J. Blake Couey, in “Isaiah as Poetry,” begins with the basic fact that nearly all of the book is written as poetry and encourages readers to approach it as such. He surveys its erudite vocabulary, its creative use of sound, and its parallelism and larger strophic structures. He closes with an extended appreciation of the “imaginative worlds” evoked in the book through the use of imagery and metaphors. He observes of its poetic vision that “its scope is nearly boundless.”

This chapter describes Clare’s attitude to form and surveys the various forms in which he writes. It emphasizes the variety of Clare’s formal achievement, showing how across his career he adopts different prosodic and generic conventions, including those of the sonnet, ballad, lyric, couplet, and ode. Running through all Clare’s poems, the chapter suggests, is a wariness of imposing excessive order upon the patterns of experience. The irregular beauty and emotional clarity of Clare’s poems emerge out of an effort to find a balance sympathetic to nature over artifice, spontaneity over control, and existing tradition over individual embellishment.

This chapter takes the history of literary history beyond the confines of the classical period, and past the formal parameters of prose. Its focus is Philostratus’ depiction of the Second Sophistic, one of most instrumental and contentious ancient models of epoch-making. The Second Sophistic is conventionally considered a world of prose. I make the case for the central role of poetry in Philostratus’ conception of its literary identity. After some preliminary remarks on the complex construct of the Second Sophistic as a cultural phenomenon, and the undoubtable but controversial role of Philostratus at the centre of it, I offer a close reading of the multiple moments of poetry within the Vitae Sophistarum, which shed new light on Philostratus’ approach to the textuality and temporality of this milieu. The chapter ends by discussing the Heroicus, which contains Philostratus’ most elaborate verse compositions, and sees the voices of ancient poets resurrected into new sophistic poetry. This close encounter with Philostratean verse reveals an active and experimental approach to the poetic tradition which treats canonical verse texts as both bounded and closed, and inherently unfinished, and where the lines between old and new, verse and prose, exegesis and literature are interrogated and undermined.

This chapter asks how literature and literary criticism contribute to the understanding of Asian American racialization. It traces the emergence of the panethnic construct of Asian America as a radical exercise of global, anticolonial imagination, exploring how Asian Americans are racialized as intermediaries within the United States. Asian American literature captures the dynamism of this construct, Rana argues, drawing out an allegory for literary analysis from Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker. The tragic characterization of the novel’s protagonist – a spy cast as analyst – renders the model minority myth as mythos, reorienting its trajectory of assimilation and incorporation toward the broader interpretive totality of US militarism and empire. Asian American literature thus enables readers to trace the cocreative relationship between social formations and literary forms, to read not for the representation but for the refiguration of race.

Exponential growth can be a head-scratcher. Accounts and taxonomies that seem inviting near the start of a growth curve can seem like fool’s errands afterwards. And the story of queer—or gay and lesbian, or queer and trans, or LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+– poetics since the late 1960s is a story of exponents, of proliferation from stigmatized rarity to celebrated (but still endangered) ubiquity. Does Randall Mann share linguistic goals with Pat Parker? Chen Chen with Samuel Ace? Reginald Shepherd with Carmen Giménez Smith? A sampling offered by me (a white, prosperous, midcareer, polyamorous, Northeastern trans woman with kids) may be more likely to include poets who share my identities, as well as my tastes, and to overlook those who do not. But there is—at least in the arts—no view from nowhere: one informed view is better than none.

September 1830 saw the first purpose-built passenger railway open between Manchester and Liverpool, followed by a proliferation of local, national, and international lines. Yet the integration of railway infrastructures, perspectives, and plotlines into writing was slow. This chapter examines terminology, speculative journalism, and early engagement with railways in fiction to demonstrate how writing across genres extended the emergent ‘railway imaginary’ well beyond the scope of its built referent. Yet gaps in spatial and temporal perception opened up by the railways posed a challenge to those plotting long-form fiction that relied on a sense of momentum towards a definitive ending. While selected works, including the Mechanics’ Magazine, Railroadiana, and The Pickwick Papers, stop short of representing railways as an inhabited system closely entangled with the familiar rhythms of 1830s life, they do take seriously the task of establishing a dynamic relationship between railway and narrative form that matched technological and literary ambition alike.

Chapter 22 introduces the concept of morphology, the study of form which attends to both the uniqueness of individual manifestations of life and the invariable laws which underpin them. Rather than forming a single theory, Goethe’s extensive reflections on morphology emerged in different contexts and run throughout his oeuvre. The chapter examines the most significant stages in Goethe’s engagement with morphology, from his search for the Urpflanze (primeval plant) in Sicily to his development of Anschauung (intuition) as a method, and positions him in relation to other thinkers, above all Wolff and Kant.

Chapter 8 offers an overview of Goethe’s development as a lyric poet, from his earliest innovations to his mature work, and highlights the diversity of his poetic oeuvre. It demonstrates the variety of forms which he adopted, often shaping them decisively in turn. The chapter also positions him in relation to his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, emphasising the influence of Klopstock, and examining Goethe’s participation in certain literary trends, including classical metres and the sonnet form. Finally, it considers Goethe’s relationship to the German Romantics.

This chapter provides guidance on how to send specimens to a virology laboratory, including the need to provide full and accurate patient information, relevant clinical information, how to package and transport specimens and the need to send the correct specimens.

Wagner’s early compositional training is seldom examined, perhaps because of his unambiguous claim in 1851 to be an autodidact, taught only by ‘life, art and myself’. Yet Wagner’s work with Christian Müller and particularly with Theodor Weilig on early works and in abstract skills (notably counterpoint) reveal various dependencies. Wanger’s shifting attitude towards this period of training sits alongside his choice of more public mentors, in Beethoven and Weber, whose works he studied and arranged.

The complex relationship between Wagner and Liszt has been much caricatured. Liszt is usually perceived as long-suffering, patient, and generous in his support, while Wagner appears self-serving and ruthless. This chapter unravels how their relationship was shaped by contemporary economic, political, and, artistic forces. In doing so, it observes the contrasting ways Liszt and Wagner attempted to reconcile revolutionary republican sympathies with their desire for royal patronage. It examines the advice and practical support Liszt provided Wagner through his position as Kapellmeister at the Weimar Court Theatre, Liszt’s ambitions to position his relationship with Wagner as equivalent to Goethe and Schiller within a new artistic ‘golden age’ in Weimar, and their differing responses to contemporary aesthetic debates. It highlights similarities and differences in their ideas about the future of music, the relationship between music and drama and its implications for musical form, and their compositional approaches.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus deploys modal vocabulary, especially “possibility.” Some readers take this to signal commitment to substantive modal theories. For others, it is metaphysical nonsense to be thrown away. We steer a middle path. We uncover the central role of possibility in Wittgenstein’s philosophical development from criticism of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgment to the conception of propositions as pictures in the Tractatus. In this conception, modality is not the subject matter of theorizing but an ineluctable aspect of picturing of reality whose showing forth Wittgenstein aims to help us see by operationalizing the construction of propositions.

Focusing on contemporary life writing of chronic pain, specifically lyric essays, this chapter explores the language of pain, refuting its untranslatability, and suggesting that creative forms and experimental expression are helping to develop language to meet experience. Recent illness narratives are building a common language with which to articulate their physical sensations, with Eula Biss’s ‘The Pain Scale’ (2005) encouraging a community of pain expression, and becoming a generative intertext. While pain sufferers reclaim their experiences, they are also reclaiming and renewing diagnostic vocabulary, for example through ‘subterfuge‘, which requires readers to better engage in attentive listening, with an ethical obligation not to overlook or mishear marginalized voices. Alongside Biss, this chapter explores the work of Amy Berkowitz, Molly McCully Brown, Anne Boyer, Sinéad Gleeson, Sonya Huber, and Lisa Olstein.

Chapter 4 argues that those material objects that, in the Categories, would fall under the category of substance qualify as hylomorphic compounds (i.e. they have matter and form). It presents three arguments in defence of the thesis that artefacts have forms. The first argument is that artefacts undergo genuine unqualified coming-to-be (or substantial change), as opposed to the mere acquisition of a property by a substrate. Related to this argument is the crucial Aristotelian distinction between per se unity and accidental unity. The second argument is based on Aristotle’s application of the ekeininon-rule to artefacts, which reveals that the identity of an artificial object cannot be reduced to its matter. The third argument is that Aristotle’s application of the synonymy principle to artefacts shows that the form in the mind of the artisan is identical to the form present in the actual artefact, insofar as it is thought, and that the artisan’s use of tools represents the stage at which the artefact’s form is in potentiality.

The first movement, at least on the surface, is in the traditional form Berlioz knew well from Beethoven and others and that he had used in earlier overtures: a slow opening and a long faster movement. But the opening Largo is too long to be considered a mere ‘introduction’. Rather than beginning the Allegro with a sharply defined motive suitable for development, Berlioz presents a long melody, the idée fixe, and bases most of the movement on it, breaking it down and reassembling it in various forms, including a big climax and a wistful coda. The connection of the Allegro to sonata form has been an area of disagreement ever since, considered in more detail in Chapter 10. Major revisions undertaken after the first performance changed the movement’s proportions; the original version cannot be recovered.

My introduction makes four closely related arguments: that the promise functions as the governing trope of James’s work, that James rearranges the moral landscape of the nineteenth-century novel, that the depictions of promise-giving in James’s fiction challenge a number of moral philosophy’s accounts of the nature of obligation, and that the relation between morality and literature is better posed in terms of form than in terms of content. I explore a range of ethical dilemmas posed by philosophers working in moral philosophy, speech act theory, and the philosophy of identity. In addition I sketch out a short history of the nineteenth-century novel, focusing on the centrality of the promise to British, French, and American writers.