bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
PSVIII-9 Effect of Garlic Extracts on Galectin Protein Secretion in St. Croix Sheep Blood
Authors: Inupala Sreenavya , Jagana Sowmya , Pande Priyanka , Uzzaman Md Rasel , Mulumebet Worku
Published: September 2022

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of garlic extract on the modulation of Galectin protein secretion in sheep blood. Dietary supplements can influence innate immunity. Garlic (Allium sativum) and its derivatives are eco-friendly non-antibiotic, growth-promoting dietary supplements known to modulate inflammation. Galectins (Gals) are a family of animal lectins that bind β-galactosides. Secreted Gal modulates pathological processes and inflammation. It is important to define potential targets of Garlic for its applications in sheep health. Clinically, healthy adult, age-matched non-pregnant St Croix sheep (n=12) from the NC A&T University farm were divided into treatment group (n=6) and control group (n=6). Treatment group 1 was drenched with 5 ml garlic juice (Garlic Barrier (Glendale, CA) concentrate at a rate of 10 ml diluted in sterile distilled water 1:1. The control group was drenched with 10ml sterile distilled water for four weeks. The body weight, body condition, and FAMACHA scores were measured weekly. Faecal egg count was evaluated using the modified McMaster technique. Total plasma protein was analyzed using the BCA assay. Secretion of Gals 1, 3, 9 was evaluated using ELISA kits (My BIOSOURCE). Data were analyzed using T-test where p≤0.05 (SAS9.4 SAS Institute Cary NC). Garlic had no significant effect on FAMACHA ©, body condition score, packed cell volume, differential white blood cell count. Fecal egg count decreased significantly in treated animals in weeks 1(p< 0.034) and 3 (p< 0.003). Total protein, GAL-1 and GAL-3 concentration increased (p< 0.004) in the treatment group. The concentration of Gal-9 decreased when compared to the control group. Garlic had no adverse effect and differentially modulated Gal secretion. Further studies are required to determine the health and production benefits of the observed Gal modulation using garlic in St Croix sheep.
Enantiomeric excess of amino acids in interstellar ice analogues-asymmetric photolysis of precursors by circularly polarized UV light
Authors: Sharma A
Published: September 2022

Based on the results from UV-irradiated interstellar ice analogues, we describe a two-step phenomenological theory for enantiomer-selective, asymmetric formation of molecules like amino acid precursors: (1) UV photolysis of interstellar ices to molecular fragments/radicals and formation of racemic population of chiral molecules and (2) asymmetric photolysis of precursors by UV-circularly polarized light (UV-CPL), resulting in preferred growth of one enantiomer. Independent of specifics of step (1), when ice-analogue is irradiated with UV-CPL, enantiomeric excess of amino acids following hydrolysis is limited to |EEice(max)|=|(σ+ − σ−)/(σ+ + σ−)|, 0.5 times the anisotropy factor (g) for amino acid precursors (σ+/− is molecular cross-section for absorption of right/left UV-CPL light in cm2). For amino acids, the calculated EEice(max) ∼ 1 per cent agrees with experiments. Over small duration, EE is given by, |EEice(t)|=|(I+ − I−)(σ+ − σ−)|t/4, (I+/− is photon flux of right/left UV-CPL cm−2 s−1) which agrees with the observed dependence of EE on time-integrated flux of UV-CPL light. For ice irradiated with linearly polarized/unpolarized light followed by irradiation of residue with UV-CPL, |EEres(t)|=|tanh[(I+ − I−)(σ+ − σ−)t/2]| and can be much larger than EEice(max) for ice alone. When both ice and residue are irradiated with UV-CPL, EE = EEice + EEres and depends on the durations of irradiation for ice and residue. Similar analysis by assuming asymmetric photosynthesis of precursors as the underlying mechanism does not agree with experimental observations.
Measuring interacting binary mass functions with X-ray fluorescence
Authors: Dashwood Brown C , Gandhi P , Charles P A
Published: September 2022

The masses of compact objects in X-ray binaries are best constrained through dynamical measurements, relying on radial velocity curves of the companion star. In anticipation of upcoming high X-ray spectral resolution telescopes, we explore their potential to constrain the mass function of the compact object. Fe K line fluorescence is a common feature in the spectra of luminous X-ray binaries, with a Doppler-broadened component from the inner accretion disc extensively studied. If a corresponding narrow line from the X-ray irradiated companion can be isolated, this provides an opportunity to further constrain the binary system properties. Here, we model binary geometry to determine the companion star’s solid angle, and deduce the iron line’s equivalent width. We find that for systems with a mass ratio q > 0.1, the expected Kα equivalent width is 2–40 eV. Simulations using xspec indicate that new microcalorimeters will have sufficient resolution to be able to produce Kα emission-line radial velocity measurements with precision of 5–40 km s−1, for source continuum fluxes exceeding 10−12 erg cm−2 s−1. Several caveats need to be considered; this method is dependent on successful isolation of the narrow line from the broad component, and the observation of clear changes in velocity independent of scatter arising from complex wind and disc behaviour. These issues remain to be proven with microcalorimeters, but this method has the potential to constrain binary parameters where optical measurements are not viable.
OCT4 interprets and enhances nucleosome flexibility
Authors: MacCarthy Caitlin M , Huertas Jan , Ortmeier Claudia , vom Bruch Hermann , Tan Daisylyn Senna , Reinke Deike , Sander Astrid , Bergbrede Tim , Jauch Ralf , Schöler Hans R , Cojocaru Vlad
Published: September 2022

Pioneer transcription factors are proteins that induce cellular identity transitions by binding to inaccessible regions of DNA in nuclear chromatin. They contribute to chromatin opening and recruit other factors to regulatory DNA elements. The structural features and dynamics modulating their interaction with nucleosomes are still unresolved. From a combination of experiments and molecular simulations, we reveal here how the pioneer factor and master regulator of pluripotency, Oct4, interprets and enhances nucleosome structural flexibility. The magnitude of Oct4’s impact on nucleosome dynamics depends on the binding site position and the mobility of the unstructured tails of nucleosomal histone proteins. Oct4 uses both its DNA binding domains to propagate and stabilize open nucleosome conformations, one for specific sequence recognition and the other for nonspecific interactions with nearby regions of DNA. Our findings provide a structural basis for the versatility of transcription factors in engaging with nucleosomes and have implications for understanding how pioneer factors induce chromatin dynamics.
CRISPRactivation-SMS, a message for PAM sequence independent gene up-regulation in Escherichia coli
Authors: Klanschnig Marco , Cserjan-Puschmann Monika , Striedner Gerald , Grabherr Reingard
Published: September 2022

Governance of the endogenous gene regulatory network enables the navigation of cells towards beneficial traits for recombinant protein production. CRISPRactivation and interference provides the basis for gene expression modulation but is primarily applied in eukaryotes. Particularly the lack of wide-ranging prokaryotic CRISPRa studies might be attributed to intrinsic limitations of bacterial activators and Cas9 proteins. While bacterial activators need accurate spatial orientation and distancing towards the target promoter to be functional, Cas9-based CRISPR tools only bind sites adjacent to NGG PAM sequences. These circumstances hampered Cas9-guided activators from mediating the up-regulation of endogenous genes at precise positions in bacteria. We could overcome this limitation by combining the PAM independent Cas9 variant SpRY and a CRISPRa construct using phage protein MCP fused to transcriptional activator SoxS. This CRISPRa construct, referred to as SMS, was compared with previously reported CRISPRa constructs and showed up-regulation of a reporter gene library independent of its PAM sequence in Escherichia coli. We also demonstrated down-regulation and multi-gene expression control with SMS at non-NGG PAM sites. Furthermore, we successfully applied SMS to up-regulate endogenous genes, and transgenes at non-NGG PAM sites, which was impossible with the previous CRISPRa construct.
Microbiology and outcomes of polymicrobial peritonitis associated with peritoneal dialysis: a register-based cohort study from the French Language Peritoneal Dialysis Registry
Authors: Forté Valentine , Novelli Sophie , Zaidan Mohamad , Snanoudj Renaud , Verger Christian , Beaudreuil Séverine
Published: September 2022

Background

Previous studies have reported that polymicrobial peritonitis in peritoneal dialysis (PD) is associated with poor outcomes, but recent data from European cohorts are scarce.

Methods

We included from the French Language Peritoneal Dialysis Registry all patients ≥18 years of age who started PD between January 2014 and November 2020. We compared microbiology and patient characteristics associated with mono- and polymicrobial peritonitis. We assessed patient outcomes after a first polymicrobial peritonitis using survival analysis with competing events. We differentiated microorganisms isolated from dialysis effluent as enteric or non-enteric pathogens.

Results

A total of 8848 patients contributed 13 023 patient-years of follow-up and 3348 culture-positive peritonitis episodes, including 251 polymicrobial ones. This corresponded to rates of 0.32 and 0.02 episodes/patient-year, respectively. For most patients (72%) who experienced polymicrobial peritonitis, this was their first peritonitis episode. Enteric pathogens were more frequently isolated in polymicrobial than in monomicrobial peritonitis (57 versus 44%; P < .001). In both cases of peritonitis with and without enteric pathogens, the polymicrobial versus monomicrobial character of the peritonitis was not associated with mortality in patients who did not switch to haemodialysis {adjusted cause-specific hazard ratio [acsHR] 1.2 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.3–5.0], P = .78 and 1.1 [95% CI 0.7–1.8], P = .73, respectively}. However, the risks of death and switch to haemodialysis were higher for monomicrobial peritonitis with enteric pathogens compared with those without [acsHR 1.3 (95% CI 1.1–1.7), P = .02 and 1.9 (95% CI 1.5–2.4), P < .0001, respectively].

Conclusion

Isolation of enteric pathogens, rather than the polymicrobial character of the peritonitis, is associated with poorer outcomes.
Single-Dose, Patient-Initiated Amenamevir Therapy for Recurrent Genital Herpes: A Phase 3, Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Study
Authors: Kawashima Makoto , Imafuku Shinichi , Fujio Kosuke , Komazaki Hiroshi
Published: September 2022

Background

Amenamevir is a helicase-primase inhibitor with novel mechanisms of antiherpetic action. A patient-initiated single-dose regimen showed clinical efficacy for genital herpes in a phase 2 study.

Methods

In this phase 3 study, adult immunocompetent patients with recurrent genital herpes and able to accurately recognize prodromal symptoms were randomly assigned to administer amenamevir 1200 mg or placebo as a patient-initiated therapy within 6 hours after onset of prodromal symptoms. The primary efficacy endpoint was time to healing of all genital herpes lesions.

Results

In the modified intention-to-treat population, which excluded patients with aborted lesions (amenamevir, n = 89; placebo, n = 97), the median time to all lesion healing was 4.0 days for amenamevir versus 5.1 days for placebo (hazard ratio, 1.60 [95% confidence interval, 1.19–2.15]; P = .0018), indicating superiority of amenamevir. All treatment-emergent adverse events in both groups were mild in severity.

Conclusions

Patient-initiated single-dose amenamevir reduced the time to all lesion healing of recurrent genital herpes versus placebo, with no safety concerns, suggesting it could be an effective treatment option for patients with recurrent genital herpes.

Clinical Trials Registration. JapicCTI-194955.
The Sociopolitical Context of Social Work Practice and the Carceral State
Authors: Patricia O’Brien , Willison Judith S.
Published: September 2022

This chapter introduces readers to the carceral state, which is defined as a system of punishment that includes all parts of the criminal legal system. This chapter showcases how to apply the anti-oppressive and feminist social work approach for analysis of the system of power that is the current criminal legal system in the United States. The chapter helps readers make connections between the carceral state, its sociopolitical context, and how individuals and communities are disproportionately impacted. Specifically explained is how the history of multiple oppressions, particularly white supremacy and economic inequalities, have constructed the sociopolitical context of today’s criminal legal system.
Disappearing Black People through Failures of White Empathy
Authors: Jones Janine
Published: September 2022

Empathy is sometimes thought to be, if not a moral panacea for crimes against humanity, then a moral motivator to work against them. This chapter argues that the construction of black people’s minds in Manichaean opposition to that of white people’s is at the root of white failures of empathy for black people. The chapter maintains that it is primarily due to this Manichaean-structured opposition, grounded in a fundamental difference between white and black fungibility, that white people’s ability to successfully perceive or empathize with black people is impeded. This view understands white and black fungibility as established by and derived from the nature of the kinds of minds constructed through anti-black, white-supremacist logics. Black fungibility is derivatively attributed to black bodies and implemented through them. The chapter proposes that rather than seek to empathize with black people, white people aim to self-empathize.
“I Shall Be of Use to the World”
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses the American historical context that gave rise to the antebellum temperance movement. As one of the major social movements before the Civil War, Frances Willard came of age when temperance activism reached its height. Willard and her family were especially influenced by Neal Dow, whose successful campaigns for prohibition in the state of Maine briefly became a model for other northern states to enact “Maine Laws.” The chapter also discusses Willard’s launching a teaching career, while analyzing her relationship with her best friend, Mary Bannister. The question of Willard’s sexuality is discussed, particularly how her early life experiences with women’s friendship relate to the research on nineteenth-century women’s friendship popularized in the 1970s by Carol Smith-Rosenberg.
“Tell Every Body to Be Good”
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

This chapter carries Frances Willard’s story through the 1860s, exploring her life during the Civil War, her teaching career, and her efforts to become a writer. In 1862, her sister, Mary, died, leading Willard to publish her first major book, Nineteen Beautiful Years, a biography of her late sister. The book illustrated several evangelical themes of personal piety and entire sanctification that Willard later emphasized in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). This chapter focuses on Willard’s friendship with other schoolteachers, in particular Kate Jackson. After her father’s death, Willard and Jackson traveled two and one-half years through Europe and the Middle East, allowing Willard to explore issues of women’s rights. A highlight for Willard was her time in Paris, where she met with the French feminist Julie Victoire Daube. These travel experiences provided her a template that she was later able to use in undertaking a career as a college educator and social reformer.
“How to Win”
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses Frances Willard’s successful campaign in the late 1870s to become the second president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Aided by women such as J. Ellen Foster, Willard pushed the WCTU toward embracing the home protection ballot, allowing women to vote in local elections on questions of saloon licensing. Forced temporarily to abandon her temperance work to manage her late brother Oliver’s newspaper, the Chicago Post, Willard resumed temperance work in the fall of 1878. She used her influence in the Illinois WCTU to mount a highly publicized state campaign for the woman’s home protection ballot. Although her efforts failed, the publicity generated in the Illinois campaign served as a template for Willard’s promotion of her “Do Everything” message. The chapter concludes by discussing Willard’s election as WCTU president in 1879, defeating her conservative rival, Annie Wittenmyer.
“White Shield Women”
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines Frances Willard’s support of the late-nineteenth-century social purity movement. Largely associated with British reformers such as Josephine Butler, Ellice Hopkins, and William Stead, Willard drew attention to the double standard that allowed men to sexually abuse women and girls with impunity. In creating a Department of Social Purity, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) campaigned for raising age-of-consent laws, as well as seeking ways to reach out to women nationally and globally who lived in forced prostitution. The chapter explores how the social purity movement in the WCTU was a major catalyst for the founding of the World’s WCTU. In creating an alliance with the British Women’s Temperance Movement (BWTA), Willard forged an Anglo-American women’s movement that increased Willard’s prominence. It also placed her in the orbit of international women’s leaders such as the Indian reformer Pundita Ramabai.
“New Testament Ethics”
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

This chapter explores Frances Willard’s leadership in the social gospel movement. Emphasizing an applied Christianity centered upon Jesus’ teachings, Willard pushed the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) to endorse organized labor, specifically the Knights of Labor led by Terence Powderly. During the mid-1880s, Willard was influenced by numerous theorists, including Henry George, Richard Ely, and Josiah Strong. As part of her Do Everything agenda, Willard increasingly saw economic justice as essential to the success of the woman’s temperance movement. The chapter concludes by looking at the ways in which some temperance supporters began to question Willard’s expansive social agenda, centered upon economic justice and woman suffrage.
“I Should Have Loved . . . to Be a Gospel Preacher”
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines Frances Willard’s role within her own denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church. As someone who desired to be an ordained minister, the chapter explores Willard’s arguments in support of women’s ordination. It also looks at persons who influenced Willard’s theology outside of Methodism, such as contemporary ministers including Henry Ward Beecher. Willard’s efforts to give women a voice in her church during the 1880s culminated with her election to serve as a lay delegate to the 1888 General Conference. Amid failed efforts in 1880 to approve the ordination of two Methodist women, Anna Oliver and Anna Howard Shaw, Willard also feuded with Rev. James Buckley, a prominent Methodist leader and opponent of women’s ordination.
“Queen Frances”
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

This chapter explores Frances Willard’s time in England with Isabel Somerset through 1893. Highlighting her and Somerset’s campaign to bring Do Everything reform to British women’s temperance organizations, the chapter discusses Willard’s professional triumphs early in her time in England. However, Willard’s growing health struggles ultimately forced her to abandon public speaking for several months. Willard’s prolonged absence from the United States led to multiple crises, with Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) leaders like Anna Gordon and Lillian Stevens staving off a series of challenges to Willard’s authority. Most damaging was a protracted campaign to detach the WCTU from ownership of the Woman’s Temple, in which several WCTU members called for the removal of one of Willard’s chief supporters, Matilda Carse.
“What Ails Miss Willard?”
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines Frances Willard’s career from 1894 through 1896. Focusing many of her efforts in building up the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Willard emphasized the need for temperance women to work toward alleviating poverty. Grounded in Christian socialism, Willard confronted numerous critics, as well as wrestled with the ramifications of a new prohibition organization in the United States: the Anti-Saloon League. The chapter concludes by discussing Willard’s and Isabel Somerset’s effort in the summer and fall of 1896 to raise public support for Armenian refugees in southern France, who escaped the Armenian massacres propagated by the Ottoman Empire. While engaged in her work in Europe, Willard continued to grapple with significant problems in the United States, including ongoing disputes over the Woman’s Temple and whether the WCTU should continue to endorse the Prohibition Party.
Conclusion
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

The final chapter assesses Frances Willard’s historical significance and how her legacy has been reinterpreted since her death. Despite the efforts of Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) women like Lillian Stevens and Anna Gordon to preserve their friend’s Do Everything legacy, themes in Willard’s home protection message were appropriated by twentieth-century conservative leaders like Phyllis Schlafly to advocate for a pro-capitalist agenda associated with the religious right. At the same time, Willard’s home protection and religious language has emerged in progressive political figures like Hillary Clinton. While not always successful, Willard’s Do Everything philosophy grounded in her late-nineteenth-century religious idealism crafted one of the most important models of women’s activism in American history.
Aerial Environments on the Early Modern Stage
Authors: Preedy Chloe Kathleen
Published: September 2022

During the early days of the professional English theatre, dramatists including Dekker, Greene, Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, and Shakespeare wrote for playhouses that, though enclosed by surrounding walls, remained open to the ambient air and the sky above. The drama written for performance at these open-air venues drew attention to and reflected on its own relationship to the space of the air. At a time when theories of the imagination emphasized dramatic performance’s reliance upon the air through which its staged fictions were presented, plays written for performance at open-air venues frequently draw attention to that element’s theatrical significance. This book considers the various ways in which the air is brought into presence within early modern drama. Analysing more than a hundred works that were performed at London’s open-air playhouses between 1576 and 1609, I evaluate how the various textual, theatrical, and staging effects used by early modern dramatists and those presenting their plays might have foregrounded the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre’s relationship to and impact on the actual air. I conclude that open-air drama’s ongoing attention to aerial imagery, actions, and representational strategies reflects an emerging dramaturgical consciousness that extended from the earth to encompass and make explicit the space of the air.
Accumulating Airy Matter
Authors: Preedy Chloe Kathleen
Published: September 2022

As those writing for the playhouses and playing companies of Elizabethan and Jacobean England sought to theorize the compositional and performative practices of a nascent commercial drama, they engaged with what might be described as an aerial technology. Contemporary understandings of cognitive and affective processes were underpinned by inherited models in which sights, sounds, and other sensory stimuli were understood to be transmitted and processed via the medium of air. Yet such associations were prospectively threatening for the early modern theatre, as antitheatricalists denounced fiction’s airy insubstantiality and contagious threat. This chapter explores how various Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, including Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare, responded to these tensions in writing dramatic fictions that were formed from and realized through the air.
Working the Air
Authors: Preedy Chloe Kathleen
Published: September 2022

This chapter explores the potential kinaesthetic significance of the various early modern dramatic episodes in which characters employ mechanical and supernatural technologies to work with and through the air. Fictional merchants and sailors are depicted negotiating the unpredictable movements of the wind, finding success or disaster insofar as they are able to predict its unseen operations, in a reflection of this aerial force’s contemporary commercial, religious, and political significance. The related, prospectively martial connotations of harnessing the air’s propulsive and ascensive force are more explicitly advertised in dramatic episodes that imply or simulate the onstage release of projectiles or depict characters ascending into and flying through the upper regions of the elemental world. In representing fictional aerial technologies, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playwrights such as Robert Greene and William Haughton responded to open-air drama’s often challenging interactions with and implication in the air, offering playgoers a kinetic fantasy of elemental control and aerial action that paralleled the ambitions of real-life inventors and hinted at the comparable aspirations of those involved with the early modern playhouses.
Manipulating the Atmosphere
Authors: Preedy Chloe Kathleen
Published: September 2022

The early modern dramatic representation of aerial technologies was complemented by effects that suggested a more sustained and transformative mode of atmospheric encounter. From the sprinkling of herbs to the simulated firing of towns, the professional English theatre depicted episodes that imagined—and might actually achieve—a material alteration in the aerial environment. Discursive olfactory prompts were often accompanied by visual signifiers, and some dramatists crafted plays that made sustained use of scented properties and effects. Dispersing from the stage into the space of the audience, the fumes of incense, tobacco, and sulphur-infused gunpowder would have exerted a powerful imaginative and perhaps material influence over the fictive and actual aerial environment(s) of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Thus, by manipulating the atmospheric conditions of playgoing, early modern dramatists and companies further interrogated the aerial impact and prospective influence of their performed fictions.
One Baptism
Authors: Cockayne Joshua
Published: September 2022

This chapter focuses on the role of a baptismal liturgy as an instance of initiation into the community of the Church, reflecting on the implications of this initiation for how a new member relates to the group. First, it considers recent philosophical work on the nature of promises. It argues that the promises made in baptism might be understood as instances of what Margaret Gilbert has called ‘joint commitments’. As Gilbert shows, promising, understood as an instance of joint commitment, always entails certain obligations of both promisor and promisee, and the same is clearly true in the promises of baptism. However, whilst Gilbert’s account captures important features of baptismal obligations in local communities, it fares poorly when extending this to consider the relationship to the Church as a whole. These promises must be understood as a response to work of the persons of the Trinity, who determine the grounds of membership in the Church, rather than effecting the membership by itself. Here, the chapter unpacks John Calvin’s notion of baptism as a sign and seal of the work already achieved through Christ. Finally, the chapter considers how this position can be extended to think about the case of infant baptism. Understanding baptism not as an instance of personal testimony, but as an initiation into the family of the Church allows us to see that making commitments on behalf of a child can be made sense of within our understanding of the Church’s ontology.
Wondrous Deeds
Authors: Arft Justin
Published: September 2022

Chapter 6 examines how Odysseus responds to Alkinoos’ request for theskela erga (“wondrous deeds”) that challenges the authority exhibited by Arete in the intermezzo. This chapter raises questions about Odysseus’ place in hero song and reveals Arete’s even deeper role in structuring the epic. Odysseus’ performance takes his skills as a poet to new levels as he leverages both Homeric and Hesiodic conceptions of heroism, ultimately casting the theskela erga as deeds of a bygone era that should never be revisited. After Odysseus recodes the theskela erga as deeds that are less Homeric but more associated with both Herakles and the end of the Age of Heroes, he uses song sequencing techniques to shift his tale back to the place where he began his tale to Arete—his departure from Ogygia and the notional beginning of the Odyssey itself.
Conclusion
Authors: Arft Justin
Published: September 2022

The Conclusion briefly examines Arete’s final appearance in the epic that reinforces her status as a transitional and transformational figure. This chapter argues further that the Phaeacian episode as we have it is immanent to Odysseus’ recapitulation to Penelope, which itself is arguably an idealized performance of the epic. Likewise, the epic asks us to imagine the Phaeacians as fixtures of Odysseus’ transformation in kleos, making them integral to successive reperformances of the epic. Without these figures, Odysseus does not achieve nostos or kleos, so their existence in this song is critical not only for his renown but also for the shape and existence of the epic itself. The Conclusion closes with a brief reflection of Odysseus’ status as a man who is remembered selectively, at the mercy of those who suffered him, as a better, banal, and very human version of himself.
From Busboy Poet to an International Voice for the Working Masses
Authors: De Santis Christopher C.
Published: September 2022

With the publication of startlingly original blues poetry and an essay that became a manifesto to young Black artists and writers in the United States, Langston Hughes emerged in the 1920s as one of the major literary voices of the Harlem Renaissance, a writer uncompromising in his position that a racial art which reflected and celebrated the distinctive cultural practices and productions of Black communities was a necessary component in challenging and resisting systems of racial oppression. Visits in the 1930s to Cuba, Haiti, the Soviet Union, China, Japan, Mexico, and Spain deepened Hughes’s understanding of global issues of race and class, and his increasingly radical writings and statements during this period coincided with his rise from a celebrity poet of Harlem to an international voice for the working masses.
Jim Crow, Economics, War, and the Black Writer
Authors: De Santis Christopher C.
Published: September 2022

Disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, Hughes took actions to distance himself from the radical left and his more polemical, sometimes incendiary work of the 1930s. In public statements and interviews, he explained his artistic use of irony and the unmasking of hypocrisy in earlier writings while refocusing readers’ and audiences’ attentions in the 1940s on the immediate horrors of war, poverty, racial violence, and discrimination. During this phase of his career, Hughes emphasized a democratic ideal and appealed to the principles on which the United States was founded while demonstrating through his own life experiences, the experiences of other Black people in the United States, and the struggles of Black soldiers during World War II the many ways in which democracy was being compromised by racism.
The Transparency Paradox
Authors: Koivisto Ida
Published: September 2022

The book provides a compact theoretical account of the hidden functioning logic of the ideal of transparency. Transparency as a concept has become hugely popular in legal discourse and beyond. The book argues that there are underlying optical, conceptual, and social reasons why transparency makes sense to us: it promises immediate seeing and understanding. That is why it can form a powerful metaphor of controllability: in the state, for example, the governed are able to monitor the inner workings of the governor through transparency practices. The modern push for transparency is premised on the notion that the truth about governance is key to its legitimacy, and transparency can provide legitimacy through access to truth. The book argues that this premise is false. Instead of accessing legitimacy by providing truth, transparency is labelled by either or logic, which is referred to as ‘the truth-legitimacy trade-off’ in the book: transparency can provide either truth or legitimacy. Through this argument, the book questions the neutrality promise vested in transparency and claims that transparency is primarily a tool for creating appearances. The book consists of nine chapters divided into three parts: The Opacity of Transparency, The Promise of Transparency, and The Reality of Transparency. It combines legal and policy themes and research with interdisciplinary inputs, such as social philosophy and cultural and media studies, contributing to the growing literature on critical transparency studies.
Introduction
Authors: Crawford Alice , Crawford Robert
Published: September 2022

The Introduction surveys libraries in literature in anglophone imaginative literature from the Middle Ages until the present, sets out the ways in which the volume is the first wide-scale, book-length critical treatment of the topic, and includes a multitude of ways in which librarians have featured in modern fiction. Having taken account of some other related writing on the subject of libraries and librarians (particularly as they are treated in creative writing), the Introduction concludes with an outline of the book’s chapters, making clear that, although the principal focus is on English-language works, the book also includes considerations of French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish texts.
Battle-Sites of Books
Authors: Jones Tom
Published: September 2022

This chapter describes the physical space and imaginative significance of the library in Jonathan Swift’s ‘Battel of the Books’ and relates it to the anthology of improving literature published by Richard Steele and George Berkeley in 1714 as The Ladies Library. It considers the role libraries and the idea of the library have in social life in the early eighteenth century: how they define knowledge, grant or restrict access to it, and shape the behaviour of those seeking it. The chapter notes that conservative or nostalgic attitudes to knowledge and society exist alongside modern features of book production, distribution, and use in these two texts, and in the career of Swift more generally. The chapter also notes the gendering of knowledge, and the role of gender in restricting access to knowledge and regulating behaviour through books.
Libraries and the Formation of Character in Nineteenth-Century Novels
Authors: McCray J. Louise
Published: September 2022

This chapter explores the significance of libraries in a range of nineteenth-century novels including William Godwin’s Fleetwood, Walter Scott’s The Antiquary, and M. A. Ward’s Robert Elsmere. It shows how writers used intimate relationships between libraries and characters to raise concerns about what delimits or directs personal identity: for Godwin it was primarily the experience of educational environment; for Scott, the licence of historical testimony; for Ward, the magnetism of collective intellectual movement. What unites these fictions is the way that each account of personal realization through the library simultaneously advertises the submission of the individual to movements or forces beyond themselves. Libraries in literature, this chapter argues, became a point of convergence for two prominent (and eerily modern) cultural phenomena in nineteenth-century Britain: heightened ‘media consciousness’ in the literary world, and escalating debates about the nature of individuality amongst philosophers, scientists, and cultural critics.
‘Modified Bliss’
Authors: Marsack Robyn
Published: September 2022

In the modern period what the library represents changes from the collection that reflects individual taste to the dizzying inclusiveness of the library as conceived by patrons concerned with public benefit. The key ingredients of the modern library poem are the freedom to enter the building and to choose the books to be read. These books are often seen as transformative, especially for women and working-class readers. This chapter focusses on poems about the readers and what they are looking for or how they behave; who is allowed in and who is kept out; and, of course, the librarians, who make the decisions. The poets quoted are mainly British and American, ranging from Randall Jarrell to Rita Dove, Tom Leonard to Jackie Kay, not forgetting famous poet-librarians Philip Larkin and Jorge Luis Borges.
Raw Materials
Authors: Sepielli Andrew
Published: September 2022

This chapter introduces the two features of thought and discourse (the ‘raw materials’) which will serve as fodder for the arguments of the ensuing three chapters. These features are: (1) what I call the ‘depth’, and, conversely, the ‘superficiality’, of inquiry and debate, and (2) the special links between ethical thought and motivation and affect. Deep disputes are defined as those the conclusions of which exert characteristically representational influence on non-conceptual representations and on action. Superficial disputes are defined as those the conclusions of which do not. The chapter then pauses to compare the deep/superficial distinction to Rudolf Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions. It then explains the connections between ethical thought and motivation and affect that are required to do theoretical work in the next few chapters.
Why Does There Seem to Be a ‘Problem with Ethics’?
Authors: Sepielli Andrew
Published: September 2022

This chapter fashions the ‘raw materials’ from Chapter 2 into an explanation of why ethics seems not to afford objectively right answers. First, it explains why superficial disputes seem not to afford objectively right answers. Then it adverts to the special connections between ethical thought and motivation and affect to explain why we often infer the non-objectivity of ethics as a whole from the apparent non-objectivity of superficial ethical disputes, even though we do not infer the same regarding non-ethical domains of inquiry. It proceeds to explain, again adverting to the aforementioned ‘special connections’, why the behaviour of ethical inquiry in deep contexts does not lend it the appearance of objectivity. The chapter concludes by arguing for the superiority of this explanation of why ethics seems not to be objective with some more well-known explanations of the same.
Objectivist Quietism about Ethics, Part Two
Authors: Sepielli Andrew
Published: September 2022

This chapter addresses some concerns about the arguments in Chapter 4. It begins by responding to arguments that the relevance of metaphysics or semantics is constitutive of the major ethical concepts, such that the conclusions of the previous chapter are not even conceptually possible. Then it addresses a series of concerns about assessing beliefs for their values instead of for their truth or justifiability. It proceeds from there to offer an account of ethics in deep contexts, before considering some questions about how ethical values and truthy values interact. The chapter concludes by responding to the worry that a value-based vindication of ethics begs the question, which sets the stage for the next chapter’s discussion of pragmatism.
Pragmatism
Authors: Sepielli Andrew
Published: September 2022

This chapter ensconces the value-based vindicatory strategy of the previous two chapters within a broader strategy—pragmatism—wherein all vindication, whether of claims or domains of inquiry, is fundamentally evaluative. First, the chapter explains the difference between pragmatism and its chief rival, representationalism—the approach on which we seek to guide our inquiry by veritistic, rather than evaluative, considerations. It then offers some glimpse into what a pragmatist explanatory and vindicatory strategy might look like. Next, the chapter presents three arguments in favour of adopting a pragmatist approach to inquiry rather than a representationalist one, and in the process, tries to draw out the incipient pragmatism in the work of many philosophers who may not call themselves ‘pragmatists’. The chapter closes by trying to dispel worries about the ‘autonomous evaluative sphere’ to which pragmatism seems to commit us.
Digging Deeper
Authors: Sepielli Andrew
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses some unexplored possibilities raised by the arguments of the preceding chapters, with the aim of further illuminating pragmatist quietism for the reader. It begins by evaluating a proposal to vindicate the autonomy of ethics not by arguing that the relevant disputes are non-substantive, or fail to afford truthy values, but by claiming that they are ‘quasi-substantive’. This strategy is rejected on grounds of explanatory unity. This leads to an explanation of why the sort of explanatory unity to which this book has often adverted is theoretically important. The chapter then queries what would follow if beliefs formed pursuant to superficial ethical disputes had negative representational values rather than no such value. It proceeds by identifying two relevant possibilities—either negative representational value rules out positive specifically ethical value, or it does not—and then explaining what would follow from each.
Pragmatist Quietism vs Expressivism
Authors: Sepielli Andrew
Published: September 2022

This chapter outlines the differences between pragmatist quietism and one of its close cousins, expressivism. Both pragmatist quietism and expressivism purport to offer something like objective moral truth without representation and without ‘foundations’. One difference is that the quietism defended here assigns the bulk of the explanatory burden to the distinction between superficial and deep inquiry, while expressivism assigns it to the sorts of mental state that moral judgements are. Another difference is that pragmatist quietism, qua form of pragmatism, seeks to vindicate moral objectivity without foundations in a way that is fundamentally evaluative, whereas expressivism typically does not. It is explained why these differences tell in favour of pragmatist quietism. The chapter concludes by offering a pragmatist-quietist-friendly attempt at the sort of semantic explanations that expressivists are often accused, under the banner of the ‘Frege-Geach problem’, of being unable to provide.
“Numbred, and measured, and weighed”
Authors: Prakas Tessie
Published: September 2022

Chapter 1 argues that John Donne constructs interactive relationships between metaphors and their writers and readers as a strategy for managing both secular and sacred devotion. His secular poetic speakers work to preserve themselves by making themselves into metaphors that their beloveds might read after their death or departure, but several of his poems also express concern that such reading might transform them afresh. This transformative potential becomes both reassuring and provocative in his sermon on Psalm 38.2, which conceptualizes divine will as a metaphor sent to us for perusal. In this the sermon suggests that we, as readers of that metaphor, might have some capacity to alter it in a manner like that of the readers within Donne’s lyrics.
“Separate to God”
Authors: Prakas Tessie
Published: September 2022

As the sole author emphasized in this project who did not take orders, Milton is the poet for whom verse most comprehensively replaces, rather than complements, ecclesiastical practice. Chapter 4 identifies a critique of corrupt ministry in Samson Agonistes, and proposes that its protagonist comes to regard his own sinful actions as a vicious form of ministry. In lines that return relentlessly to the sounds of “I” and “me,” Samson asserts a degree of uniqueness that the Chorus links with his status as God’s “mighty minister”—words that would likely have carried clerical resonances for Milton even in the later years of his career. Milton’s formal emphasis on Samson’s self-regard might seem to put this poem at odds with the triumphant individualism identified in the lyrics covered in previous chapters. Rather than building formal bridges between the speaker and God, Milton suggests that Samson’s “I” crowds God out. Yet in linking that self-regard with the ministry, Milton formulates a critique of the church continuous with and indeed significantly more outspoken than those of his poetic forebears.
Evaluating Hypotheses about Local Transport Systems through Spatial and Network Analysis
Authors: Groenhuijzen Mark R.
Published: September 2022

The focus of this study is on transport in the Dutch part of the Lower Rhine limes, and particularly transport between the local and the military population with the intention of provisioning the Roman army. In comparison with the main transport infrastructure and interprovincial and imperial trade networks, little research has been done regarding local routes and transport movements, which can be attributed at least partly to the archaeologically untraceable nature of most of these connections. This chapter presents a study on the functioning of a Roman local transport network through computational approaches. In this study, a network of potential local transport connections is modelled using least-cost path approaches and a Gabriel graph structure. Using this network to compare two hypotheses, it was found that in some regions it is more efficient to move surplus goods from the local population to the military population through central gathering points prior to the transport in bulk towards a fort. In another region, a complementary system probably existed, where the forts functioned as gathering points for their direct vicinity while at the same time transport from more distant areas could be more efficiently organized through intermediary sites. In this study, the case of the potential intermediary site of Tiel-Medel was highlighted, as recent archaeological excavations have yielded evidence that strongly suggests its role as an important node in local transport networks. This shows that the methods employed here can be complementary to archaeological field research.