Chapter 4 unpacks the conundrum faced by Restoration acting companies. Audiences wanted new works, spectacle, and theatrical innovation, but the unforeseen consequences of the duopoly hobbled the ability of the companies to respond nimbly to changing conditions. Strapped for money and shackled by the costs of maintaining their expensive, high-tech playhouses, the acting companies were hard pressed to keep up with rival entertainments and products now enticing Londoners. Coffeehouses, spas, pleasure gardens, dance recitals, and music concerts all offered convenience, variety, and value for money. Goods in expanded bourses also tempted consumers. The theatre largely responded to the new world of goods and pastimes through allusion and imitation, oftentimes to brilliant results. Intermedial exchange between the worlds of music and theatre resulted in the gorgeous dramatic operas still staged today. The new consumerism featured in the sparkling, witty comedies spoofing the London elite. Nonetheless, allusiveness could not rival actual experiences and commodities, which often could be had for less money and greater convenience than an afternoon at the playhouse.

This chapter continues the discussion of patentability. It discusses what kind of inventions plausibly ought to be owned on utilitarian grounds (the normative question).

Most intelligence models include an array of processes and mechanisms that enable experts to generalize their knowledge and processes during career transitions and produce flexibility in cognitive structures that enable individuals to overcome limitations in applying expert knowledge and processes across domains and functional areas. These processes have been described variously as insightful thinking, induction, eduction, elaborating and mapping, novelty and metaphorical capacity, inductive inference, divergent production abilities, analogy, flexibility of use, and closure. They are discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

In this chapter, I argue that interest (or interestingness) can serve as a reliable guide to the detection of important research topics, but only under specific conditions. My argument begins by reflecting on a specific cultural difference between the natural sciences and the humanities that exemplifies the disparate roles that interestingness plays in the two domains. I explain how this specific difference is a symptom of a much more far-reaching contrast between them, and this contrast tracks differences in the tendency of something of genuine scholarly significance to emerge from the pursuit of research questions that one finds interesting. I argue that disciplines whose members do not agree on a large corpus of substantive claims — in short, disciplines in which consensus is a rarity, if it exists at all — do not function as intellectual communities capable of cultivating a causal link between something’s being interesting and something’s being important.

This chapter examines a core hypothesis of the intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck: that modern political concepts underwent an accelerated period of change during the latter half of the eigheenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, a period he calls the ‘Sattelzeit’ or hinge period of intellectual history. Adapting word embedding models and metrics of novelty and the pace of change, this chapter helps to measure, visualise and disentangle the precise semantic transformations occuring at this threshold period: the consolidation of Koselleck’s ‘collective singular’ noun, for example, appears alongside a host of other cultural, technological, intellectual innovations in word usage. Finally, the data reveal not one but two revolutionary semantic periods between 1720 and 1960, a finding which both troubles the concept of a Sattelzeit while also extending it into new discursive, historical – and digital – contexts.

This final chapter treats the Snopes trilogy as a clear-sighted affirmation of immanence and interiority that responds in a self-contained way to the whole of Faulkner’s study of complex systems as outlined in this book. In The Hamlet, the symbolism of the submerged woman offers Faulkner’s clearest portrayal of an immanent underlayer to our networked social systems, an underlayer that gives value and dignity to the individual life. Although there may be a chaotic quality to the expression of such individual forms of novelty, this does not mean that the larger networked process is blind. For Faulkner, individual experience serves as both a moral anchorage for the larger expression of the social body and an ever-present wellspring for social change. The Town and The Mansion continue to depict how such individual behavior can challenge vertical paradigms of top-down power, bestowing a mercurial quality to the New South and making it open to the possibilities of change.

How do we define creativity? Studies of laypersons’ beliefs tend to find that people focus on malleability, aesthetic taste, insight, and curiosity. Experts, however, propose that for something to be creative it should be both novel or original and task-appropriate or useful. Although other criteria have been proposed, none has been as thoroughly adapted. After discussing why definitions do matter, I shift to theories that categorize creativity. I cover the classic model of the four Ps (Person, Product, Process, and Press) and then highlight a newer model that incorporates a sociocultural influence, the five As (Actor, Artifact, Action, Audience, and Affordances).

When companies working in the pharmaceutical sector choose to develop new products, they have a certain set of choices. They can decide not to develop anything new, they can choose to make incremental improvements to existing products or choose to create something entirely new. In the short term, firms are also under pressure by shareholders to provide value, which may discourage longer-term investments. This may lead to an affinity for incremental discoveries and pursuits that are more likely to succeed in the short-term, such as me-too drugs. Chapter 11 explores how financial considerations influence the rate and direction of drug development, using antibiotics as a primary case example. Additionally, the chapter explores why there is missing novelty in drug development and how we might stimulate more breakthroughs in the future.

Chapter 3 launches with Pseudolus’ opening scene which revolves around a letter. I explore Phoenicium’s epistle to discern how it determines Pseudolus’ comic course as well as audience expectations about what lies ahead, and consider what a letter composed by a meretrix reveals about literacy and the symbolism of writing on the Plautine stage. Next is the play’s protracted indeterminacy, which flies in the face of its textual exposition. Why is Pseudolus uncertain about how to proceed when he himself recites the letter that so clearly sets out the comic plot? The answer lies in this comedy’s claim to dramatic innovation. Pseudolus tells us that its epistolary interception is new to the comic stage, a nova res which inspires in the schemer a novum consilium that neither he nor we expect. But the play repeatedly undercuts its own novelty, a paradox reified in the element around which its innovation revolves – the stolen letter. I perform a close analysis of the false delivery scene in which this text is put into action, reading for its epistolarity but also laying bare the internal replication it effects and the resultant mise-en-abyme.

The Attraction emotions are reactions of liking or disliking objects (or aspects of objects) resulting from an object’s appeal (or lack thereof). Appeal, in turn, depends on tastes, which in contrast to goals and standards, tend to be unanalyzable, Hence, the Attraction emotions are the least cognitively complex of all emotions. Tastes are treated broadly and include attitudes and preferences, and the notion of an object is also broad, including anything that is evaluated qua object, meaning that even events or agents’ actions can be viewed as objects. Although issues pertaining to aesthetic judgment are raised, they are not the focus of Attraction emotions. The Attraction emotion identified depends on whether an object is evaluated as being appealing or unappealing and whether it is viewed as itself being capable of emotion. Crossing these dimensions leads to four emotion types: “Affection” and “Enmity” emotions, which pertain to emotion-capable (generally animate) objects, and “Appreciation” and “Distaste” emotions, which pertain to emotion-incapable (generally inanimate) objects.

This chapter steps back to examine the changing perception of Dutch decline across the first half of the eighteenth century. Anxieties about Dutch decline did not emerge fully formed in 1672, nor any other date; rather, they developed over time. This chapter argues that natural disasters reveal the expanding influence of proto-national decline narratives, highlight the increasing influence of economic perspectives on decline, and uncover a distinctive rural decline paradigm. The chapter also considers what this era of decline can teach us about disasters more broadly. Disasters were events and processes that manifested at the intersection of natural and cultural change. They produced differential consequences for Dutch society across scale, just as they do today. These conditions influenced Dutch perception of disaster and affected their response. The Golden Age past was key to learning from these disasters – whether as a model to emulate or a baseline to measure progress. Dutch “decline” and the natural disasters that punctuated it served as social and cultural tools that resolved in the long term. Eighteenth-century environmental histories of disaster offer insights about the role of culture and perception, progress, and agency in an era of increasing risk.

In late fall 1730, a coastal flood hit the Dutch island Walcheren. Inside the broken wooden revetments strewn across its beaches, dike authorities noticed peculiar, tiny holes. These holes contained shipworms (Teredo navalis), a marine mollusk that bored into the wooden infrastructure that protected coastal dikes. This discovery prompted the most significant redevelopment and rebuilding of coastal flood defenses in the early-modern period. This chapter investigates the origins, interpretation, and response to the ‘shipworm epidemic’ of the 1730s. It argues that the perception of shipworm novelty influenced this dramatic change. In contrast to epizootics or coastal floods, the cultural memory of disaster presented no ready solutions for shipworms. Shipworms’ perceived novelty catalyzed new natural historical investigations of the species as well as innovative new dike designs. Shipworms also produced new connections to decline. Pietist ministers and enlightened spectatorial journalists united in their condemnation of the moral decay of the Dutch Republic by linking shipworms to an ongoing wave of sodomy trials. The biological novelty of the shipworms translated to an unprecedented period of persecution.

Characteristic of the early modern period was the idea of a new start for philosophy and the sciences. In the period, those who advocated for such a program were collectively called the novatores or “innovators.” This chapter traces the emergence and the complex posterity of this term. Though now considered positive, it was much contested in the period, and the novatores were involved in numerous polemical disputes. Tracing the origins, history, and use of the term gives us precious insights into the dynamics of the great transformation of philosophy usually designated by another polemical label—the Scientific Revolution.