J. R. R. Tolkien once said of The Hobbit (1937), ‘One writes such a story […] out of the leafmould of the mind.’ Referring to fertile compost made up of decaying leaves, the word mould can also describe a container that gives shape to liquids as they solidify. Unfortunately, all too many readers respond to Tolkien’s work according to the latter definition, picking and choosing passages out of context to fit them into a pre-established thesis. The same has been done to the fiction of Tolkien’s fellow Inklings, an Oxford writers’ group he helped form in the early 1930s. In contrast, this chapter attempts to honour Tolkien’s definition of leaf-mould in order to demonstrate how George MacDonald fertilised the imaginations of multiple Inklings. It focuses particularly on how Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams read MacDonald and how MacDonald’s thought and writing provided a fertile ground in which their own writings could take root.

The library offers an apt metaphor for approaching MacDonald’s literary influences. As the narrator of The Portent (1864) remarks of the ‘neglected library’ he is asked to organise, even the outside of a book can serve as ‘a kind of sacrament – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. To read MacDonald is thus to enter the library of books he himself inhabited, for few writers so openly acknowledged their debts to earlier masters and their forms. This chapter traces the works that most shaped MacDonald’s development as a writer of fantasy, particularly the German Romantics and his contemporaries John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll. For MacDonald, the library of past and present writers was not a site of anxiety but a communal space of imaginative fellowship; by tending to it, he helped build a new wing for modern fantasy while extending the spiritual possibilities of the realist novel.

Why has China’s growing economic leverage over Japan failed to translate into consistent political influence? This chapter develops a theoretical framework to explain the limited effectiveness of economic statecraft in contemporary Japan–China relations. While existing literature emphasizes economic interdependence as a source of influence, it argues that successful coercion requires three critical conditions to align simultaneously: acute economic vulnerability, cohesive domestic lobbying, and political flexibility. Through structured comparison of three cases (the 2012–2013 Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute, the 2022–2023 semiconductor export controls, and the 2023 Fukushima water release), this chapter demonstrates that Chinese economic coercion consistently failed due to the absence of one or more of these conditions. By disaggregating the mechanisms through which economic pressure translates (or fails to translate) into policy change, this framework advances understanding of why economic statecraft often falters against developed democracies with robust institutions and dense alliance networks, even when asymmetric dependence exists.

China’s emergence as a major power poses challenges to the world in multiple dimensions, including its coercive approach to Taiwan. Beijing has intensified its military pressure on Taipei in recent years. Its goals are to discourage the island citizens’ support for Taiwan’s independence and to compel them to accept the one-China principle implied in the 1992 Consensus. Are these coercive measures successful in influencing the island citizens’ attitudes? Employing the theory of threat, this chapter analyzes recently collected panel survey data. It shows that Beijing’s coercive tactics have been counterproductive. Rather than coercing the island’s citizens into submission, Chinese leaders’ menacing tactics only invite resentment. Their coercive measures are unable to discourage Taiwan citizens’ support for independence and furthermore weaken the latter’s support for the 1992 Consensus. This chapter demonstrates that China’s coercive influence is far more limited than some people think, and it has backfired in view of Beijing’s intended outcomes. The current trajectory of the cross-Strait relationship thus suggests a challenging outlook.

Martin Amis’s prose style has been profoundly influential, and so has the consistency with which he foregrounded questions of style in his fiction and non-fiction. This chapter discusses what Amis meant when he spoke about style. It also discusses what it might be possible to say about style as such and argues that we can only really argue about a given style. It goes on to anatomise Martin Amis’s prose style using the tools of close reading, quoting from his novels Money and Time’s Arrow as well as his memoir Experience and his short story ‘The Coincidence of the Arts’. It discusses Amis’s style as a hybrid of postmodern and liberal-humanist insights into the nature of the world; as essentially urban; as positing style as a dandified response to British post-imperial decline; and, finally, as intrinsically comic.

To consider Romanticism, world literature, and empire together entails reexamining the position of authors like Byron not only within the British Empire but also within other imperial formations, such as the Ottoman Empire. Focusing on Byron’s Ottoman Turkish reception, where he seems to exert no influence on local literary-cultural sensibilities, this chapter explores possibilities of envisioning a world literature that does not reproduce Western capitalist value systems. Byron’s “insignificant” presence in the Ottoman Turkish textual-visual landscape undermines the Eurocentric romanticization of the cultural capital attributed to Western icons among non-Anglophone audiences; simultaneously, it fuels a critical reflection on the empire-empire nexus that complicates the conventional geocultural hierarchies (e.g., East versus West, Orient versus Occident, etc.) shaping the contours of world literature.

The theory of status effects illustrates one important manner in which theories can develop. Regularities in groups faced with tasks requiring group interaction were observed over a wide variety of tasks. Status inequality in particular was obvious. Some group members had more influence and were given more opportunities to interact than others, even when expertise did not differentiate among individuals. Further such inequality seemed reciprocal: group members permitted the inequality and allowed it to stabilize. Researchers developed abstract concepts and propositions to account for these regularities and concluded that inequality arises because the task interaction causes individuals to form performance expectations for themselves and others, and once those expectations form, they affect the distribution of all behavioral components of interaction.

When the Brexit referendum result came in, Tony Gallagher, editor of the Daily Telegraph, triumphantly texted the Guardian newsroom: ‘Who said the mainstream media was finished?’ Gallagher was apeing Kelvin McKenzie, one of his predecessors as Sun editor, who proclaimed after John Major’s upset election victory in 1992: ‘It was the Sun wot won it!’ Brexit appeared to vindicate his view that the press, in particular the Sun, had tipped the balance in favour of Leave. The mood inside the FT newsroom was funereal. Over at The Sunday Times, Michael Sheridan, a veteran foreign correspondent, arrived early that morning to see Martin Ivens alone in the editor’s office. ‘What have you done?,’ he exclaimed, extending a congratulatory hand. Ivens held out the possibility of a renegotiation based on the Brexit vote followed by a second referendum.

Financial diplomacy played a critical role in the remaking of diplomatic alignments during the ‘great turning point’ of European and international politics between the Russo-Japanese War and the formation of the Triple Entente. French governments used access to the Paris capital markets to secure the alliance with Russia, loosen Italy’s place in the Triple Alliance, and shape the outcome of the First Moroccan Crisis. British ministers supported Barings’ participation in the 1906 loan to Russia as a way to stabilise the Tsarist Empire and prepare for the Anglo-Russian Entente. German financial diplomacy was hampered by smaller capital markets and government borrowing, in part, to fund naval expansion. In 1910, German banks lent large sums to Hungary and to the Ottoman empire, to consolidate its alliance and influence in Constantinople. But Hungarian and Ottoman governments had first looked to Paris, which blocked access for political reasons. Examining Russian loans, the Italian debt conversion of 1906, and the Hungarian and Ottoman loans casts new light on how financial diplomacy recast power politics in the early twentieth century.

The publication of Allen Ginsberg in Context marks a dramatic shift in Ginsberg Studies (and Beat Studies), clearing important new ground for scholarship on the poet. This volume offers a crucial reminder of the need for continued study of Ginsberg’s full body of work and widest range of influences. The case for Ginsberg’s importance has not always been as clear. Ginsberg’s considerable popular readership has not translated often enough into serious attention from scholars. Allen Ginsberg in Context signals to the larger critical community that Ginsberg’s life and work are essential to the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, culture, and political activism. This book starts the necessary conversation as to why Ginsberg’s poetry can still matter. Ginsberg’s body of work might find its big-bang moment in the 1956 publication of “Howl” and the poem’s subsequent triumph against obscenity charges the following year, but his work in its totality can be seen as a primer for how to live and speak freely in a world that increasingly is bent upon state surveillance and restrictions upon movement and expression.

The environment has been leveraged as a tool of control in conflict settings throughout human history. Capturing or enclosing and controlling the resources needed for everyday needs and livelihoods has been a feature of most conflicts. Understanding how this happens and what the implications are for the environment in conflict is critical to addressing environmental and conflict issues. This chapter lays out how this has unfolded in many contexts and highlights critical nuances for different environmental mediums and across space and time.

Chapter 1 argues that apocalyptic images and texts from the late Romantic period onwards respond to John Milton’s poetic treatment of temporality and grief in Paradise Lost, focusing on Mary Shelley’s apocalypse novel The Last Man. Shelley’s work, a project of revivification and memorialisation, challenges more conventional public narratives by embracing fragmentation and combining personal loss and universal catastrophe. In doing so, the novel draws on Milton’s epic, especially Adam’s prophetic vision after the fall. Shelley’s writings, including her letters, journals and Frankenstein, are read alongside John Martin’s apocalypse paintings and mezzotint illustrations of Paradise Lost. The chapter begins by positioning Shelley’s novel as a shared intertext for Martin’s The Last Man and Louis Édouard Fournier’s The Funeral of Shelley, both housed in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. It argues that Martin’s Paradise Lost illustrations more closely parallel Shelley’s literary response to Milton: both recreate Milton’s prophetic temporality and express apocalyptic grief through reference to darkness and light.

The Introduction outlines the intermedial method of this book, which brings together Milton with nineteenth-century writers and artists who engage with each other’s work at the same time as reading Milton directly. It provides an overview of Milton’s place in the visual and material culture of the long nineteenth century. This includes the literary galleries of the late eighteenth century, the development of proto-cinematic technologies and stage spectacles, illustration on canvas and the page, and interventions in books such as extra-illustration and marginalia. The Introduction also addresses the various metaphors drawn from Milton’s writing that scholars have used to explain his influence, comparing him to a ghost, a troll, a father, even God. It then proposes the epic simile as a useful model for the way Milton is understood in this book: just as Milton’s similes describing Satan suggest, a powerful figure can be like many disparate things at the same time.

Octavia, sister of the later Augustus, often stands in the shadows of great matronae, such as Fulvia and Livia Drusilla, in modern scholarship. Yet she played a vital part in the triumviral political programme and exercised significant influence on state and triumviral politics in the years 39–32 BCE. This chapter argues for Octavia’s political influence on M. Antonius and Young Caesar being instrumental in maintaining peace between the two colleagues from the aftermath of the Bellum Perusinum to the eventual final collapse of relations between the two triumvirs in 32. This chapter further argues that the historical Octavia built on traditional modes of influence originating from the socio-political elite milieu of the Late Republic but that the Octavia constructed in the historical narratives looked ahead to the creation of the ideal matrona of the Imperial domus all while paying tribute to her vital role in preserving concordia in the res publica.

This chapter argues that, despite the lack of consensus on definitions, one useful way of conceptualising hybrid warfare, grey zone conflict and strategic competition are as, respectively, the means employed in conflict, the arena of conflict and the context. Hybrid warfare comprises the orchestrated blending of a wide range of military and non-military instruments of power. Advocates of the concept assert that hybrid warfare now plays a key role in intensifying competition between the West and its adversaries. Nevertheless, hybrid warfare remains an ambiguous and confused concept. For many, the concept of hybrid warfare obscures as much as it illuminates, and is used to refer to activities that are not new and that can be better analysed through already existing ideas.