Introduction

The introduction presents Herbert as a noble courtier and county grandee and as the product of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras in which he grew to manhood, but also foregrounds his concurrent career as a respected scholar and polymath whose writings reflected Renaissance influences but anticipated intellectual elements of the Enlightenment. It explores the reliability of his autobiography and engages with the historiographical assessment of his personality, career, and scholarship. It provides background and context for Herbert’s life and career and introduces themes and historiographical developments covered in the book. It traces Herbert’s Welsh and English descent and explores the significance of his county gentry status and the impact of his elevation to noble rank. It introduces an ambitious, intelligent, and impetuous man who placed a premium on integrity, honour, and scholarly learning and whose life and writings provide a prism through which to view the changing political, social, cultural, and religious climate of the early seventeenth century and the British elite’s complex response to Stuart kingship.

Epilogue

The Epilogue begins with final reflections on the high realist project concerning pain, the validity and limitations of its critique, the relevant historical context, and the lingering impact of its preferred aesthetic response to suffering—which can seem, ironically, like another form of anesthesia whenever it encourages numbing to and distance from the pain of others. It then offers summary comments on the less myopic, more inclusive and imaginative versions of reality envisioned by Twain, Chesnutt, and another contemporary author, W. E. B. Du Bois. After tracing patterns of sensitizing, insulating, and distancing behavior in our current reactions to seemingly intractable suffering that resonate with the high realist aesthetic, the book concludes by suggesting that the simultaneously politically galvanizing and aesthetically complex response to physical suffering that Part Two proves was available to the responsive imagination during the realist era remains available in our own day.

Formal Organization and Complex Responses to Video Games Narratives

The application of complex systems theories to the study of narratives proved able to offer a high heuristic value for the analysis of movies [24,26], TV series [35,36], music [45] and different other media with narrative capacity [cf. 20]. However, they were not yet thoroughly employed for the study of video game narratives. To address the relation between formal complexity and the complexity of response in video games, this paper conducts a contrastive analysis of two games of the Halo series, namely Halo 3 [6] and Halo 3 ODST [7]. Formal complexity is analyzed by applying Cutting's [13] approach for counting (narratorial) complexity. The evaluation of the responses to the narratives of these games is based on crowdsourced data, through Hven's [24] and Kiss and Willemsen's [26] understanding of audience response. The findings reveal that a complex response is at least partly predictable through an analysis of the formal quantitative and qualitative/organizational aspects of narratives, and, ultimately, that narrative complexity is a factor in the appreciation of games by the audience. The paper also poses the basis for the identification of a "Goldilocks level of complexity', which can maximize the appreciation of video games stories.

Culture and Colonialism: The 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary in Egypt

The 300th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death in 1916 coincided with an unprecedented political crisis across the globe. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 brought to the fore the ambitions of the established and would-be colonial powers, conflicts between and within existing nation states, and disenfranchised groups’ aspirations for self-determination. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how the 1916 Shakespearean commemorations in countries such as Britain, Germany, Ireland, and the USA registered these political upheavals. However, research into the Shakespeare Tercentenary has so far neglected Egypt’s complex response to the occasion. Amidst developing political tensions, which were to culminate in the Revolution of 1919, Egyptian intellectuals nevertheless chose to commemorate Shakespeare’s Tercentenary. These commemorations, however, were marked by ambivalence: while expressing admiration for Shakespeare, Egyptian commentators questioned the appropriateness of celebrating an English writer instead of promoting Egypt’s, and the Arabs’, own national literature. This chapter examines the manifestations of these conflicting feelings, ranging from the heated press debates surrounding the occasion, through Cairo University’s celebrations, to tributes published by individual intellectuals, such as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Mohammed Hafiz Ibrahim. In doing so, the chapter explores the ambiguities created by celebrating a cultural anniversary at a historical moment fraught with acute colonial tensions.