This chapter argues that while great strides have been made to humanise the law of diplomatic protection, its practice in the courtroom is not in alignment with this as the protected individual does not participate in proceedings. It first dismantles the famous Mavrommatis fiction and argues that other conditions for diplomatic protection (such as nationality and the exhaustion of local remedies) and its features (such as state discretion and state responsibility) have been increasingly humanised to place emphasis on the individual. Second, it analyses the case law to show how the individual does not participate in proceedings at the Peace Palace. Finally, it provides suggestions to advocate for stronger procedural participation for the injured individual in cases of diplomatic protection at the ICJ.

While most of Johnson’s paid professional writing was in prose, he wrote accomplished poetry from the age of 15 until the last month of his life, and often poured into it his most personal feelings – especially those poems and verse prayers which he wrote in Latin. Most celebrated are Johnson’s two imitations of satires by Juvenal. In London, the first of these, Johnson adopted the light personification (‘unrewarded science toils in vain’) which became his trademark. The second, The Vanity of Human Wishes, is the quintessential Johnsonian work, a meditation on false hope whose conclusion can be read as either tragic or optimistic. The same theme runs through Johnson’s fictional writing – the shorter tales as well as his longest, Rasselas. This gently comic work, much of it merely episodic, follows the Abyssinian Prince, Rasselas, as he seeks the answer to life – and ends on another ambiguous conclusion.

The epilogue briefly considers Ovid’s exile poetry from an environmental and place-based perspective. Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetry does not need to rely on a positive attachment to a local land. His exile poetry is about and is marked by place, shaped by the location from which Ovid is estranged and the location in which he writes. Moreover, local place matters to Ovid as a particular more-than-human environment. Tomis is represented as an environment with its own specific geography, climate, and ecologies. Ovid further explores ecological themes by emphasizing the physical effects Tomis has on his body, through motifs of cold and sickness. The epilogue also uses Ovid’s exilic work to clarify the theoretical foundations of the environmental poetics identified in Vergil and Horace. Through his provocative play with intertextuality and fictionality, Ovid demonstrates that environmental poetics can rely not on realistic description or extratextual reference, but rather on the poetic imagination.

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.

H. G. Wells did not openly identify his fiction as a contribution to the ‘novel of ideas’ until the publication of Babes in the Darkling Wood in 1940. And yet, he arguably did more than any other writer of his time to shape this tradition in Britain and to distinguish its trajectory and priorities from that of the dominant ‘modernist’ tradition. This chapter explores how Wells understood the difference between his own work and that of peers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf the difference between the novel as a disseminator of social, political ideas and the novel as Art. It then investigates the significance of ‘dialogue’ and ‘exposition’ to Wells as a means of embedding these ideas in fiction, moving from Ann Veronica (1909) through lesser known works such as The Undying Fire: A Contemporary Novel (1919), to The Shape of Things to Come (1933).

Remarkably, literature was the field where Darwinian thinking was immediately and warmly received. Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine, All the Year Round, at once published articles that gave detailed, sympathetic accounts of the theory of the Origin, and these were followed by writers using Darwinian themes in their fiction and poetry, Dickens himself using sexual selection to structure a key relationship in Our Mutual Friend. This continues to the present, when leading novelists like Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson use very different reactions to Darwin to mold their narratives.

The focus of this chapter is Francophone Haitian women writers. These are writers who are bound by a common idiom, French and/or Creole, and who share similar concerns. What is to be ascertained is whether they occupy a territory in which literature acquires its full meaning. Given the dominance of male writers in Haitian literature, women writers may appear as marginal figures or minor voices. However, what this chapter demonstrates is that women writers have, over many years, challenged the status quo by simply being present and making their voices heard. They offer a female-centered perspective on the tensions and contradictions of Haitian society and, as such, open new doors to imagination. Dealing with such themes as love, loss, otherness, memory, and empathy, Haitian women writers have effectively affirmed the humanistic value of literature. The term écriture de l’urgence, coined by Yanick Lahens to define Haitian literature in general, acquires a special meaning when considering women authors. Urgency does not equate haste. Rather, it refers to the direct confrontation of the writer with reality, history, and the endless possibilities of language.

This chapter seeks to revisit Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella, a foundational fiction of the Haitian Revolution which is considered to be the first novelistic representation of the event written by a Haitian author. This nineteenth-century novel gives rise to an infinite number of themes yet to be explored. The narrative design that examines the Slave Revolution of 1791 highlights the conflict between Blacks and mulattoes through two main protagonists, the brothers Romulus and Rémus. It focuses on the filiation that the Black Revolution maintains with the French Revolution by evacuating the question of agency among the revolutionaries and instead favors a purely providential approach through the white heroine Stella. The chapter attempts to offer a contrapuntal reading of Bergeaud’s figurative rendition of the Revolution by contrasting two dominant views, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized.

Hannibal and Scipio left no autobiographies, except that Hannibal in 205, before leaving Italy for Africa, inscribed a bilingual account of his military resources. Scipio’s contemporary funeral elogium (list of his offices and achievements, a kind of succinct obituary) does not survive (a much later one does). This chapter offers, by way of introduction, semi-fictional replacements for these missing documents and explains what Hannibal’s full inscription is likely to have contained. Other first-person evidence by the two men is quoted and discussed, such as letters reported in the literary sources. The chapter closes by asking what Hannibal and Scipio looked like. Appendix 1.1 lists and evaluates the sources for the book, and there is a sub-section on reliability of speeches. Appendix 1.2 addresses the problem of whether Plutarch’s lost Life of Scipio was about Hannibal’s opponent or Scipio Aemilianus, his younger relative by adoption. Appendix 1.3 is about ‘roving anecdotes’.

This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was one of the most prominent figures in the 1830s literary scene. She became known, and was often condemned, for a ‘fatal facility’: a tendency to write too easily and too frequently for a market that was itself so overproductive that its grasp on posterity’s regard has proved unstable. Landon’s work in the 1830s mirrors the decade in its variety, its speed of production, its dubiety about cultural status, and its self-conscious reflection on its own potential place in literary history. This chapter explores a wide range of Landon’s 1830s work, work that has typically been passed over by her critics. It explores her interactions with the market via such forms as Silver Fork fiction, short fiction, essays, literary criticism, and ‘hack’ journalism. Her work is shaped by her unstable place as both a literary celebrity and a worker for the press, a combination of identities that was especially difficult for a woman writer. She became the decade’s chronicler: her experiments in 1830s literary forms produce a mode of understanding the uncertain temporality of this unusually self-conscious decade.