The introduction sets out the rationale, objectives and scope of the project. The rationale is to explore ancient views about the criteria for a life at least barely worth living. In contrast to the more familiar themes of ancient ethics, particularly the account of a happy life or the morality of suicide, these views have been neglected in the scholarship, despite their potential relevance for modern philosophers working on related themes. The objective of this project is to offer an overview of ancient discussions about the life worth living from Socrates to Plotinus. These ancient discussions are introduced in the broader context of early Greek views about the value of human life in non-philosophical literature, as well as in the context of contemporary philosophical accounts of the life worth living.

Milton’s late poems suggest that the best way to represent the experience of modernity is to turn to and to reimagine the work of the Ancients—the modern paradox. This raises questions of periodization, and time. Milton is more “Renaissance” than “early modern,” at least in terms of how the early modern is usually understood, i.e., as a temporally delimited historical period after the medieval and before Enlightenment modernity. The Renaissance was modernizing in its appropriation of the Ancients. Milton’s late poems are obsessed with temporality—well, temporalities, plural, actually—since Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes narrate three different temporalities. Paradise Lost narrates the continual backwards and forwards of living in history—a present affected by the past, and by anticipatory imaginings of an as-yet unrealized future. Paradise Regained stays in the present, bringing readers along in a story that moves from a beginning to an end. In Samson Agonistes, Samson sees no future. The key subsequent literary development in verbally representing forms of modernity, the novel has a deep presentism which persists. Milton is received in a literary-critical tradition deeply affected by the novel’s focus on the present and on the synchronous life of the characters.

This chapter explores structural differences between the 1667 ten-book edition and the revised twelve-book version of 1674, not only to continue a reconsideration of Eve, but to revive attention to the implications of the formal properties of the revision, and to argue that this reformation formally embodies the narrative’s claims about how to adjust to modernity. The drama created by the final, reconfigured two books highlights how Adam and Eve and their relationship change and grow during the poem. At the end, the poem’s profound linguistic tensions are instantiated by Eve, while Adam’s reaction and the narrator’s description emphasize the pleasures of pluralistic readings. In short, the reformation of Paradise Lost rebalances the poem, by countering the scale of the consequences from the War in Heaven with a proportional rearrangement of the invocations. Its twelve-book shape mitigates against loss and creates a space to emphasize the continued growth of the two human characters, particularly Adam. Perhaps most importantly, the new, concluding pair of books provide a space of non-domination in which Eve can emerge and be recognized as the poet she is.

In the tensions between sight and sound, between the horizontal and the vertical, and between the narrative and the order of its telling, Paradise Lost hosts an expansive plurality to which each reader potentially contributes. What Milton’s epic offers to reading is central to the poem’s relationship to the experience of modernity. With a 1668 printing of the first, 10-book edition, Paradise Lost initiates a pattern for Milton’s late poems: prose prefaces in which Milton highlights how the poem is organized, and thus presumably ways the poems should be read. The story told in Paradise Lost seems to be simple in its familiarity: Satan rebels against God, comes to Earth, tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and then she offers the fruit to Adam, who also partakes, after which God sentences both of them to different curses, and banishes them out of Eden. In Milton’s telling, though, the story is at first ten then ultimately twelve books (and roughly 10,000 lines) long, and layered with opposed possibilities, often in the same sentences and lines. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Telemann’s complex relationship with the musical past encompassed a healthy respect for the works of previous generations (Lully, Corelli, and others), ambivalence about “ancient” music that was marked by impoverished melodies and contrapuntal excesses, and disdain for Ancients who rejected whatever was new. This chapter addresses yet another perspective, of a composer at pains to bring outmoded musical idioms into a meaningful dialogue with more modern ones. Two works in particular, church cantatas that Telemann composed in Frankfurt am Main, demonstrate how such juxtapositions can serve as rhetorically powerful tools for communicating a theological message. Whereas Sehet an die Exempel der Alten (TVWV 1:1259) cleverly caricatures music of the mid-seventeenth century, the striking dialogue cantata Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe (TVWV 1:459) casts a doubting, disconsolate Christian as a musical Ancient and the consoling Jesus as a Modern, an opposition vividly highlighted by text, musical style, and instrumentation. That Telemann’s reminiscences of the musical past are not cut of a purely nostalgic or ironic cloth but instead offer a productive dialogue with the musical present – one articulating an enlightened awareness of the divide between historical and present-day consciousnesses – may be read as evidence of the composer‘s extraordinary capacity for aesthetic and theological reflection.

This epilogue concludes the volume with an investigation of the legacy of William the Conqueror and his age in public culture, international politics, media, and social memory.

This chapter connects Conrad’s delayed decoding with Russell’s logical atomism, arguing that what the latter sought to do for philosophy, the former attempted to do in literature. Both delayed decoding and logical atomism communicate elementary sense-impressions; they construct a truth hierarchy where the particular is above the abstract. The chapter analyses how the language use of each concept corresponds to a host of assumptions about how we experience reality and what constitutes truth, assumptions that aid in explaining their extraordinary friendship. The chapter continues by explicitly calling into question Ian Watt’s concept of delayed decoding using my category, “delayed miscoding.” The chapter contains a lengthy demonstration showing that the most quoted example used to illustrate this hallmark of Conrad scholarship is inconsistent. My reading is not an attempt to discard Watt’s delayed decoding but an attempt to show that there is a discrepancy between what it names and what it explains. Delayed decoding’s binary structure and bivalent logic are limited ways for analyzing a text that is paradigmatically ambiguous.

Chapter 1 examines the moralization of work and stigmatization of laziness in the works of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman moralists between the first and the second constitutional period (the 1870s to 1908). At the center of this chapter are Ottoman morality texts, a genre, yet to be fully explored, reconfigured in the nineteenth century. These texts articulated many emerging discourses and anxieties of the Ottoman reform period on a normative level. After an overview of the question of laziness in Ottoman thinking, attention is drawn to how a novel kind of knowledge was produced in the field of morality, expressing a new subjectivity in relation to modern citizenship; the normative nature of morality texts and the way these texts moralized, nationalized, and even Islamized productivity is then studied. Ottoman moralists identified certain beliefs and practices as handicaps for productivity and declared them un-Islamic and antithetical to progress. This chapter rethinks the construction of morality and Islamic knowledge in modern times, by examining deontological discourses on work that later produced the neologism of the “Islamic work ethic.”

Industrialization was the catalyst for the spread of urban modernity across China in the first half of the twentieth century, although most factories were in large coastal cities and the northeast in Manchuria. The Japanese invasion of 1937 forced the Nationalist government and millions of people to move west, and cities such as Chongqing and Kunming grew substantially. Cities were now connected via rail, road, telegraph, telephone, and air travel, and the urban system was reconfigured along these new communications networks. Chinese cities acquired commercial and industrial districts, new administrative zones, parks, and residential areas, while new building technology and architectural styles transformed urban skylines. Experiments in municipal governance came together in a suite of new laws passed after the Nationalist government came to power in 1927 that sought to impose order and standardization across the country, and urban plans were produced for many cities, although many never made it off the drawing board. No longer was American, European, or Japanese culture confined to coastal treaty ports. Teachers, doctors, engineers, shop girls, bank clerks, and factory workers across the country were all able to purchase global brands, watch films made in Hollywood or Shanghai, and listen to jazz in clubs.

This book is a history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had a dynamic imperial urban civilization. This consisted of a complex empire-wide urban system linking cities, towns, and villages. Although there was variation across the empire, there was a recognizable Chinese urban form, especially in imperial capitals. At the same time, cities were managed by a mixture of Chinese officials and organizations such as migrant associations. Finally, a vibrant urban culture developed that distinguished cities from the countryside that surrounded them. Then, over the past century, because of a number of historical forces, including industrialization and the emergence of governments committed to urbanization, this urban civilization was transformed into the world’s largest modern urban society. Indeed now, with some of the largest cities and most densely populated and networked cities in the world, China is shaping what it means to be a modern urban society. Like those throughout China’s history, these cities are connected to others around the world, and by highlighting these links, this book writes China into the history of how the world has become a modern urban society.

The present volume provides a wide-ranging history of the novel in French from the fourteenth century to the present, illuminating and offering readers routes through a varied landscape while comparison and connection making between writers, works and historical periods. It does so via accessible accounts of how novelists writing in French have responded to the diverse economic, socio-political, cultural-artistic and environmental factors that shaped the world in which they found themselves. The editor’s introduction outlines the existing scholarship and provides a summary account of the structuring and approach taken in the volume (a history of the novel in French, rather than of the French novel). It then gives an overview of the five sections into which the volume is divided: ‘Beginnings’; ‘The Eighteenth Century: Learning, Letters, Libertinage’; ‘After the Revolution: the novel in the long nineteenth century’; ‘From Naturalism to the nouveau roman’; and ‘Fictions of the Fifth Republic: from de Gaulle to the Internet Age’. Echoes, imbrications and cross-references across and between these sections serve as reminders of the artificiality of the cut-and-dried, linear periodizing approach of much literary history.

This chapter outlines the connections between African resistance to cultural imperialism during the colonial era, the call to “decolonize the mind” in the 1970s and 1980s, and, finally, debates about decolonizing development today. All of these movements have challenged the racial and cultural inequalities built into the development episteme. Decolonizing development entails much more than pointing out the legacies of the civilizing mission or colonialism in contemporary development discourses on Africa. Both Western and African cultures transformed over time, but what has not changed is the perception that the former is “modern” and the latter “traditional.” The false dichotomy between the “developed” West (or “the global north”) and the “less developed” or “developing” countries of Africa (as part of “the global south”) reifies colonial-era stereotypes and continues to fuel the development industry. Whether seeking to transform a “backward” custom or making decisions about expenditure, hierarchies of power are foundational to the development episteme. As long as Africans remain the targets of intervention rather than the policy makers or drivers of development, and as long as development remains an industry whose power base remains in the global north, efforts to decolonize development will fail to restructure the development episteme.

Chapter 1 addresses the debate about the stylistics of the new (muḥdath) Abbasid poets, with a particular focus on rhetorical figures (badīʿ). It establishes that there was a shift in paradigm from an old school of criticism (ninth–eleventh century), which based its evaluation of poetry on its truthfulness and naturalness (qualities associated with the idealized “classical style” of the pre-Islamic poets), to a new school of criticism (eleventh century onwards) based on an aesthetic of wonder. This new school, represented first and foremost by ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 1078), articulated the beauty of the kinds of rhetorical figures (badīʿ) that the muḥdath poets relished, especially hyperbolic and fantastic make-believe imagery, by adducing their ability to evoke wonder in the listener. By doing so, they shifted their judgment of poetry from a truth-based scale, to one that is based on an experience of wonder, which results from novelty, strangeness, and the unexpected that can exist in the poetic form regardless of the truth or falsehood of its content. The chapter argues that an aesthetic of wonder is inherent in the very structure of many of the rhetorical figures, including those identified by critics beyond al-Jurjānī, namely, al-Sakkākī, and al-Khaṭīb al-Qazwīnī.

The history of New York’s literature encompasses centuries where war, commerce, revolution, democracy, industry and immigration have shaped the city into a global metropolis. Therefore, it is a literature which not only addresses the experiences of those living within the city but the city’s relationship with the rest of the world. The city’s literature possesses a universal quality, as it serves to remind readers of the forces that shaped our lives and our identities. Written within the city’s novels, memoirs, poetry, periodicals and magazines are the myriad experiences and perspectives that chart the traumatic and triumphant processes that have formed our contemporary society. This study draws the connections between the work of authors and writers in the city and the wider world through examining movement. The prose, poetry and fiction that has emerged from the city is infused with this character that defined the modern age. This is a city built on movement; as such, it is a metropolis that evokes the changes that have made the modern world. This ensures that the narratives of this city move beyond the confines of Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island and tell a global story.

In keeping with the nature of the Cambridge Critical Concepts series, the introduction establishes decadence as a concept. We show how the concept emerges from a combination of etymology and history, and how decadence cuts across and calls into question traditional literary categories, such as genre and periodization. We articulate the relevance of decadence to recent literary interests, such as gender politics and queer theory. Finally, we explain the rationale for the organization of the volume as an effort to ‘scale up’ and reset the parameters of decadence as a concept; preview the individual contributions to the collection; and clarify the structure of the volume: the origins of the concept of decadence, its development through nineteenth-century fields, and its application to various twentieth-century disciplines and literary modalities. The introduction concludes with commentary on the contemporary resonance of decadence today.