This chapter surveys queer theoretical investigations of nineteenth-century American literature while turning an eye to its future potential. Since the 1990s, the emergence of queer studies shifted focus away from the identitarian scope of lesbian and gay studies to one that engages queer acts, desires, objects, and temporality, to name a few. Queer offers a way out of that Foucaultian maxim, by which in the late nineteenth century the “homosexual became a species.” No longer needing to “know” if one was gay, the rest of the nineteenth century became ripe for a capacious engagement with bodies, affects, and desires. Despite this prominence in queer studies, trans studies is largely absent from early American literary studies. I argue that scholarly pushback on nineteenth-century sexology and its problematic theory of “inverts” has all but left the actual embodiments of those who thwarted gender to the wayside. Neither has the field confronted how nonwhite, brown, and Black people were marked via inversion, such as female hypermasculinity and male effeminacy. If queer studies revisited nineteenth-century literary texts with new vigor, this paper proposes the same through a trans studies reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Archibald Clavering Gunter’s A Florida Enchantment, and Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland.

This essay examines how nineteenth-century American literature paved the way for the modern exposure of private life in such disparate venues as the gossip column, social media, and reality television. In particular, this essay examines the sketch form, a popular nineteenth-century prose genre that has often been characterized as a minor form in comparison to the novel. In examining the history of the sketch form, this essay shows how the sketch conveyed reservations about the interiority and exposures central to the novel form. As practiced by Washington Irving, the earliest popularizer of this genre, the sketch advocated respectful discretion, the avoidance of private matters, and social stasis, the latter of which positioned the sketch in opposition to the social mobility characteristic of the novel. Irving presented the sketch as the genre of literary discretion, but its latter practitioner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, used the sketch to divulge confidences and violate social decorum. Willis adapted the sketch to become a precursor of the gossip column and to mirror the novel form in exposing private life.

If individual distinction was one criterion for a mansabdar's success, the ability to command men and women was another. The family emerged as a key political institution of the Mughal Empire to meet the latter condition. It supplied martial and marital resources, both of which were essential to expanding political power. The mansabdar, especially in the higher ranks, was a military position. Unlike the modern general, the mansabdar was not given troops and officers to lead. He was expected to recruit and outfit his own men. Rank and emoluments were tied to the number of cavalry a noble was required to maintain. A robust military labor market made the task easier, but a mansabdar also required trusted officers to lead campaigns and manage his estates, or jagirs. These men were often drawn from kith and kin. A noble's command over them was not merely a function of money relation but rather of his patriarchal position as the head of the family. Even as the family served as the basis of power for noblemen, it was also a source of threat. Male relations, including sons, brothers, nephews, uncles, and others, could and did challenge patriarchal authority, sparking off violent contests of power. Affective bonds of marriage and service, the redistribution of wealth, diplomacy, and coercion were some of the tools available to contain opposition.

Marriages helped forge alliances between men of different families. They could also strengthen relationships between men within a family. Consequently, women, too, were important political resources within this patriarchal system. By the end of the sixteenth century, royal and elite women increasingly became associated with the honor of the family. Their protection and violation both came to hold symbolic significance. Concomitantly, a man giving a woman in marriage was an act of trust, and often an act of submission, connoting giving one's honor to another man. Women could facilitate bonds between men in other ways, too. Sharing a woman's milk created meaningful ties between men, who would come to regard each other as foster-brothers. Dara Shukoh attempted to secure a Rajput noble's support in his succession struggle against his brother Aurangzeb by having him drink water that had washed his wife's breast.

I address three questions. First, how do Eastern theologians configure the way the incarnation is rendered as God’s original intention, and how significant is that insight? The answer is that this is central to their portrayal of God’s purpose. Second, what precisely is God’s purpose in the incarnation? The answer lies in the notion of deification, our being made divine, a concept pivotal to Eastern theology – and yet one that seems in significant respects problematic. Third, are there ways in which Eastern theologians portray God’s purpose that are less problematic, yet equally integral to their notion of God’s original and constant purpose? The answer is, yes there are. I conclude with three key motifs that I find more transferable yet nonetheless wholly authentic to the Orthodox theological imagination: communion, participation and transfiguration.

This chapter explores the synergies, limitations, and challenges of addressing statelessness through human rights and development approaches, using the Hill Country Tamils of Sri Lanka as a case study. In addressing the legacy of statelessness, both the human rights and development frameworks must be drawn on and used simultaneously. However, a frameworks approach alone falls short in addressing statelessness, given the political, economic and societal factors that perpetuate discrimination. Instead, as the case of the Hill Country Tamils demonstrates, both human rights and development approaches must be underpinned by a deeper commitment to pursuing equality and combatting discrimination at large. Despite claims of success, the legacy of statelessness in Sri Lanka still lingers. The Hill Country Tamils are still among the ‘furthest behind’ in Sri Lanka and continue to experience severe discrimination well after securing formal citizenship. The community’s prolonged statelessness has led to long-term deterioration in human rights conditions, such that a grant of formal citizenship alone is inadequate to address structural drivers of disadvantage that the community continues to endure.

This chapter provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary formation of postsecular studies and briefly outlines its influence in literary studies broadly as well nineteenth-century literary studies specifically. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women then provides a case study for the demonstration of a postsecular reading attending to the production of secularity around the novel’s bifurcated but intertwined concern with playfulness and morality.

WRITTEN ON A STONE AT A SPRING

Babur, the first king of the Mughal Empire, spent much of his early life wandering Central Asia. Though a Timurid prince, he was without a kingdom to rule. In 1501, after losing Samarkand to the Uzbeks for a second time, the nineteen-year-old found himself in the Matcha Hills. At a spring by a shrine, he inscribed the following lines (Image I.1):

The words are scratched into rock in a rough and uneven hand, without much evidence of considered design, and signed by Babur. Perhaps, these were the actions of a downcast prince, spurning power that felt beyond his grasp. It may be that he was seeking morbid comfort in the transience of life and the certainty of death.

However, the words of the ancient Persian king, Jamshed, quoted in the inscription, are more than a reflection on the futility of worldly accomplishment. They are an instruction to attend not to what one can take beyond death but to what one can successfully leave behind. Speech and conquest are ephemeral acts—“gone in the twinkling of an eye”—particularly in contrast to geological time immanent in the spring. In inscribing the verse, Jamshed introduces writing as another form that endures. It stays constant like the spring and constant by the spring. The longevity of the inscribed words is put in service of a literary reflection on transience, whose lesson returns the reader to the material visualization of the enduring nature of writing. By Babur's time, Jamshed's kingdom had long turned to dust. Yet these words, first carved in stone, persisted. If nothing can be taken to the grave, then Babur's act of leaving an inscription was not an admission of defeat, or a resignation to namelessness, but rather the resolve to leave behind something more enduring than conquest—a remainder, a reminder, a legacy.

Neurath’s first port of exile after the fascist takeover in Austria was the Netherlands. With the aid of existing connections there, he set up the International Foundation for Visual Education in The Hague, providing an official haven for the work of the Social and Economic Museum. It also acted as a base for the International Institute for the Unity of Science, through which Neurath organized its congresses during the 1930s. Neurath’s Dutch period was marked by increasing contacts with England and the USA: he wrote books in C. K. Ogden’s Basic English and for New York publisher Knopf; he also became editor-in-chief of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. On several visits to the USA, he secured high-profile contracts for Isotype work, while also exploring the possibility of a foothold in Britain.

The chapter defines the top seal as a transient feature on the geological timescale. It divides seals into lithological and fault seals. The chapter goes through the physical apparatus controlling the behavior of various types of seals, all the main mechanisms involved together with their controlling factors, and finishes with an attempt to use case strike-slip and transform regions for describing the seals of these settings in a systematic way, trying to tie their variability to variations in the structural architecture of their respective settings.