bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘Beautiful, baleful absurdity’: Chinoiserie and Modernist Ballet
Authors: Witchard Anne
Published: September 2017

The post-war return of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to London in 1918 was heralded by colourful posters of a ‘Chinaman’ complete with trailing pigtail. This was Picasso’s design for the Chinese Conjurer in Jean Cocteau’s ballet, Parade (1914). However Parade would not receive its London premiere until months later. While the avant-garde Parade had a distinctly minority appeal, Picasso’s Chinese Conjurer was a shrewdly commercial choice, testament to the British love affair with theatrical chinoiserie. This chapter examines the ways its engagement with chinoiserie contributed to the development of Modernist ballet. It starts with Alexandre Benois’ designs for Stravinsky’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Nightingale’ in 1914. Diaghilev re-adapted it in 1917 as Le Chant du Rossignol, commissioning Italian Futurist designer, Fortunata Depero. In its juxtaposition of artifice with nature, ‘The Nightingale’ lent itself to modernist treatment. Depero’s kinetic sculpture garden of cones and discs peopled by geometrical court ladies and mandarins was never staged, but in 1919 Diaghilev revived the idea, bringing Henri Matisse to work with choreographer Léonide Massine in London. In 1925 Diaghilev revived Matisse’s Le Chant du Rossignol for a third time with new choreography by George Balanchine fresh from the Soviet avant garde.
Cukor’s Tragicomedies of Marriage
Authors: Turim Maureen
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses four of Cukor's comedies: Dinner at Eight (1933), No More Ladies (1935), The Women (1939), and The Marrying Kind (1952). They are films largely derived from Broadway successes, rewritten and reimagined for the screen by some of the best writers working in Hollywood alongside a director known not only for his sensitive work with actors but also for infusing drama into all his comedies, to shape both modes with great irony. Through these films, the chapter explores Cukor's structural dynamic of building narrative threads toward a climactic ensemble in the first three films, as well as his focus on working-class marriage in The Marrying Kind.
Libel, Scandal, and Bad Big Names
Authors: Lennard Dominic
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses four of Cukor's films which focus on socially condoned and legitimated identities, especially on their tendency to articulate a particular performance of self as the truthful and necessary expression of one's identity while concealing broader social forces that work to disempower the individual. These four films also illustrate selves that transcend societal prescriptions and, consequently, cannot ever find stable realization within the filmic world that contains them. The films under scrutiny are: Camille (1936) and Romeo and Juliet (1936), which both feature socially forbidden love; and It Should Happen to You (1954) and Les Girls (1957), both of which explore the problematic female self-image.
Modulations of the Shot: The Quiet Film Style of George Cukor in
Authors: Carruthers Lee
Published: September 2017

This chapter concentrates on the cinematographic style of Cukor's work, at the same time acknowledging the films' resistance to scholarly analysis as well as their formal restraint. It outlines some of the challenges to analysis that Cukor's films present, and the limitations of the received criticism, before examining a range of diverse titles to see what can be discovered about their formal character. Specifically, the chapter points to particular modulations of the shot that prove characteristic for Cukor's cinema, related to their realistic texture and canny framings. This analysis thus finds fresh affinities across Cukor's oeuvre, extending from the early projects What Price Hollywood? (1932) and Sylvia Scarlett (1935) to the commercial successes of Born Yesterday (1950) and My Fair Lady (1964).
Doubling in the Cinema of George Cukor
Authors: DeAngelis Michael
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides an examination of doubling in the spatial, temporal, and perspectival attributes of four Cukor films that at first glance might seem to have little in common—The Royal Family of Broadway (1930), A Bill of Divorcement (1932), A Double Life (1947), and Bhowani Junction (1956). As this chapter shows, the doubling that occurs in these films evidences a concern with the implications of relationships between here and there, then and now, and seeing and being seen. Moreover, this chapter's critical investigation of such a little-studied dynamic promises to illuminate an aspect of doubling that is no less fundamental to the director's concerns than any other aspects of his cinema.
The Furthest Side of Paradise
Authors: Palmer R. Barton
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the blunders, failures, and controversies of Cukor's less successful films: Two-Faced Woman (1941), A Woman's Face (1941), Wild is the Wind (1957), Hot Spell (1958), and Winged Victory (1944). Two-Faced Woman, a story of female attractiveness and male desire, suffered from a controversy during its initial release and was furthermore potentially responsible for ending the career of noted actress Greta Garbo. A Woman's Face dealt with a number of issues, including its lead character, pre-production blunders, and other factors. Wild is the Wind and Hot Spell both belong to a series of adult, sensational melodramas made by producer Hal Wallis and featuring the seamy and unglamorous side of life. Winged Victory is a film adaptation of a successful Broadway production, made as a contribution to the American war effort even as it suffered backlash for this same reason.
Television and Domesticity
Authors: Pullen Christopher
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the representation of the straight girl and queer guy within television form, framing the notion of the glance rather than the gaze, relative to domesticity and female identity. Considering early and developing television representations within sit-com such as those within Love Sidney (Warner Bros 1981–83, US), Tales of the City (Channel 4 1993, UK and US), Ellen (ABC 1994–98, US), Will and Grace (NBC 1998–2006, US) and Gimme Gimme Gimme – (Channel 4, 1999–2001, UK), the notion of union and alliance is foregrounded, whilst also focusing on leisure and consumption. Besides this, the queer guy and straight girl are considered separately as minorities, within Sex in the City (HBO 1998–2004, US) and Girls (HBO 2012 to present, US), where the queer guy is minority to the main straight female cast, and in Queer as Folk (Showtime 2000–5, US) and Looking (HBO 2014–15, US), where the straight girl is minority to the main queer male cast. At the same time the context of bisexuality is explored in Russell T. Davies’s Bob and Rose (ITV 2001, UK) and Torchwood (BBC 2006–11, UK), highlighting the transformation of the queer male as vulnerable to the advances of the straight girl.
Youth, Realism and Form
Authors: Pullen Christopher
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the straight girl and queer guy relationship in relation to the transgressive potential of social realism, and the context of youth. Initially Beautiful Thing (Hettie MacDonald 1996, UK) and The Way He Looks [Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho] (2014, Brazil) are examined as exemplars of social realism, framing the affective youthful queer body as a site of feeling and agency. Later the landmark television series Glee (Fox 2009-2015, US) explores the abject position of the queer guy and the straight girl, hypothesizing the significance of youth culture within TV form. After this the queer independent films Gayby (Jonathan Lisecki 2012, US) and G.B.F. (Darren Stein 2013, US) are examined considering diverse issues such as dating, child-raising, the commodity of identity and the significance of masquerade..
Introduction
Authors: Hassan Riffat
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter highlights Muhammad Iqbal's paradoxical extraordinary uniqueness as both a poet and philosopher. The ability to communicate both logical and symbolic concepts, even those that shy away from logical assertion, is exceptional in its own right. Yet to also inspire and energise millions, places him in an exclusive position within human history. The chapter also looks at Iqbal's most significant intellectual contributions to humanity, notably his concept of khudi (selfhood), ijtihad (independent reasoning), mysticism, and a commitment to a religion that empowers believers. From these, one can still see how Iqbal becomes a renewed source of inspiration for those today torn between tradition and modernity, between their own culture and Westernisation.
The Contemporary Relevance of Muhammad Iqbal
Authors: Koshul Basit Bilal
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyses Muhammad Iqbal's continuing relevance in three parts. The first part examines the ‘One/Many’ problem in the universe through Iqbal's concepts of khudi and the reality of God. It shows how Iqbal's philosophy is an ‘achievement possessing a philosophical importance far transcending the world of Islam’. The second part offers an illustrative example of how religion and science come into dialogue in Iqbal's thought. It shows Iqbal critiquing and repairing the cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments for the existence of God by combining the findings of modern science with the wisdom of the Qur'an. Lastly, the third part suggests that the dialogue between religion and science at the core of Iqbal's thought can be better understood through the lens provided by Charles Peirce's pragmatism.
Pragmatism and Islam in Peirce and Iqbal: The Metaphysics of Emergent Mind
Authors: Gilmore Richard
Published: September 2017

This chapter identifies parallels between the philosophies of Muhammad Iqbal and Charles Peirce. By emphasising the ‘by their fruits, ye shall know them’ evaluation of human actions, it distinguishes the methodological parallel between Iqbal's understanding of Islam and American pragmatism. This parallel is brought to the fore when Iqbal's conception of tauhid (‘oneness (of God)’) and Peirce's conception of ‘personality’ are compared. Other parallels between Iqbal and Peirce include nature possessing signs of transcendence, rejection of scientific mechanical cosmology, creative development of the ego, and teleological drive of the cosmos towards harmony. Ultimately, Iqbal and Peirce share a common mission of repair (tikkun), repairing what modernity had damaged by refocusing one's attention upon the genuinely progressive teleological causality at the heart of the cosmos.
Between Hegel and Rumi: Iqbal’s Contrapuntal Encounters with the Islamic Philosophical Traditions
Authors: Rizvi Sajjad
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses Muhamad Iqbal's place in South Asian thought through his interaction with contemporary Muslim and European ideas and thinkers. Iqbal transcends all attempts to limit his philosophy to a particular school or influence. Thus, Iqbal becomes one of the few South Asian intellectuals who reassessed their heritage and sought for it a space within European thought. The chapter then divides Iqbal's intellectual history into three phases: early Indian, middle European, and late Indian. In each phase, it contrasts Iqbal with particular individuals and schools to show that Iqbal neither returned to religious tradition nor completely embraced modernity, but may be described best as a Muslim existentialist in light of his doctrines of khudi, free creative power, and open possibility.
Muhammad Iqbal: Restoring Muslim Dignity through Poetry, Philosophy and Religious Political Action1
Authors: Nix Dayne E.
Published: September 2017

This concluding chapter details how Muhammad Iqbal aimed to re-establish Muslim dignity under the British Raj. Iqbal diagnosed a wound within the modern Muslim soul, caused by two injuries — first, a paternalistic colonialism justified through particular socio-political, philosophical, and religious doctrines and, second, the intellectual laziness and lack of courage on the part of the Muslims themselves. The medicine that Iqbal prescribes is the empowerment of the self (khudi). These newly empowered Muslims will be able to revitalise the community and confidently assert themselves against oppressive rule. However, in order to see a khudi-empowered community realised, Indian-Muslims need to be committed to instilling the necessary character traits within themselves.
Malaysian Pirates, American Cowboys and the Marginalised Outlaw: Constructing Other-ed Adventurers in Italian Film
Authors: Wong Aliza S.
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the ways in which a hero of the nineteenth century — a Malaysian pirate who, in his rescuing of the imperially downtrodden, the exploited, and the betrayed, spoke in actions and words with anti-imperialist flourish — became reimagined as a twentieth-century, post-war anti-hero by a director of westerns all'italiana who had, in his own films, fashioned a bandit, a ‘noble savage’, who opened the eyes of a Texas ranger to the corruption of the aristocracy and Orientalist assumptions. The first section introduces the nineteenth-century Italian children's author Emilio Salgari, and the hero of his most famous and well-loved novels: the pirate Sandokan. The second section analyzes Sergio Sollima's radical westerns, focusing on the protagonist of La resa dei conti and Corri, uomo, corri: Cuchillo, played by the Cuban-American-Italian actor Tomás Milián. The final section examines the ways in which Sollima melds his vision of the anarchic borderlands of the USA and Mexico with his imagining of the primitive wilds of Southeast Asia in his 1970s television series and films, bringing Sandokan, Salgari, and Sollima together.
Corbucci Unchained: Miike, Tarantino and the Postmodern Discursivity of Exploitation Cinema
Authors: Koven Mikel J.
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores both Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and Miike Takashi's Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) as they reference the Spaghetti Westerns, specifically the films of Sergio Corbucci. In an interview that first appeared in The New York Times, Tarantino cited the influence of Corbucci on Django Unchained; not only because he directed the Italian Western to which both Miike's and Tarantino's films make direct reference in their titles (Django (1966)), but also because ‘his was the most violent, surreal and pitiless landscape of any director in the history of the genre’. While Tarantino's claim may be mildly hyperbolic, his citing of Corbucci as an explicit influence is central to the present discussion. The chapter first offers a synthesis of some key ideas within postmodernism, followed by textual consideration of Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django and Tarantino's Django Unchained as two different kinds of postmodern texts.
Bounty Hunters, Yakuzas and Rōnins: Intercultural Transformations between the Italian Western and the Japanese Swordfight Film in the 1960s
Authors: Klein Thomas
Published: September 2017

This chapter presents a comparative analysis based on the assumption that the outlaw is a global figural stereotype in cinematic narratives that make use of semantic elements as well as syntactic formations of the Western genre. It argues that typical figures of the Italian Western and the Japanese sword film make equivalent claims on the outlaw narrative. In the Italian Western, bounty hunters and mercenaries are often ‘nihilistic heroes’ who, although they are not outlaws in a narrow sense of the word, often act like them in an ambivalent way. The sword film can be considered a subgenre of jidai-geki (the Japanese expression for historical period dramas). Typical figures in these films are rōnins (masterless samurais) and yakuzas (gamblers), who often act as bounty hunters and mercenaries. All these figures are modelled on the stereotype of the outlaw.
For a Few Comic Strips More: Reinterpreting the Spaghetti Western through the Comic Book
Authors: Grady William
Published: September 2017

In Christopher Frayling's book Spaghetti Westerns (1981), he highlights how the character of the Spaghetti Western has since become subsumed into later Western comic books, evidenced through the Lee Van Cleef-like bounty hunter featured in Morris and Goscinny's bande dessinée (French comic) Lucky Luke: The Bounty Hunter (1972). Drawing upon this relationship, this chapter will take a similar approach to Frayling, who mediates between comic book influences upon the Spaghetti Western and the later reciprocal impact of these Westerns upon the comic book. It begins by demystifying some of the tacit references to the comic-like qualities of the Italian Westerns. This provides context for the exploration of the impact of these films upon the Western comic book, primarily achieved through a case study of the bande dessinée series, Blueberry (1963–2005), by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean Giraud. In a collection that looks to map the relocation and appropriation of the Spaghetti Western, the chapter reinterprets these Italian productions through the comic book.
Transit to East Germany: The Distribution and Reception of Once Upon a Time in the West in the German Democratic Republic
Authors: Stott Rosemary
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the relocation, transition, and appropriation of the Spaghetti Western in a hitherto under-researched context: the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), prior to its unification with the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1990. It explores the selection, distribution and reception of Once Upon a Time in the West (C'era una volta il West, Sergio Leone, 1968) in the German Democratic Republic as a case study of how international cultural transfer causes objects of cultural production to be repositioned as they enter a new reception context. It also examines the ideological, economic, and sociological concerns underpinning the decisions of those who facilitated the movement of film across the political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries of nation states. In East Germany, the facilitators involved in the selection, censorship, dubbing, and promotion of films were mainly government administrators rather than film business professionals, because film was a state-controlled industry. The chapter focuses on the ‘official’ reception of the film on the basis of available censorship protocols and government policy papers, as well as print media sources.
Off the Page
Authors: Jamie Kathleen
Published: September 2017

I used to live there     scuffing

the reek and rattle of dead leaves

cycling inside the keep-out fences

digging things up    throwing stones

in the quarry    building and burying

tins of treasure. The world

would never be so close again

as close as the dirt under your nails....
‘The Tilt from One Parish to Another’: The Tree House and Findings
Authors: Mackay Peter
Published: September 2017

This chapter addresses the questions of how humans interact with the natural landscape and the status of poets – as opposed to scientists and activists – in this interaction. It focuses on the recent poetry of Kathleen Jamie in the context of contemporary ecocriticism and prose non-fiction accounts of Scottish ‘nature’ and especially the ‘wild’, including Jamie’s own Findings and Sightlines and the work of Robert McFarlane and Alasdair MacIntosh. The essay will address the extent to which our relationship with the environment is –problematically – portrayed as one of communion or community, and whether this is a re-emergence of (Utopian) versions of the pastoral, in which ‘nature’ is always already destroyed or necessarily forever beyond reach.
Midlife Music: The Overhaul and Frissure
Authors: Falconer Rachel
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the theme of a midlife threshold in Jamie’s two volumes published in 2012-13. Instead of a conversionary trope, such as we find in the famous opening lines of Dante’s Commedia, Jamie’s poetry here explore edges of being that open onto unfixed and transitional states. The forms of the poems are correspondingly fragmentary and fluid. Images of river flow, breezes and bird flight, predominate. If The Tree House depicts Jamie’s local landscape, The Overhaul performs its weather. The poetry here is musical, in the sense explored by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy: it is coming and going, emerging and fading, unlike visual images which appear at once. And like musical performance, which creates echo chambers between instruments struck and sound responding, the subject captured in Jamie’s midlife poetry is attentive and responsive to many voices and noises, not necessarily human ones. Both formally and thematically, these poems perform the processes of fracture and healing, in the body, in landscape, and above all, in the sounds they make falling on the ear.
Pedagogic Practices and Newer Approaches to Contemporary Bollywood Cinema
Authors: Wright Neelam Sidhar
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on pedagogic practices and newer approaches to contemporary Bollywood cinema. It begins with a discussion of Satyajit Ray's views on popular Indian cinema and the reasons for Indian cinema's cursory appearance in film studies courses. It then considers student responses to studying popular Indian films, the current status of Indian film education and academia's alleged failure to do much good for popular Indian cinema. It also examines postmodern practices in contemporary Bollywood cinema and outlines new directions in Indian film research. The chapter argues that many of the academic approaches towards, and much critical journalistic writing on, Bollywood have worked against Bollywood's interests in securing international appeal.
Postmodernism and India
Authors: Wright Neelam Sidhar
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines how the Indian film industry has taken a postmodern turn after the millennium as a response to Bollywood's increased global exchanges and commercialisation. It first considers the postmodern presence in contemporary Indian cinema by observing the film industry's geographical site of production in two of India's most prominent celluloid cities: Delhi and Mumbai. It then explores postmodern shifts in contemporary Bollywood and the concept of postmodernism within a global context by reviewing selected critical writing which has previously attempted to relate the concept to both Western and Eastern cinemas. It also analyses the issue of legitimacy wih respect to the relationship between contemporary Bollywood cinema and postmodern art concerns.
Postmodern Bollywood
Authors: Wright Neelam Sidhar , Wright Neelam Sidhar
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines how the postmodern, as an aesthetic style and fluid cultural practice, manifests in contemporary Bollywood film texts. Drawing upon the various concepts and traits identified by postmodern theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and Hayden White, as well as postmodern film theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, Peter and Will Brooker, and M. Keith Brooker, the chapter reveals a variety of postmodern strategies and conventions operating within contemporary Bollywood cinema. It also analyses the films Om Shanti Om, Koi...Mil Gaya and Abhay, as well as several features of postmodernism that are present in them, including depthlessness, blank parody, intertextuality, hyperrealism, metahistory, and the sublime. The chapter concludes by explaining how films such as Abhay may help resolve the conflict between art cinema and mainstream popular Indian cinema.
Indian Cinema: A History of Repetition
Authors: Wright Neelam Sidhar
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines examples of postmodern aesthetics in contemporary Bollywood cinema by looking more specifically at a particular kind of filmmaking that has emerged prolifically over recent years: the Bollywood remake. Drawing upon various theoretical work on textual adaptation — including issues of textual fidelity that continue to plague the Bollywood remake's critical reception — the chapter considers how remaking has emerged as a platform for innovation and creative translation in Bollywood. It also explores how the diverse methods of remaking that Bollywood employs (intertextuality, cross-cultural borrowing, aesthetic and narrative appropriation, pastiche and parody) allow it to experiment with and innovate in its filmmaking practices. The chapter discusses and compares Bollywood remakes produced within the post-millennium decade in order to highlight a new phenomenon of remaking that is symptomatic of the recent impact of postmodernism, globalisation, modernisation and internationalisation in Indian cinema.
The Cosmopolitan Alexandrian
Authors: Ostle Robin
Published: September 2017

This chapter describes Alexandria and Mustafa Badawi's early life in the city. Badawi was born in Alexandria in 1925 and spent most of the first half of his life there. He was one of the first cohort of students in the new University of Alexandria (then known as Faruq I University), which became an independent university in 1942. After providing a background on Alexandria, the chapter considers some of the authors who contributed to the rise of modern Arabic literature, including Adib Ishaq, Georges Zananiri, Michel de Zogheb, and Constantine Cavafy. It then turns to one of the most influential Alexandrian personalities on the young Badawi, Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi, best known for his contribution to Arabic poetry in the Romantic period. It also looks at two Alexandrian painters, Mahmud Saʻid and Muhammad Nagi, whose works depict social life in the city between the two world wars.
Muhammad Mustafa Badawi in Conversation
Authors: Isstaif Abdul-Nabi
Published: September 2017

This chapter presents a 1997 interview with Mustafa Badawi and includes sections relating to his early life and education until 1947 when he was sent to England to pursue further studies in English. Badawi first talks about the years of his early formation in the family, the neighbourhood and his various schools in Alexandria before discussing his cultural formation in the city. He reveals that he decided to specialise in English language in order to deepen his study of English literature so that he could see Arabic literature in the wider context of world literature. Badawi also describes his attitudes towards literature and criticism, which he says involved three essential questions: the relationship between literature and politics; the relationship between literature and morality; and the nature of language and its function in poetry, and consequently the relationship between poetry and science, or between poetry and thought or knowledge in general.
The ‘Second Journey’ (Al-Rihla al-thaniya) of Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s Hadith ͑Isa Ibn Hisham Revisited
Authors: Allen Roger
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, the author discusses the second part of Muhammad al-Muwaylihi's Hadith ʻIsa Ibn Hisham, the ‘second journey’ (Al-Rihla al-thaniya). The author published his Oxford DPhil thesis of 1968, a translation and commentary on Hadith ʻIsa Ibn Hisham, in book form upon the suggestion of Mustafa Badawi. It appeared in 1992 as A Period of Time (Fatra min al-zaman). Later in the 1990s another Egyptian scholar, Gaber Asfour, requested the author to prepare for publication the complete works of Muhammad al-Muwaylihis and his father Ibrahim. These also appeared in Cairo in 2002 and 2007 respectively. The author first provides a background on al-Muwaylihi's ‘first journey’ in Hadith ʻIsa Ibn Hisham before turning to Al-Rihla al-thaniya, al-Muwaylihi's account of his visit to Paris.
Does Literature Matter? The Relationship between Literature and Politics in Revolutionary Egypt
Authors: Kendall Elisabeth
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the complex relationship between literature and politics in revolutionary Egypt. The 2011 revolution (and its ongoing aftermath) has sparked a wave of literary activity that is generally subject to two assumptions: first, it gave expression to the pulse of the Egyptian nation; second, it formed an integral part of the uprising, and possibly even played a role in inspiring and fuelling it. The chapter analyses both of these assumptions by discussing the ways in which politics can influence literature and vice versa. It also considers how the consumption of literature (particularly poetry) in contemporary Egypt affects political participation and democratic views. Drawing on the results of a survey conducted from December 2011 to January 2012, it shows that poetry consumers, whilst sharing with the general population their strong support for democracy, were more likely to support a strong leader taking non-democratic measures if necessary.
Lepaulle Appropriated
Authors: Popovici Alexandra , Smith Lionel D
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses the English translation of the first chapter of Pierre Lepaulle's 1932 book Traité théorique et pratique des trusts en droit interne, en droit fiscal et en droit international (A Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Trusts in Municipal Law, Tax Law, and International Law). The book articulates Lepaulle's vision of the common law trust as an affected patrimony. His goal was to explain the common law trust to a civilian audience, using the vocabulary and the conceptual tools of the civil law in its French manifestation. The chapter first provides a background on the translation project, which involved appropriating Lepaulle, and the author before presenting the translation. It emphasises the significance of Lepaulle's work to the notions of trust and patrimony as well as to civil law in French and to private law more generally, including the common law.
Square Peg, Round Hole? Patrimony and the Common Law Trust
Authors: Matthews Paul
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the relation between the doctrine of patrimony and the common law trust. Patrimony derives from the notion of personality. The doctrine reached its full flowering with the French nineteenth-century work of Charles Aubry and Frédéric-Charles Rau. After discussing the difficulties that arise from the notion that patrimony has particular importance in relation to the rights of creditors and of heirs, the chapter considers the significance of patrimony to the question of succession. In particular, it analyses the transmission of economic personality to the heirs. It also describes various uses of patrimony in relation to trusts before revisiting the English case Jennings v Mather. Finally, it looks at the implications of a trustee's death for patrimony, the Scottish law on trusts, dealings with trust property, and why a patrimonial approach to trusts should be adopted.
Trusting Patrimonies
Authors: Popovici Alexandra
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses the story of trust as patrimony in Quebec, with particular emphasis on the symbolic and normative power of patrimony. After a brief overview of the story of the trust in Quebec, the chapter examines why patrimony, specifically the patrimony by appropriation, was chosen to recast the trust in the new code. It then explores what it means to call a trust a patrimony and especially patrimony by appropriation. It also considers patrimony as property, as personality, and as legal universalities, and asks whether it is possible for property and obligations to be bereft of personality in the civil law. Finally, it looks at two different visions of purpose patrimonies and two different visions of the trust as understood in the civil law.
Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean Medicine
Authors: Amar Zohar , Lev Efraim
Published: September 2017

For more than one thousand years Arab medicine held sway in the ancient world, from the shores of Spain in the West to China, India and Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the East. This book explores the impact of Greek (as well as Indian and Persian) medical heritage on the evolution of Arab medicine and pharmacology, investigating it from the perspective of materia medica — a reliable indication of the contribution of this medical legacy. Focusing on the main substances introduced and traded by the Arabs in the medieval Mediterranean — including Ambergris, camphor, musk, myrobalan, nutmeg, sandalwood, and turmeric — the chapters show how they enriched the existing inventory of drugs influenced by Galenic-Arab pharmacology. Further, they look at how these substances merged with the development and distribution of new technologies and industries that evolved in the Middle Ages such as textiles, paper, dyeing, and tanning, and with the new trends, demands, and fashions regarding spices, perfumes, ornaments (gemstones), and foodstuffs some of which can be found in our modern-day food basket.
Introduction
Authors: Amar Zohar , Lev Efraim
Published: September 2017

This chapter traces the history of Arab medicine and science and how Greek, Indian, and Persian medical knowledge had come to Arab medical practices. It considers the Arab attitude to science, the translation of Greek science into Arabic, as well as the assimilation of theoretical and practical medicine into Arab culture. Hereafter the chapter considers the influences of Persian and Indian medicines in Arab culture, and how Baghdad acted as the hub and crossroads through which diverse intercultural medical legacies passed: those of the Greek, Indian, Persian, and the local Mesopotamian. Finally, the chapter turns to the trends and distribution of medicinal substances and other products that emerged from the Islamic conquests from the seventh to eighth centuries — a process that persisted through to the tenth to twelfth centuries and even later.
The Gothic Girl Child
Authors: Armitt Lucie
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on anxiety about intimacy between girls or between girls and women as represented in works such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Library Window’ and Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’. A young girl’s desire for a female Other is the unspeakable subtext of these and similar stories. Examining Daphne du Maurier’s short story ‘The Pool’, Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, Stephen King’s Carrie and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, Armitt explores both the rivalry between sisters and the self-abjection that can result from the onset of menstruation. The common narrative trope of the double or mirror is used to produce skewed images or strange doppelgängers that reflect the fear of a new identity following menstruation and the loss of childhood innocence. Finding that bonds between girls in Gothic texts are constantly fraught with danger, betrayal and loss and that the Gothic girl child must undergo trauma on her journey towards womanhood, Armitt concludes that it is hard to find positive messages for younger women in Gothic works, a textual feature that perhaps reflects the contradictory attitudes held towards girls by society at large.
Wicked Women
Authors: Williams Anne
Published: September 2017

This chapter suggests that the villainesses of early male Gothics, such as Lewis’s Matilda in The Monk, are characters of romance, wherein we expect to find types and stereotypes rather than realistic psychological portraits. They can be unambiguously wicked because they are women in a metaphysical system that blames Eve as the root of all evil. ‘The female’- constructed by patriarchy as instability, materiality, sexuality, irrationality, darkness, evil – appears even in the architecture of early Gothic texts. The chapter argues that since the 1790s the Gothic tradition has been engaged in challenging and deconstructing the notion of ‘wicked women’, reflecting cultural notions of female psychology. Psychoanalytic theory is used to examine representations of the sexually desiring woman as ‘hysterical’, focusing in particular on the figure of the rebellious nun. Many Gothic texts are fraught with anxiety pertaining to mothers, often represented as witch figures. Expression of sexual desire by female characters, in texts such as diverse as Zoyfloya the Moor, Jane Eyre and Rebecca, is associated with an adopted masculinity and with wickedness. Williams concludes by looking at works by Shirley Jackson and Henry James and examining how they exploit the ambiguities inherent in the familiar Gothic conventions used to portray feminine evil.
Introduction
Authors: Perriam Chris , Waldron Darren
Published: September 2017

The opening shot of Michèle Massé’s 2014 documentary about ageing among four lesbians, Las ventanas abiertas (Open Windows), shows two instantly recognisable cityscape images, one above the other. The familiar smooth grey tiles and windows of Parisian mansard roofs fill the top half of the screen; in the bottom half, a panorama of Madrid’s Palacio Real and the Almudena Cathedral, lit by the setting sun. Two cities, which serve internationally as metonyms for the countries of which they are capitals, countries that have played pivotal roles in the historical evolution of Western Europe, are brought together in a film that examines the experiences of four older lesbians, two in France and two in Spain....
Audiences and Critics: Dialogue and Disagreement
Authors: Perriam Chris , Waldron Darren
Published: September 2017

The chapter compares audience responses with critical reception. It contrasts professional reviews of La Vie d’Adèle and L’Inconnu du lac in Spain with reactions of ‘amateur’ LGBTQ cinephiles and general audience members online and as collected via questionnaires. It compares critical and non-professional responses to François Ozon, André Téchiné, and Pedro Almodóvar, specifically his La piel que habito and Los amantes pasajeros. Overall it reveals how details of fine response often displace the generalities of the more professional critics or offer more telling readings than those of academic writers or the quality media’s star reviewers.
Controlling the ‘Social Evil’: Policing Prostitution
Authors: Settle Louise
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the ways in which legislation was implemented by the police and magistrates on a day-to-day basis, and the impact police policies had on the regulation and organisation of prostitution. Rather than there being a ‘crack-down’ on prostitution, as was the case in other cities such as London during this period, in Edinburgh and Glasgow the number of arrests and convictions sharply declined. The chapter uses police, magistrates and prison records to explore these trends further and examine the various reasons behind these patterns, including the wider changes in social attitudes towards prostitution and the importance of police chief constables and police officers in shaping the way that individual men and women were treated under the law. In particular, the importance of the Scottish method of using cautions, a system that relied on distinguishing between ‘amateur prostitutes’ and ‘hardened prostitutes’, will be examined. The first half of the chapter begins by examining the policing of street prostitution and the second half explores the policing of brothels and ‘pimps’.
Dance Clubs and Ice-cream Tubs: Clandestine Prostitution and the Kosmo Club1
Authors: Settle Louise
Published: September 2017

This chapter uses detailed court and newspaper coverage relating to the 1933 trail of the mangers of the Kosmo dance club in Edinburgh for living off the earnings of prostitution, to explore the role that dance clubs played in the development of new sites for clandestine prostitution and to examine what influence this environment had on the experiences of the women who worked there. The chapter provides a rare glimpse of the ways in which these women negotiated the considerable dangers posed by this new environment and tells us more about the lives of women who were less likely to come to the attention of the police. The first half of the chapter explores how various clandestine forms of indoor prostitution were organised, and how these networks facilitated new methods for selling sex. The second section focuses on the experiences of women who worked at the Kosmo dance club and examines their relationships with the men who managed and frequented the club, including some of the ways in which they resisted attempts made by the police, magistrates and club owners to label and to control them.
Introduction
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues for the importance of literature and film in understanding the human dimension of surveillance. It recognises that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is the ‘go-to’ text when surveillance is discussed in the pubic arena, but it argues that, in a world of computer surveillance and Big Data, we need to move beyond Orwell if we are understand surveillance and respond imaginatively to it. It makes the case that the utopian genre has long presented a rich and provocative set of texts that encourage us to think imaginatively about surveillance. It also registers how surveillance scholars have often utilised such texts for illustrative purposes without fully exploring the rich generic links the current book analyses at length and in depth.
Surveillance Studies and Utopian Texts
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: September 2017

This chapter surveys the history of the emerging academic subfield of surveillance studies, noting key developments in surveillance theory that start with the invocation of Nineteen Eighty-Four and George Orwell by James Rule. Surveillance theory moves, in the 1970s and 1980s toward the rich and generative work of Michel Foucault, and his revision of Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the ‘panopticon’, and then beyond Foucault into new territory. The chapters argues that an often-neglected link between these ideas is that of the utopian genre, which provides a challenging and illuminating set of texts through which to explore some of these notions. The chapter shows how these texts have been used, or might be used profitably to explore concepts raised by such foundational surveillance studies scholars as Gary T. Marx and David Lyon. It shows that more recent and important scholarship by, amongst others, Kevin Haggerty and Zygmunt Bauman, continues to invoke (even if negatively) utopian texts, suggesting the challenge and enlightenment such works still offer to surveillance studies more generally.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: September 2017

This chapter is devoted to George Orwell’s compelling and still-influential masterpiece of dystopian surveillance. It deals with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s dominant and unique place in the public imagination, while considering how surveillance theorists have dealt with the novel. It also traces connections between Nineteen Eighty-Four and previous utopias, showing how Orwell’s ideas were in different ways influenced by writers such as H.G. Wells, Jack London, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Aldous Huxley. The chapter then presents a reading of the novel that stresses new ways of interpreting the treatment of surveillance, emphasising the limitations of monitoring in the novel: how the proles, who make up 85% of the population, are largely left alone, and how the countryside is a space seemingly surveillance-free. It also examines the distinct characters of Winston Smith and Julia, noting that, despite having lived under Party control all her life, when Winston meets Julia she is already consciously resistant to the putatively totalitarian ideology. The chapter also addresses the surprising extent and nature of resistance that Winston puts up, even in a world terrorised and warped by the Thought Police, telescreens, Newspeak, the Party, and Big Brother. Despite its efforts, the Party never really gets ‘inside’ Winston’s head in the sense of knowing his thoughts, reducing him to a compliant shell at the end of the narrative a hollow victory that marks the failure of Oceania’s surveillance regime.
Spaces
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: September 2017

If surveillance involves the monitoring of people, it necessarily requires monitoring the spaces and places people inhabit. Utopian texts have the root word ‘topos’ (or place) encoded in their genetic DNA. And because utopias inevitably provoke comparisons between the spaces that people inhabit and those projected in utopian novels and films, the genre is ideally situated to investigate surveillance systems. Many utopias incorporate good (eutopian) and bad (dystopian) spaces within them, the borders between theses zones being key pinch points for monitoring, and with it inclusion and exclusion. So, the chapter looks at the ways in which borders between spaces and worlds are critical to surveillance in films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, as well as novels such Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The chapter also considers the ways in which degraded, dystopian spaces are prone to surveillance in order to separate them from eutopian spaces, a trope seen in Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men. The chapter also ventures in cyberspace, evaluating the ways in which virtual spaces are monitored in William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
Technologies
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: September 2017

The association of surveillance with technology is longstanding and profound. In the contemporary world, the computer has supplemented the camera and the mobile phone. This chapter deals with relationships between types of technology and types of surveillance, recognising that in the world of Big Data information becomes a central monitoring source. Much computer surveillance is invisible to those under scrutiny, done at light speed, and potentially global in its reach. Repeated technological advances determine that surveillance endlessly morphs into new and unexpected directions, without due consideration of the personal, ethical and social consequences. This chapter also investigates texts that deal with the failure of technology, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, as well as the ways in which new technology can call into question the purpose and consequences of surveillance, as in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.
The American Divergence, the Modern Western World and the Paradigmatisation of History
Authors: Mota Aurea
Published: September 2017

This chapter reconstructs the conceptual, rather than geographical, separation of ‘the Americas’ into a North America and a South America with distinct sociopolitical connotations. More specifically, it examines what it calls the paradigmatisation of history and the emergence of the modern Western world, along with some aspects of what was regarded as America, the ‘New World’, before and after the modern ruptures that occurred in the liminal ‘age of revolutions’. It also discusses what became known as the ‘American Revolution’ with its notions of ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘American exceptionalism’. The chapter argues that what used to be understood as the New World went through a process of divergence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that this divergence was appropriated by instituting different significant categories by the narratives of the enlargement of the modern Western world in the twentieth century.
An Unsettled Past as a Political Resource
Authors: Nedimović Svjetlana
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines recent debates about transitional justice and argues against attempts at ‘overcoming the past’ or ‘settling the past’. Drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis's theory of the social-historical, it shows that engaging with the past is an inescapable dimension of societal existence and its self-creative process. It contends that such past is not necessarily a burden but can become a political resource in the (re)construction of political community. The resourcefulness of the past, however, is contingent upon standing or permanent political institutions and normative frameworks. The unsettled past, the chapter suggests, becomes a valuable political resource only if it remains unsettled and, as such, a vital part and live matter of everyday political processes through the interconnected workings of collective political responsibility and political imagination.