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This chapter explores the relationship between natural disaster, Apocalypse, emotions and time through a number of pamphlets in the late sixteenth-century collection of the Zurich pastor, Johann Jakob Wick. Zika argues that in early modern Europe the Apocalypse provided a potent meaning-making system for the collective emotional impact and social disruption caused by disaster, and also helped establish an emotional state that reinforced the conviction that the End Time had either arrived or was imminent. The imminence of the Apocalypse sometimes also stimulated strong feelings of being out-of-time, a new dimension in which linear time had collapsed and could be both lengthened and shortened. As a result emotions often became more intense and also conflicted, and the meaning and memory of disaster could be transformed.

This essay explores mental journeys that probe the edges of knowledge and experience. Edges are inherently paradoxical and perplexing, marking both safety and danger, access and containment. In the context of travel, maps can be central to the process of ‘locating’ places in the geographical and literary imagination; but cartography is also a practice that exposes where our knowledge begins and ends. Inevitably, there remains the question of what lies beyond the ‘edge’, outside the map of known places. This essay asks the question: how do we deal with terrae incognitae — the unknown or ‘empty’ spaces on the map?

The years of 1955 and 1956 are generally considered a watershed in twentieth-century English drama. In 1955, Waiting for Godot was performed at the Arts, directed by Peter Hall, and 1956 saw the visit of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble to London and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court. In their different ways, these productions seemed to offer ways of escape from the stifling routines of the well-made play. While Osborne’s play, considered revolutionary at its time, is now considered “fairly orthodox,”1 the impact of absurd drama and epic theatre was more profound and enduring. Waiting for Godot was a liberating experience for playwrights because it broke all the rules: there is no specified place or time, the characters do not seem to have a history or any psychological “depth” and, perhaps most importantly, the plot does not follow the traditional formula of “rising action — climax — falling action,” but after some time starts to repeat itself. Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble, by contrast, served as a model for a pronouncedly political, radical theatre, and on the level of theatrical style, suggested an escape from the confines of the well-made play by smashing the “fourth wall.”

Theodor Adorno once famously opined that philosophy continues to exist because the moment for its abolition was missed.1 In an ironic parallel, the same might be said of Marxist literary and cultural theory. It continues because the moment for its abolition was missed, when the old mole of history decided to assert itself instead of subsiding into the hibernation predicted in the famous post-1989 edict of Francis Fukuyama: the end of history.2 Instead of the steady-state, stable capitalist societies envisioned by Fukuyama, we have witnessed the near-collapse of the global capitalist financial infrastructure with resulting social and political turmoil, including the revival of anti-immigrant and anti-Keynesian forces, and the imposition of austerity and no-end-in-sight high unemployment in both Europe and the United States. This is on top of a slightly older resistance to capitalist globalization manifested in the various religious fundamentalisms and other political movements of our time. And even more recently and unexpectedly, something like both 1848 and 1989 seems to have occurred again in the Middle East.

‘Recessional’ and ‘White Man’s Burden’ have been crucial in establishing Rudyard Kipling’s reputation as the de facto poet laureate of the British Empire. ‘Recessional’ celebrates the sacrosanct nature of the civilising mission and chastises those who cheapen it through ‘tumult’ and ’shouting’ (Kipling, 1996a: 266). Written for Queen Victoria’s jubilee, it serves as a reminder of the fate of empires that forget divine providence and indulge in displays of pride and pomp. Kipling intended it as a nuzzur-wattu, ‘an averter of the Evil Eye’ (1977: 120). ‘White Man’s Burden’ operates as a virtual manifesto of empire’s purpose and the racial theories on which it was constructed. The poem upholds the certitude of race even while it covertly acknowledges the nature of conquest by using the imagery of trapping and hunting. Yet other poems and some short stories reveal a subversive side that surfaced only occasionally and was coded in complex ways. Read against such poems and short stories, the works which afford Kipling his reputation as a jingoist would seem to be rehearsing empire. At the very least, Kipling’s oeuvre reveals what Angus Wilson describes as ‘the poetry of tension, not of “give”’ (1977: 117). Nowhere is this more apparent than in his writings about war.

In October 1835 Derwent Coleridge wrote to his brother Hartley in the role of family peacemaker. Hartley had bruised the feelings of their sister Sara in his, perhaps too vigorous, attack on the veracity of her husband, Henry Nelson Coleridge’s edition of ‘specimens’ of their father’s Table Talk. Derwent struck a conciliatory tone, both admitting the merit of Hartley’s view that: ‘It [the volume] is, and could not but have been, fragmentary in respect to the conversation extracted—yet a succession of little wholes in respect of itself’,1 and defending the work on the grounds that it was clearly impossible to capture Coleridge’s conversa­tional brilliance. In this argument, the ‘little wholes’ that Henry pro­duced had their source in Coleridge’s talk, but inevitably failed in their task of accurate representation. The very nature of Coleridge’s speech made it inimitable; Derwent described it thus: ‘the heard gust of a corn-blowing wind, that came from I know not whence, and went you knew not whither—a stream, with an eddying surface, yet with an unchecked progression: the very substances broken and suggestive, rather than expressive and declarative’.

How do we understand other people’s emotions? In attempting to explain this question, the concept of empathy has become quite a popular subject in both philosophy and psychology.

During a typically angst-filled episode in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), the protagonist (Ethan Hawke) watches a video of a Buddhist monk expounding a philosophy of interrelatedness: We have this word to be. But what 1 propose is … a word to interbe … Because it is not possible to be alone. You need other beings in order to be. Not only do you need father, mother, but also uncle, brother, sister, society … sunshine, river, air, trees, birds, elephants, and … it is impossible to be by yourself, alone. You have to interbe with everyone and everything else. And, therefore, to be means to interbe.

Henry Wheaton is the Blackstone of international law. By giving lawyers a simple, clear and convincing description of international law, as he understood it, Wheaton shaped the law of nations for his contemporaries, and their successors for at least half a century after his death. Wheaton’s Elements of International Law, first published in 1836, went through many editions, culminating in the canonical eighth edition, with notes by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., published in 1866. Dana’s became the most frequently cited version, and was selected by the Carnegie Endowment for reproduction in its series on the Classics of International Law. Wheaton’s Elements of lnternational Law presents the classic statement of international law doctrine, as it was understood for most of the nineteenth century.