In his chapter, Luke Gibbons examines artists and writers who take up the subject of the “great scar” of the Civil War, and in their work he finds silence, misdirection, and the kind of temporal indeterminacies that are characteristic of so much revivalist cultural production. By examining literary and cinematic works by Louis D’Alton, Liam O’Flaherty, John Ford, and Dorothy McCardle, Gibbons argues that temporal discontinuity has a positive role to play by reactivating that which history has deactivated. Civil War literature invites the reader to go beyond the surface realism of the text in a way that provides an opening to the real, which in Lacanian terms is foreclosed and mapped over by imaginary constructs. Gibbons’s consideration of Irish literature and film strongly suggests an alternative to conventional realist accounts beholden to historical causality, a way of reading the temporal discontinuity in way that offers a fresh perspective on the trauma of the Civil War.

This chapter traces naturalism, a radical outgrowth of realism and one of the earliest movements in modernist theatre, beginning with its first articulations by Émile Zola and his French contemporaries through to manifestations, variations, and subversions of naturalist ideas across Europe, the United States, China, and India. Based in scientific epistemologies and a rejection of aesthetic idealism, naturalism introduced still potent innovations in dramatic form, scenography, audience experience, and the division of labour in theatre. Through confronting depictions of character and agency as fundamentally shaped by physiological, hereditary, and environmental forces, naturalism paved the way for later reformist theatre while seeding subsequent modernist movements that rebelled against its physicalist and materialist accounts of human experience.

Conclusion: The book ends by reflecting on the boundaries of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in the context of maritime writing and the range of texts that render the different forms of lived experience associated with seafaring. It restates the book’s focus on the everyday global sea of the long nineteenth century that shaped the lives, labour practices, and imaginative worlds of working-class individuals and their families.

In Schoenberg’s Vienna the theatre, more so than music, was central to cultural discourse; unsurprisingly, opera and musical drama interested Schoenberg from early on, and he returned to dramatic genres repeatedly throughout his compositional career. In surveying the lively and varied theatrical life of Vienna around 1900 and after, this chapter examines shifting trends in modernist drama – including changing fashions in staging and set design – alongside the influence of significant authors, artists and innovators. It locates the Viennese stage as a site for cultural exchange with other major European centres, and ultimately argues that, if written from the perspective of the theatre, the history of Viennese musical modernism would look quite different from the story of post-tonal progress that has dominated our narratives of Schoenberg’s creative trajectory.

If literary form and railway infrastructure do not neatly align in nineteenth-century novels, then what is the significance of their close, inconsistent entanglement? Chapter 4 examines George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda, which takes full advantage of transport and communications infrastructure in its two mainline plots. Throughout Eliot associates markers of such systems – ‘dusty waiting rooms’, un-consulted Bradshaw’s railway guides, and telegrams relaying old news – with stasis and regression. Even where they advance the plot, they draw the narrative back in time. This chapter parallels communication infrastructure and novel form to interrogate how and why Eliot reconfigures established and well-traversed form in her final novel that pushes against the margins of literary realism. By offering an upset chronology and a refusal to drive plotlines to a conventional resolution, to what extent does Eliot reconceptualise systems rooted in timeliness and destination in Daniel Deronda?

Although María Irene Fornés is recognized by her peers as one of the great avant-garde innovators of her time, her absence from many critical and mainstream accounts of American playwriting suggests that her experimental techniques were not easily intelligible as part of a movement, even one fabled for the unintelligibility of its creative effects. As a corrective critical gesture, Roy Pérez looks to Art (a short and sparsely documented play from 1986) to understand the role of the avant-garde in Fornés’s larger body of work. Pérez argues that – even as the avant-garde earned a reputation for being fixated on unpragmatic political ideals, aesthetic difficulty for its own sake, or humorless alienation – Fornés wrote plays plays that danced their characters and viewers through spellbinding thought experiments, making lofty questions seem like everyday ruminations, that we might pursue with a sense of play, or at least with authentic feeling.

Chapter 4 addresses four types of issues. First, I delve into the ambiguous status of the idea of legitimacy in the discourse on politics. Legitimacy is both omnipresent and an object of suspicion. On the one hand, it is one of the terms most frequently used in conversations on politics. On the other hand, especially in the academic disciplines that deal with the study of politics, the notion of political legitimacy has its detractors. There is intellectual nervousness about embracing it and relying on it. Second, comparing natural sciences and social sciences, I explore some of the features of what a theory is (description, explanation and predictability) and what this means for the theory of social phenomena that factors in political legitimacy. Third, I examine two different approaches of politics: politics mainly as power, and politics mainly as community. Fourth, I highlight the centrality of legitimacy for a theory of politics as community.

This chapter considers Heidegger’s “two-handedness” on the issue of realism versus idealism: on the one hand, an apparent realism about entities, while on the other, an apparent idealism about being. Interpreters tend to resolve the tensions such two-handedness engenders by giving one side or the other the upper hand. Kantian approaches to Heidegger privilege idealism, other readings favor realism. The latter readings neglect Heidegger’s own rather mocking remarks directed at those who fear idealism as “the foul fiend incarnate” and favor instead what he calls a “blind realism.” Properly understood, such remarks point toward a position beyond both realism and idealism, a position akin to, but importantly different from, Quine’s naturalism. Quine’s imagery of “working from within” and “mutual containment” provide models for a more evenhanded approach to the issue of realism and idealism. Moreover, they help us to understand Heidegger’s principal aim of rejecting both positions.

The chapter starts by outlining the version of direct realism endorsed by Aristotle. I argue that he was committed to uncompromised realism about perceptible qualities and to the view that we immediately perceive the bearers of these qualities without any need of further synthetic acts. These features highlight the difficulty of capturing the explanantia of perception. Two notions key to that endeavour are those of mediation and discrimination. The chapter provides a novel analysis of mediation (for discrimination, see Chapter 6), arguing that, for Aristotle, media are – more or less perfect – qualitative conductors. Furthermore, the chapter addresses the existing debate about what, according to Aristotle, happens in the sense organs when we perceive. I argue that the dilemma governing this debate between spiritualism and materialism (either ‘literalist’ or ‘analogical’) is a false one. Tertium datur, and this alternative turns out to be precisely the view Aristotle embraced: perception consists of a thoroughly material process, but what this process results in must not be a standing material likeness (which would mark the end of perception because like cannot be affected by like), but a dynamic ‘phenomenal’ likeness – the presence of a quality of the perceived object which remains to be precisely a quality of that object.

This chapter examines what are arguably the two most jarring moments in the relationship between the history of technology and that of the English novel by way of two novels that refigure imaginary space first for a national and then for an international readership. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) demonstrates how the intervention of the power loom spelled the doom of the working household by moving productive labor from the home to the mechanized factory, thereby transforming domestic life into a space reserved for that highly cathected version of social reproduction: the romantic couple and nuclear family. A century and a half later, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) spells out how the spatial transformation of Victorian realism as communication technology progressively subsumed the trappings and function of both the home and communal spaces reserved for the attitudes, behaviors, and events composing everyday life and spat them out in a continuous flow of information. Where realism divides literary space into reproduction and production, love and labor, respectively, the contemporary novel collapses these categories as the former becomes a repository of information to be algorithmically guided toward a new class of consumers who desire nothing more than to become the very objects they consume.

This chapter begins by sketching the standard belief-desire model of action and action-explanation employed by most philosophers, while also noting some variations. Of necessity, given the immense literature on the topic, this is presented at a high level of generality, abstracting over many local disagreements. The model and its variations provide the main set of foils for the scientifically grounded accounts to be discussed in later chapters, which are then briefly previewed. The remaining sections of the chapter go on to explain and quickly motivate three major assumptions that are taken for granted throughout the remainder of the book (and also by many philosophers and almost all cognitive scientists, it should be said): realism, physicalism, and representationalism.

Chapter II reconstructs the complex frame narrative underlying The Lord of the Rings, according to which Tolkien came into possession of an old book, which allegedly included stories from an ancient past of the world and was written by three authors of Hobbit race; the book was soon supplemented by a large bulk of miscellaneous material, and was later heavily edited, through a process whose last stage was Tolkien’s own compilation and translation. The second part investigates the theoretical implications of this meta-textual frame. Some of these are related to Tolkien’s mythopoetic ambition and urgency for narrative ‘realism’; others reflect important aspects of the literary fabric of the novel, including its Hobbito-centrism, as regards both focalisation and themes. More deeply, the meta-textual frame allows Tolkien to express and self-reflect on his own experience as a writer, who perceived his stories as something ‘other’ from him, ‘given’ or ‘discovered’, and free from the control of his rational mind.

The chapter starts with empirical teasers. The reliance on maps during the Congress of Vienna, Sanskrit poetics in premodern South Asia, the coronation in the Middle Ages, and the European Parliament’s staged plenary votes in the absence of formal competencies all find a mention. The chapter then defines representants as those practices, artefacts, and language that stand in for the units of the international system in international interactions. In comparison to existing theories of changes of international orders, a focus on representants carries some advantages. Approaches studying material capabilities omit how highly centralized orders can exist even if capabilities are widely distributed. Constructivists could do more to identify the transmission mechanisms through which abstract ideas affect practical politics. How exactly ideas are materially instantiated leaves its mark on historical events. Theoretically, the book’s aim is to anchor the macro-processes of international order’s stability and change in everyday and extraordinary embodied encounters. The focus is on scaling up (from new materialist and much of practice scholarship) and scaling down (from traditional scholarship on transformations of international order) at the same time. The chapter briefly summarizes the theory of change of international orders, and it provides an outline of the monograph.