This chapter examines how Byeon Gyeryang 卞季良 (1369–1430) struggled to consolidate a nascent dynasty in the context of ritual hierarchy between Ming and Joseon. After the successful establishment of Joseon, Byeon insisted on continuing a ritual practice from the preceding dynasty that was generally regarded by the majority of the Korean ruling elites as deviating from “the standard” of the ritual that underpinned Sino-Korean relations. In Byeon’s view, the task of consolidating the new dynasty simultaneously required Korean public decision-makers to find a way to balance their Neo-Confucian subscription to the interstate moral hierarchy between Ming and Joseon and the latter’s Heaven-given mandate to protect its land and the people. This chapter investigates how Byeon attempted to achieve this balance through the use of “the expedient,” thereby encouraging the Joseon monarch to be fully responsible for the well-being of his people with a renewed commitment to the Mandate of Heaven.

This chapter explores both the Scottish dimension of MacDonald’s biography and the ways Scotland is reflected in his writing. During his lifetime, Scotland itself underwent greater changes than the simple phrase ‘Victorian Scotland’ implies. In addition, MacDonald found himself in the position of feeling both intimately Scottish but also a distanced observer of the Scottish scene. His sense of his native land was compounded with his memories of his own early years there and with his reverence for Scotland’s previous literary achievements, particularly in the works of Burns, Scott, and Hogg. Scotland’s distinctiveness – indeed, its otherness – in the minds of his readers provided him with a means of articulating his own distinctive vision of reality, a vision which sought to relate the mundane world of Victorian Britain with the larger spiritual world of which (in his eyes) it was part. His fiction, therefore, encompassed both realism and fantasy; Scotland helped him bring the two into a fruitful relationship. By surveying the Scottish novels he wrote throughout his career, we can attain a more truthful understanding of his idiosyncratic contribution to nineteenth-century fiction.

Earnestness, the attitude of moral seriousness for which the Victorians became famous, was first recognized around 1830, on the threshold of the Victorian era. Earnestness and a corresponding humorlessness subsequently entered the popular imagination as the Victorians’ defining characteristics. My study of deadpan, a performance of seriousness for comic effect, begins in this period because it shows how comic style responded to a socially central attitude. That earnestness gave shape and significance to early English deadpan’s inexpressive conventions is the central contention of this chapter. It examines the “quieter” modes of comic acting that developed across the century with attention to the classed, racialized, and gendered terms in which critics, performers, and playwrights described them. By explicating the values and tastes that accrue to early deadpan’s descriptors in dialogue with developments in comic genres and staging practices, the chapter models a method for understanding a style before it was named.

While George MacDonald’s reputation as a fiction writer rests upon fantasy and Christianity more than realism, his realist novels reflect a remarkable generic range. MacDonald wrote twenty-nine realist novels between 1863 and 1897, most of them set in Scotland and England. Together, these novels share many overlapping themes and plot trajectories, and critics have objected to their formulaic characters (noble workmen, saintly women, dying children) and predictably happy endings. These shared features aside, the novels set in England also provide a micro-history of ‘the novel’ in the later Victorian age, incorporating elements of the social-problem novel and a concern for the urban poor; the sensation novel’s detective plot; and the gothic novel’s seeming supernaturalism, ultimately explained by nature. This chapter examines these subgenres as well as MacDonald’s sophisticated use of metafiction. While metafiction has been dominantly explored in modernism, MacDonald is one of many Victorian novelists whose self-conscious formal techniques draw attention to his experimental realism.

This introduction contributes to performance history and historiography by analyzing the emergence of deadpan style during the century before it was named. It lays out the book’s key arguments and methods, building on Jacky Bratton’s concept of intertheatricality and Tracy Davis and Peter Marx’s idea of critical media history to propose a “pre-history” of deadpan. It argues that three genres and their associated performance styles are key to understanding how deadpan signified between 1830 and 1930: first, comic underplaying developed in contradistinction to the expressive hyperbole of popular nineteenth-century theatre genres, especially melodrama. Second, it emerged alongside and sometimes as a parody of the more subdued, underplayed style of realism. Third, it was named during the vaudeville era, where it was nonetheless a departure from vaudeville’s conventional aesthetic. The chapter introduces several frameworks that inform the book’s analysis of deadpan: gesture and voice; racialized aesthetics; and gendered conventions of bodily display.

This chapter is about William Gaddis’ 1955 novel The Recognitionsand its depiction of creative labor in the thoroughly commercialized space of New York City’s culture industry. In this novel the classically tragic trope of recognition or anagnorisis plays out against a social backdrop of art and commerce and within a narrative whose dominant mood is comic. In this way Gaddis’ novel presents a dialectical movement between the comic and melancholicregistering tragedy above all in the stylistic shifts that occur between long stretches of dialogueon the one hand and omniscient description on the other. Here a profound melancholia registers in the exchange between the Faustian satire performed at the level of narrative content and the sincerely wrought descriptions of art studios and the urban environment. Specifically tragic affect persists within scenic descriptions of postwar New York as though to recognize the exhaustion and defeat of artists laboring under the emergent regime of consumer capitalism.

The ‘Introduction’ to the Cambridge History of the Irish Novel contrasts the tendency to identify the history of the novel with realism, following the work of Georg Lukács, with Peter Boxall’s concept of the novel as ‘prosthetic imagination’, arguing that the latter may be the more useful way of understanding the history of the Irish novel. The difficulties in accommodating the Irish novel to a realist norm help to explain the long-held critical belief that the social and cultural conditions in Ireland were not amenable to a novelistic tradition, a position that is clearly untenable at the time of writing when Irish novels are winning global acclaim. This recent resurgence of fiction in Ireland, combined with a transformational social change dating from the early 1990s, and corresponding changes in critical practice and availability of texts, means in turn that the history of the Irish novel needs to be reshaped.

‘Realism and Rural Ireland’ considers the extent to which the figure of the peasant was embedded in the social, political, and literary culture of Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also explores the ways that this idealised figure was questioned, and critiqued, in a number of mid century Irish novels, including Flann O’Brien’s satirical An Béal Bocht (1941), the fiction of Liam O’Flaherty, Maura Laverty’s Never No More (1942), and Patrick Kavanagh’s semi-autobiographical The Green Fool (1938) and Tarry Flynn (1948). In each of these texts, peasant culture is not seen as the site of sustaining a spiritual core but as characterised by deprivation and impoverishment. This counter to the romanticised pastoral of the Revival found its literary form in a mode of realism which, as Sean O’Faolain argued, unmasked official orthodoxies at a time of literary censorship.

‘Novels of the Irish Revival’ notes that the novel is perhaps the literary form least associated with the Irish Literary Revival, a movement dominated by poetry and drama. However, it is possible to discern a distinctive Revival novelistic tradition, beginning with Rosa Mulholland’s The Wild Birds of Killeevy (1883) and extending to AE’s (George Russell) The Interpreters (1922). Many of these novels take over from the New Woman novel of the same years a concern with female protagonists in opposition to conventional practices regarding marriage and maternity, usually in the name of artistic fulfilment; however, unlike their English counterparts, these protagonists typically experience an interiority that takes on the contours of the supernatural, in some novels (such as The Interpreters) literally so. At the same time, there is a strand of fiction in the period that takes its subject matter from Irish legends, although often in the name of very similar narratives of self-fulfilment.

This chapter provides an in-depth discussion of some key aspects of Sellarsian inferentialism, addressing two main problems. The first problem is the language–world relationship: if meaning is the use of an expression, how exactly are extra-linguistic objects relevant to the meaningfulness of expressions? The correct use of an expression entails its use in the appropriate non-linguistic circumstances, but the correlation between a linguistic predicate and an object, even when ostensible, must not be understood as a meaning relation.The second problem concerns the ontological status of Sellarsian linguistic notions, such as roles and functions. Given that Sellars is a nominalist, how can we avoid concluding that he introduces new kinds of universals: linguistic? Although inferentialism requires the ability to categorise expressions, categorisation can be successfully done using linguistic distributive sortals, which translate property and kind talk into the talk of linguistic tokens. Therefore, there is no need for Platonic or linguistic universals. Explanation through human practice is sufficient.

Chapter 1 traces the appearance of psychopath in nineteenth-century psychiatric discourse and his precipitate adoption by mid-century crime fiction. This fiction registered the uncertainties within the American psychiatric community about whether hereditarian or developmental theoretical models best explained him. With the gradual ascendance of the latter, particularly in the form of psychoanalysis, the everyday origins of deviant behavior came under examination, and the line between the normal and the pathological received greater scrutiny. Through extended readings of two mid-century detective novels, Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury (1948) and Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952), as well as shorter discussions of other works, the chapter identifies a shift in the narrative focus and epistemological structure of the genre of crime fiction. Where the mystery of the classical crime narrative had been the crime event and its solution had been providing the proper name of the perpetrator, with the arrival of the psychopath, the mystery increasingly became the riddle of the criminal himself, and the solution entailed explaining his desire, motivations, and behavior. It was, in effect, a transition from whodunit to whatisit. And this transition expanded the guilty parties to include not only the detective but female victims as well.

For financial and personal reasons, Eliot was keen that Adam Bede should be popular, but that aspiration necessarily brought the novel into competition both with popular culture and the popular fiction by women that Eliot had criticised in 1856. Adam Bede explicitly recognises the challenges of its publishing context, and seeks, whilst exploiting some of the interests of popular fiction, to educate its readers both about the responsibilities of the novelist and their fiction to practise a responsible form of realism, and the readers’ own capacity for more substantial fare. The overwhelming popularity of Mrs Poyser and her home-spun wisdom sites the novel’s popularity in the nostalgic appeal of country life, but primarily, as the reviewer Anne Mozley argues, in its developing the reader’s sympathy with ordinary people, and in establishing a link with the reader based in the harmonious creation of memories of familiar places and emotions.

Chapter 5 examines Swift’s major foreign policy writings, particularly the Conduct of the Allies and the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. It differentiates his neoclassical balance-of-power theory – which pointed toward the need to negotiate peace – from modern, nonnormative, militaristic, and pseudoscientific versions of the theory, which his contemporaries used to justify continuing the war. Swift condemned militarism even when exhibited by his own country. He opposed the attempted subjugation and domination of an enemy country as unwise policy that would lead to international power imbalances and unintended consequences, and thus threaten both domestic constitutionalism and international security. He adopted a mixed qualitative-quantitative method of argument and revealed the conceptual flaws of the quantitative or military-statistical approach adopted by the pro-war Whigs. While his arguments facilitated the Peace of Utrecht (1713), French delays in implementing the peace terms left Swift with little more than satire in his last Tory pamphlets.

The history of astronomy and the history of philosophy are inextricably fused. This chapter highlights some of the dramatic episodes when astronomy confronted philosophical issues in metaphysics – questions regarding the objects astronomy studies; in epistemology – what is the most fruitful way to acquire knowledge in astronomy? And finally the ultimate existential question – what kind of a science is astronomy? Is it even a natural science at all?

Philosophical problems infuse the theory and practice of astronomy, including metaphysical foundations and influences, the limits of reasoning as in black holes and the multiverse, the problematic nature of observation and inference ranging from the canals of Mars to dark matter and dark energy, the role of technology and science policy in our present understanding of the universe, and the epistemological status of astronomy and its central concepts, including space and time, life and intelligence. The conceptual and methodological foundations and challenges of astronomy have not received systematic attention as they have in other fields such as philosophy of physics and biology. Here we argue for a unified history and philosophy of astronomy to include not only classical astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology but also space science and astrobiology. Examining such influences is an important step toward scientific advance. In this volume, fifteen historians of science, ten philosophers of science, and five scientists combine to analyze these influences. In addition to being useful for astronomers, historians, and philosophers of science, for the first time a book on the philosophy of astronomy is written for a broad audience.

Chapter 8 addresses the conclusion of Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, and examines Swift’s definition of humans as animals merely capable of reason, not inherently rational. This definition is influenced by, and influences, international politics and thought. The parable of angelic horses and bestial humans remains the interpretive crux of Gulliver and Swift’s entire body of work. The international dimension contradicts the scholarly consensus that Swift’s Hobbesian view of human nature led him to seek refuge in a political ideology of absolutism and authoritarianism. Swift insists on the indispensable role of liberty and reason even in nature, thus differentiating the state of nature from the state of war. While he deflates revolutionary idealism and utopianism, and implicitly undermines schemes of “perpetual peace” and world government, he also hints at the benefits of social institutions that promote peace, good governance, and productivity.

This chapter analyzes Lane’s clever use of combinations of geographical, temporal and formal markers in his titles, alternative titles and subtitles to indicate to borrowers and buyers what kind of story a volume contained and explains how this book’s chapters follow and explore the taxonomy he designed. The second section describes the construction of Lane’s principal genres and the sophisticated methods of imitative writing used to compose them. These overlaid romance with realism and made repetition-with-difference a primary mode of communication to engender the Press’s characteristically innovative, modular and debating texts. The chapter concludes by using Clara Reeve’s arguments in The Progress of Romance (1785) to contrast the Aesthetics of Originality which we have inherited from the Romantics with the Aesthetics of Reuse which had been used since the Renaissance to notice and evaluate the “beauties” of imitative writing, and which ordinary readers still use today.