bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shakespeare the Bodger
Authors: Altman Joel B.
Published: May 2024

Drawing inspiration from Robert Greene’s deathbed attack on Shakespeare as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,” The Bodger (Elizabethan variant of “botcher,” “mender,” “patcher”) argues that Shakespeare’s dramas are compositions of “shreds and patches” pieced together by a mind of extraordinary synthetic acuity. Such patches include passages of dialogue that, as described in the sixteenth century, “lead objects before our eyes” by means of ekphrasis.  The book offers substantial art-historical research into the only visual artist named by Shakespeare, Giulio Romano--who performs an important role in The Winter’s Tale as the alleged sculptor of a statue of the dead Queen. Giulio, heir to Raphael's workshop, is known primarily as a painter and architect.  My research has revealed that he was also a designer of sculpture. Applying historical and theoretical materials to close readings of several plays, I focus on the most critical issues of The Winter’s Tale—King Leontes’ sudden fit of jealousy; Shakespeare’s introduction of a surrogate playwright in the personification of Time, who refashions the play from tragedy to comedy, assisted by a behind-the-scenes female ghost writer; and the Queen’s statue amazingly “coming to life” through an interactive declaration of faith.
“Your sorrow was too sore laid on”: Portraying the Subject of Ekphrasis
Authors: Altman Joel B.
Published: May 2024

This chapter distinguishes between two kinds of human representations on the stage: dramatis persona (a Moor, a Queen, a Prince) and character. Characters often speak through ekphrases, using vivid descriptive language, which is Shakespeare’s way of infusing depth into dramatis personae. The argument continues that ekphrasis can also persuade an audience that a person in the play is making a terrible error (as Romeo, seeing Juliet in the Capulets’ tomb awakening from the sleeping potion that Friar Laurence has given her, and believing her lingering pallor is a sign of coming death, takes poison so that she will not die alone).
Introduction: Towards an Organism-Oriented Ontology
Authors: Žukauskaite Audrone
Published: May 2024

The introduction proposes a new concept of an organism-oriented ontology, which encompasses different threads coming from systems theory, the notion of autopoiesis, and the philosophy of biology, and relates them to actual and ‘vital’ ideas circulating in contemporary philosophy. An organism-oriented ontology pursues the Kantian idea that some characteristics defining living beings – organisms – might be helpful to reconceptualise traditional ontology. In this respect, the notion of an organism-oriented ontology engages with the controversies concerning whether the living system is closed or open, whether it follows a certain teleology and purpose, or, on the contrary, is absolutely contingent and unpredictable. An organism-oriented ontology examines the relationships of continuity and discontinuity between different levels of a living system, and also between organisms of different complexity. It problematises the relationship between organisms and technological objects and extensions, asking to what extent these technological extensions can be seen as part of the organism.
Gilbert Simondon: From Ontology to Ontogenesis
Authors: Žukauskaite Audrone
Published: May 2024

Chapter 1 introduces Simondon’s theory of individuation. Simondon argues that philosophy should analyse not complete and self-identical individuals, but the processes of individuation. Individuation is understood as a shift from the pre-individual state to the continuous process of individuation, and the individual is seen only as a result, emanating from this process. In this respect, the theory of individuation tackles both the metaphysics of substance and traditional hylomorphism, and places processes at the centre of ontology. The process of individuation is seen as the potentiality for transformation, or change, when a metastable system is undergoing a phase shift under certain conditions. Simondon compares physical, biological, psychical and technical individuation. In contrast to physical individuation, which is completed when certain conditions are exhausted, biological and psychical individuation is in continuous transformation through the interaction both with the pre-individual and its milieu. Simondon’s theory not only defines the unique trajectory of biological individuation but also reveals that psychical and social individuation, as well as technological individuation, are deeply rooted in the biological.
Raymond Ruyer: Organic Consciousness
Authors: Žukauskaite Audrone
Published: May 2024

Chapter 2 discusses Ruyer’s philosophy of biology. Like Simondon, Ruyer is interested not in bounded individuals, but in processes and becomings. In contrast to the theory of preformationism, which presumes that an organism is formed in advance and later changes only in quantity, Ruyer argues that an organism develops by undergoing a qualitative change and guides its own morphogenesis. Ruyer defines an organism as a primary consciousness, which has the capacity of equipotentiality and self-survey. Equipotentiality refers to an organism’s capacity for change and transformation, whereas self-survey is understood as a recursive system of self-organisation which both directs the process of development, or morphogenesis, and maintains the organism’s identity. For Ruyer, organic consciousness is primary in relation to secondary cerebral consciousness and to complex psychological consciousness. In this sense, organic consciousness is a characteristic of any living being. Human consciousness thus appears to be not the highest form of organisation, but just a phase in a biological continuum.
Planetary Organism
Authors: Žukauskaite Audrone
Published: May 2024

Chapter 6 discusses the attempts to connect all kinds of ontogenetic development into a consistent whole in terms of the Gaia hypothesis. In the 1970s James Lovelock explained Gaia in terms of a cybernetic machine; later, together with Lynn Margulis, they remodelled Gaia in terms of symbiogenesis and explained it as a kind of superorganism. At the same time, when Lovelock and Margulis were trying to conceptualise Gaia theory, Maturana and Varela were working on the theory of autopoiesis. In 1988 Lovelock, Margulis and Varela participated in a Gaia theory symposium in Italy, where Varela argued that Gaia can be characterised as being living-like, and therefore as an autopoietic entity. Margulis took Varela’s point further by pointing out that cells and Gaia display a general property of autopoietic entities. The theory of autopoiesis was challenged by Donna J. Haraway’s theory of sympoiesis, which helps to define the interaction between organisms and thus to explain how something new might emerge.
Is Small Axe Cinema or Television and does it Matter? Discourses of Authorship and Production in the Publicity for Small Axe
Authors: Geraghty Christine
Published: May 2024

Considers how Small Axe was discussed and reviewed in the UK magazine Sight & Sound as primarily a collection of films, rather than a television series. Explores McQueen’s public comments, which oscillate between defining Small Axe as television or as five distinct cinema films. The chapter also emphasises the significance of executive producer Tracey Scoffield as a key intermediary between television and film, between the BBC and McQueen as a filmmaker and artist.
Dilemmas of EU Citizenship: The Persistent Divide between Economic and Political Integration
Authors: Seubert Sandra
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on EU citizenship and argues that competing conceptualizations of citizenship in the EU has given rise to unresolved dilemmas at the European level. The chapter analyses the conflicting political and economic logics at the heart of these notions of citizenship and reflects on the recent dynamics in the development of a European citizenship regime. The EU citizenship is primarily an ‘economic citizenship’ which threatens to hollow out rights-based conceptions. By wavering between a self-standing and complementary status vis-à-vis national citizenship, the EU citizenship’s political determination remains uncertain. Particularly in relation to the normative dimension of citizenship and its connection to democratic self-determination, the EU citizenship regime is stuck in a limbo of hitherto unresolved tensions.
Beyond Democratic Minimalism: How Democratic Contestation Can Support European Integration
Authors: Lacey Joseph
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses whether the EU can and should accommodate higher levels of democratic contestation. The chapter challenges standard interpretations of the dilemma related to democratic contestation in EU studies which regard real democratic contestation as problematic in an environment characterised by far-reaching scepticism from anti-system actors. However, the costs of trading-off democratic contestation to serve problem-solving effectiveness may be far greater than they first appear. This is because in the absence of democratic contestation about the EU, citizens are more likely to maintain ambivalent attitudes towards this political system. Shifting our understanding of dilemmas related to democratic contestation in the EU reveals opportunities for exploring how democracy’s contestatory aspects may serve to strengthen the political order.
The European Union’s Main Democratic Deficits in Comparative Perspective
Authors: Kelemen R. Daniel
Published: May 2024

This chapter questions the need to further strengthen the collective democratic arrangements in Europe. It takes a comparative perspective and argues that the oft-assumed democratic shortcomings of the EU fair rather well against similar systems. This concerns both current public support for the system, at times higher than the confidence placed in national politicians, and the ways in which Europeans engage in politics at the EU level, evidenced for instance by the levels of participation in European elections. Instead, attention should be turned to the way in which current institutional arrangements in the EU not only allow democratic backsliding in its member states, but also facilitate the continued dismantling of democratic institutions by largely unconditional access to EU funds.
The Dilemmatic Perspective on European Democracy
Authors: Bremberg Niklas , Norman Ludvig
Published: May 2024

This chapter sets out directions for future research on democracy in Europe’s political order from the perspective of the volume’s dilemmatic approach. Key benefits with this perspective are highlighted, in a discussion that which discusses the questions that the focus on democratic dilemmas of European democracy provokes. The chapter also identifies a set of issue areas where the perspective could be applied.
Resistance in The Lobster : Mapping an Intensive-Image in Contemporary Popular Film
Authors: Escobar Cristóbal
Published: May 2024

Chapter five studies Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, a surrealist black comedy that expresses the indeterminate potential, and always dynamic nature, of the notion of intensity. Here, my analysis traces two maps by looking at the film’s politics of resistance. The first map, which is delineated through extensive cartography, marks the physical spaces in which the action of the film takes place. This is a diagram that covers three geopolitical locations, all of which are said to be equally oppressive in practice although dissimilar in ideology. The second map, which I offer as an alternative route to the tyrannical regime of Lanthimos’ dystopic society, is no longer conceived as a plane delineated in extension but rather as an invisible line surpassing the film’s official norms. This is an intensive map which I draw via two forms of political resistance: resistance as an external act performed by characters who mock the conventions set up by dogmatic administrations; and resistance as an internal act enacted by a filmmaker who leaves the image open for virtual navigation.
Material
Authors: Wadiwel Dinesh Joseph
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes the method and approach taken with respect to the “materialist” analysis within the book, and the importance of a structural approach which is alive to political antagonism. There are two sections. The first relates to emerging “new materialist” approaches, their attachment to ontological monism, the potential implications of the political monism inherent in some of these accounts, and the limitations for politics with this framing. The second section explores the distinction between a structural analysis which is alive to political antagonism and an “intersectional approach.” Here the book highlights the potential hostility animal labourers face in relation to the human proletariat – I draw here from theorist Frank B. Wilderson III to articulate this distinct structural relation.
Resistance
Authors: Wadiwel Dinesh Joseph
Published: May 2024

This book charts the confrontation that animals experience in relation to capitalist industrial agriculture. This is often a battle between fixed capital (machines, enclosures, instruments) and animals who are compelled by this machinery. It is thus resistance that is the central marker of animal agency in the face of capital. This Chapter looks at the case study of industrialised fisheries, exploring how resistance might be conceptualised, and the ways this resistance can be read against deployments of fixed capital. Examining the fish hook, the purse seine net and aquaculture, these technologies of capture reveal the parasitic relation at the centre of capital’s orientation to these beings, which seeks continually to subdue these animals in order to suck value. But, a focus on resistance is also useful as it reminds us that animals are co-co-producers of the world we see, and thus point us towards the potential productivity of a re-imagined world without this violence.
Bülent Somay
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Bulent Somay
Can Dündar
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Can Dundar
Hayko Bağdat
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Hayko Bagdat
Şehbal Şenyurt Arınlı
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Sehbal Senyurt Arinli
Introduction
Authors: Jones Nick
Published: May 2024

The introduction to the book considers the scholarly work that has already been undertaken on convergence, transmedia, and computer interfaces, and argues for the need for an updated discussion of screen entertainment media which accounts for the centrality of the graphic user interface (GUI) today. Such an account must address the GUI’s gooey tendencies (the way it sticks media together, and the way it leaves sticky aesthetic traces upon them). The videogame Spider-Man (2018) is offered as an example of the kind of media text which cannot be properly understood without paying attention to its overlaps with other media and its inherent gooiness. A chapter breakdown is also provided.
Programming Matter
Authors: Jones Nick
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the influence of the graphic user interface (GUI) on architecture and ideas of matter itself. It begins by discussing parametric and topological architecture; that is, the use of computer software to design excitingly pliant and complex buildings. The work of Greg Lynn is key here, as he represents a broader field of architects (and others) who posit that computer-aided design (CAD) tools are changing the very nature of built space. The connections that Lynn draws between cinematic VFX and architecture are extended, with the chapter identifying echoes of his claims in the Transformers film franchise. If these seem incompatible, then there is more here than meets the eye: both Lynn and these blockbuster films use digital images to revitalise postindustrial wastelands, namely the Packard Plant in Detroit. Computational possibility is sacrosanct in both contexts, and so they each in their own way trace the eruption of desktop editability into (images of) the real world. The chapter ends with a discussion of the polymer-like aesthetic of Lynn’s work and related depictions of ‘programmable matter,’ tracing how and why this matte-like, textureless finish also appears in other media.
Conclusion: Stuck In
Authors: Jones Nick
Published: May 2024

This chapter summarises the key claims of the book, and uses the preceding work to explain the existence (and challenge) of a media object like The Matrix Awakens (2021) – not quite videogame, not quite game engine, not quite product demo, not quite television, not quite film, Awakens indicates the urgent need for the media agnostic model of gooey media proffered in its pages (and even – inevitably – indicates how much more work there is to do in this area).
Hospitality or the Limits of the Political Community
Authors: Herrero Montserrat
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the possibilities of a politics of hospitality. Hospitable action is at the heart of any community. The ethical duty to welcome the other, which urges political action to prevent the closing of the political community, is based on an idea of the human solidarity that has theological roots. The chapter re-inscribes the concept of hospitality in its theological locus to understand why there is an unconditional duty to welcome the other and how this unconditionality cannot disappear in dealing with conditions. Chrétien, Levinas and Derrida are among the foremost who have inspired a politics of hospitality in the twentieth century. It is by revising their arguments that the chapter attempts to escape the aporia in which Levinas and particularly Derrida leave us immersed. The chapter ends by recovering the history of one of the most effective structures of welcoming, that of the, hospital.
A Brief History of Indie Music in American Indie Film
Authors: Sexton Jamie
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides a broad, historical overview of the increased intersections between American independent cinema and indie music. It begins in the late 1970s, a key moment for independent music following the explosion of punk music, which also intersected with film on numerous occasions. It then charts the increased licensing of indie music and the growing attention paid to how such music could be used to bolster a film’s independent identity and act as a commercial hook. In assessing the growing commercial appeal of higher-end indie acts, it also discusses the growing importance of music supervisors in the age of promotional cultures.
Documenting Scenes and Performers 1: Punk, Smithereens and Suburbia
Authors: Sexton Jamie
Published: May 2024

This chapter turns attention to the representation of indie scenes and musicians. It commences with an overview of two films which represent different strands of punk music and cultures. As punk music is considered an important mode of music which both influenced indie, and continued as a variant of indie music, this chapter analyses tensions between reality and fiction, between authenticity and performance, which have continued as key tensions informing the values of indie music cultures. The chapter looks at Smithereens (1982), which documents New York punk cultures in the early 1980s, and Suburbia (1983), a more nihilistic interrogation of hardcore punks in LA.
Indie Music, Film and Race 2: Sorry to Bother You
Authors: Sexton Jamie
Published: May 2024

The second chapter on race goes beyond existing conceptions of indie music to explore some of the ways that indie has often been opposed to ‘black’ music. Through an analysis of Sorry to Bother You (2018), it focuses on how racial codification can take place in numerous ways, a factor that the film addresses. This extends to its musical score, in which white indie band Tune-Yards also create music which sometimes confuses sonic colour boundaries. The chapter also focuses on how the film employs strategies related to hip-hop music – such as remixing and recontextualization – in its avoidance of essentialism. The chapter concludes by discussing broader ways in which indie music might be conceptualised in less racist ways.
Conclusion
Authors: Sexton Jamie
Published: May 2024

The conclusion revisits some of the difficulties defining ‘indie’ and issues of authenticity, noting how the growing commercialisation of indie music and film has only heightened such debates. It discusses, but counters, how some critics have begun to question whether the term ‘indie’ has become emptied of meaning due to its profligate uses. It then outlines some areas that were overlooked or only briefly mentioned, and which would benefit from further research, which include indie musicians acting in indie films, actors who make indie music, indie music videos, and the increased number of indie musicians who have moved into scoring films.
Hilaritas and acquiescentia in se ipso : A Dynamic of Joy
Authors: Bove Laurent , Filion-Donato Émilie
Published: May 2024

In this chapter, the author investigates the role of the affect of hilaritas in the philosophy of Spinoza. Hilaritas corresponds to a state of perfect equilibrium. It is a joy without excess, where excess is understood as a state of disequilibrium. It expresses a generalized pleasure in existing. The affect involves an optimal affirmation of existence, which can yield beatitudo. This is because hilaritas can propel us from a passive experience of generalized joy to an adequation of causality and knowledge with respect to ourselves. Hilaritas thus underlies the crucial ethical moment of acquiescentia in se ipso. In other words, because the experience of hilaritas is an experience of an affective equilibrium, it can spur new and good pleasures rooted in who we are. This chapter thereby interprets the cultivation of hilaritas as the most enabling ethical and political strategy, paving the path from passivity to activity through the experience of joy.
The Innocence of Reality and the Recursive Cycle
Authors: Bove Laurent , Filion-Donato Émilie
Published: May 2024

This chapters delves into the metaphysical ramifications of Spinoza’s conception of substance. It exposes the Epicurean roots of the problem of a world created by chance. Spinoza responds to the Epicurean problem by bringing immanent causality central to his understanding of reality. Immanent causality, Bove argues, constitutes the radically novel element of Spinoza’s account of the unity of reality. Reality is unified in a way that combines the ostensibly contrary concepts of genesis and structure into a genetic structure, which is one in its causal power, yet expressed in infinitely many diverse ways. The chapter delves into the challenge to unity posed by the “infinite modes” within Spinoza’s system. Spinoza, on Bove’s analysis, rejects the neo-platonic theory of ontological hierarchy and proposes instead a circularity between the finite and the infinite. The analysis concludes that Spinoza’s metaphysics entail the identity between each individual and its process of production. Thus, each individual mode, as both a determinate and a strategic expression of immanent causality, contributes to the self-production of reality.
The Hebrew State: Elements for a Second Theory of the Imaginary Constitution of the Political Body
Authors: Bove Laurent , Filion-Donato Émilie
Published: May 2024

This chapter studies Spinoza’s reflections on the Hebrew State. Central to Bove’s argument is the notion of auto-organization, the idea that the political body is constituted by a collective imaginary. Importantly, the source of this imaginary does not lie outside the multitude but is immanent to it. Through consideration of the role of Moses in Spinoza’s analysis, Bove shows that the political imaginary must express the ingenium (character) of the nation to be created. The crucial notions of habit and the joy principle re-emerge. Bove suggests that Spinoza’s political thought focuses on the immanent production of institutions, rituals, and social life that do not depend upon their truth-value to be effective. Rather, they work well if they express the multitude’s conatus as a nation. Thus, Spinoza rejects utopianism as a project to conceive novel and ideal States. Instead, what politics requires is a careful consideration of history as it truly expresses a given multitude’s singular essence.
Form
Authors: Archibald David
Published: May 2024

Chapter 2 draws on interview material and film analysis to deal with questions of film form, suggesting that realism in Ken Loach’s work might be understood as a practice as much as an aesthetic. The focus here is on Loach’s use of popular narrative, realist mis-en-scène, how the camera is positioned as a sympathetic observer, how the director maximises the use of natural lighting, continuity editing and unobtrusive soundtrack, sometimes combined with recognisable pop songs.
Conclusion
Authors: Tas Latif
Published: May 2024

Conclusion identifies the main causes and implications of authoritarian regimes, their discriminatory legislations and unjust actions. It underlines the ways in which alternative courts have been instrumentalised to serve competing political agendas and new power structures, while consideration of new gender roles and norms have emerged as key to an alternative governmentality. It discusses how the empirical case study of Kurdish political mobilisation contributes to our wider conceptual understandings of the intersections between alternative justice, new forms of political control, as well as the potential and challenges of trying to create alternative forms of governmentality amongst minorities.
Social Stratification
Authors: Malatras Christos
Published: May 2024

In the first section of the chapter, are considered models of social stratification based on the function of social groups in society (occupations, estates and so on), only to discover their relative unimportance to the Byzantine social structure. Rather, the Byzantines stratified their society according to the degree of possession of economic and political capital. The Byzantine models were usually based on a binary opposition (such as rich–poor) which, even if valid, hardly described the complexity of society with all sorts of social groups in-between. Instead, it is necessary to identify a middle class to describe all the different, diverse social groups, such as merchants and artisans or soldiers and independent peasants, between the elite and the lower dependent classes. The chapter discusses the composition of each of the social groups: the differentiation between common soldiers and the officers who came from the elite; the divisions within the elite in terms of function (military and civil) and in terms of social power (higher and lesser); the composition and the occupations of the urban middle classes; and the social conditions in the countryside, including the status and obligations of the dependant peasants (the paroikoi).
Social Power
Authors: Malatras Christos
Published: May 2024

The chapter analyses the access of each social group to the economic and political resources. First are identified the different types of economic resources and their relevance to the establishment of the elite. There is also a thorough analysis of the incomes and inequality among peasants, with the use of statistical models on some villages of Macedonia. In regard to political power, it becomes obvious that it was controlled by a few people, mostly from the higher elite, while the lesser classes (the dēmos) had virtually no political power, although they were often used as a pressure group and acted through their ‘representatives’, who belonged to the upper middle strata and the lesser elite. There are discussed the two sources of legitimate authority: the State and the Church, as factors for the distribution of political, economic, and social capital. The Church is viewed as the amalgam of constituents with different interests and social background. It is also argued that imperial authority remained relatively strong for most of the period under discussion, until the growth of government by consent, the alienation of the provincial elite, and the economic crisis helped the emergence of decentralising tendencies.
Transgressive Art Films
Authors: Kenny Oliver
Published: May 2024

Transgressive Art Films offers a holistic approach to the way we consider controversial and extreme cinema – not just as individual or grouped texts for analysis – but as artefacts that ought to be considered within a complex network of social factors. This book provides a rigorous framework for understanding some of the most controversial films of the past twenty-five years.
The term ‘transgressive art film’ designates the phenomenon of a small number of controversial films recuperated each year by the cinema art world as part of an expansion of the definition of film art. Rather than seeing controversial films as aberrations, this book suggests that transgressive art films should be understood as a socio-cultural phenomenon and a central plank of cinema’s need for newness, innovation, and renewal. By paying attention to all scales of cinema, from close analysis of individual frames, through the discourse constructed around them, up to global distribution and film-festival networks, Transgressive Art Films details how certain kinds of cinematic transgression gain wide-ranging institutional support rather than being ignored or forgotten.
Genre
Authors: Kenny Oliver
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on type and degree of transgression, the almost-transgressive and the marginally transgressive. Having explored this in terms of film form – visibility, proximity and duration – this chapter considers how this theory can be applied to a specific very relevant boundary to transgressive art films: the boundary between art and pornography. Many transgressive art films transgress this boundary, even as it remains an important legal and cultural dividing line between two mutually exclusive genres. This chapter explore how genre theory is able to shed light on some of the issues provoked by transgressive art films, but is also insufficient to fully explain them. Focusing especially on Jacques Derrida’s account of genre, this chapter is an attempt to find a rigorous framework for thinking about genre hybridity and the mixing of low/high art that I have critiqued as unsatisfactory in much commentary on extreme cinema. Using the example of A Hole in My Heart and applying ideas about marginal transgression and polarising reception to poststructuralist readings of genre boundaries, I argue that we can grasp the transgressive and liminal positioning of the transgressive art film, which finds itself described and received as both art and not-art, pornography and not-pornography.
Before Vikings in Scotland – A Brief History of Viking-Age Archaeology in Scotland
Authors: Owen Olwyn
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of archaeological research in Scotland prior to the publication of Vikings in Scotland in 1998. The main highlights of archaeological fieldwork and research from across Scotland concentrate on those from the Northern Isles, where most of the work had taken place. Key sites include the Brough of Birsay, Buckquoy, the Earl’s Bu, Brough of Deerness, Skaill, Pool and Tuquoy in Orkney, and Jarlshof, Underhoull, Old Scatness, The Biggings and Sandwick in Shetland. Fewer sites were investigated in the Western Isles and mainland Scotland, but the author gives an overview of the scarcer settlement evidence these latter areas, as well as other types of archaeological evidence from across Scotland, including that of pagan graves, Viking-Age gold and silver hoards. In conclusion, interdisciplinary work, considered ground-breaking in the 1970s and 80s, is discussed, an approach that has now become the norm in today’s research into Scandinavian Scotland.
Norse Settlement in the Southern Hebrides: The Place-name Evidence from Islay
Authors: Macniven Alan
Published: May 2024

This chapter suggests we rethink assumptions about weaker landnám in the southern Hebrides, and on Islay in particular, given prominent Old Norse nature generics, the survival of Old Norse place-names on prime land throughout Islay, and the virtual absence of a pre-Old Norse onomastic stratum. Since at least the 19th century, scholars have attempted to understand Scandinavian settlement in the Hebrides amid the fog of a post-Viking-Age resurgence and northern expansion of Gaelic over areas with an Old Norse-speaking interlude. Key questions centre on the linguistic border of Gaelic and Pictish before Old Norse speakers settled in the first half of the 9th century, how extensive the settlement of Old Norse speakers was and whether there were distinct north-western and south-eastern sociolinguistic regions in the Hebrides. The research outlined in this chapter concludes that the initial impact of Viking settlement in the southern, Inner Hebrides, was very similar to that in the north.
Understanding the Norse Period through Place-name Evidence: A Case Study from the Island of Mull
Authors: Whyte Alasdair C.
Published: May 2024

This chapter is a case study that argues for a move away from models that separate Old Norse and Gaelic-speaking southern Hebridean communities in favour of interdisciplinary ones that allow for a ‘more nuanced’ view. Focussing on Mull, and on the area around the head of Loch Buie in south-east Mull in particular, the existence of Old Norse place-names provides evidence of resident Old Norse speakers on the island. The fact that these Old Norse place-names survive long enough to be recorded among Mull’s settlement names when they first appear in 15th century textual sources provides evidence of some degree of persistence of Old Norse in the resident population form into the subsequent period, when Gaelic was the predominant language of the island. Using a multidisciplinary approach that considers archaeology and early sculpture, this research concludes that there is strong evidence for pre-Norse Christian sites, and for a degree of continuity and stability from the pre-Norse to the Norse period and beyond.
Feasts, Food and Fodder: Viking and Late Norse Farming Systems in Scotland
Authors: Mainland Ingrid
Published: May 2024

This chapter demonstrates that over the last forty years there has been a shift in zooarchaeology away from purely economic aspects towards social perspectives, partly due to an expansion in the application of scientific approaches within archaeology, such as stable isotope analyses and aDNA. Our understanding of the role of animals in Viking and Late Norse society within Scotland has been transformed as a result. Food production is now seen as part of a more complex social system which included patronage and displays of wealth. Feasting is already well-attested to in written sources such as the Orkneyinga Saga. Evidence for the slaughter of animals for meat at a prime age in the Viking Age and increasing large-scale consumption and subsequent specialisation of farms in the Late Norse period, has meant that it is now convincingly identified in the archaeological record.
Revisiting Tuquoy – Still Full of Surprises …
Authors: Owen Olwyn
Published: May 2024

This chapter reports on the excavations and survey undertaken at Tuquoy, in Westray, Orkney, in the 1980s and early 1990s, which produced evidence for a high-status Norse farmstead and settlement situated adjacent to the medieval church of Crosskirk. Advances in survey and sampling techniques identified extensive building remains, and collected a wealth of palaeoenvironmental and artefactual evidence, including metalwork and bone dress ornaments, locks and keys, copper alloy vessels, and even a goat-skin shoe, as well as woodworking materials form a waterlogged pit. Subsequent analyses of the material have produced a date range of the 11th to 14th centuries for the site, with hall activity beginning in the 12th century. The survey at the site suggests a Late Norse tower or castle may also have existed on the site. Whilst the site at Tuquoy appears to have been relatively short-lived, it was clearly an impressive and wealthy complex and would warrant further, more extensive, excavation.
The Galloway Hoard
Authors: Goldberg Martin
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides a summary of the Galloway Hoard, discovered through metal detecting in 2014, and still undergoing detailed analysis and research. This remarkable hoard, which was deposited around 900 at Balmaghie in Kirkcudbrightshire, contains a variety of materials and objects from diverse cultural backgrounds from as far away as Central Asia. The hoard was buried in two layers, in separately-wrapped parcels, and amongst other things included silver bullion (ingots and arm rings, some inscribed with Anglo-Saxon runes), a silver pectoral cross and chain, a silver gilt vessel, a wooden box containing gold items, glass beads, rock crystal and other pendants, and brooches. The hoard includes the largest collection of gold objects surviving from Viking-Age Britain and Ireland. Organic materials such as leather, linen, wool gut, and silk cord also survive, where they were used to wrap many of the objects together, and hold the potential to provide radiocarbon dates, and to tell us more about the deposition of this magnificent hoard.
The Broken Scene: Thomson’s Tales
Authors: Somervell Tess
Published: May 2024

This chapter addresses the episodes in The Seasons that seem to depend most clearly on narrative time: the interpolated tales, and the depictions of the poet-narrator’s own creative process. This chapter argues that even these seemingly narrative passages undermine the supposed chronological order of their parts. Examining a specific tale, the story of Damon and Musidora in ‘Summer’, this chapter shows that in its content as well as its reception (by Thomson in his revisions, and by artists in their illustrations) this tale both endorses and questions the ongoing flow of time.
The Gothic Poetess: Self-Confinement in the Sonnet Cell
Authors: Loksing Moy Olivia
Published: May 2024

This chapter identifies a poetics of enclosure as a key and productive poetic conceit imported from the 1790s Gothic novel into nineteenth-century poetry. It reads Romantic and Victorian metasonnets against the trope of liberty-in-restraint, a familiar message used by Gothic patriarchs in novels to reassure imprisoned young women that their confinement in fact offers them safety and protection from far greater dangers. This message is later rehearsed in sonnets by Wordsworth and Keats, where each poet defends the constrictions of sonnet form by likening the poem to a maiden trapped or bound. Here, the sonnet’s stanza or room is exchanged for a prison cell. Victorian sonnet masters Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti adopt this figuration of the prison too, exploiting Gothic modes of confinement and exalting in a poetics of Gothic enclosure. Construing the sonnet as a prison and a womb, they embody tropes of Gothic motherhood from 1790s novels, intensifying the structural constrictions of sonnet from through innovative sonnet sequences and bouts-rimés.
The Cloistered Cleric: Confessional, Confinement, and Hopkins’s Poetics of Wavering
Authors: Loksing Moy Olivia
Published: May 2024

This chapter unifies Gothic tropes of the preceding three chapters (overhearing, the thrall of confinement, and fluctuating bodies) by considering the private writings of G.M. Hopkins. Hopkins’s poems voice the harrowing celebration of violence and the suffering of religious bodies, from priests to nuns. He literalizes the cloister as a site of trauma through the trappings of Catholic life. Read against the anti-Catholic subtext of 1790s Gothic novels and their caricatures of the Inquisition, Hopkins transforms the exaggerated, fictional Gothic figure of the foreign evil monk in British nineteenth-century literature by instead bringing home the real-life experience of an English Catholic priest. His spiritual, devotional verses in fact recruit and embody Gothic literary forms to convey the convergence of his English identity and Catholic faith. Reading Hopkins in such a way both reveals and overturns the powerful anti-Catholic stereotypes that Victorian poetry inherited from Gothic fiction.
Imagining The Region of Underdevelopment
Authors: Avery Tamlyn
Published: May 2024

Chapter 6 contextualizes the early twentieth-century trope of Southern underdevelopment, which informed developments of the Bildungsroman genre there. If the Bildungsroman is defined by its allegorical schema in which youth becomes the “symbolic form” of capitalist modernity, as Franco Moretti argues, and if it is the geographical logic of nationhood that puts “the brakes” on youth’s boundless development in the genre, as Jed Esty furthers, then what shape does youth’s development take when it is contoured by the geographical imaginary of a regionalism popularly distinguished by its stubborn anti-modernization? Ever lurking at the peripheries of the imagined nation, the twentieth-century South has historically been imagined as a site of antidevelopment, in ways that were linked to its economic underdevelopment. Reacting against the amplified social mobility of Northern modernism and the New Negro Renaissance, the Fugitive Agrarians’ regionalist manifesto counteracted that trope through regional containment. But many Southern Bildungsromane subsequently registered those uncanny cultural effects of the New South’s abrupt entrance into modernity, and the challenges of integrating the region’s heterogeneous but economically underdeveloped local cultures into America’s national-historical time, as those processes were filtered through the lens of an unfinished youth.
Mid-Century Gothic Cinema (1931–79): From Monster Business to Exploitation Horror
Authors: Reyes Xavier Aldana
Published: May 2024

This chapter traces the key changes experienced by Gothic cinema during the years bookended by the success of Universal Studios’ Dracula and Frankenstein and Hammer’s failed attempts to modernise their Gothic horror brand. Key developments during this period included the crystallisation of the horror franchise as a viable commercial venture in the 1930s and 1940s, the rise of Gothic realism in the women films of the 1940s, the widespread use of colour film processes in the late 1950s, and the subsequent rise of titillating and increasingly openly erotic spectacles in the exploitation cinemas of Italy and Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside these medium-specific developments ran the temporal fixing of the nineteenth century as the new Gothic era, or ‘Gothic cusp’, a fantastic or idealised version of the past that enabled the staging of ideological tensions between the barbaric past and the modern present. With the rise of pornography in the 1970s, it is argued, the Gothic aesthetic became unnecessary, even redundant, as the concerns once channelled through the safe distance offered by retrojection were suddenly able to manifest in horror films set in contemporary times. By considering similarities and points of divergence between Universal’s Frankenstein (1931) and Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the chapter underlines the cultural continuity of the Gothic aesthetic in this period and its evolution.
The Unheimlich State: Surveillance and the Digital Nation
Authors: Wright Julia M.
Published: May 2024

The chapter opens by referencing an important episode of one of twentieth-century Gothic TV’s most notable manifestations: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) to argue that a significant section of post-1960s ‘Television Gothic’ builds upon the early Gothic’s concern with local forms of power and questions the nation-state’s power as expressed through its monitoring of households. It goes on to explore three key points of friction between the state and the individual: the irreducibility of the individual to the mathematical unit; the invisible extension of state power over the individual through technological networks; and the fragmentation of the self through interactions with media and other digital forms. TV shows such as The Prisoner (1967–8), Kolchak, the Night Stalker (1974–5) and The X-Files (1994–2001, 2016, 2018) are discussed, and it is further argued that these Gothic television series, amongst other things, explore the violence inherent in digital technologies of power.
The Politics of Immigration in Scotland
Authors: Westfall Aubrey L.
Published: May 2024

While most nationalists worldwide fear immigration will dilute their national culture, pro-immigrant advocacy has become a critical element of nationalism and nation-building in Scotland. Elite-level endorsement of immigration and diversity serves Scotland’s moral and strategic interests, and is a symbol of Scotland’s distinction from England, which justifies arguments for further devolution or ultimately independence. This book dissects the central features of Scotland's social and political environment that provide an opportunity for the development of pro-immigration policy preferences, and evaluates how well those preferences are communicated with quantitative and qualitative analysis of primary and secondary data. Importantly, there is elite and mass divergence in understandings of Scottish identity and the desirability of immigration, which threatens the implementation of the government’s multicultural policies. The book illustrates the extent of the divergence and offers recommendations for how Scottish leaders can bridge the gap.
The Project: Building a Scottish Nation with ‘New Scots’
Authors: Westfall Aubrey L.
Published: May 2024

“The Project” outlines the development of the Scottish brand of liberal civic nationalism and connects it to the politics of immigration within Scotland. It begins by defining the scholarly ideal types of civic and ethnic nationalism and describes how elites attempt to implement civic nationalism in Scotland with somewhat contradictory results. The second half of the chapter focuses on how immigration fits into notions of Scottish nationalism and discusses how openness to immigration is framed as a reflection of Scottish values and a solution to Scottish problems. It illuminates the way Scottish elites mobilise domestic audiences in support of both nationalism and immigration through collective memories of the Scottish diaspora and the Highland Clearances. The chapter provides the foundation of the central argument of the book, which links the politics of immigration in Scotland to the political ambitions of the nation.
Conclusion: The Prospects for Attracting and Retaining Migrants in Scotland
Authors: Westfall Aubrey L.
Published: May 2024

The Conclusion brings the many strands of the book’s argument together to reinforce the central claim that immigration has become a critical tool for Scottish nation-building, regardless of whether or not Scotland succeeds at gaining more control over immigration post-Brexit. It offers suggestions for how Scotland can attract and retain more migrants and maintain a pro-diversity and multicultural political culture built on the powers that the Scottish Parliament and local authorities already have. It also makes additional recommendations for if Scotland achieves independent control over immigration. The recommendations and lessons from the Scottish case should be applicable in multiple contexts and at different levels of government.
Democracy in Turkey
Authors: Keyman E. Fuat , Turk Cana Tulus
Published: May 2024

Reading the history of modern Turkey as outlined in this chapter indicates that democracy should not be taken as a given or derivative phenomenon; on the contrary, it is the most important systemic benchmark not only for critically assessing the past but also for building a better future by learning from past mistakes. In this sense, critiques of Turkey’s dynamic process of transformation from the angle of democracy should encompass both a critical analysis of its failure to consolidate its democracy and its recent backsliding. It is only by doing so that a successful and sustainable redemocratisation can be possible and hopefully achieved.