Beyond the bounds of western Europe: Paleolithic art in the Balkan peninsula

Paleolithic art offers unique perspectives on prehistoric societies and cultures. It is also considered a key component of modern human behavior. Until recently, Paleolithic artworks were thought to be geographically restricted to a very few areas, especially southwestern Europe. Discoveries of art in other parts of Europe and other parts of the globe have challenged this vision, expanding the documented distribution of this important cultural phenomenon. As a consequence, there has been renewed interest in less well-known areas, with the goal of determining whether the current lack of art is a reflection of a past reality, the product of limited research, or a matter of preservation. One of these regions is the Balkan Peninsula, a key area for understanding Upper Paleolithic societies given its location at the crossroads of several migration routes into Europe. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the Paleolithic symbolic products, including both rock art and portable art from the Balkans. Recent research has led to new discoveries and insights into the symbolism of this long-neglected area. The present review, combining existing literature and new fieldwork, sheds new light on social and cultural interactions in this part of the continent and leads to a better understanding of its role within the European Upper Paleolithic cultural sphere

The role of ascorbate peroxidase, guaiacol peroxidase, and polysaccharides in cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) roots under postharvest physiological deterioration

Abstract This study aimed to investigate the role of ascorbate peroxidase (APX), guaiacol peroxidase (GPX), polysaccharides, and protein contents associated with the early events of postharvest physiological deterioration (PPD) in cassava roots. Increases in APX and GPX activity, as well as total protein contents occurred from 3 to 5 days of storage and were correlated with the delay of PPD. Cassava samples stained with periodic acid-Schiff (PAS) highlighted the presence of starch and cellulose. Degradation of starch granules during PPD was also detected. Slight metachromatic reaction with toluidine blue is indicative of increasing of acidic polysaccharides and may play an important role in PPD delay. Principal component analysis (PCA) classified samples according to their levels of enzymatic activity based on the decision tree model which showed GPX and total protein amounts to be correlated with PPD. The Oriental (ORI) cultivar was more susceptible to PPD.This work was supported by PEC-PG ("Programa de Estudantes Convenio de Pos-Graduacao") coordinated by CAPES ("Coorde nacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior"). CNPq has provided a research fellowship to Marcelo Maraschin

British Romanticism and the Global Climate

As a result of developments in the meteorological and geological sciences, the Romantic period saw the gradual emergence of attempts to understand the climate as a dynamic global system that could potentially be affected by human activity. This chapter examines textual responses to climate disruption cause by the Laki eruption of 1783 and the Tambora eruption of 1815. During the Laki haze, writers such as Horace Walpole, Gilbert White, and William Cowper found in Milton a powerful way of understanding the entanglements of culture and climate at a time of national and global crisis. Apocalyptic discourse continued to resonate during the Tambora crisis, as is evident in eyewitness accounts of the eruption, in the utopian predictions of John Barrow and Eleanor Anne Porden, and in the grim speculations of Byron’s ‘Darkness’. Romantic writing offers a powerful analogue for thinking about climate change in the Anthropocene

Climate and History in the Anthropocene: Realist Narrative and the Framing of Time

This chapter is prompted by recent calls by historians and other scholars for new understandings of history in the Anthropocene; it asks what this might mean for literary realism, invested as it is in the depiction of the passing of time. History in the Anthropocene renders redundant the human-historical, individual-universal dialectic that has long been the hallmark of the realist novel. Following Ian Baucom, this chapter looks to Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of history for clues to a new form of literary realism. For Benjamin, a true understanding of history demands the recognition of the 'image' of history, a recognition occurring in a moment of 'arrest' or stoppage in the flow of time and of thought. This chapter speculates on the emergence in the Anthropocene of a literary realism that performs just such an arrest, taking its reader beyond conventional understandings of (human) history and time

Ethereal women: Climate and gender from realism to the modernist novel

This chapter examines Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–1938) and selections of non-fiction writing by Virginia Woolf published between 1919 and 1925. It argues that the fluid psychology we traditionally associate with twentieth-century experiments in literary form begins with the impact of nineteenth-century climate science on realist fiction. The atmospheric modes of female consciousness and ethereal embodiment that women’s presumed sensitivity to climate engenders in novels like Jane Eyre and Bleak House, thus give rise to later, feminist engagements with female authorship such as Richardson’s and Woolf’s. Taking May Sinclair’s pioneering use of the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe Pilgrimage in 1918 as a pivot point, the essay connects Richardson’s acknowledged debt to Villette with the climatic underpinnings that inform Woolf’s responses to both of these novels as well as her famous definition of modern fiction as ‘an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’

The Seasons

The seasons are one of the most prevalent means by which literary texts engage with and represent climate. This chapter explores the implications of the seasonal perspective of climate, and argues that literary texts have used the seasons as a domain for interrogating the interface between nature and culture. The first half of the chapter traces a history of literary representations of the seasonal cycle. This climate model of change-within-constancy has been interpreted variously as a source of reassuring stability or as evidence for nature’s hostility. The second half of the chapter focuses on individual seasons and the cultural associations that have accumulated around them. Particular seasons are associated with particular human activities, emotions, psychological states, and literary genres. Often the most interesting examples of seasons literature are those texts that interrogate these associations and ask whether nature or culture has shaped our responses to and expectations for each season

The Rise of the Climate Change Novel

This chapter outlines the emergence of climate fiction and its key modes. It pays particular attention to the extent to which climate fiction has worked within the established conventions of literary realism, meeting the many representational challenges mounted by climate change. While it considers the extent to which realism is able to render the abstract and intangible phenomenon of climate change visible, it argues that there is also a significant body of writing on the subject which turns to alternative forms and narrative strategies in the effort to represent climate change, and manages to overcome some of the limitations of realism. In other words, where climate fiction meets the challenges of representing climate change, it has the potential to provide a space in which to address the Anthropocene’s emotional, ethical, and practical concerns