Robin Peel explains the resonance of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in The Bell Jar. As the event fades into history, its extraordinary impact on 1950s American psychology can easily be forgotten. The electrocution of the Rosenbergs for espionage is important to Plath’s novel because of the resonance of their Jewishness, insider/outsider status and apparent vindication of Cold War paranoia. In addition, Peel reads the event from a retrospective and transatlantic perspective. The thirty year old adult woman writing in the persona of senior student mirrors the simultaneous political engagement and distancing that has troubled so many readers.

Richard Kerridge describes the literary, cultural and scientific context of Plath’s interest in wild animals, landscape, climate and pollution. The letters and journals show that this interest was intense, but also that it was not scientific or systematic, even in a rudimentary way. Plath’s strategy was to preserve the dramatic immediacy of unexpected encounters with wildlife, rather than frame those encounters with scientific information. Nevertheless, an emergent ecological consciousness and environmental concern are evident in her writing. Kerridge provides the historical and scientific background for this concern, by outlining the major conceptual shifts that were taking place in ecological science, the recent history of wild nature in literature, and some of the changing popular attitudes in Britain and the USA.

Contemporary readers tend to view The Bell Jar through a post-feminist lens. Kate Harding situates the novel within a cultural and historical moment that we too readily lose sight of. Harding reads the novel in the context of 1950s discourses in which the gendered roles that Esther resists are enforced by sexual violence. Drawing on mid-twentieth century rape laws, Harding reveals the disconnect between Esther’s view of events and the contemporary readers’. Where the latter will see acquaintance rape and female victimisation, the former will see sexual availability and victim-blaming. In her brave and original response to The Bell Jar, Harding brings to light the pervasive rape culture that underpins Esther’ss story, and reveals the importance of this underpinning to our understanding of the novel.

The literary critic Cornelia Pearsall reveals Plath’s life-long preoccupation with war, showing us how it permeates Plath’ss correspondence and filters into her poetry and prose, gaining in focus and momentum towards the end of her writing life. Pearsall establishes yet another crucial angle through which we can read Plath’s deliberately outward looking political and historical engagement, as opposed to any narrow view of merely personal and biographical concerns.

This chapter begins by examining Muslims’ military, commercial, and intellectual achievements between the seventh and eleventh centuries. At that time, most of Islamic scholars (ulema) were funded by commerce, while only a few of them served the state. The merchants flourished as an influential class. The chapter goes on to analyze the beginning of the intellectual and economic stagnation in Muslim lands in the eleventh century. It explains how, gradually, the ulema became a state-servant class and the military state came to dominate the economy. The alliance between the ulema and the military state diminished the influence of philosophers and merchants. This changing distribution of authority led to the long-term stagnation, if not the decline, of Muslim intellectual and economic life. This gradual process began in the eleventh century and continued for centuries, as subsequent chapters elaborate.

Phillip Tobias once dated the earliest Bushmen to about 40,000 years ago, though recent findings at several sites trace the origin of symbolic culture in southern Africa to more than twice that figure. What this means in terms of either the origins of language or the relation between the earliest symbolism and living populations is, of course, open to debate. A clear solution to such a debate would also dissolve any difference between what in southern Africa are known as the Middle Stone Age and the Later Stone Age. Archaeological findings such as those of early rock art give a better clue to Bushman prehistory. These can be dated to at least 25,500 BCE, although again the connection with people called ‘Bushmen’ today is far from certain. This chapter will explore these and other issues, as well outline the discoveries of contemporary archaeology. The latter include Iron Age migrations into Bushman territories and possible connections with hunter-gatherer groups in eastern Africa.

This introduction begins with a survey of eighteenth-century Irish theatre practitioners and argues that their contribution was considerable and sustained by ethnic support networks. Theatre has often been elided from discussions of Enlightenment, but the Irish example shows how the theatre can be a powerful agent of Enlightenment. Theatre was a forum within which the Irish had tremendous success and which they used to represent Irish civility during a period when British audiences were more receptive to such ideas. The 1740s in particular, fuelled by patriot resentment after the Declaratory Act, revisionist historiography and Irish patriot activity in Ireland and England, saw the emergence of a robust and assertive theatrical Enlightenment, embodied in and symbolized by the life and career of Charles Macklin.

This chapter begins by examining Muslims’ military, commercial, and intellectual achievements between the seventh and eleventh centuries. At that time, most of Islamic scholars (ulema) were funded by commerce, while only a few of them served the state. The merchants flourished as an influential class. The chapter goes on to analyze the beginning of the intellectual and economic stagnation in Muslim lands in the eleventh century. It explains how, gradually, the ulema became a state-servant class and the military state came to dominate the economy. The alliance between the ulema and the military state diminished the influence of philosophers and merchants. This changing distribution of authority led to the long-term stagnation, if not the decline, of Muslim intellectual and economic life. This gradual process began in the eleventh century and continued for centuries, as subsequent chapters elaborate.

This chapter calls into question a widely held historiographical perception that the failure of the Commune marked the end of a French revolutionary tradition inaugurated by the Revolution of 1789 and perpetuated by the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It reassesses the contexts in which the word ‘revolution’ was used and shows that this dominant interpretation conflicts with the actual writings of ex-Communards on the subject. Activists referred frequently to the events of the recent revolutionary past, but these references were not indicative of the desire to create a static and prescriptive ‘French revolutionary tradition’. Revolutionaries were preoccupied with placing events since 1789 within a longer and broader French genealogy in order to define revolution as a social movement rather than a political event. This was partly a response to moderate Republican efforts to claim and historicise the French Revolution after 1871, but was not solely a product of circumstances. Using the work of Louis Auguste Blanqui, I demonstrate that neutrality regarding the Revolution (1789 and the more radical 1793) had been an element of revolutionary thought since the 1850s. Consequently, I also suggest that the intellectual differences between revolutionaries and more moderate republicans during this period have been overstated.

This chapter calls into question a widely held historiographical perception that the failure of the Commune marked the end of a French revolutionary tradition inaugurated by the Revolution of 1789 and perpetuated by the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It reassesses the contexts in which the word ‘revolution’ was used and shows that this dominant interpretation conflicts with the actual writings of ex-Communards on the subject. Activists referred frequently to the events of the recent revolutionary past, but these references were not indicative of the desire to create a static and prescriptive ‘French revolutionary tradition’. Revolutionaries were preoccupied with placing events since 1789 within a longer and broader French genealogy in order to define revolution as a social movement rather than a political event. This was partly a response to moderate Republican efforts to claim and historicise the French Revolution after 1871, but was not solely a product of circumstances. Using the work of Louis Auguste Blanqui, I demonstrate that neutrality regarding the Revolution (1789 and the more radical 1793) had been an element of revolutionary thought since the 1850s. Consequently, I also suggest that the intellectual differences between revolutionaries and more moderate republicans during this period have been overstated.

The stages of development identified in the text-critical chapters of this study are then put into chronological relationship with other texts of the period. This chapter presents an argument that the Arthaśāstra, which was probably originally called the Daṇḍanīti, was composed around the first century BCE and redacted by Kauṭilya around the third century CE. This allows us to trace the development of certain political concepts in the text, which is undertaken in the final three chapters.

This is not a collection of essays on Chaucer in the normal sense. Neither is it a ‘Companion’ or ‘Guide’ or ‘Handbook’ to Chaucer. It does not have the primary intention of providing readings of the texts of Chaucer (even though it contains much illuminating treatment of his works). It endeavours to be more lastingly helpful than that. Its key aim is to enhance the independence and critical capacities of modern readers of Chaucer by giving them a rich repertoire of contexts – historical and conceptual information and perspectives – through which to read, interpret and enjoy the primary text themselves with greater confidence and assurance.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.