The chapter begins with the observation that global history has an ambivalent attitude towards explanation. In many cases, the mere presentation of sources and voices from many different parts of the world seems sufficient to justify a global approach. The need for explanation is ignored or even denied. In other cases, global explanation is eagerly pursued, but often at the expense of more complex explanatory models that incorporate factors at different scales. In this perspective, global explanations are claimed to be inherently superior and a privileged way of explaining historical phenomena. After a cursory survey of current positions on causality and explanation in general methodology and ‘formal’ historical theory, the chapter proposes a brief typology of explanatory strategies. It goes on to discuss the peculiarities of explanation within a framework of connections across great distances and cultural boundaries. The much-exclaimed concept of narrative explanation is found to be of limited value, as it underestimates the difficulties of producing coherent narratives on a global scale. Concepts offered in the social science literature, such as the analysis of mechanisms and temporal sequences, could be helpful in refining purely narrative approaches to explanation.

Coroners have a wide discretion in the calling of witnesses, including expert witnesses. This chapter looks briefly at the role of experts in the coroner’s court, admissibility of expert evidence and some factors that experts consider when writing a report.

The chapter looks at a substantial number of texts outside the boundaries usually placed in Byzantine Studies through conventional taxonomic categories such as genre or antithetic pairs like learned versus vernacular language. Four larger themes are used to explore this varied textual production and offer a proposal for understanding its basic socio-cultural and aesthetic functions for its immediate recipients and later readers. The four themes discussed are education and literature, patronage and literary production, rhetoric and genre in prose and poetry, narrative art from the enormous to the small. Despite the strong presence of ‘Hellenic’ subjects, Komnenian literature owes more to its own dynamism (deriving from a reformed teacherly practice in the schools) than to the imitation of ancient models. At the same time, the role of the patrons in promoting literary production shapes much of both learned and vernacular literary experimentation, while religious literature generously defined is strongly involved in an ongoing experimentation with form and content. Finally, the chapter asks whether any form of change can be traced within the literary production of the Komnenian era.

Schubert’s twenty-eight ballads provide an unusual perspective on his approach to writing for the piano for several reasons. First, the role of improvisation within balladeering was much more pronounced, traces of which remain within Schubert’s published works. Second, the piano was used to provide more explicit scene-setting, through the use of scenic effects, than is generally the case in Schubert’s other Lieder. Third, the ballads allow for the re-examination of narrative processes within nineteenth-century Lieder – in other words, how songs told stories.This chapter focuses on three ballads that show Schubert adopting different approaches to rendering poetic imagery in musical terms. It begins with his 1815 settings of Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Der Taucher’, D77, and Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty’s ‘Die Nonne’, D212, considering their use of elaborate ‘Schauder’ or ‘shudder’ effects, which now tend to be dismissed as hackneyed but might instead be considered to offer access to often-overlooked aspects of early nineteenth-century performance culture. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, and of Schubert’s career, comes his simple strophic setting of Gottfried Herder’s ‘Edward’, D923 (1827). Concepts and practices of the ballad shifted over the course of Schubert’s career and would continue to do so for subsequent generations.

In Singapore, residents have expressed concerns about the safety of autonomous vehicles. This chapter considers the case of Singapore, which has supported the development of autonomous vehicles and tested their use. Using research studies and newspaper reports, the chapter examines the rhetorical devices used to frame relevant discussion and identifies the narrative arguments used to reduce fears and justify the presence of vehicles on public streets. The narratives of government and commercial entities complement each other and are frequently upbeat, but they differ in that commercial entities asserted the narrative that autonomous vehicles were inevitable, while government entities did not. The government’s rejection of inevitability supports a different view of law and government, in which government officials decide the degree and pace of AV development. However, Singapore has not adopted a strict regulatory approach, and opted instead for light touch regulation. As a narrative argument, rejection of inevitability does not dictate regulatory approach.

Chapter 6 is the first to develop the new theory of martyrdom and draws together insights from case studies towards an understanding of martyrdom as a performance of suffering that enacts the truth of a sovereign imaginary. First, I analyze the similarities and differences regarding the practices of self-killing and introduce the concept of performance suffering to explain how martyrdom’s afflictions of the body are used to communicate a truth by a) seeking to directly influence the situation martyrs face, and b) making a symbolic statement about the nature of the crisis, the social collectives involved, and the hopes for an ideal world. I examine the settings wherein martyrs are produced, the scripts guiding their performances, the sacred models they reinscribe, and the audiences to whom martyrdom communicates. In doing so, I argue the present becomes aligned with a sacred past, creating an experience of living again in legendary times requiring legendary feats. As martyrdoms are seen to reiterate the deeds of sacred models, they are marked as possessing the highest character, lending their speech a greater impact through the form of truth-telling known as parrhēsia.

This chapter begins with a familiar antithesis: the opposition between the lyric poem and the novel. If the former seems to be characterized by the capture of a single instant, the expression of subjective thoughts and emotions, and a reaching after eternal truths, the latter seems instead to move through time, to fictionalize the objective world, and to be caught in the social and political webs of real life. This chapter challenges this received wisdom by considering the hybrid genre of the verse-novel and by taking as its chief case study George Meredith's 1862 verse-novel Modern Love. Meredith's work simultaneously dissolves and highlights the borders of the single poem, forcing readers to reconsider the relationship of the individual lyric to a larger whole, to the narrative threads running through that whole, to other individual poems, and to other generic alternatives. The chapter concludes by arguing that, because the act of reading verse-novels is often so self-conscious, the genre productively questions ideas of singularity and of self-sufficiency.

September 1830 saw the first purpose-built passenger railway open between Manchester and Liverpool, followed by a proliferation of local, national, and international lines. Yet the integration of railway infrastructures, perspectives, and plotlines into writing was slow. This chapter examines terminology, speculative journalism, and early engagement with railways in fiction to demonstrate how writing across genres extended the emergent ‘railway imaginary’ well beyond the scope of its built referent. Yet gaps in spatial and temporal perception opened up by the railways posed a challenge to those plotting long-form fiction that relied on a sense of momentum towards a definitive ending. While selected works, including the Mechanics’ Magazine, Railroadiana, and The Pickwick Papers, stop short of representing railways as an inhabited system closely entangled with the familiar rhythms of 1830s life, they do take seriously the task of establishing a dynamic relationship between railway and narrative form that matched technological and literary ambition alike.

The year 1926 is a milestone for Argentine literature as it marked the publication of three books which represented a radical innovation for narrative prose: the novels Don Segundo Sombra, by Ricardo Güiraldes, and El juguete rabioso (The Mad Toy) by Roberto Arlt; and Horacio Quiroga’s Los desterrados (The Exiles), a short-story collection. These three books can be seen as a reconfiguration of a literature that, since its origins, had space as its privileged protagonist. Güiraldes’ novel postulates an idealized image of the countryside that, in the third decade of the twentieth century, was consciously anachronistic and nostalgic. In Arlt’s novel, the modern city is a symbol of novelty and even of the future, and also a constant source of irresolvable conflicts. In turn, the stories from Los desterrados, which take place in the frontier territory of Misiones, updated the fictional possibilities of the border understood as a contact zone. The publication of these three books in 1926, then, implied a renewal of the spaces privileged by Argentine literature: the countryside, the city, and the border. In addition, they are testimony to how the 1920s marked a definitive change in the ways of being a writer.

The Argentine crisis of 2001 saw economic collapse, social unrest, and police repression. But if it caused a political and economic fracture with apocalyptic overtones, in literature – and in prose fiction, specifically – it did not mean a complete break with the past nor an eruption of the new, but instead the return or reformulation of the old. Despite everything, the 2000s was a period of productivity and global acclaim for Argentina’s writers. Certain activist uses of literature and its insertion in other areas of social praxis coexisted with a search for a personal voice, namely autofictions, writings of the self, and stories of everyday life. This chapter structures a reading of the literature of the 2000s around three key topics that emerge from this conjuncture: an aesthetic of recycling; an aesthetic of haunting; and the presence of a reinvigorated feminist gaze. After a period of scepticism about the role of literature in social change, these trends sparked a renewal of interest in the activist uses of fiction. At the same time, other writers made abject characters the protagonists of their stories and agitated for a literature that strives to be both autonomous and political at the same time.

Chapter 1 introduces the story in Samuel and the theological paradoxes that emerge from the book. It surveys possibilities regarding who might have written it, when, and why, and considers how far it is a historical narrative and how far it is a piece of imaginative literature.

This chapter brings together key concepts from decolonial, feminist, and liberation-focussed psychologies to advocate for the role of community arts in the pursuit of epistemic justice and liberatory community empowerment. The chapter focuses on three areas of praxis that are evident in community-oriented psychology’s engagement with calls for decolonizing science: archival retrieval, relational knowledge practices, and storytelling and counter-storytelling. These areas are further illustrated via two case examples from Australia that detail how people who are marginalized and racialized form communities to address structural and symbolic violence while also strengthening practices and capacities for re-existence. The cases show how, through forming intentional settings and mobilizing cultural practice, practices of cultural remembering and reauthoring of stories can contribute to decoloniality and epistemic justice. These cases also highlight that marginalized and racialized communities can create home places of healing, connection, and memory. These relational practices of accompaniment require ongoing critical reflexivity and deliberate deep rethinking as well as equitable access to material and symbolic resources to engage in decolonial and antiracist work.