bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Youth and Family Ministry
Authors: Bockmann Melanie
Published: May 2024

Seventh-day Adventism’s primary focus is to preach the gospel in preparation for the Second Coming of Jesus, and Adventists believe successful evangelistic efforts begin at home, with strong marriages and families whose example and positive influence strengthen the church and its witness. In line with their missional program, Adventists are dedicated to training a new generation of faithful Adventists by developing the spiritual aptitude and mission focus of its youth through various programs and resources. Given the challenges of cultural diversity within its global reach, as well as societal fluctuations during its 150-year history, the Adventist church has sought to adapt its methods while maintaining the core integrity of its traditional teachings. This article highlights the central purposes, approaches, and means of Adventist family and youth ministries, as well as their historical development, placement in broader society, and particular areas of focus and concern for the Adventist church in its worldwide context.
Adventists in Asia and Global Themes
Authors: Chow Christie Chui-Shan
Published: May 2024

Asia displays regionally differentiated patterns of the transmission and reception of Seventh-day Adventism, defined by the very question of church-state relationships, and in the broader context of war and revolution, colonialization and decolonization, migration and urbanization. The diverse Asian expressions of Adventism took root in response not only to American missionary initiatives during the twentieth century but also to decades of indigenous efforts to deepen the Adventist faith in the face of adversity, persecution, and secularization. The synergy between global religious resources and local conditions highlights the indigenization of Adventist ecclesial and theological currents, and the enduring patterns of mission-church collaboration in different temporal and spatial settings. From the late twentieth century onward, Adventism has embedded itself into the Asian religious landscape, and some of its adherents have followed migration routes to build diaspora churches in the Global North.
Adventists and Racial Equality
Authors: Baker Benjamin
Published: May 2024

This chapter surveys the race challenges of Seventh-day Adventists by exploring how white and Black members of the church have related to each other in three key sites: the United States, South Africa, and England. What emerges is a church that has always prided itself on being “not of this world,” yet in the most quintessential of Christian principles—treating all people justly despite color—has in fact reflected the racism of its host nations and often even fallen behind them in racial progress. In response, the church has been consistently confronted by members within its communion who have stood up against its racism and demanded that Adventists live up to their professed Christian ideals, making for a long struggle between supporters of a status quo of racial prejudice and those trying to change it. Despite making considerable gains, racial harmony remains elusive for Seventh-day Adventists.
Women in Adventism
Authors: Olson Campbell Heidi
Published: May 2024

The Seventh-day Adventist Church was founded by a woman, Ellen White, who preached and held ordained ministerial credentials. In the decades since White’s death, women have also held ministerial and leadership positions within the denomination. Yet the denomination to date, despite heated debates, has not voted to officially ordain women. Disagreements about gender roles in the denomination have coalesced around whether to ordain women. This chapter explores why a denomination founded by a woman has had so many debates about women’s roles, with a special emphasis on gender debates in the early twentieth century. It closes by delving into the impact of the denomination’s increasing globalization on gender views and how missions have provided women both opportunities for greater leadership within the denomination and, conversely, limitations.
Adventists and Ethics
Authors: Plantak Zdravko
Published: May 2024

Coming from a variety of Christian faiths, early Adventists held similar ethical views opposing slavery, promoting soft pacifism, and defending women in ministry. Common-sense reasoning and Wesleyan Quadrilateral influenced church leaders to a broader ethical decision-making through reflective equilibrium. Adventists were ardent abolitionists, and they stood against racial discrimination. Sanctity of life mattered to Adventists, and this influenced their decisions to create one of the largest Protestant healthcare systems in the world to improve lives of millions. Adventist ethics has had a checkered history, at times speaking up and taking action. At other times, however, Adventists have done very little, stayed silent, or even acted unethically due to pragmatic or self-preservation reasons. For greater consistency, Adventists need to base their ethical influence on solid moral reflections emerging from common-sense experience and reason, identifying with Jesus, who called his disciples to radical and peculiar morality driven by divine-like agape love.
Jewish Law and Orthodox Law
Authors: Ferziger Adam S.
Published: May 2024

One of the foundational distinctions of the past three centuries in Jewish history from its predecessors is the changing role of Jewish law. Jewish law long served primarily as a dividing line between Jews and Gentiles—or those gravitating toward apostasy. In contrast, the queries in this chapter demonstrate a clear, self-conscious emphasis by the authors on disparities between their core Jewish constituencies—the Orthodox, as opposed to non-Orthodox or nonobservant Jews. Attention to such divergences is not simply a cosmetic or technical matter. When evidenced broadly, it reflects a more fundamental characteristic of the transition from pre-modern Jewish law to an adjusted novel articulation. A system that celebrated divisions between Jews and non-Jews shifted to one that did not abandon prior principles regarding non-Jews—although many authorities sought to neutralize them—but brought to the fore that which differentiated between Orthodox Jews and their Jewish counterparts.
Korean Buddhism in America
Authors: Schippert Claudia
Published: May 2024

An introductory vignette illustrates the simultaneous existence of two forms of Korean Buddhism in North America: those practiced by Koreans in the United States or Canada, and those practiced by communities of largely non-Korean and mostly white practitioners who trace origins of their practice to a Korean lineage. The chapter first differentiates the two groups in terms of language familiarity, linguistic usage, and cultural identity. Then, Korean heritage communities are contextualized historically and by describing the function of one temple. The next section introduces as “translation into English” the major North American convert communities founded by Korean teachers. Finally, three relevant themes in explorations of Korean Buddhism in America are suggested: the legacy of Jinul’s inclusive style in formation and transmission of Korean Buddhism; Korean Buddhists’ double minority status in North America; and the complex legacy of resistance to Japanese colonial rule in changing geopolitical transnational contexts.
Ritual, Rituals, and Ritualizing in American Buddhism
Authors: Payne Richard K.
Published: May 2024

Popular religious discourse in America both valorizes meditation as good and ritual as bad, and dichotomizes the two as distinct and separate. Historically rooted in the conflicts of the Reformation, these paired oppositions perpetuate a Cartesian-style dualism of mind and body, a privileging of thought over action, and an implicit appeal to human exceptionalism. Instead of paired oppositions, understanding ritual practice in terms of three levels of analysis is introduced in this chapter. The three are the concrete level of lived performance, a first level of abstraction as some specific ritual, and a second-order abstraction as the general category “ritual.” The distinction between ritual and meditation at the second order of abstraction enables us to understand the distinction as one of different perspectives on lived activity—either a perspective that focuses on the body or a perspective that focuses on the mind. Lived activity itself, however, is integral, and therefore there are meditative dimensions of ritual, and ritualized dimensions of meditation.
Mindfulness and Meditation in the United States
Authors: Gajaweera Nalika
Published: May 2024

This chapter investigates the historical shifts, culturally contingent forces, and power-laden dynamics that have enabled the emergence of mindfulness as a therapeutic modality in the context of North America. Engaging with an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, including historical textual literature and ethnography, the chapter traces the multiple historical confluences and culturally contingent forces that have shaped the emergence of meditation from its historical conditions in Asia to its contemporary application in both covert Buddhist communities and secular settings. As much as current formulations of mindfulness have uncoupled Buddhist meditation practices from their role in traditional Buddhist authority and soteriological power, equally important are the nuanced new meanings, significances, and forms of power relations that play a role in its ongoing formation. The chapter thus explores the contemporary mindfulness phenomenon as entangled in and co-constituted by broader systems of modern power, including colonialism, neoliberalism, and whiteness.
Food in American Buddhism
Authors: Curley Melissa Anne-Marie
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines dynamics of boundary crossing and boundary control within the American Buddhist foodway. It first considers American Buddhist interpretations of alms donation and the use of temple grounds as a space for commensality. Moving into the domestic sphere, the chapter explores two varieties of American cookbooks, surveying the kinds of Buddhist subjectivities each seeks to cultivate. Next, it takes up mindful eating as a strategy for eating less while enjoying one’s food more, assessing mindful eating in light of broader critiques of mindfulness practices. Finally, it reviews some American Buddhist efforts to use food production and distribution as an avenue for developing more compassionate relationships with other beings. Across these broad topics, the chapter seeks to demonstrate how the American Buddhist foodway works both to define and delimit identities and to increase and expand cultural—and thus social and political—capacity.
American Buddhism and Visual Culture
Authors: Kyan Winston C.
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the diversity of American Buddhism through the wide lens of visual culture, which takes all images as social facts. Accordingly, it situates a broad understanding of American Buddhist visual culture in a chronology of key moments in the practice and reception of American Buddhism. The result is a restitutive overview that brings the Buddhist temples and altars of Chinese and Japanese immigrants into the spotlight given to European American Buddhist converts, juxtaposes the Buddhism-inspired contemporary art practices of women and Blacks with the compositions of the New York avant-garde, and positions mass media representations of Buddhist monks on TV and in cartoons alongside conceptual film and video installations.
Zen Buddhism in America
Authors: Van Overmeire Ben
Published: May 2024

The focus of scholarship on Zen in America has been white communities affiliated with Japanese teachers who practice meditation to the expense of other ritual practices. This has led to a narrow vision of what constitutes “Zen in America.” The current chapter aims to give an overview of existing lines of scholarship, as well as indicate what future directions are promising. In doing so, it focuses on literary production. After a brief literature review, the chapter sketches the function of Zen literature in China and Japan. Then, it shows how Zen Buddhist apologists such as Daisetz Suzuki translated these ideas for an American audience. Then, it discusses two prominent Zen teachers in America, and the effects of the sex scandals on American Zen practice and scholarship. After noting gendered and racialized perspectives, the chapter ends with a reflection on the global influence of American Zen.
More than a Feeling
Authors: Vonk Jennifer , Torgerson-White Lauri , Edge Jared , Benton Bridget
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews the available methods for assessing components of emotion, with emphasis on positive and negative emotional experiences in nonhuman animals (NHAs). The authors consider the ability of NHAs to receive and interpret signals of emotion from conspecifics and allospecifics and address the possible impacts of domestication in addition to natural selection pressures on the expression of emotion. The authors find little evidence for the hypothesis that group-living species exhibit greater emotional complexity compared to non-group-living species. They discuss challenges while emphasizing the importance of developing more objective methods for assessing emotional experiences in NHAs. They conclude that emotion is still poorly understood in NHAs. Improving this understanding will be critical for informing acceptable welfare standards and practices for captive and domestic species.
Defect or Design Feature?
Authors: Ketelaar Timothy
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes motivated reasoning from an evolutionary perspective. A central premise is that when two individuals arrive at strikingly different interpretations of the same evidence, these different perceptions might not reflect a mere difference of opinions but may instead represent the operation of fundamentally different worldviews. Kant’s transcendental psychology offers a philosophical framework for understanding how two individuals—or even the same person in different contexts—will often perceive the same physical reality in markedly different ways. Finally, the chapter draws upon evolutionary insights regarding cognitive bias to review the literature on emotion and motivated reasoning. Equipped with these evolutionary and philosophical insights, this chapter shows how the “Affect-as-Information” model from social cognition can illuminate how many instances of cognitive bias, such as motivated reasoning, may be more accurately interpreted, not as “bugs” in our “mental software,” but as possible “design features” of the human mind.
Benefits of Community Singing for Cancer Patients, Survivors, and Caregivers
Authors: Clements-Cortés Amy , Yip Joyce
Published: May 2024

Humans have harnessed the power of singing, chanting, or intoning throughout documented history and cultures have universally elevated wise teachers and powerful healers. Community singing remains a powerful tool for accomplishing specific ends, especially in the hands of those with the specialized training in leading others toward those ends. The chapters gathered here exemplify various ways that group singing can improve well-being; specifically, it can improve quality of life, social isolation, group bonding, and assertions of identity. Perhaps most invigorating about these reports is that goals are reached more effectively when community singing hinges upon collaborative engagement.
“Everyone Can Sing”
Authors: Bonde Lars Ole , Ingerslev Stefan
Published: May 2024

Regular community singing in Danish primary schools has become quite rare, while children’s choirs have become increasingly successful in the context of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Widening disparities in the population’s cultural and social needs make the creation of socially inclusive communities a challenge for Danish public schools. The Danish school choir project Everyone Can Sing, underway since 2018 in a primary school in Albertslund (Copenhagen suburb), is based on the hypothesis that grade 0–3 class choirs have a significant impact on pupils’ ability to bond socially and better integrate as a community. In a co-teaching collaboration between teachers in the primary school and professionally trained children’s choir leaders, children learn how to sing an age-appropriate repertoire, move naturally, and perform in the community. Two weekly lessons take place in the class, and regular performances in and outside the school also contribute to children’s learning. The study follows a mixed methods convergent design, integrating quantitative data from sociometric analyses, selected national tests, and annual Pupil’s Wellbeing surveys. The chapter presents only preliminary qualitative results, especially a detailed description of the intervention prototype that has been developed over four years. Choir leaders’ understanding of ways the choir model might improve children’s social well-being and inclusion is highlighted. Preliminary positive gains include joy of social and academic learning, inclusion, and an estimated reduction in social segregation.
Community Choirs
Authors: Drudge Kayla , Nekola Anna E.
Published: May 2024

Among its many benefits, community singing provides opportunities to be with people of like minds and heritages. We sing in groups, partly to announce or affirm our places in the world, to resist societal pressure, or to remember and transmit our cultural heritages. Each chapter in this section focuses on demonstration of identity, but in addition, each shows how ideals are announced, upheld, and acted out in singing groups. Community singing therefore can reinforce our desire to be our best selves as individuals and in our relationships with others. This cultural work is crucial as societies strive to combat divisiveness.
Selling with Singalongs
Authors: Cook Malcolm
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the use of community singing as advertising in cinema, radio, and television, especially the tradition of singalongs characterized by the use of on-screen lyrics and the “bouncing ball” animated indicator. While some traditions of community singing examined in this handbook were motivated by musical or civic betterment, here it was in the service of consumption and profit. Illustrated song slides and early singalong films at the start of the 20th century commonly served to promote sales of sheet music or recordings. Cinema clubs and sponsored radio shows in the intra-war period used community singing to build brand identities and bind consumers to them. Television commercials have utilized singalongs to bridge temporal and spatial distance between viewers. While all examples aim to induct audiences into a community of mass consumption, several changing vectors and historical variations are characterized: the balance between direct selling and brand formation; the changes from in-person communal singing to mediated imagined communities; a development from local or regional brands to a global marketplace, as well as subsequent nostalgic resistance or reversion. This chapter investigates English-language examples of the use of singalongs as advertising from the early 20th century up to the present to understand the ways in which they aimed to sell products, direct audiences to adopt specific viewpoints and behaviors, and form brand identities and customer loyalty.
Women Singing in a Rural North Indian Community
Authors: Singh Kamlesh , Sigroha Suman , Shokeen Bharti
Published: May 2024

The current study explores the important role of community singing in the lives of rural women residing in the North Indian state of Haryana. Women sing a variety of folk songs, such as spiritual and religious songs, songs for special occasions, and songs that reflect contemporary concerns like health, gender, politics, or even COVID-19. In this chapter, the authors categorize a selection of songs under broad headings: gender discrimination, anecdotes, spiritual/religious messages, and contemporary health concerns. Translation from the local dialect is followed by a brief textual and musical analysis in order to clarify the function of community singing and to document the ways that social, spiritual, political, educational, economic, and cultural themes are reflected through these folk songs.
Community Singing in Flint and Baltimore, 1917–1920
Authors: Morgan-Ellis Esther M. , Spurgeon Alan L.
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents two case studies of community singing activity during the Great War, during which community singing was promoted as a wholesome pastime and patriotic activity not only in US Army and Navy training camps but in civilian communities large and small. By the end of the war, community singing had become a mainstream activity. In Flint, Michigan, George Oscar Bowen (1872–1957) was hired by the Community Music Association (CMA) to develop programming in support of its aims. Flint was a prosperous automobile manufacturing city of around 110,000 inhabitants, and many of the plant workers, most of whom came from Eastern Europe, were new immigrants to the United States. The CMA was founded, in part, to help instill patriotism among these new Americans. As director, Bowen led large group sings in the high school stadium as well as smaller noontime sing-alongs in the factories during the workers’ lunch hour. In Baltimore, community singing activities were spearheaded by May Garrettson Evans (1866–1947), founder and superintendent of the Peabody Preparatory Division, and music educator Henrietta Baker Low (1869–1960). During the Great War, Evans and Low left public singing activities to the men of the city but maintained an active singing program within the walls of the Prep. By considering the activities of these organizers in parallel, we gain insight into the gendered spheres of wartime community singing.
The Voices of Hope
Authors: Bishop Susan
Published: May 2024

These chapters consider community singing as a transgressive practice that transports singers beyond societal and cultural limitations. Authors shed light on the cultural work of community singing among incarcerated people, where some find healing and others receive help in restoring the self and resisting injustice. Group singers in other environments find homes away from home and new families, or reinforce identity in the face of death. Community singing can both educate the naïve to unimagined social complexities and form a bridge of understanding in community. These outcomes exemplify the power of community singing to negotiate and transcend.
From “Preguntitas sobre Dios” to “Solo le pido a Dios”
Authors: Silva Steuernagel Marcell
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the intersection of Latin American Protest Music and Christian music from the perspective of community singing. Based on a broad definition of community singing that encompasses networks of people gathered through experience and intention, the chapter traces the development of Latin American Protest Music, the rise of liberation theology in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, and the development of Catholic folk masses and socially engaged Protestant repertoires throughout the region in that context. By examining repertoire at the intersection of these interrelated phenomena, this chapter provides insight into how community singing can coalesce into protest and piety both locally and transnationally.
Music and Human Flourishing in Christian Communities
Authors: Myrick Nathan , Gessner Benjamin , Alvarado Johnathan
Published: May 2024

Authors of these chapters prioritize the feelings of community singers and the establishment and maintenance of “healthy” group singing experiences that contribute to flourishing or well-being. They query how virtual congregational singing makes people feel, how best to bridge a rift between two sets of leaders in a diasporic singing community, how the understanding of history can underpin the search for spirituality and eudaimonia, how entrainment is implicated in leaderless group singing, and how musical composition might be reconstructed further democratize community singing. These questions promise to help propel community singing and our writings about it into the future.
Gendering the Inter-American Human Rights System
Authors: Céspedes-Báez Lina Maria , Jaramillo Ruiz Felipe
Published: May 2024

The insertion of feminist ideals in mainstream institutional power has sparked debates within feminist literature. This chapter builds on this debate and explores the insertion of gender in the Inter-American Human Rights System. It describes the complex and gradual process through which feminist ideals find space in institutional organs, discourses, and procedures, discussing the main lessons from the shift toward a more gender-sensitive approach in international human rights governance. By applying a gender perspective, five crucial periods in the history of the Inter-American System have been identified, tracing the key milestones and processes in the insertion of feminist insights. This analysis contributes to the debate about the extent of feminist power in mainstream international institutions and knowledge.
Diaries, Notebooks, and Marginalia
Authors: Mahoney Charles W.
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines three closely related modes of Romantic writing—diaries, notebooks, and marginalia—which until recently have typically been studied for their circumstantial insights into the larger lives and nominally more important writings of their authors, rather than for their own sake. All three modes of writing represent what Samuel Richardson termed ‘writing to the moment’, an attempt to capture the now of the writer’s life, whether in relation to him/herself, others, or other forms of writing. The boundaries between these modes of writing are porous, but nevertheless demarcate discrete forms of production. While the diary nominally attends to the matters of a given day (the term ‘diary’ being derived from the Latin dies), and the comparatively informal classification of the notebook designates a more haphazard, asystematic, and potentially capacious form of writing, marginalia represent the private annotations of a public text, with varying degrees of personal reflection.
Food and Drink
Authors: Taylor Anya
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the multivalent realities and representations of food and drink in the Romantic period. As much as possible it uses the vibrant language of Romantic writers to express dismay at hunger or at extravagance, delight in tastes and appetites, and enthusiasm for or dread of inebriation. The chapter begins with real scarcity of wheat in the 1790s, recording the outrage of Coleridge, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Clare, and Cobbett at the hunger of the rural and urban poor. It moves to the lavish gluttony of the upper classes often served by chefs escaping the French Revolution, and to the many dishes in novels by Austen that reveal character in the hosts or guests. Abstemiousness and vegetarianism have proponents and mockers in this period. Drink becomes dangerous with the perfection of distilling practices, and many writers fear for the health of the country. Others exult in the creativity unleashed by alcohol. Both food and drink reveal the Romantic avidity for intense experience.
Landscape
Authors: Stewart David
Published: May 2024

Landscape is central to Romantic literature. This chapter explores how Romantic prose does more than provide a commentary on the more famous accounts of landscape provided by dramatists, novelists, and poets. Romantic prose forms such as travel writing, personal essays, and aesthetic treatises gave readers and writers new modes of landscape appreciation. Rather than seeing prose as a factual backdrop to the creative transformations of place that characterize Romanticism, it considers a series of innovations in prose forms that think through the complex ways in which land is shaped in a period deeply concerned with that very process due to significant changes in agriculture, aesthetics, science, and colonialism. Considering writers including Ann Radcliffe, John Clare, Dorothy Wordsworth, James Hogg, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the chapter suggests the vitality and the complexity of the relationship between Romantic prose and landscape.
Latin America
Authors: Fermanis Porscha
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores three key ideas about Latin America in nineteenth-century British prose writing: first, the medievalization and orientalization of Spain, Portugal, and their colonies; second, the region’s role in Britain’s movement towards free-trade liberalism and informal or economic empire; and third, the relevance of new world republicanism for British conceptions of nation-state formation. In each case, it situates British interests and perspectives on Latin America within a transimperial and global framework that recognizes the overlapping legacies of competing empires and the importance of Euro-Afro-Indo-American interrelations, as well as incorporating wider Atlantic histories of slavery, revolution, and resistance. More generally, the chapter argues for the importance of Latin American revolutionary, republican, and subaltern experiences in the emerging paradigm of political modernity, rather than simply understanding the region as part of Britain’s informal empire.
Literary Criticism
Authors: Keanie Andrew
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by examining William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, a collection which, though radical, could hardly have been classed as a full-frontal attack on the Establishment, but one which still looked a bit too interested in undermining convention. Hence, Francis Jeffrey’s reaction to Wordsworth is considered here as the absorbingly articulated anxiety of a high-end conspiracy theorist. This chapter also revisits some of the critical hostility to John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Thomas De Quincey’s seminal insights into Macbeth, too, are revisited, as is an example of De Quincey’s contemporary book reviewing at its most meltingly Machiavellian. Finally, this chapter shows that Coleridge’s evaluation of Wordsworth in the Biographia Literaria marked the arrival of a new kind of criticism that could include consideration of the weaknesses of a work of literature as part of a more helpful appraisal of its life-changing strengths.
Literary Parody and Satire
Authors: Mason Nicholas
Published: May 2024

While it may no longer be controversial to claim that satire and parody not only survived the rise of Romantic sincerity but remained central to British poetry, drama, and prints well into the nineteenth century, the achievements of Romantic-era prose satirists are still broadly underappreciated. As a corrective to this tendency, this chapter emphasizes how literary fads and follies were especially apt to inspire innovative experiments in parodic and satiric prose. After briefly contrasting the respective lineages and functions of parody and satire, it highlights three exemplary instances of the tradition of Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne being kept alive: the wave of novelistic parodies of the 1790s (most famously, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey) lampooning Gothic excess, Thomas Love Peacock’s deployment of Menippean satire to bring Romantic poets back to earth, and Blackwood’s transformation of the monthly magazine into the principal medium for literary parody and satire of the late Romantic age.
Nature Writing
Authors: Higgins David
Published: May 2024

This chapter emphasizes the complexity, diversity, and rhetorical self-consciousness of Romantic prose nature writing. It begins with two foundational figures: Gilbert White and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. White’s influential book, The Natural History of Selborne (1789), focuses on the dynamic processes of nonhuman nature. Rousseau’s botanical writings are confessional and therapeutic, but also formally self-conscious. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals occupy a middle ground between White and Rousseau, bringing together details of domestic life and an interest in the agency of nonhuman forces. The chapter then examines how Charlotte Smith engages with the legacy of White and Rousseau in a series of rich generic experiments that move between prose and poetry. Part three addresses ecomimesis and its limitations in the prose of John Clare and the art of Thomas Bewick. It ends with James Hogg’s ‘Storms’, a short story about the entanglement of nonhuman and human forces and the power of nature writing itself.
North America
Authors: Perkins Pam
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the range of approaches taken by British writers in describing both Indigenous and settler cultures in North America. Beginning with some of the idealized accounts of emigration during the later eighteenth century—including pamphlets and fiction by Gilbert Imlay and Robert Bage—the chapter then turns, first, to less optimistic versions of North American settlement, such as the shattered pastorals created by Hector St John de Crèvecoeur and Anne Grant, and next, to more straightforwardly hostile accounts of the emigrant experience. The rest of the chapter then considers some of the reasons for anxieties about North American settlement, looking at both biogeographical issues—in particular, at fears of the debilitating impacts of climate—and at concerns about transculturation. In approaching this final topic, the chapter moves from narratives of emigration and settlement to accounts by explorers and fur traders including Samuel Hearne, George Cartwright, and Peter Fidler.
Polar Prose
Authors: Carroll Siobhan Maria
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines Romantic nonfiction’s construction of polar space, arguing that the poles’ challenge to European claims to planetary knowledge made them an important site for the formation of British imperial ideology. Whereas in the eighteenth century, writers of colour such as Olaudah Equiano could insert their perspective into accounts of controversial polar expeditions, by the early nineteenth century, John Barrow’s drive toward a unified polar narrative had eliminated such possibilities. By analysing the prose of polar articles and voyage narratives, we can better understand not only Romantic-era politics surrounding polar expeditions, but also the influence of polar writing on British attitudes toward empire, Indigenous knowledges, and the ecology of the Arctic.
Political Controversy I
Authors: Lee Yoon Sun
Published: May 2024

The revolution controversy in Britain had as much to do with prose style as with politics. The political impact of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared to lie in its form and style even more than in its arguments. Instead of using prose to extract and convey stable abstractions and principles from something called experience, Burke drew attention to the complex, entangled historical and political conditions of any prose utterance, and to the risky play of blindness, insight, analogy, individual experience, and collective knowledge that prose enabled, regardless of its author’s intent. The ensuing debate was about the representation of voice, as well as the ownership and communication of feeling at the level of the sentence, paragraph, printed text, or even unwritten constitution. In its concerns, it anticipated much later explorations of the literary mode called free indirect discourse.
Political Controversy III
Authors: Chittick Kathryn
Published: May 2024

In 1780, only 3 per cent of the population in England and Wales could vote. The 1832 Reform Bill increased the electorate to 18 per cent of adult males. However, no straight path leads from the 1782 call for reform to 1832, nor is there any real connection through the 1790s ‘rights of man’ debate. Whig Reform motions were repeatedly defeated. After 1816, the return of unemployed soldiers from over twenty years of war transformed Reform from an arcane parliamentary issue into a populist cry: William Cobbett’s Political Register educated the working classes into political self-consciousness. Paradoxically, it was the Ultra-Tories, feeling betrayed by Catholic Emancipation (1829)—the real constitutional issue—who introduced the Reform Bill. This chapter looks at the literary narrative of ‘Reform’ as seen in Lord Byron’s Don Juan and its piracies, Cobbett’s Political Register, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Friend, Blackwood’s, and the parliamentary exchanges of Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Wilson Croker replayed in the Edinburgh and the Quarterly reviews.
Political Parody and Satire
Authors: Demson Michael
Published: May 2024

Edmund Burke’s critique of French political satire in 1790 launched a debate in England about the value of satire, its efficacy as a political tool, and its literary status. Burke deemed satire a political discourse, detached from traditional literary history, and he decried both its destabilizing influence on social order and the impact of derisive texts on solemn political institutions. In response, 1790s radicals, including Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, lionized political satire for the very reasons Burke denounced it, disseminating their estimation of its value through cheap print media. Equating satire with sedition, conservatives responded with prosecutorial campaigns against the radical press, culminating with the 1818 trials of William Hone, who vindicated himself by arguing that satire was a genre of literature, and thus not bound to any political moment. The Peterloo Massacre (1819) inspired the fiercest political satire of the period, but repression of the press eventually turned readers to other interests.
Prefaces, Prospectuses, Defences, and Manifestos
Authors: Cole Heinowitz Rebecca
Published: May 2024

The proliferation of authorial paratexts during the Romantic period was a reflex of two concomitant developments: the rise of a commercial book trade and periodical press, and the emergence of a mass reading audience. As reviewers wielded increasing influence under the aegis of ‘public opinion’, authors were impelled to address prospective readers in extended prefatory notes and pre-publication prospectuses which frequently exceeded their explanatory or apologetic functions by taking aim at both the marketplace and its self-appointed arbiters. Yet while these textual supplements encouraged readers to exercise their independence in assessing literary merit, their arguments—like those of their antagonists—rested on the assumption that literature should serve the moral interests of society. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ thus earns its place as the Romantic era’s most radical statement of poetics by refuting the logic according to which a literary work can be assessed by the public effects it produces.
Regionalism
Authors: Broadhead Alex
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the ways in which four Lakes-based writers—Thomas West, William Wordsworth, Ann Wheeler, and Dorothy Wordsworth—navigated between two contrasting modes of Romantic regionalism. The first mode, driven by a desire to provide an exhaustive inventory of the life or history of place, usually reinforced the idea of cities and regions as discrete zones, each with their own identity and character, even as they drove the forces which unsettled and dispersed local communities (tourism, for instance, or enclosure). The second mode registered the discontents of that disruption, and testified to the fact that, for many (especially women and labouring-class people), the lived experience of regionality was characterized as much by dislocation, incoherence, and the uncanny, as it was by a sense of rootedness. In the differences between the two forms, the author finds a deeper, unresolved division at the heart of Romanticism’s connection to the English provinces.
Regionalism
Authors: Aaron Jane
Published: May 2024

During the Romantic period the revolutionary spirit of the age inspired many Welsh pamphleteers who, like Richard Price (1723–1791), welcomed the fall of the Bastille. Members of the London–Welsh society, the Gwyneddigion, also advocated pro-revolutionary developments, while at the same time furthering in their prose the late eighteenth-century Celtic Revival. Back in Wales, many pamphleteers were also Dissenting preachers, a factor arguably reflected in their characteristic prose style, which attempted to appeal both to reason and highly spiritualized emotion. Robert Owen (1771–1858) was influenced by Welsh Methodism in his youth in Montgomeryshire; his early socialism, in turn, influenced the letters and pamphlets of men who later became Welsh Chartist leaders. This chapter aims to assess the significance of these political, cultural, and religious developments as they affected Wales, while at the same time drawing attention to certain stylistic aspects which arguably characterized Welsh prose of the Romantic period.
Reviews
Authors: Cutmore Jonathan
Published: May 2024

Review journals of the Romantic period gained cultural and political agency by fusing literature with politics. They were the primary representative in print of middle-class cultural and political ambition. Each of the famous review journals—the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and the Westminster—was initiated and conducted by a socio-political coterie, liberal, conservative, or radical. Each review journal advanced its cultural and political agenda by subordinating authors to subjects. The intention of a review journal’s conductors and contributors was not to persuade the unpersuaded but to attract, inform, and rally a sympathetic constituency of readers. Readers elevated the status of a review journal by believing (not always correctly) that it influenced opinions, reputations, and the sale of books. The review journals’ cultural and political agency faded with the passage of parliamentary reform, with the rise of a mass readership, and in the face of competition from general-interest magazines.
Social Science
Authors: Hewitt Regina
Published: May 2024

Complementing studies of the content of British Romantic-era nonfiction prose on the nature of social, political, and psychological well-being prompted by the French Revolution, this chapter focuses on the method by which a sampling of authors from Edmund Burke to Thomas Carlyle constituted their writing as a reliable source of information about human relations and therefore as functionally equivalent to ‘social science’. Before analysing the sampling, I note the Scottish Enlightenment origin of truth claims about social relations. In analysing the sampling, I note the interplay of invention and analysis in the texts, and I argue that the act of writing a nonfiction prose inquiry is part of constituting a work as ‘social science’, of constituting the identity of the author as a source of valuable insights into human relations, and of constituting the identity of the reader as an informed participant in social processes.
Sports Writing
Authors: Strachan John
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks at the print culture of sport in the Romantic era and the extraordinary effervescence of sporting prose in the period. William Hazlitt’s famous meditation on bareknuckle boxing, ‘The Fight’ (1822), an account of the championship contest between Tom ‘The Gas Man’ Hickman and Bill Neat, is one of the most significant of Romantic-period prose writings. It can also be seen as the culmination of several decades of sports writing, initiated by Peter Beckford’s Thoughts on Hunting (1781), including the four volumes of Pierce Egan’s Boxiana, or Sketches of Modern Pugilism (1812–1829), and the first modern sports biography, Charles James Apperley’s (‘Nimrod’s’) sensational, tragi-comic Memoirs of the Life of the Late John Mytton (1837). Sport became a forum in the late Georgian period to discuss matters such as masculinity, war, and education, what it meant to be British, and what it meant to be a man.
Table Talk
Authors: Bowers Will
Published: May 2024

Books of table talk are an often ignored and quintessentially Romantic form of criticism. These once popular volumes allow us to broaden our sense of what comprises literary-critical thought—a broadening, paradoxically, which provides a better sense of Romanticism’s major critical preoccupations. Romantic critical media is usually confined to what is written down or formally spoken, but in doing so we miss out on the most common means of opinion. On walks, over dinner, at the pub, and in clubs and societies, conversation was (as it remains) the simplest way of discussing literature. The years 1786 to 1856 constitute the great age of table talk: this chapter outlines the form’s development, before using specific examples to consider how these volumes structure and present criticism. It concludes by putting these volumes back at the centre of Romantic criticism by using them to appreciate anew one of its greatest works: William Hazlitt’s ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823).
Open or closed? China’s dilemmas in a changing geopolitical and geoeconomic order
Authors: Mitter Rana
Published: May 2024

China is currently being forced into a dilemma in policy terms, needing a more open economy to boost growth at a time when conditions are poor, but also seeking to close society in the name of security. A range of issues currently constrain the Chinese economy, including a weak property market, demographics that will lead to an increasingly ageing population, and increasingly large numbers of unsuccessful loans from the Belt and Road Initiative. Furthermore, rural dwellers are unlikely to be able to reap the benefits of training and technology available to urbanites. However, openness seems troubling to many policy-makers when China defines itself in terms of its own modern history, in which it was repeatedly invaded or occupied, creating a wary attitude toward the outside world. However, overall, China is likely to find opportunities to try out new economic opportunities in its own region, which may be successful as long as there is no confrontation over issues such as the status of Taiwan.
Medical staff monitoring in interventional cardiology: over apron dosemeter placement based on measurements and simulations
Authors: Ferrari Paolo , Venturi Giovanna , Campani Lorenzo , Mariotti Francesca , Becker Frank , Jansen Jan , Jovanović Zoran , Krstić Dragana , Teles Pedro
Published: May 2024

Interventional cardiology is characterized by high radiation exposure for both the patient and the operator. Adequate shielding and monitoring of the operator are fundamental to comply with radiation protection principles. In a previous work, the effect on the dose of the dosemeter position on the chest was studied. In this paper, the investigation has been completed, employing an anthropomorphic thorax phantom, equipped with arms. Although there are differences between the Monte Carlo simulations and the measurements, similar trends are observed, showing that the reduction in dose, due to the arms, is between 20 and 60%, compared with the situation without arms. For that reason, considering a dosemeter placed on the chest, the upper position, which is the least affected by the arms, should be preferred while the extreme lateral position, near the armpit, should be avoided.
Trends in State-Level Maternal Mortality by Racial and Ethnic Group in the United States
Authors: Fleszar L.G. , Bryant A.S. , Johnson C.O. , Blacker B.F. , Aravkin A. , Baumann M. , Dwyer-Lindgren L. , Kelly Y.O. , Maass K. , Zheng P. , Roth G.A.
Published: May 2024

(JAMA. 2023;330(1):52–61. doi: 10.1001/jama.2023.9043)

Although the US spends more per person on health care, the maternal mortality rate (MMR) has continued to increase in the past 2 decades, while other high-income countries have been able to decrease maternal mortality. The Global Burden of Disease has studied MMRs and has estimated about 4 deaths per 100,000 live births to 44 deaths per 100,000 live births in high-income countries in 2019. Further, in the non-Hispanic Black population and non-Hispanic White population, MMRs are 2 to 4 times higher. There is a paucity of data regarding state-level trends of maternal mortality in many states. This study provided estimates of MMRs by state to support the development of maternal mortality surveillance.