The introduction posits the centrality of local environments, and specifically precise London neighborhoods, on a confluence of English writers in the 1590s, including Thomas Nashe, John Donne, John Manningham, and John Marston. In the process, it asserts the importance of these urban localities to the genesis of the metaphysical style of writing, a style not normally associated with the city nor with nonpoetic writing. The methodological emphasis on local environment foregrounds the importance of everyday experience to the creation of literature, picking up on recent work in early modern literary studies in historical phenomenology and affect theory. The introduction also details the profound infleunce of skepticism on this group of writers and intellectuals working in and around the Inns of Court in the 1590s. It argues for the centrality of a specific community of disaffected and privileged young men coming to London in the 1590s to the advent of a particular way of seeing the city and a particular style of writing that we now identify as the metaphysical.

This chapter examines Foucault’s theory of self-cultivation and its influence in anthropology. It considers the criticisms of atomistic individualism and social determinism that are often levelled at practices of self-cultivation and argues that practices of self-cultivation are neither wholly self-directed nor wholly socially determined. Ethnographies of self-cultivation reveal the efforts that people make to shape themselves and the worlds in which they find themselves. How far such efforts go, the form that they take, and the relationships in which they are embedded will be specific to particular lives, but focussing on practices of self-cultivation enables anthropology to account for the reflective efforts that people make to live well. Resisting interpretations of self-cultivation as entirely self-directed or socially determined collapses a second dichotomy prevalent in the literature, between those practices of self-cultivation found in ‘pedagogic’ ethical projects and those found in ordinary life. This chapter makes the argument that forms of reflective self-cultivation are found in the ‘midst’ of everyday practice to varying degrees, and in contexts of intense ethical training people remain vulnerable to moral plurality and the contingency of messy everyday life.

This chapter puts forward the thesis that fictional forms, and the imaginative reach they bring to thinking, serve as a kind of philosophical method for Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. It explores how the original use Wittgenstein makes of fiction and stories revitalizes conversations in the space between literature and philosophy. For Wittgenstein’s commitment to fiction as method, distinctively, allows him to sound out actualities and realities in the world. It is a uniquely truth-capable use of fiction that also highlights what novels, stories, films, performances, and other fictional forms are intrinsically capable of. The chapter begins by developing a contrast between Wittgenstein and Plato on the use of story. It continues into readings of central characters, figures, circumstances, and events in the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations. The discussion concludes with reflections on two novelists, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, whose interest in giving everyday life narrative form illuminates the stakes of Wittgenstein’s commitment to story. The chapter more broadly asks central questions about how fictional forms put us in contact with consequential parts, pieces, and aspects of the world and how Wittgenstein’s philosophy paves a new path into this connection between fiction and life.

This chapter starts off by discussing the roots of historical anthropology in ‘people’s history’ before the linguistic turn. It then traces the journey from the history workshop movements of the 1960s and 1970s to historical anthropology, focusing on European and Indian groups (the Subaltern Studies Group). It highlights the work of Ann Laura Stoler as an example of how historical anthropology led to new and exciting perspectives in historical writing with deep implications for the deconstruction of historical identities. Historical anthropologists brought with them a concern for the everyday, diversity, performance and resistance and they raised an awareness of the undeterminedness of the past. They also emphasised how collective identities were rooted in constructions of culture. Relating cultural values to practices, diverse theories of the everday examined different structures of power and the agency of ordinary people in resisting and re-appropriating these structures of power. Treating culture as fluid, plural and changing, it also contributed to the de-essentialisation of human identities. Emphasising mimetic processes and the interrelationship of diverse mimetically produced images, historical anthropology also contributed to the decentring of Western perspectives.

Introduction: Walter Scott’s tales of chivalry and adventure inaugurated a masculinized Scottish romance tradition that celebrated a sublime and heroic version of Scotland. Nineteenth-century Scotswomen responded to Scott’s influence by establishing a countertradition of unromantic or even antiromantic representations of Scotland. Their novels challenge the long-standing claim that Scotland lacked any equivalent to the English realist novel. In turning from the past to the present and from the sublimity of Scott’s Highland landscapes to farmhouses, factories, and suburban villas, Scottish women writers brought romance to everyday life, illuminating the magnificence of the mundane. Drawing on the evangelical discourses emerging from the splintering of the Presbyterian Church in 1843, they represented fiction as a form of spiritual comfort, an antidote to the dreary monotony and petty frustrations of daily existence.

In their account of Romantic poetry as a medium, Celeste Langan and Maureen McLane argue that poetry, unlike the novel, ‘had a stronger claim to be considered a supermedial transhistorical venture’. However, the fiction of Austen and Edgeworth suggests that the novel too had aspirations to be a ‘supermedium’ by incorporating and aestheticising the experience of ‘common life’. The society novel in particular achieved this by assimilating the printed ephemera of polite sociability: it remediated the paper filters that facilitated social life in the eighteenth century in order to make the interstices or hyphenations of sociable life, spaces occupied by women in particular, more visible as an appropriate object of fiction. As I suggested previously, the affect of the ephemeral social encounter, the transience of events that flicker to life and disappear, were the common subject of Sarah Sophia Banks and Jane Austen, the former’s assemblages of tickets for balls and assemblies and the latter’s novels textualising the same phenomenon. The evocation in ephemeral print of ‘common life’ as a kind of diurnal historiography was the context in which the novel became central to the affective rhythms and routines of human activity, establishing an idea of the everyday as intimate, familiar, and reassuring rather than as something that was estranging in its absolute anonymity or carelessness, something to ‘fear’ in Blanchot’s terms. The materiality of the codex form of the novel, its solidity and tendency to take the reader’s time while being portable and adaptable to both private and social life, allowed the novel to remediate the specificity of social and affective experience but also to defend both itself and the reader from the abyss of entropic ephemerality. The novel thus capitalises upon an idea of the everyday that it simultaneously resists. Arguably, however, as a literary form most closely linked with the second printing revolution, with which its ‘rise’ coincided, the novel never completely escaped its affiliation with ephemera, as indicated by the enduring association of the novel and novel-reading with trashy, ‘ephemeral productions’, with that which wastes time rather than redeems it.

Chapter 7 focuses on the year 1814 to argue for the importance to Romantic-period culture of an ephemeral historicism. The year 1814 was notable for ephemeral public events, beginning with the February frost fair on the Thames and the extensive celebrations for the premature peace in the summer, culminating in the Jubilee Fair in the royal parks of London. Both occasions produced a wide range of ephemeral print – tickets, handbills, and prints – collected and arranged from very different political perspectives by Sarah Sophia Banks and the radical reformer Francis Place. I focus on 1814 in order to trace how ideas of ephemerality as developed in the eighteenth century mutated into the category of the everyday in the nineteenth. The year 1814 is also significant in literary history as the year in which Jane Austen set her posthumously published Persuasion. I relate that novel to the significance of 1814 as a particularly ‘ephemeral’ year, with reference to Austen’s acknowledgement of the presence of ‘flying’ literature in the form of the newsmen of Bath.

In the late 1920s in Old Headington outside Oxford, a woman called Lilian Gurden, who was working in the garden of the home of Mrs Dorothea Johnson, was invited inside by her employer for a cup of coffee. Mrs Johnson was the wife of John de Monins Johnson (1882–1956), Printer to the University of Oxford from 1925 to 1946 and the most significant English ephemerist of the twentieth century. Interviewed in 1986 by another important ephemerist, Maurice Rickards, Lilian Gurden (later Thrussell) recalled Dorothea Johnson telling her that she was unable to take a bath because it was ‘full of soaking album pages’. These albums contained printed ephemera from which John Johnson was extracting material for his collection, the ‘Sanctuary of Printing’, housed in an upper room of the printery of the Oxford University Press. Johnson’s interest in paper scraps had been inspired by his early experience as an Egyptologist, ‘digging the rubbish-mounds of Graeco-Roman cities in Egypt for the written materials – the waste paper of those ages’. Encountering long queues outside cinemas in 1920s Oxford as he travelled home from work, Johnson was led to contemplate the relationship between twentieth-century visual media, the cityscape, and advertising as a form of graphic and visual art. His not inconsiderable ambition was to document ‘the miscellany of the world … Trivial things like the development of advertisements on our hoardings … all the ephemera of our lives’.