In the late 1970s, queer parents increasingly fought to maintain custody of their children from different-sex relationships. These mothers and fathers were responding in part to the gay liberation movement, which inspired them to come out and demand their rights. Also important was that the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness, which eliminated what had been an all-but-impenetrable barrier to custody. Courts were nevertheless reluctant to grant these petitions, fearing that the children would learn to be gay or lesbian from the adults in their lives. In response to these court cases, social scientists developed research studies that concluded parental homosexuality had no effect on the future sexual orientation of children. Based on that work, family courts around the country granted custody to lesbian mothers and gay fathers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, creating the first wave of visible queer-headed families.

This chapter considers important female figures in Puccini’s circle. It begins by outlining Puccini’s relationship with his mother, Albina, who died relatively early in the composer’s life, and with his six sisters. The author then discusses Puccini’s relationship with his wife, Elvira, in some detail, considering the circumstances in which the couple met and their subsequent rather strained relationship. Puccini’s affairs with other women are considered, and particular attention is paid to the Doria Manfredi scandal, when a young woman wrongly accused of an affair with the composer committed suicide. The author discusses Puccini’s step-daughter and granddaughter, Simonetta. She also considers his platonic relationships with female friends, most importantly Sybil Seligman.

Chapter 2 analyzes the life histories and experiences of métis children who were wards of the colonial state in the 1930s in Senegal and Gabon. They received government funding and management of their education. The daily lives of métis wards became a battleground through which fictive and blood kin, métis activists, emerging African political leaders, French colonial administrators, and Catholic missionaries debated the meanings of race, culture, and child welfare. In Senegal, African stakeholders mediated métis children’s access to French education, living conditions, and colonial welfare payments based on their parentage from French and European men. The state was obliged to provide access to education for all children born in Africa, with métis as a distinct group. In Gabon, an association of adult métis lobbied for access to favorable material conditions for métis children and for them to attend a school for European children and reside in a boarding home without black children. Contestations around their welfare hinged on the French republican rhetoric of universal rights and equality and racialized hierarchies within African societies.

The longing for love and the possibility of its loss are consistent concerns in Ishiguro’s production. Through references to ancient and modern conceptualizations, the chapter addresses the varieties of love that dominate Ishiguro’s works. It moves from the guilt-ridden love of a mother for her suicided daughter in A Pale View of Hills, through Stevens’s barely acknowledged love for Miss Kenton in Remains of the Day, to the unresolved tension between the devotion to our nearest and dearest and the pursuit of a higher ideal in The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans. After minor excursions into songwriting and short stories, the chapter focuses on the most recent three novels, considering the deceptive possibility of romantic love’s redemptive power in Never Let Me Go, the long-standing but apparently doomed conjugal love of Axl and Beatrice in The Buried Giant, and Klara’s touching devotion to the sick Josie in Klara and the Sun.

Civil war has beset France yet again. Victor Hugo reacts to the slaughter of the Commune in 1872 by telling – like Vergil, Lucan, and Augustine – a story from the past. Quatrevingt-treize is set during the Terror (1793) following the French Revolution. Paradigmatic characters and places instantiate ideologies that have mapped positions since ancient Rome. As in Augustine, no history has managed to overcome civil war. Christianity has merely enabled the shift to a new form of domination in monarchy. A new republic is needed that will refound France – a universal paradigm like Rome – on secularized Christian values that will finally bring new order to the world.

This chapter deals with the development of early hymnography (c. 400–600 CE), including the Syriac and Georgian texts that influenced, or witnessed to, the Greek tradition. After an introductory section that deals with the second-century Odes of Solomon and fourth-century hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, the chapter moves on to fifth- and sixth-century Syriac poetry and dialogues, followed by important Greek hymns such as the Akathistos. The chapter concludes with sections on the Akathistos Hymn and on the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist, who was responsible for creating a more human, as opposed to symbolic, literary image of the Virgin. Romanos remained influential for both hymnography and homiletics in subsequent centuries, as liturgical writers elaborated the image of the Virgin Mary as human mother and intercessor for their audiences.

Beginning with “multidisciplinary approaches to the study of self,” the chapter explores the “collective experience” of Africa through poetry. The chapter, in its depiction of the interwoven relationship between self and narrative, establishes the perpetuity of self with words such as “ever-changing,” “evolving,” “becoming,” and “actualization.” Further, the chapter establishes how self is discovered through a consciousness of belonging to a larger society vis-à-vis self’s relationship with other aspects of the society. Poetry gives the reader the opportunity to feel a larger expression of the narrative, such as the energies, events, and experiences felt by the poet. However, understanding these expressions requires the possession of the same level of sensitivity by the reader. With references to his poetic collection, the author proceeds to examine the narration of self to portray existing socio-cultural values/desires and their importance in Africa. They include eulogizing and celebrating individuals, extolling the mother both as the carrier and nurturer of life, and the pride in face marks as ethnic identity, amongst others.

This essay focuses on Sarah Winnemucca’s development of a school for the Paiutes that would avoid the assimilationist violence often associated with white-run schools for Native Americans in the nineteenth century. Following her book Life Among the Piutes into this history gives us a way of thinking about Native American literature more broadly, and the histories that led to its emergence, its necessity, in a nation determined to control the voices and destinies of Native Americans across the country. To become educated at Winnemucca’s school is not to “become white.” A combination of Northern Paiute traditions and Elizabeth Peabody’s feminist-minded educational philosophy, the Peabody Institute was a powerful counterpoint to the U.S. boarding schools of the time. Winnemucca’s interpretation of her school is apparent in several features: the centrality of the mother figure; the emphasis on Native American languages, traditions, and cultures; and the role of the Native American woman – the interpreter – as educator. In these terms, the Native American woman determines the direction of her school, a truly anti-colonial move. As Life Among the Piutes and the nineteenth-century newspaper articles and letters teach us, then, there was an alternative to the colonialist boarding school.

The chapter focuses on a persistent problem within nationalist ideology, as it emerged in Jacob Grimm’s reflections on the rise of mandatory schooling. School systems can impose a uniform language across a large territory, effectively giving shape to a national people. This became increasingly clear to Grimm as he witnessed the emergence of a veritable army of schoolteachers around the mid-nineteenth century. While he approved of greater national unification by means of mass schooling, the fact of public education also forced him to consider that the nation may not grow from below to delimit the proper reach of a state. Instead, an existing state apparatus could forge a more standardized culture by institutional means, at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language and customs within families. Hence the state may not need a philologist to trace national boundaries. Indeed, the school system itself, a necessary institution in the developed modern state, threatened local cultures with extinction and hence deprived populations of the cultural memory that Grimm had pledged to protect as a scholar.

I wrote this book in the hope that it would help protect the planet for my son, his generation, and future generations. The preface describes my motivation for writing this book, some of the experiences that have shaped the book itself including my research in Ethiopia, my experiences as a new mother, a researcher, a teacher, and a practicing dietitian. The preface likens Earth to a very sick patient and how as clinicians we would do everything in power to save her, and that it is time to treat Earth in that same manner, and do everything we can to save her. It is a very emotional and powerful message to the reader.

This chapter deals with the development of early hymnography (c. 400–600 CE), including the Syriac and Georgian texts that influenced, or witnessed to, the Greek tradition. After an introductory section that deals with the second-century Odes of Solomon and fourth-century hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, the chapter moves on to fifth- and sixth-century Syriac poetry and dialogues, followed by important Greek hymns such as the Akathistos. The chapter concludes with sections on the Akathistos Hymn and on the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist, who was responsible for creating a more human, as opposed to symbolic, literary image of the Virgin. Romanos remained influential for both hymnography and homiletics in subsequent centuries, as liturgical writers elaborated the image of the Virgin Mary as human mother and intercessor for their audiences.

The forces creating a writer’s life and work are myriad and not always obvious. In Elizabeth Bishop’s case, some of these forces existed before she was born: ancestors and historical events affected and influenced her throughout her entire life. Bishop’s parents, especially her mother, and her maternal family are vital elements in her development, as was the place where she spent key years of her childhood: Great Village, Nova Scotia, Canada. This chapter explores aspects of Bishop’s childhood in Great Village and with her maternal family, revealing some of their many impacts.

Responses to prompts for words and phrases used to describe people and things

Responses to prompts for words and phrases used to describe people and things

“Debts to Nature” explores Greek myths about overreach and encroachment involving the operational deity the Greeks variously described as Potnia Therōn (“Mistress of the Animals”), the Great Goddess, or Mother of All, whose domain is Nature. It also concerns the implications of some sustainability principlesembedded and at work in Greek cult, especially acts of reciprocity and exchange in sacrificial ritual, which are ultimately explained by way of Albert Schweitzer’s philosophy of “Reverence for Life” (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben). The poet Hesiod is proffered as an adherent to this kind of worldview and as an early systems thinker, deeply concerned about sustainable living.

This chapter argues that Hamlet’s status as the preeminent early modern instantiation of modern subjectivity, which dates back to the romantic era, is predicated upon the downgrading of Senecan tragedy’s status and upon misunderstanding the nature of Shakespeare’s relationship with the Senecan tradition. Senecan tragedy as a tradition offers resources for thinking about self-assertion and its limits, and these underpin questions about agency, choice and pre-scriptedness that have been foundational for the tradition that sees Hamlet as a “tragedy of thought.” Hamlet’s post-Freudian association with Oedipus, meanwhile, though traditionally associated with Sophocles, is better understood as part of what we might call a Senecan Oedipus complex. In Senecan tragedy (including Seneca’s Oedipus) the figure of the mother is one symbolic representation of the limits of human autonomy, but the symbolic meaning of the figure of the mother is not limited to a domesticated narrative of infantile development. Critics have asked why Hamlet, of all plays, should have become the key proof text for modern theories of subjectivity and psychology; this chapter suggests that the nature of the play’s engagement with Seneca may be a major reason.

Considers how Quintus captures his stance towards Homer through the presentation of family relationships. Harnessing the frequent collusion between generational and poetic succession (examined using Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ and very prevalent in silver Latin poetry), Quintus first depicts a series of failed rivalrous filial usurpations – Penthesilea, Ajax, Achilles, Memnon – and shows that they fail because of their violent antagonism. He then portrays the two most successful examples of succession – Neoptolemus and Athena – as characterised by impersonation, embodiment and necromantic possession. This contrast becomes a reading of Quintus’ own positive and assimilating approach to Homer. Becoming the poetic father thus becomes the surest way to achieve lasting renown.