This chapter explores how country and city stand in as proxies for political, racial, and cultural positions. The country operates as the custodian of the “real America,” which becomes imagined as white, masculine, traditionalist, and working class. The city, meanwhile, teems with the elite and the cosmopolitan. Such gestures conjure away any trace of Indigenous peoples, migrant farmers and ranchers, urban–rural labor alliances, black agrarian Populists, and the city’s intersectional working class. Even as we must acknowledge the generative role country-and-city scholarship has played in US literary criticism, this chapter ultimately calls for rethinking this binary by turning to texts that provide a different account of the rural – a narrative that the country as a concept so effectively obfuscates. Writing by authors such as Hamlin Garland and Zitkála-Šá, conventionally categorized as local-color or regionalist, demonstrates that scarcity and survivance rather than city and country shaped the cultural politics of rural spaces in the nineteenth century. They both challenged the bureaucratic state, as an entity that protected the interests of finance capital by subjecting settlers to constant precarity and violently seeking to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their own land, liberty, and literature.

Vitruvius’ De architectura (c. 35–23 BCE) offers an ideal lens through which to view the emergence of the Imperial artes. In the introduction to his work, Vitruvius develops an elaborate theory of architectural knowledge that connects the discipline with other branches of specialized knowledge and gives pride of place to causal explanations of architectural method via natural first principles. Vitruvius’ theory is tailored to architecture but is of wider importance in that it establishes a general notion of ars predicated on the scientific premises sketched in Chapter 2. True to his expansive conception of the discipline, throughout his treatise Vitruvius carefully explains his methods in terms of natural first principles, demonstrating their fundamental soundness. His advice for orienting city streets and walls (Book I) and for choosing building materials (Book II) exemplifies his characteristic interest in connecting architecture with a broader understanding of nature.

Catherine Waters argues that the growth of London, and the proliferation of cheap periodicals, particularly after the repeal of the newspaper stamp tax in 1855, generated a new form of ‘metropolitan travel writing’ representing ‘the lived rhythms of urban experience that is a distinctive development in the print culture of the 1850s’. Dickens’s Household Words, launched in 1850, published graphic sketches of city life that provided readers with a vivid experience of imaginary flânerie. This chapter is concerned with George Augustus Sala, a protégé of Dickens, whose 1858 serialised account of a day in London for The Welcome Guest – ‘Twice Round the Clock’ – deploys its serial form to map the temporal geography of the metropolis with an appealing blend of reporting and storytelling.

Chapter 3 revisits the Cold War Scramble for Africa. Throughout the continent, the ‘concession model of extraction’ – the renting out of land to foreign corporations in exchange for royalties – was based on the early emergence of mining giants in South Africa. The concession model was not dismantled following independence. Gatekeeping politics were consolidated through the alternate paths taken by London and Paris. France incorporated its former colonies within a ‘post-colonial block’. Britain reconverted as a dual middle power – with London as jurisdictional apex and the City as financial powerhouse. The Cold War sidelining of The Hague justice institutions enabled the deployment of the US Cultural Cold War, based on the formidable sway of the alliance of Wall Street resources – finance, arbitration and corporate law firms – which contributed to the insulation of foreign corporate rights in property in resource-rich African states from national and international oversight.

This chapter is the first of two that examine the legal encounter with Jewishness in public space by focussing on the Orthodox practice of the eruv. The eruv is a distinctly Orthodox practice and fault lines here do not run simply between Jews and non-Jews but also between different Jews. In the modern secular legal arena, questions of non-establishment and the boundaries of religious freedom serve as the dominant legal frames, turning the eruv into a matter of excessive religiosity to be contained by law. Yet underneath the lofty language of constitutional separation often lurk concerns about national and local identity as well as sovereignty and ownership. Moreover, while circumcision has often galvanised Jews of different denominations, the eruv exposes internal Jewish rifts about Jewish identity and difference in contemporary societies. Indeed, some Jews themselves have not shied away from mobilising the authority of secular law to enforce their vision of what they consider the acceptable boundaries of Jewishness today.

In Sydney’s north, planning for an eruv began in the early 2000s by a group of Shabbat-observant Jews. What looked like an innocent project that did not involve much more than erecting a couple of poles in inconspicuous colours with wire attached to them, most of them on private land with the consent of the owners, became a several years-long dispute in which the imagined boundary turned into a real one for many residents, which they sought to prevent by recourse to planning law. This chapter explores how residents and councillors in St. Ives mobilised planning law to draw the acceptable boundaries of Jewishness. By analysing public documents, including a survey on the eruv commissioned by the Local Council as well as Council meeting minutes, media reports, and submissions to local newspapers, I trace the implicit religious and racial boundaries of belonging in this Australian suburb that the eruv rendered visible and I examine how the planning law regime participated in protecting these boundaries, thereby affirming White Christian settlers as rightful inhabitants of this suburban land.

We begin with the origin of the city/countryside dialectic and review the historical literature on the nature of the city. We then introduce the contradictions between urban and rural, acknowledging the important concept of the metabolic rift, followed by Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the “right to the city.” Finally, the analytical framing of popular rural social movements is discussed in the rural/urban contradictory framing.

Despite popular perceptions of Vaughan Williams as being focussed primarily on nature and the pastoral, a vivid appreciation of urban environments played an equally crucial role in shaping his artistic vision. A Londoner for most of his adult life, he also spent significant time in Berlin and Paris, and had a special regard for New York. Yet while he relished the bustle and rich social diversity of London, the de facto capital of the world during his lifetime, he was also keenly aware of its deprivation and dark undercurrents. A London Symphony is the most ambitious musical work to thematicize the modern city composed anywhere before 1914, and it evokes psychological and experiential tropes central to modernism’s urban imaginary across the arts, including the collision of multiple social identities, temporalities, and spatial perspectives, and the associated alienation and fragmentation of the unitary self. The composer employs an exceptionally wide range of materials, juxtaposing folk song, ragtime, street noise, and much else, in a multilayered environment of sometimes violent dissonance and rhythmic dislocation. Yet the work strives to integrate such diversity within an overarching symphonic framework – a powerful metaphor for a vision of nation and humanity that underpinned the composer’s later work.

This chapter examines 1890s women poets through the lens of ecology. By focusing on three main parameters (countryside, city, and empire), the chapter offers a new landscape of poets and poetries of the 1890s and argues that some of the most advanced ecological thinking of the period appeared in women’s poetry. Starting with Christina Rossetti, the chapter unveils how poets of the 1890s used genres such as the pastoral, realist, and symbolist poetry paradigmatically to produce powerful critiques of agrilogistics, globalization and eco-colonialism at the fin de siècle. Central to the chapter is its focus on polluted environments. Looking at Amy Levy and Alice Meynell, it shows how their poetics of soot and grime argued for green spaces to combat the damaged caused by the coal industry to modern city living. The chapter also analyzes the anticolonial poetics of Katharine Tynan and Sarojini Naidu and their use of autochthonous plants in their fight against the British empire.

This essay examines medieval women dramatists, from Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim in tenth-century Germany, through Hildegard of Bingen and her Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) in the twelfth century, to Katherine Sutton, Abbess of Barking in the late fourteenth century, who composed liturgical dramas for Holy Week. The essay locates these women dramatists within the wider context of medieval convent performances in England and Europe, and shows that religious women were not only authors but also actors, directors, and costume makers; their convents provided the play space, while laywomen sometimes also contributed. Niebrzydowski also explores the often speculative or conjectural evidence for womenߣs participation in drama outside the convents. Although there is only one definitive English example of women as associated with a Corpus Christi production, a lost Chester pageant of ߢour Lady thassumpcionߣ, other fragmentary evidence suggests lay womenߣs involvement in a range of dramatic forms from saintsߣ lives, interludes, and morality plays to processions and pageants.

The ‘noble lie’ is crucial within the political philosophy of the Republic, as the ideology of the charter myth needed to motivate the citizens of the Republic’s good city in general, and the rulers in particular, to care above all for its well-being. I look first at the way lying figured in the Greeks’ imaginary and their political discourse, particularly that of the Athenian democracy; then at ethical dimensions of Socrates’ notion of ‘useful lie’, and his distinction between deception by speech and deception in the soul. What makes the ‘noble lie’ useful is its ability (if believed) to instil in citizens love for their community (not merely calculation that promotion of its well-being is in their own self-interest), through representation of their human identity as membership of a single family, with their core affections and obligations directed to their mother country. It is that sense of basic identity and commensurate obligation, not dialectically based grasp of eternal truth, which will persuade philosophers to take their part in ruling the city. Finally, I tackle the issue – its difficulty highlighted by Socrates himself – of how belief in the narrative is to be secured.

This chapter begins by synthesising the results of the previous modelling chapters, also considering how far one might go with conclusions in each case, given the limits and quality of the various datasets. Having synthesised these data, the models are tested against two ‘known’ networks, described in ancient literature: the Ionian League and the Kalaureian Amphiktyony. In highlighting the differences between the expected and the actual results, the case is made that literature and historical documents can project a greater degree of unity between communities than might have in reality been expressed or presented for reasons of their own political gain and unity.

This book closes by returning to the problem of the polis, and to considering the extent to which a fresh approach can contribute new thoughts to an old debate. In considering what exactly an ancient city was, its activities are emphasised: the fact that a city formed political and economic connection with its neighbours helped to define it. The potentials and pitfalls of modelling for historical enquiry are considered, and the case is made for a more data-driven and ‘scientific’ classical archaeology of the next generation.

This chapter begins by considering the pattern of archaeology in Greece form the past 100 years that has generated huge datasets – and that these datasets have been largely under deployed in making historical conclusions about Greece of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. After reviewing the history of scholarship on ‘Archaic Greece’ (and the relative quietness of scholarship on this topic in the most recent decades) this chapter considers ways in which the huge amount of data from Archaic Greece could be organised and analysed. Various methods from the Digital Humanities are considered, with discussion focusing also on data cleaning and organisation, before proposing that network analysis will be a useful framework for this study in making clear the ways in which the first communities of Archaic Greece formed economic and political alliances – and rivalries – with one another.

This chapter follows microcosmic worlds figured in the skyscraper across three “Chicago Schools”: in architecture, in urban sociology, and in political economy. Three novels map three historical phases: Frank Norris’s The Pit (1902), the financialization of wheat in Chicago’s early skyscrapers; Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), the “color line” and the public sphere on Chicago’s South Side; and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), the landscapes of oil and steel in Dubai. In each the skyscraper appears fleetingly on the horizon, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye as it shifts scales from stage to prop. The three corresponding “Chicago Schools” are: the architects of early skyscrapers assembled around the slogan “form follows function”; the group of urban sociologists that included St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, authors of Black Metropolis (1945); and the economists who supplied the neoliberal precepts by which oil wealth was converted into speculative real estate in Dubai and elsewhere. The article concludes with a coda that records, with reference to the work of urban sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod and the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, the stark divisions of labor that haunt these three “Chicagos” and their skyscrapers, from Lake Michigan to the Persian Gulf.