This introductory chapter examines the scope and range of wonder and the marvellous between Homer and the Hellenistic period, explores the significance of ancient conceptions of wonder in the modern literary critical tradition and outlines this book’s theoretical underpinnings and the scope and content of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter examines the significance of wonder in ancient conceptions of music, choral song and dance. The essential role of wonder in ancient religious thought as an effect which often accompanies epiphanic encounters between gods and humans and which naturally arises within the ritual space created by song performance is explored. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is examined as a case study in which the rich relationship between music, semata (signs) and thauma in the Greek imagination is particularly evident. This chapter also discusses the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the Odyssey and the story of Arion in Herodotus’ Histories.

The defining verbal representation of Justinian’s bronze horseman was created by Prokopios. His Buildings (I.ii, I.x.5) is a multivalent text, which deserves both a greater consideration and a historiographic rehabilitation. While on the surface Buildings appears to flatter the emperor, I argue that the deeper narrative reveals strong elements of figured speech and safe criticism. Buildings is ekphrastic in certain aspects of form, but not in overall substance. Formal conformity with the genre constitutes a veil for criticism. Focusing on a close analysis of his representation of Justinian’s equestrian monument, I argue that Prokopios indicts Justinian on the charges of gigantomania and obliteration of the past. The bronze horseman features twice in Buildings – within the otherwise coherent cluster of Justinian’s church-building, and as the headlining sculpture in the section dedicated to Constantinople’s non-ecclesiastical monuments. This exceptional return to the bronze horseman is thus both notable and deliberate. The equestrian monument is the only sculptural monument of Buildings that merited a substantive description beyond a list-like entry.

Chapter 5: This chapter situates the American artist Deke Weaver’s long-term project The Unreliable Bestiary within the ecological politics of the Anthropocene. Weaver aims to create a performance for every letter of the English alphabet, with each letter representing an endangered species or threatened habitat. The performances he has made to date – Monkey (2009), Elephant (2010), Wolf (2013), Bear (2016–17), and Tiger (2019) – address the looming threat of the sixth great extinction by pairing the most fantastic flights of the animalized imagination with the most astonishing facts discovered by animal science. Reactivating and reconfiguring the medieval bestiary in this way allows Weaver to braid together an epistemology derived from the ‘squishy science’ of performance with an affect he calls ‘plain old wonder’, producing a new theatrical grammar for being in and with extinction and a new ethical framework for encountering our remaining animal others.

Nussbaum’s capabilities approach harks back to ancient Greek phūsis at the origin of the philosophical tradition, but it is a form of environmental humanism developing Enlightenment values. This complexity is not without its tensions. Using the contradictions I find contained in Nussbaum’s commitment to wonder as a universally important ethical experience, I push her extension of moral regard for other species farther than it can currently go. Nussbaum has transformed the Enlightenment concept of dignity to include other forms of life. Her considered position is a form of biocentric individualism. Biocentric individualism is the view that individual lives as such have dignity. However, I will show that her outlook, grounded in wonder, presents insurmountable obstacles to her biocentric individualism. I resolve these by suggesting that moral individualism ought to be jettisoned when species are not morally individualized in their form of life. I motivate this argument through the risk of a mass extinction cascade, which characterizes our planetary ecological situation and poses a threat both to human development and the moral and ethical commitments of the capabilities approach. I propose one general criterion for reasonable institutions regarding this risk, surrounding it with a call for environmental humanism in political culture.

Wonder is a key emotion to Shakespeare’s work as a whole, from first to last. Three principal sites of the evocation of wonder are discussed: in narrative, in character, and in language. Discussion of the first focuses on Shakespeare’s career-long interest in romance narratives of marvel, drawing on both ancient and popular traditions. These traditions inform Shakespeare’s writing from The Comedy of Errors through the last plays. In them marvellous events – especially involving recoveries and reunions – reveal a world unexpected in its amplitude, larger than human knowledge can easily understand. Audiences are encouraged to share this perception of the world-opening possibilities of poetry. Wonder experienced by characters provides an opportunity for audiences to examine closely the mechanics of the affect, and the attempts of persons to negotiate and emerge from it into knowledge. Wonder in language touches on Shakespeare’s characteristic extremity of rhetorical style, particularly his use of figures such as paradox, hyperbole, and catachresis. Altogether, this commitment to wonder reveals Shakespeare as a poet of an unclosed universe – one ever rich in possibility and the unexpected.

This essay is an outline of some of the key terms in the classical Sanskrit tradition that can be translated as “imagination.” This enables us to map a very different yet recognizable terrain for our understanding of the concept. The essay is in four parts. The first looks at the articulation of ideas recognizably centred on imagination in the performative aspects of early or Vedic texts (1500–300 BCE). The second presents various terms that approach different aspects of “imagination,” and looks at some of the genres within which these terms were thematized. The third section surveys some influential contemplative practices in which imagination was carefully explored as a disciplined way of cultivating and expanding awareness. The fourth section very briefly considers the philosophical question of the cognitive status of imagination at least in aesthetic production. The conclusion opens up discussion about how this tradition of thematizing imagination may enrich the contemporary study of imagination, whose philosophical roots lie in the Western tradition.

The Introduction presents the argument that aesthetic judgment in classical Arabic literary theory came to depend on the ability of poetry or eloquent speech to produce an experience of wonder in the listener. This experience of wonder is not merely a reaction of amazement and bedazzlement, but it also entails a process of discovery. After presenting an account of the nature of classical Arabic literary theory, its various approaches to literary assessment, its topics and historical development, the Introduction highlights that the main aspects of literary expression Arabic criticism was concerned with lay in rhetorical figures (badīʿ), simile (tashbīh), figurative speech (majāz), metaphor (istiʿāra), metonymy (kināya), and sentence construction (naẓm). It is in these aspects of linguistic expression that an aesthetic theory of wonder can be uncovered in the classical Arabic critical tradition, including in discussions of poetry proper, engagements with Aristotelian Poetics, and works on eloquence and the miraculousness (iʿjāz) of the Quran, culminating by the thirteenth century in the formalized study of eloquence in ʿilm al-balāgha (the science of eloquence).