Chapter Seventeen provides an ambitious synthesis of many of the concepts and authors addressed earlier in the volume in order to argue for two intertwining genealogies of modern fiction: on the one hand, the historical and social novel, and on the other, the Gothic, fantastic tales, and other non-realist literary forms. All these genres and forms encode questions of uneven development and often also express a sense of historical and epistemological disorientation. The chapter opens with examples of crossovers between fiction and other artforms to show the rich variety of forms and their influence on European culture. It then looks at cross-border influences and on individual nations’ different material conditions. Romanticism inherited and transformed a series of existing forms and themes, including travel literature, the epistolary novel, the Gothic, and the picaresque, into new forms, including the Bildungsroman, the fragment, the tale, and novella. These reflect an intense self-consciousness regarding historical time and place, even when they appear most ahistorical.

This introductory essay to the volume sets out the volume’s form and purpose, and then provides advance introduction of each of its component essays in turn. Since the volume comes together as a tightly organised and cumulative introduction to David Tracy, this essay forms its own concerted introduction to Tracy parallel to the performance of the book as a whole.

David Tracy’s theological formation and work stretch across more than five decades of his emergent ‘theology-in-culture’. Diachronically, this essay highlights: (1) the influence of Bernard Lonergan; (2) how Blessed Rage for Order (1975) articulated a ‘critical not dogmatic’ theology turned towards a ‘twofold crisis’ of Christian meaning in post-Christian times and modern meaning in post-modern times; (3) how The Analogical Imagination (1981) clarified this ‘mutually critical’ reading-together of historical tradition and contemporary situation, opening it to radical problematisings of interpretation and culture; and (4) how this then has led Tracy to identify cultural and religious classics as ‘fragments’ and ‘frag-events’. Taken as a whole, Tracy’s theology-in-culture follows ‘an analogical paradigm’ that regards the human creature as having a transcendentally driven grace-informed nature, in spite of tragedy and sin. Hence, art and conversation remain theological hopes for Tracy, and when the noble endeavours of modernity yield to post-modern fragmentation even this remains hopeful for Tracy, because humans inhabit an invisible infinity which exceeds the visible world.

This essay begins with a close reading of Tracy’s recent programmatic formulations concerning: (1) the ‘strong fragments’ of culture that ‘shatter, fragment, negate any closed totality system’; and (2) those ‘most powerful fragments’ that ‘show themselves not as substances but as events and positively open to liminal Infinity’. If some cultural fragments are mere ‘period pieces’ without enduring truth or transformative power, and others are dangerously nostalgic, these fragments, Chase suggests, can act strongly when collaged into some ‘new form of witness against any false whole or claim to completeness’. T. S Eliot’s The Waste Land is an ambiguous example here. The pinnacle of the fragment for Tracy, however, is the ‘frag-event’ that opens towards the creative liminality of an invisible Infinity. ‘Marxist-Kabbalist’ Walter Benjamin is ‘the projective force’ behind Tracy’s forays into the fragment. The essay proposes the role of assemblage or collage for both fragmenting fragments and the Tracyean frag-event, stressing the role of edges and unexpected connections, and concluding by wondering how far Christian theology is really ready to think in such a manner of collage.

The opening chapter introduces the most significant areas of contemporary research in the molecular astronomy of star formation: prestellar cores, hot cores, hot corinos, accretion, protoplanetary disks, photodissociation regions (PDRs), HII regions, stellar jets, disk winds, outflows, and masers. These sit within the wider considerations of dense molecular clouds on many scales, from the giant molecular clouds (GMCs) to fragments, filaments, and clumps. Our understanding of these molecular cloud environments depends on our understanding of molecular excitation, energy balance, gas and grain surface reaction kinetics, cosmic ray ionization, and photochemistries. Chemical modelling involving both gas-phase and grain-surface reactions is described, as are the observational and analytical essentials of antenna temperature, optical depth, velocity distribution, column density, beam dilution, relative abundance, rotation diagrams, and radiative transfer modelling.

Unica Zürn’s narratives exemplify the post-1945 afterlife of surrealist narrative forms, which persist as mutations ruptured by historical trauma, marked by and constitutive of the fractured, damaged temporalities of subjective and historical experience. Joao Ribas has commented on how Zürn’s drawings exploit a ’repertoire of surrealist techniques’ (Dark Spring, 21); her writings similarly adapt many familiar surrealist narrative-aesthetic traits and practices to explore specific German post-war and post-Shoah contexts, deploying strategies of automatism, prolepsis, cryptographic and other phantasmagorical techniques, fairytale, literary, cinematic and other allusions, alongside formally experimental, densely polysemic, and allegorically autobiographical structures. Adapting the extensive archival resources provided by surrealist techniques enabled Zürn to produce narratives focused on representing and navigating the damaged durational temporalities of traumatic experience, encountered as simultaneously subjective (and thus rooted in problematically autobiographical narratives) and social (and thus grounded in shattering historical events and their disastrous psychological impacts). The essay examines key works to explore her insistent linguistic registering of trauma through a poetics of the fragment – a remnant of shattered language, and a preoccupation she inherited from her involvement with Alexander Camaro and the post-war Berlin surrealist group Der Badewanne and its aesthetics of constrained recycling as a response to the post-war scarcity of art materials – in which meaning is encrypted, demanding decoding by the reader.

This chapter examines the complex physical relations that characterized a range of eighteenth-century literary, visual, and material objects that attached small fragments together into a new larger form. Arguing that these created a dynamic dialogue of part and whole, it explores how the process of joining allowed small fragments, displayed and placed together, to materialize emotional connection. It focuses on four key material forms: the production of herbaria; a series of collaged stained-glass windows at Plas Newydd, the home of the “Ladies of Llangollen,” Lady Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), in Llangollen, North Wales; the interior decoration and furnishings of A la Ronde, in Exmouth, Devon, home to cousins Jane and Mary Parminter (1750–1811 and 1767–1849); and the creation of eighteenth-century patchwork.

Chapter 12 analyzes the phenomenon whereby various types of elements may appear in postverbal position in Korean: arguments such as the subject, the object, the indirect object, and clausal complements may be dislocated to the right. Moreover, a variety of non-argument projections such as adverbials, prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and small clause predicates may also appear in a postverbal position. The chapter focuses on two basic issues on RDCs: (i) whether the RDC involves a mono-clausal or bi-clausal structure and (ii) whether postverbal elements undergo movement or are base-generated. The chapter also looks into differences among sub-varieties of RDCs in Korean, as classified by the grammatical and semantic function of the Right-Dislocated material, the type of the correlate in the main clause, and the number of dislocated items. Cross-linguistic implications of the Korean data for the current research on RDCs in other languages such as English, Dutch, German, and Bangla are also discussed.

A study of Elliott Carter’s shorter instrumental compositions. Included are individual analytical essays on each of the six “Figments”; each of the five “Retracings”; each of the short piano pieces 90+ (1994), Two Diversions (1999), Retrouvailles (2000), Two Thoughts About the Piano (2005-06, including Intermittences and Caténaires), Tri-Tribute (2007-08, including Matribute, Fratribute, and Sistribute); the instrumental solos Shard (1997), 4 Lauds (1984/1999-2000, including Statement - Remembering Aaron, Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi, Rhapsodic Musings, and Fantasy - Remembering Roger), Steep Steps (2001), HBHH (2007), and Mnemosyné (2011); the duos, trios, and quartets Two Fragments (1994/1999), Hiyoku (2001), Au Quai (2002), Call (2003), Elegy (1939, arr. 2007), Tre Duetti (2008-09), Trije Glasbeniki (2011), and Rigmarole (2011); and the ensemble pieces Sound Fields (2007), and Wind Rose (2008).

Crystal Parikh’s chapter on dissolution takes up narrative fragmentation to thematize outward-moving fictions of “interruption, isolation, suspense, and precarity.” Starting with Valeria Luiselli’s interviews with migrant asylum-seekers, Parikh argues that a defining feature of contemporary literature is its formal techniques of “dissolution and the fragment as vital aesthetic and stylistic forms to convey the splintering effect that global modernity in the twenty-first century induces.” From Luiselli to George Saunders’s short stories and novels by Celeste Ng and Jesmyn Ward, among others, Parikh argues that nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative techniques have been remixed by contemporary authors who draw on realism and experimentalism to tell stories of ongoing and unresolved dislocation and vulnerability.

Catullus’ poem 51, paradoxically, would be incomplete without its famous lacuna: the gap in 51.8 functions as an acoustic channel through which the sonorous presence of Sappho and her lyric poetry is evoked. This paper shows how this ‘epiphanic’ textual lack enables the readers to experience the past in its sublimity, or to feel themselves connected to a chain of voices and silences. Catullus’ lacuna, accordingly, is interpreted as an empty monument of the ‘absent presence’ of the Sapphic voice which is being simultaneously silenced and reanimated by the endlessly iterable events of reading. In that regard, Catullus’ ‘translation’ is a realization of Walter Benjamin’s imperative included in ‘The Translator’s Task’, awakening the ‘echo’ of the Sapphic original. At the same time, the lacuna – labelled here as Catullus’ ‘Black Square’ – is envisioned as an inherent part of the poetic play between Calvus and Catullus in poems 50 and 51, to be supplemented by Calvus’ textual or bodily presence. In this sense, the 30 or so conjectural supplements of 51.8 in the textual history of the poem – among others, the famous vocis in ore – do nothing more than take on the role of Calvus, and write a palimpsest of absences and presences.

Catullus’ poem 51, paradoxically, would be incomplete without its famous lacuna: the gap in 51.8 functions as an acoustic channel through which the sonorous presence of Sappho and her lyric poetry is evoked. This paper shows how this ‘epiphanic’ textual lack enables the readers to experience the past in its sublimity, or to feel themselves connected to a chain of voices and silences. Catullus’ lacuna, accordingly, is interpreted as an empty monument of the ‘absent presence’ of the Sapphic voice which is being simultaneously silenced and reanimated by the endlessly iterable events of reading. In that regard, Catullus’ ‘translation’ is a realization of Walter Benjamin’s imperative included in ‘The Translator’s Task’, awakening the ‘echo’ of the Sapphic original. At the same time, the lacuna – labelled here as Catullus’ ‘Black Square’ – is envisioned as an inherent part of the poetic play between Calvus and Catullus in poems 50 and 51, to be supplemented by Calvus’ textual or bodily presence. In this sense, the 30 or so conjectural supplements of 51.8 in the textual history of the poem – among others, the famous vocis in ore – do nothing more than take on the role of Calvus, and write a palimpsest of absences and presences.

This chapter considers the quintessential Romantic genre of art song. After a brief background in late eighteenth-century song style, it describes the expansion and deepening of the genre that began in the nineteenth century with the oeuvre of Franz Schubert. As other composers imitated and developed Schubert’s approach to song, poems in many languages were set to music. Across the century, these texts represent the changing emphases and concerns of Romantic poetry. The chapter outlines some central ideas of early German Romanticism: interdisciplinary collaboration, the idealisation of the fragment, and the importance of subjective experience. The gathering of short literary fragments into collections is compared to the song cycle, which groups songs to create a larger story or impression. Three case studies – songs by Schubert, Fauré, and Schumann – are explored to show how various poets and composers used scenes of nature metaphorically to express larger topics of pantheism, intimacy, and mystic unity.

The immediate presence of the medium of writing, taken as object of Dante’s vision, becomes a metaphor for the immediacy of vision in the visio Dei. Writing is a medium or a means, but it is made here to function also as an immediate revelation, of God – or at least as a symbol for such immediacy. And yet, Dante’s vision of the divine Word as writing breaks it down into signifying by virtue of difference. The positive presence of the divine is rather signified by a negative play of difference generated by the signifiers of writing. Writing, consisting of signifiers of absent signifieds, indicates how all sense in language is generated by difference without positive terms. Dante’s presentation of the written text of Wisdom from Scripture makes this generation conspicuous in its binary differentiations between noun and verb, vowel and consonant, gold and silver, etc. By highlighting the nature of writing as signifying by difference Dante reveals language as profoundly and metaphysically a way of alluding to the unrepresentable. Writing is subject to fragmentation and breaking down in every visible manifestation. This disintegration becomes itself the token of a higher meaning and being beyond its grasp. All its expressions and transmissions fall victim to radical contingency. The breakdown of mediation is the realization of Dante’s vision as the immediacy which is God. Anguished lest contingency undermine belief in divine providence, Dante turns contingency into the marker of a higher, humanly incalculable, urepresentable yet necessary Being and meaning. Such Being and meaning alone can be believed to be divine.

British Decadence was, in large part, inspired by the poetry and prose of France. The cross-Channel traffic in advanced literature saw extremes of Francophobia and Francophilia in the British press, with writers such as Émile Zola having translations of their work censored and attacked in the House of Commons while receiving rapturous receptions when lecturing in London. A central figure in this traffic of Decadent literature was the poet Paul Verlaine, whose dissolute life scandalized the British public. As this chapter demonstrates, British writers took from their French counterparts both formal innovation and an antagonistic approach to moral orthodoxies. Verlaine’s queer sexuality and relentlessly self-scrutinizing approach to poetry came to symbolize for a generation of young English writers an intoxicating possibility of a poetic revolution against cultural hegemony. Verlaine’s lecture tour of England in late 1893 represents the highpoint of the British obsession with French décadence before the Wilde trials saw progressive literature retreat into the margins.

This concluding chapter is a detailed methodological essay which narrates the process by which the archive underlying this book was reconstructed by the author from its various fur-flung locations within and outside India. It demonstrates the value of such archival reconstruction, and the use of micro-history in combination withsystematic data analysis associated with quantitative methods. It proposes that such a methodology can reveal the vast archive of Indo-Islamic and/or Indo-Persianate legal documents hidden in plain view, exploding the myth of archival vaccuum and providing vast quantities of new data and analytical approaches. It is argued that such an approach is productive not only for uncovering dramatic, people-filled stories, but also for adding legibility and comprehensibility to a body of material that has long been neglected for its alleged dryness and difficulty. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the practice and ethics of memorializing the past of one’s family, which created this invaluable, but necessarily selective, archive.