Despite popular perceptions of Vaughan Williams as being focussed primarily on nature and the pastoral, a vivid appreciation of urban environments played an equally crucial role in shaping his artistic vision. A Londoner for most of his adult life, he also spent significant time in Berlin and Paris, and had a special regard for New York. Yet while he relished the bustle and rich social diversity of London, the de facto capital of the world during his lifetime, he was also keenly aware of its deprivation and dark undercurrents. A London Symphony is the most ambitious musical work to thematicize the modern city composed anywhere before 1914, and it evokes psychological and experiential tropes central to modernism’s urban imaginary across the arts, including the collision of multiple social identities, temporalities, and spatial perspectives, and the associated alienation and fragmentation of the unitary self. The composer employs an exceptionally wide range of materials, juxtaposing folk song, ragtime, street noise, and much else, in a multilayered environment of sometimes violent dissonance and rhythmic dislocation. Yet the work strives to integrate such diversity within an overarching symphonic framework – a powerful metaphor for a vision of nation and humanity that underpinned the composer’s later work.

This chapter proposes solutions to some longstanding problems surrounding the anthropogony of On Flesh. First, it shows how the author’s three main principles of the hot, the cold, and the wet reflect widely attested beliefs about the effects of heat and cold on bodily fluids. After that, it argues that the author’s two supplementary principles of the “fatty” and the “glutinous” are derived from a traditional dichotomy between bile and phlegm. The upshot of these observations is that the author of On Flesh uses the microcosm of the body as a tool for understanding the macrocosm of the universe. For this author, the natural world is primarily a reflection of the body (not the other way around), and it is specifically medical knowledge that gives him insight into the cosmos. Just as Eryximachus claims to have acquired his awareness of the universal power of eros “from medicine, our art” (ἐκ τῆς ἰατρικῆς, τῆς ἡμετέρας τέχνης, Pl. Smp. 186a), so the other cosmological doctors viewed medicine as a privileged starting point for contemplating the universe as a whole.

This chapter uses a close reading of The Lancet medical journal, and its radical, charismatic editor Thomas Wakley, to delineate the ‘high-water mark’ of Romantic sensibility as an emotional regime. It explores the ways in which Wakley and The Lancet leveraged the emotional politics of contemporary melodrama to critique the alleged nepotism and corruption of the London surgical elites. More especially, it analyses their campaign to expose instances of surgical incompetence at the city’s leading teaching hospitals, demonstrating the ways in which this strategy weaponised the emotions of anger, pity, and sympathy, and considering its implications for the cultural norms of an inchoate profession and for the ultimate stability of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility.

From the 1920s onward, James Joyce and Latin American literature have been inextricably connected. Anglo-American criticism has traditionally seen this connection as a case of influence radiating from an iconic figure of European Modernism to the periphery. However, a close analysis of how prominent writers from Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar to Gustavo Sainz and Ricardo Piglia received and engaged with Joyce’s work reveals a less centralizing literary map. In their critical and creative writings, Joyce appears not as a model to be emulated but as an irreverent Irish writer that occupied an eccentric position within the Western literary tradition. Responding to changing political and social landscapes and diverse national contexts, these Latin American authors have marshalled and refashioned Joyce’s eccentricity to express their local conditions and cultural specificity in a cosmopolitan literary style.

The first chapter provides a brief historical overview of Ionia as a region, discusses its geographical extent as represented in the works of the authors Strabo and Pliny from the Roman Imperial period, and analyses its place in relation to the superimposed administrative units of the conventus districts and, on a larger scale, within the framework of the province of Asia: both of these transcended the traditional boundaries of Ionia and thus potentially challenged its perceived coherence. The use of city-titles making explicit reference to Ionia is highlighted at the end of the chapter as part of the intercity rivalries consciously imitating references to the larger frame of the province of Asia.

Simmel’s focus on individuality in ambivalent interaction within the context of the metropolis constitutes a central feature of his contribution to sociology. He was not inclined to issue laments about the presumed end of the individual due to modern forms of domination; rather his work focuses on the possibilities for individual action in modern societies predicated on novel cultural values. This article illustrates that it is essential to view his work in terms of the dialectics between work and play, as well as that between the realms of necessity and leisure.

Vincenzo Mele is Associate Professor of General Sociology in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pisa. He is the author of Metropolis: Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Modernity (2011), Aesthetics and Social Theory: Simmel, Benjamin, Adorno, Bourdieu (2013), and Globalizing Cultures: Theories, Actions, Paradigms (with Marina Vujnovic, 2015). He is editor of the journal Simmel Studies.

The history of New York’s literature encompasses centuries where war, commerce, revolution, democracy, industry and immigration have shaped the city into a global metropolis. Therefore, it is a literature which not only addresses the experiences of those living within the city but the city’s relationship with the rest of the world. The city’s literature possesses a universal quality, as it serves to remind readers of the forces that shaped our lives and our identities. Written within the city’s novels, memoirs, poetry, periodicals and magazines are the myriad experiences and perspectives that chart the traumatic and triumphant processes that have formed our contemporary society. This study draws the connections between the work of authors and writers in the city and the wider world through examining movement. The prose, poetry and fiction that has emerged from the city is infused with this character that defined the modern age. This is a city built on movement; as such, it is a metropolis that evokes the changes that have made the modern world. This ensures that the narratives of this city move beyond the confines of Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island and tell a global story.

Chapters 5–6 deal with some of the chief aspects of Ovidian and cinematic metamorphoses. Chapter 5 examines another crucial moment in screen history, when film pioneer Georges Méliès accidentally discovered how bodies and objects could be changed into something completely different on the screen. Ovid’s versions of the myths of the sculptor Pygmalion, whose ivory statue, later named Galatea, comes to life, and, conversely, the petrifying gaze of the Gorgon Medusa initiated two important developments in modern visual arts: the Pygmalion Effect and the Medusa Effect. Related to these are the Hephaestus and Daedalus Effects, in which statues acquire movement. This chapter connects elements from Ovid’s myths to a variety of related film forms and genres. Visible essences and underlying characteristics of bodily metamorphoses are as important for Ovid’s epic as they are for the cinema. The latter has extensively shown complex metamorphoses through editing and camera tricks since the days of silent films and in animated films. Now computer-generated images (CGI) add a whole new dimension of verisimilitude to what is physically impossible. A complex metamorphosis, from human to robot, occurs in Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis, while the metamorphosis of a young ballerina in Black Swan may well be the most realistic change of the human body in the CGI era. The chapter closes with a brief homage to Eisenstein’s famous montage in Battleship Potemkin, in which three marble statues of lions become one animated lion.

The repeated patterns of metropolitan urban activities that act as palimpsest in Chaucer’s fiction also impose themselves on our understanding of his place and achievement in late medieval and early modern London book history. The London Chaucer legacy takes on many different, often quasi-autobiographical, forms in the two hundred years following his death. Sensitivity to the dynamics of reader response inherent in his fiction among near contemporary and later writers ensured Chaucer’s works remained an important part of a vibrant metropolitan English literary culture. The making and celebration of an English past that glorified London remained a high priority within that culture among the book producers, copyists and printers who also serve as the first chroniclers of London’s Chaucer.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.