The opening chapter outlines how reflective narratives can elucidate and extend existing conceptualisations of transitional justice goals. It traces the characteristics of historical, legal and creative narratives about the war and genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the different meanings these narratives have given to violence and its aftermath. Here reflective narratives – produced slowly in and through the arts and law – emerge as stories that imagine or help imagine futures different to the present. The chapter introduces the entanglement of the methods of ‘law as literature’ and ‘law in literature’ in this book. It also locates the arts and law in the field of transitional justice, arguing for the need to understand core goals from new perspectives that account for the interdisciplinarity of the field and for the inclusion of non-participatory arts in knowledge production. The chapter closes with an overview of the subsequent chapters.

Central to the field of translational medical humanities (TMH) is the concept and rhetorical repertoire of translation as a bridge between medicine and the humanities. Traditionally, fields such as translational medicine and translation studies operated with distinct and seemingly incompatible notions of what translation entails. TMH brings these paradigms into dialogue, using translation as an analytical and methodological lens to understand how knowledge moves, changes, and acquires meaning across contexts. By foregrounding translation as an interpretive and semiotic process, it challenges dominant models of knowledge translation that rely on linear, decontextualised metaphors of transfer. Alongside translation, the model of translational medical humanities adopted in this book acknowledges narrativity as a central mechanism of knowledge translation that must be explicitly addressed through a narrative approach to translational medicine. This final chapter synthesises these insights into a framework for narrative-informed knowledge translation that operates across scales, from the micro-narratives of individual experiences through the meso-level of clinical guidelines to the metanarratives of evidence-based medicine and scientific progress. In integrating narrative theory into models of knowledge translation, the aim is to foster a more reflexive, inclusive, and human-centred approach to translating medical knowledge.

This chapter sets out to re-narrate knowledge translation and render its complexity visible. The dominant medical narrative tends to frame translation as a purely scientific and objective process, often overlooking the essential role of texts, mediation, and politics. In science and medicine, translation is typically reduced to a sequence of empirical and methodological steps with a detailed and often rigid, unidirectional temporal structure: preclinical studies, proof-of-concept trials, early-phase clinical trials with small participant groups, large-scale clinical trials, meta-analyses, and ultimately health service research and implementation studies. Embedded within each of these stages of the narrative are layers of textual and narrative production, interpretation, and re-narration that are integral to the shaping, communication, and reception of knowledge. Scientific findings do not simply progress through the process as isolated facts; they are continuously mediated through written reports, regulatory documents, peer-reviewed articles, clinical guidelines, and public health communications. Each of these textual forms follows specific types of narrative that require interpretation, with each narrative constructed to influence how knowledge is understood and applied.

Chapter 4 considers dramatic plotting, exploring competing tastes and approaches, and focusing on Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Thomas Jordan’s The Walks of Islington and Hogsdon. It considers early modern debates about narrative and plot, including the decorum and necessity of adhering to classical precedents and theories; the respective merits of simplicity and conscious craft; and the need to incorporate individual narrative ‘moments’ popular with an audience. It puts various approaches emphasising structure and conscious artifice in conversation with the alternative view that a good plot is simply one that serves the set-piece moments that a playgoer desires. It argues that both Volpone and The Walks combine complex and visible structural craft with the careful provision of set-pieces designed to appeal to playgoers who judged their plots on moments rather than movements. These case studies reveal dramatists writing subtly and effectively in conscious anticipation of multiple approaches to playhouse censure.

The prologue frames the Iliad and the Odyssey as poems that speak to the aftermath of violence. Rather than treating war as an episode that ends when fighting stops, it introduces the book’s central claim: Homeric epic preserves the textures of lived experience, including silence, grief, and the long work of rebuilding. It also explains the book’s approach, combining archaeology and close reading for general readers and students.

This chapter explains how to write AI papers that reviewers can understand quickly and trust. It treats writing as part of research, not a final packaging step, and shows how early planning clarifies the problem, contribution, and experiments before drafting begins. It then walks through writing around the research problem, using each paper section to move readers from motivation to method to evidence. The chapter emphasizes narrative coherence, precise claims, and consistent terminology and notation. It also gives guidance on revising with feedback and responding to reviewer critiques in rebuttals with a professional, evidence-focused tone.

This chapter proposes an approach to social science inquiry suited to the Iranian case and, more broadly, to the silences that constitute revolutionary mobilization and memorialization. With reference to a partial archive of interview data with people who experienced the mass uprisings of late 1978 and early 1979, and analytical statements they made in interviews about their experience of popular assemblies, the chapter shows how individual accounts from opposing ideological positions and social classes converged around a shared concept of collective identity in the image of Zaynab bint Ali. The chapter weaves between interviews conducted with pro-Khomeini Islamists active in Iran during the late 1970s (all of whom were men) and interviews conducted with women from leftist groups or unaffiliated members of the population as well as stories from a women’s daily magazine published at the time. It shows that narrative reception and judgment play an important role in revolutionary action, the representation of which augurs a comparative methodology for social science inquiry about revolution in the Global South.

This chapter is an interview with Erle Ellis and the book editors. It begins by considering Professor Ellis’s work on how humans have long been transforming ecosystems, and how these can be understood as producing anthropogenic biomes, or anthromes. It then discusses how the planetary boundaries, and novel entities in particular, are framed as part of broader narratives of crisis. These planetary narratives are discussed for how they assign responsibility, and the ways that they often do not. It offers an alternate view of understanding the multiple scales through which societies are, and have long been, entangled with their environments. By understanding both longer histories of human–Earth interactions and different scales of entanglement, the focus on ‘novelty’ as it arises in the planetary boundaries framework is set aside for a focus on relationships of how different societies and cultures affect, and are affected by ecological systems.

Four narratives by Black women – Phyllis Montana-Leblanc’s Not Just the Levees Broke, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom, and Kionna Walker LeMalle’s Behind the Waterline – each offer counterstories and counterhistories against singular, fixed ways of articulating what the cataclysm of Hurricane Katrina meant and means. To contextualize these narratives in intersecting theories of trauma, displacement, home, violence, and Southern Black Womanhood is to see the high stakes often hidden by facile, dominant representations of this territory in shopworn tropes of “resilience” and “soulfulness” and “entertainment.”

Chapter 5 examines the domestication of queer desire and generic traditionalism in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. For a novel written on the eve of Stonewall, by an openly gay author, and narrating the explosive obliteration of the citadel of the heteronormative family by two pathologized protagonists, there has been remarkably little agreement about the place, or even the presence, of same-sex desire in the text. Similarly, Capote’s generic innovation in creating the nonfiction novel has ultimately been overshadowed by the text’s classification as simply a heavily factual return to nineteenth-century realism. This chapter offers an explanation for these contradictions by reading them as a function of Capote’s challenge to the binaries informing both desire and literary representation at the moment. On this account, the hetero/homo binary that constituted the period’s framework for thinking about desire and the truth/fiction binary around which debates about New Journalism centered were both inflected by a heteronormative impulse to consider homosexual desire fiction and heterosexual desire fact. Ironically, disrupting the fact/fiction dyad itself, we might reappropriate this mapping by recasting heteronormative desire as an ossified, repressive status quo and queer desire as the exploration of as-yet-unseen possibilities of imagined alternatives.

Some of the most remarkable early Irish poetry appears within prose texts, whether Sweeney’s pellucid nature poems in Buile Suibhne [The Madness of Sweeney], the lengthy lyrics in Fingal Rónáin, or the knotty roscad that appear in Táin Bó Cúailnge [The Cattle Raid of Cúailnge/Cooley]. A number of legal, historical, and genealogical texts are also characterized by prosimetric structures, perhaps most famously the Lebor Gabála Érenn [The Book of the Takings of Ireland]. This chapter studies the role of verse within prose works, examining its formal characteristics, generic investments, and rhetorical functions.

The four symphonies of Michael Tippett occupy a central position in his output. Written at different stages in his compositional career, each symphony not only functions as an important waypoint along Tippett’s stylistic journey, but also has something of significance to express, whether that concerns the genre itself and its relationship to past composers and models, the human condition, or contemporary society. The concept of humanity is central to Tippett’s oeuvre; in interrogating this humanistic element, this chapter examines Tippett’s four symphonies (and the withdrawn early Symphony in B♭) through a triple lens of narrative, agency and embodiment, an approach driven not only by the immediacy of the symphonies’ communicative musical language, but also through a recognition of Tippett’s views of symphonic music as reflecting the ‘inner flow of life’. The chapter argues that listening for narratives of agency and embodiment brings new light, and life, to Tippett’s symphonies and acts as a powerful reminder of what it is to be human.

Propaganda and storytelling are key themes of this chapter. It examines the important roles of providence and martyrdom in constructing stories of the Irish rebellion and beyond, whether in the depositions or other accounts, including print. Both themes were important in building the rebellion and subsequent warfare as a confessional conflict, with providence and martyrology used for polemical purposes: to demonise the enemy, demonstrate divine favour for one’s cause and support co-religionists in their struggles. This played a crucial role in articulating the period as one of religious conflict above all, as violence, suffering and other ills were narrated and understood through recognisable confessional vocabulary, imagery and tropes. The chapter also considers the importance of martyrdom and martyrology in the emerging imperial context, with victims of violence in colonies – including Ireland – described in martyrological terms that contributed to justifying empire and disguising the violent intent and reality of imperial ventures.

The chapter provides an introduction to the sociocultural analysis of second language (L2) acquisition as a process of socialization by and through the learning of an additional language. It offers a discussion of socio-cultural institutions and communities involved in L2 learning as well as a description of the development of language repertoire in additional language learning as a social accomplishment. The chapter opens on a summary of the controversy that arose in the early 2000s between the cognitive and the socially-oriented Second Language Acquisition (SLA) paradigms. Bypassing this divisive debate, the chapter focusses on the diversity of approaches to additional language learning within the sociocultural paradigm. Key concepts of sociocultural SLA research such as social integration, agency, identity and power relations as well as affordance and language repertoire are defined. A framework of analysis for the learner’s language repertoire is presented. Finally, the chapter recalls issues in the study of naturalistic SLA as a privileged area of research in light of the sociocultural paradigm. Longitudinal data from one migrant worker are analysed to illustrate the social and linguistic development of his language repertoire. In conclusion, the chapter charts some pending issues for the sociocultural analysis of L2 socialization.