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Perhaps no episode encapsulates the wide-ranging effects the sociable encounter can have better than James Boswell’s 1765 meeting with Pascal Paoli. In analysing this event and its several contexts, the chapter looks at how different notions of the social played a role in shaping its significance for Boswell, Paoli and the British public. Boswell’s trip can be seen as a constant recalibration of his expectations as to what kind of sociability he would encounter, from an idealized “noble savage” concept to a pseudo-Roman civic simplicity all the way to the surprising encounter of an accomplished and enlightened sociability with Paoli at its centre. Indeed, it is Paoli himself who enables Boswell—and later, during his long exile in London, fashionable society—to act as a bridge between the “noble savage” notion about Corsicans and the Enlightened hopes that were connected to their project of achieving “liberty”.

This chapter reexamines the debates over the nature of Chinese writing and attempts to bring theoretical discourses on the sign in Chinese and Western thought into a meaningful dialogue so as to acquire useful insights for providing answers to some fundamental questions concerning the nature of Chinese and Western written sign, the linguistic gap between Chinese and Western writing systems, possible common ground for linguistic differences, and analytical tool that can be used to create a bridge across the gap. It argues that despite the distinct contrast between the ideographic nature of Chinese writing and the phonocentric nature of Western writing, Chinese language philosophy is not significantly different from its Western counterpart in the conceptions of linguistic sign.

An official announcement was made in late 2015 that the Oresund region would be rebranded as ‘Greater Copenhagen and Malmo’ from 2016. This event makes clear the exigency of this book as an attempt to understand how the cultural narratives of the Oresund region were imagined before the rebrand, and how film and television had captured the region’s fault lines, fractures, and its trajectory from the exuberant, optimistic inauguration as a borderless region until the eventual (re)separation into two national territories. This introductory chapter includes a concise description of the aims and motivations of the present study and positions the book as a contribution to Scandinavian screen studies. The introduction also addresses the significant role that the popular Nordic noir television series Bron/Broen (The Bridge) has played in mediating particular visions of the region to an international audience and therefore positions this book as a necessary companion to analyse how different media genres present alternative narratives of the Oresund. A brief introduction of each of the following chapters rounds off this section.

In editing ethnographic film, a visual psychological anthropology (VPA) approach calls for the theorized yet inductive process of narrative development, the necessary artifice of narrative shape, and an emphasis on participant emotional experience and viewer emotional response, despite the risks of attempting to bridge different cultural worlds of emotional expression. A comparative discussion of the three films – 40 Years of Silence, Bitter Honey, and Standing on the Edge of a Thorn – illustrates how these shared tenets lead to meaningful differences in film structure and style in terms of narrator (be it academic “expert,” cultural authority, or participant first-person), supporting visuals (such as archives, art, and symbolic imagery), and other techniques such as montage, soundtrack and diagetic music, and sound design.

This chapter builds a bridge between the cathedral’s pagan pre-history and the Reformation. In A Survay of London (1598), John Stow recalls a medieval biannual celebration still occurring through the first half of the sixteenth century involving a ‘buck being brought up to the steps of the high Altar in Paul’s church’. The procession signalled a collaboration between Church and State paradoxically projected onto the body of the divided deer. The enactment of ecclesiastical and temporal power rendered the procession symbolically potent during the restoration of Catholicism under Mary Tudor, while its sacrificial resonances with both the pagan pre-history of the site and with popish and medieval ceremonialism made this a charged occasion for Elizabethan commentators. This chapter explores the Keepers’ processions in the light of the upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century, and examines how socio-political and urban conflicts and cohesions could be enacted through display of the animal body.

Owing to the transcultural nature of “Solomonic Magic,” multilingualism is one of the most dominant features of Solomonic works, which deal mainly with methods for summoning and binding demons for fulfilling wishes. The fifteenth-century Liber Bileth is such Solomonic work, where Arabic demonological structures appear alongside Hebrew and Aramaic formulas. While the process of incorporating “foreign” knowledge into magical texts is considered, occasionally, like an accident or a misunderstanding of the authors, in Solomonic works, especially in Liber Bileth, the authors are well aware of this kind of knowledge, and they even used it to bridge some gaps in their textual traditions. This chapter focuses on the case of Liber Bileth, followed by a discussion concerning a work by Yohanan Alemanno, a renaissance Kabbalist who used Arabic and Christian traditions to systematize Solomonic practices. These aim to shed light on the history of several Solomonic works.

The Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches do not only share a common liturgical, cultural, and spiritual heritage but also a legal one, which is rarely subject to academic discussion, although the congruent elements in their legal structures could constitute a vital component of ecumenism. This chapter addresses such a component on the example of the concept of synodality, which is firmly established in the Orthodox as well as the Eastern Catholic Churches. Subjects of comparison in particular are the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Russian Orthodox Church. The chapter applies a comparative approach and draws conclusions for the ecumenical dialogue. The main thesis is that the concept of synodality is not something “stolen,” but, rather, it is a mutually preserved and shared patrimony which forms a bridge between the both traditions.

The article explores intergenerational aspects of play in two contemporary picture books. The discussion of the form and the content of the books relies on Krystyna Milobedzka’s philosophy of art and on Wieslaw Karolak’s reflections on education through art and play. The main premise of the text is that art can become a site of an intergenerational encounter through its playful and ethically engaged approach inspired by the experience of childhood. The picture books selected for analysis bridge imaginary childhood and adulthood, fostering a holistic vision of human consciousness through their use of avant-garde visual strategies and through their effective integration of the playful visual convention with a universally appealing narrative content.

A truly unexpected musical phenomenon transpired in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. Many Japanese intellectuals demonstrated an intense dedication to Richard Wagner, despite many of them having never watched the German artist’s work live. This phenomenon reveals the mechanisms of music transfer across cultural borders, which otherwise can remain hidden within the choices and preferences of individual aficionados. This chapter examines the significant role that non-musical, conceptual components—in this case, devotion to Wagner’s philosophical thought—can play in the transfer process. These elements help the recipients, who may be puzzled by utterly unfamiliar sounds, bridge the transitional period, until they can eventually adjust to the imported music and its underlying logic.

Petri nets are a well-known mathematical formalism usually applied to the fields of information representation and manipulation. Scientific literature has demonstrated their applicability to the field of music analysis, thanks to the possibility to achieve a clear description of music processes and transformations, to obtain easy-to-understand graphical representation, and to use formal tools for net analysis. More remarkably, the adoption of Petri nets can foster also music creation, above all for compositions based on the transformation of music objects. Nevertheless, there is a gap between the way a music piece is typically conceived and the way it can be described in terms of Petri nets, or another equivalent formal tools. The goal of the present work is to demonstrate how digital approaches rooted in computer-human interaction can bridge such a gap, thus fostering both creativity and analytical activities in music composition processes.

Leos Carax’s Lovers on the Bridge updates Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. The physicality of his star and alter ego, Denis Lavant, along with admiration for the imagery of silent cinema, turned Carax’s attention to Chaplin’s Tramp. Lovers, like City Lights, is an allegory of class difference, recast because of the sixty-year temporal distance between the films. Cynicism replaces Chaplin’s naive embrace of human goodness, and the media environment of human society has greatly changed. Lovers on the Bridge especially reflects the expanded range of stylistic options over the long arc of cinema history: Carax’s narrative no longer contains its characters and ideas but rather is roiled from within, moving beyond any definition of realism in the relationship among story, characters, events, and their representation.

In this chapter Alyson Campbell looks at The Butch Monologues (TBM) by Libro Levi (Doc) Bridgeman, directed by JulieMc McNamara (Mack) (2013–present). Based mainly on an interview with the writer and director, and Campbell’s own multiple viewings of the work, the chapter examines how the collection and, more precisely, the productions of it, make an intervention into this very painful contemporary context, and history, of ‘“border wars’ between butch lesbians and trans men” (Mackay in J Lesbian Stud 23:399, 2019b; and see Halberstam, 1998). It is suggested that TBM manage to blur these borders, or at least niggle this negative framing, and Campbell argues that the stories it tells are more relevant than ever, given this current tension.

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘bridge church’ as it has been developed in the Church of England. It shows how the idea became a common image of Anglicanism from those outside, especially Roman Catholic commentators including Yves Congar and George Tavard. It shows how this perception was a one-sided view of Anglicanism that gained currency among High Churchmen and was associated with the notion of via media which saw Anglicanism as the church of the Aristotelian mean and standing between the extremes represented by both Catholicism and Protestantism. This is demonstrated by a discussion of the work of two leading nineteenth-century Irish Anglicans, Alexander Knox and John Jebb. It concludes by showing how the concept of the via media has in practice served to caricature other churches and to open up Anglicans to the charge of complacency. It suggests that any churches seeking to build bridges must acknowledge the need to cross over to the ‘extremes’ and not regard themselves as already having reached perfection in the golden mean.

In this paper, I compare two installations’ processes: Avaton (2007) by Nunzio and Revenge (2007–2018) by Vascellari, to claim that to take into account architecture, through the theoretical lens of (Goodman, Language of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1968) and (Genette, Immanence et transcendance, Seuil, Paris, 1994), and their distinction between autographic and allographic works, might help to understand the difference between the copies of an installation (when the second version of a work is not accepted as authentic) and its instances (when the second version of a work is considered as authentic as the preceding ones). In other words, while conservator Laurenson (2006) compared installations to musical compositions, through the prism of Goodman, in this paper, I claim that installations are rather close to architecture, through the prism of Genette, following conservator Caianiello (2013). Indeed, Goodman and Genette did not write especially about installations, and thus, it is useful to create a bridge between an art form they already investigated. Here, it will be demonstrated that architecture is best suited to creating that bridge, allowing to answer the following question: why was it less problematic for conservators to reinstall Avaton than Revenge?

Latin America has posed a range of revolutionary scenarios. This chapter considers both that of guerrilla struggle and that arising from electoral politics, using classic films for illustrative purposes. The films depict revolutionary processes in Cuba (Che Part 1), in Peru and Bolivia (Principal Enemy; Che Part 2), and in Chile (Battle of Chile). Che re-enacts the rise and fall of its protagonist, Ernesto “Che” Guevara; The Principal Enemy is a fictional drama based on actual struggles in the Andes; The Battle of Chile is a documentary about the final turbulent months (in 1973) of the elected Popular Unity government. Questions of how to bridge differences between oppressed peoples and those who would guide them—the perennial questions of leadership—are central in each case.

It is crucial to distinguish between neurological synesthesia (the brain condition that Nabokov had) and “literary” synesthesia, or metaphorical synesthesia—a quite preeminent term in literary studies. Nabokov’s “case” is a very interesting one, as he is a writer whose neural synesthesia is established, and whose texts teem with examples of literary synesthesia—with, however, very few actual references to forms of neurological synesthesia. The aim of this chapter is to see whether one can draw a parallel between Nabokov’s brain condition and his writing. If the connection can seem obvious on a general basis, this chapter aims at showing that the specific issue of synesthesia is not so self-evident, especially in its connection with metaphor, and notably in erotic scenes. The heightened presence of sensory and sensual modalities in these particular texts provides a fitting ground for such an investigation.

The book’s coverage is outlined. The reasons for focusing on the visual arts, popular arts, and paintings not in the collections of art museums are explained. Mass-produced original paintings are described along with their importance to art criticism, the psychology of art, and aesthetics; why they serve as a bridge between the popular and traditional arts; and how their study interrelates science and the humanities. Noted, too, is the place of mass-produced paintings in the fine arts, the popular arts, evolutionary theory, history, cultural studies, aesthetics, and the social sciences, especially psychology. The advantages of studying mass-produced originals and their neglect by the artworld are introduced. The author’s empirical and multidisciplinary approach is emphasized. Mass-produced paintings are illustrated.

The image of a beach-going woman across Gold Coast media and advertising is one that invites male and tourist gazes to admire her as part of the landscape. While literary fiction and memoir set on the Gold Coast acknowledge that the city is mythologised as a bridge to heaven, the gendered aspects of this are rarely touched upon. This chapter finds female-identifying characters aware of and rejecting the local spectacle of the ‘bathing beauty.’ Instead of paradise, female characters perceive the ocean as a site for literal death and metaphorical rebirth, thus revealing that Gold Coast beaches and connecting rivers are for women in literature not features of paradise, but instead represent insecure sanctuary from men and other dangers.

This chapter looks at works that map a Tokyo where events arising from individuals’ “deeper psychic drives”—to quote terminology used by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (2000)—unfold across telephone lines, in the bedrooms of luxury condo buildings, on the city’s watery margins, in a crowded train car in full public view, within the walls of fraying apartments and those of well-tended homes, on the streets of prosperous neighborhoods, in the shadows of the city made visible on the dark web, beneath the surface of the city’s pavement, and within an alternate world. The novels and short stories discussed here expose extreme and unrelenting bullying, sexual abuse and exploitation, domestic violence, random attacks on women walking alone at night, and, of course, murder for multiple reasons and taking multiple forms. They also extend to fearsome events arising out of the natural world. Collectively, the materials illustrate a point made by Philip Howell (1998) that works of crime fiction—to which can be added mystery fiction broadly defined—“can be taken … as alternative epistemologies of the city, worthy of as much consideration as radical geography’s urban knowledge.”

In this chapter, Madeleine Wood explores the treatment of mourning in these female-authored texts through two analyses: ‘North and South: Mourning and Community’ and ‘The Mill on the Floss: Elegy, Memory and Desire’. As Wood shows, Gaskell and Eliot construct ethics in relation to mourning; however, the novels suggest that mourning cannot take place within the enclosed domestic scene, requiring movement out into new social and communal spaces. In North and South, the apparent gulf between working-class man and middle-class woman is bridged through a shared recognition of loss. Mourning for the self means becoming open to the trauma of the other. This proposition is equally applicable to Eliot. Eliot formulates a realist mode adequate to her expansive vision, while simultaneously calling this mode and vision into question. She functions as the bridge between two literary moments: the mid-century period dominated by Dickens and the late-nineteenth-century realist moment. Eliot’s approach therefore differs substantively from the authors addressed in earlier chapters.

This chapter focuses on the development of visual style in Danish drama series. Conceptually, it links motivational categories as they are established by Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985) to a discussion of overt and unobtrusive style. It argues that overt stylistic practices have been important to the internationalization of Danish series in two ways. First, overt style was key to miniseries garnering prizes and critical accolades at international festivals. Secondly, the function of overt visual style has persisted but transformed historically. Highly overt style in miniseries has migrated to long-form series, taking on a less obtrusive yet still stylized form that is even more important to the internationalization of Danish series. The chapter uses Riget/The Kingdom (DR, 1994, 1997), Den serbiske dansker/The Serbian Dane (DR 2001), and Bron/Broen (The Bridge, SVT/DR, 2011–2018) as examples.

This chapter discusses three Great War films directed by James Whale: Hell’s Angels (1930), Journey’s End (also 1930) and Waterloo Bridge (1931). Although Whale, who served in the conflict himself, is best known as an auteur of horror films, these three movies were key contributions to the portrayal of the war in the popular culture of the early 30s. Production histories and audience reaction in the United States and United Kingdom from the standpoint of Historical Reception Studies are included.

This chapter gives an introduction to the book. The first part highlights the necessity for this book, given our world’s challenges in many fronts. The chapter then gives an introduction about the arrangement of the book, mainly that the book is written as two separate parts by Jing Lin and Tom Culham but on overlapping themes. Part I by Jing turns to the traditional Daoist texts to tease out an understanding of the highest pursuit of Daoism, that is, immortality. Integrated with her personal experience and understanding, she brings forth a systematic understanding of Daoist ontology, axiology, and epistemology on cultivation for immortality, crystalizing the vital role of virtue and qi cultivation. Tom Culham’s part takes a western perspective to discuss the unity of body, mind, and spirit. Tom incorporates contemporary scholarship to understand cultivation of qi and virtues. He brings in philosophy, and contemporary science in a number of fields to build a bridge to Daoist notions and practices.

Hamilton uses Ramona Fernandez’s idea of the “somatope,” which expands upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope,” and Elaine Stratford et al.’s concept of the archipelago to bridge the gap between the somatopic black body of Anyanwu, the co-protagonist of Butler’s Wild Seed, and archipelagic spatiality. According to Hamilton, archipelagic studies allows us to think through the various kinds of relations Anyanwu’s black somatopic body might have, maintains the body’s relationship to consciousness, history, and subjectivity, and goes beyond linear and binary relationships, so we can get at the political implications of a “raced spatiotemporality.” The significance of reading Wild Seed through an archipelagic model, Hamilton concludes, is that it allows us to engage American literature and history from a black feminist perspective.

A number of modernist authors wrote for children and, in doing so, expanded the cultural understanding of childhood. Barai focuses on two texts that express the diversity within the corpus of modernist children’s literature: Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’ Popo and Fifina (1932) and Gertrude Stein’s The World is Round (1939). These texts bridge two seemingly incompatible categories, by being modernist in style and content, and being for children. They critically reassess earlier models of childhood—and particularly childhood ‘innocence’—for what they exclude. Building from cultural developments in the early twentieth century, these texts celebrate urban life, envision the worlds of postcolonial children and queer the child’s relation to nature, in order to make space for marginalized identities and give voice to new kinds of childhood.

Konigsberg, a city on the eastern border of Prussia, was one of the most flourishing ports in the Baltic Sea in the nineteenth century. Within the circles of philosophers, it was known as “the city of Immanuel Kant”: the great German thinker was born and had lived there, and he had always led an extremely regular and habitual life; the locals used to set their clocks when they saw him passing by. Contrastingly, within mathematical circles, Konigsberg was instead known as “the city of the seven bridges”: placed at the confluence of two rivers, the town was divided into four parts, connected to each other by seven bridges. According to a legend, there was a bet about the possibility of finding a route that, starting from one of the four areas of the city and crossing each bridge only once, would allow one ultimately to be able to return to the starting point. But, no matter how they tried, nobody was ever able to come up with a solution: the problem truly seemed to be impossible…

Nordic noir can be productively defined as a group style. The global popularity of prototypical Nordic noirs Forbrydelsen (The Killing, 2007–2012) and Bron/Broen (The Bridge, 2011–2018) encourages Nordic filmmakers and television producers to adapt and appropriate their conventions in the hope of reaching large audiences. Employing a specific style is a way of producing crime films and television series in an identifiable manner as Nordic noir. As a key example, the chapter analyzes how “the first Finnish Nordic noir” Sorjonen (Bordertown, 2016–) adapts and appropriates stylistic elements from The Bridge and The Killing in its use of 1) modernist art cinema elements, 2) conventions of the popular crime genre and 3) Nordic regional elements. These are the three categories that are essential for Nordic noir.

This chapter demonstrates how the Commonwealth impinged on British relations with France during the Second World War. Luc-Andre Brunet explores how Jan Smuts interceded with the Vichy state for dual strategic purposes: to foster reconciliation at a dangerous time for the Allies in Europe and also with a view to maintaining French imperial designs in Africa as part of the greater European ‘civilising mission’. When the French fleet was controversially sunk by Britain at Mers el-Kebir, in 1940—with the shocking loss of more than 1000 French sailors—Smuts exerted influence on Churchill and the French Minister in Pretoria, to continue diplomatic connections with Vichy, reasoning that this was vital for the maintenance of Commonwealth and empire.

In the “Preface” to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant declared his time to be “the genuine age of criticism.” Little did he know how much criticism would flourish in the decades that followed. This chapter argues that the early German Romantics were at the center of this development, making important contributions to debates about the nature of philosophical critique and literary criticism during the 1790s and early 1800s. It is through these new conceptions of philosophical critique and literary criticism that the early German Romantics were able to bridge the divide between history, philology philosophy, and poetry in the early nineteenth century.

This chapter explores the work of the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris and the art historian E.H. Gombrich during the Second World War. It traces links between their work and the integrated analyses of social scientists such as Robert S. Lynd. Kris, Gombrich, Lynd, and their wider circle sought not only to join several disciplines from the humanities and the social sciences but also to bridge the pursuit of scholarship to participation in the war effort. During the war, Kris and Gombrich applied integrated research to the analysis of propaganda. Lynd served as an advisor to wartime projects organized by John Marshall and the Rockefeller Foundation, including a book on German propaganda co-authored by Kris. The projects pursued by Kris, Gombrich, and Lynd provided a foundation for similar efforts at intellectual integration after the war.

It is a nice summer’s day; the sun is shining in the Sicilian sky. On Mount Antennamare, which looks out over the strait and the city of Messina, the perfume of oregano permeates the calm air. A Lambretta’s buzz gets closer, as it emerges from around a corner. Two young men are riding it; one is driving, and the other looks distracted and is wearing a Basque beret. They talk, joke, leave the Lambretta, and proceed on foot. They discuss chess matches, they joke about the differences between “Sicilians” and “Continentals,” they talk about the Don Mommo restaurant where you can eat for two liras, they contemplate Sicily’s perfumed oregano and maybe also the visionary project to span the Messina Strait with a bridge. At one point, the young man with the beret has a nervous tic, twitches suddenly, and begins talking about soap bubbles. Soap bubbles. They a favorite childhood pastime; everyone knows how to make one, with a plastic jagged-edged ring and some water mixed with detergent. For a child, soap bubbles are a question of instinct and practice, of the skill in knowing how much and how hard to blow, but for a mathematician they are a phenomenally complex topic. Ennio De Giorgi, wearing his beret, explains all of this to Ferruccio De Stefano, the friend who is driving the Lambretta.

Ovals with more than four centres have been widely used, for example to align important points in a building and/or to improve a four-centre oval in its resemblance to an ellipse. These can be so close to each other that many researchers argue whether famous buildings were in fact designed (and/or built) as eight (or more) -centre ovals or as ellipses. Within the common work on the Colosseum [1], Trevisan (see [18]) compares the ground plan of various Roman amphitheatres and discusses the four- and eight-centre options (we will discuss this in detail in Sect. 8.2), while Benedetti (see [2]) suggests an eight-centre oval construction for Antonio da Sangallo’s Vatican dome, as also reported by Migliari in [12], where in general the oval vs ellipse dispute is discussed. Due to technical, practical and aesthetical advantages, arches and bridges have often been built using half-ovals with 5, 7, 9 or more centres (the formula for a half-oval is 2n + 1 centres): we will deal with an example of this in Sect. 8.3—the bridge at Neuilly by Perronet—with the help of Zerlenga’s book [20]. More about lowered arches can then be found in Breymann’s work [3].

This chapter addresses the sf trope of human contact with extraterrestrials and sf’s usefulness as a metaphor for critical narratives of colonization in Sylvie Berard’s novel Terre des Autres (2004; Of Wind and Sand, 2008) and Francine Pelletier’s trilogy Le sable et l’acier (1997–1998; Sand and Steel). These novels depict the oppression and inequality inherent in any form of colonization. At the same time, they offer a parcel of hope as they depict small groups of people working together to bridge the gap between different groups and species who come into contact with each other in the colonial setting.

Seriality in popular culture has its own specific pedigree that has evolved over time. Currently, this is characterized by a cross-media bridge formed in the popular culture of the twentieth century. Contemporary narratives now serve as an intertextual, transmedia, anchor while formerly autonomous media become attached under the umbrella of a single narrative. This phenomenon is one of the prime characteristics of one of the youngest media, video games. The usually diadic model of internal (intrinsic/inherent) seriality and external seriality stemming from substance (a string of stand-alone games genetically related by a narrative as prequels, sequels, midquels, spin-off, mash-up etc.) and form (several versions of the same game as enhanced version, collectors version, modded version, reboot, port etc.) has been transformed into a triad after transmedia storytelling became established due to a technological, economic, and social paradigm shift and the development of convergence culture. This chapter investigates both paradigm shifts of convergence and synergy and their effect on the expansion of storytelling forms that have been adapted not only by popular culture but also by the art world, marking the transformation process from seriality to a single hybrid supertext (narrative/storytelling) form.

This Introduction looks at the growth of London and Westminster from the accession of Queen Elizabeth I (when it was already a busy port and a diverse and cosmopolitan city) to the Restoration of Charles II. It pays particular attention to the lay-out of Elizabethan London, and follows in detail an imaginary time-traveller on her journey from Bedlam, north of the City, down Bishopsgate, southwards past the Royal Exchange and Lombard St, and over London Bridge to Shakespeare’s Globe, with some consequent consideration of Elizabethan theatre.

This chapter provides a historical survey of the involvement of Australians in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) and how this has reflected the cultural and political history of Australia and Europe. The first section demonstrates that Australia’s history in the ESC goes back to the very beginnings of the contest in the late 1950s, when Australia’s cultural and political orientations were still overwhelmingly British. The second section discusses the Australian multiculturalist policy behind the development of the multilingual, public service broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), in the late 1970s. SBS began broadcasting the ESC in Australia in 1983 at a time when its content was mostly targeted at non-Anglophone European immigrant communities. The third section examines how the increase in immigration from Asian states to Australia from the 1970s has been reflected in the biographies of artists who have represented Australia in the ESC, as well as in SBS’s plans to establish a version of the ESC for Asia, making Australia a commercial and cultural bridge for the ESC between Europe and Asia.

This chapter examines the question of seriality and the notion of the writer building bridges between discrete texts through the genre convention of the “cycle.” Elisabeth Vonarburg’s “Bridge Cycle” (1980–2009) explicitly features a bridge that allows her protagonists to travel between parallel worlds. Berard examines her work in tandem with that of one of Quebec’s most famous “mainstream” writers, Michel Tremblay. Best known for his pathbreaking theatrical works set in Montreal’s gay community, in his earliest fiction Tremblay was influenced by H. P. Lovecraft, and he consistently invokes the supernatural. Admitting that these writers’ corpuses are quite different, Berard nonetheless teases out how they create fictional worlds that traverse textual boundaries. The study shows the crossings between the two universes; how Vonarburg’s science fiction and fantasy (sff) is anchored in the genre in both a transnational and specifically Quebecois fashion, and how Tremblay’s intrinsically Quebecois world has always been connected to the fantastical.

Beckman suggests that Shakespeare invented charm in the modern sense. Charm comes from outside of ourselves, yet we take it into ourselves as it touches our heart. It is outside, yet we appreciate it, make it our own. We are charmed by Rosalind pretending to be someone other than herself while she plays the role of the person she is. The ambiguity of which self is speaking, the real or the pretend, is itself a part of Rosalind’s charm. This doubleness is a benign version of the Homer’s Sirens’ duplicity. The structure of wit and charm is doubleness, whether duplicity, ambiguity, the making of a bridge between seemingly unrelated elements, as in Johnson’s complaint that metaphysical poetry yoked heterogeneous elements by violence together.

This chapter takes a comparative approach to two postapocalyptic novels by transnational Canadian writers. Both deploy the metaphor of the bridge, featuring devastated worlds, in which most of the bridges allowing people to reach out to each other have collapsed. But, they also focus on a handful of characters using memory and art to build new bridges. In Oscar De Profundis (2016), Mavrikakis’s hero is a world-famous singer who creates museums and mausoleums to the glory of endangered communities threatened by engulfment in “global culture.” Similarly, in Station Eleven (2014), Mandel presents a troupe of itinerant actors who roam the Great Lakes region to perform Shakespeare and music, thus acting to preserve a culture threatened with loss.

Living in a time when the Lollard movement was still active and the Wars of the Roses were imminent, Osbern Bokenham seeks to bridge political and religious gaps by writing saints’ lives in the native tongue. He aims at creating a sense of an English “nacioun” based on a common language and an orthodox belief in saints. At the origin of his literary endeavour is St. Margaret, who assumes a maternal role of engendering the proper employment of the English tongue and the Christian faith. Just as the saint’s body has the strength to convert and heal, so her anglicised vita is presented as a regenerative force to make the audience (re)turn to the true faith against heresy and in the name of political unity.

Contrary to the two most famous albums of the series “Le Spirou de …”, Panique en Atlantique (2010) by Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice Parme apparently does not allude to history at all. Focusing on some examples such as the one of the tunnel created by Spirou to join two sunk ships and save their passengers, I show how Trondheim uses these images of the tunnel to bridge two “comics worlds” (Beaty) too often presented as sealed off, in particular during the contentious years of the 2005–2010 “crisis-panic” of L’Association with, on the one side, the old-fashioned world of classic Franco-Belgian comics and on the other, the not-so-new-anymore world of L’Association. Hence, Trondheim illustrates with humor how an adventure of Spirou can be read as a bridge between comics and memory.

The J. M. W. Turner painting Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway has a special importance as one of the earliest canvases to show how the Industrial Revolution altered the British landscape. Could nineteenth-century railroad timetables help us to understand the origin of this painting? Can we identify the railway bridge in the canvas? Turner first exhibited this work at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1844. Remarkably, an eyewitness account of a June 1843 trip by Lady Jane Simon on the Great Western Railway apparently described the moment that inspired Turner to create Rain, Steam, and Speed. Some art historians have accepted the veracity of Lady Simon’s story, but others have been skeptical and regard her account as unreliable.

Astronomical analysis can help to solve mysteries about historical events. Our Texas State University group used hydrographic calculations of tide levels, astronomical calculations of lunar phases, analysis of calendars, and study of archival primary sources to derive new results for the three examples described in this chapter.

Due to the multifarious influences he was exposed to as a man and as an artist, Oscar Wilde’s work, so closely tracing the tenets of the Romantic and Post-Romantic heritage, at the same time anticipates some features attributed to Modernism and Postmodernism. Wilde’s concepts are indebted to the Keatsian theory of impersonality and aesthetic appreciation based on sensations, simultaneously denoting a transition from Coleridge and Keats to the Baudelairean predilection not only for art but also for the artificial. Conversely, in a Modernist manner, Wilde in his literary output withdraws from society and avoids worldly, mundane knowledge, devoid of spirituality. Finally, he is primarily concerned with the linguistic artifact itself, with the game forming a bridge between Modernism and Postmodernism, where paradox, the comic device corresponding to the theme of dual personality, stirs the cliches of the current statements into a novel meaning.

The essential form of literature is narrative, a meaningful and well-organized story about human beings. Yet in the modern world it often is supported by technology, through which history can bridge from the humanities to the social sciences. Family history narratives are perfected forms of memoirs, possessing rigor, incorporating materials from multiple sources, and having some story, plot, theory, or theme. This chapter shows how coherent narratives can be distilled from diaries and letters, with clear examples such as a boy growing up using 23 years of his mother’s diaries during 1915–1938, and courtship letters from his father to his mother during 1909–1911. Examples of retrospective diaries based on episodic memories, and the expansion of a written family memoir into a wiki, illustrate the range of methods available to family historians today. The potential deeper meaning of diary-based narratives is considered in the famous cases of the Robert Falcon Scott expedition to the South Pole in 1911–1912, and the famous flights of Richard E. Byrd in 1926–1927. Byrd illustrates the tension between fame and fact, drama and documentation, because his claim to have flown over the North Pole appears to have been false, and his flight across the Atlantic Ocean was publicized in such a way as to hide the probable reason why his plane crashed, which the diary of his doctor reveals.

As an editor at McClure’s Magazine, Willa Cather oversaw the publication of the article that first introduced Maria Montessori to many US readers. Her encounter with Montessori’s ideas coincided with, and appears to have contributed to, her shift from the early prose style of Alexander’s Bridge to the mature style that begins with O Pioneers! This latter style shares Montessori’s emphasis on creating a structured, unfurnished space through which subconscious forces can be channeled. However, while Montessori sees these forces as wholly good, Cather sees them as both necessary and dangerous, and this difference leads Cather to politically reorient the Montessori framework from self-conscious progressivism to an ambivalent anti-progressivism. This chapter includes a sustained reading of Montessori’s aesthetic theory.

This chapter reveals how digital media can bridge artists’ concerts and the growing recorded archives of the new online music services, thereby facilitating novel music experiences. It identifies evolving practices through which live-music organizers tap into online music archives to contextualize performances, and online music services bring their archives to life through various forms of interaction with concerts and festivals. The chapter studies the efforts and techniques of intermediaries (primarily the Oya festival and WiMP/Tidal) with regard to (re)gaining a powerful connection with artists and audiences. It assesses the power of live and recorded music intermediaries in terms of how people receive and experience music, considering, among other things, the new intersections between the curatorial work conducted by humans and the guidance offered by the machines and algorithms of digital music archives.

This chapter offers a chronological analysis of the visual culture of domesticity surrounding Jane, Duchess of Gordon (1748–1812). While visual representations of the eighteenth-century marriage union have been extensively considered by art historians, the perspective provided by satirical prints has often been elided due to a focus on painted portraiture. This study seeks to bridge this gap between two modes of representation by considering the limits of formal portraiture in articulating a filial and genealogical narrative. It argues that graphic satires offer an alternative narrative, with those representing the Duchess of Gordon exposing her as a flawed wife and mother. In so doing, it reveals how marriage itself was conceptualised in eighteenth-century Britain.

The paper is intended to deepen a specific theme, which affects almost uninterrupted continuity the architectural culture, related to the relationship between three-dimensional nature of architecture and its representation; the topic is developed through critical reflections on the relationship between the concept of spatial designed conformations and the expressive forms of figuration drawn, figured as interpretations qualified by distinctive knowledge values. We try to answer to the following questions: which products can be compared with the representative transcriptions of the past? Is it possible to define some common elements or the differences are too substantial to evoke an unlikely continuity?

Among the suite of images put together by Rafael Moneo’s office for purposes of a Powerpoint presentation about his Northwest Sciences Building at Columbia University are a rustic stone-and-brick Basque farmhouse with diagonal timber bracing and a drawing by Jasper Johns from the artist’s Crosshatching series. Beyond their sha diagonal iconography, these evocative images from utterly different worlds—along with a third, the facade of Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt project of 1953–54 for a long-span convention center—suggest the gamut of inspiration and aspiration that informs the architecture of Moneo’s new Columbia University building. The brief was a demanding one: to fit into the university’s century-old brick-and-mortar McKim Mead & White campus; to house twentieth-first century research in several theoretical and applied sciences; to span a large preexisting sports facility that occupies most of the ground and subterranean level (and had to remain open during construction); to bridge to two adjacent science buildings; and to complete the corner of the Morningside Heights campus on a sloping city block while making a mark on the neighborhood skyline and emblematically opening to a planned extension of the university half a dozen blocks northwest in Harlem. These heterogeneous givens demanded a complex, not to say complicated, solution. It is to Moneo’s great credit that he succeeded in finding an architectural image coherent and legible enough to subsume them all.