ABSTRACT This article proposes the notion of “ante-victimhood” to challenge atomic bomb victimhood, whose emotional appeal tends to obscure its larger contexts. Ante-victimhood denotes the sociopolitical contexts, adapting David Kazanjian’s words, “before, against, [and] alongside” victimhood. To substantiate the concept, this study examines how Jackie Copleton’s A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (2015), heretofore underexamined, portrays the ambivalent atomic bomb victimhood of Amaterasu Takahashi. Such ambivalence arises from struggles with her preceding complicity with Japanese imperialism, which draw out the contrasting victimhood of peoples subjugated by Japan and the co-existing oppression of Japanese women by Japan’s patriarchy. The dynamics of ante-victimhood provide a wider context to understand Amaterasu’s victimhood, which is arguably rendered precarious in her manoeuvre between the Japanese Empire’s militarism and the United States Empire’s nuclear hegemony. Through Laura Doyle’s inter-imperiality, this article demonstrates the tense subjectivity of individuals caught between imperial forces, revealing how inter-imperial rivalries shape personal lives.

ABSTRACT This essay charts the status of hieroglyphs in Francis Bacon’s writings, considering his praise of these precise and mimetic real characters in tandem with his opposition to modes of rhetorical volubility engendered through copia and varietas. The practice of imitation offers an interface between both models – where promising rhetoricians were trained to imitate Cicero, Bacon presents hieroglyphs as perfect representations of the natural world. I argue that Bacon and William Rawley borrow familiar compositional prompts, but gear the imitative impulse of the orator away from the domain of humanistic learning and towards artisanal constructions of nature. Like hieroglyphs, such simulacra seek to approximate and represent creation in miniature, and in the utopia of New Atlantis they emerge as the implausible endpoint of a society moving further from speech and closer to a regimen of pictographic communication.

ABSTRACT The article explores uses of the present perfect with definite past time adverbials in Samuel Pepys's Diary. Although the Diary was written using shorthand and some instances may contain encoding or decoding errors, a comparison to the Paston Letters written 200 years earlier reveals similar, consistent patterns. This consistency suggests a continuation of an established pattern rather than a coincidence. The present perfect in the Diary functions as the narrative present perfect, similarly to the historical present. This function of the present perfect is characteristic of Pepys's style and is used when conveying new, unexpected information. The study identifies syntactic triggers that evoke the use of the present perfect and distinguishes two types of contexts uncommon in Present-Day Standard British English: (1) with words signalling new, unexpected information with adverbials denoting various degrees of remoteness, and (2) with adverbials of a recent past in monotopical discourse stretches. It is argued that these are ambiguous contexts where the present perfect may be reanalyzed as a past perfective, signalling completed past actions without emphasizing current relevance. The study demonstrates how the interaction of temporal, syntactic, and pragmatic factors creates conditions for the functional drift of the present perfect toward a past perfective.

ABSTRACT In twentieth-century Scotland, the project of independence was advanced as much by literature as by politics. Central to many literary works was an idea of community, both local and national, which this article argues was defined by a distinct and powerful sense of “placedness.” Such an idea has been deeply transformed by the negative outcome of the 2014 Independence Referendum and the ensuing local and global events, which have collectively redefined the bonds of solidarity that shape and sustain it. Using the concepts of “affective community” and “merciful solidarity,” this article examines how four novels - Leila Aboulela's The Kindness of Enemies, Jenni Fagan's Luckenbooth, James Robertson's News of the Dead and Martin MacInnes's In Ascension - portray the emergence of new coalitions across and beyond Scotland. The analysis frames these alliances not as simply expressive of a culture of care, but as possessing a transformative potential to navigate rapid and traumatic change.

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on balance, a central motif in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, seeking to illustrate how Austen endorses the value of balance and how it is negotiated through three salient tensions, that is, tensions between sincerity and civility, desire and decorum, and happiness and materialism. Drawing on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century moral, philosophical, and political discourse, I argue that fortitude is essential to reconciling female passion with the demands of decorum and that Austen critiques the excesses of calculated materialism through an insistence on ethical balance in the pursuit of happiness. An examination of the (im)balance between honesty and civility demonstrates that moral integrity is vital to resolving this tension without making one lapse into duplicity. By interrogating balance as an ethical and social virtue, this essay illuminates how it informs the novel’s engagement with contemporaneous discourse on manners, morals, and happiness.

ABSTRACT Scribes, whose languages can be localised to specific locations, may not share all their respective linguistic features. Texts localised in the same area may differ considerably and even a single scribe will display varying characteristics across texts. Lack of uniformity is the norm in Late Middle English writings, but recurring elements can sometimes be seen in the works of different scribes unrelated to dialectal provenance. This may stem from shared professional training in communities of writing. The two main scribes of the manuscript National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn ii.1 shared many features, likely collaborated, and they both seem to have acted as organisers of the materials. This paper explores the possibility that they belonged to the same writing community by analysing their productions within this manuscript. Both scribes’ written languages are localisable to the same area in Warwickshire. The analysis examines their palaeographical features including abbreviations and writing marks, their spellings of diagnostic and common words and suffixes and the representation of specific sounds.