bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Postfeminist Gothic
Authors: Wisker Gina
Published: May 2020

This essay first moves rapidly through arguments about the end of feminism to refute optimistic blinkered versions, arguing that postfeminist Gothic consistently problematises complacencies about rights, cultures and bodies. Instead it offers flexible notions of ‘becoming’ woman, gives voice and body to the Other and radicalises representations of gender and gender-based identities, particularly in relation to (the horror of) heteronormativity (Halberstam 2007). Postfeminist Gothic emphasises contestation, through the haunting, continuation and morphing of familiar Gothic concerns and the figures which articulate them, including vampires, werewolves, zombies, serial killers and mermaids. It focuses on Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) and The Paying Guests (2014); Angela Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ (1974); Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ (2000); and variants of postfeminist Gothic in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–8; 2008–12) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). These postfeminist Gothic texts further arguments on Otherising, bodies, history and cultures in post-industrial society.
Neoliberal Gothic
Authors: Blake Linnie
Published: May 2020

This chapter engages with the geopolitical context of the Gothic’s migration from the periphery to the fast-beating heart of popular culture – specifically the rise to economic and cultural predominance of global neoliberalism. I contend that the Gothic texts of the neoliberal age can be seen to undertake the same kind of cultural work that was carried out by the Gothic mode in earlier periods of socio-economic turbulence. And, as in earlier periods, we can see a variety of ideological allegiances at play in Gothic texts of the neoliberal age – ranging from the revolutionary to the radical to the downright reactionary. The chapter ranges across texts and media including novels – i.e. Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010), Hemlock Grove (2013–15), The Strain (2012–17), True Blood (2008–14), World War Z (2006) and In the Flesh (2013–14).
Gothic Comedy
Authors: Spooner Catherine
Published: May 2020

Comedy has become an increasingly prevalent feature of Gothic in the twenty-first century, and thus Gothic comedy can be found across a multitude of media. This chapter surveys the kinds of comedy that appear in contemporary Gothic (such as sitcom, stand-up, romantic comedy, mock-documentary) and argues that, in the twenty-first century, Gothic comedy often functions to travesty culturally significant concepts of family, domesticity and childhood in the light of a liberal identity politics. Beginning with twentieth-century precedents such as television sitcom The Addams Family (1964–6) and Edward Gorey’s illustrations, the chapter analyses a range of contemporary texts including The League of Gentlemen (1999–2017), Corpse Bride (2005), Ruby Gloom (2006–8),Hotel Transylvania (2012) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It concludes that far from being frivolous or disposable, contemporary Gothic comedy forms a politically significant function in its tendency to undermine right-wing ideologies of the family and promote a celebratory politics of difference and inclusion.
South African Gothic
Authors: Duncan Rebecca
Published: May 2020

The period following the second decade of the millennium has witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of Gothic forms in what is frequently called ‘post-transitional’ South African fiction. Readily identifiable in the work of young writers in particular, these should be understood as an enunciation of real anxiety breeding in the postapartheid nation. The fall of apartheid marks South Africa’s postcolonial incorporation into a neoliberal world order, and the disorientation and unease of these circumstances is appearing in the fiction of South Africa’s new millennium in uneasy, indeed Gothic forms. This chapter outlines key dimensions of this millennial South African Gothic, focusing specifically on emerging speculative production in diverse media, including short fiction, graphic narrative, literary periodicals and film.
Embodied Cognition in Berkeley and Kant: The Body’s Own Space
Authors: Mensch Jennifer
Published: May 2020

Berkeley and Kant are known for having developed philosophical critiques of materialism, critiques which lead them to propose instead an epistemology based on the coherence of our mental representations. For all that the two had in common, however, Kant was adamant in distinguishing his own ‘transcendental idealism’ from the immaterialist consequences entailed by Berkeley’s account. In this essay I return to their respective theories of spatial intuition, since it is by paying attention to Berkeley’s account of space that we discover a surprising account of embodied cognition, of spatial distance and size that can only be known by way of the body’s motion and touch. More striking than this, is the manner in which Kant’s approach to the problem of incongruent counterparts also relies on a proprioceptive cognition. Thus while cognition theorists today have recognized that certain challenges faced by perception and cognition can only be resolved by way of an appeal to the facts of embodiment, my aim in this essay is to show that such recourse is not new.
Epilogue: A New Arabian Nights
Authors: Dickson Melissa
Published: May 2020

The brief epilogue to this volume offers some concluding thoughts on the process by which the Arabian Nights was absorbed into British literature and culture. It then identifies the emergence of a new vision of these tales in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, which celebrated the transformation of the magical metropolis into a dynamic space of magic and mystery that supposedly far excelled its Eastern counterparts. The increasing permeability of national boundaries, coupled with an increasingly global commodity culture in late-Victorian London, intensified fantasies of the modern city as a place of adventure, with a now internalised, potent Oriental presence. In many ways, this centre of commerce, industry and science became that fantastic, unpredictable and ever-alluring space of a new Arabian Nights.
Introduction
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

This first part of the book looks at the work of the filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Dardenne brothers. It builds on the existing Levinasian ethical readings of their work – such as those by Sarah Cooper (2007), Joseph Mai (2010) and Philip Mosley (2013) – to show how a performativity-led approach to their work shines a new light on their films and their relationship to Levinas. It looks at Luc Dardenne’s own comments on the inspiration the Dardennes take from Levinas’s ethics and how this inspiration informs their film style. And it argues that it is fruitful to discuss their work in terms of performativity, as this will bring out how their uses of style enable their films to perform a Levinasian responsibility for the Other and a refusal to settle for easy solutions that would close down ethical engagement. Rather, their films invite the viewer to engage ethically with the characters through the directness and subjectivity of the film style. This introductory section sets up the discussions to follow on four Dardenne films: Je Pense à Vous (1992), La Promesse (1996), Le Fils (2002) and The Kid with a Bike (2011).
Levinasian Responsibility in Le Fils
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

Chapter 2 considers the Dardennes’ 2002 film Le Fils, a dramatic story of Levinasian responsibility for the Other based around a teacher and his pupil and a key exemplification of the Dardennes’ film style. It assesses the film in the light of Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘originary performativity’, as seen, for example, in his 1976 analysis of the American Declaration of Independence. Derrida argues that originary performativity occurs when a work performs its own creation – such as happened when the founding fathers of the United States signed a document that already spoke of an American people, a people who were brought into being by the very document that spoke of them. It is the power of an artwork to create a rupture in the order of the world, to originate a new type of world. This chapter reads the Dardennes’ use of style in Le Fils as a filmic type of originary performativity, both presenting the world as it is and showing a world as it could be. Through this, the film powerfully evokes a Levinasian responsibility for the Other as embodied in its protagonist, Olivier (Olivier Gourmet).
Passivity and Responsibility in The Comfort of Strangers, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and Adam Resurrected
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

In Otherwise than Being, Emmanuel Levinas talks of ethics state as being ‘a passivity more passive than all passivity’, the idea that we want nothing for ourselves and that this is what enables us to be devoted to the Other. The Paul Schrader films that this chapter analyses – The Comfort of Strangers (1990), adapted from the Ian McEwan novel, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) and Adam Resurrected (2008), from a novel by Yoram Kaniuk – focus on protagonists who are passive in their wants, desires and relationship with life, and my readings of these films will discuss Levinasian passivity and its ethical importance to film. These protagonists are affected by their passivity in different ways: Colin (Rupert Everett) in The Comfort of Strangers comes up against a man who wishes to murder him; Father Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård) in Dominion faces off against Satan; Adam (Jeff Goldblum) in Adam Resurrected is fighting the trauma of his own persecuted past during the Holocaust and his present-day struggles to control his overactive but fractured sense of self. Schrader shows in these films that ethical engagement has passivity as a necessary component, and that passivity is perhaps the most demanding aspect of Levinas’s ethics.
The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885-1915
Authors: Gutman David
Published: May 2020

This book tells the story of Armenian migration to North America in the late Ottoman period, and Istanbul’s efforts to prevent it. It shows how, much like the present, migrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were forced to travel through clandestine smuggling networks, frustrating the enforcement of the ban on migration. Further, migrants who attempted to return home from sojourns in North America risked debarment at the border and deportation, while the return of migrants who had naturalised as US citizens generated friction between the United States and Ottoman governments.
The author sheds light on the relationship between the imperial state and its Armenian populations in the decades leading up to the Armenian genocide. He also places the Ottoman Empire squarely in the middle of global debates on migration, border control and restriction in this period, adding to our understanding of the global historical origins of contemporary immigration politics and other issues of relevance in the Middle East region, such as borders and frontiers, migrants and refugees, and ethno-religious minorities.
Smugglers
Authors: Gutman David
Published: May 2020

This Chapter explores the emergence of dense networks of migrant smuggling in response to the efforts of the Ottoman state to enforce the ban on Armenian migration to North America. It shows how these networks formed very shortly after the imposition of the ban, and until the lifting of the ban in 1908, assisting the travel of thousands of Armenian migrants from their home communities in the Anatolian interior to various port cities on the Black and Mediterranean Sea coasts and on to steamships bound for European transit ports. It also provides insight into the diverse set of actors that comprised these networks and coordinated them across vast stretches of time and space. The Chapter also draws parallels between the dynamics that drove clandestine migration in the late Ottoman period with those that drive the same phenomenon in the present.
The State
Authors: Gutman David
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the efforts of the Ottoman state to enforce the ban on Armenian migration to North America. It demonstrates the many dynamics frustrating Istanbul’s efforts to implement the ban from outright corruption to internecine squabbles between officials stationed throughout the empire’s vast holdings. The Chapter provides a window into the innerworkings of the Ottoman bureaucracy and the often competing and contradictory interests of the people who comprised it.
Geology and Evolution
Authors: Jenkins Bill
Published: May 2020

The dominant school of geology in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century was that of the followers of the German mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner. His most important disciple in the English-speaking world was Edinburgh’s professor of natural history, Robert Jameson. The Wernerians believed that the history of the earth was fundamentally directional; they believed the earth started out as a ball of hot fluid from which the different rocks that now form the crust of the planet gradually precipitated out over geological time. It is argued in this chapter that this directional model of the geological history of the earth was peculiarly compatible with a progressive model of the history of life on earth. The changes in the physical condition of the earth over geological time were seen by some Wernerian geologists as driving the evolution of life.
Meschonnic’s Theory of Rhythm, his Key Concepts and their Relation
Authors: Pajević Marko
Published: May 2020

This chapter introduces into the key concepts of Meschonnic’s theory. Basing the conception of language on the sign represents an obstacle to the awareness of certain elements of human life, especially to a full understanding of what language or art do. Meschonnic’s poetics of the continuum and of rhythm criticizes the sign based on Benveniste’s terms of rhythm and discourse, developing an anthropology of language. Rhythm, for Meschonnic, is no formal metrical but a semantic principle, each time unique and unforeseeable. As for Humboldt, his starting point is not the word but the ensemble of speech. The poem, then, is a process of transformation, a way of thinking, and rhythm is form in movement. Thus, Meschonnic’s poetics attempts to thematize the intelligibility of presence. Art and literature raise our awareness of this continuous. This poetic thinking is a necessary counterforce against all institutionalization.
The Stillness of Solitude
Authors: Devereaux Michelle
Published: May 2020

The Stillness of Solitude explores the Romantic connections between a selection of seven films from contemporary American filmmakers Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, and Charlie Kaufman. Linking the current socio-cultural moment, which has been described as ‘metamodern’, to the Romantic era, it describes how the Romantic relation to selfhood, intersubjectivity, and ‘being in the world’ informs the films studied. The first section of the book lays out the aesthetic argument, the second describes the role of imagination and emotion in creating that aesthetic, and the third explores narratives of personal growth and their relation to cultural history. The overall structure of the book traces the progression of Romantic thought and situates the films historically, while simultaneously engaging with an up-to-the-moment present. It explores gender, childhood, the artistic process, revolution, scepticism, the natural world, love, and death through specific discourses of contemporary film theory including aesthetics, cinematic metatextuality, feminist criticism, eco-criticism and animal studies, and ethical studies. It argues for the emergence of a particular strain of American ‘independent’ cinema that draws extensively on 1970s New Hollywood film in ways differing from 1990s ‘smart’ cinema, and considers how the films use both classical Hollywood and American/European arthouse cinema tropes to create an uneasy dialectic between the two, emphasising the anxieties of our own time, nostalgia for an imaginary past, and fear of an uncertain future.
‘It’s not too much, is it?’: Keats, Fancy and the Ethics of Pleasurable Excess in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette
Authors: Devereaux Michelle
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in relation to personal subjectivity and excess, specifically drawing on notions of poetic fancy, modernity, gender and ‘unwholesome’ consumption, and the poetry of John Keats. Coppola’s emphasis on sensation and surfaces elicits what Keats refers to as the ‘material sublime’, an engagement with sensory excess contrasted with the core subjectivity the Romantic sublime invokes. The film is compared to Keats’ Lamia, an allegorical poem about attempted psychological recuperation through aesthetic excess, as well as Colin Campbell’s description of ‘modern autonomous imaginative hedonism’. The chapter also engages with the ‘depth model’ of Romantic subjecthood that Coppola brings to the fore when Marie Antoinette’s bulwark of sensory pleasure is stripped away, along with its attendant aesthetic function, signalling not just the maturation found in her ethical acknowledgement of the suffering of others, but also her imminent death.
Machinic Empathy and Mental Health: The Relational Ethics of Machine Empathy and Artificial Intelligence in Her
Authors: Shaw Frances
Published: May 2020

This paper situates a discussion of Her within contemporary developments in empathic machine learning for mental health treatment and therapy. Her simultaneously hooks into and critiques a particular imaginary about what artificial intelligence can do when combined with big data. Shaw threads the representation of empathy and artificial intelligence in the film into discussions of contemporary mental health research, in particular possibilities for the automation of treatment, whether through machine learning or guided interventions. Her provides some useful ways to think through utopian, dystopian, and ambivalent readings of such applications of technology in a broader sense, raising questions about sincerity and loss of human connectivity, relational ethics and automated empathy.
On Private International Law, the EU and Brexit
Authors: Isidro Marta Requejo
Published: May 2020

There is a key value embedded in the EU regime: legal certainty, as explained by Marta Requejo Isidro in this final chapter of Part I. Requejo Isidro examines the impoverishment that Brexit represents in the specific context of private international law and transnational litigation, in both commercial and family law, as this exit means a significant loss in terms of legal certainty for all parties involved.
Admittedly, the hurdles of uncertainty regarding jurisdiction, or the disadvantages of losing a swift system for passporting UK judgments into Europe will not affect all stakeholders equally: some groups of the population, such as consumers, employees, small businesses, children or maintenance creditors, are likely to endure worse experiences than major litigants in complex corporate litigation. This chapter analyses the complexities of Brexit in this field as well as the contributions of English and Scottish legal systems to the development of EU private international law from a continental European perspective. It concludes that Brexit means overall impoverishment. EU law is as it is – not civil law, not common law, not even mixed, but European – thanks to many influences, including the very important British common law perspective.
The Challenges of the New Social and Scientific Realities in Private International Family Law – The Latin American Experience
Authors: Rubaja Nieve , Albornoz María Mercedes
Published: May 2020

Private International Family Law has been challenged by the impact of recent social changes. Such an impact is shaped by an increasing globalization, new types of families, and, especially, technology and biomedical developments.
Some of the new complex situations call for the creation of original solutions. Latin American countries are making efforts to gradually include in their domestic Private International Law provisions that capture this scenario. However, some international treaties still in force in the region were drafted many years ago, reflecting cultural, religious and social conceptions which have been outgrown by new realities and principles nowadays prevailing.
This chapter shows some of the difficulties, possibilities and challenges that the most relevant multilateral legal instruments currently face in Latin America. It also explores and highlights the work of several international bodies in order to achieve the international protection of families and, in particular, to guarantee the rights of children.
Introduction
Authors: Epstein Hugh
Published: May 2020

This chapter is divided into three sections which, in turn, initiate the rationale for reading Hardy’s and Conrad’s impressionistic writing together in the light of Victorian physical science; review the biographical and literary connections between the writers such as they were, and the contemporary critical reception which linked them; and give a brief overview of previous critical work that has associated the two writers. Finally, the Introduction proposes ‘scenic realism’, a literary correlate of field theory, as the mode in which both authors work. A distinctive place in late-Victorian fiction is argued for over against the ‘transitional’ status they are often accorded, and the broad division of the book into visual and auditory fields, as the senses most attended to, is explained.
The Physiology of Sensation and Literary Style
Authors: Epstein Hugh
Published: May 2020

This chapter pairs two formative, but often disregarded novels, Desperate Remedies and The Rescue, on the basis of their shared interest in sensation. Also showing that sensation is a fundamental consideration in contemporary physiology, the chapter explores a correlation between popularised studies of nerve transmission and energy circulation and the way that the two novelists construct scenic events in their fiction. The enforced solipsism which Walter Pater embraces is distinguished from the necessary participation in a medium which the characters in the wider physics of the novels of Hardy and Conrad undergo. Through an examination of a number of highly sensory scenes, both novels are shown to dramatize the threat of passivity and the requirement of activity.
An Audible World
Authors: Epstein Hugh
Published: May 2020

The chapter opens by contrasting the human capacities for audition as opposed to vision, and the qualities conveyed by sound as opposed to those by light. Despite the general acceptance of wave theory, from the nineteenth century through to today issues of auditory location, transmission and reception remain contested. The ‘auditory scene analysis’ conducted by the novels in this study sees/hears them as participating in this ontological and epistemological uncertainty. Both The Return of the Native and ‘Heart of Darkness’ powerfully evoke densely enveloping closed systems that are examined in terms of their circulating sounds, ‘acoustic pictures’ raised upon the air by sighs in Hardy and whispers in Conrad. Whilst the discussion of ‘Heart of Darkness’ shows that it is an individual voice, and particularly its ‘cry’, which provides a guiding thread for Marlow, when the chapter moves on to sound in Nostromo it is the ambient noise of a historically evolving modernity that carries the theme of the reach of ‘material interests’. Sounds, conceived as units of shock, provide the agitated fabric of this novel of jolts and collisions.
The ngangkari Healing Power: Conversation with Lance Sullivan, Yalarrnga Healer
Authors: Glowczewski Barbara
Published: May 2020

This chapter is based on the transcript of a one hour filmed conversation with an Indigenous healer, a Yalarrnga ritual leader who grew up in the desert community of Boulia and studied archaeology and anthropology at James Cook University: Lance Sullivan was invited to France in 2017 by the festival of Shamanism and Ancient Traditions that gathered 200 healers from around the world. He then agreed to share publicly his knowledge and experience to explain how he was initiated as a child to heal according to the ngangkari ‘cleverman’ tradition practiced by different desert tribes. His examples of the way he operates to pull out the source of pain from men and women, who suffer physically or spiritually, demonstrate that people’s health is connected with the care of the land. He also comments on different forms of magic love and sorcery.
Regime Politics and Rivalry
Authors: Broers Laurence
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the much-debated question of conflict and democratization. It argues that over its first quarter-century the Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry was sustained by the interactions of two hybrid regimes, in which authoritarian leaders were secure enough to secure power but not to enforce unpopular compromise. It then examines the roles of informal power structures and the persistent insecurity generated by prolonged militarised competition. It argues that while the causal relationship between regime type and rivalry is complex, over the long-term insecurity has provided important resources to authoritarian regimes ‘demobilizing’ constituencies for reform and democratic change. The chapter acknowledges revolutionary changes in Armenia in 2018, while highlighting the capacity of enduring rivalries to outlast democratic openings and remain stable across mixed-regime dyads.
‘Gifts of the Wild’: Dwelling, Temporality and Landscape in Kathleen Jamie’s Writing
Authors: Szuba Monika
Published: May 2020

Following Kathleen Jamie’s words that ‘poetry is a sort of connective tissue where myself meets the world, and it rises out of that, that liminal place’, the chapter discusses Jamie’s poetic work from a phenomenological perspective. An important aspect of Jamie’s writing, connectivity highlights interrelations between the world and poetic form and as such is examined in a theoretically-informed analysis. The chapter argues that in a place where the poet meets the world, poetic language negotiates external factors that have an impact upon it, and in doing so, the poet can begin to illuminate lived experience. In the process of writing a temporary self that evokes the experience of the world through embodied participation, temporality plays an important role. As Jamie demonstrates in her writing, the perception of the land — and our coexistence with it — is affected by the awareness of the passage of time. The discussion focuses on the poems recording the experience of landscape represented in past, present and future considerations of change, and examines how in Jamie’s writing a sense of permanence is intermingled with a pervasive sense of transience. It centres around Jamie’s emphasis on transitoriness, which foregrounds the temporality of our dwelling.
Ethos: The Great Sceptical Guide
Authors: Fosl Peter S.
Published: May 2020

Custom is the second dimension of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold, and Hume positions custom and habit centrally in his thought. Chapter Five unpacks and weighs the philosophical import of Hume’s thinking about custom and habit. Chapter Six describes the way Hume’s use of custom and habit inform Hume’s theory of general ideas and anticipates hermeneutic philosophy, as well as howHume’s Copy Principle enacts the historicity of Pyrrhonian recollection. The text goes on to show how custom and habit inform Hume’s ideas about nature, contingency, reasoning, moral and aesthetic judgment, and the human self. The chapter then moves into an investigation of Hume’s political theory and his ideas about religion. The chapter shows how the complex and sometimes apparently inconsistent weave of Hume’s thinking about politics and religion is coherently organized around central features of scepticism. With an eye towards the various virtues and pathologies of politics and religion, Chapter Six explores Hume’s critical ideas about opinion, true religion, moderation, tranquillity, balancing, common life, metaphysics, faction, enthusiasm, and superstition.
Technai: Dogmatism and the Technologies of Doubt
Authors: Fosl Peter S.
Published: May 2020

Chapter Seven undertakes to articulate Hume’s scepticism with regard to the third dimension of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold—technê. More particularly, the chapter examines the instruments he deploys against dogmatism, that is his technologies of doubt. The chapter devotes special attention to Hume’s sceptical arguments regarding the epistemic capacities of reason and the senses, especially in regard to the primary/secondary quality distinction and what Hume calls ‘false philosophy.’ The text argues that Hume is an entirely radical sceptic who refuses all epistemic and metaphysical claims, including those related to personal identity, the immateriality of the soul, hidden substances, energies, and powers, including the causal power. The chapter explains what exactly counts for Hume as dogmatism and what is not consistent with scepticism. The chapter explores the import to empiricism of Hume’s Copy Principle.
A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture
Authors: Hirschler Konrad
Published: May 2020

In the late medieval period, manuscripts galore circulated in Middle Eastern libraries. Yet, very few book collections have come down to us as such or have left a documentary trail. This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both, a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves – the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus. On this basis, the book suggests that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.
Collaboration and Marriage: The Dynamiter
Authors: Murfin Audrey
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers Stevenson’s acknowledged collaborations with his wife, Fanny, most substantially, their co-written work, The Dynamiter, also titled More New Arabian Nights (1885). Husband and wife collaborations create subtle problems, largely because we expect a wife to assist her husband without credit. The Dynamiter structurally draws upon The Thousand and One Nights, which themselves concern issues of narrative and marriage. The Dynamiter, a novel about Irish terrorism, was well regarded in the nineteenth century, but not so in the twentieth or twenty-first, precisely because recent critics have resented Fanny’s involvement. The chapter additionally considers Fanny and Louis’ collaborative play “The Hanging Judge” and the controversy surrounding Fanny’s short story “The Nixie.”
The Study of Achaemenid Egypt
Authors: Colburn Henry P.
Published: May 2020

The introductory chapter provides some historical context for the study of Achaemenid Egypt. This period in Egyptian history is an orphan of sorts, falling between the earlier periods, of great interest to Egyptologists, and the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, of great interest to classicists. Along with this lack of interest, there is also a more insidious tendency to emphasize the scarcity of evidence for this period, something Margaret Root has called the ‘politics of meagerness.’ This tendency is tied to nineteenth century orientalist views of the Persians as savage despots, a view also held by the ancient Greeks. To avoid these issues, this book focuses on the experience of Achaemenid rule. This involves two main approaches: 1.) the examination of continuities and changes in the structures of Egyptian society, and 2.) a study of identity through decisions made about material by individuals and communities.
Experiencing Achaemenid Egypt
Authors: Colburn Henry P.
Published: May 2020

The final chapter considers briefly how Ptolemaic ideology and propaganda have refashioned the memory of Achaemenid rule into something explicitly negative, thus coloring all subsequent accounts of the period. It then discusses and recapitulates how studying experience provides a way around these Greek-influenced accounts of the Persians, and provide a clearer picture of the complexity of ancient imperialism.
The Chief Rabbi, the London Beth Din and the Battle for Leadership in the ‘Provinces’
Authors: Holtschneider Hannah
Published: May 2020

Chapter 2 examines the context in which the discussions about religious leadership and the authority of the Chief Rabbi took place in pre-World War I Britain. Centre stage is taken by the Conference of Anglo-Jewish Ministers which at their first two meetings in 1909 and 1911 suggested a radical overhaul of the authority structure of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire, proposing the devolution of religious authority to regional batei din. The death of Hermann Adler in 1911 and the election of Joseph Hertz as his successor as Chief Rabbi in 1913 changed the course of events, and the scheme was dropped from discussions. However, the scheme remained prominent in Salis Daiches’s mind and he pursued it actively in Scotland from 1919 onwards. While his religious politics ran counter to that of Chief Rabbi Hertz, his voice had traction in the communities he served. Though futile in the end, the repeated articulation of a plan of decentralisation of rabbinic authority is a helpful barometer for the mood in Jewish congregations in the early twentieth century whose long-term members were massively outnumbered by recently immigrated co-religionists.
Film and the Imagined Image
Authors: Cooper Sarah
Published: May 2020

Film and the Imagined Image explores the extraordinary ways in which film can stimulate and direct the image-making capacity of the imagination. From documentary to art house cinema, and from an abundance of onscreen images to their complete absence, films that experiment variously with narration, voice-over, and soundscapes do not only engage the thoughts and senses of spectators in a perceptually rich experience. They also make an appeal to visualise more than is visible on screen and they provide instruction on how to do so as spectators think and feel, listen and view. Bringing together philosophy, film theory, literary scholarship, and cognitive psychology with an international range of films from beyond the mainstream, Sarah Cooper charts the key processes that serve the imagining of images in the light of the mind. Through its navigation of a labile and vivid mental terrain, this innovative work makes a profound contribution to the study of spectatorship.
Seeing Pictures
Authors: Cooper Sarah
Published: May 2020

This opening chapter serves to introduce the principal focus of the book, which explores the felt experience of mental image-making while watching film. The introductory discussion positions the book first of all in relation to cognitivist work on imagination within film studies and points to the gap in scholarship on spectatorship regarding the experience of the image-making capacity of the imagination, situating it within a broader debate on mental imagery. The chapter engages with film theory and philosophy that anticipates the kind of image-making that will be focused on throughout the book and introduces what it means to imagine in images. It also justifies the book’s concentration on sound rather than silent cinema, since the verbal dimension and soundtracks are crucial to the kind of direction that produces the most vivid mental images, and the verbal dimension in particular permits introduction of the work of Elaine Scarry on guided imagining. It is the vivacity of such mental images that this first chapter outlines. In conceptual terms, this chapter and the following chapter serve to set up the key notion of ‘dual vision’ – of seeing what is on screen and ‘seeing’ what is in the mind – that informs the entire study.
Layering
Authors: Cooper Sarah
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on how films get spectators to perform the feat of creating imagined images and layering them over those that are on screen. Gary Tarn’s Black Sun (2005) provides the opening example in which the blind French artist Hugues De Montalembert recounts in voice-over his strong memory of a striking scene that he witnessed prior to going blind and which contrasts markedly with the images that appear on screen for the length of time that he tells his tale. This example serves to explain how and why mental images can appear just as vividly in spectators’ minds as onscreen images do. The ground of imagining is formed before spectators are guided on how to take flight from it across sections that introduce further examples, from Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015) through Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy (1994-2010) to Agnès Varda’s Jane B. by Agnès V. (1988). In addition to an on-going dialogue with the work of Elaine Scarry, this chapter interweaves references to cognitive psychology and philosophy that inform other chapters too. Layering is just one of the processes at work in the formation of imagined images while watching films, and subsequent chapters outline others.
Novel Institutions
Authors: Mullen Mary L.
Published: May 2020

Novel Institutions rethinks the politics of institutions by reinterpreting the most institutional of literary forms: nineteenth-century British realism. Although realist novels, like institutions, mediate social life through a set of formal conventions and informal expectations, they also offer strategies for more capacious political imagining through their prevalent anachronisms. These anachronisms—untimely chronologies, obsolete practices, and out-of-date characters—unsettle the shared time of institutions and the consensus it fosters. Paying unprecedented attention to Irish novels, this book argues that the movement between shared institutional time and anachronisms is more pronounced in realist novels from Ireland, where Britain relied on a dual logic of institutional assimilation and exclusion. But such movement does not mean Irish novels are anomalous: these novels make the tension between the shared time of institutions and the unruly politics of anachronism visible in English realist novels. The book concludes that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure.
Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Authors: Mullen Mary L.
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that establishing an origin for what we now call ‘British realism’ or ‘the Irish novel’ is both an institutional and an anachronistic endeavour: the stories that we tell about novels are actually stories about the cultural institutions that study novels. Considering the formal and political divisions of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent alongside its changing critical reception, the chapter demonstrates how ‘British realism’ is an anachronistic formation and offers a new origin story where ‘British realism’ and ‘the Irish novel’ are not separate traditions or forms, but rather dynamically intertwined. Castle Rackrent, long thought to be an exemplary Irish novel precisely because it is not realist, develops realist contradictions that are taken up by later nineteenth-century Irish, Scottish and English novelists like Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope.
George Eliot’s Anachronistic Literacies
Authors: Mullen Mary L.
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on narrative metalepsis in the novels of George Eliot, the most central figure in studies of Victorian realism and often the standard through which Irish novelists are deemed not realist enough. But William Carleton’s and Charles Kickham’s ethnographic realism allows us to understand Eliot’s provincial realism in a new way: as divided rather than integrative. In novels that encourage institutional consolidation, Eliot uses narrative metalepsis to question modern institutionalism’s drive toward futurity. Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) produce a form of anachronistic literacy—a mode of reading and remembering that collapses historical distance as it celebrates the immediacy of the past—to question women’s fraught relationship to modern institutionalism. Eliot’s embrace of anachronism is surprising because her novels seem to produce a form of historicism grounded in path-dependency: in her novels, past choices tend to constrain present decisions. But, in novels that otherwise confirm the existing path, Eliot’s anachronistic literacy creates radical ruptures that mobilise anachronisms to imagine otherwise.
Introduction
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: May 2020

A brief introduction describes the centrality of narrative in our lives, and across human history, before foregrounding the key themes of the book and indicating its structure. It covers some basic definitions of humanism before proceeding. One of the key features of humanism is an exploratory vulnerability that seeks to find new ways to describe the complexities of human interaction, both in stories and in scholarship around stories – the introduction explains how this book will provide resources for achieving open listening to human otherness.
Connectedness and Character
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the way we feel connected to others through fiction, and what part character identification plays in this process. It looks at stories used to stave off loneliness, to establish ingroups and outgroups, to help us to feel intelligent or equipped with special knowledge, as well as the values of ritual and rite-of-passage. It also covers how we can articulate our selfhood through fictive characters and broadcast our self-schemas using the stories we like, as well as roleplay, ideology and status markers.
Mental Work and Memory
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: May 2020

This chapter covers fantasy, imagination and play, the way stories can offer autotelic relief from purposeful cognitive work, the way we ogle at the invention of other humans through story, the comparison of our fantasy lives to our real lives, and story as humour, titillation and mateship display. It also covers the values of pattern recognition, memory and symbolism, and how we exercise these unique competences in narrative.
An Introduction to the Millennial Suburban Ensemble Film
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: May 2020

Part III uses the hermeneutics and narrative theory established in the first half of the book to investigate a film genre that emerged at the end of the millennium: the suburban ensemble dramedy. The first chapter makes the case that suburban ensemble cinema comparatively amalgamates a number of conventions from a range of antecedent genres: infidelity dramas, family trauma dramas, the midlife crisis film and the coming-of-age film, along with works from other media, including socially conscious domestic TV sitcoms. It compares the history of suburban media depiction in American cinema with the lived realities of residentially dispersed contexts as they developed over the second half of the 20th century.
‘Our own little grain of truth’
Authors: Smith Angela
Published: May 2020

‘Our own little grain of truth’ focuses on the interaction of tragedy and comedy, including the gothic grotesque, in Katherine Mansfield’s work in the last three years of her life; it does not offer biographical interpretations of the texts covered. It considers the effect of her reading, suggesting that it provided a trigger for new directions in her writing. Her response to the novel by R. O. Prowse, A Gift of the Dusk, which she reviewed for the Athenaeum and discussed in letters to John Middleton Murry, shows her imagining the dark places of psychology, when traumatic experiences lead characters to confront the unthinkable. Abjection is a motif in all the texts considered: Prowse’s A Gift of the Dusk, Mansfield’s ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Vera. In each a character confronts what Julia Kristeva describes in Powers of Horror as ‘one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed at a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside’, yet each of these fictions contrives to combine comedy with the dark, tragic dimension.
Strange Monsters: The Struggle for Women’s Validity as Artists in the Writings of Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield
Authors: Cappuccio Richard
Published: May 2020

Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension (1911) and Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and Christine (1917) are works that examine the conflicted position of the woman artist who navigates filial and marital obligations. Readers must consider the role of women artists in a culture in which expectations for conformity conflict with women’s ideas about their creative needs. This paper examines the position of women artists in two of von Arnim’s novels as well as three of Mansfield’s stories, two from In A German Pension, ‘A Modern Soul’ and ‘The Advanced Lady’, and one later story, ‘The Singing Lesson’ (1920). These are works that address the challenges and alienation that the modern woman faced if she identified herself as an artist; they also question whether art alone could change the status quo.
Shakespeare in Transition: Pedagogies of Transgender Justice and Performance
Authors: Kemp Sawyer
Published: May 2020

As the rhetoric of gender and trans theory has made its way into Shakespeare studies, critics and practitioners increasingly reach for “trans” as a lens through which to read and produce Shakespeare. This chapter points out that although both Shakespearean performance and criticism rely on the rhetoric of trans people and their bodies, actual trans people and bodies are predominantly absent from discourse and performance. This essay looks to readings of the “transgender” in Shakespeare as a way of grappling with both historicist and presentist methodologies, asking us to look beyond “the pants” of cross-dressed heroines to more subtle signifiers of gender nonconformity. The essay then tracks some ways in which education and outreach departments can engage trans and gender-nonconforming communities at the level of production.
Failing with Shakespeare: Political Pedagogy in Trump’s America
Authors: Mentz Steve
Published: May 2020

Amidst the perils and rewards of teaching Shakespeare during a U.S. presidential election year, Steve Mentz demonstrates how good Shakespeare is to think with during times of crisis and failure. This chapter proposes new pedagogical implications for the old story of Shakespeare’s dramatic ambivalence: both by connecting the current political situation of the U.S. to critical moments in the past, and by exploring the range of available ethical responses to the experience of uncertainty, failure, and defeat. After all, as Mentz notes, “Politics is always violent and theatrical,” making a course structured around analysis of live theatrical productions particularly generative in the current climate. Mentz also unflinchingly addresses an experience so many of us have had of feeling like we are “failing,” and guides teacher-scholars toward an adaptive methodology that makes room for our own sense of disorientation and frustration.
Confronting Bias and Identifying Facts: Teaching Resistance Through Shakespeare
Authors: Gatta Carla Della
Published: May 2020

This chapter foregrounds the essential role of critical analysis in an era when facts, feelings, opinions, news, and propaganda have become increasingly hard to disambiguate. Carla Della Gatta explains that Shakespeareans are in an excellent position to help students navigate this terrain, thanks to our field’s “lengthy, cross-cultural, and international history of determining, disputing, and reinterpreting facts,” a habit that can be put to especial use in identifying various modes of misinformation and bias. This chapter relates exercises in introductory scholarly editing and comparative theatrical/film analyses that enable students to be makers, not just consumers, of knowledge. Putting primary sources directly in students’ hands empowers them to apply rigorous analysis, solve interpretive problems, and hone their confidence in questioning established authority and venerated “facts.” The payoffs span from the understanding of Renaissance literature to informed encounters with “fake news,” biased sources, or unresearched content.