Chapter 9 is dedicated exclusively to an analysis of Romance de 1930. It interrogates the prevailing assumption that environmental determinants unilaterally shape character development, thereby limiting the potential for self-awareness to emerge. By closely examining seminal literary texts of the period, the chapter argues that the interaction between social and psychological factors creates a complex dynamic in which both domains exert reciprocal influence. As a result, the traditionally perceived gulf between the regionalist and intimist novel – often considered substantial – appears significantly less pronounced upon closer scrutiny. Within this conceptual framework, rigid categorical distinctions may obscure essential insights rather than clarify them. Jorge Amado’s designated “proletarian novel,” Jubiabá, serves as a salient example, illustrating how the external milieu and Balduíno’s internal subjectivity jointly determine the arc of this iconic popular protagonist. This case forms part of a broader set of analyses presented throughout the chapter.

This final and concluding chapter highlights the main points discussed in the book and explains the importance that Early German Romanticism can have in the ecological and environmental-philosophical debate today.

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.

In these pages, the problematic at the centre of the book is introduced. It explores how the concepts of sovereignty and freedom and the human/nature relationship are linked and how they influence the idea of self. This Introduction also displays past and current interpretations of the Romantic conception of subjectivity and of Romantic political philosophy, highlighting the shortcomings of these readings. Indeed, they neglect the political essence of the Romantic Self. This chapter closes with an overview of the structure of the book and a list of the Romantic authors considered.

This chapter focuses on the relationality that constitutes the Romantic Self, highlighting the ethical and political consequences that derive from it. The Romantics refuse the lexicon proper to modern political thought, centred on the concept of sovereignty and autonomy: they highlight the illusory essence of these concepts and the dangers they imply. Consistently, they also dismantle the possibility to write a political theory that pretends to offer universal principles. Relations are not extrinsic elements added to a fully formed subject and to be considered only after the identity of the subject has been defined. Relations are what we are. That is why in its political reflections, Romanticism’s primary polemical target is modern contractualism, founded on the tacit assumption that it is possible to study human beings in their individuality, skating over the interplay among them. This chapter shows how the idea of forces and the priority given to relationships influence the Romantic political concepts. These concepts in particular will be scrutinised: representative, constituent and constituted powers, democracy, individuality, equality, and justice.

William Burroughs’ avid consumption of pulp magazines in his youth led to his discovery of H. P. Lovecraft, whose influence would impart a distinctive set of horror devices to Burrough’s writing. Naked Lunch displays these devices with remarkable vividness, giving graphic expression to the key horror tropes of interstitiality and impurity. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject provides a useful interpretive tool to assess the effect of these tropes, enabling a reading of Naked Lunch that identifies the disintegration of selfhood as its central concern. Using repeated images of bodily fluids and monstrosity, Naked Lunch excavates the anxiety of being a gay drug addict in the normative 1950s. In the process, both the reader and the narrator undergo abjection through the visceral language and profoundly fragmented narrative voice. Naked Lunch represents a redeployment of Lovecraftian horror that helped to create the body horror of the 1980s.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ equivocal position within the American literary canon, examining both the institutional challenges to his inclusion and the theoretical strategies scholars have used to argue for his legitimacy. Sean Bolton traces critical attempts to align Burroughs with modernism, postmodernism, and even a proposed “amodernist” tradition, while also acknowledging the persistent difficulty of assimilating his work into stable frameworks of interpretation. Drawing on Harold Bloom’s aesthetics of canonicity, poststructuralist theory, and his own concept of “narrative revolution,” Bolton contends that Burroughs’ formal innovations – particularly the cut-up method and fragmented subjectivities – both exemplify and exceed existing literary categories. Ultimately, the chapter questions whether Burroughs needs the canon at all, suggesting that his enduring cultural influence may rest precisely on his resistance to assimilation. For readers and scholars alike, Burroughs remains an outsider by design, a figure whose work continues to provoke, disturb, and inspire on its own uncompromising terms.

I have often been asked: How can mathematics be beautiful? This question is usually sparked by popular culture, such as the movie A Beautiful Mind or television shows that have popularised mathematics. For most of the inquirers, their experience with mathematics is so divorced from subjective statements such as ‘beautiful’ that they cannot fathom any connection between them. They have also been taught that mathematics is supposed to be objective – that is, transcending our own subjectivity (or bias) to find ‘the truth’. These are common perceptions of mathematics informed by our common experience with the teaching and learning of mathematics. This chapter explores such perceptions, questions notions such as objectivity and explores how these perceptions have positioned Indigenous people as mathematical learners. In essence, this chapter explores the connection between culture and mathematics – putting subjectivity back into mathematics and looking at how this can affect the teaching and learning of mathematics for Indigenous students. These new approaches also have implications for mathematics education in general, by allowing students to connect with mathematics through their own social and cultural backgrounds.

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.

This introduction explores the growing presence of offensive language on social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, where anonymity often encourages more aggressive behaviour. It discusses the difficulty in distinguishing between what is ‘merely offensive’ and what crosses into illegal or grossly offensive territory, highlighting how this is a complex issue spanning multiple disciplines. The chapter highlights the importance of linguistic insights in understanding offensive language, especially given the limitations of automatic detection systems and the inherently subjective nature of offence. It also provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

When Elizabeth Maconchy entered the British compositional scene in 1930 with the premiere of her orchestral suite, The Land, she and her fellow composers had an unsettled relationship with the prevailing musical styles of Europe. Whereas continental composers were highly regarded by British critics as cutting edge, their British contemporaries were faulted as derivative, unoriginal, and too steeped in national traditions to contribute to the ‘new’ music. Constant Lambert argued his rival countrymen (and women) had let their moment to be ‘modern’ pass them by. This chapter examines the scope of modernism on the continent and scholars’ difficulties in pinning down a precise functional definition of the so-called ‘modernist’ style. Practitioners of European modernism sought to be sensational or at the very least individual. British modernism, on the other hand, tended toward the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’, an eclecticism that is not bound to any specific ideology.

This chapter argues that our subjective experiences – how we experience the world and understand ourselves within it – are just as closely governed as our objective conduct, discussed in Chapter 5. Whether they realise it or not, contemporary teachers are expected to play a significant role in this form of regulation. After all, teachers are now not simply responsible for transmitting a given curriculum and keeping children in line; they are de facto psychologists, responsible for the mental health, regulation and development of their pupils.

This essay discusses Pablo Neruda’s youth love poetry collection Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) in relation to situated subjectivities, from decolonial, intersectional feminist perspectives. One hundred years after the collection was published, we briefly account for Neruda’s inter- and intra-subjective exploration of love and otherness. Particular attention is given here to the poetic process as an unending dialogue between production and reception, including some current poetic and nonpoetic canceling, as well as rediscoveries of his rich eco- and geopoetic vocation.

This chapter contains a first formulation of the question ‘What is science?’, followed by a brief treatment of realism vs. antirealism and an introduction to how observations can be made more trustworthy. The theory-dependence of ‘facts’ and the resulting fallibility of observations are introduced - how scientific findings can turn out to be wrong. A first brief treatment of how science is used and misused in society is also included as a stepping stone to why some understanding of the philosophy of science matters to everybody.