bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Wind properties of Milky Way and SMC massive stars: empirical Z dependence from cmfgen models
Authors: Marcolino W L F , Bouret J -C , Rocha-Pinto H J , Bernini-Peron M , Vink J S
Published: February 2022

Detailed knowledge about stellar winds and evolution at different metallicities is crucial for understanding stellar populations and feedback in the Local Group of galaxies and beyond. Despite efforts in the literature, we still lack a comprehensive, empirical view of the dependence of wind properties on metallicity (Z). Here, we investigate the winds of O and B stars in the Milky Way (MW) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We gathered a sample of 96 stars analysed by means of the nlte code cmfgen. We explored their wind strengths and terminal velocities to address the Z dependence, over a large luminosity range. The empirical wind–luminosity relation (WLR) obtained updates and extends previous results in the literature. It reveals a luminosity and Z dependence, in agreement with the radiatively driven wind theory. For bright objects (log L/L⊙ ≳ 5.4), we infer that $\dot{M} \sim Z^{0.5-0.8}$. However, this dependence seems to get weaker or vanish at lower luminosities. The analysis of the terminal velocities suggests a shallow Zn dependence, with n ∼ 0.1−0.2, but it should be confirmed with a larger sample and more accurate V∞ determinations. Recent results on SMC stars based on the PoWR code support our inferred WLR. On the other hand, recent bow-shocks measurements stand mostly above our derived WLR. Theoretical calculations of the WLR are not precise, specially at low L, where the results scatter. Deviations between our results and recent predictions are identified to be due to the weak wind problem and the extreme terminal velocities predicted by the models. The Z dependence suggested by our analysis deserves further investigations, given its astrophysical implications.
Phases of fossil fuel decline: Diagnostic framework for policy sequencing and feasible transition pathways in resource dependent regions
Authors: Nacke Lola , Cherp Aleh , Jewell Jessica
Published: February 2022

Phasing out fossil fuels requires destabilizing incumbent regimes while protecting vulnerable groups negatively affected by fossil fuel decline. We argue that sequencing destabilization and just transition policies addresses three policy problems: phasing out fossil fuels, transforming affected industries, and ensuring socio-economic recovery in fossil resource-dependent regions. We identify the key mechanisms shaping the evolution of the three systems associated with these policy problems: (i) transformations of technological systems addressed by the socio-technical transitions literature, (ii) responses of firms and industries addressed by the management and business literature and (iii) regional strategies for socio-economic recovery addressed by the regional geography and economics literatures. We then draw on Elinor Ostrom’s approach to synthesize these different bodies of knowledge into a diagnostic tool that enables scholars to identify the phase of decline for each system, within which the nature and importance of different risks to sustained fossil fuel decline varies. The main risk in the first phase is lock-in or persistence of status quo. In the second phase, the main risk is backlash from affected companies and workers. In the third phase, the main risk is regional despondence. We illustrate our diagnostic tool with three empirical cases of phases of coal decline: South Africa (Phase 1), the USA (Phase 2) and the Netherlands (Phase 3). Our review contributes to developing effective policy sequencing for phasing out fossil fuels.
The 1898 Anti-Jewish Violence in Habsburg Galicia
Authors: Unowsky Daniel
Published: February 2022

In the spring of 1898, thousands of peasants and townspeople in western Galicia rioted against their Jewish neighbors. Attacks took place in more than 400 communities in this northeastern province of the Habsburg Monarchy, now divided between Poland and Ukraine. Jewish-owned homes and businesses were ransacked and looted, and Jews were assaulted, threatened, and humiliated, though not killed. Emperor Franz Joseph signed off on a state of emergency in thirty-three counties and declared martial law in two. Over five thousand individuals—peasants, day laborers, city council members, teachers, shopkeepers—were charged with myriad offenses. Through its analysis of the riots as a form of “exclusionary violence,” this chapter offers new insights into the upsurge of the antisemitism that accompanied the emergence of mass politics in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.
Prophets without Honor
Authors: Ben-Ami Shlomo
Published: February 2022

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is the story of the defining failure of the entire two-state peace paradigm, a rote religion that still dominates the international discourse on Palestine. In its two first parts—Anatomy of a Seminal Misencounter and A Savage War for Peace—this book is an insider account of the July 2000 Camp David summit and the negotiations that followed it, amid the Second Intifada, the cruelest war in Palestine since 1948, until the last days of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Clinton’s Peace Parameters were the “final product” of that endeavor. The failure of Camp David is also explained through the drama of the interplay between its main actors, Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton, and Yasser Arafat. The third part—A Story of Promise and Deceit—comprises six chapters that offer an interpretive account of all peace negotiations to this day; a description of the occupation’s traits of permanence; and the inherent contradictions of the two-state solution; The fourth part—Denouements—has two chapters that bring under scrutiny ominous alternatives such as the binational state, an Israeli unilateral pullout from much of the West Bank and Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century.” It also discusses the “Jordanian option”, a solution with a long pedigree here revisited.
The English Divide
Authors: Salomone Rosemary
Published: February 2022

This chapter lays the foundation for discussing the rise of English as the world’s dominant lingua franca and its nuanced effects on educational quality, national identity, and democracy in diverse geopolitical settings. Raising the question of English dividing the world between those who speak it and those who do not, the chapter introduces recurring themes that tie the book together, including the use of language as a political and economic tool, the ways in which English intersects with globalization and the knowledge economy, and the driving force of neoliberal ideas as they shape government decisions on languages in schools and universities. It further poses related questions of whether a common world language is necessary, whether English can “do it all,” and whether English-speaking countries and others should promote multilingualism.
Myth or Reality?
Authors: Salomone Rosemary
Published: February 2022

To what extent is the European Union’s push toward multilingualism a reality? What impact has English had on the EU’s multilingual agenda? To answer these questions, this chapter explores the use of English within EU organizations along with official statements supporting multilingualism to promote integration, enhance job mobility, and counterbalance English. While focusing on the EU, it briefly looks at the Council of Europe’s work promoting individual plurilingualism. It further examines efforts by France to resist English and restore the status of French within EU institutions, especially post-Brexit. Critiquing the EU’s “mother tongue plus two” program for all Europeans, the chapter looks at language learning and proficiency across EU countries. Despite years of funding for language learning, including the Erasmus+ program promoting student mobility, evidence shows that most Europeans are not gaining high proficiency in multiple languages but rather concentrating on learning English for its economic value and social appeal.
Adieu to French
Authors: Salomone Rosemary
Published: February 2022

This chapter explores the move toward English within French-speaking countries in Africa. It focuses primarily on Rwanda and Morocco, countries with distinct histories and political tensions that have shaped language policies, particularly in education. It considers Rwanda’s tense relationship with France following accusations of French responsibility in the 1994 genocide, the country’s official switch from French to English, and the negative impact on educational outcomes. It explores Morocco’s multilingual landscape shaped by Modern Standard Arabic, Tamazight, and French, the growing influence of English, the failures of Arabization as measured by low student performance, and the current debate over language in the schools where all four languages have coalesced in a dizzying combination of support from competing political factions and interests. It assesses the benefits and burdens of English and suggests key factors that may determine whether and how quickly Morocco will follow Rwanda’s lead with English dominating government and education.
Confronting the Raj
Authors: Salomone Rosemary
Published: February 2022

This chapter looks at English in India throughout wavering national policies shaped by a lingering caste mindset, a growing class system tied to language, a vast multilingual landscape, and a nationalist government seeking to unite the country through Hindi. It considers the compromise in the 1949 constitution naming Hindi as the official though not the national language, while English has continued as a “subsidiary official language” under the Official Languages Act of 1963. Focusing on education, the chapter examines the preference among parents for their children to learn through English. It delves into the proliferation of private schools, including low-fee schools where the quality of English teaching is especially poor. It discusses the 2009 Right to Education Act and its failed attempt to impose standards and equalize access. It further addresses longstanding disagreements between Hindi and non-Hindi states on using Hindi or English as the country’s “link” language and recent reforms in the Three Language Formula that make only fleeting reference to English despite the vital role of English in the economy.
Reframing the Narrative
Authors: Salomone Rosemary
Published: February 2022

This chapter explores the efforts of educators, government officials, and civil society to develop a workforce that meets the needs of the global economy. It begins with research findings on the cognitive advantages of bilingualism, which have resonated especially among educated parents, policymakers, and school officials. It delves further into critiques of those findings and looks at more recent fine-grained studies that yield hopeful though not definitive conclusions. It examines several federal initiatives in recent years promoting language study, including the Language Flagship Program focusing on critical languages. It discusses the 2017 report of the Commission on Language Learning, as well as several initiatives that have grown out of the report’s recommendations. The chapter sets the spotlight on the states in discussing the State Seal of Biliteracy, adopted in forty-three states plus Washington, DC, which officially recognizes multilingual proficiency in secondary school students, including heritage language speakers.
A Revolution in the Making
Authors: Salomone Rosemary
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines the growing interest in dual language immersion programs that, abandoning the deficit narrative, respond to demands of globalization and migration. The chapter looks at notable examples in two states and one city and the political and demographic factors that have made each one succeed. The California discussion focuses on grassroots efforts by Californians Together in building a coalition of advocates and state legislators despite a state law limiting bilingual instruction. In Utah it examines the collaboration among business interests, language advocates, and the state, with an overlay of religious pragmatism. The discussion lastly turns to New York City and the “bilingual revolution” led by French-speaking families with the support of the French embassy. The chapter reveals the challenges facing these programs in staffing, funding, and materials and in assuring that they serve the less privileged students whose bilingual potential the approach was originally designed to realize.
The Digital Hustle
Authors: Ticona Julia
Published: February 2022

Chapter 1 describes the “digital hustle,” a shared set of coping strategies that both high- and low-wage workers use to find and coordinate work. While offering handyman services on Craigslist and maintaining a LinkedIn page may not appear similar at first, this chapter illustrates the hidden convergences behind these disparate practices. The digital hustle empowers workers to piece together patchworks of paid work in the margins of high- and low-wage labor markets, but because the digital hustle is unpaid, it may exacerbate inequalities between workers. The digital hustle isn’t only used to meet economic needs; it also plays an important role in the constitution of identity and provides a source of dignity within often humbling labor market conditions.
Comparative Advantages
Authors: Ticona Julia
Published: February 2022

Chapter 3 turns toward the high-wage workers. While low-wage workers are often understood as scrambling over hurdles that interfere with their ability to use digital technologies in the same ways as high-wage workers, this chapter flips the script to understand how high-wage workers are the beneficiaries of “digital privilege” that facilitates their technology use for work. Our understanding of digital technologies and work in the United States has been characterized by a white-collar frame. However, rather than seeing white collar gig workers as particularly skillful, this chapter argues that the institutions of high-wage gig work allow them to exercise these skills, making their smooth hustles look like individual achievements. The chapter illustrates how white-collar work naturalizes and rewards ubiquitous connectivity.
Conclusion
Authors: Ticona Julia
Published: February 2022

The conclusion reflects on the political consequences of leaving workers to their own devices as well as on the consequences of thinking about inclusion as an important facet of digital inequality. It explains the implications of the book’s findings for researchers concerned with digital inequalities as well as for people working to solve some of these pressing issues. The consequences of our deepening dependence and expanding ecology of digital technologies in the world of work shouldn’t only be a concern for Uber drivers and factory workers whose jobs are under threat from automation; it should be a concern for all of us. As we stare down the “future of work” for US workers on either side of a polarized labor market, the mistaken belief that digital technologies democratize access to the American dream of economic mobility through work affects us all and has serious consequences for our ability to understand our new ways of working.
What Do We Mean When We Talk about Meaning?
Authors: Cassedy Steven
Published: February 2022

This book explores the word meaning as it is used in such expressions as “the meaning of life,” “the search for meaning,” “ultimate meaning.” In many of the metaphysical contexts where we find the word meaning, it appears to mean “purpose,” “value,” “goal,” “direction,” and even “God.” The book answers the following questions: How did the English word meaning come to carry these various sub-senses, given that its original sense has to do with signifying? When did the notion of a “meaning of life” arise in English and other languages? How does the English word meaning, which is a verbal noun, differ in these usages from the roughly equivalent words in other European languages? How did the word evolve in usage over time? How has it been used in recent decades? The book’s chapters show that the usage is relatively recent, arising in the late eighteenth century in German Romanticism and passing into English in the early nineteenth century; that the English word functions differently from the way its European near-equivalents do, thanks to its ability to suggest “signifying” and hence “interpretation”; that it is seldom defined and hence ambiguous and polyvalent; that it functions today in a wide variety of contexts, including psychotherapy and the continuing conversation between secularism and religion; and that ambiguity and polyvalence are actually the source of its power, since those qualities allow for flexibility in the way the word is understood.
Introduction
Authors: Hingley Richard
Published: February 2022

This brief chapter sets the scene for the book, addressing why Julius Caesar and a succession of Roman emperors, from Caligula to Hadrian, aimed to make conquests in Britain. Britain was seen as special, as a result of its location within Ocean, and was a land that even the mythical Hercules and the great Macedonian commander Alexander had not reached in their far-flung travels. Success in Britain helped secure the divinity of several emperors while adding to the poor reputation of others. This chapter also addresses how we know about the Roman invasion of Britain, introducing the classical texts and archaeological discoveries which are drawn upon in later chapters. A brief introduction addresses the geography of Britain.
Emperors and Kings
Authors: Hingley Richard
Published: February 2022

Octavian rose to power in Rome after the murder of Julius Caesar and was awarded the title Augustus in 27 bce, after which he ruled the empire for forty years. The peoples of southern Britain were ruled by numerous war-leaders, and some of these friendly kings developed considerable power as a result of alliances they made with Augustus. This enabled Augustus to keep peace in southern Britain, although he considered invading on several occasions. During his reign, two kingdoms developed and subsumed several individual peoples as the result of the influence of their leaders. These kings received gifts from Augustus, which helped them to build their networks of power. Tiberius succeeded Augustus as emperor of Rome and followed the same diplomatic policy with regard to Britain. The most prominent friendly king in southern Britain at this time was Cunobelin (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline), who ruled at the oppidum of Camulodunum. When Caligula succeeded Tiberius in 37 ce he decided to invade Germany and Britain, although he failed to follow through with his plans, and he was quickly disgraced and murdered in 41.
Finding the End of Britain
Authors: Hingley Richard
Published: February 2022

Vespasian established his rule as emperor in 69 and, with his prior experience of campaigning in Britain, focused Roman attention on completing the conquest. He appointed an ambitious governor and supplied an extra legion to accomplish this task. The first phase of conquest under Vespasian resulted from a second rebellion by the Brigantes against Cartimandua, which presented Rome with the excuse to conquer a substantial area of central Britain. The conquest of Wales was completed by 80 with the final defeat of the Silures and the invasion of Anglesey. The main remaining task was to conquer the far north of Britain, and earlier diplomatic contacts were followed up from the late 70s with military campaigns led by the provincial governor Julius Agricola. Agricola, whose fame is largely the result of the biography written by his son-in-law Tacitus, appears to have come close to completing the conquest, when he won a famous victory over the combined forces of the Caledonians, under their leader Calgacus, at the battle of Mons Graupius (in 84). By this time, the emperor Domitian was ruling in Rome, and the conquest of Britain, the subduing of Ocean, seem finally to have been completed. Agricola was recalled to Rome.
Emperor of the Ocean
Authors: Hingley Richard
Published: February 2022

A serious uprising in Britain around the time of the death of Trajan in 117 threatened the security of the province, and Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, decided to restore order on the frontier provinces, including Britain. This significant setback may have resulted in the defeat and disbanding of the Ninth Legion. The restoration of the frontier in Britain required the allocation of additional military forces, and Hadrian instructed the building of a great wall just to the north of the Stanegate. This major building operation disrupted friendly relations with local people along the line of the wall and served as a measure to divide the people of the province from those to the north. Hadrian became the second Roman emperor to visit Britain in 122, when he inspected the building operations under way along the wall, and he may personally have commanded the strengthening of it with the construction of regular forts and a second substantial earthwork, the Vallum. A dedication ceremony on a victory monument at the east end of the wall that bore the emperor’s name commemorated his control of land and sea, drawing attention once again to the close association Roman commanders made between the conquest of Britain and the subduing of Ocean. The building of the wall confirmed the abandonment of Roman ambition to conquer the far north, although a number of forts positioned on the roads running to the north of the wall indicate that Rome continued to exercise control over the neighbouring peoples of northern Britain.
Introduction
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: February 2022

This chapter describes the overall line of argument of Self and Identity. It also introduces the two questions around which Self and Identity revolves. These are The What Question: What is it for a person at a future time to have (at that time) what matters in survival for you? And The Why Question: What way of being related to a (conscious) person at a future time explains why that person will have (at that time) what matters in survival for you? This chapter also argues that the What Question is distinct from the Why Question, and that these questions have different answers.
What Matters in Survival
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: February 2022

Consider: The What Question: What is it for a person at a future time to have (at that time) what matters in survival for you? This chapter begins by clarifying the ideas that are invoked in my answer to the What Question. Then I motivate my answer, which is: its being appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate the experiences that that person will have at that future time; and if that person will have good (or bad) experiences at that future time, its being appropriate for you to have future-directed self-interested concern with regard to those experiences. This chapter also distinguishes the What Question from other questions with which it might be conflated.
On the Sufficiency of Personal Identity
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: February 2022

This chapter defends my answer to: The Why Question: What way of being related to a (conscious) person at a future time explains why that person will have (at that time) what matters in survival for you? My answer is numerical identity. That is, I say that your being numerically identical with a (conscious) person at a future time explains why that person will have (at that time) what matters in survival for you. This answer is controversial. For this answer implies that your being numerically identical with a person at a future time explains why it is appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate, and have future-directed self-interested concern with regard to, the experiences that that person will have at that time.
On the Necessity of Personal Identity
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: February 2022

This chapter defends the claim that every good answer to the following question implies being numerically identical with: The Why Question: What way of being related to a (conscious) person at a future time explains why that person will have (at that time) what matters in survival for you? So this chapter defends the claim that personal identity is necessary for what matters in survival. This chapter also shows that Derek Parfit’s famous argument to the contrary fails. But there is no single way in which Parfit’s argument uncontroversially goes wrong. Rather, the way in which that argument fails depends on this or that controversial metaphysics of persistence. So that argument fails in one way given endurance, and it fails in a different way given (for example) stage theory. Most importantly, there is no metaphysics of persistence on which that argument succeeds.
The Same Self
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: February 2022

According to the Selfer view, your first-personally anticipating, or having future-directed self-interested concern with regard to, a person’s experiences at a future time is appropriate only if the way you are now is relevantly psychologically connected to the way that person will be at that time. The relevant sort of psychological connectedness is being substantively alike with regard to values, desires, and projects. So to be Selfer is to be committed to the view that a person will have, at a future time, what matters in survival for you only if that person will have, at that time, (enough of) your current values, desires, and projects. This chapter opposes the Selfer view.
Agential Continuity and Narrative Continuity
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: February 2022

Consider: The Why Question: What way of being related to a (conscious) person at a future time explains why that person will have (at that time) what matters in survival for you? Chapter 5 focused on an answer to the Why Question in terms of a specific sort of psychological connectedness, namely, having the same self-narrative. This chapter considers two more answers to the Why Question, one of which—like the answer considered in Chapter 5—involves narrative. But the answers considered in this chapter are in terms of specific sorts of psychological continuity, as opposed to psychological connectedness. This chapter also defends the conclusion that it is false that any good answer to the Why Question must be in terms of some sort of psychological connectedness or psychological continuity.
The Hope of Glory
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: February 2022

Previous chapters defend a variety of claims about what matters in survival. This chapter puts those claims through their paces by applying them to a new topic: personal immortality. I begin by using the distinction between persistence and survival to clarify the idea of personal immortality. I then show how claims defended in earlier chapters allow us to block familiar objections to the desirability and to the possibility of immortality. Here are two examples. Chapter 4’s conclusion that the Selfer view is false plays an important role in my reply to the Tedium Objection. And my answer to the Why Question in terms of numerical identity provides the resources to argue that what matters in survival will not slowly ‘fade out’ over time and change.
Human-Centered AI
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

Researchers, developers, business leaders, policy makers, and others are expanding the technology-centered scope of artificial intelligence (AI) to include human-centered AI (HCAI) ways of thinking. This expansion from an algorithm-focused view to embrace a human-centered perspective can shape the future of technology so as to better serve human needs. Educators, designers, software engineers, product managers, evaluators, and government agency staffers can build on AI-driven technologies to design products and services that make life better for people and enable people to care for each other. Humans have always been tool builders, and now they are supertool builders, whose inventions can improve our health, family life, education, business, the environment, and much more. The remarkable progress in algorithms for machine and deep learning have opened the doors to new opportunities, and some dark possibilities. However, a bright future awaits AI researchers, developers, business leaders, policy makers, and others who build on their working methods by including HCAI strategies of design and testing. This enlarged vision can shape the future of technology so as to better serve human needs. As many technology companies and thought leaders have said, the goal is not to replace people, but to empower them by making design choices that give humans control over technology.
Introduction: What Are the Goals of AI Research?
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

Debates rage about the AI goals, with two primary camps. One sees the goal of AI research as long-term curiosity-driven research to understand how computational agents, humans or machines, perceive, decide, and act in the real world. They do their work by building programs that perform well in laboratory studies on specified tasks. The second camp of AI researchers is devoted to creating successful products and services by using many forms of algorithms, especially machine and deep learning. They are devoted to mission-oriented tasks that could be widely deployed.
Reliable Systems Based on Sound Software Engineering Practices
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

Reliable HCAI systems are produced by applying sound technical practices to software engineering teams. These technical practices clarify human responsibility, such as audit trails for accurate records of who did what and when, and histories of who contributed to design, coding, testing, and revisions. Other technical practices are improved software engineering workflows that are tuned to the tasks and application domain. Then when prototype systems are ready, verification and validation testing of the programs, and bias testing of the training data can begin. Software engineering practices also include the user experience design processes that lead to explainable user interfaces for HCAI systems.
Tracing Characters
Authors: Berman Carolyn Vellenga
Published: February 2022

This chapter focuses on reporting, examining Dickens’s apprenticeship to reading and writing shorthand through Gurney’s Brachygraphy, as it is depicted in David Copperfield, in order to reconsider the relationship between parliamentary representation and print culture. Though we have long known about shorthand as an element of Dickens’s career, we have not yet seized its role as a fulcrum for media, politics, literature, and print in the nineteenth century. Writing was one of several “arts of representation” being modernized early in Dickens’s career. The chapter examines Gurney’s manual alongside claims for shorthand as a modern form of writing, excerpts from Dickens’s autobiographical fragment, and Dickens’s fiction. Shorthand was a crucial part of the ecosystem of news publication, but it was profoundly incompatible with print. It was at once a technology for breaching parliamentary privilege and a means of fostering secrecy through cryptography. The chapter untangles the dense political history of Victorian writing.
Snoring for the Million
Authors: Berman Carolyn Vellenga
Published: February 2022

This chapter looks at periodical publication as a third form of representation undergoing modernization in the 1830s, with a focus on Dickens’s first serial novel, The Pickwick Papers. First, it examines The Mirror of Parliament as a commercial enterprise from the perspective of its rivals like The Parliamentary Review and Family Magazine. Second, it considers how the Parliamentary Papers (or blue books) sought to re-present the People through new kinds of literature, combining numbers and words, derived from verbatim testimony. Third, it reveals the parliamentary subtexts of The Pickwick Papers, including its references to Henry Brougham, a major figure in the First Reformed Parliament. It does this in part by tracing Dickens’s debt to a previous pictorial series by Robert Seymour (the original Pickwick artist), a satire of Brougham called The Schoolmaster Abroad. Finally, it links the breach of privilege with which Pickwick begins to the breach of promise suit with which it ends. Throughout, it emphasizes the lulling qualities of verbatim reporting and the “hearing” of voices on paper.
Circumlocution
Authors: Berman Carolyn Vellenga
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines Dickens’s rumination on national government and global circulation in his later fiction. It reads Little Dorrit (1855–7) in light of Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), examining the former’s dysfunctional Office of Circumlocution alongside the latter’s election of Mr. Veneering as the Member for Pocket-Breaches. Teasing out covert references to Parliament in both novels, it draws on Dickens’s articles in his magazine Household Words. It examines the metaphor of blood circulation, adapted for global networks of shipping in Little Dorrit, and reveals the novel’s subtle interrogation of “free trade” for promoting poisonous commodities like opium. Tracing watery networks and “locks” in the novel, the chapter also looks at circumlocution as a technique for crossing languages. Finally, it links the depiction of debt and insolvency in Little Dorrit to the “ship of state” and the “Book of Insolvent Fates” in Our Mutual Friend.
National Dustmen
Authors: Berman Carolyn Vellenga
Published: February 2022

This chapter asks how Our Mutual Friend recycles a key metaphor from Hard Times, where Members of Parliament were “national dustmen” who seemed to “owe no duty to an abstraction called a People.” It does so by following the coal dust across Dickens’s writings. In particular, it looks at Dickens’s response to the blue books about coal mines, along with the employment of a literary man, Richard Horne, as a blue book commissioner and an industrial correspondent for Dickens’s Household Words. It examines the intertextual relationship of Dickens’s novel with Horne’s articles, including “Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed,” “The Black Diamonds of England,” and “A Coal Miner’s Evidence.” Reading Our Mutual Friend as “industrial fiction,” the chapter emphasizes Dickens’s attempt to redeem the decomposing forms of national literature, in the lead-up to the Representation of the People Act of 1867.
Pax Britannica to World War, 1878–1919
Authors: Chi Man Kwong
Published: February 2022

This chapter covers the lives of the Hongkongers who joined the British armed forces during this period, such as the Hong Kong ratings of the Royal Navy and the Hong Kong Submarine Miners. A close look at these experiences shows that at least among the British and Hong Kong Chinese servicemen, a cooperative, if not cordial, relationship existed, although the voice of the Hong Kong Chinese themselves was largely absent due to the scarcity of primary sources. At any rate, the British showed admiration and respect towards their Hong Kong Chinese servicemen. It then turns to the experience of the Hong Kong servicemen during the First World War, particularly the thousands of military labourers who were employed by the British Indian Army to work in Mesopotamia. While the Chinese Labour Corps (consisting mainly of Chinese from Shandong) is well known, the contribution of the Hong Kong labour corps in Mesopotamia has been largely forgotten.
Libel and Lampoon
Authors: Bricker Andrew Benjamin
Published: February 2022

Legal pressures fundamentally shaped English satire during the long eighteenth century. Rather than being purely repressive, however, the law often encouraged authors and their booksellers to find creative ways to write and publish satire to circumvent both the authorities and the courts. As part of their strategy, satirists developed verbally evasive forms of satire, producing coyly ironic, densely allegorical, and circumlocutory rhetorical styles markedly unlike the seventeenth century’s most bald-faced manuscript lampoons. Shifty printers and booksellers also complicated the mechanics of detection and prosecution through a host of publication ruses. In effect, the elegant insults, comical periphrases, and booksellers’ tricks that came to typify eighteenth-century satire were a way of writing and publishing born of legal necessity. Early on, these emergent satiric practices stymied the authorities and the courts. But they also eventually led to new legislation and innovative courtroom procedures that targeted satire’s most routine evasions. Especially important were a series of eighteenth-century rulings that increased the legal liabilities of printers and booksellers and that expanded and refined doctrines for the courtroom interpretation of verbal ambiguity, irony, and allegory. By the mid-eighteenth century, satirists and their booksellers faced a range of newfound legal pressures. Rather than disappearing, however, personal and political satire began to migrate to dramatic mimicry and caricature. Such acoustic and visual forms relied less on verbal ambiguity and were therefore not subject to either the provisions of preperformance dramatic licensing or courtroom interpretive procedures that had earlier enabled the prosecution of printed satire.
Irony in the Courts
Authors: Bricker Andrew Benjamin
Published: February 2022

This chapter studies irony in the eighteenth century and how it troubled not only lay but also legal interpretation and especially seventeenth-century revisions to the law of seditious libel. Especially difficult was ‘extrinsic’ irony, which relies not on internal linguistic clues but on readers’ knowledge of extra-textual information. Two trials foregrounded the problem of irony in prosecutions for seditious libel: Joseph Browne’s for The Country Parson’s Honest Advice, in which Chief Justice Sir John Holt established a sociocentric procedure for determining ironic intent; and Daniel Defoe’s for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Such a re-evaluation of irony and seditious libel reveals the extent to which Defoe was merely one victim during a troubling era of conservative judicial activism, when a new regulatory regime for policing an increasingly unruly—and verbally evasive—press was coming into being.
Tales of the past
Authors: Roth Carla
Published: February 2022

This chapter explores the role of orality in the formation of historical narratives. Rütiner often recorded several different accounts of significant events and did not change earlier entries even if they conflicted with later ones. His notes serve as a reminder that most people in sixteenth-century St Gallen would not have encountered the past in the form of a well-ordered chronicle, but as a set of slightly haphazard, fragmented, and contradictory tales which changed considerably over time. The chapter studies how St Gallers used objects and places as mnemonic devices and how, over time and over many conversations, complex historical events were boiled down into a series of highly symbolic scenes. Changes in the way past events were retold, the chapter argues, offer us important insights into the storytellers’ present and allow us to observe history in the making.
Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture
Authors: Hobson Suzanne
Published: February 2022

Unbelief offers a new account of the relationship between literary and secularist scenes of writing in interwar Britain. Organized secularism has sometimes been seen as a phenomenon that lived and died with the nineteenth century. But associations such as the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association survived into the twentieth and found new purpose in the promotion and publishing of serious literature. This book assembles a group of literary figures whose work was recommended as being of particular interest to the unbelieving readership targeted by these organizations. Some, including Vernon Lee, H. G. Wells, Naomi Mitchison, and K. S. Bhat, were members or friends of the RPA; others, such as Mary Butts, were sceptical but nonetheless registered its importance in their work; a third group, including D. H. Lawrence and George Moore, wrote in ways seen as sympathetic to the Rationalist cause. All of these writers produced fiction that was experimental in form and, though few of them could be described as modernist, they shared with modernist writers a will to innovate. This book explores how secularist ideas were adapted and transformed by these experiments, focusing in particular on the modifications required to accommodate the strong mode of unbelief associated with British secularism to the notional mode of belief usually solicited by fiction. Whereas modernism is often understood as the literature for a secular age, Unbelief looks elsewhere to find a literature that draws more directly on secularism for its aesthetics and its ethics.
The Ethics of Unbelief in Vernon Lee and William James
Authors: Hobson Suzanne
Published: February 2022

Chapter 1 explores Vernon Lee’s argument for an ethics of unbelief and her struggle to practice this ethics in literature which, she feared, had an inbuilt tendency to comforting falsehoods. The first part of the chapter outlines Lee’s case against William James and Friedrich Nietzsche whose work, she felt, offered inducements to belief in spite of their protestations to the contrary. Lee shared the view of prominent Rationalists in thinking that James made it possible for his readers to believe in almost anything, except, that is, the arguments of unbelievers. Lee offered ‘responsible unbelief’—belief in the believable—as an altogether more rational, proportionate, and humble alternative to the immoderate and masculinist versions she found in her peers. The final section of this chapter explores Lee’s experimental fiction, Satan the Waster (1918), a genre-defying ‘novel’ in which Lee tests the extent to which imaginative literature can be made to serve a Rationalist agenda. The questions that Lee raises in Satan set the agenda for this book as a whole: given the ease with which language flows into necessary fictions, can literature ever accommodate or encourage unbelief in the strong ethical sense of belief only in the believable? What forms of representation, if any, might be adequate to the expression of a ‘responsible’ unbelief?
Naomi Mitchison’s Rationalist ‘Heresy’ and Speculative Humanism in Beyond This Limit
Authors: Hobson Suzanne
Published: February 2022

Chapter 5 examines Naomi Mitchison’s claim to be a Rationalist heretic and her attempts to reshape Rationalist priorities and values to better serve a new generation of left-leaning and feminist unbelievers such as herself. Mitchison was a life-long member of the Rationalist Press Association, though not always supportive of its aims. In articles and speeches, some of which were published in the RPA journal, she argued for a realignment of Rationalism to bring it closer to socialism, on the one hand, and, curiously, religion on the other. This was not, this chapter argues, a wholesale abandonment of Rationalist principles, especially not those concerning the limits of human knowledge. On the contrary, Mitchison re-orientates Rationalism in the direction of a speculative humanism that goes beyond the confines of scientific naturalism without sacrificing the primacy of human reason to some other, extra-human or godlike, way of knowing. This chapter turns to Beyond This Limit, the short novel Mitchison co-created with Wyndham Lewis, to explore the working out of her philosophy in fiction. Beyond This Limit posits the existence of an afterlife but in such a way as to suggest, that if this is to be a legitimate and rational form of conjecture, then the afterlife can only be imagined as an extension of the conditions of mortality—as a form of living on.
K. S. Bhat, Soma, and a Transnational Literature of Unbelief
Authors: Hobson Suzanne
Published: February 2022

The final chapter provides an account of Soma (1931–4), the only little magazine from the period seemingly dedicated to the production and dissemination of a transnational literature of unbelief. The editor, K. S. Bhat, had links to the Rationalist Press Association as well as to progressive literary groups in London and India and these connections are manifest in the magazine’s hybridized literary style. This chapter explores some of Soma’s sources and influences from Indian literature and folklore, to Soviet realisms, and Anglophone modernisms. As Johannes Quack suggests in relation to his own work, the point of this approach is not to impose European values on Indian cultures, but to show how new formations of unbelief emerge at the point where different traditions intersect. In Soma, these formations often overlap with those seen in the British Rationalist context; the magazine gives priority to human values and flourishing over and above religious sensitivities and sanctions. But the magazine’s close affiliation with Eastern European and Indian sources and groups also produces new and distinctive formations. This chapter focuses on the parables and fables contributed by Bhat himself as exemplary of the magazine’s unique voice and contribution. Soma is a fitting place to end this book because, in both its conception and realization, the magazine extends the reach and the remit of what has thus far been considered under the heading of a literature of unbelief.
Liberty
Authors: Highley Christopher
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines the Blackfriars’ status as an ex-ecclesiastical liberty independent of mayoral jurisdiction. It explains how the residents governed their own affairs and how they clung tenaciously to the liberty’s special privileges. As an “exempt place,” the Blackfriars was also free from the City’s Livery Companies and the restrictions they placed on non-native workers. This situation attracted many French and Dutch refugees who came to form a distinct sub-group of residents that was successfully integrated into the neighborhood. The liberty’s privileges helped unite its disparate residents, fostering a strong collective consciousness and attachment to place. Yet those residents, for all their claims to autonomy, still depended upon the wider economic and municipal structures of the metropolis.
Early Troubles
Authors: Highley Christopher
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines the successful attempt by a group of Blackfriars residents in 1596 to stop James Burbage from opening a second, larger, playhouse in the precinct. As well as identifying the petitioners and their concerns, the chapter asks why other residents may have been reluctant or unwilling to sign up. The petition was successful in the short term, but it does not represent the wishes of the entire community. The playhouse, in other words, was a divisive issue. A few years later a company of boy, rather than adult, actors took occupancy of the performance space. The chapter argues for the centrality of Ben Jonson in this new venture; his early plays for the boys established a tradition of satirical and topically “edgy” drama that would characterize the playhouse for the next decade or so.
Epilogue
Authors: Highley Christopher
Published: February 2022

The Epilogue examines later petitions against the Blackfriars playhouse and their possible influence on Parliament’s ultimate closure of all the playhouses in 1642. These petitions have been used to suggest that, beginning in the early seventeenth century, Blackfriars was a neighborhood in decline: wealthier residents moved out as the capital’s cultural center of gravity shifted westward to Westminster and the new west end. The chapter argues that despite undeniable changes in the residential makeup, economy, and physical fabric of Blackfriars, the area maintained its unique and vital identity, thanks in no small part to the presence of the playhouse.