This chapter examines the British essay in the age of the Internet, a period which has radically reshaped literary culture. Online magazines and journals now outnumber their print precursors, vastly increasing the venues available to budding essayists. But this transformation was predated by a more pivotal online trend: blogging. Beginning in the early years of the new millennium, and ending, effectively, with the rise of social media, the golden age of blogging allowed a wave of self-published writers to revolutionise literary criticism and cultural theory. Free from professional aims and ambitions, experimental and avidly personal, their essays left a lasting impression on both literary journalism and the academy. This chapter explores the underacknowledged possibilities and legacies of blogging, surveying the ways in which prominent bloggers reimagined the essay form.

This chapter is an overview of the problems and uses that affect theory offers the study of African American literature. Defined as aside from the traditions of thought that made black literary fields thinkable in an institutional context, it is not difficult to surmise, in generous faith, why the turn to affect has been inhospitable to lines of inquiry that presume a racial subject. Meanwhile, questions regarding the transmission of affect have remained central to the project of African American literature since before its advent as literature. This chapter considers how the work of the critic in the field necessarily presumes the relevance of affect, arguing that consciously reading for affect wards off duller accounts of what African American literary texts signify in favor of vivacious dialogue on what they do and how.

To engage with sustainable development and the SDGs, I present a heuristic framework to explore the underlying aspirations and actions from different perspectives: the worldview framework. In essence, it distinguishes the dimensions of I--local--particular from We--global--universal, and body--material from soul--immaterial. It is a methodology to experiment with, not a (scientific) theory. Its conceptualization is based on a historical analysis of Modernity (previous chapters), on insights from perennial philosophy and on empirical surveys. The four corners of this space are denoted Subjective Materialism (A2), Objective Materialism (A1), Objective Idealism (B1) and Subjective Idealism (B2). I apply it to interpret the roots of Modernity in European history and I offer a tentative social dynamics theory as a broad canvas for exploring sustainable pathways. The centre of this worldview space is the locus of the integral worldview, where dialogue, partnerships and coalitions are the means to overcome the -- often polarized -- differences in values and ideas of the competing worldviews.

Chapter 7 discusses the potential theoretical ramifications of this ideological narrative. It begins by discussing some of the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of ideological analysis, seeking to identify a number of methodological “best practices.” From there, it considers whether the distinctions and interplay between normative and empirical elements of ideological worldviews studied here shed any light on the theoretical analysis of other major ideologies, or of paradigmatic changes in modern politics. The creation of a descriptive and ostensibly empirical social theory to support normative positions is, of course, commonplace, but what is perhaps more interesting is that those empirical theories often develop an intellectual identity and sociopolitical lifespan quite separate from their original normative foundations. As the example of Qing fiscal policy demonstrates, empirical beliefs can often be more influential than normative ones. This has important ramifications for our general understanding of how political ideology affects legal and political institutions. In particular, it highlights and questions the role that the state plays in certifying and “discovering” politically relevant information, and how the state-driven centralization of information is as important a tool of ideological entrenchment as more normative kinds of state action, such as lawmaking.

How to explain the curious movements in which people of the past engaged? Critique of interpretivist approaches – cultural theory and post-modernism. Movements as intentional acts are best described by means of cognitive theory and phenomenology. Movements as a matter of attuning oneself to the mood of the situation one is in. All meaning is grounded in such fundamental movements. The history of movement is a history of the world that we made.

This Introduction sets out the key emphases of the book as a whole, exploring: the evolving theoretical debate concerning violence in the early modern and modern periods; the controversies surrounding militarism in Tudor England; the theatrical undertaking of Shakespeare’s histories; and European literary responses to the late Elizabethan court.

This chapter tries to determine how the study of port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean can be linked to the discussions on global history. It also tries to define "culture" in a way that makes it more operational for the study of heterogeneous societies, gives an outlook onto the chapters to come, and explains in which way the investigations within this book differ from earlier studies of late Ottoman society and identity.

This chapter examines the vision of key non-fictional essays written by creative writers such as C. L .R. James, Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Salman Rushdie, etc. and puts them in dialogue with the critical and theoretical debates of major literary and cultural critics such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Homi K. Bhabha, Avtar Brah, and others. Pointing to shared areas of concern, elements of synergy, and extracting elements which illuminate the historiography of creative and critical exchange, this chapter focuses on particular moments of cultural intervention. It traces how the history and development of this body of writing – which has now gained belated acknowledgement – as well as the literary, cultural, and theoretical debates that have surrounded it are inextricably linked with its political and historical context of emergence.