This chapter argues that Black community obtained as much in the 1960s as it did during the 1930s, and as Vincent O. Carter’s overlooked stream-of-consciousness novel, Such Sweet Thunder itself implies is inevitably the case, it was forged as much in the context of what we might call collective domesticity as in the properly political public sphere. Indeed, Carter’s novel offers up three primary mechanisms for the establishment and maintenance of African American community that, precisely because they are by no means unfamiliar, certainly have to have been deployed throughout the entire period during which Carter was seeking a publisher: social dance and musical enjoyment; communal food preparation and consumption; and storytelling. If we trace some of the ways these mechanisms were implemented in that 1960s historical context, as this chapter explains, we can arrive at a fuller understanding of what constituted African American life during the period than if we focus on political activity alone, with the likely result that we will also arrive at an expanded conception of African American literary culture during this pivotal decade.

This chapter explores the similarities between Abraham Tucker, who lived in the eighteenth century and outwardly appeared to be a follower of Locke, and William James, whose life spanned the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James is one of the most famous and best loved psychologists, while Tucker has been almost completely forgotten. However, they held very similar views about the mind; and in their writing, both were superb users of telling examples. Tucker anticipated James’ view of consciousness as a stream and much more besides. He also recognised that theory and examples often stood in conflict one with the other; and James was to warn against the psychologist’s fallacy, which occurs when psychologists only notice what their theoretical concepts guide them to notice. Both James and Tucker agreed on the importance of examining concrete examples, rather than formulating abstract theories, for understanding the nature of experience.

The third chapter, “Paris Digested,” shows how Joyce extends this singular exchange into the sentient thinking of the Ulyssean stream of consciousness by drawing on the interior monologue form pioneered by the post-Symbolist Edouard Dujardin in Les Lauriers sont coupés. Initiated into an embodied aesthetic practice through Molly’s sharing of the seedcake on Howth Head, Bloom models a permeable digestive being who traverses the binaries of aggression and the predatory structures in which he finds himself in “Lestrygonians.” This embodied aesthetic practice guides Bloom’s informal commentary on neoclassical aesthetics in his reflections on Greek statues and excretion at the counter of a public house.

This chapter examines Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–1938), and selections of non-fiction writing by Virginia Woolf published between 1919 and 1925. It argues that the fluid psychology we traditionally associate with twentieth-century experiments in literary form begins with the impact of nineteenth-century climate science on realist fiction. The atmospheric modes of female consciousness and ethereal embodiment that women’s presumed sensitivity to climate engenders in novels like Jane Eyre and Bleak House thus give rise to later, feminist engagements with female authorship such as Richardson’s and Woolf’s. Taking May Sinclair’s pioneering use of the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe Pilgrimage in 1918 as a pivot point, the chapter connects Richardson’s acknowledged debt to Villette with the climatic underpinnings that inform Woolf’s responses to both of these novels as well as her famous definition of modern fiction as ‘an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.