This chapter examines Clare’s place among the poets in his own lifetime and more recently. The first section considers his appeal to recent and contemporary poets such as Heaney and Paulin. It argues that they have been inspired by Clare’s commitment to the local and provincial, especially his use of local vernacular, and also by his aesthetic of the uncouth and rebarbative, which also influenced Thomas. It goes on to explore how Clare’s close sensory attention to the natural world influenced Thomas, Longley, Oswald, and Jamie.  The second section argues that Clare’s poetry developed in conversation with his wide reading. It focuses on a number of examples, including Collins, Cowper, and Thomson. Reading these poets alongside and through Clare we see new features of their writing emerge, giving us a richer, more dynamic sense of eighteenth-century verse, and of Clare’s poetry.

This chapter explores the relationship between John Clare’s writing and the evolving discipline of ecocriticism which, in its broadest terms, treats literature as a representation of the physical world and the reader as a mediator between these complex environments. Clare’s work was central to the early ecocritical canon of the 1990s and continues, in more recent years, to shape our understanding of how and why environmental writing matters, particularly in a context of ecological despoliation, species extinction, and global warming. That Clare’s resolutely local voice and perspective should be at all relevant to an understanding of our broader world speaks to the challenge that he poses to modern readers by the example of his own relation to natural otherness. That relation, exemplified in poems such as ‘The Nightingales Nest’, is predicated on habits of attention and self-circumscription, a sequence by which the poet as ecological actor evokes the experience of coexistence.

It is close to 15 years since the first edition of this text was published in 2010, and then translated into Korean in 2014. The second edition was published in 2015 and translated into Chinese in 2018. Much has happened in early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) since then. Hence, the case for a third edition was persuasive. When the first edition was written, the text demonstrated mainly an Australian orientation, while the second edition expanded authorship to include more international chapters. This third edition builds on the work of all previous authors and, as editors, we argue that the content of the two previous editions continues to be highly relevant! This third edition offers a much wider range of chapters from around the globe and almost double the number of authors, though it continues to maintain its Australian applicability. We reflect that Australian ECEfS benefits from the ideas and experiences of authors beyond Australia, just as we believe Australian perspectives have much to offer readers internationally.

This chapter puts forward new guidelines for designing and implementing distributed machine learning algorithms for big data. First, we present two different alternatives, which we call local and global approaches. To show how these two strategies work, we focus on the classical decision tree algorithm, revising its functioning and some details that need modification to deal with large datasets. We implement a local-based solution for decision trees, comparing its behavior and efficiency against a sequential model and the MLlib version. We also discuss the nitty-gritty of the implementation of decision trees in MLlib as a great example of a global solution. That allows us to formally define these two concepts, discussing the key (expected) advantages and disadvantages. The second part is all about measuring the scalability of a big data solution. We talk about three classical metrics, speed-up, size-up, and scale-up, to help understand if a distributed solution is scalable. Using these, we test our local-based approach and compare it against its global counterpart. This experiment allows us to give some tips for calculating these metrics correctly using a Spark cluster.

The constitution of any state, whether written or unwritten, is the set of political, governmental and legal structures and shared values within which the business of everyday politics and governance operate. In fourteenth-century England there occurred the first two depositions in post-Conquest English history, which were precipitated by ‘unconstitutional’ behaviour by the monarchs in question and were effected by ‘unconstitutional’ legal devices on the part of the community of the realm. It was a century of cataclysmic demographic transformation brought about by the Black Death, of almost constant warfare with Scotland and France and of spectacular governmental growth and legal change. It is therefore ironic that, when English constitutional history was at its height, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourteenth century, parliamentary developments apart, was regarded as a sorry backwater. It was useful only to reflect on how a wrong turning had been taken. ‘We pass’, Bishop Stubbs lamented, ‘from an age of heroism to the age of chivalry, from a century ennobled by devotion and self-sacrifice to one in which the gloss of superficial refinement fails to hide the reality of heartless selfishness and moral degradation’.1

There have been several calls for transformation in food systems to address the challenges of climate change, hunger, continuing population pressure, and to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Although complicated, working across scales and actors is critical for food-system transformation, alongside understanding the entry points. As agricultural research for development (AR4D) is ultimately about farming practices and farmer livelihoods, a focus on the local scale is essential, as in most cases, farms and districts are where the most action is required. Through effective cross-scale work, lessons from local levels can shape the thinking of regional and national governments, as well as the private sector. Involving multiple and ideally nested scales, designing sets of solutions, and developing actionable, fundable, and implementable solutions is likely to provide rich food-system outcomes. Partners need to provide the tools, signals, and resources so that local people, communities, and policy planners are empowered to drive transformation.

Surveys the extensive literature concerning inequalities of classical Hardy type.

Historic places are vulnerable to a wide variety of threats: neglect, lack of maintenance, demolition, war, and, of course, time itself. No physical or legal intervention will ever be able to make them last forever. Yet, laws can help make historic sites more resilient to the avoidable consequences of obvious threats. This chapter focuses on the legal framework in the United States for fortifying heritage against one particular threat: disasters resulting from natural hazards. Natural hazards include large-scale meteorological and geological events such as hurricanes, tropical storms, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, wildfires, earthquakes, extreme heat, and drought. Climate change has made many of these events more frequent and more intense. Given the increasing risks to historic sites, one might think that planning, mitigation, and recovery efforts are being undertaken with increased urgency. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Without adequate planning and protection, some of our cultural heritage has already been lost or will be lost imminently. This chapter begins by identifying and assessing current policies regarding the protection of historic resources before, during, and after a disaster. It highlights key elements for successful legal protection at each of these three stages. Then it describes our multi-governmental, federalist framework for heritage-related disaster policy. This policymaking takes place at the federal, state, and local levels, mostly through the legislative process and action by executive agencies. Each level of government plays overlapping roles in planning for, mitigating, and recovering from disaster. As the scale of government gets smaller, coordination among historic preservation authorities becomes either less effective or non-existent. This chapter covers each level of government in turn by first describing federal disaster planning and historic preservation requirements. Next, the chapter explores how two states and four local governments have integrated disaster mitigation and historic preservation considerations.

Chapter 11 analyzes the fiscal relationship between the central and local governments. It first examines China’s budget system and the central-local tax sharing system, the fiscal imbalance between local fiscal revenues and expenditures, and the massive fiscal transfers from the central to local governments. It then discusses fiscal decentralization through extra-budgetary revenue collection, land sales, and bank borrowing by local governments. Next, it discusses the fiscal imbalance of the central and local governments and regional fiscal disparities. Policy suggestions on how to improve the central and local fiscal relationship are provided in the end, including the increase in local government revenue and the shift of some expenditure responsibilities from local governments to the central government, as well as granting local governments more fiscal freedom.

From the 1920s onward, James Joyce and Latin American literature have been inextricably connected. Anglo-American criticism has traditionally seen this connection as a case of influence radiating from an iconic figure of European Modernism to the periphery. However, a close analysis of how prominent writers from Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar to Gustavo Sainz and Ricardo Piglia received and engaged with Joyce’s work reveals a less centralizing literary map. In their critical and creative writings, Joyce appears not as a model to be emulated but as an irreverent Irish writer that occupied an eccentric position within the Western literary tradition. Responding to changing political and social landscapes and diverse national contexts, these Latin American authors have marshalled and refashioned Joyce’s eccentricity to express their local conditions and cultural specificity in a cosmopolitan literary style.

Sean Lathan’s chapter addresses the recent explosion of article submissions to the James Joyce Quarterly from areas outside Europe and North America, especially Asia, and consider the questions of academic methodology and critical apparatus that this new situation raises. Ulysses, as we know, has been translated into dozens of languages and is read across the world.Approximately half of the submissions that arrive at the JJQ each year come from outside the United States, and over a third are from non-Anglophone countries.In a marked break from even ten years ago, the journal now regularly receives submissions from Iran, China, Sweden, and Japan. What does it mean to think about Joyce in this genuinely global context?This question is itself connected to a larger set of debates now playing out in modernist studies more generally about the intersections between the local and the regional, the national and the global, the marginal and the cosmopolitan, the intra-imperial and the transnational. This chapter explores what it means to see Ulysses from these different critical vantage points and how that, in turn, shapes our perception of the book as a work of art, a piece of globally circulated cultural capital, and an icon that looms over contemporary literary history.The aim of this chapteris not to claim Joyce’s masterwork for any particular critical school, but instead to explore how Ulysses changes when seen from these different perspectives.The chapter concludes by speculating about what this might portend for a new understanding of Joyce, as well as for a modernism no longer organized around national or linguistic coordinates.

Sean Lathan’s chapter addresses the recent explosion of article submissions to the James Joyce Quarterly from areas outside Europe and North America, especially Asia, and consider the questions of academic methodology and critical apparatus that this new situation raises. Ulysses, as we know, has been translated into dozens of languages and is read across the world.Approximately half of the submissions that arrive at the JJQ each year come from outside the United States, and over a third are from non-Anglophone countries.In a marked break from even ten years ago, the journal now regularly receives submissions from Iran, China, Sweden, and Japan. What does it mean to think about Joyce in this genuinely global context?This question is itself connected to a larger set of debates now playing out in modernist studies more generally about the intersections between the local and the regional, the national and the global, the marginal and the cosmopolitan, the intra-imperial and the transnational. This chapter explores what it means to see Ulysses from these different critical vantage points and how that, in turn, shapes our perception of the book as a work of art, a piece of globally circulated cultural capital, and an icon that looms over contemporary literary history.The aim of this chapteris not to claim Joyce’s masterwork for any particular critical school, but instead to explore how Ulysses changes when seen from these different perspectives.The chapter concludes by speculating about what this might portend for a new understanding of Joyce, as well as for a modernism no longer organized around national or linguistic coordinates.

Christine Cusick argues in this chapter that “an ethics of environmental engagement [often] decenters a sense of nation,” revising our sense of identity honed within discourses of political modernity. She focuses on this crucial aspect of ecological dwelling, countering the rise of nationalist discourses in the twenty-first century. Irish literature, like many other postcolonial literary traditions, is in a bind here: Questions related to borders and border transgressions (central to the discourse of political modernity) need to be rethought in the present. Cusick notes that “Implicit in the question of border mapping is the familiar question about how a critical discourse might approach texts as locally embedded without denigrating global import.” The essay draws on the work of the geographer Nessa Cronin and the polymathic narratives of Tim Robinson but moves beyond them to center contemporary Irish writers.