Christophe Triau’s chapter accounts for the state of the art of mise en scène in contemporary theatre. Triau explains how contemporary mise en scène is characterized by its marked refusal to construct immediately legible meaning or recognizable reference points on stage. Instead, with reference to the works of four major directors – Claude Régy, François Tanguy and the Théâtre du Radeau, Joël Pommerat, and Gisèle Vienne – Triau argues that stage direction tends to place audience members’ sense of perception under pressure. The stage is transformed into a destabilizing space of uncertainty, dream, hallucination or fantasy, which questions and renews the audience’s experience of perception, opening it out to other possibilities distinct from ordinary perception. In their very different ways, these directors bring into play not only what is seen but how the audience sees: the frameworks and activity of perception both in the theatre and in life.

Clare’s declaration that he ‘found the poems in the fields, and only wrote them down’ is, to some extent, pretence; however quickly he might compose, he corrects and revises from very early on, before he gets any guidance from others. The more he writes, the more he confronts the inevitable problem of repetition: his solutions can be seen in the concentrated echoes and references back and forth between poems. The manuscripts in all their teeming detail demonstrate his determination to get things right. Once publication arrives he has to contend with the conflicting demands of editors, publishers, and supporters; there are vexed questions of taste and politics. As he moves towards The Shepherd’s Calendar, however keen his desire for independence, increasingly the process becomes collaborative. When his life is turned upside down with the move to Northborough in 1832, his deeply personal poems of loss are worked on with extraordinary intensity.

This chapter examines how Pindar and Bacchylides make use of early epic (esp. Homer) in their victory odes, from an explicitly ’intertextualist’ perspective. It discusses (inter alia) the meaning of ’Homer’ in the fifth century BC to the earliest audiences of Pindar and Bacchylides and adverts to the complexity and multiplicity of the audiences of their victory odes. It argues furthermore for the critical importance and benefits of intertextual analysis of Pindar and Bacchylides, especially the ways in which interaction with texts such as those of archaic epic should prompt a wider openness to intertextual investigation of victory odes.

Across centuries and continents, the Irish essay has captured impressions and insights triggered by socio-political transformations across the island, and the form’s malleability has allowed writers to puzzle out the contours of Irish identity, often highlighting its deliberate performativity. Shaped by the culture’s oral tradition, the Irish essay frequently imbricates with storytelling, theatrical performance, and public lectures, live events that underscore its performative qualities. Writers often gear their impressions and inquiries self-consciously to audiences real and imagined, assuming the essay plays a meaningful role in public dialogue. In the twenty-first century, personal and lyric essays focused on rapidly changing perceptions of bodies and sexuality exemplify this trait. This alertness to performance and audiences helps to explain the Irish essay’s ready adaptation to new forms, technologies, and platforms in pursuit of readers, listeners, and viewers at home and abroad.

This chapter turns from democracy as theatre to the question of theatre’s place within a democracy. Modern political theatre foregrounds playwrights, understood to be people capable of enlightening the audience through their truthful representation of the world. Euripides’ Trojan Women has typically been read as an exposé of political wrongdoing, and an invitation to empathise with the suffering of the protagonists. In Athens, these plays were ’political’ in that they helped spectators unpick rhetorical strategies (Aristotle’s term is dianoia), making them discriminating judges in the law-courts and Assembly. Tragedies were part of a competition where audiences learned to judge the performance skills of writers and actors. Aristophanes’ Frogs is a case study in how decisions were actually made. Plato thought it unacceptable that aesthetic judgements could be based on crowd responses. He coined the term theatrocracy to evoke the power of the crowd to make aesthetic judgements, which he thought should remain the preserve of an educated elite. He saw the rule of the people in the theatre as both a metaphor for democracy and an instance of democracy in action.

The difference in how Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison conceived of Black subjectivity has profound consequences for how we understand the audience of African American literature in the contemporary period. While Ellison assumed that the Black subject is invisible because whites fail to recognize African American humanity and complexity, Morrison understood herself to be both legible and embraced by her Black community. Ellison and Morrison represent twin poles for the consideration of such issues as the implicit desire for white validation to the bold expectation that Black life not be explained to outsiders. Evidence of Ellison and Morrison’s respective approach to Black literature is reflected in two recent texts by prominent African American writers. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) and Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (2019) both highlight how key aspects of Black life remain invisible to white observers while also using readerly intimacy as a potent force for social change. These texts demonstrate the continued tension of presenting Black writing within a national landscape dominated by white hegemonic power.

Ovid’s journey towards Tomis is represented as a reversal of Aeneas’ destiny, particularly because – unlike the Virgilian hero – the exiled poet has to leave Rome (the world capital, and not a ruined city) with no promises of a glorious future. Thus, his new subjective elegy which originates at this (wild) periphery of the empire cannot but be a sad elegy. However, Ovid’s ‘eccentric’ exile poetry increasingly displays – from the Tristia to the Epistulae ex Ponto – some remarkable traces of evolution. In particular, towards the end of the second collection, the poet sketches a peculiar image of himself: that of an interethnic uates who has been able to find a new, unprecedented audience in the Greco-Getic tribes. The public role he now plays in Tomitan society allows him to engage in a sort of civilising mission as an imperial officer. Such a complex strategy of self-accreditation emphasises the transnational character of his poetry rather than its merely national dimension. The exile still remains a harsh experience for Ovid: nonetheless, he conceives the possibility of an evolution and cultivates the dream of gaining universal poetic renown even from the extreme boundaries of the world.

This chapter approaches the problem of the poem's audience vis-à-vis the relational process of reading whereby one poem opens windows onto another, either through intertextual references and allusions or through the reader's own cognitive connections. The chapter expands on this relational ontology of poems to argue that in the act of reading there is no single poem; instead, a universal named “poetry” is extracted from the particularity of the so-called “single” poem. The chapter focuses on the poet-reader as a specific category of audience and, in order to read the transnational travel of poems, it considers the reception of T. S. Eliot in the works of Rabindranath Tagore and of the generation of Bengali poets who, after Tagore, both translate Eliot and echo him in their own poems. If Tagore is dissident in his use of Eliot's poetry as a counter-frame, the younger Samar Sen records a supportive intertextual presence of Eliot, while Bishnu Dey's translation of Eliot foregrounds a self-reflexivity of the poem that he imports into Eliot's text. These close readings affirm the chapter's central critique of the autonomous single poem in the pluralistic reading process.

This chapter describes both the centrality of Morris’s work as a public lecturer and his feelings of ambivalence about speaking out in this way. It moves from Raymond Williams’s characterisation of the lectures as where Morris spoke as a ‘whole man’ to Thomas Carlyle’s mixed feelings about the form, poised as it was between conflicting ideas about preaching, about political life and about celebrity. It examines how Morris’s career as a lecturer was an aspect of his deepening engagement with public controversy from 1877, and was imagined as a duty that Morris was obliged to take up. It considers Morris’s resistance to rhetoric, which he connected to the deceiving modes of contemporary conventional politics. It argues that Morris’s own rhetoric was more compelling when he spoke at dramatic occasions, such as his Oxford lecture on ‘Art and Democracy’, rather than when he considered the lecture to be part of the grind of socialist agitation, where Morris sometimes worried about the capacities of his working-class audiences to understand his central message. The chapter ends by considering Morris’s speaking in Northumberland in 1887, as a temporary utopian moment when public speaking and the condition of the people were integrated and not separated.

This chapter charts the impact of the establishment of systematic state funding on the nature of the relationship between theatre goers and theatre makers; the forms of theatre available to audiences; and theatre makers’ attitudes towards theatregoers. Citing Baumol and Bowen’s 1960s survey of British theatregoers – which noted their exceptionally elite status – it discusses the social, technological, and cultural shifts which have shaped the opportunities for greater audience interaction, agency, and ownership in recent years. Touching on the building of new civic, repertory, and university theatres in the regions between the 1950s and 1980s, the health and status of touring theatre companies, and efforts to create more accessible and inclusive experiences, the chapter acknowledges that the period since 1945 has seen extraordinary developments in the understanding of what being an audience means, in terms of visibility, conventions governing behaviour, marketing, opportunities for participation, and assumptions about what constitutes an appropriate place for the encounter between performer and spectator. It concludes, however, that twenty-first century British theatre still has some way to go before it can claim to have addressed its reputation for elitism and exclusivity.

While Percy Shelley anticipates and speaks to many important subjects of “our times,” he also developed a poetry and methodology for connecting and collaborating with peoples in other places and epochs. In this account, the editors reconsider Shelley’s often binaristic historical reception as both politically radical and childishly idealist, instead offering a version of the poet who continuously rethinks categories and relations among people and their times.

This chapter evaluates the landscape of Pauline studies, demonstrating the need for reevaluation of Paul’s understanding of the relationship between Israel, the Jews, and the non-Jewish individuals receiving the spirit through Paul’s ministry. Contrary to many modern readings, Paul’s gospel is not systematically opposed to “legalism” or “ethnocentrism,” and his treatment of (former) gentiles as descendants not only of Abraham but of Israel begs explanation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the composition and interpretive capacity of the recipients of Paul’s letters and a discussion of key terms in the Pauline letters.

Important definitions for a professional editor and writer: audience, work/s, authenticity, sensitivity, diversity, accessibility, inclusivity, editorial judgement

Emphasizing preparing for a range of different audiences, Chapter 17 opens by asking readers to think about who might respond particularly well to the demonstrations that they are developing. The chapter contrasts audiences in informal learning settings and elsewhere. For the former, it’s important to have a pitch that is friendly and enthusiastic, and to be clear that your activities are free for everyone. Strategies for increased inclusivity are suggested. Summarizing some guiding principles, the chapter returns to the strands of science learning in the context of knowing your goals; considering how given and new vary across people, and planning ahead are also emphasized. Concerning applied audiences such as teachers or lawyers or policy makers and academic audiences, the principle that incomplete is not incorrect is again stressed. With all kinds of audiences, practice is paramount. The Worked Example uses a demonstration with George Bernard Shaw’s "ghoti" spelling, adjusting the spin for several different audiences.

Chapter 10 opens by asking readers to choose two kinds of people they might encounter in informal learning settings and to identify questions those people might have about their general topic and about their specific activity. Returning to the fact that a successful conversation is cooperative, this chapter emphasizes asking questions and listening. Asking questions of an audience gives the expert substantive information to listen to. Sets of questions give people choice, and the sets can include questions about explanations of the phenomena being shown. A "juicy question," for example, is one that nonexperts can address by using the materials/examples at hand – in effect, encouraging scientific reasoning. Giving people time to answer questions and then listening carefully as they do so shows respect, as does asking new questions that reflect people’s earlier responses. Readers are cautioned to avoid testing their audience or to feel that they themselves are being tested. The Worked Example finds juicy questions in a map-based demonstration of variation in regional dialects.

Emphasizing readers’ perspectives on the demonstrations that they are developing, Chapter 6 opens by asking readers to describe a time when a phenomenon in their topic area awed or puzzled or amused them. Using reminders of what a free-choice setting is, this chapter emphasizes the importance in such settings of generating an audience’s interest and excitement. As advertisers do, science communicators benefit from quickly accessing positive emotions. Fun, intrigue, and coherence are some ways to do that. The chapter recommends that readers go back to basics by focusing demonstrations on the classic phenomena that all theoretical perspectives agree on; this avoids current and complex debates. The Worked Example finds the basics in a highly technical article on sentence structure in Mayan languages, then uses the Star Wars character Yoda to show one way to illustrate these basics that might be interesting to and accessible for nonexperts.

Emphasizing other people’s perspectives on the demonstrations that readers are developing, Chapter 7 opens by asking readers to imagine specific people who they might encounter in an informal learning setting and to reflect on why those people might care about their topic area and what they might already know about it. The chapter then reviews several examples of connections between language and broader, real-world experiences that many people are likely to have had. One of the advertising examples uses Bounty’s "quicker picker upper" phrase to show morphological processes. One of the cell phone examples uses mistakes in automatic speech recognition to show sociolinguistic comparisons across accents and genders. One of the popular song examples uses mondegreens (or misperceptions of lyrics such as Taylor Swift’s "lonely Starbucks lovers") to show phonotactic regularities. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to write down specific ways that people might encounter their demonstration’s central topic in everyday life.

From the local color boom to university multiculturalism, the minority short story has been central to transformations bringing new classes of writers and content into American letters. This chapter outlines the promises and failures of the form to racially democratize the literary marketplace. It highlights the possibilities minority writers developed within these limitations. Zora Neale Hurston, Zitkála-Šá, and Winnifred Eaton deflected White audiences and their ethnographic expectations. Their frame tales challenged framings by White gatekeepers. Their feints force scholars to rethink autoethnographic fictions as savvy ethnographies of White audiences. These strategies persist in the multicultural era with writers such as Rattawut Lapcharoensap and Edward P. Jones. However, the short story has shifted from a commercial to an educational form: the easily teachable nugget of diversity. Meanwhile, audiences for ethnic authenticity now include many highly educated minorities. Sandra Cisneros, Nam Le, and others navigate this shifting map, revealing new freedoms and constraints.

Salman Rushdie is perhaps one of the most recognizable global literary writers. This emerged in the early 1980s when his work was seen as the quintessential exponent of the Indian novel in English. Distinctive marketing campaigns by publishers, as well as speculation about his advances and publishing deals, have further fuelled the success of the Rushdie brand. This chapter considers issues of reception that relate to Rushdie’s position in the literary marketplace and combines a review of some of the available sales figures with readers’ comments about Rushdie’s novels on online book reviewing sites. It addresses Rushdie’s position in the context of the consolidation of the Anglo-American publishing world through a series of mergers in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and the significant impact this has had on the way in which literary works are disseminated. It considers what readers’ reviews of his novels and the existence of a critical apparatus, including annotations and study guides, reveal about the classification of Rushdie’s fiction and the constitution of his audience, and it reviews concepts of reading, not reading, and partial reading with a view to the Rushdie affair.