Eva Marie Håland focuses on the field of literary sociolinguistics as she approaches the testy and as yet unsolved problem for Arabic about the nature of language in literary works, raising the issue of complex discourse coherence relations when two (or more) distinct variants are used. The long-held taboo on encoding vernacular Arabic in writing has seen its hold gradually diminish over time, especially during the last half-century, with rapidly accelerating changes in authentic dialogue and first-person narrative. Håland examines the shifting formulas and standards for vernacular writing and orthography, including blending, codeswitching, and hierarchies of registers used for different purposes, such as parodic stylization.

Mark Goble uses the concept of convergence to explore the implications of formal and temporal compression, economy, and slowness in an age of unprecedented expansion and speedup. Richard McGuire’s Here presents an extreme example of spatial restriction and temporal expansion, while novels by Ruth Ozeki, Richard Powers, and William Gibson juxtapose ecological, scientific, technological, and theological timespans to human ones in ways that echo postmodern and science fiction precursors, but with very different aims and warnings in mind for denizens of the Anthropocene.

Tacitus’ Germania is notable for its absences: lacking a preface and programmatic statements, and being the only ethnographic monograph to have survived from Greco-Roman antiquity, readers have often leapt to fill in its perceived blanks. This chapter aims at redressing the effects of overdetermined readings by interpreting the text’s absences as significant in their own right.

This chapter examines how a variety of twentieth-century popular forms – circus, Las Vegas spectacles, the modern pop/rock concert, living history museums, and theme parks – created new languages of performance and expanded the realm, scale, and scope of spectacle by borrowing and reshaping past forms and methodologies. These new languages of popular entertainment performance engage most directly with threads of technology, narrative, authenticity, and audience engagement. These threads in turn come to characterize the popular and influence contemporary traditional theatre practice, both nationally and internationally.

In the first chapter, I explore the relationship between narrative and identity. More precisely, in this chapter, I argue (i) that narratives construct and give unity to individual and collective identities; (ii) that modern law, understood as part of modern culture and not as its consequence, constructs a narrative that has contributed to the creation of the modern subject – a narrative that is built around the conceptual opposition "subject of law/legal barbarian"; and (iii) that comparative law has played a central role in the formation of this conceptual opposition. Comparative law has been fundamental for forming the legal “self” and "other" of modernity.

Chapter 1 looks at the range of figurative language types that can be found in advertising, discusses how and why they are used creatively and reports findings from studies that have explored the relative advantages of different combinations of metaphor and metonymy. It introduces key concepts such as metaphor, hyperbole, understatement, metonymy, and illustrates how they work alone and in combination in effective advertising. The chapter then explores ways of exploiting the creative potential of figurative messaging. These include the use of personification, shock tactics, anaphoric reference, innuendo, and narrative structure. Finally, it shows how figurative language can be used effectively in advertisements to convey humour and irony.

Chapter 3 explores how and under what conditions consumers interact with figurative language in advertising and respond to it on a deeper, more emotional level. It shows how metaphor and metonymy can be used in emotional, powerful and memorable ways that encourage consumers to ‘interact’ with the narrative, thus provoking deeper and more emotional bonds with the product or brand. It shows how metaphor has the potential to be ‘experienced’ rather than simply encountered, and outlines the factors that are most likely to lead to this. Four campaigns are analysed, each of which was a Grand Prix winner at the Cannes Lions Festival in 2019. The analysis shows how they harness and maximise the experiential potential of metaphor, thus increasing the effectiveness of the campaign. Each of these campaigns illustrates a different way in which the experiential nature of metaphor and metonymy can be enhanced in order to maximise the appeal of an advertising campaign, convey the personality and values of a brand, and build the relationship that it has with consumers. The chapter also analyses another successful campaign, the 2019 Christmas campaign that was developed by John Lewis and Partners and Waitrose and Partners in the UK, and shows how this campaign combines metaphor and metonymy with humour and dramatic irony in order to maximise interactivity and promote feelings of brand ownership. To sum up, the chapter considers the complex and sophisticated ways in which advertisers employ figurative messaging to involve the viewer in a campaign. The campaigns considered are dynamic and interactive, with some of the more experiential campaigns inviting the viewer to ‘act out’ the metaphor.

Over a span of a millennium or more, Maya scribes and sculptors in the Maya lowlands used a writing system notable for its formal complexity and close links to imagery. At times, in so-called full-figure writing, glyphic elaboration erupts into a welter of massed bodies, imparting a misleading impression of narrative pictures. Wit and fun seem to abound, along with hints of an exuberant, scribal personality behind certain inscriptions. The stress on physicality ‒ things with interiors, exteriors, and defining edges in between ‒ is thoroughgoing. Efficiencies of graphic presentation lead logically to a design choice, whether to show a full thing-in-the-world, or to abbreviate that display by exhibiting a recognizable feature. As a deliberate category error ‒ is it picture, is it text? ‒ full-figure signs heighten the pleasure of being puzzled. They build in part on the cognitive frissons of the Stroop Effect, in which one set of information collides with another. The pictorial interaction of such signs ranges along one of two extremes: sociable contact that is decorous, restrained, respectful, and an indecorous, emotive striving that might lead to uncertain outcomes. In the most extreme cases, Maya writing oscillates between controllability and a bare containment of feral will in the glyphs.

In this chapter, we consider how youth make sense of their own retaliatory goals and actions in the aftermath of being harmed, and we elaborate on the implications of their meaning-making for processes of moral development and behavior. We begin by describing how youths’ experiences of revenge are distinct from other forms of harmdoing, and how these unique features of revenge may inform the meanings that they construct from their retaliatory desires and actions. Next, we describe age-related changes in these constructive processes, and discuss how youths’ histories of interactions in their social milieu may undergird their constructions of meaning about revenge. We conclude by articulating implications of our analyses for intervening with children and adolescents surrounding issues of revenge.

Desiring vengeance against those that hurt us is deeply human; justice systems are one means by which those desires can be contained and addressed in ways that avoid cycles of revenge. However, such systems require that people have trust in them. We begin with the relationship between institutional trust and the reduction of vengefulness. We then consider how youth develop their sense of institutional trust, with a particular emphasis on school justice systems in the K-12 context. We propose that a narrative approach to institutional trust might complement existing work, and outline strengths of that approach. We contrast retributive disciplinary and restorative justice systems in schools and consider how each of these systems looks from a narrative lens. Finally, we make recommendations for future research and practice based on ways that institutional trust, narrative, and school-based approaches to justice and discipline may reduce vengeful behavior and promote youths’ development.

Focus on multimodality looks beyond spoken and written language to how people communicate about their religious experiences using other resources, like gesture, showing how insights can be gleaned about how people think and talk about their experiences by specifically looking at how they gesture.

Shows how narrative approaches and storytelling within communities can be an important way of tracing how community and individual identity are tied to interaction around sacred texts and rituals, even in informal settings.

Drawing attention to the Anthropocene as both proposed geological epoch and discourse about the Earth’s future, the Introduction examines the Anthropocene’s challenge to the value of literature and literary criticism and the opportunity it offers to reinvigorate both. It works from and summarises the chapters in the book while highlighting arguments and perspectives from Anthropocene studies in literature and environmental humanities. Citing diverse writers, it argues that literature can deploy its unique practices (narrative, poetics, etc.) and faculty for imagining the future towards an understanding of humans’ interconnection with the Earth that the Anthropocene demands; and that it can best do so by adapting and evolving those practices towards sharing divergent experiences (e.g. stories of people and species disseminated online) and, via (say) experimental poetry or elongated narrative, relating human beings to exponentially vaster scales: deep history, Earth, the distant future. The Introduction concludes with a case study of Chile which underlines literature's and culture’s value in mediating the complex social, cultural and ontological questions that the Anthropocene poses.