The practice of relational reiteration shapes the Old English and Anglo-Latin riddles. Challenged to “say what I am” without actually naming themselves, the books, bells, wild creatures, and mysteries of the early English riddle tradition respond by reiterating their own conceptual edges, drawing upon the same types of social, chronological, and physical “landmarks” that a local tenant would use to perambulate property bounds. Aldhelm, the first known English riddle-writer, declares that his aim is to “reveal with verse the hidden mysteries of things,” and his Enigmata are explicitly framed as a cosmology: an attempt to articulate the subtle links between individual elements of God’s creation. Although the Old English Exeter riddles make no such claim, these poems are even more invested in the link between identity and practice: each speaker’s physical form comes into view through the lens of their interaction with human beings. The result in both cases is transformative. Each riddle creature is “built” incrementally, piece by piece, as the riddle describes its interactions with the hierarchical world outside itself—not physically, per se, but as a conceptual entity.

A participant in the ongoing ontological turn in the humanities, this chapter argues for a new approach to World Literature. It contends that in the wake of the Anthropocene, World Literature must reinvent itself in order to remain – or perhaps become – relevant in and to the very world whose literature it professes to attend to. This claim is premised on the ever-more conspicuous disjunction or gap between the highly complex world unveiled by the historical processes and body of knowledge of the Anthropocene and the human-centered world paradigm with which comparative literature has been operating ever since its post-Cold War resurgence as World Literature under the auspices of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Weltliteratur and, subsidiarily, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. The gap, the chapter maintains, is epistemologically disabling: to be sure, we know and understand less than we should because of it. But, it also notes, World Literature scholars can close it by drawing on world models built by recent trends in philosophy and critical theory such as New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and speculative realism, which all take into account the role of more-than-human actors and objects generally in worldmaking and world-writing alike.

We often conceive of objects as fixing us – and themselves – in time and space. We place them by their dates, materials, manufacturers, and other markers of origin. Yet exemplary narratives from the eighteenth century – such as “it-narratives” that imagined material objects as sentient protagonists – prioritize objects in motion. Accordingly, this chapter attends to moveable goods and what their circulation unveils about the slipperiness and unknowability of material culture. It tackles mobile material culture from three intersecting perspectives: material culture’s multidisciplinary terrains; the movements of objects across and within cultures; the movements of objects between the material and the literary. In addition to foregrounding how circulation might enrich the multidisciplinary study of material culture, it examines the key role of the cultural and geographic movement of literary and fashionable things across a global eighteenth century. Rather than fixing what we know about objects in provenance and place, this chapter highlights how objects might unmoor us and invites us to rethink rigid disciplinary categories.

This chapter further explores the concept of chunking, showing that rules that describe various syntactic patterns are not linear in nature. The special focus is on the phenomenon of binding, especially reflexives, which are used as a litmus test at various level of language. It is shown that concepts of subject and object, although important to describing syntax, are not enough to describe the distribution of reflexives.

This chapter continues with the themes in the previous two chapters but applies the same concepts to languages other than English. In particular, languages that at first glance present a possible counterexample to the idea of non-linearity of language are considered. It is shown that even languages as varied as Irish Gaelic, Malagasy, and Warlpiri follow the same non-linear principles discussed throughout the book.

Chapter Three provides a thorough exploration of the multifaceted experience of being Qizilbash within the Ottoman realm and the consequential implications of such an identity within the intricate Ottoman–Safavid geopolitical landscape. By scrutinizing a diverse array of Qizilbash texts, artifacts, and ceremonial practices, the chapter elucidates the complex processes entailed in shaping and perpetuating a collective sense of belonging. Additionally, this chapter seeks to integrate a discussion of the Ottoman state’s surveillance strategies into the analysis of Qizilbash subjecthood formation within the empire.

It is a principle of international law not only that workers should be free to join trade unions and take part in their activities, but also that trade union autonomy should be respected by the State. Trade unions in the United Kingdom in contrast are subject to detailed regulation by legislation, which undermines their right to promote political objects without restraint, decide their own procedures for the selecting and electing senior officials, and determine when disciplinary powers may be used against those who break the rules. This chapter considers these and other questions, as well as the controversial regulatory role of the Certification Officer.

Sher-Gil declared her ambition to be India’s first modern artist, yet her melancholic portraits elicited complaint about her representational choices and share a more than passing interest in the passive as an aesthetic stance. The most challenging aspect of Sher-Gil’s work is its resolute interest in passivity. In representing her subjects’ listlessness (or their object-ness), the painter is able to focus on aesthetic relationships very broadly, recasting subjects and objects from an oppositional to a more inextricably relational or mutually constituting state. Sher-Gil’s paintings make passivity an aesthetic stance. Stepping away from the immediate demands of the socio-political world in which she lives, and in which her models are placed, Sher-Gil revises experience along aesthetic lines. She doesn’t forfeit political agency so much as investigate what it cannot include as she explores the sensual possibilities made available through her haunted and dreaming figures.

Material culture profoundly influences the ways we understand, experience and represent sexuality. This chapter examines cross-cultural material cultures of heterosexuality, homosexuality, domestic life, communal rituals, sex work and intimate relationships, among other examples. The history of sexuality and material culture is a long one, and to consider Roman brothels, Palauan men’s houses and Peruvian pottery is to recognise their significance in changing sexual mores. Objects, including buildings and artworks, can tell us about fundamentally diverse ways of understanding sexuality as an everyday practice and the subject of academic inquiry. The chapter also offers a discussion of the ephemera of movements for sexual rights in more recent times. These objects may be everyday items repurposed for queer life and politics, for example, or custom-made props for protest and organising. Museums have often paid little attention to the material culture of sexuality, hiding away incriminating exhibits, but new museological approaches to objects reveal the intricacies of intimate life, tell the story of previously marginalized forms of sexuality, and even resist established modes of power. Material culture, and the ways we address it, speak forcefully to the politics of sexuality.

Chapter 7 takes up themes developed throughout the book and summarizes how focusing on the logic of perspectivism, an Amerindian ontology, enables the archaeological record to be read differently. Perspectivism, or any other ontology taken seriously as a theory, can challenge our conceptions of objects, things and human agency. Finally, having argued that the principal challenge presented by Perspectivism in Archaeology is to find ways to understand and think about particular archaeological records in the light of a local ontology, the chapter explores how perspectivism as theory can ultimately be seen as an experiment in decolonizing archaeological thinking and situating its practices.

This essay presents congruities between Sebald’s juvenilia and his major works of prose fiction to reveal a portrait of a budding artist who never wandered far from his personal and literary origins and yet learned his lessons from these youthful ventures into writing. It introduces selections from his unpublished and fragmentary literary writings from the 1960s, which are housed in his literary estate at the DLA. These include the short narratives ‘Wartend’ (‘Waiting’) and the untitled story about Herr G. (Mr G.), along with the six-page play Der Traum ein Leben oder die Geschichte des Fr. v. Sch. (The Dream A Life, Or The Story of Fr. v. Sch.), and the two versions of his untitled novel. In these texts, one finds Sebald’s early critiques of capitalism and consumer culture, his interest in the uncanny, the agency of material objects, the crisis of the artist, the horrors of the past, the influence and violence of the totalitarian personality, the power of images, and the destruction wrought by nature. Sebald’s juvenilia make clear that they foreshadow the philosophical, historical, and sociological considerations in his mature prose fiction.

The products of Artefaction are not just made things but making things. Included in this class are tangible things with a capacity for rhetorical performance – for example a statue or a flag – as well as intangible things, of which the preeminent example is the word. Where words combine in sentences and in speech, they can attain monumental status and influence. Contemplating Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke argued that a word like ‘freedom’ is only as good as the use to which it is put, Richard Dawson observes that for Burke, words are ‘evolving cultural artefacts that shape us and are shaped by us as we use them’. This serves as an excellent definition of the Making Sense informing the term ‘Artefaction’ as it is used in this chapter, as does James Boyd White’s idea (as summarized by Dawson) that language is ‘an evolving cultural artefact for making and remaking ourselves and our world – the real world’. In defence of ‘underwater basket weaving’, this chapter turns to material culture to consider the relationship between the weaving of words and such handcrafts as the weaving of baskets.

This chapter considers the role of Shakespearean theater in fostering the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and courage. Shakespeare offers an especially compelling site for investigating this topic in act 3.2 of Julius Caesar. Here, Mark Antony addresses the plebeians in the wake of Caesar’s assassination using the latter’s bloody mantle (i.e. cloak) as an object lesson in civic and moral failure. This scene, the chapter argues, has something important to teach us about the theatricality of the cardinal virtues, including, especially, the object-specific way in which particular things enable general moral insights. As this suggests, the cardinal virtues do not so much offer scripts for the cultivation of inner qualities as they do a community-oriented set of practices grounded in the capacity of humans to think, feel, and discern together. Put another way, the cardinal virtues are a social logic or dynamic, rather than personality traits or individual moral attributes. Like theater itself, they provide a linked set of frameworks for physical, emotional, and ethical participation in the world.