This chapter outlines how Christopher Brennan ushered in an experimental strand of Australian poetry through his engagement with French Symbolism, which was followed by John Shaw Nielson’s celebration of intuition and the more-than-human. It considers Nietzschean vitalism in Kenneth Slessor’s representation of urban Sydney and analyses the beauty and nihilism of his “Five Bells.” The chapter also argues that Lesbia Harford’s poetry was modernist in its radical openness about female sexuality and the female body, its minimalist representation of the working life of modern women, and lack of Romantic assumptions in her treatment of the natural world. It further considers the rhetorical force and frankness of queer desire in the work of Anna Wickham, before addressing the hoax poet Ern Malley.

This chapter looks at the profound advances made over the past two decades or so in our understanding of modern human origins, of how humans lived in southern Africa during Marine Isotope Stages 6−4, and of their cognitive capacities. While genetics and palaeontology cannot establish a central role for southern Africa in H. sapiens’ emergence, the region provides the most detailed early evidence anywhere for a wide range of complex behaviours that speak to the cognitive abilities of those responsible for them: art, jewellery, bone tools, archery, pigment manufacture, pyrotechnology, snaring and trapping of small game, etc. Much of this material is associated with the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort industries and the significance of this is discussed along with how southern Africa’s record relates to the wider Palaeolithic context in Africa and Eurasia. While underlining the importance of sites like Blombos, Border Cave, Klasies River, Pinnacle Point, and Sibhudu, the chapter emphasises the limitations of (near-)coastal/Fynbos Biome-oriented research and the increasing importance of fieldwork in other regions, such as Namaqualand, the southern Kalahari, and highland Lesotho.

Although Impressionism and Symbolism are but two of the numerous ‘-isms’ found in Paris in Debussy’s early years, these two movements are invariably associated with him. This chapter defines the symbolist literary style in France and surveys its development through some of its leading figures as well as its diffusion through some of its main institutions (Mallarmé’s salon, cafés, journals, bookstores). The author distinguishes between two phases in Debussy’s creative output: 1882–1902, when French-speaking literary symbolism clearly dominated the composer’s inspiration, and 1902–1917, when he became receptive to a wider range of poetry (especially that of French poets from the 15th to the 17th centuries). Important Debussy landmark pieces inspired by Symbolist writers (mélodies, the orchestral piece Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and the opera Pelléas et Mélisande) are situated within the context of other musical works equally inspired by the same writers (Fauré, Bonheur, Bréville, Chabrier, Charpentier, Chausson, Duparc, Ravel).

Debussy’s operatic aesthetic is defined as much in relation to the traditional genres of French opera as in relation to Wagner or naturalism. His style is built by both assimilation and opposition – the two processes can be simultaneous. The assimilation process, considered as a more or less visible and conscious form of appropriation, is the most commented on in the case of Pelléas et Mélisande: what Wagnerian processes does Debussy retain in his score? How does he integrate earlier styles into his writing? What elements of Russian music may have influenced him? And so on. The opposition process is less often analysed, for it is not confined to the rejection of a work, but hinges on this work by responding negatively to its musical concepts. With Debussy, negation becomes a powerful creative operation. One of the peculiarities of his personality is radicalism, amplified by the search for an ideal and uniqueness. To write is to gradually eliminate the easy solutions, the surplus, the conventions.

Paul Dukas believed that the strongest influence that Debussy came under was that of writers, not composers. Writers were also prominent in his friendship circles, and this chapter outlines the importance of these circles to Debussy’s musical development. So many French composers have been influenced by artists of all types at least as much as by their musical peers, and Debussy was no exception to this. Perhaps surprisingly for someone so personally reserved, his face-to-face encounters with writers were at least as important to him as the time he spent reading their books. But as a collaborator, he was far better at discussing projects than actually completing them: Debussy’s list of projected theatrical works is considerably longer than his list of achievements in this sphere. His personal connections with writers started with the odd coincidence that Debussy’s first piano teacher was Paul Verlaine’s mother-in-law, Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville; her daughter, Mathilde, and the poet lived under her roof when the nine-year-old Debussy studied with her.

Since the early 1880s, Paris had become a place where it was possible to be ‘modern’. In the arts, by Modernism we mean a vast movement based on the concept of modernity appealing to the notions of evolution, progress, independence, freedom, and also resistance to certain social and economic change. Modernism in art in the broadest sense will constantly evolve and take many forms. Thus, if Symbolism and Impressionism dominated the Debussyan sphere, many other movements marked the period (1880–1914) and they aroused varied reactions on the composer’s part, ranging from the sincerest interest to the most pronounced rejection. To be interested in Modernism in the world of Debussy is therefore to be as interested in Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, Orphism, Cubism, Naturalism, and even in Futurism. Art Nouveau (Modern Style) is given its due in this broad context. Debussy was particularly sensitive to the style and possessed a magnificent Art Nouveau lamp by the English firm Benson & Co., which he probably bought at the Siegfried Bing gallery Maison de l’Art Nouveau (Bing was a great proponent of Art Nouveau).

Chapter 2 focuses on the early poetry and drama, in which Yeats discovers the worldmaking potential of art and creates at least two kinds of autonomous imaginary worlds: an impossible one based on the otherworld of faery, a parallel world of nonhuman beings and magical practices, and a possible one based on the private world of the lover and beloved, a world created in the artistic recasting of memory and desire. In the poetry, temporality is recursive and generative, with aspects of the past and future arranged in a nested fashion so that temporal moments are embedded in one another and, in a sense, produce one another. The early drama tends to express this tensed temporality in terms of the confrontation between two worlds: the actual world and the faery otherworld. These tensed temporalities enable both an accommodation of what is outside the realm of human experience and a renewed sense of the nature and limits of that experience. Misprision – the strange deceptions of the faery otherworld on the one hand and the recollected fantasies that structure so many of the early poems on the other – characterizes these new temporal arrangements.

Messiaen’s music is rhythmically and harmonically complex. It reflects, as he affirmed, the miraculous beauty of God’s Creation. By the early 1940s, he had developed a musical language of religious symbolism comprising a variety of components. The building blocks on which this language is based and the contents their inventor intended them to represent were clearly defined, and hardly changed in the course of the composer’s long life. This article gives an overview of this symbolism and discusses the prevalent devices Messiaen used, along with the religious concepts informing each of them.

Messiaen was inspired by a pantheon of saints and theologians that were important to him: Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse de Lisieux, and then Ernest Hello, Dom. Columba Marmion, Romano Guardini, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This chapter focusses in particular on St Thomas Aquinas, whose work exerted the greatest influence on Messiaen’s understanding of Christian doctrine. It examines the way this shaped his language, and assesses the range of the symbolic manifestations of Aquinas’s thought in his art.

For much of its history The Magic Flute has posed source problems. Some single out literary antecedents drawn from a variety of genres; others emphasize social and cultural influences. To see Mozart’s last opera instead as a synthetic, exploratory work questions whether these different readings are necessarily at odds with each other. As Goethe suggested, the work seems to offer different readings to different audiences. Gernot Gruber has distinguished “causal-historical” readings of the opera, which ground themselves in its cultural-political world, and “metahistorical” ones, which favor the abstract, the mythic, or the universally human. These categories may themselves complement rather than compete with each other.

This chapter looks at the discursive production of theater as a decadent institution over the course of the fin de siècle in Britain and France, focusing especially on the prevalence of the antitheatrical prejudice at the time. It considers why theater was thought to be inadequate or injurious on the basis of several kinds of impurity, including the pejorative condemnation of its potentially viral degeneracy (moral impurity), critical ruminations on creative sclerosis and declining artistic standards (aesthetic impurity), as well as the reasons why several prominent playwrights and critics of the period who were closely associated with both decadence and symbolism were uneasy about the staging of decadent drama (metaphysical impurity). Moving from a two-dimensional account of theater’s decadence in the hands of moral purity advocates, to a more nuanced consideration of the surprisingly generative qualities of the “Paterian paradox,” the chapter argues that theater’s decadent “wrongness,” especially when it is embodied and enacted, may be the best starting point we have for appreciating its role in a nascent modernism.

The manner in which armed conflicts are catagorised is an important feature of the politics of warfare. There are different implications and aspects of symbolism whether a conflict is categorised as being a civil war or a geopolitical shatterbelt. This is of relevance and significance for foreign sponsors and patrons of the conflict as terminology is useful in determining how different audiences perceive and react to the conflict in question. This chapter explores the rhetorical categorisation of the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine in terms of the narratives and storytelling used to engineer opinions, perceptions and responses to these conflicts.

Culture and language are crucial elements of the information realm to interpret and represent contemporary armed conflict in the cognitive realm. They set the tone for how different audiences perceive mediated conflict events, which engineers observers’ opinions, perceptions and responses to the physical realm event. Language and culture have been instrumentalised by Western countries to facilitate conflict and warfare, creating unneccessary wars of choice through creating simple binary stories of ’Us’ versus the ’Other’ that attempt to convince the audience of the moral and ethical superiority of ’Us’ over the ’Other’. The result has been the Endless Wars and the rapidly expanding New Cold War.

In this chapter, the most common narratives relating to the function and purpose of investment treaties are analysed that emerged from our data. The overarching discursive framework of the narratives about IIAs’ purpose was marked by the faith in their important role in economic development of the studied countries (IIAs as articles of faith). This broader view was undergirded by the idea of a linear and progressive march of history, in which earlier state and economic formations are eventually transformed into the universally superior social order of capitalist legality, rule of law, and good governance (IIAs as progressive economic development). This broader progressive narrative about IIAs was translated in more specific narratives about IIAs in specific temporal and spatial contexts. International investment agreements were, thus, viewed either as a natural necessity, as a necessary (lesser) evil in the march towards economic progress, or simply as benign instruments that merely reflect the progress already undertaken. Finally, IIAs were also signed to express cultural affinity and played a symbolic role in showing political like-mindedness (IIAs as symbolic tokens of political affinity). In some cases, IIAs helped to project countries’ self-perception of their position in the stylised international relation hierarchy as ‘developed states’.

In the 1950s, University of Pennsylvania archaeologists recovered over fifty pieces of wooden furniture from three royal tumulus burials and the city mound at Gordion, Turkey. Tumuli MM and P (eighth century BCE) contained thirteen tables and three serving stands with characteristic Phrygian features. The style and joinery of the tables tie them to a long trajectory of wooden tables from the ancient Near East. A variety of fine wooden objects was found in two tombs excavated in 1972 at Verucchio in northern Italy (late eighth through early seventh centuries BCE). The finds from tombs 85 and 89 include wood tables, footstools, thrones, boxes, and other organic materials. Three tables from tomb 85 had legs attached to the table top with a version of the collar-and-tenon joinery used for the Gordion tables. Rarely are ancient wooden artifacts recovered in good condition; the finds from Verucchio and Gordion provide a large and important corpus from the early first millennium BCE. This paper examines the similarities (and differences) between Gordion and Verucchio wooden furniture and investigates the possibility of interaction between Near Eastern and Italic woodworking schools in the eighth through the seventh centuries BCE.

Lindsay Ceballos examines the circles of avant-garde Russian poets who grew up alongside Chekhov’s writing and who saw in Chekhov – among many other qualities – a “realist” antagonist, fellow symbolist, “poet of despair,” paragon of moral fortitude, and ultimately a larger-than-life embodiment of the Russian cultural edifice at the turn of the century.