The art historical component of the manuscript: how we can describe images; what materials and techniques were used; the limitations of facsimile and digital editions; and how images affect our perception of the manuscript and its contexts of production

This chapter examines the profession of music composition during Strauss’s lifetime, noting his success relative to that of his contemporaries while highlighting the many professional difficulties and economic hardships faced by aspiring and established composers alike during the period. Limited performance opportunities, unfavorable publishing and copyright terms, disappearing avenues of patronage, and a lack of standardized credentialing processes or conservatory curricula for composers all contributed to a rather bleak state of affairs for the average composer. The figure of the composer was a complex one during Strauss’s long life, trapped between the nineteenth-century ideal of unfettered inspiration and the often-ugly economic and social reality of the twentieth. Led by Strauss, German composers sought to professionalize their discipline – albeit largely unsuccessfully – seeking reforms in music publishing, copyright, and music education that would place them on a more secure economic footing.

Various characteristics of the networks are examined: their composition, density, homogeneity and dispersion. Their overall structure can be very varied, and therefore builds contrasting environments. Using examples, various personal network profiles are described by analysing the social issues that lie beneath their differences. The study of personal networks, their distribution, their temporal strata, their diversity, and their degree of interconnection, therefore allows us to approach a kind of dynamic social mapping of the modes of circulation and anchoring in social worlds. To better grasp the particularities of personal network analysis, the authors briefly explore a few examples.

This chapter introduces the two principal forms of polyphony practiced during the Renaissance: written and extemporized. The transition from manuscript to print culture is perhaps the most significant extramusical determinant for musical practice in the Renaissance period. Examples of manuscript and printed sources (including different kinds of written sources) are examined, and their implications for practice considered. Next, different forms of extemporized practices are introduced and described, including the surviving evidence for them; in turn, their implications for polyphony as a practice are considered. Finally, the two forms of practice are compared, and the relationship between the two. It is clear that most teachers of the time regarded them as interdependent, while viewing the relationship differently.

This chapter concerns Coetzee’s encounter with philosophers and philosophy. After a brief description of Coetzee’s formation and institutional affiliations, it turns its focus to the ways in which Coetzee has probed both the capacity of literary works to confront philosophical questions and the innate capacities and limitations of philosophy’s own embedded disciplinary procedures and approved forms of discourse. It argues that Coetzee has done this by developing provocations: elaborating propositions – about the nature of human language, consciousness, and being; about the nature of truth, knowledge, and existence – that entice and frustrate philosophical readers, asking that they at least consider what their discipline takes for granted or leaves out of account in its framing of these issues.

This chapter explores the genesis and development of the two novels that brought J. M. Coetzee significant international notice, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life & Times of Michael K (1983). It makes use of Coetzee’s papers which are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, in particular Coetzee’s manuscripts and notebooks, in giving an account of his creative processes in the formative stages of his career. The chapter shows that ‘composition and craft’ in Coetzee involved a creative tension between self-discipline, organization, and rigour, and openness to the uncertainties of invention.

Our knowledge and understanding of the structure and function of complex host-associated communities has grown exponentially in the last decade through improvements in sequencing technologies. Despite this, there are still many outstanding research questions, which will undoubtably lead to many more. Concerted effort is required to elucidate the composition and function of taxonomic groups other than bacteria that constitute host microbiomes, and to extend our current cataloguing efforts to non-model and field-based host organisms. Further to this, we need to continue to move beyond the 'who?' question provided by relatively cheap amplicon sequencing to gain a better understanding of 'what?' the microbiome is doing, using metatranscriptomics approaches. Critically, we need to understand how members of the microbiome interact to confer function. Given the current unprecedented environmental change, microbiome plasticity may prove vital to host resilience and fitness. Furthermore, there is considerable potential for microbial biotechnology to improve numerous aspects of humanity, although care must be taken to ensure environmental and social justice prevail.

Two major outstanding questions in microbiome research ask what microbes are present in a community and how they interact with each other and their hosts. Recent, rapid improvements in nucleic acid (DNA and RNA) sequencing allow us to study the composition and function of microbiomes in unprecedented detail, leading to a step change in our understanding of host–microbe interactions. This chapter gives a broad overview of the basic toolkit available to modern microbiologists and microbial ecologists, exploring their application to key questions about microbiome structure and function. We cover tools based on nucleic acid sequencing (e.g. amplicon sequencing, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics) as well as approaches targeting larger molecules such as metabolomics and proteomics. We discuss the use of microbial culture as a means of measuring functional capacity of individual microbes, or building artificial communities to understand emergent properties of consortia. We emphasise the advantages of combining multiple techniques alongside robust experimental design to garner powerful quantitative estimates of microbiome structure, and how this relates to host–microbe interactions.

There is no plausible connection between the genesis of the Greek alphabet and the composition and writing down of the Homeric poems.

This chapter is a survey of the genesis of the book “Confessions,” including reflections on the title, structure, date, influences, and style; an examination of the conversational structure of the text, including the dialogic form in relation to “Confessions” as a prayer; and an analysis of the terminology of “confession” as both positive (praise) and negative (admission of wrongdoing).

What do Dickinson’s habitual composition strategies indicate about her poetics? I argue that Dickinson and her peers wrote the way they did, generating variants and saving their writings in hand-bound booklets, because of the education they received in composition and rhetoric. This chapter draws on archival evidence to argue that many of Dickinson’s contemporaries composed in similar ways because of ideas about the importance of diction in the New Rhetoric. Dickinson’s training in varieties of skeptical, realist, and nominalist semiotic theory derived from Locke contribute to her persistent doubt and fragile faith in language. In a reading of several of Dickinson’s poems reflecting upon the composition process, I demonstrate both the presence of these rhetorical theories and their consequences in repeatedly staged crises of reference and articulation. This chapter lays the groundwork for subsequent chapters by depicting Dickinson’s poetics as evolving out of conflicts in a particular philosophical milieu.

This chapter focuses on the archival documents relevant to a study of McCarthy’s works completed in the 1970s: the novels Child of God and Suttree, and the teleplay The Gardener’s Son. It surveys the collections of correspondence available for these years, but concentrates primarily on McCarthy’s typescripts, identifying the relationships among the key drafts and highlighting some of the insights to be gained from the archives about the genesis, composition, revisions, and editing of these works. It shows how Child of God took its genesis from the second draft stage of Outer Dark when McCarthy repurposed material from one book for the other. For The Gardener’s Son, it surveys the documents available in the papers of McCarthy, film director Richard Pearce, and the Ecco Press Records, and outlines the changes which McCarthy made in the teleplay between its second draft and the shooting script. The Suttree section concentrates on material deleted from the novel before publication, either on McCarthy’s initiative or in response to his editor’s plea for compression. It argues that the deleted scenes saved by McCarthy in a separate folder focus primarily on the transformation of oral to literary narratives and emphasize Suttree as a writer in the making.

This chapter surveys currently available archives of drafts and correspondence relevant to a study of the works McCarthy wrote wholly or in part during his Tennessee years. It suggests broad guidelines for doing archival research on McCarthy before focusing on his first two novels, The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, for which the most important archives are McCarthy’s papers and those of Random House editor Albert Erskine. For this period we currently have few letters with correspondents other than McCarthy’s editors; but the archives provide a rich introduction to his working practices. They offer important glimpses of McCarthy’s early sense of confidence about his writing, his aesthetic aims and principles, and his developing relationship with Erskine, who edited his novels for twenty years. The chapter describes the relationships among the key drafts and highlights some of the insights to be gained from the archives about the genesis, composition, revisions, and editing of these works. McCarthy’s revisions of The Orchard Keeper, first for Lawrence Bensky and then for Erskine, are especially revealing of his approach to revising for another reader. The first and early drafts of Outer Dark provide rare insights into McCarthy’s compositional strategies and practices.