This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

The image of Alexander flourished across the disiecta membra of the empire he created and far beyond it. Consideration is given here to the appropriation of the king’s image in the broader sense – and principally through the medium of texts – in relation to the founders of the greater two of the Successor dynasties, those of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The legend of Seleucus was richly bathed in Alexander-imagery, and this imagery was focused, in different ways, on the person of Seleucus himself. Some of the tales focus syntagmatically on his personal interaction with the king, whilst he yet lived, and indeed in one case even after even he had died. Others serve to establish paradigmatic or typological parallel between the actions of Alexander and those of Seleucus, and some seek to do both. The case of Ptolemy is different: whilst there is again some focus on Ptolemy’s personal interaction with Alexander, much of the legend-generation focuses rather on Alexander’s relationship with Ptolemy’s city of Alexandria, the glory of which was the king’s tomb. So long as Ptolemy remained ensconced in the city, he could afford to bask in a more indirectly reflected variety of the king’s charisma.

We follow Euclid from the elementary idea of division with remainder to unique prime factorization in the natural numbers, by way of the Euclidean algorithm. We also glimpse some more general concepts - algebraic integers, rings, and fields - that throw more light on ordinary integers. In particular, we show how the Pell equation can be solved with the help of quadratic integers.

Extending the "integer" concept to algebraic numbers suggests the more general algebraic concept of ring. Likewise the concept of rational number suggests the algebraic concept of field. In this chapter we look specifically at fields of algebraic numbers and how to define their "integers." This involves the study of polynomial rings and the corresponding concepts of "prime" polynomial and "congruence modulo a prime." Then we return to algebraic number fields and view them "relative to" their subfields, such as the fields of rational numbers. This is facilitated by ideas from linear algebra, such as basis and dimension.

This chapter presents Plato's specific contribution to the history of theoria: how he reacts to the notion of traditional theoria and specifically, which of its elements he rejects and which he reconceives. Platonic theoria stands, although somewhat uneasily, on the shoulders of traditional theoria in regard to its emphasis on observational performance rather than perceptual understanding: for Plato, the follower of traditional theoria is merely "a lover of sights and sounds" rather than a true philosopher. However, certain features are shared across traditional and Platonic theoria, such as that involving perceptual experience, being focused on objects of high significance and the idea of elliptical motion. These features are distinguished as falling along two planes, structural and philosophical, and discussed using analyses of Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus, and Symposium, among others.

Comprehensive and quite lengthy introduction to Wagner and the Ring. Covers concept of the volume as well as basic biographical details and intellectual and cultural influences for Wagner. Explains the significance of the Ring in musical, literary, and cultural terms. Sections include mythological sources, musical structure, compositional process, discussion of overall “meaning,” approaches to interpretation, performance history and impact.

In 1852, Wagner described his text for the Ring cycle as “the greatest poem that has ever been written.” This chapter asks to what extent the musical innovations – responding to historical linguistics – were formative for a generation of writers as well as composers. To what extent did innovation in one medium engender innovative techniques in another? After contextualizing Wagner’s operatic reforms within his early writings and related moments within the history of the genre, it explores a cornucopia of modernist writers working in the shadow of the Ring cycle: from Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, and Aubrey Beardsley, to Yeats, Mann, and Beckett; from Mallarmé and Dujardin to Zola and Proust, to name but a few. It traces the profound influence on literature of leifmotivic techniques, as “carriers of feeling,” amid the shift to words as a dereferentialized system of signs. The role of alliteration, direct parody, interior monologue, and involuntary memory all contribute to the overall view that appropriation and influence of “reformist” techniques in literature and linguistics remained in the hands of authors, regardless of Wagner’s predictions for his own literary greatness.