bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Early Gothic Novels and the Belief in Fiction
Authors: Lynch Deidre
Published: June 2018

This chapter looks at Gothic novels. A Gothic Romance or even ‘a Gothic Story’ may be one thing, but a Gothic Novel is something else again. Though that term has been retrospectively applied to a body of macabre, sensational, ghost-infested fiction from the late eighteenth century only since the early twentieth, in its suggestion of a perverse hybridizing of the outmoded and the up-to-date it aptly captures the transgressiveness these fictions represented for their original critics. More directly than the contemporary fictions that aspired to be life-like and observe the norms of probability, Gothic novels foreground that peculiar mental gymnastics that since the eighteenth century has enabled readers to participate in a secular culture industry ‘which invites the subtle and supple deployment of belief’. In this sense, by helping to define the frontiers of the fictive, the Gothic mode did not interrupt the rise of the novel, but instead completed it.
The Novel Wars of 1790–1804
Authors: Mee Jon
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores the novel in the period 1790–1804. The French Revolution profoundly shaped the English novel in the 1790s. Originally, the Revolution was welcomed by sections of the reading public, many of whom regarded it as bringing France into line with the liberty under law perceived as the British system of constitutional monarchy. Opinion began to change significantly after Edmund Burke's attack on the Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Accounts of the novels written in the decade after Burke's assault on the Revolution are now routinely organized around the two poles of ‘Jacobin’ and ‘Anti-Jacobin’ fiction. Certainly, the novel in this decade did find itself shaped by the ‘war of ideas’, but—like the pamphlet war itself—it was neither conducted as a straightforward exchange of fire between two distinct ideological camps, nor was it untouched by developments in the novel as a form.
Evangelical Fiction
Authors: Mandal Anthony
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines evangelical fiction. It is unsurprising that the novel became a powerful tool in effecting the evangelicals’ mission to improve the moral condition of the nation. At the same time, the troublesome reputation of fiction, particularly in the wake of the French Revolution, caused fundamental problems for evangelical writers who remained anxious about the genre and their association with it. Nevertheless, these authors were able to blend populism with propriety through a careful traversing of theological, national, and generic boundaries, contributing significantly to the rehabilitation of the novel during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the legacy of evangelicalism to fiction was the purging of many of its excesses and the legitimization of the novel from the mid-1810s onwards.
Celebrity and Scandalous Fiction
Authors: Tuite Clara
Published: June 2018

This chapter studies scandalous fiction. One way of registering how scandal fiction might figure in a revised history of the novel is to consider scandal fiction as embodying everything that the polite novel sought to repudiate or disavow: criminality, sexuality, sensation, vulgarity, voyeurism, and reflexivity. For just as the novel genre itself is a scandal for much of the eighteenth century, the increasing respectability of the novel genre from the 1750s is predicated upon the move away from forms such as romans á clef and chroniques scandaleuses. Indeed, the English novel starts to define itself as a national genre against the scandalous excesses of the French or Italian novel—which it often does while exploiting and purveying these foreign excesses. This is particularly the case with the most scandalous forms of fiction: pornography and erotic fiction.
Fictions of the Union
Authors: Keymer Thomas
Published: June 2018

This chapter looks at the fictions of the Union. At the culmination of her influential essay ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’, originally prefixed to her multi-volume anthology The British Novelists (1810), Anna Laetitia Barbauld makes an arresting claim for the nation-building potential of the novel genre. Where Jane Austen focuses on generalities and universals, Barbauld emphasizes instead the public function of novels, and of the canon enshrined in her anthology. She does so a century after the British nation had been formally inaugurated by the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, and just a decade after union with Ireland had taken effect. Her clear message is that in creating and sustaining a sense of overarching united nationhood, the ‘systems’ binding these composite entities—the principles and mechanisms underlying these unions—might be less efficacious than works of fiction, with their vivid and compelling dramatizations of shared interests, affiliations, and histories.
Short Fictional Forms and the Rise of the Tale
Authors: Jarrells Anthony
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses some of the short fictional forms that persisted in as well as alongside the novel. These short fictional forms include chapbook and bluebook abridgements, religious tracts, and what would come to be called—by the end of the period covered here—the tale. Together, these forms highlight the dynamic field of writing that comprised the years that span the novel's rise and canonization. As it appeared in stand-alone collections, magazines, and literary annuals, the tale pushed the novel to consolidate its boundaries even as it developed its own mix of features to challenge the novel on its established ground. In the end, however, the novel won out in its generic competition with half-told and mangled tales.
Children’s and Juvenile Literature
Authors: Grenby M. O.
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines children's and juvenile literature. Many pre-Victorian children did not encounter children's fiction at all. A substantial number, of course, were largely disconnected from literary culture by indigence or illiteracy. However, lots of those young people who did consume books continued to use material designed primarily for adults. What confuses the matter is that the distinction could be very blurred between literature for adults and literature for ‘young gentlemen and ladies’. What would now be called ‘crossover’ works were common: titles originally aimed at adults that were quickly appropriated by or for young readers. By 1820, the novel for children was establishing itself as a distinct entity, but had not quite disconnected itself from the mainstream. Children's fiction was still shadowing the novel for adults, imitating its genres, and sharing its concerns.
The Rise of the ‘Rise’ of the Novel
Authors: Siskin Clifford
Published: June 2018

This concluding chapter argues that the rise of the novel has been one of the most widely circulated narratives in the study of literature. However, when one tracks the rise of that rise, a very old and a very straightforward reason comes into view: literature as a category to study was itself put into circulation by novelism. The eighteenth century's extensive discourse of and about the novel was a primary medium not only for that genre but also for literature's own rise. That is why, 200 years later, The Oxford History of the Novel in English (OHNE) matters, even for those with other generic predilections: a new history of the novel will be a necessary tool for anyone attempting to write a genuinely new literary history.
Elizabethan Popular Romance and the Popular Novel
Authors: Maslen R. W.
Published: June 2018

This chapter concerns the work of writers who proclaim their commitment to a readership of commoners: craftspeople, tradesfolk, domestic servants, and others below the rank of the gentry. In doing so, the chapter reveals the voracious appetite of the marketplace of print for copy. It draws attention to the competing interests of printers and considers the question of how to make a living by writing under these circumstances. Writers experimented with different methods of turning the copy they produced into a steady income, but many failed. However, the attempt led to the extraordinary variety of prose pamphlets (short, inexpensive books) printed in the 1580s and 1590s.
‘The conjunction cannot be hurtful’?
Authors: Alexander Gavin
Published: June 2018

This chapter considers Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia and its unusual place in English literary history. Arcadia is the most significant and substantial work of original prose fiction in English before Samuel Richardson; it contains around eighty poems in nearly four thousand lines of verse. Its author, Sir Philip Sidney, calls it only a ‘work’ and a ‘book’, and for his contemporaries that is all they can call it. This chapter, however, attempts to think of Arcadia as a novel. In doing so, it asks questions about its relation not only to its literary past, but to its literary future too, to register and measure the gap between what is novel about it and what is novelistic, to see that it is animated and finally incapacitated by its generic and formal combinations and minglings, by its wish to be all things to all people.
Rabelaisian Comedy and Satire
Authors: McDowell Nicholas
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses the influence of François Rabelais in English literary culture. It looks at this impact on earlier English prose narrative and fiction of Rabelais' loosely related tales of gluttonous, bibulous giants and their fantastic adventures, collectively known as Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64). ‘Rabelaisian’ is of course an adjective which in both criticism and common linguistic currency has become detached from its literary and authorial origins to become an alternative term for the ‘bawdy’, the ‘vulgar’, and the ‘earthily humorous’. The chapter shows the process beginning from the moment the term is coined to describe an author's character rather than appraise their literary style, evoking a sensibility healthily drawn to festivity and indulgence but also somewhat at odds with Christian decency. The generality of the term has doubtless contributed to the vagueness of much critical discussion.
Formal Experimentation and Theories of Fiction
Authors: Hudson Nicholas
Published: June 2018

This chapter situates the theory and practice of the early novel in the context of developing ideas about literary art in general. It argues that issues such as the relationship between fiction and probability, or between historical fact and allegorical truth, belonged to a wider and evolving discussion of literary art. The neoclassical rules that predominated in the Restoration came under challenge in the early eighteenth century, a reassessment that facilitated the ‘rise of the novel’ after 1740. On the other hand, the evident exclusion of the novel from an authoritative classical tradition made this ambiguous form artistically undisciplined and morally suspect. Particularly as the outlaw ‘novel’ began to gain a real foothold in the print marketplace during the 1720s, proving its ability to captivate readers in ways not authorized in neoclassical theory, it needed to be harmonized with the tradition of the epic, comic drama, and other ancient genres.
Classical French Fiction and the Restoration Novel
Authors: Ballaster Ros
Published: June 2018

This chapter considers the ways in which Restoration fiction in England adopted and adapted the classical styles of elegance and concision derived from the new experiments in French fiction of the later seventeenth century. Here, the ‘Restoration’ refers to more than a specific dynastic period. The kings of this period brought with them a fondness for and familiarity with the forms of French fiction and French drama acquired in their years of exile in that country. The term also marks a longer tradition of a relatively libertine fiction, concerned with amorous intrigue and profoundly informed by the practices of plotting and performance found in both the comedies and tragedies of the French, and later the English, stage. It was not only diasporic kings who facilitated the ‘cross-Channel invention of the novel’, but also the diaspora of French Huguenot, particularly female, writers to England.
Swift, Satire, and the Novel
Authors: Rawson Claude
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores Jonathan Swift's role in the evolution of a form of novel that did not yet exist in his own day. It is a form priding itself on immediacy of reporting, a rhetoric of intensive confessional exploration, and a sense that the process of writing itself is part of the self-disclosure. Swift's A Tale of a Tub (1704), while not properly a novel, had a shaping influence on the history of fiction, as well as being the product or by-product of a popular culture, and book-trade practices, which provided a foundation for the evolution of the novel. Swift's speaker, dedicating his book to Prince Posterity, boasts ‘that what I am going to say is literally true this Minute I am writing’. He adds in his Preface that his aim is to achieve ‘a Parity and strict Correspondence of Idea's between the Reader and the Author’.
‘Moral Romance’ and the Novel at Mid-Century
Authors: Sabor Peter
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses several developments pertaining to the phenomenon of ‘moral romance’ as well as the state of the novel at mid-century. The 1740s were a pivotal decade for the novel in English, particularly because of the rivalry between Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Both writers notably disparaged conventional ideas about romance. In addition, the chapter explores moral romance in Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744). It shows that, although she uses the phrase ‘Moral Romance’ so diffidently in her short-lived Advertisement, Sarah Fielding has more to say about romance- and novel-writing within David Simple itself. Finally, the chapter considers the state of the novel at mid-century.
Boltzmann’s Kinetic Theory
Authors: Succi Sauro
Published: June 2018

Kinetic theory is the branch of statistical physics dealing with the dynamics of non-equilibrium processes and their relaxation to thermodynamic equilibrium. Established by Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) in 1872, his eponymous equation stands as its mathematical cornerstone. Originally developed in the framework of dilute gas systems, the Boltzmann equation has spread its wings across many areas of modern statistical physics, including electron transport in semiconductors, neutron transport, quantum-relativistic fluids in condensed matter and even subnuclear plasmas. In this Chapter, a basic introduction to the Boltzmann equation in the context of classical statistical mechanics shall be provided.
Lattice Boltzmann Models with Underlying Boolean Microdynamics
Authors: Succi Sauro
Published: June 2018

This chapter takes a walk into the Jurassics of LBE, namely the earliest Lattice Boltzmann model that grew up out in response to the main drawbacks of the underlying LGCA. The earliest LBE was first proposed by G. McNamara and G. Zanetti in 1988, with the explicit intent of sidestepping the statistical noise problem plaguing its LGCA ancestor. The basic idea is simple: just replace the Boolean occupation Numbers with the corresponding ensemble-averaged population. The change in perspective is exactly the same as in Continuum Kinetic Theory (CKT); instead of tracking single Boolean molecules, one contents himself with the time history of a collective population representing a “cloud” of microscopic degrees of freedom.
LBE in the Framework of Computational-Fluid Dynamics
Authors: Succi Sauro
Published: June 2018

This chapter outlines the main properties of LB as a numerical scheme within the general framework of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The matter has witnessed significant developments in the past decade, and even though the bottomline picture of LB as a very effective numerical scheme stands intact, a number of assessments made in the previous book need some revision. Since the matter is fairly technical, only general notions shall be discussed, leaving in-depth details to the original literature.
Lattice Boltzmann for reactive flows
Authors: Succi Sauro
Published: June 2018

The dynamics of reactive flows lies at the heart of several important applications, such as combustion, heterogeneous catalysis, pollutant conversion, pattern formation in biology and many others. In general, LB is well suited to describe reaction-diffusion applications with flowing species. This chapter provides the basic guidelines to include reactive phenomena within the LBE formalism. Reactive flows obey the usual fluid equations, augmented with a reactive source term, accounting for species transformations due to chemical reactions. Such term comes typically in the form of a polynomial product of the mass densities of the reacting species.
The Fluctuating Lattice Boltzmann
Authors: Succi Sauro
Published: June 2018

Fluid flow at nanoscopic scales is characterized by the dominance of thermal fluctuations (Brownian motion) versus directed motion. Thus, at variance with Lattice Boltzmann models for macroscopic flows, where statistical fluctuations had to be eliminated as a major cause of inefficiency, at the nanoscale they have to be summoned back. This Chapter illustrates the “nemesis of the fluctuations” and describe the way they have been inserted back within the LB formalism. The result is one of the most active sectors of current Lattice Boltzmann research.
LB for Flows with Suspended Objects: Fluid–Solid Interactions
Authors: Succi Sauro
Published: June 2018

In the recent years the theory of the fluctuating LB, as it was proposed and developed by A.J.C. Ladd in the early 90s, has undergone major developments, both at the level of theoretical foundations and practical implementation. This Chapter provides a cursory view of such developments, with special focus on the general formulation of fluid–solid interactions within the Lattice Boltzmann formalism. Clearly, the rheological behavior of these suspensions is highly accepted by the way the suspended particles interact with the fluid and among themselves. From the mathematical and computational standpoint, this configures a technically thick issue, namely the treatment of fluid-solid moving boundaries, in a more macroscopic-oriented context also known as fluid-structure interactions (FSI). In the sequel, a description of a number of methods which have been developed to include FSI within the LB formalism, is presented. In particular, the case of rigid and deformable bodies, both vital to many applications in science and engineering, shall be covered
Advanced RLB models
Authors: Succi Sauro
Published: June 2018

The relativistic LB scheme described in Chapter 34 is based on the top-down approach and limited to weakly relativistic fluids. This chapter presents a systematic derivation of relativistic LB based on the continuum kinetic theory. The resulting scheme can handle relativistic flows with Lorentz factors up to order ten, thereby considerably extending the scope of the method. In addition, the extension of the LB scheme to generalized coordinates for the simulation of flows on curved manifolds, is also illustrated.
Book History
Authors: Low Gail
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses Book History. Drawing on the disciplinary fields of ‘analytical bibliography’ and influenced by work in Annales social history, Book History takes as its subject the cultural history and the sociology of print, and also the impact of print on the ‘thought and behaviour of mankind’ from the Gutenberg press to the present day. As books make the complicated journey from the idea to print in all its variant forms, the connections between publishing, cultural, educational, and literary institutions—and the individuals involved in these—are crucial to understanding how they emerge in print, how they are used, how they circulate, and what they mean. The chapter thus addresses the following areas of importance to the social and material histories of the Anglophone novel to 1950: the ‘glocalized’ geographies of print and trade; newspapers and local literary cultures; colonial editions; libraries, readers and writers; trade and copyright legislation.
The Indian Novel in English to 1950
Authors: Narayan Shyamala A.
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines the Indian novel in English. It is an historical fact that the novel in India developed under the stimulus received from the West; but the potentialities for the novel already existed in Indian modes of storytelling. As early as the seventh century, India had a sophisticated prose literature in Sanskrit. Nevertheless, early novelists in India followed English models like Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens. It is only much later that they developed the confidence to experiment with form. However, the beginnings of Indian English writing are not fully documented. Many books published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have not been preserved because of the lack of public libraries, the hot and humid Indian climate, and the poor quality of the paper used.
The Novel in English in the Caribbean to 1950
Authors: Rosenberg Leah
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores English-language novels in the Caribbean. The West Indian novel was seen as a post-Second World War literary phenomenon, the creation of male authors who, born in Britain's Caribbean colonies, began arriving in England in the 1950s as part of a larger wave of Caribbean immigrants. Despite the diverse origins and perspectives of the Anglophone Caribbean's many writers, several dominant themes emerge. West Indian novels comprised a spectrum of direct, indirect, partial, and unwitting deviations from and challenges to English literary genres and ideologies. Novelists were particularly engaged with the ideologies of race and domesticity and the closely linked genre of romance. Nearly all West Indian novels of the nineteenth century were romances featuring elite West Indian heroes who excelled their English counterparts in domestic and civic virtue, while the twentieth century saw the emergence of literature that so revelled in social and sexual disorder that it constituted anti-romance.
Olive Schreiner
Authors: Burdett Carolyn
Published: June 2018

This chapter focuses on Olive Schreiner. Schreiner's work mediates the cultural politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in distinctive ways, demonstrating how the so-called colonial ‘margins’ were in fact often formative of metropolitan notions of social justice and progress. The position of women and the treatment of Africans were inseparable in Schreiner's thinking: in essays, campaigning polemic, short stories, and letters she sought to implicate metropolitan feminist aspiration in the arguments about race, labour, and class which dominated South African politics. The chapter examines these mediations in relation to Schreiner's three novels: Undine (1929), The Story of an African Farm (1883), and From Man to Man (1926). Of these, only The Story of an African Farm was published in her lifetime.
Marcus Clarke
Authors: Mccann Andrew
Published: June 2018

This chapter looks at Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (1870–1872), which is considered as his enduring contribution to Australian literature and to a broader literature of empire. The peculiarly citational quality of the novel is barely intelligible without understanding the way in which Clarke came to situate himself in relationship to both colonial literary culture and to an emerging European canon. His acute sense of having to balance cultural legitimacy against commercial viability lends his work an unusual degree of self-consciousness in regard to the processes of commodification and the regimes of cultural capital that were having an enormous impact on the development of mid-nineteenth-century Melbourne, the city in which Clarke lived and worked. Ultimately, a novel like His Natural Life reflects the desire to reproduce the popular textual forms of the metropolis in the everyday experience of the colonies.
G. V. Desani
Authors: Sharrad Paul
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines G. V. Desani's only novel, All About H. Hatterr (1948). All About H. Hatterr enjoyed a brief flash of success and then slid into the shadows until 1972. By this time, Desani had revised it and an American edition had appeared, followed by a Penguin edition in the UK. In the interim, English Literature had taken up the study of writing from colonies and ex-colonies. Read in a ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘postcolonial’ context, All About H. Hatterr seems more central than eccentric—although even then, it does not conform to the early phase of nationalist realism/idealism found in many novels writing out from under imperial controls. It challenges the Western understanding of the novel by making its English sound like Indian speech and its form look like Hindu philosophical texts
Fiction and the Native Author
Authors: Stafford Jane
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses native authors of fiction. Indigenous, colonized, or native authors of fiction in English are rare in the British Empire before 1950. There are exceptions, however, in India, there is a body of English-language fiction from the second half of the nineteenth-century onwards. Nevertheless, a sustained presence and the development of a local literary tradition in English were difficult. The short story, published in newspapers and magazines, was a more common though at the same time more ephemeral form than the novel. Native writers authored prose collections of Indigenous myths and legends in English, overtly signalling their authority to do so in terms of their Indigenous identity and the access it entailed.
The Context Principle
Authors: Linnebo Øystein
Published: June 2018

According to Frege’s context principle, we must never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation but only in the context of a sentence. This chapter examines the context principle and its role in Frege’s philosophical project, paying special attention to the question of whether the principle provides a way to understand the idea of thin objects. Various analyses of the principle are presented and assessed. It is argued that, appearances notwithstanding, the principle survives into Frege’s Grundgesetze and that this provides valuable information concerning its interpretation. Interpretations based on an ultra-thin conception of reference and the idea of recarving of content are dismissed, and a more promising metasemantic interpretation is canvassed.
The Julius Caesar Problem
Authors: Linnebo Øystein
Published: June 2018

The Julius Caesar problem concerns cross-categorical identities such as “3 = Julius Caesar”. The problem and its significance to some Fregean projects are explained. The notions of sortal and category are introduced. A neo-Fregean argument to the effect that every object belongs to a unique category is criticized and an alternative, more pragmatic argument to the same effect is developed. The handling of such mixed identity statements often needs conceptual decisions, not just factual discoveries. The conceptual decisions of our ancestors are implicit in our inherited linguistic practices, which have by and large legislated against the overlap of categories, but exceptions to the rule are certainly possible and very likely even actual.
Perceptual Constancy and Apparent Properties
Authors: Allen Keith
Published: June 2018

Properties like shape, size, and colour exhibit perceptual constancy: they appear to remain constant throughout variations in the conditions under which they are perceived. A number of writers have suggested that “apparent properties”, mind-independent relational properties that vary with the perceptual conditions, play an essential role in explaining perceptual constancy. On this view, when we see, e.g. a penny from an oblique angle, we see the circularity of the penny by or in virtue of seeing a mind-independent relational apparent property (its elliptical look). This chapter argues that views which explain the perception of constant properties of objects by appealing to perception of mind-independent apparent properties are structurally similar to sense-datum theories of perception; as such, they face many of the same challenges. It concludes that apparent properties play at best a modest explanatory role, functioning as the objects of awareness when we direct our attention in the appropriate ways.
Art and Ambiguity
Authors: O’Dea John
Published: June 2018

This chapter defends a solution to the problem of variable appearances that co-occur with perceptual constancy. In conditions which are non-ideal, yet within the range of perceptual constancy, we see things veridically despite a puzzling “appearance” which is suggestive of a non-veridical state of affairs. For example, a tilted coin is often taken to have an “elliptical appearance”. This chapter defends Gestalt-shift approach, according to which these appearances are in fact illusory, but not part of normal perceptual experience. The experience of ellipticality when viewing a tilted coin, it is argued, arises from something like a brief and unstable Gestalt shift to a different visual interpretation of the scene, of the kind that E. H. Gombrich argued artists invoke when painting a three-dimensional scene on a flat canvas. Recent empirical work on multistable perception is used to show how this might work.
Object Seeing and Spatial Perception
Authors: French Craig
Published: June 2018

This chapter considers the Spatiality Claim: if one sees an object then one sees some of that object’s spatial properties. The author considers an argument for this given by Cassam (2007), and challenges Cassam’s argument. His argument involves the idea, inspired by Dretske (1969), that seeing an object requires visual differentiation. But, it is argued here, there are prima facie counter-examples to the visual differentiation condition. Next, the author discusses the Spatiality Claim directly, and defends it against potential counter-examples which come from reflection on empirical cases where subjects can see objects yet have some sort of spatial perception deficit. One theme that emerges is that insofar as versions of the Spatiality Claim are defensible, we should focus on the relatively determinable spatial properties of objects and our perception of such properties.
Imaginative Presence
Authors: Kind Amy
Published: June 2018

When looking at an object, we perceive only its facing surface, yet we nonetheless perceptually experience the object as a three-dimensional whole. This gives us what Alva Noë has called the problem of perceptual presence, i.e. the problem of accounting for the features of our perceptual experience that are present as absent. Although he proposes that we can best solve this problem by adopting an enactive view of perception, one according to which perceptual presence is to be explained in terms of the exercise of our sensorimotor capacities, this chapter argues that this is a mistake. Rather, we can best account for presence in absence in terms of the exercise of our imaginative capacities.
History and Society
Authors: Cheng Christine
Published: June 2018

Beginning with the troubled relationship between the freed slaves from America (Americo-Liberian Settlers), this chapter traces how a history of discrimination and ingrained social inequality prepared the ground for the emergence of extralegal groups almost two centuries later. While providing a broad sociopolitical sketch of the country’s evolution, the chapter discusses four key ideas: distrust of the central state, the use of violence and coercion to control outsiders, Firestone’s role as a model enclave economy, and the liberalization of the trade in commodities. It considers how the country’s vast inequalities gradually developed and were systematically institutionalized through state structures, and why, as a consequence, many native Liberians continue to regard the country’s central authorities with distrust. Although these four factors are not necessary conditions for the formation of extralegal groups per se, their influence continued to reverberate many decades later, affecting extralegal group formation and development in contemporary Liberia.
Timber
Authors: Cheng Christine
Published: June 2018

During the civil war, Liberia’s forestry sector rose to prominence as Charles Taylor traded timber for arms. When the war ended, the UN’s timber sanctions remained in effect, reinforced by the Forestry Development Authority’s (FDA) domestic ban on logging. As Liberians waited for UN timber sanctions to be lifted, a burgeoning domestic timber market developed. This demand was met by artisanal loggers, more commonly referred to as pit sawyers. Out of this illicit economy emerged the Nezoun Group to provide local dispute resolution between the FDA’s tax collectors and ex-combatant pit sawyers. The Nezoun Group posed a dilemma for the government. On the one hand, the regulatory efforts of the Nezoun Group helped the FDA to tax an activity that it had banned. On the other hand, the state’s inability to contain the operations of the Nezoun Group—in open contravention of Liberian laws—highlighted the government’s capacity problems.
Vision
Authors: Dudek Piotr
Published: June 2018

Vision is a sensory modality of primary importance to many animal species. The efficient implementation of visual perception is also one of the main challenges in the design of intelligent robotic systems. This chapter reviews the principles of operation and key features of the early stages of biological vision systems. Following the observation that visual information processing starts in the eye, it reviews several approaches to constructing biomimetic artificial vision systems. It presents devices inspired by the morphology of the insects’ compound eyes, and devices tightly integrating image sensing and processing circuitry. These include silicon integrated circuits mimicking the operation of vertebrate retinas, and bio-inspired systems oriented towards machine vision applications, such as dynamic vision sensors and vision chips with pixel-parallel cellular processor arrays. It elucidates the advantages of the near-sensor processing of the visual information, and potential for future developments of neuromorphic vision sensors.
Decision making
Authors: Lepora Nathan F.
Published: June 2018

Decision making is the process by which alternatives are deliberated and chosen based on the values and goals of the decision maker. In this chapter, we describe recent progress in understanding how living organisms make decisions and the implications for engineering artificial systems with decision-making capabilities. Nature appears to re-use design principles for decision making across a hierarchy of organizational levels, from cells to organisms to entire populations. One common principle is that decision formation is realized by accumulating sensory evidence up to a threshold, approximating the optimal statistical technique of sequential analysis. Sequential analysis has applications spanning from cryptography to clinical drug testing. Artificial perception based on sequential analysis has advanced robot capabilities, enabling robust sensing under uncertainty. Future applications could lead to individual robots, or artificial swarms, that perceive and interact with complex environments with an ease and robustness now achievable only by living organisms.
Quadruped locomotion
Authors: Witte Hartmut , Fischer Martin S. , Preuschoft Holger , Voges Danja , Schilling Cornelius , Ijspeert Auke Jan
Published: June 2018

This chapter considers locomotion in living machines, focusing particularly on mammals and on the possibility of designing mammal-like quadrupedal robots. Locomotion is the movement of an organism or a machine from one place to the other, covering a defined minimal distance. In organisms, locomotion usually is driven by a central element and/or appendices. Vertebrates are characterized by the existence of a spine and the mechanics of an endoskeletal system. The amphibio-reptile type of vertebrate locomotion shows oscillations of the body stem mainly in the horizontal, which are coupled to the ground by legs with two long segments. The vertical oscillations of the body stem in the mammal type of quadrupedal locomotion are coupled to the ground by legs with three long segments. For any size of animal and any allometric relation between mass and ground reaction force the resonance mechanisms of gravitational and spring-mass-pendula are tuned to one each other. Elongated feet allow torque exchange with the substrate.
Flight
Authors: Hedenström Anders
Published: June 2018

Animal flight represents a great challenge and model for biomimetic design efforts. Powered flight at low speeds requires not only appropriate lifting surfaces (wings) and actuator (engine), but also an advanced sensory control system to allow maneuvering in confined spaces, and take-off and landing. Millions of years of evolutionary tinkering has resulted in modern birds and bats, which are achieve controlled maneuvering flight as well as hovering and cruising flight with trans-continental non-stop migratory flights enduring several days in some bird species. Unsteady aerodynamic mechanisms allows for hovering and slow flight in insects, birds and bats, such as for example the delayed stall with a leading edge vortex used to enhance lift at slows speeds. By studying animal flight with the aim of mimicking key adaptations allowing flight as found in animals, engineers will be able to design micro air vehicles of similar capacities.
Biomimetic systems
Authors: Prescott Tony J.
Published: June 2018

So far in this volume we have considered the nature of living things and some of their key building blocks and capabilities. This has set the stage for the current section and the next where we will describe some exemplar integrated biomimetic and biohybrid systems—living machines. To place these contributions in some additional context this introduction briefly reviews the history of life and of its variety, noting some of the critical branching points in the phylogenetic tree, identifying some of the organisms that have been the focus of research on biomimetic systems, and exploring why they might be seen to be important or pivotal. We begin with the first replicators, then consider bacterial colonies, the emergence of multicellularity and of bilateral symmetry, and conclude with a brief discussion of biomimetics applied to vertebrate brain and body plans including those of humans.
Mammals and mammal-like robots
Authors: Prescott Tony J.
Published: June 2018

Mammals are warm-blooded tetrapod vertebrates that evolved from reptilian ancestors during the late Triassic period around 225 million years ago. This chapter focuses on some of the most distinctive mammalian characteristics and on integrated robotic systems that seek to capture these capabilities in biomimetic artifacts. Topics covered include the mammalian brain, novel sensory systems, agile locomotion, dextrous grasp, and social cognition. Attempts to build integrated robotic systems that broadly match the behaviour and appearance of specific mammalian species have focused most strongly on humans, on quadrupeds such as cats and dogs, and on rodents. The goal of creating robots that resemble mammals will be encouraged by interest in mammal-like robots that can emulate some of the capacities for social companionship provided by domesticated mammals such as rabbits, dogs, and cats.
Brain–machine interfaces
Authors: Prasad Girijesh
Published: June 2018

A brain–machine interface (BMI) is a biohybrid system intended as an alternative communication channel for people suffering from severe motor impairments. A BMI can involve either invasively implanted electrodes or non-invasive imaging systems. The focus in this chapter is on non-invasive approaches; EEG-based BMI is the most widely investigated. Event-related de-synchronization/ synchronization (ERD/ERS) of sensorimotor rhythms (SMRs), P300, and steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) are the three main cortical activation patterns used for designing an EEG-based BMI. A BMI involves multiple stages: brain data acquisition, pre-processing, feature extraction, and feature classification, along with a device to communicate or control with or without neurofeedback. Despite extensive research worldwide, there are still several challenges to be overcome in making BMI practical for daily use. One such is to account for non-stationary brainwaves dynamics. Also, some people may initially find it difficult to establish a reliable BMI with sufficient accuracy. BMI research, however, is progressing in two broad areas: replacing neuromuscular pathways and neurorehabilitation.
Implantable neural interfaces
Authors: Vassanelli Stefano
Published: June 2018

Establishing direct communication with the brain through physical interfaces is a fundamental strategy to investigate brain function. Starting with the patch-clamp technique in the seventies, neuroscience has moved from detailed characterization of ionic channels to the analysis of single neurons and, more recently, microcircuits in brain neuronal networks. Development of new biohybrid probes with electrodes for recording and stimulating neurons in the living animal is a natural consequence of this trend. The recent introduction of optogenetic stimulation and advanced high-resolution large-scale electrical recording approaches demonstrates this need. Brain implants for real-time neurophysiology are also opening new avenues for neuroprosthetics to restore brain function after injury or in neurological disorders. This chapter provides an overview on existing and emergent neurophysiology technologies with particular focus on those intended to interface neuronal microcircuits in vivo. Chemical, electrical, and optogenetic-based interfaces are presented, with an analysis of advantages and disadvantages of the different technical approaches.
Micro- and nanotechnology for living machines
Authors: Fukuda Toshio , Nakajima Masahiro , Takeuchi Masaru , Hasegawa Yasuhisa
Published: June 2018

The chapter Micro- and nanotechnology for living machines describes research on new biohybrid technologies, engineered at the micro- and nano-scales, that combine some of the benefits of mechanical and electronic systems with those of biological systems. The chapter begins by reviewing some of the challenges of building devices at very small physical scales and discusses how new fabrication methodologies could impact on different classes of industrial, daily life, and biomedical products. We next explain how progress is being achieved through advances in micro- and nanomechatronics, particularly in the field of nanorobotic manipulation. Finally, we summarize recent progress towards building biohybrid living machines that combine nanomaterials with biological cells and outline the design of a micro- and nanorobotic manipulation system for cell assembly called the nanolaboratory.
Biohybrid touch interfaces
Authors: Bensmaia Sliman J.
Published: June 2018

This chapter on biohybrid touch interfaces discusses the importance of touch in everyday life, namely in object manipulation, embodiment, and emotional communication. It then describes approaches to restore touch for individuals who have lost a limb or who have upper spinal cord injuries (SCIs) and thus have lost sensation from their limbs. One promising approach to restoring sensorimotor function in these patients is to fit them with robotic prostheses. For these limbs to be clinically viable, however, the patients must not only be able to control movements of the limb but also be able to receive sensory feedback about the consequences of the movements. Touch can be restored by interfacing with the peripheral nerve or with the brain and each approach offers promise but also faces challenges.
The ethics of virtual reality and telepresence
Authors: Maslen Hannah , Savulescu Julian
Published: June 2018

Present-day biohybrid technologies increasingly allow us to escape the experiential confines of our biological bodies. However, as human agents spend more time in virtual environments, and as the prospects for telepresence become more sophisticated, a number of philosophical and ethical questions arise. This chapter considers a range of examples of virtual reality and telepresence technologies. It examines the value of the virtual experience, asking how virtual experiences contribute to our wellbeing. It asks whether human agents can be authentically “themselves” in virtual environments, and how to understand the relationship between virtual and real acts. It considers the ethical principles governing behavior in virtual environments, addressing how these will or will not differ from the ethical principles governing behavior in non-virtual life. Finally, the chapter addresses the ethical questions raised by the prospect of acting at a distance through telepresence technology, focusing particularly on the moral responsibility of the telepresent agent for her remote acts, and on the harm that might be inflicted on the telepresent agent.
Australia
Authors: Bode Katherine
Published: June 2018

This chapter on the history of book publishing in Australia divides Australian novel publishing since 1950 into three periods: the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s, and the 1990s to the present. During the 1950s and 1960s, British companies dominated the publication of Australian novels and publishing decisions were predominantly made overseas, but the period also witnessed a ‘local publishing boom’, driven by the belief in the importance of Australian literature and publishing. The 1970s and 1980s saw the growth of a vibrant local publishing industry, supported by cultural nationalist policies and broad social changes. At the same time, the significant economic and logistical challenges of local publishing led to closures and mergers, and — along with the increasing globalization of publishing — enabled the entry of large, multinational corporations into the market. This latter trend, and the processes of globalization and deregulation, continued in the 1990s and beyond.
Aotearoa/New Zealand
Authors: Caffin Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses the history of publishing, particularly of the English-language novel, in Aotearoa/New Zealand since 1950. It begins with a review of the local book scene during the period 1950–1965, when aspiring novelists faced many publication difficulties, such as the dominance of the local fiction market by British publishers and the power of publishers to fix and determine retail prices and bookseller discounts. It then turns to the years 1965–1980, when serious literary novels began to attract attention, and the 1980s, when New Zealand fiction gained overseas recognition after the 1984 novel the bone people by Keri Hulme won the 1985 Booker Prize. The chapter also examines important developments in the 1990s, such as the emergence of small independent publishers like Tandem Press and the proliferation of book festivals, and since 2000, including the expansion of internet bookselling and the rise in popularity of e-books.
South Pacific
Authors: Sharrad Paul
Published: June 2018

This chapter focuses on the history of the South Pacific novel as a post-1950s phenomenon. Many Pacific writings from the early phase of literary production came in the form of ‘auto-ethnographic’ accounts of village life or the transcription of oral stories in which the separation of the writer is indicated often implicitly in the external viewpoint of the narrative and its use of formal English to depict a clearly non-Anglo world. To become a writer, one had to enter school, where he/she had to be acquainted not only with maths tables and alphabets but also new patterns of behaviour fitted to the subject position of ‘student’, disruptive of a traditional sense of communal identity. The chapter examines how literacy, with its ties to Western education, allowed Pacific Islanders to correct false representations of themselves in colonial adventure stories. It also shows that South Pacific fiction is imbued from the start with the vision of flux and fragmentation that is modernity, while contemporary shifts in Pacific identities due to the pan-Pacific diaspora and transnational networks have encouraged novelistic innovation in the increasingly pervasive print culture of a globalized Pacific.