Some of the key messages of this book are reviewed here in the format of ’reminders’ to clarify the concerns of past misunderstandings and to emphasize solutions to perceived challenges. The importance of basic fundamentals, such as visual assessment, awareness of assumptions and potential numerical solutions is described and then the complementarity of the many statistics and their bases is reviewed. The exciting potential of ongoing developments is summarized, featuring hierarchical Bayesian analysis, spatial causal inference, applications of artificial intelligence (AI), knowledge graphs (KG), literature-based discovery (LBD) and geometric algebra. A quick review of future directions concludes this chapter and the book.

Spatial analysis originated in a broad range of disciplines, producing a diverse set of concepts and terminologies. Ecological processes take place in space and time, and the spatio-temporal structure that results takes different forms that produce spatial dependence at all scales. That dependence has major effects, even when ecological data are abstracted from the spatial context. Not all dependence exhibits a smooth decay with increasing separation, but it can vary with scale, stationarity or its absence and direction (anisotropy versus isotropy). A key factor in spatial analysis is the ability to determine neighbour events for points or patches and we present various algorithms to create networks of neighbours. We discuss a range of spatial statistics and related randomization tests, including a ’Markov and Monte Carlo’ approach. The chapter provides a detailed conceptual background for the technical aspects presented in subsequent chapters.

This first chapter sets the context for the topics covered throughout the book by introducing the relationship between ecological processes and spatial structure, and by clarifying terminology related to both. These processes and spatial analysis methods are classified by several criteria, including static versus dynamic data and one versus several species. The concept of scale is applied to spatial, temporal and organizational contexts. The chapter provides a discussion regarding the background and motivation for spatial analysis in ecological research.

This chapter begins with a re-reading of Henri Lefebvre’s theorisation of social space and representation in his influential volume, The Production of Space (1974). Since the appearance of its English translation in 1991, Lefebvre’s theories have proved to be foundational for much of the work on literature and space that has emerged over the previous few decades, particularly his distinction between representations of space and representational spaces. The chapter thus traces the impact of Lefebvre’s work upon various literary critics and cultural geographers, exploring the development of ideas of textual space, concepts of space and place, and the relation between material and metaphorical spaces. The chapter then moves to consider the concept of scale, an idea somewhat neglected by Lefebvre, but which has begun to gain traction with critics writing on, for example, world literature and modernism (such as Nirvana Tanoukhi, Susan Stanford Friedman, and the essays in the 2017 volume edited by Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg). Thinking through the question of ‘what is the scale of the literary object’ (as posed by Rebecca Walkowitz) thus offers a new way to understand the complex relations between representation, literary texts, and diverse forms of social space (local, regional, national, transnational, global).

This chapter examines the lengthy history and usage of the terms "translocal," "translocality," and "translocalism," which have been crucial to humanistic and social scientific inquiry about issues of literature, culture, globalization, and territorialization since the 1990s. It recounts the evolution of these terms from seventeenth-century debates about religion through early twentieth-century ideas about politics, psychology, and artistic analysis. It then turns to the present, concentrating on the reemergence of these concepts during the 1990s among social scientists seeking to describe geography and space, human movement, migration, and boundary crossing (in the work of Massey, Appadurai, Clifford, Hannerz, Smith, and others). It describes how these concepts change scholarly studies of mobility, networks, and national and transnational identity (in the work of Kraidy and Murphy, Freitag and Oppen, Brickell and Datta, and Greiner and Sakdapolark), and then it recounts their impacts on literary, historical, and cultural methodologies, especially those involving European empires, poetry and poetics, and colonial and postcolonial literature (including Ramazani, Ballantyne, and Burton). Ultimately, this chapter suggests how literary and historical scholars might connect humanistic accounts of translocalism with social scientific notions of translocality to refocus scholarship on how migration and spatial scale have affected literature and culture.

This chapter argues that Western border thinking emerges concurrent with early formulations of conquest and labor management. Tracing an arc that begins with Spanish philosopher Juan Maldonado and concludes with African philosopher Achille Mbembe, the chapter discusses the utility of borders to the concepts of self, property, and freedom. It further argues that such conceptual work of borders has also been challenged and reconceptualized by contemporary poets and novelists including, most famously, Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as Sandra Cisneros, Alfredo Aguilar, and Eric Gansworth (Tuscarora). Each of these attend to the ways borders serve as generators of revenue for states and as abjection machines, but also as places of habitation, as processes, and as dense horizontalities, rather than as fixtures on a nested hierarchy of scales.

Modern slavery is an amalgam of legal concepts defined in international law united by a shared characteristic – they are all forms of unfree labour: one person deprives another person of their freedom for profit. The introduction explains how unfree labour involving migrant workers and supply chains is particularly troublesome for states to govern because these transnational vectors do not fit within the ‘default’ territorial format of legal jurisdiction and, thus, challenge traditional ideas of state sovereignty. It treats modern slavery laws, which combine international, national, and (sometimes) regional laws, as an example of transnational law and shows how, in this context, the nation state is but one among an assemblage of governance actors. It develops a multidimensional conception of jurisdiction to explore the transnational legal governance of unfree labour and to illustrate how modern slavery laws reconfigure traditional understandings of sovereignty.

The materialist turn in contemporary literary theory – comprising of multiple discourses such as new materialism, posthumanism, ecocriticism, speculative realism, affect theory, and others – has been deeply influential in the field of nineteenth-century American literature. However, one key tension within these materialist theories is the question of its politics: how does a turn to materialism, which privileges the actual physical matter of bodies and things over the ideological and linguistic categories of ideas, advance any political or ethical imperatives? Is a world of matter a world without human meaning? This chapter outlines both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on this question in recent nineteenth-century American literary study. It then seeks to redraw the political impasse between them as one of scale. To that end, I examine two mid-century texts – the anonymously authored “The Ultra-Moral Reformer” (1842) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Sphinx” (1846) – as depictions of the challenges (and opportunities) of scalar distortion. These texts suggest that the political and ethical impasse within materialism can be described within materialist terms itself, and that doing so offers a way of understanding the value judgments inherent in materialist methodological commitments as scale dependent.

Focusing on the role of the Australian charitable foundation Walk Free, an organisation connected to the faith-based abolitionist movement, this chapter traces the emergence of a global antislavery governance network and explores the role of philanthrocapitalists and public–private partnerships in it. It shows how Walk Free established an ethical business alliance that portrays slavery in global supply chains as resulting from market failure and depicts the control large transnational corporations have over their supply chains as an antidote to the limits of state sovereignty. Walk Free and the global antislavery governance network advocates for market-based solutions to the problem of modern slavery – such as supply chain transparency and mandatory human rights due-diligence legislation – that enlist transnational corporations located in the Global North to enforce international legal standards against contractors located primarily in the Global South. This chapter illustrates how scale and governance interact in ways that reconfigure sovereignty and shore up neoliberal capitalism.

This chapter adopts an Anthropocene framework to contextualize Gerard Manley Hopkins. Placing his work within the epoch of human geophysical agency, I argue, affords new perspective on his radical contribution as an ecological witness. It allows us to see that Hopkins’s depictions of natural entities involved an intuition about their embeddedness in larger systems, many inchoately explained by contemporary science; that his representations of non-human nature seldom avoided the ‘anthropos’ (the ‘human’ in Anthropocene), whether as destructive interloper or divinely privileged steward; and that his life and work included moments of prescience about human activity interfering with Earth-system processes. To recontextualize Hopkins thus is to furnish different ways to interpret his work (in wider conceptual networks and deeper time horizons) and to animate that work’s reception (in light of present concerns). It is also to affiliate Hopkins with ecopoets whose formal innovations might be fruitfully juxtaposed with his poetics.

The ecological thinking of the Georgics leads to intricate problems of scale, which Chapter 4 traces. The poem seeks to conceptualize humans’ place in their local environments – epitomized by the bounded space of the farm – while also imagining life at larger scales and attempting to think the world as a coherent whole. The chapter connects these issues to political, geographical, agricultural, philosophical, and poetical questions. This chapter finds in the Georgics a searching exploration of what it means to be local, and whether such a thing is even possible in the age of Jupiter and the time of Caesar. Ultimately, the poem rethinks a more nuanced concept of locality that is intertwined with the global, and is of shifting, unpredictable scale: a concept of fractal locality. At the center of the poem, Vergil places a fitting emblem for a fractally local poetry, the temple he vows in his native Mantua. This temple models Vergil’s achievement as anchored in particular place, and yet in a place that has become local, Roman, Italian, and global all at once.

This chapter offers an overview of historians’ writings about scale and their debates on micro- and macrohistory in the past half century. It is argued that the complex debates between followers of Italian microstoria, members of the Annales school, and social and cultural historians in the Anglo-American world need to be considered in the context of similar discussions and experiments with scale in literary writings, in artworks and especially in the scholarship in human geography. The chapter claims that, in an era of human-made climate crisis, we should reconsider how we conceptualise the role of particles, microbes, parasites, worms, and other animals in historical writing, going beyond the dichotomy of micro- and macrohistory. It is proposed that the geographer Neil Smith’s concept of ‘jumping scales’ is an especially productive way of discussing how hierarchical power structures are established and disrupted by agents operating at levels that range from the microscopical to the global.

Chapter 1 begins with the problem of conflicting timescales in antiquarianism. At Pompeii, the question of human significance at the scale of geological deep time inspired writers to reconsider the material past and explore alternatives to traditional timelines. This chapter shows how Charles Dickens in particular experiments with nonlinear temporal forms in his travel narrative Pictures from Italy, which I argue uses a fractal temporal form to nest infinite pasts in present sites. A fractal is a nonlinear shape that repeats its structure even when viewed at fine scales. When Dickens deploys it as a temporal form, he necessarily changes the shape of history, offering alternative possibilities for Italian politics. Chapter 1 ends by considering the ethical ramifications of linear and nonlinear temporal forms in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage. This poem, depicting the Roman Republic of 1849, dramatizes English tourists’ attempts to reassert the historicism that casts Italy as past despite the Risorgimento. Ultimately, Chapter 1 shows how both Dickens and Clough respond to political potential in Italy by reconfiguring time.

The introduction to Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a survey of recent and historical transnational approaches to Irish cultural production. In doing so, it shies away from insisting on a definitive method for the scholars in the field, choosing rather to highlight the diversity of approaches in the chapters in the volume. The introduction calls for a “weak theory” of the transnational, recognizing the myriad ways that both cultural producers and critics understand the term and the project. It also calls for a critical evaluation of the methods and scope of studying Ireland in a transnational phase, one that does not simply accept that a globalized world must necessarily be read in a globalizing frame.

The concluding chapter of this volume maps the contributions of the book as a whole, articulates possible future directions for further research, and offers a humanities lens to this conversation about youth mental health. Directions for further exploration include expanding the frame to encompass studies of affect and emotions (not just mental health), investigating the cultural politics of emotions (not just the importance of inner well-being) by situating emotions within political landscapes, enlarging the vocabulary of climate emotions (beyond the language of mental health), and queering climate emotions research.

This chapter examines the boundary-breaking spatial and social dynamism of animalian entities embodied within LB I–LB II polychrome murals of Crete and Thera. In these innovative paintings, animalian entities engaged with both painted and lived contexts, taking on novel manners of involvement in Aegean sociocultural spaces; some established new aspects of creaturely identity and relation. We begin with three animalian entities considered – boar’s tusk helmets, ox-hide shields and ikria – examining how their presence in murals further challenged long-standing parameters of two-dimensional representation. Here discussion broadens to consider how renderings of various animals in Minoan frescoes charged and unsettled the fabric of powerful built spaces. Innovations in color, scale and the creation of spatial depth approached the ways animalian bodies were experienced in the round. Simultaneously, details of the frescoes kept the painted creatures, and the spaces they occupied, tautly embroiled in the structured order of the wall. We close by considering how polychrome frescoes could foster radical newness in animals’ identities, focusing on renderings of blue simians. This blueness, regardless of whether originally intended to approximate biological hues, engendered distinct status for simians in the Aegean, with fascinating connections to renderings of young peoples.