This chapter examines second language learning and teaching from a skills perspective, that is, reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The chapter first explains the differences among the four skills (e.g., receptive vs. productive; the necessity of formal instruction). Then, the chapter dissects each skill. As for reading and writing, the chapter discusses the necessity of formal instruction, and how the two skills are developed cognitively. The chapter also distinguishes writing-to-learn-language and learning-to-write. In terms of listening, the chapter explains different ways of processing incoming information (i.e., parsing). In relation to speaking, the chapter discusses differences between monologues or dialogues and the influence that time pressure has on second language production. By drawing on the previous chapters focusing on specific language components, the chapter ends with pedagogical recommendations for teaching the academic skills (e.g., how to target and sequence different skills).

Arguing its relevance in historiography, and its connection with the related concept of the classic, this chapter examines the place of the canon in history: its formation, key turning points, convenience, usefulness, and the desirability of its existence itself. In the first part of the chapter (‘Constructions’), I examine the five main turning points in the formation of the canon in history: Greco-Roman, Collingwood-Croce, narrative history of the 1970s, gender and postcolonial, and global canon. The second part of the chapter (‘Canonizing’) examines three case studies of the canon in history: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Macaulay’s History of England and White’s Metahistory. The third part (‘Resistances’) explores the rejection of the canon among historians, describes some of its manifestations and reflects on its motivations. The fourth part (‘Paradoxes’) details the main characteristics of the historical canon, points out the differences among other canons such as the literary and artistic, and explores the peculiar combination of art and science that every historical operation entails. The conclusive section (‘Inescapability’) argues for the great paradox of the canon: the impossibility of conducting cultural and intellectual exchanges without it.

The aesthetics of comics is deeply linked to the history of media serialities. Modern comics were born in the newspaper and followed its periodic rhythms and exploited its logic of reader loyalty. The two historically dominant models of comics, the comic strip and the comic book, are each linked to a publication medium or format – the newspaper and the magazine, respectively – and to their logics of consumption. Many characteristics of the comic strip – the principle of gag variations, the importance of generic conventions, recurring characters, spin-off series, crossover logics – can be reinterpreted according to the industrial and media contexts in which they appear and which are aesthetically exploited by the authors. Reflection on the seriality of comics can therefore not be limited to analyses of plots or modes of graphic narration. It needs to consider media logics, including the industrial and commercial dynamics and modes of consumption they encourage. Ultimately, comics seriality engages with, on the one hand, the principles of generic seriality, which thematize these logics of production and consumption. On the other, diegetic seriality, of the recurrent character and the fictional universe, also determines the strategic choices of industrial and media players.

On and off the map of “the world republic of letters,” literary Beijing, from exotic configurations to multivalent self-portraits, has unfolded, historically and geopolitically, as an ancient capital of traditional China, a Republican city of new thoughts and everlasting memories, a fallen city under Japanese military control, a socialist capital of Maoist ideology, and a rejuvenated and cosmopolitan megacity in the post-Cold War era and the new millennium. This chapter situates Beijing writing in the intertwined contexts of Chinese literature and World Literature in terms of evidenced influences, implicit connections, and paralleled representations. The methods of imagining Beijing have formed in the multilayered city-texts by writers across different historical times, which entailed variegated genres, ideas and trends, places and spaces, emotions and materiality, and cultural chronotopes. Entangled with Beijing narratives created by authors across the globe, the city’s imageries in Chinese literature prompt intriguing dialogues, in both visible and invisible ways, with World Literature. Together, this tapestry of urban writing encodes and decodes Beijing as a real, imagined, mythical, metaphorical and semiotic city surviving barbarianism, exoticism, Orientalism, (mis)understanding, (over)interpretation, and (un)translatability.

In this chapter the general questions, genres, and authors addressed in the volume are presented.

The introduction begins by addressing the uses of studying cultural institutions. It provides a working definition of ‘institution’ and a historical overview of the emergence of the infrastructure of institutions in the period 1700 to 1900. The logic of choosing the period is addressed in relation to the uneven translation from cultural institutions based on the court and church to voluntary institutions that had an arms-length relationship to the state. It also discusses the historical irony that just as a ‘romantic’ definition of the literary individualism emerged that might seem to pit literature against Institutions, there was a proliferation of institutions of literature. The purview of the collection in relation to British national and imperial culture and identities is explained and the opportunities for further work in related areas discussed in the framework of the collection’s own historical moment at a time when the university-based discipline of Literature seems to be undergoing a fundamental change in its structure and purposes.

Chapter 18 charts the history of medical translation and developments in the field. It introduces the main genres and target groups and discusses important challenges that medical translators face. The shift from the biomedical paradigm to patient-centredness and patient empowerment means that people want to understand information involving their own health, so that intralingual translation is often required for expert–lay medical translation. The chapter discusses the challenges that such intralingual translation presents, especially when coupled with interlingual translation. The importance of medical ethics in medical translation is also highlighted.

Huang and Mendoza’s introduction to the fourth volume of Asian American Literatures in Transition offers a refresher on Lisa Lowe’s formative critical work, Immigrant Acts (1996), published at the beginning of the time period covered in this volume. The authors reframe Lowe’s terms “heterogeneity,” “hybridity,” and “multiplicity” within several watershed moments affecting Asian Americans and other groups in the USA: including the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), the September 11 attacks, the decriminalization of sodomy (2003), the COVID pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement. While many of these events exacerbated the vulnerability and precarity of some Asian American groups, the turbulence of the time fueled the Asian American literary imagination as writers in this period drew on more representational strategies for their literary experimentations than in previous periods. This volume covers precisely these tensions: artistic proliferations in the face of injustice, recognition in the face of social erasures, innovation in the face of neoliberal white supremacy’s monopoly on wealth and violence.

An overview of various kinds of sources shows the extent of script usage during the Old Kingdom well into the fifteenth century BC to have been relatively modest. There is evidence for some monumental and administrative use as well as for texts as aide-mémoire. The existence of an extensive chancellery with an organized tablet storage system cannot be proven. With the shift to writing in Hittite, however, came the recording of foundational texts (e.g., Anitta Text, Zalpa Tale, indigenous Anatolian myths), bolstering a sense of common identity of the young kingdom. In the same period the old so-called Palace Chronicles may have developed into the Hittite Law collection. On the whole, the Central Anatolian Hittite kingdom was still very much an oral society.

This chapter examines further changes in elite honor and shame in the Eastern Han. First, it traces the elevation of writing, earlier treated as consolation for a failed political career or entertainment that demeaned the author. During the late Western and Eastern Han, several writers invoked the ideal of the hermit to justify a life of retirement devoted to study and writing. Historical figures such as Confucius or the Duke of Zhou were portrayed as writers, as were the hidden sages of the Zhuangzi. This facilitated new genres—funeral inscription, critical essay, and shorter verse forms for self-expression—where the late Han sought honor through writing. Second, it examines the emergence in the late Han of “factions (dang ?)” defined in part through the practice of “pure discussion (qing yi ??).” These groups, like the newly celebrated writers, cited the ideal of “social eremitism” to justify refusing government offices. They criticized eunuchs and imperial affines, as well as leading officials and scholars who still served the state.

This essay presents an overview of similes and trends of analysis from narratological, cognitive, oral theory and generic interaction perspectives.