Drawing on narrative theory, performance studies and the history and philosophy of science, this chapter explores the distinct kinds and functions of what we might call plant narratives – the stories we tell about botanical life, but also the stories that plants tell us. Charles Darwin’s botanical studies developed various techniques to study plant behaviour and record their movements in time. These methods drew scientific observers into an experimental ‘dance’ that aligned human and plant actions in order narratively to reconstruct evolutionary histories, especially histories of exaptation. These culminated in his last study, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), which uses extensive illustrations to record and then reconfigure these individual micro-histories as what Darwin termed the ‘life history of a plant’. Ultimately, its holistic account integrates these individual narratives and evolutionary history through a unified narrative, a conclusive Bildungsroman detailing a generic plant’s experiences over the course of its life.

Historians and archaeologists habitually describe ancient households as domestic contexts without explaining what the neologism means or how it relates to Greek and Roman household organization. This chapter interrogates the disciplinary usage of the term by exploring how the category of the ‘domestic’ has evolved at the intersection between representations of private life in modern museum galleries and Athenian vase-painting, on the one hand, and normative evaluations of significant and insignificant human action, on the other. A survey of three museum displays (in the Museo Ercolanese, the British Museum and the Getty Villa) reveals a shift in how the domestic sphere was defined, substituting for the models provided by the architecture of European noble estates the home of the Victorian citizen, with its gendered distinctions between private and public. To understand this shift the discussion extends from the factors of industrialization and middle-class consumption foregrounded in social histories of the 19th century to the contemporaneous discovery of non-mythological scenes in Athenian vase-painting as depictions of ‘everyday life’.

The theme of violence is largely represented in the visual media of ancient Mesopotamia and Syria, from ancient times (fourth millennium BCE) up to the periods of the great empires of Assyria and Babylonia in the first millennium CE. Violent scenes, mostly related to war, principally show the punishment and killing of enemies according to recurrent visual topoi – such as beheading, beating, impalement, blinding, cutting and amputation of limbs – on different media, from cylinder seals to inlays and larger reliefs. This chapter seeks to point out the differing nature of the visual documents and contexts where scenes of violence on monuments and pictures were eventually shown, displayed and thus perceived, and will analyse the representation of violence accordingly, taking into consideration the use of violence within the religious and political spheres and pointing to cultural differences across time as a reflection of the political system.Mesopotamia, Syria, ritual, sacred violence, warfare, prisoners of war, rituals of war, visual narrative, visibility, audience

Peter K Steinberg shows us how Plath used scrapbooks as an early means of honing her story telling techniques and narrative skills, combining the linguistic and visual aptitudes that were present throughout her life and developing the art of self-performance and selection that are vital to any artist. Moreover, these relatively overlooked documents are a valuable source of key biographical data that amplify our understanding of the context out of which the work emerged.