This chapter explores the double bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci – first presented at the Metropolitan Opera in 1893 in the context of increasing Italian emigration to New York, and becoming a staple of New York’s operatic life. Mascagni’s one-act opera had been a huge success at its Roman world premiere and capitalised on widespread interest in the economically impoverished Italian South on the part of Northern and Central Italian audiences. The two operas became a focal point for wider discussions in New York about Italian identity and Italian opera’s position within the cultural hierarchies of the time: ones in which distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow were being negotiated, and Italian opera shifted between social allegiances and degrees of cultural (and racial) capital. Tracing the operas’ ongoing critical reception and performance history, I indicate how the operas fluctuated between contemporary politics and aesthetic escape and argue for the formulation of italianità as much as an expressive mode as a cultural category, during a period of emerging interest in (and monetisation of) human psychology and emotional behaviour.

This chapter focuses on Puccini’s 1907 tour to New York, following the disastrous premiere of Madama Butterfly at La Scala and reflecting a longer engagement with US culture on the composer’s part. Puccini could embody a lineage of now vanished Italian composers for New York critics, and the New York visit followed a similar tour to Buenos Aires in 1905. But the emergence of gramophone opera recordings offered an alternative model of transatlantic encounter, as Italian operatic voices were increasingly mediated through American technology. Opera discs promised a specifically American form of operatic experience, I argue, one that was the source of considerable cultural and legal controversy between US companies and Italian composers. Madama Butterfly’s plot and opposing sound worlds can ultimately be heard as a meditation on broader Italian-American tensions, shaped by contemporary discourses around Italian vocality and American materialism. Madama Butterfly emerges at the centre of a changing auditory culture in the early twentieth century, in which Puccini’s musicalized Japan has suggestive echoes of Italy.

This chapter shows how, contrary to modern assumptions, the Press distinguished between Historical and “Gothic” or Terror Fiction and how, contrary to what Romantic critics pretended, Minerva’s women authors ridiculed and dismissed Walpolean Gothic with its specters and clanking chains. Eliza Parsons, Anna Maria Mackenzie, Mary Meeke, Isabella Kelly, Agnes Mulgrave, Regina Maria Roche and anonymous others innovated, instead, by displacing the language of terror to the “unnatural” or criminal acts that families hid from public view – primarily husbands’ sadistic domestic abuse, incest, bigamy and fratricide – while inflecting “Gothic Romance” into the Mystery Story. They also imported and developed the “German” uncanny in a line leading straight to Collins, Bradden, Brockden Brown, Hawthorne and Poe, and taught readers to be skeptical both of names and of stories.

Eliot's ‘waste land’ is over a century old – but the ‘heap of broken images’ (1922: l. 22) that strung together the poetry of its desolation seems particularly apposite for a contemporary tale of ‘memory and desire’. This book must therefore begin in April 2022, telling the tale of yet another cruellest month.

‘Bulldozers in Performance, Police in the Audience’

On a Wednesday morning of that Indian summer – a hundred years away from Eliot's England – the predominantly Muslim residents of a North Delhi neighbourhood in Jahangirpuri woke up to news of the local municipal corporation's ‘encroachment demolition’ drive in their area. Almost all of them had been staying in the locality for decades, occasionally with members of their families migrating in search of work from districts in West Bengal and subsequently silting up their lives around small shops and cart-stalls attached to the houses.1 When, in December 2019, an amendment to India's citizenship laws inserted religion as a determining factor in the apportioning of citizenship rights – and specifically sought to exclude Muslims from the ambit of the legal claims-making process2 – these Jahangirpuri residents came to be publicly maligned as ‘illegal migrants’ from Bangladesh or as Rohingya refugees (Hossain 2022; A. Kumar 2022). The ruling Hindu right-wing government which authored the amendment was unsurprisingly also in charge of the local municipal body.

Chapter 1 introduces the “puzzle” of the variability of Eurasia’s gas interdependence over both time and space. It outlines how political dynamics of natural gas pipelines therefore differ from oil pipelines, in part because the market for natural gas is much more regional and segmented than the integrated global market for oil. It summarizes the historical development of the Soviet-Eurasian gas trade and delineates variations in natural gas interdependence between various European and Eurasian nations in order to lay out the main argument grounded in constructivism — that the uneven character of Eurasian (natural gas) interdependencies is motivated and shaped by shifts in dominant narratives over time and across nations. This book also elaborates the conditions under which large shifts occur in the way firms define their commercial interests. It considers how international economic opportunities moderate domestic politics while adding personal leader incentives — in turn, based on individual personality traits and dispositions — while being attentive to the particular sociopolitical contexts in which shifts in natural gas interdependence take place.

This chapter asks the question what being ‘local’ really means. How many generations must people of Phoenician ancestry live locally before they are considered ‘locals’? Analysis and comparison of ceramics and burial rituals in Iron Age South Iberia show that locality is produced daily by myriad actors who were differentiated and connected by ethnicity, social status, age, and gender. Who is considered ‘local’ in one place might look alien compared to how other communities and individuals perform their locality elsewhere. Ultimately, this chapter debunks the persistent notion of stable ethnic identities in the ancient Mediterranean that add little to our understanding of selfhood and cultural and colonial contacts.

This chapter presents Persistent Citizens’ central theoretical framework: a psychological explanation for state-centric persistence. The chapter highlights the significant psychological costs associated with engaging the state, including feelings of stigma and shame and the loss of autonomy and control.  The authors identify three domain-specific attitudes that they argue can both reduce these costs and otherwise directly increase the likelihood of persistence: entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy. The book refers to these attitudes collectively as "2ei." The chapter defines each of these attitudes, explaining that entitlement is the belief that one has a right to a benefit; indignation is the emotional response to a violation of that right; and self-efficacy is the belief in one’s ability to successfully interact with the state. The chapter hypothesizes that individuals who possess these attitudes are more likely to engage in state-centric persistence.

Chapter 6 summarizes the evidence and then asks whether this longue-durée reexamination of the ups and downs in natural gas interdependence provides insights into the recent collapse of decades of EU-Russia gas cooperation amid war in Ukraine. It considers how dominant narratives may help explain why Putin decided to invade Ukraine at considerable commercial and political cost. The chapter suggests solutions to three puzzles: (1) Does reconstructing Eurasian gas ties across time and space and uncovering sources of change contribute something new to an understanding of Russia’s gas interdependence with a host of neighboring countries? (2) Does this reexamination provide insight into the subsequent collapse of decades of EU-Russia gas cooperation amid war in Ukraine? (3) Does this reconstruction and reexamination of gas interdependencies across Eurasia offer anything new to explain puzzling political outcomes in dyads where economic interdependence is high? Finally, the chapter places the book’s central arguments in an International Political Economic perspective, considering pathways to energy cooperation across Eurasia under various circumstances, especially energy transition.

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.

Chapter 4 focused on leaders’ attributes and dispositions to demonstrate the incompleteness of rationalist explanations for Sino-Russian gas interdependence variations. The chapter presented evidence of significant trends. In 2014, Russia and China concluded a thirty-year, $400 billion deal to ship Russian gas to China. The chapter emphasizes the importance of historically contextualizing such turning moments and deals of large geopolitical value. Second, the culmination of Sino-Russian gas cooperation in 2014 was undergirded by important personal relationships between Presidents Putin and Xi and between Russian and Chinese corporate partners. The chapter highlights the role of political entrepreneurs to shape worldviews. The international and domestic contexts in which states are embedded shape their societies’ identities in powerful ways. It suggests how China’s rapid adoption of net-zero targets fits a broader normative turn in global climate governance and Russian gas is bound to play a bridge role in Beijing’s low-carbon future. Finally, it considered the war in Ukraine and the further deepening of Sino-Russian gas trade.

The introductory chapter of Persistent Citizens lays out the core conceptual, theoretical, and empirical claims of the book. It begins by highlighting that expanded social policy commitments in countries like Brazil and Argentina do not always translate into consistent access to social programs for all eligible citizens. The authors introduce "state-centric persistence" as a key behavior that explains who ultimately receives benefits. The chapter then previews a psychological theory that explains persistence based on three attitudes: entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy, collectively termed "2ei." The chapter reviews the scope conditions of the argument and outlines the empirical approach of the book, which involves original qualitative and quantitative research in Brazil and Argentina, focusing on health care and early childhood education. The chapter concludes by discussing the book’s contributions to literature on social policy access, claim making, and administrative burden.

This chapter provides a historical overview of social welfare provision in Brazil and Argentina. It details how both countries, in the early twentieth century, established welfare systems that were largely regressive and favored formal workers and privileged groups. The chapter then describes the social policy expansions that have occurred in recent decades, particularly since the countries’ transitions to democracy in the 1980s. While these reforms have expanded access to previously excluded populations, the chapter notes that uneven access persists despite these new commitments. It also summarizes the current state of public provision of health care, especially medication for chronic illness, and early childhood education in each country.