This chapter focuses on the precipitous decline of wild animals. It identifies the inception of ‘defaunation’ with the emergence of human empires as well as animals’ philosophical displacement in comparison to the distinguished human, both reaching back to classical antiquity. The chapter then discusses defaunation today – its recent causes and ecological consequences. It argues that this disappearance of animals impoverishes the world by stripping away manifestations of diverse animal minds. Divested of animals' presence and their numinous expressions, landscapes and seascapes also become disenchanted. This reinforces a notion that animist cosmologies are ‘fantastical’ and that the dominant zeitgeist of the universe as mechanical and purposeless is sensible. The chapter ends by decrying the humanisation of the Earth and calls for humanity to scale down and pull back, to allow for a resurgence of wild animal life.

Within the early Christian communities, according to the documents that bear witness to them, the figures of Paul, Peter, and James the brother of Jesus loom large. Already in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Peter (Cephas) and James are noted as “pillars” of the church (Gal. 2.9) and are the only two apostles Paul deemed it necessary to meet during his first trip to Jerusalem (1.18–19). In subsequent decades and centuries, the importance of all three figures was continually reaffirmed through communal memory, traditions, and writings about them or attributed to them. Limited to the writings that comprise the Apostolic Fathers, however, their representation is somewhat sparser. Of the eleven authors now conventionally included among the Apostolic Fathers, five do not explicitly mention Paul, Peter or James at all. Considered individually, appeals to these figures are not evenly distributed: Peter and Paul appear variously while James is entirely absent, with the possible exception of one fragment from Papias, discussed below. Even within the letters of Ignatius, whose seven-letter corpus contains the majority of appeals to Peter and Paul in the Apostolic Fathers, only three or four of the seven mention Peter or Paul. All this amounts to the fact that roughly half of the authors or writings of the Apostolic Fathers do not feel the need to appeal explicitly to any of these apostolic figures in the course of their arguments, however much they may be indebted to them on the level of broader early Christian discourse. This is no doubt due, at least in part, to the artificial and somewhat arbitrary nature of the textual corpus labeled the “Apostolic Fathers,” which arose in the seventeenth century and whose textual contents were not fixed in convention until after the publication of the Didache in 1883. It is perhaps also a function of the nature of the works included in the collection: the occasional nature of the Ignatian letters, the appropriation of apocalyptic discourse in The Shepherd of Hermas, the presumption of many shared, and therefore unstated, traditions in all texts, etc.

This chapter engages with questions around the possibilities and limitations of the novel and narrative in the Anthropocene. It addresses these challenges by drawing on and extending work in econarratology, and applying it to three novels in which floods depict the impact of climate change. In navigating the spatial, temporal and representational challenges of imagining climate crisis, these novels achieve a switching back and forth between the reader's actual world and the textual world. It is this back and forth, and the realisation that results from it, that is central to the role that the novel as a genre might play in depicting the Anthropocene.

This chapter examines how contemporary poetry is responding to the cognitive, representational and ethical questions of the Anthropocene. Rather than focusing on work that extends the traditions of nature poetry, it examines an alternative legacy: that of post-war ‘open-field’ poetics as developed by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Through techniques such as the decentring of the lyric persona, collage and spatial composition, as well as emphasis on the poem as a field of energies and exchanges, open-field poetics provokes a rethinking of relations between figure and ground, subject and object, human and non-human entities. After outlining ‘open-field’ poetics and its implications for ecological thinking, the chapter discusses poems by three contemporary writers – Ed Roberson, Evelyn Reilly and Stephen Collis. These poets rework open-field poetics in the context of ecological crisis.

The recent renewed reflection on the role of catastrophe in literature and culture has received special attention from scholars in the environmental humanities. In particular, the connection between catastrophe and violence came into focus more prominently in an effort to understand how catastrophes have been framed rhetorically and culturally. This chapter shows how the theatre functions as a laboratory for exploring the Anthropocene by way of a reading of a German Expressionist play that focuses on the connection among catastrophe, violence and the negotiation of environmental risks. It also considers how these consequences and risk assessments might be perceived from a culturally decentred position by focusing on a unique conversation that took place in the 1990s between the German tradition of political theatre and its redaction by an Aboriginal Australian playwright, suggesting the continued need for a post-colonial critique of the concept of the Anthropocene.

Drawing attention to the Anthropocene as both proposed geological epoch and discourse about the Earth’s future, the Introduction examines the Anthropocene’s challenge to the value of literature and literary criticism and the opportunity it offers to reinvigorate both. It works from and summarises the chapters in the book while highlighting arguments and perspectives from Anthropocene studies in literature and environmental humanities. Citing diverse writers, it argues that literature can deploy its unique practices (narrative, poetics, etc.) and faculty for imagining the future towards an understanding of humans’ interconnection with the Earth that the Anthropocene demands; and that it can best do so by adapting and evolving those practices towards sharing divergent experiences (e.g. stories of people and species disseminated online) and, via (say) experimental poetry or elongated narrative, relating human beings to exponentially vaster scales: deep history, Earth, the distant future. The Introduction concludes with a case study of Chile which underlines literature's and culture’s value in mediating the complex social, cultural and ontological questions that the Anthropocene poses.

Early in the nineteenth century, the planetary Earth emerged as a new object of fascination across the Western world, upending Biblical authority and intertwining the once-separate orders of human and natural history. The industrial and imperial energies released by the emergence of Earth into human consciousness launched chains of causality leading to the Anthropocene, chains that bind us to this earlier era even as the Anthropocene cuts us off from its grounding assumptions. As natural scientists from Buffon and Hutton to Humboldt, Lyell and Darwin elaborated Earth’s evolutionary development and the ecological interdependences of living systems, political economists wrestled with the resulting problem: Do human beings have planetary agency? Their epochal decision to admit such agency in theory even while denying it in practice would bequeath us an unresolved legacy of metaphysical terror – as well as a role for literary artists in reimagining the horizon of the human.

Romantic nature writing emerges at roughly the same time as the industrial innovations that will eventually lead to global carbon capitalism and therefore is for some scholars coeval with the birth of the Anthropocene. This chapter takes a genealogical approach to the Anthropocene by suggesting that there are significant continuities between Romantic literature and contemporary discourses on environmental catastrophe. Focusing on two case studies – William Cowper’s The Task and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both of which responded to climate change caused by volcanic eruptions – this chapter shows how Romantic writers address what it means to be alive at a catastrophic turning point in planetary history. They are concerned with the power of the human imagination to shape its environments, yet also with our vulnerability to elemental forces that we may affect but that we cannot control.

Welcome to the Cambridge Companion to the Drum Kit. We are delighted to share this first of its kind text, an edited volume dedicated solely to scholarly consideration of the drum kit. This brief introduction to the Companion provides background on the work’s origins, discussion of its potential import, an explanation of the volume’s organization, introductions to the individual authors and chapters, and suggestions for how readers might use the text.

This essay will analyze the Jesus tradition in the Apostolic Fathers in light of recent debates on the relationship between orality and textuality in antiquity. Specifically, it will analyze the Jesus tradition in the Apostolic Fathers as oral tradition, given that it almost certainly derived from an oral-traditional source. This approach reflects a scholarly paradigm-shift that has been gaining momentum over the last three decades in studying the interplay of orality and textuality in early Christian circles. Prior to this paradigm-shift one could say with Werner H. Kelber that historical biblical scholarship was “empowered by an inadequate theory of the art of communication in the ancient world.” The paradigm-shift involves taking seriously that early Christianity arose and spread within societies that were predominantly oral. Not that attention to oral tradition is something new; New Testament scholars appealed to it for centuries, for example, in debating the sources and historical reliability of the canonical Gospels. Relatively recent, however, are the many insights into the inner workings of oral tradition in antiquity provided by a newer generation of scholars, many of whom built upon the pioneering work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. These new insights are reshaping our understanding of the role of oral Jesus tradition in the early Christian community, and causing us to rethink the impact of orality and textuality upon early Christian writings and their sources.

Writing in the fourth century, Eusebius puts forward what may be regarded as the traditional story of Ignatius of Antioch. Little is said of his birth or early life. Eusebius’ account begins in earnest with the apparent arrest of Ignatius in Syria or, more specifically, in Antioch. Ignatius is then forced to travel with a cohort guarding him overland through Asia. While in Smyrna and Troas, he wrote seven letters: five to nearby communities of believers in western Asia (Ephesians; Magnesians; Trallians; Philadelphians; Smyrnaeans), one to believers in Rome (Romans), and one to a fellow ecclesial leader named Polycarp (Polycarp). In his Letter to Polycarp, Ignatius says that he would like to write more but is unable to do so because he is being forced to sail on to Neapolis (Ign. Pol. 8.1). This is the last that is heard from Ignatius himself. To follow the story to the end we must consult documents that postdate Ignatius’ letters. These end with Ignatius’ death by the beasts that he had earlier hoped would become his tomb (Ign. Rom. 4.2).

Jazz music has long been understood as a generational practice, one where older musicians mentor, encourage, and teach younger, aspiring players. That tradition of tutelage is evident in the long lineages of musicians who have graduated from the ensembles of noted bandleaders. Historical examples include Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. In this chapter, the author considers mentoring as it relates to two drum kit players; Jack DeJohnette, a major figure in the history of jazz drumming and a bandleader recognized for nurturing younger musicians, and Terri Lyne Carrington, a premiere figure in contemporary jazz drumming and a celebrated leader of ensembles that feature young, developing musicians. The chapter is organized according to four broad themes: (a) the importance of mentors; (b) challenges of learning to play the drum kit; (c) the unique place and space of drummers; and (d) ‘something bigger than just the music’. Those themes emerged during a series of interviews with the two participants and in qualitative analysis of the participant thoughts, statements, and expressions.

Papias of Hierapolis flourished in the early second century and wrote five books of Exposition of Dominical Oracles (logiōn kyriakōn exēgēseōs), of which only scattered quotations from his readers survive, including Irenaeus, Eusebius, Apollinaris, and Andrew of Caesarea. Among these excerpts, we learn that Papias was commended by Irenaeus as a hearer of John and a colleague of Polycarp. Eusebius mentions him too for his testimony on the origin of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, and this is the main reason why Papias holds our interest today. Yet his materialistic views about the millennial kingdom of Christ fell out of favor in the third century and ultimately led to the loss of his magnum opus. The largest edition of his remains to date is that of M.W. Holmes, which has twenty-eight separate “fragments” of Papias, though my forthcoming edition for the Oxford Early Christian Texts series will have more than triple the number of items.