This chapter examines Lucian’s manipulation of images of geographical authority in his True Histories, with particular reference to his representation of human and other bodies immersed in their environments. It look first at the tension between detached geographical observation and images of bodily immersion or entanglement with particular landscapes both in imperial Greek literature more broadly, and also in Lucian’s work, where that theme has a particular prominence. That point is illustrated first through discussion of Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, which returns repeatedly to images that challenge the idea of a clear dividing line between bodies and their environments, and also between observer and participant status. The second half of the chapter then traces the contrast between detached observation and corporeal immersion through the True Histories, especially in the scenes in the stomach of the whale, from 1.30–2.20, arguing that Lucian in this text undercuts notions of detached geographical authority in ways that are closely related to his comical undermining of various other kinds of intellectual and social pretension in his other works.

Chapter 16 presents an overview of the most common language teaching approaches. Presented on a spectrum from grammar-based to naturalistic, these approaches are compared and contrasted based on learner, teacher, syllabus, and programmatic factors. Rationale and challenges of transitioning between teaching approaches are presented alongside suggested activities for professional development.

Chapter 2 focuses on how and why target language input is important for language learners. Authors discuss several different types of input and how it has been found to contribute to second language development. Research-backed approaches for integrating more target language into classrooms of all languages, levels, and ages are presented for teachers to implement in their lessons.

In this chapter, we reinforce the book’s aim to shed light on changes inflicted on language, cognition, and the brain rather than to focus on advantages and disadvantages of being bilingual. To obtain a more realistic picture of bilingualism, its assets (i.e., what is easier), and its difficulties (i.e., what is taxing and leads to high consumption of mental resources), we have drawn on research from various disciplines. We conclude the book by identifying complexity as the major issue for research on bilingualism. The complexity problem is fundamental to definitions of bilingualism and the characterization of bilingual participants in empirical studies, leading to discussions about its assessment as a dichotomous or continuous variable. Considering bilingualism as an experience and how such experience impacts overall language development, cognition, and the brain at different levels are related to usage-based approaches of examining bilingualism as well as a concern regarding confounding and moderating variables. The shift for designing research in the field of bilingualism seems to necessarily be more interdisciplinary in nature than in the past.

While there are a few older examples of fantasies that create secondary worlds imaginatively separate from the Earth we know, such building projects became increasingly prevalent during the twentieth century. World-building is seen as one of the quintessential activities of contemporary Fantasy. Consequently, this chapter considers what fantasies, their creators and their audiences gain from imagining new worlds. It begins by examining J. R. R. Tolkien’s arguments about the importance of consistency and immersion in sub-creation, while also considering alternative views articulated by writers including Michael Saler, André Breton and H. P. Lovecraft. After drawing out the wide applicability of the world-building metaphor in conversation with work by Farah Mendlesohn, the chapter explores the metaphor’s limitations by looking at examples drawn from Michael Moorcock and Fredric Jameson. The second part of the chapter explores a wide range of world-building techniques using case studies that include Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series, Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Fantasy television, Planescape: Torment and Elden Ring.

This chapter provides an overview of the variety of contemporary digital comics.

Digital comics encompass diverse objects, both online and offline, ranging from print comics that are digitized to webcomics that resist print publications and have greater affinities with video games or animation. The chapter regroups these different formats into three main categories; it reconstructs the history of digital comics, isolating four partially overlapping phases connected to the evolution of digital culture. It traces the similarities and divergences between digital and print comics, identifying their formal specificities and contextualizing them in the analog/digital debate; and discusses their different characteristics in terms of immersion and agency. Finally, it reflects on the relationship between digital media and participatory practices on the one hand, and comics preservation on the other, elaborating on the issue of copyright infringement.

In doing so, the chapter offers a multidisciplinary and comprehensive account of the heterogeneous nature and stratified history of digital comics.

Learner engagement is the foundation for effective training. This chapter describes two design principles for creating engaging augmented reality-based recognition skills training. The Immersion Principle describes ways in which training designers can create a sense of learner presence in the training through cognitive and physical engagement. The Hot Seat Principle describes a strategy to increase engagement by making the learner feel a sense of responsibility for training outcomes. This is particularly useful for team and small group training. The discussions of both principles include examples, theoretical links, and implications for people designing augmented reality training.

As a new immigrant to Canada, Marie-Paule Lory lived the popular “Canadian experience,” including learning and working with English-speaking researchers. Her vision of multilingualism in Ontario is to address the "threat" to the sustainability of the French language while taking the risk of changing teacher practices in multilingual classrooms.

Ever since their seventeenth-century origins, Baptists have represented an array of theological, racial, ethnic, ideological, and political backgrounds and have traversed a number of social, theological, and ecclesiastical roads. The first Baptists came out of the dissenting tradition in England; the persecution they experienced during their early history in America helps explain their enduring support for the separation of church and state. Baptists make the Bible central to their practice, an emphasis central to their disputes over slavery, gender, and sexuality. They value the theological notion of the “priesthood of the believer.” Baptists hold that only people who can publicly profess their Christian conversion can be candidates for baptism. They have varied on who can take the Lord’s Supper; many Baptist churches practice open communion, but some do not. A central tenet of Baptist governance is the autonomy of the local church.

The immersion principle in multimedia learning is that immersive virtual environments promote better learning when they incorporate multimedia design principles. In short, immersive media do not necessarily improve learning but effective instructional methods within immersive virtual environments do improve learning. The goal of effective instructional design in immersive virtual environments is to promote processes of selecting, organizing, and integrating information. Psychological presence – the subjective experience of “being there” – is an affective affordance of learning in immersive learning environments that can motivate learners to engage in deeper learning. The chapter also describes boundary conditions of immersive virtual environments, including the potential for instructional design to cause extraneous cognitive load and impose high metacognitive demands on learners. Multimedia learning principles developed based on research with less immersive media may generalize to learning in immersive environments.

Imperial ekphrasis is the topic of Chapter 8. The disinterest in the aesthetics of deception in Hellenistic epigrams is continued in the ekphrastic works of Callistratus and the Philostrati. They use the term apatē not infrequently but, by and large, do not tie aesthetic illusion to deception in an ethical sense. It is another text, commonly disregarded as simple and unsophisticated, that intriguingly plays with the ambiguity of apatē. I will argue that the Tabula Cebetis, besides toying with the recession of representational levels, also uses the personification of Apatē in the painting it describes to associate aesthetic illusion with moral corruption, thereby issuing a reading instruction for itself. In fact, it can even be argued that in the Tabula Cebetis the aesthetics of deception, which Lucian had marshalled to criticize protreptics, helps preempt this criticism.

Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, discussed in Chapter 10, still awaits its discovery by scholars of ancient aesthetics. The latest of the five fully preserved ancient Greek piercingly reflects on the aesthetics of deception. After a close reading of a passage from book 3 that sharply juxtaposes deceit and aesthetic illusion and simultaneously intimates their similarity, I will explore their blending together in the Athenian novella. The aesthetics of deception also pertains to the Ethiopica themselves, which are designed to enthral the reader and simultaneously threaten to dupe her. A Platonic intertext that evokes the condemnation of poetry in the Republic highlights this danger. At the same time, Heliodorus recasts the aesthetics of deception differently from Plato and suggests an allegorical reading of his novel that envisages aesthetic illusion ultimately as a means of overcoming deception.

Plato is not only a key figure in the history of the aesthetics of deception; the focus of my study also permits us to reassess his criticism of poetry in the Republic. Chapter 4 examines how Plato takes seriously Gorgias’ playful entwinement of aesthetics with ethics and uses it to give new substance to the charges against poetry that Gorgias had deflated. For Plato, immersion is a central factor of the harm done by poets. After exploring his entanglement of aesthetic illusion with the corruption of the soul, I consider passages that seem to respond to Gorgias and help us capture the similarities and differences between the two thinkers. Finally, I contend that, while unanimously condemned by a broad alliance of scholars, Plato’s view of poetry is premised on an assessment of aesthetic experience that turns out to be valid when seen in the light of cognitive studies.

Chapter 7 moves on to Lucian, who extends the field of reflection by conjuring up the entwinement of deception with aesthetic illusion, not exclusively but chiefly in texts devoted to philosophy and its pretensions. Philopseudes uses the allure of superstitious tales circulated by philosophers to contemplate the effect of immersive narrative at large; Nigrinus calls upon the aesthetics of deception to expose the shortcomings of protreptic discourse and facile ideas of conversion; Hermotimus compares philosophical misguidance to the effects of visual art and poetry. However, Lucian’s engagement with the aesthetics of deception is not confined to ridiculing philosophy; it is carried by a serious concern with the effects of logos as diagnosed by Plato. The high reflexivity that the form of dialogue and the layering of narrative levels generate in the discussed texts can be seen as a response to the danger inherent in immersion.