This chapter explores the interplay between identification and distance that Lucian sets up for his readers in relationship to the speaking characters in the Dialogues of the Courtesans. While readers are, at times, invited to identify with the plights of these ‘others’ as partners in restrictive power structures, at other times, the otherness of the courtesans is emphasised through female verbal markers, female-specific cults, and women-only sexuality. Again and again, the subjectivity of the courtesan is offered to the reader, only to be withdrawn from their grasp. And, in fact, in its current form, the collection begins with a soldier and ends with a virgin – the courtesan managing to slip away. Lucian’s play with the courtesan’s subjectivity leaves his readers full of suspicions about intentional misdirection, both by the characters within the stories and by the author Lucian himself.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

How would our understanding of the history of literary theory change if we focused on the seminal essays, rather than the monumental books and monographs? It would surely seem more variegated and provisional, less finished and definitive, more of a process of trying out ideas and defending interests, more motley, confusing, and elusive, a bit like the essay form itself. This chapter examines the rise and fall of theory in the UK inside and outside the academy, beginning with its origins in the British New Left, which looked to continental Europe for intellectual sustenance. It traces the institutional influences and pressures exerted on the essay form as it migrates across the Channel, arguing that while critique could be amenable to the norms of tough-minded knowledge acquisition, the more oblique and personal voice that we associate with essayism has, until recently, often been eschewed in universities.

This chapter elaborates on why an exclusive focus on the individual within psychology cannot be culturally valid for all children. Contrasting Western individualistic goals for child-rearing and development with the more collectivistic goals and orientations of the majority world, this chapter shows that foundational assumptions regarding the nature of subjectivity differ by culture. Three specific components of the interdependent approach to child development as demonstrated by African, Latin American, Indigenous, and Asian societies are examined in depth. These themes include a holistic view of development, intelligence as a form of social responsibility, and children as apprentices. Together, these themes characterize child development processes within the majority world. Research shows that societies that consider a socially contingent self as the ideal outcome for development might be more likely to support collaborative competence. Overall, the literature reviewed suggests that Western conceptions of subjectivity and therefore intersubjectivity do not extend to all cultures. In addition, collaborative competence highlights the strengths of minoritized children in the US while supporting all children’s development.

This chapter explores the connections between ethics, the phenomenological (and hermeneutical) traditions, and education. It focuses on the idea of the subject, showing phenomenology’s contrast with the modernist picture of the autonomous subject. The chapter first briefly traces the idea of the subject in phenomenology through four representative figures – Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Levinas – and then sketches their approaches to ethics. Then it pivots to four ethical concepts in philosophy of education in this tradition – understanding, risk, subjectification, and responsibility – by connecting them to phenomenological tradition’s broad conception of the subject. The chapter brings into relief the contribution phenomenology makes to envisioning living well together and human flourishing, and education’s role in fostering ethical subjects that would enact such societies.

Chapter 2 introduces the concept of construal and explains how identical objects or real-world events can be perceived and described differently by multiple speakers, due to differences in individual speakers’ perspectives, the impact of culture as a lens on cognition, and the linguistic options available in a language. For instance, although Chinese shares similar concepts of time as English, associating time and space so that front and back can refer to temporal relationships, Chinese also exhibits a tendency to construct time vertically, in which the past is up and the future is down. Systematic crosslinguistic differences can also be found in descriptions of motion events across world languages. Learning to express time and motion in L2 Chinese often entails adjustment to new perspectives that are not articulated in a learner’s native language. L2 Chinese speakers therefore need ample opportunities to use the L2 functionally before they can develop L2-specific ways of thinking-for-speaking patterns.

This chapter highlights the importance of newspapers as essential publishing venues for American essayists during the 1880–1920 period. During this time, newspaper columns or editorials were some of the most powerful manifestations of the American essay. A new kind of personal essay emerged, revealing tensions between various categories: the genteel and the modern, progressivism and prejudice, subjectivity and objectivity. While essayistic objectivity aspired to provide verifiable evidence and to be “truthful” in its interpretations of the world, essayistic subjectivity attempted to engage the reader by means of the essayist’s own perceptions and experiences. Significantly, during this period, the essay sought new vessels for authorial subjectivity, be it in the form of fiction or nonfiction, expanding the possibilities of the personal essay. Important essayists, columnists, and editorialists of the period included H. L. Mencken, Anna Julia Cooper, Robert Benchley, Ida B. Wells, and Heywood Broun. For many of these writers, the political and personal are inseparable, and the essay often functions as a form of authorial mediation, of narrative outrage, and a call to social action.

This chapter analyses the ways in which Byron’s sense of himself as a writer was gradually, often painfully, informed by the evolving discourse of addiction as it was being medicalised throughout the early nineteenth century and subsequently used to describe a troubling new category of behaviour. For Byron, the act of writing and the emerging sense of his own identity as a poet is formulated not simply through metaphors of addiction, which he himself helped to write into culture, but also through its physical expression. This was much more than a figure of speech – his need to write emerged in painful, bodily manifestations; Byron did not simply write about his writing habit – his habit, in part, wrote him.

The Introduction argues that Faulkner discovered an epistemology for networked systems in the creation of his own imagined landscape. I present two major stages in which Faulkner’s discovery took place: (1) an earlier vision portraying how networks scale, circulate information, centralize, and produce potentially tyrannical paradigms of top-down vertical power; and (2) another view of dynamical networks that are constantly adapting to produce novel forms of movement and behavior. The Faulkner that this study evokes is at once the modernist developing a spatial narrative practice describing the emergence of complex social networks and the Romantic for whom the immanent life was paramount and even sacrosanct. That these two trajectories of inquiry and spiritual belief are not easily reconcilable gives philosophical and moral weight to the landscape and characters that Faulkner invented. They also provide a striking meditation on what it means for human beings to find themselves in systems so vast and ubiquitous that they can no longer remember what it was like to live outside them and, thus, to think outside of their ideological dicta.

Nowhere are asymmetrical power dynamics between humans and animals more evident than in systems of captivity. This chapter assesses literary responses to animal capture, with particular emphasis on zoos. It considers the colonial networks of trade that help to populate Western zoos and examines questions of spectatorship and subjectivity behind and in front of the cage. The discussion is structured around a series of vignettes staging different attitudes toward captive animals. These focus on Rainer Maria Rilke’s panther, Franz Kafka’s ape Red Peter, Julio Cortázar’s axolotl, Marie NDiaye’s fish-woman, and Lydia Millet’s benighted zoogoer, paying special attention to texts inspired by the Jardin des Plantes in Paris – the world’s oldest civil zoo, which opened during the French revolution.

This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

This chapter re-examines Boccaccio’s naturalism and its putative connection to his feminism, disputing the claim that naturalism in the Decameron is inspired by Boccaccio’s advocacy for natural rights. Critics often celebrate the strong female protagonists of Bartolomea (2.10) and Madonna Filippa (6.7), who defend themselves against accusations of adultery, as evidence that Boccaccio was an early proponent for natural rights, especially the subjective rights of women. However, when Boccaccio gives his adulteresses a chance to finally speak, it is not to insist upon their subjective rights but to take a more unsettling stance: they rest their defenses on their status as socially valuable things. In both of these tales, the women situate their infidelity within a moral economy that views property relations from the ground up, vindicating the needs of things over the rights of individual owners. Having experienced the agricultural crisis wrought by the Plague, Boccaccio’s storytellers would have been especially receptive to such arguments for “adulterous” forms of possessing.

Only a portion of the anthropological literature on philanthropy, charity, and humanitarianism explicitly engages with literature on the anthropology of ethics and morality, yet all of it describes a field of practice defined by a commitment to precisely these terms – the ethical, the moral, and the good. The first section of this essay reviews works that describe the moral and practical content and effects of philanthropic giving, focussing on the diversity of giving practices, logics, and outcomes. The second section describes how anthropologists have thought about humanitarian and philanthropic practices as the grounds upon and through which people cultivate and enact forms of ethical subjectivity. The third and final section considers anthropology’s relationship to ideas of moral clarity and moral judgement as these terms are used by anthropologists writing about, and taking part in, a range of social projects.

This chapter removes some obstacles that interfere with the correct understanding of ‘Teleology’ in Hegel’s Logic. According to a common mistake, ‘Teleology’ addresses the external purposiveness of human intentions. This misconstruction emerges from Hegel’s discussion of ‘subjective purposes’ therein and then apparently of the means employed by a person trying to achieve them. Another important misunderstanding affects the kind of reflexive argument that ‘Teleology’ develops. Among those who take it that the chapter addresses the difficulties of realising intentions, some claim that it provides an anti-sceptical transcendental argument to prove the effectiveness of some purposes. I make my case against this kind of interpretation before I present my own alternative account in the following chapter.