Many riddle subjects in the Exeter Book resist the landmarks of an explicitly human experience. Riddles that treat intimately known creatures (keys, books, ploughs, even oxen) build those creatures out of intimate knowledge: how, when, and why the creature is touched and valued. But riddles that treat more unfamiliar creatures—wild animals, mythological animals, and weather phenomena—build their subjects out of what little can be known, or accessed, by human beings: experience predicated on distance rather than intimacy. And unknown or unknowable concepts like Creation itself, in both Aldhelm’s Creatura and its Old English translation in the Exeter Book, are described through failures of human experience: as beyond the limits of the senses. In encompassing the unknown, the riddles invoke the failure of the senses to move beyond the landmarks of human experience without abandoning them. While the Latinate traditions that underlie many Old English riddles do not always include the social, chronological, and physical landmarks that define the form of relational reiteration, their Old English adaptations move towards, rather than away from, this mode of navigating identity.

Chapter 5 explores women’s substantive representation in the MENA. Whereas most previous studies have focused predominantly on what portfolios female politicians have been offered, the analysis here centres on which policy areas female parliamentarians in the MENA have pursued with a view to uncover the factors behind such choices. In other words, do female parliamentarians pursue portfolio areas based on their own gender and the presumed gendering of the portfolio area? According to their own experiences, does the number of women in parliament, women’s status in politics and women in central positions within the party leadership play a role in what policy areas they themselves pursue and are offered? Do they think the electoral system plays a role and, if yes, how? Are they attracted to the climate (or environment) portfolio? And what role do factors such as geography, qualifications and expertise play?

This chapter discusses the dazzling array of creativity that is language and metaphor in Pindar, in terms of its impact on us as its consumers and in terms of the questions that aspects of lyric diction and style ask of us. The discussion reaffirms the importance of close reading from the inside out as the key to appreciating the nature and challenge of Pindaric lyric. It assesses the powers and risks that come with lyric language in detail and across time, as readers and audiences are stopped in their tracks. The chapter discusses the experiential potential of a representative selection of examples taken from across the corpus, in three sections. Section 1, ‘Options’, investigates how Pindaric lyric fosters both a freedom of expression and an encouragement to audiences and readers to keep their minds open in response. Section 2, ‘Colours of Desire’, explores the sustained intensificatory effects of marked imagery in one extended example from Olympian 6. Section 3, ‘Access and Appropriateness’, explores how the hyperbolic nature of lyric imagery may raise further questions about our commitments to the sentiments that Pindaric lyric finds itself able to project.

Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

This introduction offers an overview of the volume’s variety of literary critical approaches to reading William James, and its account of James’s equally various approaches to literature. We draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. In outlining the three sections of the book – Style, Influence, and Method – we show how James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study. As we contend, the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. Our volume foregrounds these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature.

This essay explores the relevance of William James’s thought for addressing the contemporary climate crisis, thereby putting his thinking to a pragmatist test: what can we do with James in today’s world, marked by an unprecedented shattering of certainties, indeed of worlds? In the first part of the essay, James’s writings are revisited and the echoes of the Anthropocene are traced in view of the continuities and ruptures between his time and ours. This seems important because, if, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out, the imprint of human action on the earth is so profound as to challenge the very sense of historical continuity, then we must question the continuing validity of our intellectual past in order to think through our present. In the second part, the essay reinterprets James’s radical empiricism and pragmatism as philosophical responses to worlds in upheaval, countering simplistic readings of James as a “happy pragmatist” who simply goes for what works. It is precisely because James thought in the face of a troubled present – and not simply about it – that his philosophy can be made to matter into today’s world in turmoil.

This concluding dialogue seeks to convert James’s discursive ideas about education into scenes of lived encounter – between teachers and students, bodies and minds, thinking and feeling – while honoring the possibilities for surprise that such encounters open. In this endeavor, we are also extending Stephanie Hawkins’s work, which reminds us of how James uses the term conversion – meaning “to turn with” or “turn together” – to describe the process through which we come into transformative relation with someone or something other than ourselves. James’s dialectical, often gradual process of “educational” conversion seems to us to offer useful correctives to many incumbent histories of the discipline that would rely on entrenched and reductive genealogies of authority. By reconnecting James’s understanding of conversion with his commitment to conversation, we aim to give living voice to the cluster of deeply felt relations that constitute the life practices we call “teaching” and “learning.”

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. It thereby introduces some unique ideas and approaches to the analysis of concepts. Looking largely to pragmatism’s founder, Charles Peirce, this chapter presents an account of concepts as habits which associate specific kinds of environmental stimuli with schemata of action and ensuing experience, within linguistic communities. I explain how this account avoids Sellars’ ‘Myth of the Given’. I then explore how Peirce’s semiotic approach to philosophy of language and mind theorized signifying habits as symbols which draw icons and indices together into propositional structures, thereby generating meanings that are specifically applicable and indefinitely generalizable. This original account of concept formation is further illuminated through an examination of Peirce’s philosophy of perception, which makes particularly manifest the process whereby primitive indices, or ‘percepts’, are enfolded in symbolic meanings through habitual ‘perceptual judgements’.

This essay explores William James’s debt to Charles Peirce, arguing that this debt is integral to pragmatism’s historical use-value for studies of race and racism. Scholars of race have historically found pragmatism useful because of its anti-foundationalism. A philosophical stance resistant to abstraction and ossification, pragmatism’s emphasis on continuity through adaptation makes it useful for dismantling racial essentialism while preserving the experience of social and historical continuity necessary for the ongoing recognition of disenfranchised groups. In the late nineteenth century, however, pragmatism failed to reckon with the systematic denial of power and representation to racialized subjects. I argue that this failure is inseparable from pragmatism’s weddedness to the concept of experience and that a deep dive into how pragmatists have relied on this concept to negotiate the relationship between mind and body reveals the racial contours of its genealogy. Transforming what for Peirce was a methodological rule for scientific investigation into a theory of Truth, James imagined a world made entirely of subjects rather than objects. In so doing, he also dismantled the dialectical aspect of Peirce’s principle and the semiotics on which it depends. As this essay argues, James’s pragmatism does have potential for interpreting the history and significance of race. This potential, though, lies less in its anti-foundationalism than in its materialism and a reclamation of Peirce’s more dialectical model of embodied consciousness.