Chinese travel writing is a literary genre. All such works contain a coherent narrative of the physical experience of a journey through space towards an identifiable place, written in prose. In later Chinese literary history, however, most travel writing concerns real journeys. Unlike early European travel writing, with its focus on distant, alien, and exotic lands, Chinese travel writing most often describes places inside China. Almost always written in short essay or diary format, the journeys described therein often—but not always—describe trips undertaken for sightseeing purposes. As for content, it can vary considerably, depending on the geographical focus of the narrative and the author’s personal interests. For instance, we might find descriptions of famous landmarks, prominent mountains, local customs and products, and flora and fauna. The ‘literary’ component of these works refers to descriptive and/or commentarial language that is at once personal. ‘Personal’ means active engagement between the author and the place visited and described, which often inspires the traveller to employ an elevated style of language rich in lyrical content.

This chapter concentrates on the spatial presence of Palestinian doctors – the communities they served and those they did not. Villages rarely had medical facilities or doctors, and peasants had to travel to the town or city for medical services and would otherwise rely on traditional practitioners. Towns usually had missionary medical facilities, a small community of doctors (some of whom were native to the town), and one or two government medical facilities – a District Health Office, a government clinic, or a small hospital. Palestine’s large cities – Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa – were characterized by a relatively large professional community, substantial Jewish presence, strong missionary presence that provided both educational and medical services, and a strong presence of the Mandate administration. The chapter places doctors on Palestine’s map and examines how medical services transformed urban relationships, as well as those between the city, the town, and the countryside.

In her chapter, Maureen O’Connor shows how feminist revivalists, in their writings and political work, experienced the Irish landscape and nature as powerful forces in the conception of “Irishness.” Revival feminists give voice and prominence to the supernatural, which has long been a component of Irish folklore. While writers such as Alice Milligan, Ethna Carbery, Eva Gore-Booth, and Hannah Lynch were critical of the dominant revival narrative – particularly when it romanticized rural Ireland and its “rustic” landscape or created gendered stereotypes about the land and Irishness generally – their work nevertheless embodied the revival insofar as it focuses on how time and political struggle are embedded in the landscape. The critique of violence and masculine power is especially important in works by latter-day revivalists such as Eilís Dillon and Edna O’Brien, who take aim at masculinist conceptions of the struggle for Irish freedom in the War of Independence and in late-twentieth century conflicts in Northern Ireland.

In order to understand how urban disaster risk changes, it is essential to understand how cities change. This chapter argues that cities are continually evolving entities whose past and present dynamics provide insights into future trends and possibilities. The chapter first reviews global trends in disaster losses, along with well-established definitions and frameworks about disaster risk. It explains why these are inadequate for understanding how a city’s disaster risk changes over time. It then proposes a simple conceptual framework, the Urban Risk Dynamics framework, to help guide empirical study of evolving disaster risk in any city. The framework is based on several premises: that local geography, or landscape, is vital to understanding urban disaster risk; that cities must be understood as economic entities; and that technological change is a key driver of urban change. The chapter then introduces and justifies the selection of the six case studies to be analyzed using the framework in Chapters 3–5.

O’Casey found solace in the home of the founder and patron, as well as the most prolific and popular playwright, of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Augusta Gregory. It might not have been expected that, during the 1920s, the owner of the grand estate of Coole Park would befriend a manual labourer who worked on the Dublin railways. But in that decade Lady Gregory and O’Casey became close acquaintances, and she proved to be one of the figures who most encouraged and developed his playwriting. This chapter examines the mentoring and friendship that Gregory provided to O’Casey, and emphasises her wider influence upon him, which has tended to be underplayed in the years after her death.

This chapter consists of an extended discussion of shamanism and related ontological concepts among the Makushi. It opens with a narrative of the author’s experiences with a Makushi shaman named Mogo since 2012 and this shaman’s later death. The chapter discusses shamanic training and practices (including charms, spells, and tobacco use), as well as how shamans form relationships with spirits. It describes methods through which Makushi shamans obtain things and abilities from spirit allies. It examines notions of ‘mastery’ and ‘ownership’ and how these relations are grounded within the local landscape. However, unlike other recent ethnographic accounts from elsewhere in Amazonia, this chapter emphasises dimensions of reciprocity in Makushi shamanic relations with non-human beings. The chapter conceptualises Makushi shamanism through the combined theoretical lenses of historical ecology and Amerindian perspectivism. The shamanic relational mode described in this chapter provides a basis for examining relations with human outsiders in subsequent chapters.

This chapter initially begins with a narrative concerning how the author first came to Surama Village in Guyana in 2012. After discussing the author’s path to the village, as well as the author’s positionality in the field, the chapter describes the landscape of the Makushi people in Guyana. It provides an overview of the relational modes (particularly kinship and shamanism) through which Makushi people in Surama and beyond have engaged with outsiders (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) in the past and present. The chapter then summarises historical Makushi encounters with European colonisation involving the Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as Anglican missionisation during the mid nineteenth century. It provides a brief history of Surama Village, which is the Makushi village that is centred throughout the book. The chapter closes by providing context and background for contemporary transformations among the Makushi people in Surama Village.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

Hopkins’s journals are usually read as source-books for his poems. Their fragmentariness smacks of the archive, seeming to position this material as purely of scholarly interest. These odds and ends are meant, it would seem, to be searched for aperçus, inscapes, what Whitman would call ‘go-befores and embryons’, later immortalized in verse. But it’s also possible to read the journals as literature in their own right: as a great poet’s utmost experiment with the possibilities of prose. Hopkins’s nature descriptions experiment relentlessly with the poetics of prose his letters assert piecemeal. He inherited an aesthetic of notation that, arising from the diaries of Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was made irreversibly self-conscious within the published prose of his Victorian precursor, John Ruskin. Revealing an apparently spontaneous, self-shaping spirit alive in plants, stones, clouds, and water, Hopkins’s self-conscious sentences illuminate – as well as transcend – Victorian habits of intellectual enquiry.

The introduction calls for a mutually enriching dialogue between ancient texts and environmental literary criticism, contextualizing the book in relation to ecocriticism and classical scholarship. It also establishes the key terms of the book’s approach – place, environment, and ecology – and distinguishes these from the unreflective use of the concept of nature. Finally, the introduction sketches the contextual background for Vergil’s and Horace’s environmental interests, noting a range of ancient traditions and discourses that took the nonhuman world seriously as a site of interest and inquiry. These include literary forebears like Sappho, Hesiod, Theocritus, and Lucretius; cultural traditions such as the Roman fascination with land surveying and agricultural treatises; political contexts like the expansion and consolidation of a quasi-global Roman empire; philosophical traditions from the Presocratics to Stoicism and Epicureanism; and religious traditions. Reading Horace and Vergil as environmental poets does not mean projecting modern sensibilities onto ancient texts but rather seeing how these authors pursue their own, different interests in place, ecology, and the environment.

This chapter describes the conceptual and analytical premises used in the book’s country case studies. It uses the transition studies’ multilevel perspective as a starting point to begin exploring the diverse ways in which security and defense can be connected to sustainability transitions. It starts by discussing the landscape concept and how it ties into security. The chapter then moves onto outlining policy coherence at the regime level and ends with conceptualizing security in the transition processes of niche expansion and regime decline.

This final chapter compares the country findings and brings together the conceptual and empirical insights presented. It also aims to answer the questions presented in the introductory chapter: What are the security implications of energy transitions? What elements of positive and negative security can be found? How should energy security and security of supply be redefined in the context of the energy transition? Is there a hidden side to policymaking in the energy–security nexus? It first discusses the interplay between energy, security, and defense policies, followed by securitization and politicization. Subsequently, focus is placed on the security implications of energy transitions, and on negative and positive security. The chapter ends by summarizing the key technological, actor-based, and institutional aspects of the country cases, perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure, and final conclusions.

This chapter introduces the readers to sustainability transition studies, its key concepts, and how it has been connected to security, defense, and military issues in the past. The ways in which security can play a role in transitions is connected, for example, to how niche innovations develop and expand, how sociotechnical regimes operate, and what kind of landscape pressures are perceived to influence niches and regimes. It is interlinked to the role of states in transitions, and how war and peace are connected to niche expansion. The second purpose of this chapter is to introduce security studies, including some of its key concepts. The chapter will explain what is meant by negative and positive security, reference objects, and securitization.

This chapter discusses Clare’s nature poetry, in the contexts of the politics of land use, then and now. It reads the verse against issues including the introduction of capitalist forms of agriculture and their effects, including the dispossession and pauperization of agricultural labourers and the degradation of ecosystems. It also considers the politics of language and memory in Clare’s poetry, in relation to changes in the agricultural economy.

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.