bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Perception, Exploration, and the Primacy of Touch
Authors: Ratcliffe Matthew
Published: October 2018

This chapter addresses the question of whether and how the relationship between touch, the body, and bodily activity might be distinctive. I begin by raising a problem for any claim concerning the nature of “touch”: it is unclear what touch is, and all generalizations concerning touch are susceptible to counterexamples. Following this, I consider a recent formulation of the view that tactual perception sometimes utilizes bodily exploration in a distinctive way, and show why that view is problematic. I go on to address various formulations of the claim that touch is somehow more fundamental than the other senses, insofar as it is more intimately bound up with our bodily nature. All of these turn out to be unclear or implausible. I conclude that the most plausible case for the primacy of touch involves an appeal to its diversity, rather than to any particular characteristic of touch.
Motor intentionality
Authors: Pacherie Elisabeth
Published: October 2018

In his book Phenomenology of Perception, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty first coined the phrase “motor intentionality.” At the same time he highlighted the contrast between motor and cognitive intentionality, he also emphasized their generally smooth interplay in normal agents. An account of motor intentionality should thus aim at elucidating not just what distinguishes motor intentionality from more cognitive forms of intentionality but also how motor intentionality relates to these more cognitive forms of intentionality. Using Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of motor intentionality as my starting point, I consider how more recent conceptual and empirical work can help sharpen our understanding of the distinctiveness of motor intentionality. In contrast to Merleau-Ponty, I defend a representational stance on motor intentionality. Finally, I turn to the challenges raised by its interplay with more cognitive forms of intentionality and the problem of explaining how our motor behavior can be responsive to our intentions.
False-Belief Understanding, 4E Cognition, and Predictive Processing
Authors: De Bruin Leon
Published: October 2018

Mindreading accounts of social cognition have been increasingly challenged over the past couple of decades. Proponents of 4E cognition have argued that social cognition is not (primarily) about reading another agent’s mental states in order to predict or explain his or her behavior. A large part of their criticism has focused on the empirical findings on false-belief understanding, questioning both the philosophical interpretation of these findings and the experimental designs that give rise to them. In this chapter I will (1) discuss the empirical findings on false-belief understanding in light of the criticism leveled by proponents of 4E cognition, and (2) propose an alternative interpretation of these findings, one that is inspired by the predictive processing paradigm, and investigate to what extent this interpretation is compatible with the main insights of 4E cognition.
Enacting affectivity
Authors: Colombetti Giovanna
Published: October 2018

The enactive approach to mind and cognition has several important implications for our understanding of affectivity. It entails that cognition is inherently affective and, relatedly, that the process of cognitive appraisal is not “purely brainy” but embodied. It also entails that a dynamical systems approach is more suitable than other conceptual frameworks to account for the variability of emotional episodes across individuals and populations, while acknowledging the important role of evolution in shaping the physiological and behavioral aspects of those episodes. Finally, the enactive approach does not entail that the material vehicles of affective episodes are necessarily only biological processes occurring inside the organism; rather, it allows extraorganismic processes to be part of the physical realizers of affectivity, and to be phenomenologically incorporated into affective experiences.
Developing an understanding of normativity
Authors: Schmidt Marco F. H. , Rakoczy Hannes
Published: October 2018

Much empirical research on human social cognition and its development pertains to questions of how individuals understand their conspecifics in a causal-descriptive sense, that is, how they explain and predict others’ observable (behavioral) and unobservable (mental) states (e.g., epistemic or volitional states). Human social cognition, however, also entails normativity—the sense of right and wrong—in thought and action. This chapter introduces the notion of normativity and reviews developmental research on the early ontogeny of understanding, learning, and applying different types of normative phenomena (focusing on practical norms, e.g., conventional and moral norms). We report evidence that even very young children engage in rational and selective third-party norm enforcement, which suggests that they understand some important features of normativity (e.g., normative force and generality). Thus, from early on, human social cognition is not only concerned with the prediction and explanation of others’ behavior, but also with the prescription and evaluation of others’ actions—a conceptual space of reasons grounded in a psychological space of shared and collective intentionality.
Culture and the Extended Phenotype
Authors: Sterelny Kim
Published: October 2018

This chapter takes up the links between Dawkins’s concept of the extended phenotype and that of the extended mind. More specifically, it has three aims: (1) it argues that the extended mind effects are a special case of niche construction; (2) it identifies the cognitive foundations that made it possible for hominins to amplify their cognitive powers with material supports; in particular, the chapter suggests that our reliance on cognitive tools depends on a tripod of (a) human hyper-plasticity, (b) highly structured and enriched learning environments, and (c) family support for skill acquisition long into adolescence; and (3) it situates the extended mind and related phenomena in their evolutionary context, in the deep history of human evolution. Specifically, the material record suggests an increasing footprint of these phenomena in the later Pleistocene. Distributed cognition, the material scaffolding of skill acquisition, and improved learning strategies collectively produced accelerating change, beginning about 250,000 years ago.
Christmas Books and Stories
Authors: Glancy Ruth
Published: October 2018

This chapter seeks to eliminate some of the misunderstandings surrounding Charles Dickens’s writings for Christmas, the works he named ‘Christmas Books’ (five novellas written between 1843 and 1848) and ‘Christmas Stories’ (short pieces that were originally contained in ‘Christmas numbers’ written with other contributors for his journals Household Words and All the Year Round between 1850 and 1867). By far the best known of the Christmas writings is A Christmas Carol, and its iconic status among Dickens’s works has led to the undervaluing of his other writings for the season. The Christmas numbers are particularly important for their unique position as collaborative journalism in the mid-nineteenth century. This chapter surveys the history of the Christmas books and stories from their inception to current criticism, identifies the central issues of academic interest to date, and points to the areas that are opening up as a result of the greater accessibility of the Christmas numbers.
Dickens’s Lifetime Reading
Authors: Litvak Leon
Published: October 2018

Dickens’s reading knowledge was vast, and serves as a testament to how effectively he digested and recalled a range of material that could be used in his various forms of output, including fiction, journalism, letters, and speeches. His primary influences stemmed from childhood reading: nursery stories, fairy tales, and the Bible. To these he added more standardized reading acquired at school, including the classics, and, from the age of 18, a systematic programme of reading, including the works of Shakespeare, that was consciously undertaken in order to make the transition to a professional writing career. Other major influences include the eighteenth-century poets, novelists, and essayists, the Romantic poets, and early nineteenth-century novelists and poets. He was intimately familiar with the literary trends of his own day in poetry and fiction, as well as in such diverse fields as history, geography, travel, science, and industry.
Psychology, Psychiatry, Mesmerism, Dreams, Insanity, and Psychoanalytic Criticism
Authors: Stolte Tyson
Published: October 2018

While much recent criticism has traced Charles Dickens’s fascination with such subjects as dreams, mesmerism, and insanity, relatively little has been written about his various interventions in the debate that most roiled psychology during his lifetime, the struggle to define the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body. The stakes of this debate seemed, to many Victorians, as high as could be: at issue was the very possibility of immortality. This chapter traces Dickens’s efforts, in his fiction and his journalism, to take the side of a conservative dualist psychology in this debate, to insist on an immaterial and immortal soul. But through a reading of Little Dorrit, this chapter also reveals how difficult such a position was to maintain against the materialist theories of mind that seemed to be in the ascendant in the second half of Dickens’s career.
Race, Imperialism, Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Buzard James
Published: October 2018

Dickens’s fiction investigates the conflicting values his culture placed on race, empire, colonialism, and cosmopolitanism. Dickens believed in a hierarchy of races, but his imagination was repeatedly drawn to the possibility that so-called superior races might be susceptible to degeneration. Sometimes he denies that possibility and depicts heroic self-sacrifice rather than descent into savagery. Elsewhere he seems drawn to the spectre of degeneration. Similar ambivalence characterizes his treatment of empire, colonialism, and cosmopolitanism. He took advantage of Britain’s position as global superpower, but had misgivings about some of its possible implications. The empire could appear to be not simply an enriching, available resource for the Victorian British subject, but also a drain on the national energy or a moral distraction. And cosmopolitanism in his works seems to be transformed from an eighteenth-century ideal of elite education and culture to an imposed condition under the diversifying and proliferative force of modern globalization.
Nicholas Nickleby
Authors: Varese Jon
Published: October 2018

This chapter examines the importance of Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) in the place of Dickens’s early canon by looking into the nature of contractual relationships both inside and outside the novel. The book itself expresses extreme anxiety over exactly what constitutes a contract, and this anxiety becomes only more complicated and pronounced when read alongside the extra-textual material that surrounds the novel’s composition. The concept of equity and contractual fairness, for example, which dominates the first half of the novel, cannot be fully understood unless placed in direct conversation with Dickens’s own correspondence and publishing agreements. The ‘this versus that’ approach that emerges from such an examination is something that Dickens constantly grappled with during the first years of his career.
Deliberative Media
Authors: Maia Rousiley
Published: October 2018

The media play an important role in deliberative systems. Although several scholars are skeptical about the potential for enhancing deliberation, this chapter argues that the media system does not necessarily hinder deliberative practices. A better understanding of today’s hybrid media environment—one that merges mass and interpersonal communication and produces mixed-media relationships—is necessary for a critical perspective of connections among parts of a deliberative system. This analysis contends that political communication across Internet-based forums hosted by government bodies, the mainstream media, and multi-platforms of citizens’ talk should be assessed by taking into consideration diversified, complex, and usually contradictory interactions amongst actors that have distinct functions and interests within the political system. Insofar as deliberative principles and expectations are counterfactual, empirical research is always needed to investigate whether or not deliberative virtues are present in different contexts of media-based communication in a continuum of practices that form the deliberative system.
Deliberation and Experimental Design
Authors: Esterling Kevin
Published: October 2018

This chapter describes the methodological considerations necessary for making a causal inference regarding the effect of institutions and group contexts on deliberation. This chapter focuses on the elements of the research design of a study and the assumptions that are necessary to state a causal inference given a particular design; these considerations are applicable to randomized experimental designs, both in the lab and in the field, as well as to quasi-experimental or natural experimental designs using observational data. The chapter shows how to assess the internal validity of a study for identifying a causal effect for a given study and briefly discusses external and epistemic validity considerations that are of particular urgency for empirical deliberation.
Deliberation and Catastrophic Risks
Authors: Gunderson Ryan , Dietz Thomas
Published: October 2018

Humans have always faced catastrophic risks, such as those posed by asteroid strikes or very large volcanic eruptions. In the twenty-first century, some of these risks, in particular climate change, are caused by humans. We also have an evolving set of global governance mechanisms that might be deployed to address these risks. Deliberative approaches to addressing catastrophic risks engage questions about who should participate and how global deliberative processes might operate. The risks themselves offer special challenges to deliberation: complexity and deep uncertainty, diversity in impacts, and a global scope yet with localized impacts. We argue (1) there is a foundation for moving forward towards deliberative governance of catastrophic risks and, (2) a global approach will only evolve through experimentation, will change depending on context and circumstance, and must be polycentric.
Deliberation in Protests and Social Movements
Authors: della Porta Donatella , Doerr Nicole
Published: October 2018

The chapter addresses the relations between social movements and deliberative democracy, pointing at opportunities but also at tensions in theorization and practices of democracy. While social movements are important for deliberative democracy, and vice versa, activists and deliberative democrats alike have addressed a number of tensions between deliberative democracy and protest. The global diffusion of deliberative norms, practices, and experiences of democracy in social movements is discussed in the light of the growing literature on deliberative democracy. In particular, faced with challenges to the legitimacy and efficacy of representative democracy, social movements’ democratic innovations, such as the Forum and the Camp, represent important experiments in cooperation in settings of deep diversity and inequality. In addition, the reflections on social movements’ conceptions and practices help in specifying some conceptualization of deliberative politics.
Scaling Up Deliberative Effects—Applying Lessons of Mini-Publics
Authors: Niemeyer Simon , Jennstal Julia
Published: October 2018

The debate surrounding mini-publics has focused on top-down assessments about their use in the wider democratic system. This chapter inverts that analysis to explore how observation of mini-public deliberation informs possibilities for scaling up their deliberative effects—as opposed to their decisions. The effect involves in good part reversing the influences of strategic and manipulatory political discourse via discourse regulation and the activation of norms consistent with consistent with the “deliberative stance”. Scaling up the deliberativeness involves a form of mini-public trust, with a focus on the regulation of discourses by trusted peers, and deliberating citizens acting as exemplars of deliberative behaviour. To the extent that both practice and institutionalization exceed certain conditions there is scope for mini-publics to become engines for deliberative democratization.
Deliberative Democracy as a Reform Movement
Authors: Hartz-Karp Janette , Carson Lyn , Briand Michael
Published: October 2018

Many organizations, actors and alliances across the globe have advocated for and implemented elements of deliberative democracy, effectively addressing policy, political and national issues. Examples include the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, Participatory Budgeting (multiple locations worldwide, including “100 Percent” of some municipality budgets in Australia), the Danish Board of Technology’s Consensus Conferences, Deliberative Polls (even in China), Citizens’ Juries (in numerous democratic states), and grassroots Constitutional Conventions in Ireland, Iceland, and Belgium. It is unclear, though, whether such efforts collectively amount to a social movement. Institutionalization has been difficult to achieve, chiefly because power is rarely given up or shared. Nor can we say whether deliberative democracy initiatives have reached a tipping point at which current political practices might begin to take on a more deliberative form. For deliberative democratic principles and practice to occur and be sustained, social and political change organizations and government will need to work together.
Deliberative Democracy and the Environment
Authors: Baber Walter , Bartlett Robert
Published: October 2018

Deliberative democratic practices are especially well suited to the challenges of environmental governance, particularly under conditions associated with the Anthropocene. But this environmental promise comes with attendant perils with respect to democratic deliberation as both a form of politics generally and a strategy for environmental protection. Developing over more than a quarter-century, conceptual advancements in our understanding of deliberative democracy theory have enriched our understanding of potential contributions to environmental politics and governance, while our knowledge of what works, derived from careful empirical studies of innumerable natural experiments, has expanded as well. Yet still more research is needed to provide a full appreciation of the ultimate potential and the inherent limitations of ongoing efforts to combine deliberative democratic theory and pragmatic problem solving to address the challenges confronting environmental governance in the circumstances of the Anthropocene.
Interview with Jürgen Habermas
Authors: Habermas Jürgen
Published: October 2018

This interview with Jürgen Habermas covers a number of crucial and hotly debated topics in deliberative democracy—such as the role of the ideal speech situation, the role of (rational) consensus, and the possibility of deliberation in the strategic realm of politics and in deeply divided societies. In addition, it sets outs his assessment of current developments in deliberative theory—such as the contribution of narratives, emotions and rhetorics to the deliberative process and the role of self-interest and bargaining in deliberation. Jürgen Habermas presents an integrative and optimistic vision of the deliberative program, stressing the importance of a systemic and long-term approach where the democratic process “as a whole is filtered through deliberation”.
Music and Attention, Executive Function, and Creativity
Authors: Loui Psyche , Guetta Rachel E.
Published: October 2018

This chapter provides an overview of research at the intersection of music and cognitive functions. Music, an intrinsically creative art form, requires bottom-up and top-down perceptual processing, attention, and integration of executive functions. Literature on music and attention spans debates on selection theories, and the role of temporal attention and neuronal entrainment. Attention is a subset of executive functioning, goal-directed processes including conflict monitoring, task switching, and working memory. Considerable research has addressed the effects of musical training on executive functions, with contrasting reports of success in far transfer. Finally, contrary to goal-directed processes, creativity entails unconstrained thought processes that yield novel output. Perhaps due to the unrestricted nature of both music and creativity, the relevant research has also been variable. Considering these seemingly disparate aspects of cognitive function in tandem can inspire new and interesting research questions, promoting a more cohesive conceptualization of music within cognitive science more generally.
Brain Research in Music Improvisation
Authors: Erkkinen Michael G. , Berkowitz Aaron L.
Published: October 2018

Musical improvisation refers to spontaneous generation of novel musical compositions in the moment of performance. The neural correlates of musical improvisation have been studied using functional brain imaging studies (fMRI, PET) as well as electrophysiologic techniques (EEG, tDCS). These studies reveal a broad network of brain regions recruited during musical improvisation. These regions participate in domain-general processes such as attention and executive control; rule-based motor sequence generation, selection, timing, and execution; sensorimotor integration; multimodal sensation; emotional processing; and interpersonal communication. Improvisational expertise appears to modulate how attentional networks are recruited during improvisation, and also enhances functional connections between motivational, sensory, limbic, and motor regions. Understanding the neural correlates of musical improvisation provides broader insights into the cognitive basis of creativity.
Music and the Aging Brain
Authors: Ferreri Laura , Moussard Aline , Bigand Emmanuel , Tillmann Barbara
Published: October 2018

In a society that is getting considerably older, it becomes important to identify potential mechanisms promoting successful aging to prevent, limit, and rehabilitate cognitive and emotional impairments typical of normal or pathological aging. Music is a powerful stimulus able to modulate widespread brain activations. Recent research has increasingly considered music as a promising, stimulating training and rehabilitation tool for improving cognition and promoting well-being and social connection. This chapter provides an overview of recent research investigating music and aging. It first focuses on the effects of music in normal aging, both in terms of musical expertise and simple musical exposure, with an additional section being devoted to the underlying brain processes. The chapter then considers the principal music-based therapeutic approaches used in pathological aging. Finally, the chapter underlines the main limitations and open questions arising from the existing literature, and discusses possible future directions for research on music and the aging brain.
Music Training and Cognitive Abilities: Associations, Causes, and Consequences
Authors: Swaminathan Swathi , Schellenberg E. Glenn
Published: October 2018

This chapter evaluates the evidence that music training leads to improved cognitive abilities. It considers whether music training is associated with measures of general cognitive abilities, visuospatial abilities, and language abilities, as well as with real-world measures such as academic achievement and healthy aging. Although positive associations with music training are evident in each instance, causal evidence is lacking, inconsistent, or weak. The one exception appears to be specialized music training that focuses on listening skills and rhythm perception, which seems to improve listening skills more generally. Improved phonological awareness can, in turn, lead to improvements in reading, particularly for young children who are beginning to read, or for children with dyslexia. Otherwise, associations with music training appear to be the consequence of individual differences in demographics, personality, music aptitude, and cognitive ability, which influence who takes music lessons, particularly for extended durations of time.
The Group Element of Cybercrime: Types, Dynamics, and Criminal Operations
Authors: Nurse Jason R. C. , Bada Maria
Published: October 2018

While cybercrime can often be an individual activity pursued by lone hackers, it has increasingly grown into a group activity, with networks across the world. This chapter critically examines the group element of cybercrime from several perspectives. It identifies the platforms that online groups—cybercriminal and otherwise—use to interact, and considers groups as both perpetrators and victims of cybercrime. A key novelty is the discovery of new types of online groups whose collective actions border on criminality. The chapter also analyzes how online cybercrime groups form, organize, and operate. It explores issues such as trust, motives, and means, and draws on several poignant examples, from Anonymous to LulzSec, to illustrate the arguments.
James and Phenomenology
Authors: Levine Steven
Published: October 2018

Beginning with Edmund Husserl, The Principles of Psychology was engaged by a series of philosophers in the phenomenological tradition. The phenomenological reading makes two central claims: (1) that William James in the Principles articulates a proto-phenomenological theory of intentionality, and (2) that because of this, James came to think that psychology is not an autonomous science independent of philosophy. This chapter argues that the phenomenological reading is right that James gives a proto-phenomenological theory of intentionality, one in which thought and thought’s object are essentially correlated. It is also agued that many of the characteristics of thought enumerated by James, namely, that it is constantly changing, not comprised of parts, and sensibly continuous, can only be properly understood in light of this theory. But the chapter concludes that the phenomenological reading is wrong to think that this entails the collapse of James’s project of developing a naturalistic psychology.
Meaning in Life
Authors: Steger Michael F.
Published: October 2018

Studies have linked meaning in life with nearly every other way of measuring the quality and well-being of people’s lives. Despite great empirical strides in meaning in life scholarship, conceptualization on the nature or scope of this important variable seems to be exploding rather than integrating. This chapter discusses the recent convergence among theorists that experiencing the presence of meaning consists of comprehension (making sense of one’s experience), purpose (possessing highly valued goals or missions for one’s life), and significance (perceiving one’s life to be worthwhile and to have value). This chapter also focuses attention on the richness of concepts such as search for meaning, sources of meaning, and orientation to meaning. Finally, this chapter proposes a structural model that unifies these concepts for the first time, portraying how they may be related to each other.
The Spectrum of Fiction
Authors: Kelly Gary
Published: October 2018

The onset of modernity during the Romantic period created increasing demand for guides to, manuals for, and analyses of it. These were most accessible when fictionalized, and publishers and book-lenders hastened to exploit loosened copyright, technological innovation, inventive capital deployment, aggressive marketing/advertising, and new commercial–cultural institutions to meet and stimulate the demand. Writers devised new techniques for representing modernity’s central themes of self-reflexive personal identity, ‘pure’ relationships from intimacy through sociability to citizenship, new configurations of time and space, increased conditions of risk and trust, and expanding abstract systems from finance to government. Much of the fiction published in the period was first published earlier, but readers’ ability to read the old in new light prompted publishers to rework the old canon alongside the new. Though few works were republished beyond the period, the popular genres fashioned then founded ‘mass-market’ fiction much as we still know it.
Gender Boundaries
Authors: Mellor Anne K.
Published: October 2018

The social construction of gender in Britain during the Romantic era—in which males were consigned to the public sphere and females to the private sphere under the laws of couverture—produced an all-important difference between the writings of men and women, what we might call masculine as opposed to feminine Romanticism. Male writers tended to celebrate the development of an autonomous self, the divinity of the creative imagination, a political revolution leading to democratic freedom, and the elevation of poetry as the highest genre. Female writers, in contrast, embraced an ideology grounded in family politics; the equality of the sexes and races; the value of rationality, prudence, and self-discipline; a relational self; and the genre of the novel as the form best suited to represent the gradual evolution of the community over time. The Gothic novel offers a compelling example of the difference that gender can make.
Poetic Defences and Manifestos
Authors: Howe Anthony
Published: October 2018

This chapter surveys a range of the period’s critical and polemical writings, from famous works such as Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry to less well-known works, including Byron’s critical prose and Leigh Hunt’s verse The Feast of the Poets. It assesses some of the main arguments and controversies at stake in these works, such as those surrounding the status of Pope and Wordsworth as poets, and considers the political implications of these debates. The chapter also reflects on how some of the period’s more thoughtful poet-critics responded to the (for some) irreconcilable natures of the polemical and the literary.
The Subjective Turn
Authors: Keymer Thomas
Published: October 2018

Central to Charles Taylor’s account of secular modernity, in which divinely guaranteed truth gives way to the personal and human, is ‘the massive subjective turn … in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths’. This chapter approaches the ‘subjective turn’ of Romantic literature by way of its philosophical and literary antecedents in the eighteenth century, emphasizing the instability or inscrutability of personal identity as conceived in Hume, Sterne, and the emergent genre of autobiography. The most powerful autobiographies of the Romantic era—if we include such generically complex cases as The Prelude and Biographia Literaria—inherit and develop a Shandean sense of the problematics of their own enterprise. Yet their fascination with the processes of cognition, and more broadly with mental operations, conscious or unconscious, also bears the mark of more recent psychological discourses; they articulate a new sense of subjectivity as constituted by the creative perceptual activity of imagination.
Literature and the Senses
Authors: Jackson Noel
Published: October 2018

British Romantic writers were preoccupied with the senses and sensation to an unusually high degree. This chapter reconstructs some of the sources and consequences of this preoccupation. The notion that imagination depends on the senses derived both from a long-standing tradition of empiricist philosophy and from the contemporary physiology of the nerves. These intellectual contexts gave scientific validity and new impetus to conceptions of imaginative literature as, in William Wordsworth’s phrase, a ‘science of feelings’. Romantic writers routinely emphasize sensate as opposed to purely cogitative ways of knowing, and develop innovative accounts of embodied aesthetic response. Transmitting sensation from one person to another, the literature of sensation could facilitate more widespread social or political transformations. Less dramatically but no less significantly, the Romantics also pioneered some new and still relevant ways of understanding the most common, ordinary acts of sensation and perception.
Writer-Physicians
Authors: Jones Catherine
Published: October 2018

The study of literature and medicine in the Romantic period is an established and expanding field. However, scholars have tended to focus on a few canonical writers and a small number of texts, thereby obscuring the age’s huge diversity of medical writing. This chapter takes a wider view, presenting five case studies of medically trained or medically connected writers who demonstrate the broad intersection between medical and literary culture: John Aikin, Benjamin Rush, Joanna Baillie (sister of the physician Matthew Baillie), Erasmus Darwin, and John Keats. The chapter uses these case studies to show what is distinctive or innovative about interactions between literature and medicine in the period. The case studies also represent different genres of medical literature, or different genres that became in some sense medicalized: biography, autobiography, drama, didactic poetry, and epic. Each case study includes some consideration of the reception history of the genre in question.
The New Century: 1800–1815
Authors: Bainbridge Simon
Published: October 2018

This chapter examines the relationship between the historical events and the literature of 1800–15. It suggests that these years remain relatively understudied and identifies the important literary landmarks as they appeared to both contemporary and modern observers. It characterizes the period’s writing as ‘war literature’, examining Walter Scott’s status as ‘the “mighty minstrel” of the Antigallican war’ and exploring the rise of Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans within the context of the Peninsular War. The chapter investigates the relationship between literature and national identity following the Acts of Union, looking at the recovery of national literatures, the revival of the epic, and the emergence of the novel as the form best suited to negotiating issues of national identity. It concludes by examining how writers responded to the Industrial Revolution and the development of Great Britain’s global power, one aspect of this being the emergence of literary ‘Orientalism’.
Creative Translation
Authors: Rossington Michael
Published: October 2018

This chapter addresses the theory and practice of translation in works by Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, Felicia Hemans, Sir William Jones, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Despite Shelley’s view of its impossibility, translation is shown in the work of Jones, Byron, and Shelley to be one of the most vital and sophisticated literary activities of the Romantic era, at once a means to enlightenment about poetic traditions outside Britain and an arena for bold technical experimentation. For Shelley, translation constitutes a creative habitus through which he escapes his native language and then translates back into English from an assumed ‘foreign’ persona. Keats’s poetry, on the other hand, demonstrates how originality is prompted through engagement with the translations of others. The chapter also situates theories about translation in Britain within the context of wider debates on the Continent.
Practical Criticism
Authors: Dart Gregory
Published: October 2018

This chapter charts the development of a new model of critical reading among the English Romantics, a mode of ‘genial criticism’ expressly designed to oppose the judgemental reviewing practices of the age. Having its source in literary conversations among the Lamb circle, especially in the years 1808–12, it began to find tentative public expression in Coleridge’s Shakespeare lectures of 1811–2, Lamb’s essays for The Reflector, those Round Table essays of Hazlitt’s that were not overtaken by the ‘reviewing’ spirit, and the critical notes in Wordsworth’s Excursion and Poems (1815). The second part of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria was the culmination of this vein, giving the fullest theoretical articulation of the ‘genial’ model of criticism, although arguably the most sustained examples of Romantic practical criticism are to be found in works of a more private nature, such as Coleridge’s marginalia to the Ayscough Shakespeare.
Post-War Romanticism
Authors: Everest Kelvin
Published: October 2018

The post-war period following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo saw an influential literary journalism dominated by the political polarities of Whig and Tory. All cultural judgements were affected, in an era when British imperial confidence and international prestige were at their height. The settlement of the Congress of Vienna, the strength of the British military, and colonial expansion across the globe drove economic power while also exerting broad influence on Romantic cultural forms. Romantic literary culture was, however, not unitary, but marked by ironic oppositions and contrasting stylistic idioms. Visionary idealism, imaginative subjectivity, and emotionalism were countered by demotic realism and a groundedness in new social and political forces and in the sensuous appeal of the material world. These oppositions are internalized in the major work of the leading poets and novelists, who seek to balance a representation of their own times with a transcendent vision of experience.
The Culture of Song
Authors: McCue Kirsteen
Published: October 2018

This chapter examines the complex role of songs and ballads in Britain from the 1760s to the 1830s. It traces the emergence of a new critical discourse about song and explores how songs and ballads were presented to the public by publishers. It investigates the lyric form as it was understood and utilized by Romantic writers and discusses the importance of antiquity within modern song culture, as well the relationship between popular and art song. The chapter shows how Romantic authors worked with songs in a variety of ways, from writing about songs (Clare) and producing texts to match existing melodies (Clare, Burns, Moore) to finding inspiration in the power of live performance (Wordsworth, Shelley). Contemporary interest in the genre of national song, shaped by historical factors including the Irish Rebellion and the Napoleonic wars, is traced through the work of Moore, Hemans, and Dibdin.
The 1820s and Beyond
Authors: Esterhammer Angela
Published: October 2018

In light of new research on print culture and media history, the 1820s—once considered an age of superficiality, conservatism, and mediocrity—are emerging as a key moment of experimentation and innovation at the interface of Romanticism and modernity. The era abounds in periodicals and literary magazines, non-traditional stage performances and spectacles, popular novels and serialized fiction, and curious hybrids of prose, poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction. The chapter argues that a recurring contrast between theatricality and authenticity characterizes these forms of expression, as do themes of spectatorship and speculation. The 1820s may be redefined and reinterpreted as an ‘age of information’ as well as an ‘age-in-formation’, a time when literature thematizes and reflects on rapid changes in the conditions of communication and in the relationship between writers and readers.
Scotland and the North
Authors: Fielding Penny
Published: October 2018

The term ‘Romanticism’ takes on different associations when we consider its geographical extent. This chapter thinks about national configurations of space and time. Scotland was at once a modern producer of literature in the period and a way of imagining an ancient Romance past for modern culture. Scotland reinvents northern spaces, such as the Highlands or the Borders, as literary ones that signify this doubled temporality. Taking as key examples the poetry and novels of James Macpherson, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and James Hogg, the chapter explores how the legal, economic, and political changes in Scotland’s history after the 1707 Act of Union are translated into centres of literary production that revived the ‘primitive’ past for contemporary consumption. This doubled temporality in turn gives rise to ironic doubling of voice or Gothic tropes in Scottish writing of the period.
Ireland and Union
Authors: Kelly Jim
Published: October 2018

Irish writers reacted to the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland by creating a literature deeply invested in political disputation and sentimental appeal. The works of Irish Romanticism display formal and generic hybridity, as writers responded to the material and cultural changes brought about by Union. Far from solving the national question, the Union initiated a literature interested in fragmentation, decline, and melancholy. This chapter surveys attempts in fiction and poetry to align sentimental models of literature with political advocacy, and considers the effect that Union had on writers concerned with Ireland. The legacy of the 1798 Rebellion, the ongoing struggle for Catholic Emancipation, and economic stagnation all led to a literature that could, and often did, shift quickly from lachrymose nostalgia to Gothic trauma.
A qualitative exploration of school-based staff’s experiences of delivering an alcohol screening and brief intervention in the high school setting: findings from the SIPS JR-HIGH trial
Authors: McGeechan G J , Giles E L , Scott S , McGovern R , Boniface S , Ramsay A , Sumnall H , Newbury-Birch D , Kaner E ,   the SIPS JR-HIGH Study Team
Published: October 2018

Background

Whilst underage drinking in the UK has been declining in recent years, prevalence is still higher than in most other Western European countries. Therefore, it is important to deliver effective interventions to reduce risk of harm.

Methods

Semi-structured interviews with staff delivering an alcohol screening and brief intervention in the high-school setting. The analysis was informed by normalization process theory (NPT), interviews were open coded and then a framework applied based on the four components of NPT.

Results

Five major themes emerged from the analysis. The majority of participants felt that the intervention could be useful, and that learning mentors were ideally suited to deliver it. However, there was a feeling that the intervention should have been targeted at young people who drink the most.

Conclusions

The intervention was generally well received in schools and seen as an effective tool for engaging young people in a discussion around alcohol. However, in the future schools need to consider the level of staffing in place to deliver the intervention. Furthermore, the intervention could focus more on the long-term risks of initiating alcohol consumption at a young age.
Long-term medical consequences of the crisis at the US–Mexico Border
Authors: Almeida Marcela , Rovner Maxwell R
Published: October 2018

The recent changes in policy at the Southern American Border have urged a number of medical entities and social and human rights organizations to become vocal about its possible long-term outcomes in the lives of the affected families. This reaction is supported by robust scientific evidence on the impact of adverse childhood experiences and perceived racial discrimination, among others, on mental and physical health outcomes.
Characterization of an Ohio Isolate of Brome Mosaic Virus and Its Impact on the Development and Yield of Soft Red Winter Wheat
Authors: Hodge B. A. , Salgado J. D. , Paul P. A. , Stewart L. R.
Published: October 2018

Brome mosaic virus (BMV) is generally thought to be of little economic importance to crops; consequently, there is little information about its impact on wheat production under field conditions. After repeated detection of BMV in Ohio wheat fields at incidences up to 25%, the virus was isolated, sequenced, characterized, and tested for its impact on soft red winter wheat (SRWW). The Ohio isolate of brome mosaic virus (BMV-OH) was found to be >99% identical to a BMV-Fescue isolate (accession no. DQ530423-25) and capable of systemically infecting multiple monocot and dicot species, including cowpea and soybean, in experimental inoculations. BMV-OH was used in field experiments during the 2016 and 2017 growing seasons to quantify its effect on SRWW grain yield and development when inoculated at Feekes 1, 5, 8, and 10 in two to four cultivars. Cultivar and timing of inoculation had statistically significant (P < 0.05) main and interaction effects on grain yield, wheat growth, and multiple components of yield. Compared with noninoculated controls, BMV-OH reduced grain yield by up to 61% when inoculated at Feekes 1 and by as much as 25, 36, and 31% for inoculations at Feekes 5, 8, and 10, respectively. The magnitude of the yield reduction varied among cultivars and was associated with reductions in grain size and weight or plant population. These findings suggest that BMV could impact wheat productivity in Ohio and will serve as the basis for more large-scale investigations of the effects of this virus in commercial fields.
Starting Health Disparities Education During Resident Orientation
Authors: Talati Asha Nikesh , Lappen Justin R. , Bondurant-Sullivan Amber , Cossler Nancy J. , Wieczorek Martin , Gecsi Kimberly S.
Published: October 2018

Disparities in women’s reproductive health outcomes are persistent and prevalent. Cultural competency education of trainees is central to reducing patient-, system-, and practitioner-level factors that promote disparate health outcomes. Such issues include health literacy, access to health care, and unconscious bias. We suggest that recognizing and reducing health disparities should be a longitudinal theme in resident education, first introduced during intern orientation and continued with dedicated didactics, experiential learning opportunities, grand rounds, and journal clubs built into the residency curricula. In this commentary, we present various methods of introducing health disparities education and commencing a larger conversation about inequity and race in medicine. We hope to encourage other training programs to incorporate this important topic earlier into their educational curriculum.