s responding at first to Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, and, after mid-1914, the Italian Futurists. In these essays the cosmological would be wrestled into commerce with the everyday. The space thereby opened up for fiction gave Lawrence the opportunity to render the inner movements of deep and unacknowledged urges rather than externally dramatising them in the clear air of realism. His stories of mid-1913, ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’, as well as earlier ones revised in mid-1914 for the Prussian Officer collection, demonstrate the development. A performative habit of pushing emotions and states of being to clarifying end-points emerged, nowhere more compellingly than in the revised versions of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and ‘Daughters of the Vicar’.

This chapter analyzes Lane’s clever use of combinations of geographical, temporal and formal markers in his titles, alternative titles and subtitles to indicate to borrowers and buyers what kind of story a volume contained and explains how this book’s chapters follow and explore the taxonomy he designed. The second section describes the construction of Lane’s principal genres and the sophisticated methods of imitative writing used to compose them. These overlaid romance with realism and made repetition-with-difference a primary mode of communication to engender the Press’s characteristically innovative, modular and debating texts. The chapter concludes by using Clara Reeve’s arguments in The Progress of Romance (1785) to contrast the Aesthetics of Originality which we have inherited from the Romantics with the Aesthetics of Reuse which had been used since the Renaissance to notice and evaluate the “beauties” of imitative writing, and which ordinary readers still use today.

Lane ignored Perrault in favor of repeatedly publishing and repurposing his rival seventeenth-century French conteuses, most notably Mme D’Aulnoy. While addressing many of the same domestic and political issues as Minerva Terror Fiction and Minerva Historicals, these contes de fée unsentimentally performed their promise, “Whatever you wish you shall have,” while warning readers to be careful what they wished for. The second section considers novel Minerva fictions that preempted nineteenth-century realism by infusing magical fairy-tale materials into novels conducted in the real world.

This chapter examines the foreign policies of the Gulf states, including members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Iraq and Iran. It systematically evaluates three primary contextual dimensions that exert influence on the formulation of foreign policy within the Gulf region, namely the domestic, regional and international arenas. Furthermore, this chapter delves into the application of key international relations theories, including realism, neorealism, liberalism and constructivism, as frameworks for explaining the external behaviour of Gulf states. While realist and neorealist perspectives offer valuable insights into the Gulf states’ behaviour, particularly regarding threat perceptions and power dynamics, alternative theoretical paradigms offer different analyses that contribute to our understanding of Gulf politics. Since their inception, the Gulf states adopted diverse strategies aimed at ensuring their survival, including strategic hedging, omni-balancing and bandwagoning. Therefore, this chapter explains the evolution of Gulf states’ foreign policies, tracing their progress from the reliance on external powers, mainly the US, to having greater autonomy and confidence in the pursuit of their own interests.

This chapter traces the alignment between the Victorian novel, the articulation of geological, or “deep” time, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. The Victorian era is usually understood in terms of “uniformitarian” geology, in which Earth changes slowly and gradually, an understanding that has also informed understandings of the novel in the period. By contrast, this chapter unearths a latent “catastrophism” in Victorian fiction, examining geological events and underground spaces that reconfigure the conditions of possibility in works by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Thomas Hardy.

Sellars’s long-neglected account of “picturing” has recently found more sympathetic interpretations. At the same time, there has been more sustained engagement with Sellars in terms of Kant. However, there has not yet been an inquiry into the role that “picturing” played in debates amongst nineteenth- and twentieth-century neo-Kantians prior to Sellars. This chapter examines how neo-Kantians such as Helmholtz, Riehl, and Hertz used the concept of picturing in theorizing both scientific philosophy of mind and adjudicating debates between realism and idealism. Thus Sellars belongs to a rich and complicated tradition in his own use of the concept to address both problematics.

A hallmark of wise deliberative spaces is their commitment to truth-seeking, in contrast to “post-truth” contexts where emotional appeals and personal beliefs are more important than objective facts. Chapter 5 explores how post-truth thinking has been fueled by cognitive elites across the political spectrum and traces its roots to postmodernist ideas. The chapter reviews philosophical definitions of truth, contrasting idealist and coherentist views with realist theories, specifically correspondence, semantic, and pragmatic approaches. It draws on Hilary Putnam’s concept of natural realism to argue that objective truths do exist – depending on the domain of inquiry – but only if we distinguish between what is true and what is merely believed to be true. Postpositivism supports this by recognizing an external reality while acknowledging that our knowledge is fallible and evolving. Biases, though inevitable, can be countered through reflexive and communal inquiry. Ultimately, the chapter argues that wisdom lies in understanding the nature of different kinds of inquiry – scientific, moral, or otherwise – without falling into the trap of relativism.

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.

This chapter probes the relation between realism and the georgic in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The georgic is generally not associated with that period, and realism was allegedly on the decline. Yet, in focusing on an agricultural setting in rural Bengal, Lal Behari Day’s novel Govinda Samanta, or Bengal Peasant Life (1874) vivifies the connection between the two in ways that enhance both our understanding of the modes of colonial critique as well as the dispersed evolution of literary genres.

Thomists and contemporary epistemologists don’t often seem to have much to say to one another. I here argue that Thomism fits very well with at least one school of thought in contemporary epistemology: commonsensism. I prosecute my case by arguing that Étienne Gilson’s dismissal of commonsense philosophy as incompatible with Thomistic realism is a mistake. I begin by outlining commonsensism. I then proceed to a discussion of Gilson’s rejection of commonsense philosophy. I finish by arguing that Gilson’s criticisms fail and that Thomists should be commonsense epistemologists.

This Chapter conceptualizes security exceptions under international trade and investment agreements. In particular, it seeks to construct the chain that links trade and security-related issues arising from the application of security measures by clarifying the concept of national security to be used for the book, revisiting the current role of international organizations in balancing free trade and national security, ie the UN and the WTO, and finally contemplating the decision to incorporate security exceptions into international economic agreements or the decision to adopt security measures through the lenses of economic contract theory, the theories of international relations, such as realism, institutionalism, and constructivism, and the concept of securitization.

Beginning in the 1930s, Elizabeth Bowen wrote literary criticism, book reviews, essays, and other non-fiction works for various media at a remarkably steady pace. Much of this writing centered on the novel – whether on contemporary novels that she reviewed, on classic works of English fiction for which she wrote introductions, or on the novel as a genre with an important history and an uncertain, yet vital, future. This essay traces the development of Bowen’s thinking about the novel and her gradual honing of an idiosyncratic descriptive vocabulary for the genre. It concentrates on a key set of writings that Bowen produced towards the end of, and just after, the Second World War, when she was at the height of her own fame as a novelist and when the history of what she regarded as the ‘free form’ of the novel, especially the recent history of the modernist novel, was a matter of urgent cultural discussion.

Lane argues that Charles Peirce’s philosophy can contribute to contemporary debates about the metaphysical and moral status of prenatal humans. Some participants in those debates view an early embryo as numerically identical to, and as having the same moral status as, the adult to which it gives rise; bioethicists in this camp tend to maintain that our metaphysical and moral judgments about prenatal humans are capable of objective truth. Others argue from the continuity of prenatal development to the view that metaphysical judgments about when beings like us begin to exist and moral judgments about when beings like us attain moral status cannot be objective. Lane argues that Peirce provides the resources for developing alternative positions. Those resources are Peirce’s synechism, according to which continuity is of central importance in philosophy, his scholastic realism, according to which there are real kinds, his basic realism, according to which there is a world that is the way it is apart from how anyone represents it to be, and his pragmatic clarifications of the concepts of reality and truth.

Legg draws on Charles Peirce’s semiotics to help explain the semantic limitations of genAI software. Early AI developers were stymied by the assumption that meanings are discrete, abstract, and internal and by an approach that disallowed the growth of meaning. Legg describes some of the progress on AI that has been made in recent years but argues that some of its remaining weaknesses stem from a failure to understand that semiosis occurs in three fundamentally different ways: symbolicity, indexicality, and iconicity. Contemporary genAI systems never go beyond symbolicity to instantiate indexical signs, which are required to point to the world external to those systems, and they are not sufficiently constrained by iconic signs, especially those that would bring logical structure. Legg also critically considers claims that genAI will enable new achievements with regard to knowledge and truth, as well as claims that it will further erode our collective grasp on truth. Drawing on Peirce’s realism his view of inquiry as essentially social, Legg explains how we can reconceive reality, truth, and knowledge so as to avoid mistaking the texts created by genAI for genuine knowledge.

Widely considered to be a quintessential avant-gardist work, Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1925–35) also emerges from historical, political, and personal events that inform and act as reference points throughout the book. Contrary to prevailing interpretations of this classic book of poetry, his battle with poetic language and vanguardist aesthetic stances coexists with a realist aesthetic that highlights the sociohistorical and individual circumstances in which he is immersed. Written mostly overseas, where he served as low-level consul, the combination of the avant-gardist techniques depicts the poetic subject’s alienation from nature and society. Neruda represents the speaker as using a hermetic poetic language as a way of divulging his own estrangement. He begins to overcome this stage thanks to his relationships with women, his increasing political awareness, and his use of nature as positive force in his poetry and life.

Industrial imperialism affected Europe before anywhere else, bringing a dizzying burst of modernization that altered habits of life and the ways in which wealth was created and distributed. Among the many results of this disruption would be the opening of new niches in what had become an ossified theatrical environment. At the same time, realism and romanticism offered new ways of viewing the world and shaped how theatre artists filled those niches. Ballet and opera were transformed by romanticism although both would also eventually be touched by realism. The literary romanticism of spoken theatre was overwhelmed by competition from melodrama (which effectively integrated romanticism and realism) and the “well-made play” (which eschewed literary ambition in favor of stage-worthiness). It was then outflanked by a stringent realism that emphasized psychological and social issues, whose theatrical plainness led to avant-garde efforts to “retheatricalize” theatre.