Chapter 5 focuses on the different temporalities that are interwoven in the station, feeding into everyday experiences and informing patterns of action. In Accra’s station, just as in most bus stations in Ghana, departures do not follow designated scripts dictated by clock time; instead, they are collectively timed by the inflow of passengers. These inflows follow different rhythmic temporalities co-composed in Accra and in the destinations served by the station. By detailing the daily work activities of an inexperienced and an experienced station worker, it teases out different levels of perceptual attunement to movement and rhythm taking shape hundreds of kilometres away. It argues that the tacit dimension of temporal and kinaesthetic enskilment highlights important qualities needed to make hustle successful, which essentially requires the ability to ‘read’ the different rhythms of eruptive situations and to align and time one’s actions accordingly.

All his life, Hopkins was either student or teacher of the Classics. School, university, teaching posts, and finally a professorship in Dublin meant that he was engaged professionally with Latin and Greek almost without intermission. There are subjects, topics, or words in his writings which obviously derive directly from those studies, and there are approaches which were plainly learned from his experience. Specific examples of influence are betrayed by words and ideas, but the influence is perhaps more general; in word order, for example, or in the idea of poetry as speech, which connects with his discovery and use of Sprung Rhythm. His understanding of rhythm is the most important thing which his classical studies nurtured. In his university training and in his own teaching rhythm was a central concern. The Classics gave him models to follow, but they also freed him from some conventions of English poetry, which allowed him to write in an original style.

This chapter argues that we must understand Hopkins’s engagement with rhythm amid the cultural contexts of poetic experimentation and metrical and linguistic inquiry during the nineteenth century, a prosodic discourse in which Hopkins was a participant. Amid linguistic and religious definitions of tradition and rupture, Hopkins thought through several changing definitions of rhythm in language, in poetry and in the world. Our focus on sprung rhythm, though his most well-known innovation, clouds other theories of rhythms and important cultural histories of accent, speech, national identity, and religious identification that show the ways that accent and stress are part of a broader pattern – a broader rhythm he wants to detect – of likeness and difference in all things.

Even though we read silently, we nevertheless "hear" words on the page. Our brains use both visual and phonological loops for processing sentences, enabling us to perceive the rhythm of sentences. We primarily perceive the cadence of sentences through variations in sentences’ lengths and beginnings. Moreover, this rhythm reflects not the writer’s education or skill with words but, instead, the sources that writers read frequently. Because of this influence, writers can shift the cadence of their sentences by choosing their reading carefully, or even choosing to read books or articles that counter their usual cadence.

This section of the book takes a holistic approach by exploring elements of the compositional lingua franca that catalyzed a new musical poetics. Chapter 7 identifies approximately eight parameters (e.g., text-setting, cadences, and harmony) that in tandem can be used to create dramatic arcs.

This chapter studies H.D.’s translations of choruses from Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Aulis (1915) and Hippolytus (1919). Tracing her shifting concern from image to sound, the author argues that her work mirrors Eliot’s and Pound’s preoccupations of that period; her play Hippolytus Temporizes (1927) – abstract and formalist, yet rooted in the specific circumstances of its time – especially reflects this. More specifically, she show that the “Choruses from Iphigeneia” are a first attempt to compose, on the one hand, a long Imagist poem and, on the other, to write a “poem including history.” She then homes in on H.D.’s treatment of Euripidean rhythm and meter in the Hippolytus plays, through which H.D. questions the relationship between “antiquity” and “modernity” as well as the possibility and value of writing poetry itself. H.D. engages with discourses on Greek antiquity, which are woven into her translations and play; unlike Pound and Eliot’s mostly rhetorical engagement, H.D. measures out in her work how to translate Greek poetics into English, and yet is almost as ambivalent as Pound about the value of Greek.

The aim of this chapter is to provide the state-of-the-art of the research on the development of suprasegmental phonology in bilingual children from infancy through childhood. First, we discuss word-level prosodic phenomena, with a special focus on the bilingual acquisition of word stress and syllable structure, which has been a lively area of research. We also present recent data on the acquisition of tone, which remains a less investigated topic. Second, we consider the acquisition of phrase-level prosody, namely, rhythm and intonation. For each domain of prosodic development, we briefly review monolingual patterns and discuss how learning two (or more) phonological systems can affect developmental trajectories, showing that there can be different cross-linguistic interactions such as transfer, delay, acceleration, or fusion. We also consider potential influencing factors that can trigger different tracks in the development of prosody, for example age of onset, amount of exposure, language dominance, and simultaneous or sequential language acquisition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of avenues for future research.

This chapter reviews the last twenty-five years of L2 prosody research in three sections, word stress, sentence intonation, and rhythm, and presents findings in relation to two underlying themes, form-meaning mapping and additive versus subtractive bilingual contexts. Concerning L2 stress, pioneering research framed perception difficulties either as an L1-to-L2 cue-transfer problem or as a processing deficit linked to learners’ inability to represent contrastive stress in their lexicons. Recent research established the extent and limits of those initial frames. L2 sentence intonation has multiple factors modeling its variation. One of them, social meaning, and in particular accommodation literature revealed the effect of affective factors which in multilingual communities became stronger than that of linguistic and social factors. As regards L2 rhythm, most research uses duration-based measures. Indeed, recent L1 studies started examining pitch-based rhythm measures which are still to be explored in L2. Ending with suggestions for future research that address those biases, this chapter aims at promoting a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of L2 prosody.

Introducing the concept of verse history and adapting Roman Jakobson's distinction between verse design and verse instance, this chapter considers a sequence of brief case studies drawn from the work of multiple writers: the Beowulf poet, William Langland, the Gawain poet, John Gower, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Willis, Victoria Chang, and André 3000. The chapter proposes that, even after free verse, reading poetry historically still must involve a consideration of the relationship of rhythm to meter. The potential for friction between verse instance and verse design, and more broadly between poems and poetry, implies a need for relations of supplementarity. Moments of rhythmical disturbance disclose how what one had located outside the lone poem – a metrical template, a political ideal, or a historical event – comes rushing into it and through it.

The relationship between context and prosody is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive ones in language. At the same time, it is one of the most difficult to describe because it is based on acoustic cues that only need milliseconds to create an image in our brain. However, speakers of a language can generally understand their interlocutors’ emotional and cognitive status through their prosodic realization. Prosodic pragmatics is the branch of pragmatics that attempts to identify the intentionality of the speaker’s meaning in a real context based on the analysis of the suprasegmental aspects of speech production. If prosody studies how an utterance is pronounced in unison with the perceptual features of pitch, length, and loudness, then prosodic pragmatics studies the acoustic and cognitive contextual parameters in conversation. The chapter will show the relationship between prosody, information, and context in communication. Starting from the essential acoustic parameters of speech, it will revise the most influential theories of intonation through the prosodic pragmatics lens to understand the cognitive adaptation of a message in a specific context.

This chapter focuses on imaginative engagements with the steam engine in nineteenth-century literature. Following James Watt’s patent in 1781, the steam engine became an obsessive focus of literary writing, with reactions ranging from Thomas Carlyle’s denunciation of the steam-powered mechanization of the mind to Walt Whitman’s rhapsodic vision in “To a Locomotive in Winter” of the steam railway engine as “The type of the modern – emblem of motion and power – pulse of the continent.” In the nineteenth century, the steam engine became a symbolic magnet for working through new conceptions of logic and rationality, mobility and freedom, distance and proximity, city and country, and the natural and the manmade. Kirkby shows how Victorian authors picked up the new rhythms of the steam age, also providing their readers with “psychosomatic inoculation to the impact of railway travel on the nervous system.”

The circadian timing system has pronounced effects on learning and memory, with learning and recall regulated by time of day and the cellular mechanisms underlying learning and memory being under circadian control. Given this influence of the circadian system, studies across species, including humans, reveal that circadian disruption has pronounced negative effects on cognitive functioning. Circadian disruption leads to deficits in learning and memory by negatively affecting neurogenesis, synaptic plasticity, and epigenetic events required for acquisition and recall of memories. The present chapter describes the impact of circadian disruption on learning and memory while considering the mechanisms underlying circadian control of cognitive function. Given that the modern world is rife with temporal disruptions due to work requirements, limited exposure to sunlight during the day, and exposure to artificial lighting and blue light-emitting electronic devices at night, understanding the negative impact of circadian disruption on learning and memory and developing mitigating strategies are vital.

When the Lives first appeared as “Prefaces,” the final, resonant, paragraph was the conclusion of the “Life of Gray.” But when individual “Lives” were printed separately from the poems, this particular grace was replaced by the possibility of reading with more continuity from one “Life” to the next. Such integration highlights internal transitions, changes and shifts of topic and tone; gradations of critical engagement mark Johnson’s developing interpretation of his task. Each “Life” inscribes an individual career; this is placed in the context of other “Lives” to draw attention to ends and beginnings. Johnson thereby resurrects within his late eighteenth-century present the ghosts of a 150-year poetical past. He actualizes this past in the fictional imagination of the living. The artistic moral of the Lives arises from the succession of births and deaths of poets whose company was the late-life mental habitation of a critic who found solitude unbearable.

This chapter will introduce you to the concepts of stress and rhythm in relation to languages and to varieties of English. The chapter begins by defining stress both acoustically and articulatorily, and then examining stress across varieties. This is examined first at the level of the syllable through a focus on strong vs weak syllables in English, and the relationship between strong/weak syllables and stress. The discussion then focuses on the concept of word stress in varieties of English, after which rhythm and pitch accent are introduced, through an examination of stress- and syllable-timing, in different languages as well as varieties of English. This discussion will also present information about the function of stress and pitch accent in various substrate languages for different varieties - such as Cantonese, Malay, Filipino, Spanish, among others - to help you understand the different stress and rhythm patterns that exist across varieties. In the final section of the chapter, you will be guided through exercises designed to check your understanding of the content of the chapter.

Histories of urban sound have often fixated on the regulation of soundscapes and sensitivities to noise – frequently on the part of a perpetually rising bourgeoisie. Using the case study of the ’news-horn’, a tubular instrument used by newspaper vendors, this chapter offers an alternative way of understanding the changing soundscapes of towns and cities: rhythm. Developing from the post-horn which had been used in England since the sixteenth century, the news-horn became a common sound on the streets of 1770s London. However, with the growth of newspaper print and news from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the intensity and frequency of the news-horns’ blasts increased. This produced an arrythmia in London’s soundscape that clashed with other street sounds, sabbath-day silence, and the busy hum of London’s commercial centres. During the 1820s this resulted in the disappearance of the news-horn from London’s streets. Looking back from the mid-nineteenth century, many writers did not celebrate the news-horn’s removal. Instead, they remembered its sound with a fond nostalgia. The news-horn was one among many casualties in the emergence of a new London soundscape that replaced a pointillist pattern of auditory information with a roaring blanket of urban noise.

Literary adaptions in comics are not a recent phenomenon, but until recently the cultural status of this kind of work has always been very low, and a certain distrust has dominated the debates for many decades, the main reason of this suspicion being the fear that “fidelity” to the adapted model might jeopardize the proper creative possibilities of the adapting medium. More and more recent examples from the graphic novel field, which aims at becoming a literary practice itself, do not only show that literary adaptations can be very valuable, they also demonstrate that it is possible to use the notion of fidelity itself in highly creative ways. Taking its departure from specific case studies, Olivier Deprez’s adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle (2003), Paul Karasik (script) and David Mazzuchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (2005), Simon Grennan’s adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (2015), and Sébastien Conard’s adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Watt (2019), this chapter examines the most important techniques that can be used to transfer a novel into a visual narrative in print. It pays particular attention to the visuality of the text as it is transferred from one medium to another (typography, page layout, text as drawing).