The 2019 general elections in India, by granting a second term and a stronger mandate to the Narendra Modi government, became an imaginative test for the limits of parliamentary sanction that right-wing Hindu supremacism could enjoy. With a larger majority having balloted a definitive nod to the Bharatiya Janata Party's agendas of social polarization, the party realized that its sponsorship of mob violence and rioting action no longer needed shielding from the law as expressions of a fundamentalist ‘fringe’. Instead, such ‘expressions’ could now be the basis for law, and hate could officially become ideological fodder for law-making in the parliament. It did not matter if ethno-religious grounds for lawmaking were still deemed discriminatory by the Indian constitution; it was time that such laws be scrapped or amended. Three months into the second innings of Modi, the heavily militarized border state of Kashmir was stripped of its special constitutional protections in law, and an overnight gag operation sought to symbolically annex Kashmiri Muslims as the unreportable ‘subjects’ of a Hindu nation-state (The Wire 2019a; Noorani 2019; Varadarajan 2019; Mir 2021). Another three months went by in preventing news of the worst and longest-ever internet blockade (and accompanying military repression) in the Kashmir Valley1 from pouring out in the mainstream media, before the Indian parliament passed a law that invalidated Muslim migrants from making claims to national citizenship.

This time, protests erupted onto the streets. The Delhi Police, working under orders from the Home Ministry, swung into action by trying to make examples of student protestors (from Jamia Millia Islamia University) as ‘masterminding’ the upsurge.

This chapter describes the book and its chapters. The second section shows how recent research in history of the book and history of reading discredits Romantic critics who pretended that Minerva Press fiction was third rate, empty of ideas and read only by ignorant females, and supports the public and private praise contemporaries gave many of them during the 1780s and 1790s. The third section uses the biographical work of three generations of modern feminist scholars to check Marotti-style big-data analyses and develop a profile of Lane’s many signing female regulars, most of whom wrote for him for ten years or more, and in practice formulated and developed Minerva genres

Unlike nineteenth-century National Tales, Minerva’s earlier versions adapted the Romance structure that Natasha Tessone calls “the Inheritance Plot.” to argue against, or sometimes for, Union. Welsh, Irish, Scottish and American National Tales by Anna Maria Bennett, Maria Hunter, Eliza Parsons, Frances Jacson and many anonymous others puffed the superiority of the Celtic fringe over the corrupt and villainous English, celebrated the happiness of endogamous marriages and recommended retreating from England into harmonious local communities in one’s native Welsh, Irish or Scottish country or emigrating to America. Susannah Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown adapted the same formula to offer a bleaker view of the Early Republic. The second section shows that though episodes of wandering occurred in all genres (because central to Romance), stories titled Wanderers’ Tales highlighted the evils of homelessness, especially for young ladies, and debated the consequences of distance in a world where Britons were perpetually on the move.

This analysis of the relationships between the Late Nuragic communities of Iron Age Sardinia and Phoenicians focuses on their contributions to the formation of urban centres. Both the near-absence of colonial settlements in the eighth century BCE and the evidence of recurrent Phoenician coexistence with Indigenous communities suggest that the emergence of a small number of urban centres in the following century owed much to these cultural interactions. The role of central places in Nuragic society was instead fulfilled by a small number of major regional sanctuaries that flourished in precisely these centuries.

The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation…. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness…. [T]he Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from almost all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949: 259–261)

In Orwell's Oceania – imagined in the aftermath of the Second World War – it was ordained that Newspeak will conquer whatever remained of ‘Oldspeak’ (or ‘Standard English’) by the year 2050. Since the intention of Big Brother and his Ministry of Truth was to make speech – and particularly political speech – ‘independent of consciousness’ and free from the ‘temptation to take thought’, language itself had to occupy the limit of the permissible. In other words, what the totalitarian Oceanic state outlawed as ‘crimethink’ (or ‘thought-crime’) should not even require recourse to law.