Chapter 4, on David Jones’ The Anathemata (1952), considers the poem in terms of the author’s own aspiration to preserve the past. Jones considers art to be a way of making its object present and active, as the Roman Catholic Mass is believed to make Christ’s body and blood present. This form of “re-presentation” (anamnēsis) makes the past actively present without literally reconstructing it, offering a middle way between Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia. In Jones’ view, poets in the twentieth century must assemble the fragments of the cultural past as a means of resisting the increasingly utilitarian nature of modern culture. Ultimately, Jones’ densely allusive poetry forces us to consider the limits of nostalgia. If art inevitably makes past present, is it always in some sense nostalgic?

Chapter 6 provides an analysis of the impact of diasporic state-building and its legacy for Iraq, asking what kind of state the diaspora helped to build. Analysing the effects of elite and civil society mobilisation shows how the legacy of diasporic state-building is still felt today and how it has shaped the relationship between state and society in significant ways. This chapter also briefly explores differences in diasporic mobilisation for state-building over time between the United Kingdom and Sweden. With each political period during Iraq’s nascent democracy, opportunities shifted and were reinforced by homeland political dynamics. Charting diasporic state-building over time underscores the patterns and trends that have emerged within the diasporic transnational field to reveal the hegemonic identities, actors, and movements being shaped between Iraq and the diaspora. This two-way transnational flow not only creates attachments, allegiances and loyalties but also has significant implications for the future of the Iraqi state and the Iraqi nation. Finally, the chapter briefly explores the transnationalism of second-generation Iraqis and their commitment to Iraq. It investigates the effects of events in Iraq on their identities and senses of belonging, as well as political transnationalism towards the country.

Buildings frequently change over their lifespans as they are adapted to new needs and affected by damage and decay, yet our approaches to architectural history often fail to account for the material and cultural effects of interventions on existing structures or to pursue the critical questions they raise about temporality and urban environments. The book’s Introduction orients readers to diachronic approaches to architectural history, that is, beyond the moment of initial construction, oriented to the perspective of historical actors. In recognizing moments of architectural revision and rebuilding as inflection points, it stresses the importance of accounting for architectural fabrics composed of variously dated elements and of examining the ways that architectural change shapes audience perception of the site’s history and their own era’s relationship to it. Close examination of two exceptionally long-lasting structures, the Pantheon in Rome and the Hagia Sophia/Ayasofia in Constantinople/Istanbul present a compelling contrast to most modern forms of architectural restoration and illustrate central themes of the book. The chapter situates study of historical architecture within current approaches to cultural time and to material culture and places architectural change in dialogue with text-based approaches to Roman temporality.

Rather than view nineteenth-century Australian poetry as simply imitative of British models, this chapter examines how such poetry explored aspects of time and space in distinctive ways as well as from alternative perspectives. It considers how Charles Harpur conceptualised shifts in temporal scale, how Caroline Leakey questioned positioning and precedence, and how Eliza Dunlop engaged with the idea of distance that extended to aspects of the human condition more generally. It also analyses how writers such as Mary Bailey, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Kendall and R. H. Horne (who lived in Australia for a substantial period) reconfigured classical and English literary traditions through antipodal positions that raised questions around heritage and history. The chapter then discusses women’s navigation of delimiting conventions of authorship. Lastly, the chapter considers how nineteenth-century Australian poetry started to voice nation in an embryonic form.

Chapter 4 brings together the works of French poet and lyricist Guillaume de Machaut with those of bilingual English poet John Gower, as well as some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s lyrics. These authors take part in the ‘intellectualisation’ of love poetry that sees the language of phantasmatic love’s joy be confronted with that of Boethian happiness and sufficiency. This confrontation, I argue, demonstrates the incompatibility of love’s joy with happiness: the latter is a form of self-mastery whereas the former fragments the subject in self-delusion. This chapter also traces the transmission of the French language of joie d’amour into Middle English and its relationship with the native blisse, which I show to be at the convergence between philosophical, mystical and erotic languages of love. While Gower foregoes the native blisse, Chaucer’s lyrics bring the languages of joie and bliss together to build a new form of love’s joy as the consummation of desire and an escape from earthly temporality.

This book explores Herodotus’ creative interaction with the Greek poetic tradition from early hexameter verse through fifth-century Attic tragedy. The poetic tradition informs the Histories in both positive and negative ways, since Herodotus adopts or adapts some poetic features while rejecting others as a means of defining the nature of his own project. The range of such features includes subject matter; diction and phraseology; narrative motifs, themes, patterns, and structure; speech types and speech complexes; the role of the narrator – his presence, functions, source(s), authority, and limitations; the manipulation of time (narrative order, rhythm, and frequency); conceptions of truth and falsehood; the construction of the human past and its relation to the present; the relationship between humanity and deity, and the role each plays in the causation of events. In these and other regards Herodotus may use poetic precedent as a model, a foil, or some combination of the two.

This concluding chapter reflects on the relationship between transitional justice, power, and law at the current global conjuncture of the alleged end or “eclipse” of liberal democracy and human rights and the rise of rightwing authoritarian populism and fascism. It recapitulates the major interventions of the book that critically interrogate the binary of liberalism and authoritarianism and the abstract idealization of the virtues of transparency and the right to know in dominant transitional justice and human rights politics. The chapter organizes the concluding reflections under five headings that draw attention to the making of rightwing authoritarian populist legalism and transitional justice; the problem of Eurocentrism; capitalist and nation-state-centric politics of transitional justice; and reflections on the alternative notions of truth and political responsibility that the book has developed as part of its attempt to envision socially transformative justice beyond moral autopsy and heated political struggles.

The volume’s Introduction is divided into four parts. It begins by setting out the analytical framework animating this volume, namely “juristocratic reckoning," which builds on, yet critically modifies and reappropriates, Ran Hirschl’s (2004) notion of “juristocracy” in order to capture a broader process of transformation through which law and legal categories are invested with unusual weight and responsibility beyond their more conventional carrying capacity. Such over-freighting of law typically involves a “dialectics of reckoning,” through which law is first elevated during certain moments in time, which then give way to a second phase, a coming to terms with juristocracy’s failures marked by critique, skepticism, and eventual disenchantment. Within this larger dynamic, certain histories of juristocratic reckoning are imbued with what the Introduction describes as an “iconic indexicality,” in which their supposed historical significance itself enters into the process of juristocratic elevation and then unraveling. Against the backdrop of this conceptual exposition, the Introduction situates Reckoning with Law in Excess in the current conjuncture – an era of crisis and confrontation, characterized by growing debates, within academia and beyond, about the demise of the rule of law. Having located the overall analytical project within different historical, political, and academic contexts, the Introduction then traces the contours of juristocratic reckoning through the diverse and global range of case studies assembled in the volume, including some that are marked by an iconic indexicality and others that are not. It proposes three “taxonomies of reckoning,” which coalesce around concerns with “states of juristocracy,” “alter-legal reckonings,” as well as “juristocracies against the state,” attesting to the persisting centrality – if always contested, variable, and fragmented – of the state form. Last but not least, the Introduction examines the temporality of juristocracy, since viewing the case studies through their various temporalities reinforces the wider point that dialectics of reckoning must be understood through their empirical and historical heterogeneities rather than as exemplars of an abstracted sociolegal category. Revisiting the various case studies, the Introduction shows how the dialectics of juristocratic reckoning are associated with moments, momentums, and mobilizations in the living archives of law that often yield inconclusive or ambiguous results and remain open to multiple interpretations, directions, and futures.

With their shallow reliefs, depictions of contorted movement, and a historically inflected formal style, first century BCE and CE Neo-Attic reliefs are distinct among Greek and Roman relief sculpture. Primarily made for an elite Roman audience, the reliefs invoke stylistic techniques from different periods of Greek art and creatively combine figural types taken from earlier objects. The scenes are also characterized by a sense of spacelessness, established by the representation of figures, objects, and landscapes in shallow relief and by the frequent distorted play with depth and space. By considering a select number of examples, this chapter argues that the reliefs’ formal elements work together to evoke multiple temporalities and spaces, so that the distinct time and space created by and in these reliefs allowed them to become powerful sites of contact. In connecting their audience with an idealized past that takes place in a generic space, the reliefs offered viewers the opportunity not only to engage visually with the past temporalities of Archaic and Classical Greece, but also to become immersed in them by sharing the same space as the stylized figures, who could slip from their timeless and spaceless background to the Roman world in which they were displayed.

In chapter one, Brian Ó Conchubhair offers an examination of the metadiscourse “Revival” as a concept and the relation between revivalism and periodization. Narratives of revival too often repeat inaccurate narratives of Irish culture, to the point that our understanding of the Irish past, of Irish institutions and landscapes, suffers from unexamined conclusions about the Revival’s social and political efficacy and from images and tropes of Irishness that modern critics inherited from early revivalists. This is particularly apparent in the conception, promoted by some early revivalists, of the West of Ireland as a site of authentic Irishness. Indeed, in the Gaeltachtaí (Irish speaking regions), which have long been idealized as a stronghold of original or pure Irishness, a kind of zombification has taken place, one that in some ways displaces the long tradition of antiquarian and archaeological projects of cultural renewal and restoration.

In her chapter, Heather Laird examines twenty-first century commemorations, such as the bicentennial of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the centennial of the Easter Rising of 1916. From the time of the peak era of Revival to the present, a vision of Ireland has emerged that values tradition but that also reckons with the failures of tradition to govern modern lives. The statues and exhibitions that arose in preparation for these celebrations are the visible signs of the very future envisioned in 1798 and 1916. Laird’s examination of twenty-first century commemorations of the Dublin Lockout of 1913 and the commemoration of it in 2013 suggests that revivalism resists this idea of cultural salvage and actively serves a world to come. She discusses two 2013 commemoration projects, Living the Lockout and the 1913 Lockout Tapestry, latter-day manifestations of a persistent revivalist impulse to make the past productive of the future.

Eoin Flannery, in his chapter, examines what happens when the revivalist promise of the future has curdled into something else, an inevitability of history rather than the positing power of the artist. It is one thing to accept a faded ideal as the motivating trope of a latter-day revivalist novel; it is quite another thing to turn away from ideals altogether and to accept, even to embrace, a world defined less by cultural aspirations than financial schemes, debt and “ecosickness.” The refusal to adopt traditional revivalist reference points and temporal frameworks leads writers as diverse as Kevin Berry, Anne Haverty, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and Mike McCormack to offer narratives that range from financial degradation to social collapse. One result of this refusal is the effort to foreground language, style, voice, and the vitality and exuberance of storytelling that is a hallmark of revivalist art, an advancing light into a potentially dark future.

In this chapter, Ben Levitas investigates forms of distance and temporal indeterminacy legible in the latter-day revivalist drama of Marina Carr and Brian Friel. In their works, strategies of distance, of “paratheatricality,” seek not to avoid representation but to link it to more authentic experiences for the audience. Both playwrights create a theatre of hope, a theatre for and of the future that testifies to a continuance of the Revival’s main themes and concerns (particularly with respect to time), despite their rejection of the idealism of so many early revivalist works. Friel and Carr achieve a transposition of dramatic life from the stage to the audience – that is to say, from the stage to actual life – which is, in its turn, captured in the dramatic work. Theatrical words are forms of political action insofar as strategies of performative distance and alienation find their place in dramatic productions that support a “grammar of change.”

Project management essentially involves temporal work, in other words, the purposive effort to orient the temporal structures that guide action around given tasks. Yet, projects often involve participants or stakeholders holding different temporal orientations that may be more or less compatible with proposed temporal structures. In this paper we consider how different forms of temporal structuring influence project behavior (i.e., how participants engage with projects, and how projects play out to produce outcomes). Specifically, building on a review of the literature on projects and temporality, we explore how and why the socially constructed nature of project tasks (open-ended vs. closed-ended) interacts with efforts at temporal structuring (open vs. closed) to orient participants’ actions, with varying consequences for behaviors and outcomes. We conclude by proposing a series of future research directions aimed at better understanding the relations between temporal structuring and project behavior.

One of the concerns of postmodern British fiction was the textual and discursive means by which historical events are communicated to the present through story-telling. Much post-millennial fiction still dips into the postmodern toolbox; it is not unusual to read novels with a fragmented and non-linear narrative, for example, but these novels focus instead on the now, while asking what does it mean to be now, to recognise that the past and the present exist simultaneously, and how does this translate into an understanding of temporality. As Lauren Berlant has argued, neoliberal economic policies mobilize instability, and that instability is evident in contemporary fiction’s representations of history, genre and identity. Some novels examined here invoke past and present through an illusion of narrative simultaneity, while others investigate how the powerful can write and rewrite the present and the past and in doing so can disrupt perceptions of temporality.