The manuscript of collected verse and prose poems Bolaño began assembling in 1993 under the title “Fragmentos de la Universidad Desconocida,” published posthumously in 2007 as The Unknown University, marks a pivotal moment in his career. Bringing to a close his lifelong aspiration to gain recognition primarily as a poet, its three-part construction, with Antwerp at its center (recycled and retitled as People Going Away), signals a decisive transition and reorientation of Bolaño’s writing priorities over the course of his final decade. Positioning as “one of the wings / of the Unknown University!”–but only one–the verse poetry he had loved all his life but come to find as limiting as Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud had found it to be a century-and-a-half earlier, The Unknown University sets the stage for one of the most productive decades any writer has known. Following quite logically on the farewell to poetry as verse that is The Unknown University, Bolaño published only three years later, in 1996, the breakthrough year of his career, the condensed, prose-poetic fiction of Nazi Literature of the Americas and the novel of poetic apprenticeship this is in fundamental respects both its companion text and its sequel, Distant Star.

The manuscript of collected verse and prose poems Bolaño began assembling in 1993 under the title “Fragmentos de la Universidad Desconocida,” published posthumously in 2007 as The Unknown University, marks a pivotal moment in his career. Bringing to a close his lifelong aspiration to gain recognition primarily as a poet, its three-part construction, with Antwerp at its center (recycled and retitled as People Going Away), signals a decisive transition and reorientation of Bolaño’s writing priorities over the course of his final decade. Positioning as “one of the wings / of the Unknown University!”–but only one–the verse poetry he had loved all his life but come to find as limiting as Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud had found it to be a century-and-a-half earlier, The Unknown University sets the stage for one of the most productive decades any writer has known. Following quite logically on the farewell to poetry as verse that is The Unknown University, Bolaño published only three years later, in 1996, the breakthrough year of his career, the condensed, prose-poetic fiction of Nazi Literature of the Americas and the novel of poetic apprenticeship this is in fundamental respects both its companion text and its sequel, Distant Star.

From what he called his first “novel,” Antwerp–a numbered sequence of fifty-six discrete, titled prose poems, more disjunctive and modular than narrative and linear–through the posthumously published 2666 and Woes of the True Policeman, Bolaño explores more pervasively than any other concern over the course of his career what we may call narratives of poetic and novelistic apprenticeship. As such prose-poetic, literary-historical interventions as his “A Stroll through Literature” and “Literature + Illness = Illness” attest, he consistently inquires into the choices aspiring young writers face as they are drawn into what Franco Moretti has called the “slaughterhouse,” what Bolaño himself called the “minefield,” of poetry, of fiction, of literature. To the extent that poetry pursues self-isolating strategies, approaches that constrain and contain it in misguided attempts to protect a certain “poetic,” or “lyric,” identity, his work suggests, poetry risks finding itself increasingly marginalized in relation to the novel’s more inclusive dialogical, heterglossic capacities. Poetry’s greatest hope, what Bolaño calls its particular “non-power” (“no-poder”), thus continues to lie paradoxically in its increasing openness to other discourses, its ability to embrace a certain non-identity, the politics of genre opening onto the political in the broadest, most inclusive sense.

Begun in the late 1980s, but appearing only in 2011, a year after The Third Reich and seven years after the monumental 2666, Bolaño’s third posthumously published novel, Woes of the True Policeman, pivots decisively from the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century to a pronounced post-Cold War emphasis on questions of identity. Reframing Bolaño’s investigation of what counts, and what doesn’t, as poetry, as an inquiry into the elaboration of literary taxonomies and the aesthetics and politics of their particular ways of making visible, it orients its concerns with genre, gender, sexuality, and identity after “The Fall of the Berlin Wall” (the title of its opening chapter) toward a profound questioning of what progress we may claim to have made in negotiating conceptual, epistemological, ideological binaries. Through its central characters, the Chilean, Spanish, Mexican literature professor Óscar Amalfitano (who appears in 2666 as professor of philosophy), Amalfitano’s former lover, the poet turned novelist Juan Padilla, and the writer J.M.G. Arcimboldi (2666’s Benno von Archimboldi), Bolaño explores the degree to which, post -1989, post-9/11, in reimagining poetry, the novel, history, literary history, ideology, and politics, we may find it possible to develop a poetics of apposition rather than opposition.

Begun in the late 1980s, but appearing only in 2011, a year after The Third Reich and seven years after the monumental 2666, Bolaño’s third posthumously published novel, Woes of the True Policeman, pivots decisively from the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century to a pronounced post-Cold War emphasis on questions of identity. Reframing Bolaño’s investigation of what counts, and what doesn’t, as poetry, as an inquiry into the elaboration of literary taxonomies and the aesthetics and politics of their particular ways of making visible, it orients its concerns with genre, gender, sexuality, and identity after “The Fall of the Berlin Wall” (the title of its opening chapter) toward a profound questioning of what progress we may claim to have made in negotiating conceptual, epistemological, ideological binaries. Through its central characters, the Chilean, Spanish, Mexican literature professor Óscar Amalfitano (who appears in 2666 as professor of philosophy), Amalfitano’s former lover, the poet turned novelist Juan Padilla, and the writer J.M.G. Arcimboldi (2666’s Benno von Archimboldi), Bolaño explores the degree to which, post -1989, post-9/11, in reimagining poetry, the novel, history, literary history, ideology, and politics, we may find it possible to develop a poetics of apposition rather than opposition.

Sentimentalism in eighteenth-century Scottish literature reflected the ideas of moral philosophers like Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith, who argued that our sense of morality has its origins in feelings aroused by impressions conveyed by the senses. The influence of Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator, an imaginary witness and judge of human interactions, is evident in novels by Henry Mackenzie and Tobias Smollett, whose characters’ emotional responses to scenes of suffering are described in great detail. In theatre, John Homes’ Douglas was deemed a success by the amount of tears shed by the audience, while Joanna Baillie’s plays dramatised moral sentiments by illustrating particular vices and virtues. Macpherson’s Ossianic poems became an international sensation through their nostalgic sentimentalism, which depicted the pure and noble virtues of a bygone era. Sentimentalism in the poetry of Robert Burns celebrates both individual subjectivity and common humanity through his treatment of universal themes like love and nature. Unlike the Romantic movement that would follow it, which tended to privilege individual autonomy and subjectivity over sociability, sentimentalism in Scottish literature depicted individuals as social beings whose sensibility was stimulated and defined by their interactions with others.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf, was instantly enthralled.

During his lifetime, Brahms witnessed a veritable explosion in biographical writing and related publications of letters, memoirs and diaries. The monumental Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (1875–1912) was edited by Rochus von Liliencron (1820–1912), a personal acquaintance of his; a comparable project in Great Britain was the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900). Significant biographies of famous Austro-German composers also appeared in those years, often written by Brahms’s friends: Otto Jahn’s Mozart (1856–9), Friedrich Chrysander’s Handel (1858–67), Philipp Spitta’s Bach (1873–80) and Carl Ferdinand Pohl’s Haydn (1875–82). But one might also think of the biography of Beethoven (1866–79) by the American Alexander Wheelock Thayer, a project which was taken up in German by Hermann Deiters, Jahn’s pupil and Brahms’s colleague and contemporary. It was Deiters who in 1880 wrote the first book-length biography of Brahms, when the composer still had seventeen years to live.

This chapter outlines the emergence of climate fiction and its key modes. It pays particular attention to the extent to which climate fiction has worked within the established conventions of literary realism, meeting the many representational challenges mounted by climate change. While it considers the extent to which realism is able to render the abstract and intangible phenomenon of climate change visible, it argues that there is also a significant body of writing on the subject which turns to alternative forms and narrative strategies in the effort to represent climate change, and manages to overcome some of the limitations of realism. In other words, where climate fiction meets the challenges of representing climate change, it has the potential to provide a space in which to address the Anthropocene’s emotional, ethical, and practical concerns.

This chapter outlines the emergence of climate fiction and its key modes. It pays particular attention to the extent to which climate fiction has worked within the established conventions of literary realism, meeting the many representational challenges mounted by climate change. While it considers the extent to which realism is able to render the abstract and intangible phenomenon of climate change visible, it argues that there is also a significant body of writing on the subject which turns to alternative forms and narrative strategies in the effort to represent climate change, and manages to overcome some of the limitations of realism. In other words, where climate fiction meets the challenges of representing climate change, it has the potential to provide a space in which to address the Anthropocene’s emotional, ethical, and practical concerns.