The conclusion makes the case for Faulkner as an anti-ideological thinker, an artist engaged in attempting to disentangle image-making from propaganda as a key ingredient of his larger Yoknapatawpha project. I interpret Faulkner’s Stockholm Nobel address in this context, as a humanistic counter to modern disenchantment, an affirmation of human interiority in the face of scaling social systems in the process of becoming all-encompassing.

This essay analyses the reception of W.G. Sebald during his lifetime based on his track record of literary prizes awarded to him inside and outside Germany. His increasing recognition, both in Germany and in the anglophone world, is reflected in the literary prizes he received. Likewise, the literary prizes reveal significant differences in Sebald’s domestic and foreign reception, which result from the fact that in Germany his aggressive critical essays, attacking major literary figures, resulted in reservations of many juries awarding prizes and other recognitions.

The Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro offers a brief overview of Ishiguro’s remarkable oeuvre. The Introduction touches on the key themes and concerns of Ishiguro’s work as well as on the deceptively innovative formal narrative and linguistic qualities of his works; it offers a brief survey of the author’s career by following the successive ‘turning points’ that he adduces in his 2017 Nobel Lecture; and it considers the ways in which, in focusing so often on the ethics of professionalism, the novels also reflect on the profession of authorship itself – a role that Ishiguro has both embodied and performed with such adroitness and style, and with such admirable literary inventiveness and integrity, for more than forty years.

The 1980s was a decade in which African American literary production was starting to get the long overdue attention it deserved, but also a decade in which African American artists were emboldened to explore new territory, mainstream recognition be damned.The juxtaposition of James Baldwin’s funeral in 1987 and Trey Ellis’s essay “The New Black Aesthetic” in 1989 represent not a mere passing of the torch from the old guard to the avant-garde.Rather, the old guard was flourishing, and younger artists were also getting attention on new frontiers.In an unprecedented way, the 1980s marked an era when Black writers were sought out and recognized, to the point that their work dominated the critical conversation.This was especially true of Black women writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove who enjoyed a readership unlike anything they had ever seen before.

Chapter 19 concludes the book and analyzes the importance of the notion of synthesis for Tinbergen. Synthesis for him was a unity in moral and scientific perspective, and he admired most those economists and social reformers who were able to combine scientific insight with moral vision and practical action. The chapter analyzes the extent to which Tinbergen’s own work and efforts represent such a synthesis. It is suggested that his personal goals of peace and harmony were only partially integrated with his scientific economics. These elements coexisted, which meant that he left a fragmented legacy. His contributions to scientific expertise and its institutionalization, however, had the most long-lasting influence. And although expertise proved hard to combine with his own high-minded idealism, it is demonstrated that what attracted economists like Tinbergen to a role as policy expert was precisely the belief that social goals could be pursued through economic policy. The goal for control through rational planning of economic policy also fitted his personality well, and thus best captures the Tinbergen synthesis.

This chapter traces the contours of Derek Walcott’s career from regional Caribbean author to English-based publishing success to relocation to the United States in the American university system. Shortly after the publication of Omeros in 1990, Walcott became the Caribbean region’s first writer of colour to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award associated with a wider recognition of a new Caribbean literary 'province' that had emerged in similar ways to the Irish and American 'provinces' of the early twentieth century. Omeros is an ambitious epic work that attempts to totalize both Walcott’s and the Caribbean region’s mixed indigenous, European, African and American heritages. But, like other earlier modernist epics, Omeros combines an exultant sense of literary accomplishment with anxieties of failure. As promises of new postcolonial beginnings for the Caribbean slide into visions of climate catastrophe, and as Walcott finds himself an émigré in an imperial and racist America, the poem oscillates between its affirmative and apocalyptic impulses.

Chapter 2 describes the role that chemists played in the construction of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939). It explores how many of them became allies of the leftist policies of the new regime, with its dreams of secularism, liberal universalism and peace, as opposed to the dark images of chemical weapons of the First World War. The freethinking rationalism of the JAE placed chemistry in a comfortable position to highlight material progress and a positivistic scientific culture as solid allies of the new Republic. Within that framework, the chapter covers the opening in 1932 of the Instituto Nacional de Física y Química (INFQ) – nicknamed ‘The Rockefeller’ after the source of funding used to create it; the university reforms in teaching and experimental chemistry; the International Conference on Pure and Applied Chemistry held in Madrid in 1934; and further attempts to link academic chemistry to industrial growth, which challenges the frequent criticism of a supposedly overly academic chemistry. Utopian dreams of material progress opposed any use of chemicals for war purposes as a sign of the internationalism of the time, which supported the invitation of foreign chemists to visit Spain, as well as the sending of large numbers of young chemists for training abroad.