bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The ‘Inverse Uncanny’: Humour and Tim Burton’s Gothic Parodies
Authors: Germanà Monica
Published: January 2025

Building on existing theories of laughter and humour (Richter 1804; Freud 1927; Borch-Jacobsen 1987) and the Gothic comic (Horner and Zlosnik 2004), this chapter will explorethe destabilizing effect of playful and comic intrusions in the Gothic parodies of Tim Burton. Interrogating the Freudian understanding of humour as a strategy to endorse the ego’snarcissism and the stability of self, the chapter will draw attention to the ambiguous politics of humour whilst establishing links with the Gothic’s propensity for the dismantlement of stable categories of meaning and hierarchy.The works of Tim Burton, frequently discussed in terms of their self-conscious Gothic aesthetics (Spooner 2017; Louttit 2018), also establish links with other genres and influences, including those of Neo-Victorian fiction, the grotesque, children’s and nonsense literature. Whilst speaking to the hybridity of Gothic and its monsters, Burton’s Gothicparodies produce a reverberation of cultural antecedents, the playful interaction of which, is a source of amusement for the spectator familiar with the tropes. Simultaneously, in playing with familiar themes and points of references, Burton’sdiversions from the original narratives, generate a different kind of pleasure, triggered by the uncanny interplay of familiar/unfamiliar categories. Rather than simply subverting the Romantic Sublime’s hierarchical structure, Burton’s Gothic parodies, which include Corpse Bride (2005), Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Frankenweenie (2012), deploy humour to debunk the concepts of hierarchy and linear thinking, undermining the ‘serious’ business offear, while, at the same time, drawing attention to the frightening aspects of ‘funny’.
‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’: Feminist Camp Gothic
Authors: Brassington Thomas
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses camp and its feminist potential in comic Gothic, concentrating on how feminist camp facilitates an examination of Gothic’s pleasurable elements. It draws on Pamela Robertson’s Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (1996) to establish a critical frame for feminist camp Gothic, focusing on awarishness and how it challenges subject- object relations, cultural recycling’s ability to recoup outmoded images of femininity for expansivepurposes, and the multidirectional ways in which exchanges of power must be understood across these. Feminist camp, the chapter argues, offers comic Gothic an expansive examination of Gothic femininities concerned with pleasure. As examples, the chapter then analyses Cassandra Peterson’scharacter Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, to illustrate how Gothic femininities are recycled and recoded for queer and feminine audiences and the generation of cultural capital. Following this, the chapter discusses how Lady Gaga uses awarishness to perform self-reflexive critiques of media gossip abouther, using monstrous self-presentation to situate herself as a cultural outsider. Additionally, Gaga’s monstrous persona cultivates a celebratory spectacle of unsanctioned femininities. The chapter then concludes that the feminist politics of camp in the Gothic exhibit an additive and accretivereclamation of history’s waste.
Haunted TikTok: Comedy in Gothic Times
Authors: Bruin-Molé Megen de
Published: January 2025

In our Gothic contemporary culture, horror is everywhere and always imminent. Amidst continual existential anxiety, constant media bombardment, and weaponized nostalgia, it can often seem as though irony is dead. As this chapter demonstrates, however, the Internet generation takes a different, ‘metamodern’ perspective, an understanding ‘that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other’. What does the Gothic look like in this context? This chapter considers the question in relation to short-form digital Gothic, using the core aesthetic #HauntedTikTok to reflect on this form’s place in the wider tradition of comic Gothic. On TikTok, a platform usually reserved for dance routines, fluffy animals, and influencers, horror and terror relies explicitly on the Gothic duplicity and melodrama of digital content more generally. Accordingly, even at its silliest TikTok speaks to many larger (and very serious) issues around disinformation, cultural appropriation, and marginalization.
Imagined Communities: Digital Tools for the Study of St Nicholas ’s Global and National Readership
Authors: McDermott Shawna
Published: January 2025

This chapter uses digital mapping tools to explore how St Nicholas (1873-1943) defined itself as a children’s periodical with an international scope and readership. Child readers from all around the world wrote letters to the magazine and saw excerpts published within its pages. While highlighting both the limits and benefits of digital exploration, the chapter argues that St Nicholas privileged the correspondence of American children, particularly those in north-eastern regions.
Wild Nature, Ecoliteracy, and Activism in Children’s Environmental Periodicals
Authors: Hawley Erin
Published: January 2025

Children today are consuming more media than ever before, and their experiences of wild nature are increasingly likely to be mediated rather than embodied. The question of whether mediated experiences with nature can encourage care for the natural world has long been debated, but children’s nature periodicals have received little attention in this context. Children themselves, meanwhile, are often neglected in studies of environmental communication. Addressing these crucial gaps in the current scholarship, this chapter argues that children’s nature periodicals – including the Walt Disney Company’s National Geographic Kids and the UK-based Eco Kids Planet – function as a site where empathy, environmental sensitivity, and ecoliteracy can be cultivated.
Reconciling Us To Ourselves: Decolonisation and the Question of Subjectivity
Authors: Jilani Sarah
Published: January 2025

Discussing how the question of selfhood has had both differing and intersecting treatments in poststructuralist and materialist-Marxist approaches to postcolonial studies, this chapter delineates the book's approach to subjectivity as sympathetic to materialist work in the field, while seeking to revisit the dialectical thought of anti-colonial philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in order to clarify what he understands to be the role of subjectivity and subjectivity formation in the historical context of decolonisation. My explication of Fanon’s materialist approach to subjectivity highlights inroads into the “psycho-political” (Hook 2004) contents of realist post-independence texts: contents that manifest through both formal and narrative choices juxtaposing representations of decolonisation as a structural and as a psychic process. As such, before the book begins close readings of texts, this first chapter attempts to outline its materialist approach to subjectivity. Putting into conversation Fanon scholarship, this chapter argues that he thinks on the self as a material phenomenon, constituted and re-constituted in dialectical relation to the world. This relation, it demonstrates, rests on three broad aspects: the Fanonian subject’s historicity, embodiment, and its capacities of creative agency.
Wayward Kinship and Malleable Intimacies
Authors: Shelat Jay N.
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines defiant forms of intimacy and family in Jesymn Ward’s works. Looking specifically as Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, this analysis takes root in pathbreaking Black feminist politics of the now by Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Candice M Jenkins. Through this lens, I argue that America’s historic, systemic, institutionalized and social neglect of poor Black communities compels the creation of new forms of intimacy. These intimacies in turn ensure both togetherness and survival against anti-Black odds. Moreover, I contend that the Black kith and kin relations that populate Ward’s Bois Sauvage resist respectability politics put forth by white elites. In Salvage the Bones, then, the extension of the family outward to other members of the community, including animals, is a practice that arises from state neglect and abandonment. These errant family constructions resonate historically as well. In Sing, Unburied, Sing, I posit, a forged father-son relationship practices what Sharpe calls wake work and directly rebuffs carcerality and anti-Black ideologies rooted in the nation’s past and present. Ultimately, this chapter shows how Ward depicts the state’s abandonment of poor Black families in particular attempts to destroy the central tenets of Black life: survival through togetherness.
A Prophetic Tension: Bearing Witness Against Black Nihilism in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped
Authors: McCampbell Mary
Published: January 2025

This chapter engages closely with the spiritual dimensions of Jesmyn Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped. It explores the way Ward bears witness to the fragility of Black existence in a seemingly godless world built by the tools of white supremacy. After losing five young men she loves within a span of four grief-soaked years, she questions the cruel circumstances that led to the ‘seemingly unrelated’ violent deaths of these men while also questioning the absence or presence of a God behind the scenes, possibly orchestrating or ignoring these tragedies. Although Ward’s story is written in the shadow of a seemingly absent God, her storytelling serves a prophetic function to expose injustice, bear witness to pain, and push against the despair that leads to death. It is also a work of theodicy, interrogating both the presence/absence and goodness/badness of the God of the author’s beleaguered, forgotten community. While both testifying to an experience of ‘black nihilism’ and raising an important set of theological questions, Ward admittedly seeks, rather than abandons, meaning. Alongside its tender despair, Men We Reaped is itself a means to survival, dignity, hope, and the search for both hope and elucidation.
Experiencing the Environment from the Car: Human and More-than-Human Road Trippers in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
Authors: Stork Michelle
Published: January 2025

This chapter reads Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) as a twenty-first century road novel in which social, transcultural and ecocritical issues intersect. Bringing together approaches from mobility studies and ecocriticism, it pays attention to the complex representation of the road trip from Bois Sauvage to Parchman prison, analysing the configuration of the human and more-than-human road trippers on this multiply haunted journey. Ward’s narrative of the road trip brings together concerns around racialised im/mobility, the environment, and histories of violence. The novel deconstructs and reworks the notion of the car as a ‘cocoon’ – a safe space shielding its drivers from the outside world – by reconfiguring it as an integral part of the environment and as a space for encounters with the more-than-human world. The novel thus blurs the distinction between the car, nature and culture; arguably, the character’s embeddedness in contemporary ‘petroculture’ and the evocation of Creolised African and Native American belief systems are equally important to this reconfiguration. Ward thereby reworks the road novel to accommodate the more-than-human world, dissolving the commonly constructed divisions between car and environment, human and more-than-human, past and present.
‘The most beautiful song’: Jesmyn Ward and Diasporic Recognition
Authors: Harrison Sheri-Marie
Published: January 2025

This Afterword closes the collection by considering the local and the global – and perhaps most importantly, their interrelationships – in Ward’s work. It revisits ‘On Witness and Respair’, picking up from the analysis presented in the book’s introduction, and considers key passages from Sing, Unburied, Sing. In doing so, it attends to areas of Ward’s work that are, surprisingly, rarely discussed: its reach and resonance beyond America and the American South, and its wide and evocative range of genre codings. It points to some of the ways this book addresses these gaps while also noting the many open avenues for future study of Ward’s writing, that they open up.
‘Collect and Simplify’: Serial Miscellaneity and Extraction in the Early Nineteenth Century
Authors: Turner Mark W.
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores forms of extraction in the early Victorian period– reprinted scraps, reviews, data and other mobile forms of print published in serial formats that were in part designed to help readers contend with an overabundance of information. While what Turner calls ‘extractive miscellaneity’ predates the nineteenth century, it became increasingly ubiquitous as periodicals and other serial formats expanded across the century, addressing new markets and experimenting with new rhythms of publication. This included Charles Knight’s Companion to the Newspaper (1833–7) as well as entertaining parodies of scissors-and-paste journalism such as The Thief (1832–3). Turner concludes by examining the Australian Magazine, launched in 1821, which printed extracts from correspondence and reprinted scraps from British periodicals in order to create a sense of connection to the mother country. At the same time, by printing extracts from other colonial papers, it constructed the idea of a global communications network. Turner’s exploration of domestic and international forms of textual extraction demonstrates a broader tendency in Victorian scholarship toward exploring intersections within an expanding global economy of print.
‘The eagle claws other peoples land, & goods’: Virginia Woolf on the Desire to Dominate
Authors: Barrett Michèle
Published: January 2025

Is Mrs Dalloway principally about social class? Is the social system shown here capitalist? Is it an anti-capitalist novel?  This chapter begins to answer those questions by looking at two aspects of the novel: the extended criticism of psychiatry, and Clarissa Dalloway’s ignorance about the plight of Armenians. Neither of these is reducible to social class as we normally understand it. The chapter then turns to discuss the ways in which Woolf’s newly-digitised reading and research notes – available at WoolfNotes.com - throw light on her views about capitalism.
‘my comfortable capitalistic head’: Virginia Woolf on Consumption, Co-operation and Motherhood
Authors: Suppé Charlotte Taylor
Published: January 2025

As a member of the Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG) and a friend of the Guild’s president Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Virginia Woolf was both active in, and educated about a movement in which working-class women were using more than their basket-power to effect change. In many ways Woolf’s values were aligned with the WCG. Both challenged an oppressive capitalist status quo and both understood that women’s limited social and political influence was a question of remuneration, consumption and financial participation. Despite this Woolf displays a discomfort sometimes bordering on contempt when thinking about the work, art and even the physical existence of the ‘mothers’ of the WCG. This chapter reviews Woolf’s writing on food and motherhood, with a particular focus on the essay ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’, to explore the nuances of class in her work.
Biometric Feminism: A Room of One’s Own and the Politics of Intelligence
Authors: Periyan Natasha
Published: January 2025

Virginia Woolf’s argument in A Room of One’s Own is lauded and has been a cherished pillar of her materialist politics. And yet her feminist-socialist politics are more complex when read in the context of Woolf’s life-long interest in and ambivalence about mental ability and measurement. A Room gets its specifically feminist appeal in its negotiation of, and indeed marginalisation of, the place of relative male versus female intelligence in literary production. Woolf focuses the debate on female intelligence to consider environmental factors, not innate ability, and in so doing resists succumbing to the ‘decrees of the measurers’ (96). A biometric understanding of Woolf’s feminism also supports a reading that is sensitive to social class and race. While Woolf resists the impulse to classify and rank intellectually, she is susceptible to the pervasive influence of the intelligence testers in her statistical imagination which demonstrates a concern with the ‘typical’, a focus which also elucidates the text’s conscious, and unconscious, blind-spots on class and race. Woolf remains far more cognisant of her work’s dialogue with the metrical impulse of mental ability than her reviewers, however, who evidenced the gender-based stereotyping surrounding intelligence that Woolf’s work resisted.
Publishing and Capitalism at the Hogarth Press
Authors: Wilson Nicola
Published: January 2025

This chapter builds on Susheila Nasta’s description of the Hogarth Press as ‘a radical left-wing publisher’ (2018, vii), and develops work begun by Helen Southworth on the socio-political publications published by the Woolfs (2012). Drawing on publishing correspondence in the Hogarth Press business archive, the chapter considers how the Woolfs’ engaged as publishers with contemporary economic and philosophical ideas. Texts, networks, and publishing histories discussed include J. A. Hobson’s From Capitalism to Socialism (1932) and Sally Graves’s A History of Socialism (1939). The chapter shows show how the Woolfs’ engagement with these writers reflected their socio-political interests (not just Leonard’s) and influenced their own work, developing and extending their political networks and engagement with questions of industrialization, labour and economics.
The Rise and Fall of Critical Legal Studies
Authors: Stewart James Gilchrist
Published: January 2025

A wide-ranging intellectual history of the Critical Legal Studies Movement, drawing from personal accounts, academic works, and the media. The Rise and Fall of Critical Legal Studies unpacks Critical Legal Studies (CLS) to address what CLS was, how it came about, and what its legacy means for contemporary legal theories. Using a variety of lenses, The Rise and Fall of Critical Legal Studies unpacks Critical Legal Studies reimagines existing histories of CLS to clarify and categorise, before arguing the importance of its death. Cultural, sociological, literary, filmic, and theatrical theorists are drawn into the analysis taken. Ghosts, the CIA, and moral panic are added to challenge the story of CLS, adding to the movement’s intellectual history.
All’s Well in Love and War –or Is it?
Authors: White Robert
Published: January 2025

The seed of All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–5) may have been planted in Shakespeare’s mind some years earlier, when he wrote his best-selling erotic epyllion, Venus and Adonis. In it the goddess of love in vain pursues a reluctant young man dedicated to hunting, while Helena, more successfully in the long run, pursues Bertram who runs away from her to war. In both, violent male pursuits are directly pitted against female love.
The Rat or the Flower? Decomposed Being(s) in the Holograph Draft of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Authors: McGiff Shilo
Published: January 2025

Composition and decomposition, draft and finished form, pastoral and anti-pastoral, human and post-human worldings: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) and its holograph drafts burgeon with beauty, yet also suppurate with decay. Engaging the imaginative reservoirs offered by dark and necropastoral, this chapter takes up the discarded and disgusting beings found in the holograph drafts of The Waves to ask what a poetics of the draft form might have to tell us about ontology and metaphysics that further unravels the boundaries of modernist self and modernist text in the wider, weirder historical landscape of the Anthropocene – a landscape that enfolds the possibility of post-humanist worldings alongside visions of human extinction driven by anthropogenic forces.
Introduction: An Art of the Unseen
Authors: Deane-Freeman Timothy
Published: January 2025

This introductory chapter sketches out the central problem of the book: that of the explosive proliferation of digital images, and their potentially deleterious relationship to thought. In this context, an argument is made for the ongoing utility of Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy, according to which the cinematic image might serve to displace habituated forms of cognition, forcing us to think in new ways. While Deleuze himself writes relatively little about the digital, treating new forms of “informatic” image with a certain distrust and linking them to what he calls “societies of control,” this introductory chapter draws out the ways in which his cinematic philosophy, reread alongside information theory and cybernetics, can help us to conceive of the digital image as a potential site of creativity and resistance.
The Image and the Out-of-Field
Authors: Deane-Freeman Timothy
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores Deleuze’s idiosyncratic use of the image, mapping its emergence from the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and charting its development in his two-volume study of cinema. According to this Deleuzo-Bergsonian approach, the image is no longer a derived or secondary “representation,” inferior to a reality more properly filled with being. Rather the image, understood as a metaphysical category, becomes the very identity of matter: a selectively “framed” composition of forces, such as grants cinema a preeminent philosophical significance.
Inland Empire
Authors: Deane-Freeman Timothy
Published: January 2025

This chapter engages with David Lynch’s film Inland Empire, making the case for its significance as the site of a specifically digital outside. Through the film’s foregrounding of its own “noisy” materiality, through the chaotic disjunctions of its editing, and through its reflexive critique of both Hollywood and new media, the film thus articulates a set of potentials immanent to digital technologies for the creative individuation of thought. Whereas Deleuze claims that art is in some sense antithetical to the notion of information, the unthinkable excesses of Lynch’s film thus suggest both a new conception of information and a new way of thinking about art, both of which are pursued throughout this chapter.
Fidel Castro: The US Government’s Assassination Campaign against Cuba
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

Few assassinations campaign reached the intensity of that against Fidel Castro. The chapter covers the US government’s involvement in assassination attempts against the Cuban leader (and other Cuban officials) under three presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. This campaign involved some of the most controversial activities of the US government, from the collaboration with the Mafia, to Operation Mongoose. The chapter provides an overview of the direct and indirect assassination attempts. It assesses the role of the CIA and its proxies (e.g. Cuban exiles), and the Presidents’ leve of awareness of the plots. While the assassination attempts were ultimately unsuccessful and some were, quite frankly, farcical, the US government’s campaign included dark pages, attempted poisonings, and support for terrorist acts.
Muhammar Qaddafi: The Return of Assassination during the Reagan Years
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

This chapter covers the multiple efforts of the Reagan Administration to re-interpret and weaken the ban on assassination to pursue its preferred policy. The chapter shows how the Administration engaged in various forms of norm contestation challenging the remit, the meaning, and the validity of the ban. This contestation emerged as the Administration revamped the CIA’s role in cover operations in three main areas: the support to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, the arming and training of the ‘contras’ in Nicaragua, and counter-terrorism operations. To engage in these activities, while denying it was violating the ban, the Reagan Administration established various legal and political precedents. First, the Administration argued that counter-terrorism operations could not amount to assassination regardless of the target. Second, it argued that operations in self-defence could not amount to assassination. Third, it argued that US officials could not be accuse of violating the ban if not explicit demonstration of intent emerged. Finally, it argued that foreign leaders were not protected by the ban on assassination if they were present at a legitimate military target. These precedents permitted the Administration to attempt the assassination of Muhammar Qaddafi. They also permitted Administrations after Reagan’s to consider assassination a controversial but available option.
Manuel Noriega: Coups, Failed Coups and the Ban on Assassination
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

The chapter deals with the US government’s confrontation with Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. It focuses on an attempted coup launched against Noriega by Major Moises Giroldi. The failed coup led to bitter recriminations in Washington. It exposed the Administration of George H. W. Bush to the criticism that – having spent months calling on the Panamanian people to oust Noriega – when a coup did come the Administration did not back it. More importantly, the Giroldi coup led to a public debate as to whether the ban on assassination affected the conduct of US foreign policy. The public controversy – and secret reinterpretation of the ban – concluded with an agreement between Congress and the CIA to expand the Agency’s powers in the context of coup plotting. No violation of the ban – the new agreement entailed – could emerge unless the CIA provided coup plotters with explicit directives to engage in assassination. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the so-called ‘Parks memorandum,’ a memorandum of law defining the US government posture on assassination in the context of counterterrorism. Building on Reagan-era precedents the memorandum concluded that actions taken in counterterrorism and in self-defence could not amount to a violation of the ban.
Driven Out of the Town: Homosexuality and The British Poetry Revival
Authors: Roberts Luke
Published: January 2025

This chapter begins by addressing a discrepancy between the post-war experimental poetry scenes in North America and Britain. Among the contributors to the landmark New American Poetry (1960) anthology, more than a dozen were LGBTQ+, and several of the most important were directly involved in the struggle for gay liberation. By contrast, the literary reception of their aesthetic counterparts in Britain – the so-called British Poetry Revival – has tended towards the heteronormative. This chapter seeks to challenge a homophobic critical legacy, and works to establish a queer genealogy within and alongside the British Poetry Revival. The chapter presents a reading of Harry Fainlight’s neglected chapbook Sussicran (1965), and analyses the editorial sidelining of his early sexually explicit work. It goes on to consider the work of Lee Harwood, namely The Man With Blue Eyes (1966) – written while he was in a relationship with John Ashbery – and considers his writing in light of the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised sex between men.
Fear of Retribution: Anna Mendelssohn
Authors: Roberts Luke
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on the work of Anna Mendelssohn, also known as Grace Lake, who was imprisoned on left-wing terrorism charges in the 1970s. The chapter begins with an autobiographical account of Mendelssohn’s presence in Cambridge in the late 2000s, and the emergence of the anti-austerity and student protest movements of 2010-11. It goes on to develop a methodological argument for ‘good enough history’, drawing on the work of D.W. Winnicott and Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick. Placing Mendelssohn’s poem ‘from. Impacable Art’ in dialogue with Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘The Blacksmith’, the chapter analyses Mendelssohn’s rejection of political violence and her ambivalence towards political activism as a whole. The chapter concludes by discussing the role of the archive in future interpretations of Mendelssohn’s work.
Syntax
Authors: Pearce Michael
Published: January 2025

This chapter describes non-standard syntactical aspects of North East Vernacular English, as they are represented on RTG. Topics covered include agreement, modal verbs, negation, prepositions (function), subordinate clauses.
The Glaoua Tribe on River Seine
Authors: Ouaknine-Yekutieli Orit
Published: January 2025

This chapter covers the period running from the late 1920s to 1939. A key text from this period, analysed in this section is the French journalist Gustave Babin’s Son Excellence (“His Excellency”) (1932), which is a grand defamation of al-Glaoui. Babin (1865-1939) was a man of many faces: a journalist; exemplar of the French mission civilisatrice; an entrepreneur whose colonial dream was shattered by al-Glaoui; and an archetypal “imperial storyteller.” The chapter constructs an imagined dialog between al-Glaoui and Babin, concerning a set of illusory concepts—“truth,” “loyalty,” and “French-ness”—which appeared as central motifs in the telling of the al-Glaoui story and in public debates of the time. This fictional dialog is set within a discussion of al-Glaoui’s role in key dynamics of the period: colonial debt policy, competing legal systems, the “yellow press” in Morocco and France, and the manipulation of all of these by both colonizer and colonized. The chapter takes its name from an issue that particularly enraged Babin: the emergence in Paris of a community of al-Glaoui acolytes, labelled by Babin “the Glaoua tribe on the banks of River Seine.”
Erasure and Revelation: Telling al-Glaoui from the 1960s to the Late 1990s
Authors: Ouaknine-Yekutieli Orit
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the period between 1956 and 1999, the decades after Morocco's independence. The greater part of this period, from the 1960s to the late 1980s, was characterized by political unrest, severe civil restrictions, and aggressive state control (the so-called “Years of Lead”). Early in this period, Gavin Maxwell (1914-1969), a Scottish traveller-writer from an aristocratic background, decided to embark on a quest to trace al-Glaoui’s personal history. His plan coincided with a period during which the newly independent state had done its best to silence and repress anything related to al-Glaoui, by then considered a traitor and a collaborator with the French colonial regime. In 1966, after several years negotiating manifold obstacles, Gavin Maxwell published his Lords of the Atlas, s text analyzed in this chapter. Lords of the Atlas, consciously aimed at a mass-market audience, is a fascinating account of al-Glaoui, which contributed to the book’s enduring status as a “must read” for tourists visiting southern Morocco. Sympathetic to al-Glaoui, the book reads at times like a lamentation by proxy for Maxwell’s own fading aristocratic status. This chapter analyses Maxwell’s book, surveys post-colonial historiographies of al-Glaoui, and discusses censorship, historiographic amnesia, and their effects on al-Glaoui’s story. It also examines the fading status of old aristocracies in the context of the global collapse of an imperial world order.
Muhacir as Muslim
Authors: Fratantuono Ella
Published: January 2025

This chapter assesses border control, migrant settlement and Ottoman Islamism during the Hamidian Period (1876-1908). It evaluates how Hamidian-era anxieties over state security and legitimacy encouraged the development of Ottoman border restrictions and led administrators to elevate criteria of religion and motivation in immigration policy. In the wake of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin and with the emergence of Armenian nationalist organizations, Sultan Abdülhamid II identified Muslims as uniquely beneficial to the empire. The chapter describes how statesmen sought to facilitate Muslim immigration by establishing the Commission for Muslim Migrants (Muhacirin-i İslamiye Komisyonu). Simultaneously, the Ottoman government adopted passport and visa requirements intended to prevent Armenian return migration from North America, which encouraged officials’ surveillance over Muslims as well as non-Muslims at the border. The chapter demonstrates that at this moment of migration restriction, officials relied on the hijra – religiously obligatory migration – to advocate for the immigration of certain Muslims. The chapter concludes that rather than a signal that the empire sought to facilitate Muslim immigration at any cost, the selective application of the hijra reveals that sovereignty, nationality and legal jurisdiction remained primary concerns in the Ottoman border regime.
Negative Capabilities: Illness Narrative as Bibliotherapy in the Jesus Novels
Authors: Wojtas Paweł
Published: January 2025

This chapter aims to demonstrate the psychotherapeutic effects of Coetzee’s illness narratives, focusing on his latest series of Jesus novels: The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus. It seeks to show the extent to which Coetzee’s illness narratives lend themselves to bibliotherapy, despite failing to conform to the standards of traditional prescription books. The Jesus trilogy encourages reflection on the relationship between fiction and self-understanding, and the therapeutic effects that this self-understanding produces. Such fiction contains an inherent capacity to stimulate the reader’s self-exploratory habits through the withholding of textual meanings. This problematic “capacity” of fiction is intertwined with the complex ontological and fictional status of the protagonist, David, alongside his understanding of his (dis)abilities – or, as they are referred to in this chapter, after Keats, “negative capabilities” – and his sense of self in illness.
Human Spoken Interaction as a Complex Adaptive System
Authors: Siegel Aki , Seedhouse Paul
Published: January 2025

This book explains how human spoken interaction works. This involves two separate complex adaptive systems: the single universal ‘interaction engine’ and language(s), now numbering about 7,000. The combination of the two systems provides talk with its enormous generative power and adaptability. The interaction engine (Levinson 2006) applies universally in human populations, with some cultural variation. The interaction engine evolved before language, is acquired by infants before language and forms the ‘natural ecological niche for language’ (Schegloff 2006). We describe in detail how the components and processes of the interaction engine work together to enable us to understand each other in talk, whichever language is overlaid. Combining Complexity Science and Conversation Analysis (CA), we explain how to analyse spoken interaction on the micro and macro scales simultaneously. Focusing on L2 users of English engaged in interaction in a ‘superdiverse’ context, we zoom in on how the speakers utilise and adapt word search sequences over time in this informal English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) setting of an international dormitory. We use this approach to reveal speakers as simultaneously expert in using the interaction engine and inexpert in using the specific language. We show that the basic characteristics of the interaction engine are the same as those of other life-related complex adaptive systems. We demonstrate that it is possible to access the perspectives of participants inside a complex adaptive system as it is evolving.
Mirroring Methodology
Authors: Siegel Aki , Seedhouse Paul
Published: January 2025

This chapter explains how the universal interaction engine works by describing how Conversation Analysis CA works. Human spoken interaction is portrayed as a universal complex adaptive system and its fundamental mechanisms are introduced, which together constitute the ‘interaction engine’. These are able to adapt themselves to and mirror any variety of human activity and goal, whether social, institutional or cultural, which is delivered via any means, verbal and non-verbal and in any specific overlaid language or blend of languages. The universal mechanisms of turn-taking, sequence and repair provide the structure against which the context-sensitive implementations of social actions in talk can be interpreted and intersubjectivity maintained. The chapter provides examples of analyses to illustrate the methodology in practice.
Who calls whom a populist? A pragmatic analysis of the uses of populism(s) and populist(s) in French and Spanish parliamentary debates
Authors: Shchinova Nadezda
Published: January 2025

In this comparative study, occurrences of the term populis* (i.e. populism and its derivatives) are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively in two datasets containing parliamentary debates which took place in 2019 in the French National Assembly and the Spanish Congress of Deputies. The chapter investigates populism as a keyword in discourse and aims to determine the uses, the meanings, and the pragmatic functions of this widely used polysemic term. First, the discursive contexts in which populis* occurs are examined in order to determine the frequency of occurrence and the collocations of populis* in each dataset. Second, the chapter focuses on a sample of concordance lines, examines who labels whom as populist and identifies the pragmatic function of this label. There are some differences regarding the uses and the meanings of populis* in the French and Spanish datasets. The term is mainly employed with a negative value, and can be employed to target opponents as a tool for disqualification and de-legitimisation.
Political discourse and the new media: New architectures of communication
Authors: Chankova Mariya
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the liberalisation of communicative conduits, where political actors have a wider range of tools to use to reach their audiences and have more liberty in deploying content which is unchallenged by journalists’ questions, and may even have some sway over the reception of the discourse they produce. The case study in this chapter examines strategies for using one such tool for the purposes of political communication. It consists of a sample of written posts from the public Facebook page of the party leader of a recently registered Bulgarian political party, posted between two parliamentary elections during 2021. Contrary to positioning digital platforms as opening a gateway for all voices and as enabling communication, such platforms appear to be used by Bulgarian politicians for the purposes of political marketing and for constructing the social actor, in some cases bridging a self-created information gap. It is argued that the asynchronous communication enabled by these platforms allows for a greater control of the information flow and distance on the part of the political actor.
The CARD metaphor ‘play the X card’ as a social practice and its pragmatic functions
Authors: Tomoshige Yuuki
Published: January 2025

This chapter argues that the card metaphor, “play the X card,” is a social practice where X prototypically refers to a social member or identity in the metaphorical domain: society as a playground. Through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study addresses why one’s identity is prototypically inserted in the slot X. Structures including play the [n*] card and play the [j*] card as the lemma are used in order to provide a concise analysis of nouns and adjectives in the slot. They are then classified into a particular genre based on the discourse type and their usage analysed with the help of contextual information. Four noteworthy findings are identified: (1) influential people in society prototypically use a card metaphor to persuade subordinates and people in workplaces, communities, and politics as well as diplomacy; (2) the vulnerable are required to make listeners sympathetic to them; (3) in criticising a person, the attributes targeted are their social position, gender, and race; (4) almost all card metaphors like 1~3 above presuppose social class; however, the stratification does not come into play as long as the user’s purpose is simply to persuade a listener.
The Epitextual Sites of Cholera Poems
Authors: Bonifacio Ayendy
Published: January 2025

Chapter 4 explores another high-impact episodic event, the New York City cholera epidemic of 1866. As disease plagued the streets of the city, many newspaper poems were occasioned by cholera and its calamitous impact on society. Readers encountered these poems in their preferred newspapers and next to their daily dosage of newsprint. Thus, like many of the poems in this book, cholera poems are inherently paratextual. These poems reimagined and sometimes contributed to contemporaneous debates about sanitary reform, contagion, immigration, and preventative measures through verse that drew from the discourse of epidemiology, shaping, in many cases, how reading publics understood and managed the disease. The chapter recovers three popular cholera poems widely reprinted in New York during the 1866 epidemic: “The Voice of the Pestilence,” “King Cholera,” and “The Health Bill: A Talk Between Two Repubs at Albany.” Collectively reprinted in over forty-four dailies and weeklies between August 25, 1865 and September 6, 1866, these poems exemplify what Shira Wolosky calls “the rhetorical intersections between poetry and public discourses.” Furthermore, this chapter expands the paratext to include the epitext (paratext published outside of the proximity of poems in other contemporaneous newspapers, books, and magazines), revealing more clearly how cholera poems initiated communicative practices among publics that made shared experiences about disease (contagion, transmission, containment, and other factors relating to health) legible and aesthetical.
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda in Puerto Rico’s Partisan Press
Authors: Bonifacio Ayendy
Published: January 2025

This chapter takes a necessary turn way from the mainland U.S. towards Puerto Rico to conceptualize a poetics of paratextuality at the margins of the U.S. before and after the Spanish-American War. Not yet ceded to U.S. (this did not happen until after the Spanish-American War in 1898), the island of Puerto Rico provides a window into the colonial machinations of Spain in proximity to the expanding U.S. empire. The subject of this chapter is the Cuban-born transamerican poet, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) and her appearance in the periodical press. Avellaneda’s presence in the periodical press reveals a tryptic image of colonial, anticolonial, decolonial interests that linked the Hispanophone Caribbean to Spain and the United States long before U.S.’s involvement in Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s wars for independence. As a celebrity poetess with nationally recognized affiliations in Cuba, Spain, Puerto Rico, and the U.S., Avellaneda’s poems and reputation were bounded up in a dialectical push and pull print market of colonial, anticolonial, and decolonial desires. By comparing the varied representations of Avellaneda in New York City’s exile press to those in leading Spanish political organs in Puerto Rico, such as El Boletín mercantil de Puerto Rico and La correspondencia de Puerto Rico, the chapter reveals how Avellaneda’s poems and reputation were reimaged via certain manipulative editorial practices, including public censorship and partial political reportage. This chapter provides an important context for newspaper poets born outside of the mainland U.S., whose cultural image and reputation were routinely shaped by the paratext.
Introduction
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

This introductory chapter provides a brief biography of American writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, from his difficult upbringing as his family moved frequently before his parents’ divorce, his father’s death when Kasdan was a teenager, then Kasdan’s initial writing successes at the University of Michigan, before moving to Los Angeles and selling his first screenplay. The chapter establishes that Kasdan’s four-decade career includes influential films such as The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and The Big Chill (1983), and it argues that his pictures as writer-director have been celebrated as exemplars of “baby-boom” cinema; then it questions why his work has never been examined more forensically. Finally, the introduction explains the methodologies and rationales behind the multi-disciplinary investigations in the ensuing chapters.
Revenge of the Monomyth: Reclaiming the Hero’s Journey in Return of the Jedi
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines historical record and screenplay drafts to reveal some of the creative conflicts between the two writers of the final episode of the original Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi (1983). George Lucas aimed to complete a “fairy tale” that would make the audience feel “uplifted,” while Lawrence Kasdan preferred to raise the stakes by having one of the main characters killed. Most strikingly, this investigation establishes that Lucas was actually attempting to move away from the now famous “Hero’s Journey” at the center of the Star Wars saga (Joseph Campbell’s notion of the monomyth popularized by the series), with early notes showing that he was aiming to diminish Darth Vader’s role, having him usurped by a new antagonist. Kasdan rejected this complication, keeping the focus on Vader’s relationship with Luke Skywalker. This enabled the final showdown between father, son, and the Emperor, and the satisfying denouement to Luke’s “Hero’s Journey” that the audience had followed through the entire trilogy. The chapter argues that it was Kasdan, then, rather than Lucas who returned the Star Wars saga to the Campbellian monomyth that Lucas had claimed he was always striving to create.
A Changed Man: Solo and Beyond
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

After co-writing three screenplays in the Star Wars series alongside a director or executive producer, Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) was Lawrence Kasdan’s first time as the “senior” writer, sharing credit with his son Jonathan. The script would accentuate those aspects of the franchise that one would expect Kasdan to favor: a protagonist whose cocky swagger hides his self-doubt, ambiguous relationships, and settings that echo American Westerns and Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films. Perhaps more notable was the change in Kasdan’s status on Star Wars. This was most apparent in press reporting around the dismissal of the original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. According to contemporary articles, Kasdan was central to the decision, expressing his displeasure at Lord and Miller’s improvisational style, and part of the Lucasfilm delegation who asked Ron Howard to take over as director. Employing production and reception studies, this chapter examines the way that Kasdan’s status changed within the creative and industrial process – now perceived in the media as the powerful executive producer and “elder statesman” of the saga.