bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Strikes and Place
Authors: James Michael
Published: January 2024

The chapter takes the North as a starting point, and later narrows its focus to the North East to discuss the ways in which legacies—specifically regarding trade unions and industrial action—are liable to become co opted and appropriated by those from ‘outside’ of these communities. The chapter moves to look at Paul Bentley’s ‘The Two Magicians’, with specific attention to the ‘Chorus’. The book contends that the poem creates a place which is then filled with voices which have been ousted from (or been deprived of) their own place. The chapter closes with a discussion of other strike narratives that poets Helen Mort and Steve Ely draw from in their work and to the way in which contemporary strike narratives do not reflect or speak to the social or economic present of the North East.
Fealty v. Nihilism: How (Not) to Save the World
Authors: Kord Susanne
Published: January 2024

This chapter argues that Joss Whedon’s oft-cited ‘joyful nihilism’ is expressed in ‘Cabin’’s critique of four aspects of fealty: faith in mythical places; faith in mythical creatures; adherence to quasi-religious rituals, and a focus on humanity at large at the expense of respect for individuals. It discusses the film’s division into narrative and meta-levels (Upstairs v. Downstairs); the reduction of characters to mythical creatures (horror stereotypes) to enable their destruction; the way ‘Cabin’ caricatures the religious ritual of human sacrifice, and the film’s critique of a principal ethical paradox: the sacrifice of individual humans to the idea that humanity must be saved at all costs.
Either v. Or: The Puppets’ Choice
Authors: Kord Susanne
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses ‘Cabin’ in light of philosophical assessments of the concepts of Free Will v. Determinism and links the film’s discussion of this central tenet of philosophy to its practice of re-defining characters as types. It links these two aspects to the horror convention that requires the character’s complicity in his or her own destruction. It argues that ‘Cabin’ is a radical philosophical text presenting the unthinkable: not the end of the world, which has been imagined in apocalypse films beyond counting, but an ability to exercise one’s free will.
Arthur, Portrait of a Serial Killer
Authors: Booker M. Keith
Published: January 2024

This chapter details the ways in which Joker intersects with the genre of horror film. It surveys a number of horror films in genres such as clown horror and the slasher film to indicate the ways in which Joker resembles these films and enters into dialogues with them. The intersection of Joker and horror films is an important part of the atmospheric texture of Joker, which challenges the recent wave of 1980s nostalgia in American culture.
“Clowns Can Get Away with Murder”
Authors: Booker M. Keith
Published: January 2024

Chapter 7 further establishes the significance of the setting of Joker in the fall of 1981 by noting that this year is directly in the midst of a historical period in which serial killers first became prominent in the public consciousness of Americans, both because there was an unprecedented number of serial killings during this period and because these killings received an unprecedented amount of attention in the popular media. Joker clearly depicts Arthur Fleck as a serial killer, or at least as a would-be serial killer, leaving open the possibility that his killings occur only in his fevered imagination. Moreover, some characteristics of Fleck as a serial killer appear to have been directly influenced by the careers of real-world serial killers, especially John Wayne Gacy, aka the “Killer Clown.”
“They can bring, with less risk of detection, a greater number”
Authors: Collins Jane-Marie
Published: January 2024

Part II examines children in the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and enslaved labour and childhood manumission in Brazil. Chapter 3 commences with an assessment of the historiography of African children in the trade as a basis for understanding the statistical and social significance of enslaved child labour and freed children, especially in the major port cities of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia. In this context, Chapter 3 presents an analysis of discursive components of nineteenth-century British abolitionism and child labour reform during the post-1807 era of ‘second slavery’ generally and the illegal phase of the transatlantic trade to Brazil of 1830-1851 specifically. This was a phase of increasing British diplomatic pressure to end the trade to Brazil, and one when the two parallel humanitarian causes of child labour and slavery preoccupied the British establishment more generally. The ensuing debates drew out the limitations of British abolitionism as a humanitarian cause, and Britain’s duplicitous role in abolitionism as an economic one. Critically, the shortcomings of both the British Factory Acts and British abolitionism historicise nineteenth-century conceptions of child labour in ways that are instructive to understanding the contested terms of childhood manumission as emancipatory narratives in Brazil.
‘By the Nature of Their Calling'
Authors: Kirkby Diane , Monk Lee-Ann , Ostapenko Dmytro
Published: January 2024

This chapter is an introduction that elaborates the key themes of the book. It explores internationalism, regional and racial differences, and militancy as key shaping factors in maritime unionists’ strategic actions. It engages with the existing literature on these areas, and fills in the background history that led to the formulation of a nationalist White Australia policy at the turn of the twentieth century. It identifies several prominent maritime leaders who subsequently became prominent as politicians in their home countries. The chapter explains why these themes are historically significant.
‘The Commonwealth and the Lascars'
Authors: Kirkby Diane , Monk Lee-Ann , Ostapenko Dmytro
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the theme of racism as it uncovers a previously unexplored story of Indian seafarers sailing on the Australian coast in the first decades of the new century. When an Indian crew walked off a ship in the port of Brisbane rather than unload the cargo, they demonstrated solidarity with the local striking waterside workers and revealed an early unionist activism. Other crews who were unfortunate enough to be shipwrecked in Australian waters ran up against the zeal of authorities enforcing the White Australia policy of immigration exclusion. The chapter demonstrates the lived experience of Indian and Chinese seafarers and illuminates a complexity of positions and experience as this race-based policy was lived by maritime workers
‘Bogeymen of the Pacific'
Authors: Kirkby Diane , Monk Lee-Ann , Ostapenko Dmytro
Published: January 2024

This chapter moves the story to dockworkers internationalism in the postwar period as they faced a world-scale technological transformation in stevedoring. Wharf labourers of Australia and Japan joined with the west coast US longshore union in a trans-Pacific organisation and information-sharing network that seemed to rival the ITF in the region. Personal ties between the leaders - Harry Bridges, Jim Healy and Tomitaro Kaneda - along with the common industrial challenges they faced and their broad ideological affinities helped these unionists to develop strategy, organise conferences and joint industrial actions. Cold war tensions finally brought an end to the conferences as divisions emerged between industrial and political activism and alignments along the Sino-Soviet split.
‘Protect[ing] Workers against Shoddy Foreign Companies'
Authors: Kirkby Diane , Monk Lee-Ann , Ostapenko Dmytro
Published: January 2024

This chapter draws together themes of previous chapters as it explores how maritime unionists navigated the massive changes in shipping, in an increasingly corporatised and globalised capitalist world. The chapter takes the instance of a strike against the contract employment of Japanese seafarers on the Australian coast to illustrate how issues of racism and militancy in defence of Australian jobs was manifested in the 1960s as the White Australia policy was ending. Militancy was also evinced in defence of a national shipping line to give jobs to Australian seafarers. The focus then shifts to the attacks on dockworkers. In 1990 the ITF adopted a Port Workers Charter in response to exploitative changes being implemented against European dockworkers. In Australia militancy over the right to unionise in the face of government attempts to break their power irrevocably, led to a major dispute in 1998, ‘the battle that changed Australia.’ The chapter illustrates continuities in the history of Australia’s maritime unions and how the trajectory of their internationalism came to a head at the end of the twentieth century when the ITF and its affiliates helped them survive another targeted attack.
Freedom
Authors: Jennings William
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines how the people of Rémire held some control over their lives by subverting their enslavement and escaping its restraints, even momentarily. They worked slowly, negotiated with their masters, deserted their jobs, ran an underground economy, operated a clandestine communications network, left the plantation without permission, sheltered runaways and took refuge in their languages and cultures. In the seventeenth century enfranchisement was rare and no one talked of abolition. Rebellion and escape into the forest were the only lasting ways to cast off slavery.
Introduction
Authors: Cooke Roderick
Published: January 2024

The Introduction lays out the scope and methodology of the book, which covers fours authors’ - Émile Zola, Ferdinand Brunetière, Saint-Georges de Bouhélier and Henry Céard - careers as literary critics before addressing their political engagement in the Dreyfus Affair. I propose a method entitled ‘microhistories of ideas’ to analyze them, which combines intense focus on individual authors with longitudinal attention to the unit-ideas that recur and recombine in their writings over time. As a result, it becomes evident how each writer drew on existing literary ideas to formulate a Dreyfusard or anti-Dreyfusard discourse during the Affair. The method’s flexibility should make it adaptable to other writers and historical moments in the future.
The Prehistory of ‘J’Accuse …!’
Authors: Cooke Roderick
Published: January 2024

Chapter 1 treats Zola’s long career as a literary and cultural critic from its early days in the 1860s through to 1897, just before his engagement in the Affair. It concentrates on three polemical ‘battles,’ each separated from the next by around fifteen years, which defined his career and illustrate the origin of the arguments that Zola would redeploy during the Affair itself. These are: the battle of the Salon of 1866, when Zola outraged the Parisian art world with vehement defenses of Manet’s painting; the battle of literature against politics, when he attacked Republican politicians hostile to the success of his novels around 1880; and the battle of the bankruptcy of science in the mid-1890s, when he responded to critics who alleged science’s inability to answer moral questions or provide meaning to modern life. The chapter offers a micro-historical panorama of some of the major questions preoccupying French society between 1860 and 1900, as well as preparing the reader to understand Zola’s pro-Dreyfus engagement.
Beyond ‘J’Accuse …!’
Authors: Cooke Roderick
Published: January 2024

Chapter 2, also devoted to Zola, concentrates on the Dreyfus Affair itself. Where many discussions of his engagement focus entirely or primarily on his best-known text, ‘J’Accuse…!,’ I place that work in the context of Zola’s twelve other publications about the Affair: the complete volume of these writings is entitled La Vérité en marche. As a result, not only do the commonalities between his campaign for Dreyfus’s innocence and the literary and cultural ideas highlighted in chapter 1 become clearer, the full range of arguments and allusions he used in that campaign is allowed to emerge. In particular, where ‘J’Accuse…!’ is deliberately aimed at the army’s General Staff in order to provoke a legal confrontation, Zola’s other writings impeach a broader swathe of French society, from nationalist students to prime ministers to the populist press. By taking Zola’s Dreyfus-era writings as a connected whole, a more complex picture emerges, one which contributes to our revised understanding of the Affair as something more nuanced than a clash between two monolithic visions.
Against Zola, against Individualism
Authors: Cooke Roderick
Published: January 2024

Chapter 3 explores the work of Ferdinand Brunetière (1849-1906), who opposed Zola’s literary and political ideas for more than a quarter century, in the prestigious Revue des Deux Mondes, teaching at the École Normale Supérieure, on a sold-out speaking tour of the United States, and as a member of the Académie Française (defeating Zola to win his election). Brunetière authored perhaps the most-discussed anti-Dreyfusard text, ‘Après le procès,’ published after Zola’s conviction for libel in early 1898. I argue that Brunetière’s opposition to individualism, which is representative of a wider strain in French thought, is the source of his equal opposition to Zola’s novels and to his role as a public intellectual in the Affair. Brunetière’s search for alternatives to Zolian naturalism led him to advocate on behalf of writers such as Balzac and Alphonse Daudet, now considered close literary kin to Zola himself. The chapter explains how Brunetière could draw distinctions between Zola’s own writing and that of other novelists in the realist and naturalist traditions, while also revisiting the thought of one of the most prominent literary critics of his day.
Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, Dreyfusard malgré lui
Authors: Cooke Roderick
Published: January 2024

In Chapter 4, the early career of Saint-Georges de Bouhélier (1876-1947) is discussed in the light of his engagement as a Dreyfusard. Bouhélier, who knew and admired Zola both personally and professionally, founded a poetic movement he called naturisme, now best-remembered for having appealed to future luminaries such as André Gide and Guillaume Apollinaire. In attempting to adapt Zola’s ideas on the novel to found a new poetics, Bouhélier provoked fierce polemics in literary circles, while also articulating militaristic, xenophobic and regionalist claims: he also admitted later in his memoirs to anti-Semitic ideas. Because Bouhélier’s politics should have predisposed him to the anti-Dreyfusard position, only his aesthetics make his active Dreyfusism intelligible. The chapter also reflects on the rise and fall of a literary movement in the era of small journals and tensions within the literary avant garde.
Henry Céard Reads the Dreyfus Affair
Authors: Cooke Roderick
Published: January 2024

Chapter 5 examines the case of Henry Céard (1851-1924). A reluctant novelist and prolific journalist, Céard went from being one of Zola’s closest friends and collaborators, providing innumerable documents that Zola used in creating the Rougon-Macquart novels, to breaking with him both socially and intellectually. He moved to the right politically and disowned Zola’s late fiction, meaning that when the Dreyfus Affair arose, Céard was in a unique position. He used his insider knowledge of Zola’s literary ideas and private life in a lengthy sequence of articles that attempted to undermine the older man’s Dreyfusard campaign. Céard treated the Affair as a text, to which he applied a range of techniques of literary interpretation, from the historical to the rhetorical. His anti-Dreyfusism underlines the profoundly literary nature of many figures’ political engagements in the Affair, while also providing a glimpse of the realignment of the French right through the eyes of a middle-ranking journalist.
Conclusion
Authors: Cooke Roderick
Published: January 2024

The Conclusion describes the post-Dreyfus Affair careers of the four authors covered, discussing Zola’s allegorization of events in his final novel Vérité, Bouhélier’s successful decades-long career as a playwright, and Céard’s final novel Terrains à vendre au bord de la mer. I conclude by taking an updated microhistorical look at one of the central unit-ideas examined in the book, Brunetière’s anti-individualism, in our own time. Through the two very different examples of anti-liberal Catholic thinker Patrick Deneen and antiracist bestselling author Robin DiAngelo, we observe that contemporary figures with radically different ideologies can converge on points such as an opposition to individualism, here identified with the liberal center whose perceived failings both denounce. In the polarized democracies of the early twenty-first century, the Dreyfus Affair continues to be a touchstone. A final demonstration is provided by the 2022 French presidential campaign, in which both Emmanuel Macron and Éric Zemmour returned to the Dreyfus case to burnish their respective centrist and far-right credentials.
The Zombie as Figure of Mental Illness
Authors: Swanson Lucy
Published: January 2024

Chapter 2 discusses a widespread but underexamined zombie trope: the hesitation between the zombie as a “real” living dead person and the zombie as a mentally ill or intellectually disabled individual. This chapter begins by exploring the emergence of the trope of the zombie as a figure of mental illness in iconic occupation-era (1915–1934) and mid-twentieth century travelogues, films, and anthropological writing by writers and directors from the United States and Europe, arguing that in addition to playing on US audiences’ fascination with zombies and Haitian “voodoo,” they also reveal implicit fears about emergent Western psychiatric treatments. If this avatar of the zombie emerged as a way of simultaneously titillating US audiences and “diagnosing” the living dead—explaining this apparent product of Haitian superstition through scientific, rational discourse—Haitian writers of the twentieth century (Alexis, Depestre, and Chenet) reappropriate this avatar, blurring the distinction between the zombie as a product of Vodou and the zombie as a product of mental illness. In doing so, these authors seek to restore the complex historical and cultural backdrop against which the living dead must be understood in the Caribbean.
The Zombie Horde
Authors: Swanson Lucy
Published: January 2024

Chapter 3 examines the zombie horde avatar, an iconic trope that first emerged in contemporary US visual culture in the late 1960s, by focusing on its nearly simultaneous rise in Haitian literature in the 1970s. Why, in contrast to earlier representations in which Haitian zombies typically appear individually or in small groups, did zombie hordes began invading Haitian novels by writers such as Frankétienne and Dany Laferrière only six years after George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead represented voracious living dead masses? While scholars have noted the connection between Duvalier and the zombie’s appearance in Haitian literary fiction, this chapter connects the emergence of the living dead horde to both local and global contexts, showing how Haitian authors’ use of the trope is at once a critique of local socio-political concerns and tied to the era’s global social uprisings and Cold War–era anxieties, which also gave rise to the rabid masses of Night of the Living Dead.
Conclusion
Authors: Swanson Lucy
Published: January 2024

The conclusion examines subsequent references to the zombie in global narratives, beginning with the narratives that emerged from Haiti following the 2010 earthquake in which the zombie was transformed into a symbol of trauma. From it considers representations from writers and filmmakers from outside Haiti, visions that may initially seem to offer more accurate and nuanced representations of the zombie and Vodou, but which upon further exploration simply exemplify the new ways the Global North undermines Haiti’s economic and political sovereignty. Yet works from Guadeloupe and Senegal demonstrate the zombie legend’s continued and renewed use as a critique of similar forms of neocolonialism outside Haiti, ultimately showing that the zombie figure represents not merely the vibrancy of Caribbean culture, but also the ability of writers and artists to push against reductive narratives of the region, imagining “new narratives” and new futures.
Snares of Safety: Guillén de Castro’s La fuerza de la costumbre (1610–1615), The Force of Habit (2019) in Production
Authors: Jeffs Kathleen , Jeffs Kathleen
Published: January 2024

Guillén de Castro’s La fuerza de la costumbre(The Force of Habit) is an unsafe play to translate and stage. Each encounter with the play deepens its seductive appeal, wiggly comic polysemy, and complicity with emotional and physical violence. As each group of theatre artists puts a new lens on the text, the author has re-imagined and re-drafted the translation. The play laughs at our vulnerabilities as gendered beings and champions the performativity of social identity, but it also shows how human beings cruelly weaponize ‘Nature’ as we navigate coming of age. At the same time, the force of love courses transcendently through the play’s veins. As this study demonstrates, The Force of Habit brings to light the conflict between society and the individual, the fire and fight within the human heart, and the snares of parenting and keeping children ‘safe.’
Electra (1910): Daring Memories of Galdós’s Most Polemic Success
Authors: Fernández Esther , Martínez-Carazo Cristina , Fernández Esther , Martínez-Carazo Cristina
Published: January 2024

The purpose of this study is to contextualize the controversial play, Electra(1910) by Benito Pérez Galdós, at the moment of its premiere, explaining its success based on the topicality of its main theme, both because of the alliance between the upper-classes and the church, and because of its association with the “Ubao case,” and, finally, justifying its consignment to oblivion on the basis of Spain’s willingness to distance itself from the past in order to enter into modernity. A review of the historical context, the text, and its reception aids this study in understanding how Electra dialogued with the times in which it premiered and Spain’s past, as well as the speed with which it was eclipsed despite its spectacular initial success. Memory operates as the driving force in this work. On one hand, Galdós evokes Greco-Latin mythology by proposing a personal interpretation of the Electra myth. On the other hand, he brings to the present the burden of radical Catholicism, which, since the fifteenth century, conditioned the construction of Spain as a nation and the definition of its identity.
The “Pleasure” of Wife-Murder Drama: The Aesthetics of Gender-Based Violence in Palabras encadenadas
Authors: Pérez Villanueva Sonia , Pérez Villanueva Sonia
Published: January 2024

This chapter studies Palabras encadenadasas an artistic work that follows a cultural archetype of portraying violence against women in a perversely beautiful and erotic manner. Palabras encadenadas, the play, will be compared to wife-murder comediasof early modern Spain such as Calderón de la Barca’s El médico de su honrato explore whether it exists in a literary, historical, and cultural framework that maintains an aesthetics of violence against women, and celebrates the beautiful – or grotesque – spectacle of female suffering in Spain. This chapter also examines Palabras encadenadas, the film adaptation, and focuses on the importance of space, its relationship to violence and the consequent aesthetics of suffering. This study tries to show that depictions of women’s suffering might relate to cultural traditions, and that violence against women has been trivialized, misrepresented, and accepted as sensual, beautiful, and desirable.
Theatricality in a “sacred drama, not to be represented”: The Spanish 1700s’ Oratorio
Authors: Sanz Hermida Rosa , Sanz Hermida Rosa
Published: January 2024

This chapter delves into the Spanish oratoriums of the 1700’s. The production of sacred dramas during that time stems from the replacement of the “autos sacramentales”, a form that was prohibited at the onset of the Century and that was completely banned decades later, considered as being sacrilegious and irreverent by Enlightment figures. In this sense, oratoriums offered a safe and orthodox practice devoid of any form of theatricality, showing the sobriety and decorum typical of the counter-reformist trend. Despite that, some contemporaneous librettos contain hand-written annotations hinting at theatrical practices, such as typologies and character roles. Beyond this, studying the news extracted from the documentation and scrutinising those librettos, there are some clear theatrical signs, which the author analyses in this study to discover the essence of the theatricality of those pieces.
The Valencian Widow on the “Small Screen”: Negotiating the Russian Lopean Canon in the Late Twentieth Century
Authors: Ryjik Veronika , Ryjik Veronika
Published: January 2024

The television ballet Valensianskaya vdova (The Valencian Widow)was first broadcasted on Soviet state television on 4 November 1986. This was almost half a century after the successful premiere of Lope de Vega’s comedy La viuda valenciana at the Leningrad Comedy Theatre. During the five decades between the first Russian performance of this play in 1939 and the release of the ballet version, Lope’s comedies gained popularity. After a series of successful performances of El perro del hortelano and La viuda valenciana in 1930s Moscow and Leningrad, there was an eruption of cape-and-sword comedies on the Russian stage in the 1940s and 1950s. This caused a consolidation of a Russian Lopean canon, which entailed both its own list of popular plays, and its own model for staging these plays. In the last quarter of the twentieth century this canon often predetermined and sometimes complicated the work of theatre directors interested in staging Spanish comedias. By taking the ballet version of La viuda valenciana as an example, this chapter elucidates the processes by which Soviet artists of the 1980s entered into dialogue with the pre-existing performance tradition and attempted to set new directions in the evolution of the Russian Lopean canon.
Introduction
Authors: Kelly Paul V.
Published: January 2024

This chapter sets out the wider context of the book. The questions being posed, and why answering these questions is important, are explained. Of particular interest is the nature of the markets within the Roman economy. Was it driven by reciprocity or redistribution, or by the profit motive, within an exchange-value framework where individuals made rational decisions to maximise their financial outcomes? It also examines the conclusions that can be reached on the quantification of the Roman economy and the impact of that economic system on wider society. The introduction stresses that the book is concerned with behaviours rather than institutions, with decisions made by ordinary people rather than the elite and the anonymous state. It also stresses that the findings are based on statistical analysis married with textual evidence to ensure that the conclusions reached are valid. Finally in this chapter, the methods used to gather and analyse the papyrological data are briefly outlined.
Usury or Solidarity?
Authors: Kelly Paul V.
Published: January 2024

This chapter draws conclusions as to the structure of the credit market. Were lenders seeking to maximise profit or lending within a societal framework that was based on reciprocity and redistribution? Firstly the legal framework within which the credit market operated is examined. The nature of debt is explained and then the typology of the transactions including their nature, duration, size and seasonality is set out. The demographic elements and locations of the participants in the market are analysed to find patterns of activity. Did the old lend to the young? City dwellers to villagers? Landlords to tenants? The headline rates of interest are described and the position of moneylenders and pawnbrokers outlined. The contractual terms and the ways in which lenders sought to secure their loans against default are discussed and diachronic trends are identified. Among the conclusions are that the market was heavily localised with little inter-village or inter-city activity. Whilst a profit motive is evident in the majority of loans, there is a substantial body of loans, where profit is unlikely to have been the main driver for the lender and this will have had a significant impact on the mechanics of the market.
English Archives
Authors: Olney Richard
Published: January 2024

Archives are the records created by governments, organisations, families and individuals as they go about their daily business. England is remarkable for the wealth and variety of its archival heritage, with individual archives having in some cases been accumulated over several centuries. They provide an essential source for many aspects of political history, administrative history, religious history, economic history and social history. It is now commonplace for historians to make use of original documents in their research, and historical features of the archives themselves are becoming more frequently studied. It is perhaps surprising therefore that this is the first book to provide an historical overview of English archives from the Anglo-Saxon period to modern times by studying them from the perspective of the archives themselves rather than that of their custodians or managers. It places them nevertheless in a wider historical context, identifying periods that stimulated records creation as well as periods of loss and destruction such as the Civil War and the Second World War. The book is designed to provide a readable introduction for both archivists and historians, but has also been written in the hope that it may provide a stimulus to further research.
Dissolution and Reformation 1530–1560
Authors: Olney Richard
Published: January 2024

The chapter begins with what it describes as a unique catastrophe in English archival history, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and continues with an assessment of the archival effects of the Reformation. Among the administrative changes of the period of most significance it identifies the development of functions connected with the royal prerogative that led to the creation of the State Papers, kept not at Westminster but at Whitehall. Locally the introduction of parochial registration had equally significant implications for record-keeping.
The Later Seventeenth Century 1660–1700
Authors: Olney Richard
Published: January 2024

The last four decades of the seventeenth century saw some important and influential archival developments. The Treasury became the largest government department, although it did not totally supersede the Exchequer, and its record-keeping methods influenced other bodies such as the Customs and the General Post Office. The collection of State Papers continued to grow in bulk and importance, although the custom whereby Secretaries of State took papers away with them on leaving office also became established. In the area of private records bodies were created whose archives would become of increasing importance in future years – banks, institutions such as the Royal Society and nonconformist bodies. Among personal papers the diary was a notable innovation. The account ends with an account of the archival damage caused by the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Archives in an Age of Reform 1830–1900
Authors: Olney Richard
Published: January 2024

Archives of all kinds grew in number and size during the period 1830 – 1900, assisted by the spread of literacy, the expansion of the railway network and the availability of cheaper paper. Older bodies such as colleges, charities and the Church of England had to change their record-keeping methods, while new bureaucracies such as that of the New Poor Law came into existence. In local government the boroughs were reformed in 1835 and the counties in 1888. Voluntary organisations with both national and local archives now included trade unions, political parties and the various Methodist connexions. Of most archival significance, however, was the creation of the Public Record Office, while for political and personal papers the British Museum became the leading national repository.
Introduction
Authors: Reed Eleanor
Published: January 2024

This chapter sets out the parameters of the book and establishes its aims: firstly, to showcase an innovative methodology for surveying a domestic magazine, and secondly, to map changes and continuities in the lower-middle-class culture it produces, transforming understandings of lower-middle-class culture more broadly. In establishing these aims, the chapter makes clear the cultural significance of Woman’s Weekly, outlines the literary methodology used to survey the publication, central to which is its intersections with the romance genre, and offers a framework within which lower-middle-class culture will be discussed. This framework is constructed with reference to a range of critics and commentators, most notably Pierre Bourdieu, Thomas Crosland, Rita Felski, George Orwell, and J. B. Priestley, whose collective negativity towards lower middle classness is challenged by positive representations of lower-middle-class lifestyles and identities in Woman’s Weekly.
Introduction: What is bulk shipping?
Authors: Fenton Roy
Published: January 2024

Freight transport by sea can be divided into liner and bulk shipping. The former, now evolved into container shipping, involves an operator providing a fixed, scheduled service between two or more named ports offering to carry parcels of a wide variety of commodities. Bulk shipping usually involves just one type of commodity being carried on a given voyage between two ports. Bulk cargoes typically include grain, metallic ores, coal, stone, fertilisers, forest products, scrap metal and foodstuffs, all usually loaded to the capacity of the ship. In contrast to a ship in a liner trade, a bulk carrier will make up to half its voyages without a cargo, hence needing a facility to carry water ballast to ensure stability in light condition. The requirements of the two different trades and the difference in the quantities and characteristics of cargoes carried has a marked impact on the design of ships for liner and bulk trades, and this is considered in depth. Tankers are also bulk carriers, but their design has developed along different lines from that of the dry bulk carrier, and is not considered in this volume.
Robert Graves and Modern Poetry
Authors: Corcoran Neil
Published: January 2024

Robert Graves’s work is examined in ways that contest his own theoretical view of poetic composition as inevitably engaged with the feminine influence of the ‘white goddess’. Several key poems are read closely to indicate how poems of human relationship, war, class interest and love in fact fly the nets of the theory to become permanently significant, not limited to outmoded social and sexual attitudes. Graves’s metric is also given close attention. The influence of his work on other poets, notably Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, is demonstrated. It’s difficult to characterise adequately the tenor of Graves’s modernity, but this chapter attempts to do so. Connections between the poems and certain works of art are also proposed. Poems given detailed attention include ‘Love Without Hope’ and ‘The Straw’.
Seamus Heaney and the Classics
Authors: Corcoran Neil
Published: January 2024

This chapter defines two of the phases of Heaney’s relationship with classical literature, which is a major feature of his work as it advances. These phases are identified with Antaeus, brought into both oppositional and complementary relationship with Hercules at various stages of the Heaney oeuvre, and with Anchises, who names Heaney’s relationship with Virgil, in several of its key elements. Both personal and political relevance and implication are read in these figurations, notably in the context of Northern Irish interactions but also in that of Heaney’s attitude to Irish Catholicism. Other poets supply parallel contexts, notably David Jones and Ted Hughes.
Our Infant Sight
Authors: Corcoran Neil
Published: January 2024

This chapter offers an extended close consideration of Elizabeth Bishop’s collage Anjinhos, which is preoccupied with infant mortality in Brazil, as a way of suggesting various things about Bishop’s poetic as well as plastic art. The chapter then examines various passages of Bishop’s prose, some of it drawn from her letters, as also complementary to some of her finest poems. An extended close reading is offered of one of the greatest, ‘Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’ which, I claim, has been very little understood. Matters of interest identified and addressed in the chapter include: Bishop’s relationship with and divergence from the American artist Joseph Cornell; her modes of obliquely sympathetic recognition; her correspondence with Robert Lowell; her attitude to a European colonial inheritance in South America; the great, complex subtlety of her poetic forms.
Introduction
Authors: Oloff Kerstin
Published: January 2024

This chapter points out that zombies figure rifts in socio-ecological metabolisms. Secondly, that zombies are animated by processes through which capitalism reproduces itself as a historically specific, and environmentally destructive, way of organising natures; they thus figure changing sets of relations. Thirdly, that zombies render visible capitalism’s “absolute general law of environmental degradation.” (Foster 1992: 77)
The Horror of Theology
Authors: Wiggins Steve A.
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the theology of the May Day laid out in The Wicker Man. To do so it draws on the Beltane and sexuality themes of the previous chapter in order to make them a whole. The movie is based on a sophisticated understanding of religious thinking.
I Walked with a Zombie
Authors: Dawson Clive
Published: January 2024

A scene-by-scene analysis of the finished film, which also references a broad range of historical and academic studies of the audio-visual text. The examination covers every aspect of the production, including the script, the casting and performances, the direction and other technical aspects, and the editing and post-production. Particular emphasis is given to earlier scripted versions of the filmed scenes, and scenes that were truncated or deleted entirely during the editing process. Simultaneously, historical newspaper and journal articles are cited to contextualise the backdrop to the production whilst academic deconstruction and analyses of the visual text are used to augment the exploration of the film’s multiple layers of meaning.
Legacy
Authors: Dawson Clive
Published: January 2024

The success of I Walked with a Zombie cemented Lewton’s reputation with the RKO front office and allowed him the continued freedom to shape his future films as he saw fit, each of which pushed the boundaries of the genre in some way. However, his first two films also exerted an influence on the horror genre and the film industry more broadly, and various studios began emulating Lewton’s oeuvre. Similarly, Lewton’s films were seen as key works that also influenced the developed of the iconic film noir style during the 1940s, and they continued to act as a model for genre films throughout subsequent decades.
Sa‘udi Arabia Reborn
Authors: Kéchichian Joseph A.
Published: January 2024

Discusses the founder’s domestic and foreign policy views before and after 1927, especially as they related to the Ottoman Empire and its occupation of Arab lands. Within that broad purpose, careful assessments of individuals who became the “King’s Men” are provided, each one of whom played significant roles in the early history of the country. Yassin stood out at Court, even if ‘Abdul ‘Aziz was seldom shy to seek counsel from as many as possible, persuaded that “counsel is the mirror of the intellect” and that a leader who wished to evaluate someone’s capacity ought to “ask for their advice.” The monarch wished to benefit from each and every one of his advisors’ views, all pf whom served the monarch, though Yassin stood out. How the founder’s vision evolved and what roles Yassin played to help implement his foresight are addressed in some detail here. In his capacity as deputy foreign minister, Yassin assisted in drawing the broad outlines of a foreign policy that endured nearly a century, and while other advisors contributed to that process there was little doubt that Shaykh Yusuf’s methodical approaches allowed him to retain his senior post for so long. An effort is also made to identify linkages between Shaykh Yusuf and other advisors.
Rivalries and Alliances
Authors: Kéchichian Joseph A.
Published: January 2024

This chapter evaluates the transformations that actually made Yassin a powerful counselor. To better illustrate this constatation, four critical events are examined, all of which required the monarch to reach difficult decisions, including (1) the Anglo-American rivalries on and for the Arabian Peninsula (which earned Yassin various epithets that could best be summarized as a “thorn on the sides of diplomats who dealt with him,” even if everyone respected him), (2) negotiations with ARAMCO representatives and American officials over oil concessions, (3) the epochal meeting between ‘Abdul ‘Aziz bin ‘Abdul Rahman Al Sa‘ud and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American President who marked his era, and (4) the development of a unique security relationship with the United States, which developed after the building of the Dhahran airfield. As various dilemmas emerged in the course of these preoccupations, two additional questions—the border disputes over the Buraymi Oasis as well as the Question of Palestine—are examined from the Sa‘udi perspective. What roles Yusuf Yassin played in these events were crucial to our understanding of contemporary Sa‘udi affairs. The chapter closes with an assessment of Yassin as he mediated between the monarch’s sons, especially Sa‘ud and Faysal, after the founder entrusted the advisor with the mission to keep family harmony.
Thief and the Criminal
Authors: Swan Deryck
Published: January 2024

Chapter 4 looks at Mann’s first major cinema release and assesses its presentation of the criminal on the outside. The chapter identifies certain traits of James Caan’s high-end jewel thief Frank – some of which would go on to characterise Mann’s future criminals – and situates them within the film’s larger presentation of Chicago as a hermetically sealed machine, in which the characters obsess about work, labour yields and the tension between Marxist ideology and Capitalism.
Miami Vice and Hi-Def Day 1
Authors: Swan Deryck
Published: January 2024

Chapter 12 uses Mann’s embrace of hi-def digital technology to offer the reader a counterpoint to the post-noir nocturnal landscape of Collateral’s Los Angeles and assess its use in representing the bright, painterly world of Miami Vice’s narco-trafficking. Here the book also addresses Vice’s narrative radicalism – something that began with Ali – and, alongside the lack of concessions it offers the viewer, offers it up as one of the main reasons why the film was largely misunderstood upon its initial release in 2006 by sections of the target audience.
Blackhat and Fragmentation Cinema
Authors: Swan Deryck
Published: January 2024

The final film of the book is presented in this chapter as Mann’s most experimental yet and the one that warrants the most repeat viewings. Blackhat, released in 2015, is assessed within the confines of the book as the culmination of Mann’s narrative and visual radicalism that was inaugurated during those opening shots of Ali and an attempt is made to defend it along those lines. Using NYT writer Manohla Dargis’ helpful key word “oscillation” from her review of the film, this chapter charts the ever-shifting lines of Blackhat as they move the viewer between action and introspection, between machines and bodies and between the digital and the physical realms.
Introduction
Authors: Parker Richard
Published: January 2024

The introduction provides an overview of Ezra Pound’s biographical situation through the troubled years during which the poems studied in this volume were written. It points up some of the contradictions that the tense political situation in which Pound himself inscribed into the poetry, as well as demonstrating the breadth of material and approaches that the poetry he produced during the approximate decade studied here produced.
Canto 45
Authors: Nicholls Peter
Published: January 2024

The chapter provides historical context for Canto 45, showing that while Pound’s reference to “usura” may seem anachronistic it has connections with the so-called “New Economics” of the 1930s and particularly with Jeffrey Mark’s The Modern Idolatry (1934). The chapter looks at “usury” as the “thief of time” and compares Pound’s handling of this theme with current analyses of indebtedness as a structural feature of capitalist modernity. The use of archaism in this Canto is contrasted with the reprise of the topic in Canto 51 where the more deliberately “modern” idiom registers the plight of actors without agency in the frozen “stage set” of contemporary life.
Canto 47
Authors: Bacigalupo Massimo
Published: January 2024

Canto 47 is a celebration of human sexuality in a timeless Mediterranean setting where ancient rites are still celebrated to insure fertility. Published in 1937, it reflects current demographic and economic policies in Fascist Italy, that was waging “The Battle of Grain” (to gain domestic independence from wheat imports), and provided incentives for large families. Canto 47 is most memorable for its archaic (Biblical) language describing the local customs in Rapallo of placing floating lights in the water in July and decorating church altars with grass shoots at Easter – a repetition, Pound suggests by quoting several Greek sources, of the rites of Adonis. It also seeks to recreate through metaphor the subjective feeling of the male during intercourse: “The light has entered the cave. Io! Io!.” In Pound’s view, we have here the key to a better life that will allow us to escape the decadence of the capitalist waste land. Canto 47, one of Pound’s most sonorous and assured, powerfully sustains this illusion.
Canto 57
Authors: Gilonis Harry
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides a close reading of Canto 57 from Ezra Pound’s China Cantos. It deals with Confucius, Pound’s engagement with China and offers an entry point to the China Cantos as a whole.
Canto 60
Authors: Nagahata Akitoshi
Published: January 2024

Canto 60, one of the Chinese History Cantos, focuses on Kangxi, the fourth emperor of Qing Dynasty, and the Jesuit missionaries who were engaged in the propagation of Christianity in China during his reign. Pound juxtaposes fragments of historical episodes about Kangxi extracted from de Mailla’s Histoire générale de la Chine, and in the second half of the canto, highlights the confrontation of Christianity and Europe with Confucianism and China, using episodes including a brigadier general’s submission of a memorial that warned of Europeans’ invasion into China. While this confrontation is presented in a seemingly impersonal and objective style, in an essay written about the same time, Pound expresses his admiration for Confucianism and denunciation of Christianity with an ideological fervor. The essay serves as a reminder that beneath Pound’s illustration of Kangxi and the Chinese reaction to the propagation of Christianity in Canto 60 lies his admiration for Confucianism and China connected to his support for Fascism.