The different but overlapping notions of ‘archetypes’ in the work of Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade are outlined, and new ways of understanding the frameworks set out by them are explored in sociological terms. The relevance of ‘Platonic mysticism’ is noted in this context. Spontaneous mystical experience is also considered in this context, especially in relation to a ‘dual-process’ understanding of human cognition and Alister Hardy’s empirical research into religious experience.

Chapter 7 explores the Copernican revolution in the Western study of Buddhism in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. It argues that it occurred in two moments, the first of which was necessary for the second to occur. The first was the creation of the term ‘Buddhism’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Over the next fifty years, this term and a variety of linguistic variants in European languages appeared in the West and became the norm. The second and crucial moment was the creation of Buddhism as an object defined predominantly in terms of its own textuality. Thus, from 1820 to 1860, Buddhism came to exist in the ‘Oriental’ libraries, institutes, learned societies, and universities of the West. It was discovered in its texts and manuscripts on the desks of the European scholars who laboriously learned the languages, read the texts, and translated, interpreted, and published them. The chapter shows how, in the early 1820s, the Buddha left the world of myth and began to become a figure in history.

Surveys the extensive literature concerning inequalities of classical Hardy type.

Provides fraction versions of Hardy inequalities.

Chapter 6 begins with ballad talk (the ballad convention of narration through conversation) as it was adopted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets in verses both popular and literary in response to revived interest in the print mediation of traditional Anglo-Scottish ballads. The chapter pays particular attention to Christina Rossetti’s and Hardy’s ironic reworkings of ballad conventions. Their reliance on the expectations aroused by traditional ballads, the chapter argues, especially in the much harder cases of imagining intimate conversational relations with the silent dead or with God, prepares the depictions of failed intimacy in Hardy’s elegies for his wife Emma and in Rossetti’s devotional colloquies and roundels. There talking with ghosts or with God becomes all too often a disappointed hope of resuming conversations that failed in life (Hardy) or painfully anticipating a silent harmony with God and the saints in paradise through the imperfect approximations of poetry (Rossetti).

Analysingthe fiction of Thomas Hardy, Chapter 4 considers Hardy’s depictions of deception, concealment and misleading appearances among humans alongside his interest in adaptive appearance. This interest clashed with Hardy’s channelling of the pastoral, which characterised the natural world and rural life by honesty and transparency. Critics have noted that Hardy’s fiction problematizes the ethics of honesty. It is argued here that the logic of adaptive appearance energised this tendency as characters’ fates depend on chance misperceptions and ambiguous appearances. This sense of Darwinian contingency complicates characters’ moral agency by suggesting that many of their acts, which have the effect of deceiving, are unconscious. Apparently purposeful behaviours blur with the more mechanised displays of natural and sexual selection. Through his evolutionary vision, Hardy sometimes reframes honesty and dishonesty as outgrowths of opposing primitive instincts toward altruism and egoism. However, this utilitarian framework also rendered deception morally ambiguous, allowing for the possibility of noble deceptions that would spare others pain. Hardy’s fiction further biologized deception by depicting physical bodies that hid or falsified their owners’ identities. Random variations and chance resemblances cause characters to interpret erroneous ancestral histories in each other, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

In my fourth chapter on Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved, “A Wrinkle in Time,” I argue that the sexual escapades of an aging artist subvert the naturalist plot of decline. Instead of modeling the human lifespan on a parabola that begins with youthful possibility, reaches its apex in adulthood, and declines into senescence and death, The Well-Beloved demonstrates the opening of queer, non-normative desire as one ages. This chapter examines the discourses of evolutionary biology and geology as providing the late-nineteenth century with non-linear models for the human lifespan. These scientific models, I argue, have a narrative counterpart in the counterfactual, or the imagination of what might have occurred in the past but did not. The use of counterfactual thinking in narrative enables Hardy to construct an ambivalent attitude toward the aging of his protagonist, who inverts the horizon of possibility away from the future toward a past that he struggles to remake.