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This chapter argues that a theistic natural sign pointing to God's existence lies at the core of cosmological arguments; this sign is called “cosmic wonder” and is sometimes elicited by considering questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The author first explains some of the different types of the cosmological arguments, argues that the Easy Resistibility Principle explains why we should not be surprised that they fail as conclusive proofs, and considers the thesis that Cosmic Wonder is the source of the persistent intuition that undergirds the arguments. Finally, it is argued that traditional theists, non‐traditional theists, and non‐theists often sense the force of Cosmic Wonder. This fact indicates that it is widely accessible as a sign.

This chapter discusses Americans poets A. R. Ammons' Bosh and Flapdoodle and John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander. It suggests that both works are filled with black humor, nostalgia, regret, anticipation, and wonder. It argues that both poets have mastered the American dialect, especially its slang, and neither shies away from plain goofiness, nor does Ammons shy away from bad puns.

Could women break the barriers of Hollywood sexism? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Title VII, and Title IX facilitated change. But most important was the prevalence of new TV action shows starring women: The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, Charlie’s Angels. Stuntwomen still had to fight men’s urge to protect them, which was sometimes used as an excuse to give the job to a man. Their often tight-fitting wardrobes prevented stuntwomen from padding up when doing falls and other physical stunts, making the work more dangerous.

We tend to associate wonder with the extension of the senses and the explosion of curiosity characteristic of the Scientific Revolution. This intellectual energy and optimism was connected to the relentless drive to experiment typical of the Early-Modern Period. The emergence, dissemination, and rapid diversification of a stunning range of optical instruments—especially during the seventeenth-and eighteenth-centuries-- revealed an immense and silent universe above as well as an animated ground-level panorama whose organic action-art was fleetingly captured, if not accounted for, through equally remarkable technology. This essay turns to a raw, less apparent phenomenon. It recounts the personal experience of descending into an abandoned Colorado gold mine at dusk. This sensation of a darker wonder also occurs in sunless caves, caverns, grottoes, karsts. Such experiences of saturated blackness are often accompanied by hallucinatory visions, stimulated by our literally -embedded primal consciousness confronting an inscrutable self-organizing matter.

The Afterword offers a brief summative conclusion and outlook, addressing the question of what ‘follows’ the works considered. It draws together the strands and literary historical patterns that have emerged through the readings, but suggests that the most enduring legacy of the works in terms of aesthetics and ethics, more important even than their specific formal features, is their liberating openness and lasting sense of wonder.

The Epilogue provides a case study to showcase the multifaceted patronage of a Daoist temple, the Abbey of Sublime Mystery (Xuanmiao), by the Su Principality in Lanzhou, a frontier city. Against the background of the Su princedom, the military population in Lanzhou, the local Daoist traditions, and the Su household’s involvement in Daoism as its family heritage, the study examines the Xuanmiao Abbey and its associations (hui). Then it discusses the patterns of patronage, focusing on the princes, military servicemen, and Daoist clerics. It also deals with the dynamic interaction of the patronage of this temple by the princes of the Su and other patrons. In conclusion, the present study of the Ming princes’ involvement in Daoism makes it clear that their activities should be seen in the context of the dynasty’s official religious policies, including policies regarding princes. Due to the close connection between Daoist establishments in local society and the princely institutions, this study shows the subtlety of relations between the Ming state, princes, and local religion. The support from the princes also served to mediate between the official religious policies and commoners’ spiritual needs.

This chapter examines how Langston Hughes writes an autobiography as a literary genre. There were substantial pressures on a black autobiographer in the United States to construct himself as a subject that would represent African Americans in just the right ways: as valued citizens and loyal patriots. Hughes faced this issue not just in The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder As I Wander (1956). This chapter analyzes the link between heterolingualism and Hughes' autobiographies. To this end, it weaves together texts and a host of intertexts, including the Spanish translations of Hughes' autobiographies, around scenes of translation. It shows how the historical exigencies impinging on Hughes' acts of self-writing are intertwined with broader theoretical concerns about autobiography as a literary genre. The chapter also considers the discourses of race, gender, and nationality as well as black internationalism and international modernism that Hughes takes to task in his autobiographies.

Joan Ormrod begins the section with “Body Issues in Wonder Woman 90-100 (1994-1995): Good Girls, Bad Girls, Macho Men.” In an era that saw the emergence of violent, silicone-breasted, wasp-waisted bad girls, D.C.’s Wonder Woman’s sales dropped. In response, Diana/Wonder Woman was reconceptualized to fit the new mold. Study of this shift to elongated, muscular bodies in fetishized clothing and soft-core porn poses, argues Ormrod, is productively achieved through application and critique of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze. Then, positing an alternative model based on Turner’s notion of the “somatic society,” Ormrod reads the superhuman body as a metaphor for the body within wider culture, offering a historically contextualized commentary on women’s changing place in society in the 1990s.

This chapter shows how Bester’s early identification with Renaissance thinkers of broad and varied learning led him to think of science fiction as a Renaissance genre especially suited to mixing and marrying various influences and branches of knowledge. It also examines several of Bester’s early stories. “Voyage to Nowhere” represented Bester’s initial foray into pastiche, while “The White Man Who Was Tabu”—a little-known South Sea adventure published under the pseudonym Alexander Blade—signaled his interest in psychology and laid the groundwork for Ben Reich and Gully Foyle, the distinctive antiheroes of his trailblazing novels The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination.

The chapter focuses on the way museums, historical areas, and iconic architecture become a key asset in the promotion of an urban identity and branding. The chapter examines the various facets of the Wonder Port project and its consequence for local residents. It studies more specifically the key role played by art in the production of conflicting and sometimes contradictory spatial imaginaries. The chapter shows the tensions between Rio Art Museum’s architecture and exhibits and community-based social and cultural projects such as Morrinho (Little Hill) and the Inside Out Morro da Providência project. It illustrates how top-down market-oriented social policies of displacement of long-time residents are put into question by favela-based cultural producers.

This chapter argues that the television programs Family Ties and The Wonder Years advanced the neoconservative politics of the eighties even as they appeared to evince halting nostalgia for sixties-era dissent. The caricature of the hippie-turned-yuppie in eighties era television teaches viewers that radical beliefs, countercultural lifestyles, and women’s liberation were forms of youthful indiscretion that the baby boomer generation learned to outgrow. These programs recentered the family as the site of individual agency and moral activism, giving televisual form to the ideas undergirding neoliberalism and postfeminism.

This chapter argues against the common distinction made between the theoretical aim of Greek philosophy and the primary concern for salvation in Indian philosophy. Greek philosophy sometimes linked the intimate experience of eternity, which breaks the power of death, with true theoria in order to define a complete way of life (esp. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics X 7, but also in some presocratic thought). And in India wonder (as in Aristotle Metaphysics A 1) was sometimes viewed as the first motive leading to the disinterested search for truth about metaphysical principles. Brahman is not just a thing, but desire - for itself. And so to unite personally with the brahman implies keeping the desire for truth alive.

An affective experience of wonder arises in encounters with religious others. In defense of the authority such encounters might hold for Christian life, this chapter gestures toward a Christian theology of religious pluralism that appreciates both the incomprehensibility of otherness and the affect it awakens. Three categories from the classical Indian aesthetic theory guide this aesthetics of religious pluralism: the aesthetic emotion of wonder (adbhuta rasa), the sympathetic spectator (sahṛdaya), and transitory or nurturing emotional states (vyabhicāribhāvas or sañcāribhāvas). Wonder partakes of the ethical ambivalence that attends the aesthetic emotions generally. As a theology of religious pluralism struggles to find language and rationality, it must remain open to the mystery of the other and of the divine.

This chapter describes Sweatman’s recording career. In December 1916 Sweatman visited the studios of the Emerson Phonograph Company in midtown Manhattan and cut the first jazz records. On the strength of his reputation in vaudeville, he was asked to record two numbers. One was a popular song of the day, “My Hawaiian Sunshine,” on which Sweatman was accompanied by a studio band; the other title was his own “Down Home Rag.” Jazz is heard for the first time on record on the latter title. In 1917 Sweatman recorded six sides for the Pathé Frères Phonograph Company and recorded for Columbia in the 1918–20 period. His band can also be heard, albeit anonymously, on the Little Wonder record label.

This chapter shows that while most nineteenth-century novels engage readers by promoting active curiosity, novels occasionally model or invoke a passive state of wonder that permits the pleasurable perception of things as themselves (vs. as clues, symbols or signifiers). As such, wonder can be aligned with Keats's notion of negative capability, which functions as a counterpoint to other aesthetic theories, particularly Kant's notion of the sublime. A reading of Frankenstein brings out the specific dynamics of curiosity, wonder, and the relationship between them, in the context of novels and novel reading. The chapter then traces a pattern common to numerous Victorian representations of illness, specifically faints or fevers, in which characters briefly inhabit a state of wonder before fully recovering. This section includes analysis of novels by Dickens, Gaskell, and Charlotte Brontë, and draws on the work of Roger Caillois. Finally, the chapter offers a reading of Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, which shows us that the special modes of attention, or verisimilitudes, associated with wonder become more accessible when teleological plots, and the end-oriented desire with which they are associated, fail or are derailed.

These chapter outlines how Disney's full-length feature films developed an alternative mode to graphic narrative called “animistic mimesis.” This mode enabled viewers to feel the special affection of wonder, which means sensing something as alive that one cognitively knows is not. The chapter illustrates, through an analysis of Fantasia, how Disney's use of colour, shadow, sound and gesture enabled the development of animistic mimesis.

The chapter reads Shakespeare's late play, The Winter's Tale, along with Francisco Suárez's Mariological writings as anatomies of the media conditions required for a sovereign event. Shakespeare's play of “wonder” stages a series of recapitulations, as the political and theological pathways of sovereignty viewed in the previous chapters converge in a complex set of returns. Shakespeare's play of “wonder” draws on what Hent de Vries calls the technicity of a theological construction, the art (or techné) in which a mediated and mediating body is fabricated out of a collage of textual authorities, Ovid, Petrarch, and the book of Revelation, in the course of performing a ‘miracle.’ Like Suárez's Mysteries, The Winter's Tale is a discourse of special effects, of a performance that binds and links the spectator to a tradition that is at least as theatrical as theological, and in which what is at stake is less the body of the absolute object of desire (in this case the body of a long lost mother and queen) than the believer's relation to that object. In different ways, Shakespeare and Suárez show that sovereignty bonds are also always media-bonds, as political theology give way to what might be termed psycho-political theology.

This chapter examines a wide range of issues such as sexuality, fetishization, gender role reworkings, masquerades, the importance of fictional fathers and male creators, consumption, girlishness, and audience control in relation to the action heroine. It demonstrates action heroines as contestable figures by focusing on Wonder Woman, who has been one of the most readily identifiable action heroines since her debut in the 1940s and has been reconfigured in multiple forms in recent years. It considers the difficulties that have been encountered by Hollywood in its efforts to produce a live-action Wonder Woman feature film. It looks at Wonder Woman’s unique place in contemporary popular culture as both a symbol of heroic feminism and a fetishized sex symbol.