Before developing my ideas further I must explain why I object to the common metaphysical picture behind standard scientific realism, which I call ‘correspondence realism’: the assumption that there is well-defined reality ‘out there’ with all its constituents existing mind-independently. This picture can be put under effective critical scrutiny if we disambiguate the notion of mind-independence. All entities that we can even think about are ‘mind-framed’ (characterized in terms of some concepts supplied by the mind), but real entities are not ‘mind-controlled (they do not do as we wish). The ‘fallacy of pre-figuration’ is to mistake the lack of mind-control as the lack of mind-framing. This fallacy is at the heart of the notion of correspondence between our theories and the mind-unframed ‘world’, and the purely extensional notion of reference according to which our words simply point to pre-figured realities. Such notions are produced through a metaphorical projection of the representation relation in real practices, in which correspondence holds among mind-framed entities. In standard realist discourse in the philosophy of science the fallacy of pre-figuration is reinforced by the faith that science does give us something resembling the ultimate true picture of reality, which must be free of mind-framing.

The introduction offers an original discussion of the emergence of Gaia, informed by the extant literature while centered on the letters exchanged in their working relationship, drawing new connections and insights from these previously unpublished materials. It highlights a range of themes that animate their conversations and the history of Gaia as a scientific and philosophical idea. The introduction treats the first encounter of Lovelock and Margulis; their individual careers and professional personae; material and social aspects of their collaboration; questions of authorship; the range of scientific disciplines necessary to Gaia's elaboration; matters of geography and institutions; the significance of the occasional disagreements between Lovelock and Margulis over how best to characterize Gaia; Gaia's reception within different disciplinary and social contexts, including evolutionary biology, Earth sciences, systems sciences, exo- and astrobiology, and a range of political and environmental cultures. The introduction concludes with a chronological outline of the correspondence.

The chapter explains the basic principles of linguistic change from a sociolinguistic variationist perspective. It begins with an explanation of the inextricable relationship between linguistic variation and change, and proceeds to demonstrate how language change can be observed, investigated, and explained. Sociolinguists can document and analyse language change using either the real-time method or the apparent-time construct; these methods and their advantages and pitfalls are explained and exemplified.

Britten and Pears regarded their relationship as a ‘marriage’ and described it as such as early as 1943. Although comfortable with using this term privately, they were aware of the legal prohibition and social stigma that prevented them from proclaiming their partnership openly. And yet throughout their nearly forty years together they made no immediate secret among their circle of friends and relatives about living their lives as a couple. As this essay suggests, theirs was a special case, in that they lived their relationship with relative openness among those who knew them. Works such as the Michelangelo Sonnets and Canticle I were a declaration of sorts about the nature of their relationship, although it was not until after the composer’s death that Pears commented overtly in an interview about their love for one another. A decade after the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the UK, and with social discussion on homosexuality widening, Pears believed that his and Britten’s marriage need no longer be regarded as a secret.

Ralph Ellison may well have been the last of the great letter-writers. Beginning in the early 1930s, with his first hand-written letters to his mother while he was at Tuskegee Institute, all the way until a few months before his death in 1994, Ellison maintained a voluminous correspondence with many of the most notable writers and intellectuals of the 20th century. Often his letters become small essays, where he works out some of his most subtle and far-reaching ideas about literature, politics, history, race, and his most cherished theme, the great promise and painful betrayals of America. In letters to Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren, Albert Murray, Stanley Hyman, Kenneth Burke, and Richard Wright, Ellison maps the terrain that he would explore in his luminous chapters, in Invisible Man, and especially in his unfinished epic of America, Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

This introduction provides an overview of the collection of thirteen chapters on the life and works of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). The editor compares the content and style of this volume with two earlier multiauthored collections of essays on Hildegard of Bingen (Voice of the Living Light and Brill’s A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen) and enumerates the range of publications, both in print and online, which necessitates an updated study. The volume is organized into three main sections: Hildegard’s life and monastic context, considering the education of women religious in medieval Germany; her writings and reputation, focusing on her visionary and theological output (Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum, and Liber divinorum operum), her extensive correspondence, her sermonizing, her scientific and medical texts, and the reception of her works in subsequent centuries; and finally her music, manuscripts, illuminations and scribes, engaging with the materiality of the transmission of Hildegard’s output. The author closes by discussing potential new areas of Hildegard research, brought to light in various chapters throughout the volume.

Elizabeth Bishop observed the central tensions in mid-century American poetics from a distance, which allowed her the space to resolve them in her own work in idiosyncratic and shifting ways. This chapter thus looks to her correspondence as an archive of an ad hoc poetic theory. There we see Bishop developing unique constellations of, first, the formality of accentual-syllabic verse and the flexibility of free verse and, second, a residual commitment to modernist impersonality and an emerging aesthetics of confessional disclosure. The chapter draws primarily on letters between Bishop and both Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton to advance its argument and offers readings of Bishop’s poems “Song for the Rainy Season” and “Poem” as evidence of their author’s unique engagement with mid-century poetics.

This chapter tells the story of the exponential growth of Bishop studies, from its beginnings in the late 1970s until the present day. The chapter posits that for a field of author-studies to flourish, it must establish: (1) published access to a substantial and representative body of the author’s work, (2) an extensive body of criticism, (3) access to archival materials, (4) a regularly updated bibliography, (5) one or more sound biographical studies, and (6) a compelling articulation of the author’s role in literary history. The chapter shows how these elements have interacted over the course of the past four decades. It lays particular stress upon the 1990s, which it describes as the “decisive decade” of Bishop studies. The chapter also shows how the posthumous publication of each new primary edition of Bishop’s poems, prose, and letters has expanded our understanding and influenced our readings of Bishop’s life and work.

Frederick Douglass’s correspondence emerges in the wake of his self-emancipation and occupies a singular place in nineteenth-century American letters. It is a body of work unprecedented in its scope and its capacity to provide an anchor to the networks of activism in which Douglass wielded such influence. It marks a turn in African American letters in which the epistolary is repurposed as a tool of emancipation and of radical archival practice. His correspondence mobilizes the letter as an instrument of emancipation, able to establish political community and map cartographies of freedom that challenged the limitations placed by the United States on African American autonomy. At the same time, his letters provide a glimpse behind the scenes of a life lived to a great extent in the public eye, confirming the importance of family and home as concrete realities, and of domains of intimacy normally kept out of historical sight.

If the scientific epistemology parallels Hebraic epistemology in any significant way, then the conceptual paradigms of truth and the mechanics of justification could – or, perhaps, should – follow suit. The Hebraic model of "truth" that emerges differs at key points from some, but not all, of our folk notions of truth today. Specifically, the true/false binary that funds current and popular models of justification appears to be too rigid a model for the Hebraic style. I examine a Hebraic notion of truth and justification in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Although I will put both truth and the logic of justification in conversation with contemporary ideas, I do so only to show both the kinship we share with biblical notions, and the critique offered from the biblical texts.

This chapter introduces and examines some concepts central to our traditional understanding of knowledge, such as truth, belief, and justification.

In “Correspondence and the Everyday Hemingway,” Verna Kale and Sandra Spanier examine what letters as opposed to literary biography reveal about a writer. As two guiding forces behind the Letters Project – the collaborative effort producing a multivolume scholarly edition of Hemingway’s correspondence, which published its first volume in 2011 and is not scheduled to conclude until 2043 – Kale and Spanier are in a unique position to assess how the correspondence’s availability has expanded our notions of quotidian Hemingway. As they note, there has always been an interest in Hemingway’s letters: as early as 1930, correspondents attempted to sell their letters from him to collectors to cash in on his fame. But his private correspondence wasn’t officially available until 1981 with Carlos Baker’s Selected Letters, a book that immediately impacted Hemingway scholarship. That volume, however, collects less than 10 percent of the 6,000 letters catalogued by the Hemingway Project and gives disproportional attention to 1922–1926 and 1952, somewhat distorting impressions of his life and career; nearly 85 percent of the material the Project will gather has never been published before.

Courtship behaviour varied not just across social class but also depended on individual inclination and disposition. There were agreed patterns of behaviour, particularly in middle-class society, that signalled to family, friends and the wider community that a couple were courting and the expectation was that the courtship would end in marriage. Not everyone observed or followed the rules of courtship, particularly around the issue of pre-marital sex. Courtships sometimes broke down and led to breach of promise to marry cases. While impossible to quantify, one of the facts to emerge from a study of breach of promise cases is the prevalence of sex as part of courtship. While the Presbyterian church authorities were tolerant, if not approving, of couples who consummated their relationship before marriage, the statistical evidence slowly emerging from scattered sources also indicates a significant number of pregnant Catholic brides. The single mother may have been shunned by society but there was less shame attached to the birth of children within seven or eight months of marriage. There is evidence in middle-class urban society of changing attitudes to courtship in the early decades of the twentieth century with more men and women anxious to make their own choice of spouse.