Despite some policy gains and expanded civil liberties, sexual minorities in South Korea face challenges from both conservatives and liberals. While anti-LGBTI conservatives seek to block equal rights and antidiscrimination laws, many liberal politicians have been reluctant to embrace sexual minority rights as fundamental human rights. In many instances, they portray sexual minority rights as premature, rather than permanently impossible, asserting that it is “not yet” the right time in Korea. This chapter discusses early LGBTI mobilization in the 1990s in three parts: the solidarity politics cultivated with labor and emerging human rights activism against state violence and national security surveillance; the untimely deaths of LGBTI activists; and so-called youth protection policies that deferred freedom and empowerment for LGBTI youth. This discussion is paired with an analysis of how LGBTI rights activism fared during and after the Candlelight Protests in 2016–17 in what I call a “politics of postponement.”

For intellectuals of the re-conquest generation, Prokopios became a helpful guide to the city they had lost and regained. George Pachymeres (1242–ca. 1308), a highly placed court historian, engaged in an intertextual dialogue with the lengthy account of the horseman written by Prokopios. Pachymeres set out to write an exemplary ekphrasis that would outperform Prokopios in vivid explication of Justinian’s monument. The narrative structure follows Prokopios, but emphasizes different points. Pachymeres created a narrative contrast between the Constantinople of his own days and the glorious Constantinople of earlier times by focusing on the horseman – the tangible imperial link that threaded together two eras. The narrative offered by Pachymeres provides a lens through which we can behold the experience of an intellectual returning from exile and a learned observer examining a monument of a glorious past. His extended description of the monument sought to reconstruct its creator’s reasoning by using his own powers of observation, thus addressing a failure of Prokopios. Pachymeres can therefore be considered an eager, early pioneer of the fertile terrain that is now known as "late antique studies."

Music haunts Seamus Heaney’s poetry and criticism. The word music and its siblings – song, chorus, rhythm, note, etc. – appear throughout his work. Again and again, Heaney urges us to pay attention to words, to feel how they sound, to believe what we hear. The textbook distinction between sound and sense does little to elucidate Heaney’s poetry, where so often the sense is the sound, and vice versa: Gweebara, omphalos, rasp, nick, squelch. What gives music such force in Heaney’s work is its ability to coordinate a range of concerns. It troubles the primarily discursive function of language; it posits the body as an instrument of knowing; and it summons the powerful figure of Irish folk tradition. In short, music allows Heaney to reckon both with what it means to be a lyric poet, and what it means to be an Irish poet.

The Conclusion and Epilogue gesture toward the listed dynamics of counting and materialization in later texts through the brief examples of the Parian Marble and Lindian Chronicle. These monumental inscribed text-objects can be understood as literal transformations of cultural value into list form, extreme inventories untethered from their contents.

Chapter 6 examines aspects of the reception of catalogue in early Hellenistic poetry, focusing on Callimachus and Hermesianax. These poets, I argue, exploit catalogue as a non-mimetic form, using it to defy traditional ways of counting, and traditional orderings and boundaries of space and time. In their hands, the catalogue poem becomes a locus of disorder and fantasy.

Between 1958 and 2016, the French Caribbean novel is resoundingly about the French Caribbean, less invested in dislocation and displacement—a number of novels of the 1960s and 1970s do focus on the alienation of exiled female protagonists in Africa and France—than in grounding, naming, reclaiming, bringing home. This foregrounding of the local acquired particular political urgency in the wake of departmentalisation (1946), which sparked a process of decreolisation that was accelerated through the French education system and media in subsequent decades. The urge to explore and validate home ground, and to preserve and celebrate Creole memory, becomes more explicit from the late 1980s, and reaches its fullest articulation in the Eloge de la créolité (1989). Despite accusations of nostalgia, even very contemporary novels look to the past, often celebrating a waning Creole culture. That such novels are usually set after Abolition (1848), and that so few novels place slavery front and centre of the narrative, does not, however, mean that the story of slavery is ignored, marginalised or irrelevant. The discontinuity between the overwhelming extra-literary presence of slavery (in interviews with novelists, and in their cultural/media work), and its relative diegetic absence, is more apparent than real: almost all Antillean fiction is haunted by this absent-presence, and can only be fully understood through it.

Reversing the familiar nostrum that religion – with its omniscient omnipotent onto-theological God - is the buttress of ethics and of all things of value; Levinas follows Kant’s enlightened claim that ethics is the real truth of religion, that the imperatives of kindness (“love thy neighbor”) and of social justice are religions highest teaching, the very essence of holiness, religion for adults. The Akedah is thus a test as much of God’s justice as of Abraham’s faith. Rituals, holidays, traditions, halakha, sacred texts, Talmudic learning, and so on, retain their worth as service to kindness and justice, else, taken sacramentally, they devolve into superstition and fanaticism.

The first part of the introduction explores how historians and literary scholars have approached early modern memory and sketches the trajectory of recent work on the memory of the English and European Reformations. It then examines the ways in which the religious revolution transformed the memorial culture it inherited from the medieval past and the manner in which it engendered new strategies of remembering and forgetting, commemoration and amnesia. The second section explains the architecture and structure of the volume, which is divided into four parts (1) Events and Temporalities; (2) Objects and Places (3) Lives and Afterlives; (4) Bodies and Rituals. It probes the temporal; spatial and material; biographical; and ceremonial and corporeal dimensions of the memory of the English Reformation, establishing a series of conceptual frameworks for the essays that follow. The Reformation is reconceptualised less as a unitary moment of rupture than as ongoing struggle to reconfigure the nation’s ecclesiastical and cultural heritage and to accommodate the unruly legacy of the past. A prolonged development involving impulses towards both historical preservation and oblivion, it continues to be refought in memory and the imagination.

Even though for heuristic purposes we may separate space and time as distinctive categories for analysis, their implications can never be fully worked out individually, but only in the manner by which they are integrated into the entire magical realist textual apparatus of which they are a part. Thus, even though the focus of this essay will be predominantly on questions of space–time, I shall be following the constitution of space–time in direct relation to other aspects and dimensions of magical realist textuality while simultaneously returning to this category as the primary nexus of interpretation. While a range of texts will be referenced for this exercise, the significance of different modalities and configurations of space–time for grasping the relationship between indexicality, iconicity and a putative real world will be focused on, primarily using Robert Kroetsch’s What the Crow Said and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, two texts that illustrate the magical realist juxtaposition of different ontologies and the leakages that take place between such domains.

This chapter examines the post-Reformation afterlives of churchyard, wayside and market crosses. It explores how they were implicated in the Protestant war against idols alongside the manner in which many were recycled for alternative purposes, probing the new layers of meaning they acquired as they were modified and the contested legacies they left to the generations that inherited them. Particular attention is paid to crosses upon whose decapitated pedestals subsequently became the base for sundials. It argues that crosses converted into timekeepers not merely illuminate the interconnections between memory and materiality, space and temporality, in post-Reformation culture. They also offer insight into the evolving concept of the ‘monument’ itself. They afford a glimpse of the process by which things designed to provoke remembrance became things worthy of preservation as historic artefacts themselves. They became signposts to a disappearing past that had to be fossilised lest it be lost.

In Aristotle’s Physics we find for the first time motion and speed implicitly measured in terms of time and distance covered, as the discussion of book VI, chapter 2 shows. Aristotle’s explicit account of measurement, however, which he gives in Metaphysics Iota and with which this chapter starts, understands measure not only as homogeneous with the measurand, but also as one-dimensional only. Accordingly, the explicit measure of motion is simply time in the Physics, as we see from examining Aristotle’s understanding of time as the measure and the number of motion. For a full account of motion and speed and a complete response to Zeno’s challenge, however, a complex measure is needed, one that takes account of both time taken and distance covered. The chapter shows that this is exactly what Aristotle implicitly develops in his Physics, when he compares motions of different speed and responds to Zeno’s paradoxes of motion. But it is not what he can accommodate in his theory of measurement.

Chapter 6 examines Plato’s introduction of mathematical structures in order to explain the natural world. It contrasts his ‘mathematical approach’ to nature with that of the Pythagoreans, and shows how his use of mathematics enables Plato to make motion intelligible in itself to a certain degree. For this, the idea of measuring motion in temporal terms is crucial. However, Plato’s treatment of measurement in the Timaeus does not include measuring the distance covered by a motion. And Plato’s treatment of time and space (the receptacle) as entities of fundamentally different status, taking time to be intelligible in a way in which space is not, prevents him from connecting time and space in an account of speed. It is shown that Plato instead reduces speed to the time a motion takes. The chapter finishes by spelling out the problematic consequences of this reduction – that it only allows for restricted comparability of different motions and that in certain cases it can lead into inconsistencies.

Confronts the synchronic model of time which underpins Quintus’ whole interval poetics and approach to Homer. Analyses the key narrative features of time in the poem: pacing, counterfactuals, anachronies and motifs of closure. Proposes that Quintus draws on the two different narrative forms offered by the Iliad and Odyssey and radically recombines them into one. Given the political dimensions attached to these forms, the chapter ultimately suggests the ideological implications of this technique. By merging teleological and open narratives, Quintus creates a positive reading of the ‘inevitability’ and ‘continuity’ associated with the advance of empire, celebrating for imperial Greece the open-ended potential of the closed Homeric text.

This chapter examines how Calcidius sees the role of time in the universe; he posits an eternally existing world which owes its order to an atemporal divine cause.

In the revenge tragedies of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, the negotiation between the prodigal urge to act and, conversely, the necessity of patiently resisting action, is central to the presentation of the gendered identities of revenging characters and to the theatrical experience itself. In this chapter, I develop and complicate the ideas and arguments about patience and prodigality explored in Chapters 1 and 2 by analysing a number of revenge tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy (1585-89), Titus Andronicus (1590-92), Antonio’s Revenge (1600-1), The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), Othello (1603-4), The Atheist’s Tragedy (1607-11), The Duchess of Malfi (1612-14) and The Changeling (1622) in different ways draw attention to both the patience and prodigality of the revenger. This chapter argues that male revengers are authorised whether they achieve vengeance (thus asserting their masculine authority and carrying out the filial duty which upholds patriarchal norms) or whether they delay revenge (and in doing so express a degree of Christian piety). Female revengers, on the other hand, seem to be denigrated whether they act to revenge (exposing themselves to accusations of sexual impropriety) or delay vengeance (therefore establishing their ineffectiveness and cruelty).