Archives, Paratexts and Life Writing in the First World War

The chapters in this collection have demonstrated a range of ways the phrase 'medical paratext' can be conceptualised, and particularly the interactions between medical practice, medical texts, and their writers and readers. Focusing on the diaries of Canadian nurse-writers in the First World War (particularly the work of nursing sister Clare Gass and VAD Alice Lighthall), this chapter proposes that paratext can demonstrate the contemporary archiving and historiography of the authors' experience, and support their claims to authoritative writing - as military histories, as medical practitioners, and as women operating within male-dominated environments

Solitary waves in the Nonlinear Dirac Equation

In the present work, we consider the existence, stability, and dynamics of solitary waves in the nonlinear Dirac equation. We start by introducing the Soler model of self-interacting spinors, and discuss its localized waveforms in one, two, and three spatial dimensions and the equations they satisfy. We present the associated explicit solutions in one dimension and numerically obtain their analogues in higher dimensions. The stability is subsequently discussed from a theoretical perspective and then complemented with numerical computations. Finally, the dynamics of the solutions is explored and compared to its non-relativistic analogue, which is the nonlinear Schr{\"o}dinger equation. A few special topics are also explored, including the discrete variant of the nonlinear Dirac equation and its solitary wave properties, as well as the PT-symmetric variant of the model