Chapter 6 reads Horace’s Odes as thoroughly place-based lyric poetry. The chapter begins by differentiating its approach from landscape and symbolic readings of place. It organizes an account of the Odes around the concepts of place and place attachment, familiar from the Eclogues. Horace represents dynamic experiences of specific localities, constituted by human and nonhuman beings. He anchors his poetry to particular locations, while also making those locations real-and-textual sites of Horatian poetry. In addition, Horace represents place as helping to produce and shape his poetry through tropes of lyric ecology and poetic reciprocity. The second half of the chapter complicates this place-based reading of Horace by attending to the pervasive theme of mobility in the Odes. It argues that Horace models a translocal poetics, in which locality is continually fashioned and refashioned through forms of translation and transport. Whereas forced movement in the Eclogues means the end of local dwelling and local song alike, for Horace mobility helps create both his local place attachments and a form of lyric that is place-based but not place-bound.

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.

Chapter 1 examines how locality matters to the Eclogues, and how the poetry collection conceptualizes and constructs local place. In Eclogues 1 and 9, Vergil stresses the importance of local dwelling, representing multifaceted place attachments between individuals and their familiar homes. At the same time, in dramatizing the effects of land confiscations, Vergil probes the highly contingent nature of place, defined by unstable boundaries and through power relations. In addition to providing new readings of these particular poems, this chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book by exploring the concept of local place and showing how a multifaceted examination of place making and place attachment offers a more nuanced and fuller reading than a focus on landscape, nature, or an opposition between town and country. The chapter then turns to an apparent problem with this place-based reading of the Eclogues: the poems’ ambiguous settings. Drawing on Theocritus and Cicero, it shows that the Eclogues are interested in the many intersections and cross-fertilizations between actual and fictional places. The poems construct local places, even if they cannot be located.

This chapter explores the interplay between space production, place qualification, and market-making. It argues that market-making is closely tied to space creation, with competing socio-technical arrangements shaping and economizing space. Understanding market site qualification is crucial for grasping the relationship between marketplaces and spaces, as it involves equipping agencies to co-produce site characteristics alongside goods therein. Further, market sites are influenced by non-economic factors alongside economic arrangements, serving as spaces for social interaction and inclusivity beyond their economic function. Examining the reciprocal relationship between market spaces and places, a case study on the changes made in the Irish pub during the Covid-19 pandemic is presented. The pandemic disrupted economic activities, leading to the reconfiguration of market sites to comply with public health measures. Irish pubs serve as an illustrative example, being significant market sites for the alcohol and hospitality industries as well as community pillars. However, during the pandemic, the social interactions and alcohol consumption at the heart of pub life posed serious public health risks. This created conflicting priorities, with commercial interests pushing for pub reopening while public health authorities called for closure. The chapter highlights the qualification process of market sites and how these dynamics impact the relationship between marketplaces and spaces, with the Covid-19 pandemic serving as a catalyst for change.

The Conclusion chapter reiterates the book’s approach, focus and main points. It reminds the reader that the book has concentrated on local, provincial, peripatetic and otherwise relatively marginal sites of scientific activity and shown how a wide variety of spaces were constituted and reconfigured as meteorological observatories. The conclusion reiterates the point that nineteenth-century meteorological observatories, and indeed the very idea of observatory meteorology, were under constant scrutiny. The conclusion interrogates four crucial conditions of these observatory experiments: the significance of geographical particularity in justifications of observatory operations; the sustainability of coordinated observatory networks at a distance; the ability to manage, manipulate and interpret large datasets; and the potential public value of meteorology as it was prosecuted in observatory settings. Finally, the chapter considers the use of historic weather data in recent attempts by climate scientists to reconstruct past climates and extreme weather events.

This essay examines the work of several poets (including Langston Hughes, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Christopher Leland, Julie Gard, Heiu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, and Rane Arroyo) who engage the Midwest as a resonant source for writing about a host of topics pertaining to queer self-awareness, belonging, and memory. Not unlike the work of recent scholars aiming to dislodge the rural in particular and the Midwest more broadly as a site of unbridled anti-LGBT sentiment and politics, the essay illustrates how these poets refuse essentialist beliefs about the Midwest to instead register the myriad queer histories, cultures, and experiences stemming from America’s heartland. Furthermore, as it considers the inextricable bond between “the Midwest” and “the rural,” the essay illustrates how the urban Midwest additionally requires consideration for the way that cities like Minneapolis, Detroit, and Chicago are indeed part and parcel of the heartland yet frequently eclipsed by the customary association of gay liberation with major metropolitan coastal cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

The Introduction contextualises the book’s broader arguments by sketching out its overall narrative arc – relating to the contested consolidation of memories of the inter-war period – exploring previous explanations of this problem and foregrounding this book’s focus on everyday conversations about recent history. The Introduction explains the broader significance of these arguments for histories of popular politics and political history’s methods more broadly.

The thinking of place is a crucial preoccupation in Heidegger’s late thinking, especially sustained by an ongoing frequentation of poetry and its posture towards language. The question of Ort is illuminated in Heidegger’s discussion of Georg Trakl, notably in two essays: “Die Sprache,” presented in a first lecture version on October 7, 1950; and “Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht,” first presented on October 4, 1952 under the title “Georg Trakl: Eine Erörterung seines Gedichtes” and published the following year with the same title (Merkur 61, 226–258). In this study I trace a few moments of Heidegger’s meditation on place in these two texts. Issues ranging from estrangement to belonging, from rhythm to the quiet unity preceding all difference, from body to politics, from pain and evil to their transfiguration, are encountered along these paths.

The political theorist and intellectual historian Istvan Hont argued that the term ‘commercial society’ was used by Adam Smith in ways that were distinct from any of his peers. Smith, Hont claims, ‘stretched’ the term in order to ‘make it a theoretical object for moral and political inquiry’. This chapter engages with this argument using computational methods for interrogating datasets of varying sizes.

The first, a custom-produced ‘Adam Smith’ corpus, is compared with a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ corpus, both of which have been extracted from the larger Eighteenth Century Collections Online dataset. For the second of these datasets, a list of publishers’ names has been collated, from existing scholarly enquiries by Richard B. Sher and Andrew Hook, to construct a dataset that enables one to inspect and interrogate what might be thought of as the distinctively Scottish history of ideas in the period within which Smith wrote his seminal works.

The comparative method allows us to test Hont’s assertion that Smith deployed the concept of ‘commercial society’ idiosyncratically by charting the extent to which the features of Smith’s thinking were adopted by his contemporaries, firstly within the Scottish context, and secondly within anglophone culture of the period as represented by Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

This article excavates the Philippine nation’s cosmopolitan and transnational Asian intellectual moorings, in order to reconnect Philippine history to that of Southeast Asia, from which it has been historiographically separated. It argues that turn-of-the-twentieth-century Philippine Asianism was crucial to the concept of the Filipino nation that the ilustrados (educated elite) constructed, to the ilustrado-led Propaganda Movement’s political argumentation against Spain, and to the political mobilization and organizing of the Katipunan and the First Philippine Republic. It incorporates the “periphery” into our understanding of Pan-Asianism to correct our exclusively intellectual historical and Northeast-Asia-centric understandings of Pan-Asianism. It shows that the revolutionary First Philippine Republic’s foreign collaboration represents the first instance of fellow Pan-Asianists lending material aid toward anticolonial revolution against a Western power (rather than overthrow of a domestic dynasty) and harnessing transnational Pan-Asian networks of support, activism, and association toward doing so.

This chapter traces the turn in diasporic thought, particularly in the settler nations of Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States, toward engagement with the settler colonial histories of dispossession that were a condition of possibility for our arrivals here. It develops brief close readings of literary texts by Black, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous writers as a way to show how the entanglement of Indigenous and diasporic struggles for justice and transformation might be inhabited and mobilized. At stake, this chapter argues, is the possibility of imagining other worlds than the modernities that were born in the conjunction of Indigenous dispossession and racial slavery, worlds shaped by better, more sustaining (and sustainable) practices for relating with human and nonhuman others, including the land itself.

This chapter explore the dynamic relationship between two distinct forms of representing urban space. These more or less follow the path of the subject or that of the object, as the more subjective itinerary (i.e., an image of space that emerges from the individual subject’s perception or experience of places) necessarily elides much of what the abstract, apparently objective map (a “God’s-eye view” or “view from nowhere” that established as non-subjective overview) can reveal. Finding one’s way through urban spaces involves something more like an itinerary than a map, the latter involving some sort of supra-subjective perspective, and yet both forms are essential to the experience of metropolitan space. In situating oneself in a given place, and in moving from place to place, one traces out an itinerary that may be more or less useful, but one also must have some more abstract sense of the overall spatial array of which that itinerary is merely one part. Cognitive mapping, in this sense, combines the two at all times. I argue that every literary cartography—every work of creative writing, in fact—of the city must also put into play both modes to create a more dynamic mapping project.

In Chapter 5, I turn to ritualised practices of relatedness, specifically the weddings of those in London, approaching them as transnational household rituals, which contribute to the reproduction and reconfiguration of families across space. In examining migrant weddings as moments in individual and familial life cycles, I consider how these rituals offer opportunities for negotiating relations within a discourse of ‘tradition’. Moreover, I suggest that the emotionally and morally significant community of belonging, which weddings help to constitute, further mediate kinship relations. At the same time, the chapter considers non-normative weddings (registry ceremonies) and intimate relationships (come-we-stay’, or cohabiting, relationships), as well as singledom, exploring their impact on the making of persons and relations. Together, they reveal how marital and parental status shape expectations and practices of relatedness across space and moral economies of transnational kinship more generally.

This chapter focuses on the spatial element in the Linguistic Landscape (LL). The public space is understood in terms of a twofold spatial metaphor, in which the LL can be contained by the public space, but in which the language display of the LL in fact creates the public space. The argument that the term landscape has long-standing links to denotations of social activity and organisation directly supports an understanding of the LL not as ‘a view of the land’, but as human activity that is engaged with the built and natural environment. The chapter thus proposes a model of spatial indexicality, in which units of the LL point not only to the space which they occupy, but to nearby spaces to which they refer, and potentially to other spaces which are far removed or which may be imaginary. Within this model, examples are analysed which illustrate the regulation of spatial divisions by signage, spatial and material properties of sign units, the use of metaphor to establish authenticity and to stake cultural claims, and references to imaginary spaces. The counter-balancing potential for units in the LL to express messages which are not anchored in spatial reference is also examined.

The short story remains at heart of southern literature. Anthologies, surveys, and criticism all tout the centrality of the form to the representation of the region. But the short story form does not merely facilitate a focus on diverse, local southern cultures. Because short stories can be easily republished and collected, these “little postage stamps” also allow such diverse, local cultures to circulate broadly. In examining the ways short fictional forms enable access to and communication with far-flung places, this chapter offers case studies of three accomplished short story writers: Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Oscar Cásares. Theirs is a literature of the provinces that is far from provincial – a regional literature par excellence that remains very much engaged with the broader world.