bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Courting Controversy: Hype, Scandal and Fukasaku Kinji’S Battle Royale
Authors: Martin Daniel
Published: January 2019

This chapter focuses on the last of Tartan Film’s theatrical releases before the official adoption of the Asia Extreme brand: the scandalous Japanese action film Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000). From initial censorship concerns about the film in its native Japan, Tartan’s publicity department capitalised on Orientalist fears of the East to take advantage of the film’s ‘dangerous’ status and its potential to create outrage. Analysis traces the film’s controversy from the hysterical reaction to the film’s release in Japan, where it was associated with youth violence and triggered a parliamentary debate, to Tartan’s aggressive marketing campaign in the UK, which formed a symbiotic relationship with the film’s sensationalist status in both journalistic and critical press articles. Various factors affecting the film’s British reception will be examined, including the troubling timing of the film’s release, just three days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America. This chapter includes a comprehensive timeline of multimedia releases, demonstrating the cultural impact and earning potential of the Battle Royale franchise in Japan and the UK.
Brand Wagon: The Courtship of Multiplex Audiences and the 2003 Asia Extreme Roadshow
Authors: Martin Daniel
Published: January 2019

This chapter charts a key moment in the consolidation of the Asia Extreme label: the 2003 touring film festival and aggressive marketing campaign to court a wider audience by screening seven films exclusively in multiplex cinemas in the UK. This chapter considers Tartan’s marketing tactics, the critical reception of these films, as well as Tartan’s multiple strategies to consolidate a strong brand identity, which included shrewdly appropriating the pre-Asia Extreme fan culture through its assimilation of the Japanese cult auteur Shinya Tsukamoto. Finally, a fan’s response to the festival is examined, as the overarching analysis begins to address the increasing anxieties of fans and experts at the commodification and mainstreaming of ‘their’ niche passion. The revitalization of the Hong Kong action film is discussed, in relation to Asia Extreme’s appropriation of the genre and the legacy of John Woo’s ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ action films, as well as the controversial reception of A Snake of June (2002).
From the Margins to the Mainstream: Asia Extreme in 2004
Authors: Martin Daniel
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines cult Asian cinema in the UK at the very peak of its critical acclaim and commercial success, and the drastically altered context for Asian film reception will be discussed. This chapter argues that the proliferation and high visibility of a wider range of Asian cinema than critics had ever experienced before has allowed them to finally construct their own canons of quality within national Asian cinema industries and genres. The frames of reference used by British critics to assess meaning and value have changed dramatically. At this point, too, Tartan’s brand had been transformed, achieving mainstream visibility, yet finding itself in danger of expanding to the point of losing authenticity and fracturing into meaninglessness. Nonetheless, 2004 was the peak year for Tartan, and a wide range of their releases and promotional (and self-congratulatory) activities are examined: the acclaimed release of bold new Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs (2002); the unprecedented success of Oldboy (2003), hot off its award from the Cannes International Film Festival; the critical debate inspired by the uncategorisable cult hit Save the Green Planet! (2003); and finally the scandalous (non-)release of Battle Royale II (2003).
Introduction
Authors: Sauer Eberhard W.
Published: January 2019

The Sasanian Empire (third-seventh centuries) was one of the largest empires of antiquity, stretching from Mesopotamia to modern Pakistan and from Central Asia to the Arabian Peninsula. This mega-empire withstood powerful opponents in the steppe and expanded further in Late Antiquity, whilst the Roman world shrunk in size. Recent research has revealed the reasons for this success, notably population growth in some territories, economic prosperity and urban development, made possible through investment in agriculture and military infrastructure on a scale unparalleled in the late antique world. This volume explores the empire’s relations with its neighbours and key phenomena which contributed to its wealth and power, from the empire’s armed forces to agriculture, trade and treatment of minorities. The latest discoveries, notably major urban foundations, fortifications and irrigations systems, feature prominently. An empire whose military might and urban culture rivalled Rome and foreshadowed the caliphate will be of interest to scholars of the Roman and Islamic world.
The Northern and Western Borderlands of the Sasanian Empire: Contextualising the Roman/Byzantine and Sasanian Frontier
Authors: Lawrence Dan , Wilkinson Tony J.
Published: January 2019

This chapter investigates the archaeological landscapes of the frontiers of the Sasanian Empire. Drawing on evidence from current and archived archaeological surveys, in combination with high-resolution remote sensing datasets such as CORONA spy photography, we compare the organisation of settlements and defensive structures of the Sasanian frontier zones in response to a variety of external pressures. These varied from the Roman Empire in the west to less centralised entities, including nomadic groups, in the south-west and north-east. Following a general discussion of the multiple manifestations of Sasanian frontiers drawn from southern Mesopotamia (Iraq), northern Syria and north-eastern Iran, the main focus of the chapter is on the complex frontier landscape of the southern Caucasus, particularly the area of modern Azerbaijan, Georgia and Daghestan. We discuss the role of linear barriers, including the Gorgan Wall in north-eastern Iran and the Ghilghilchay and Derbent Walls in the Caucasus, irrigation systems, and alignments of fortifications and settlements in shaping their local landscapes. By placing the archaeological remains of the Sasanian Empire in a wider context we are able to examine the relationships between military installations, settlement patterns, infrastructure and geographical features such as mountain ranges and rivers. Comparing the different case studies allows us to conclude with some general statements on the nature of Sasanian power in the frontier territories of the empire.
Connectivity on a Sasanian frontier: Route Systems in the Gorgan Plain of North-East Iran
Authors: Hopper Kristen
Published: January 2019

Using examples from several different regions of the Sasanian Empire, this chapter will look at the archaeological evidence for connectivity in frontier zones. Though a number of geographically diverse cases will be considered, I will focus on the evidence for local, regional and interregional networks in the Gorgan Plain of northeast Iran. We currently know very little about Sasanian period routes through this landscape. Itineraries exist in antique through Islamic period textual sources, but the routes that they describe are often difficult to identify in the archaeological record. European travellers of the nineteenth century provide more detailed accounts, but the routes they describe reflect the political and economic landscape of a much later period. However, this information, combined with archaeological evidence for both earlier and later period routes, can be compared to archaeological settlement data for the Sasanian period to suggest potential pathways of movement. This approach will highlight how cultural, political and economic networks in this region (including both routes and boundaries) have changed through time.
The Arabian Frontier: A Keystone of the Sasanian Empire
Authors: Morley Craig
Published: January 2019

From a Roman perspective the Arabian Peninsula was frequently relegated to a peripheral position on the edge of the empire. In contrast, in different stages of Sasanian history the Arabian frontier acted as a keystone of their empire. Sasanian control, both direct and indirect, of the Arabian Peninsula strengthened its economic prosperity and military security. It was for these reasons that the empire’s activities on their southern frontier in Arabia peaked during three distinct periods: during the early Sasanian period, principally in the reigns of Ardashir I and Shapur I; during the reign of Shapur II; and, perhaps most importantly, during the sixth century in renewed hostilities with the Roman Empire.
The Gothic Camera: Javier Aguirresarobe at Home and in Hollywood
Authors: Davies Ann
Published: January 2019

This chapter looks at the contemporary use of a Gothic style of landscape camera deriving from the work of renowned Spanish cameraman Javier Aguirresarobe, to argue for a form of transnational Spanish Gothic that can be traced through the interaction of light and landscape. Although Aguirresarobe has not confined himself to horror and Gothic filmmaking there is a notable trend in some of his work for colder landscapes with watery light. The chapter considers the primary two examples of Aguirresarobe’s explicitly Gothic landscapes (La madre muerta/The Dead Mother, The Others) before going on to discuss his more recent work in the USA and specifically his work on New Moon, one of the installments in the Twilight film saga. Aguirresarobe’s work provides a reverse transatlantic crossing which undercuts the centrality of the Anglo-American to the Gothic mode. His schizophrenic approach to lighting, however, also undercuts our uncertainty as to where we are and what we see
Dangerously Modern: Shakespeare, Voice, and the “New Psychology” in John Barrymore’s “Unstable” Characters
Authors: Hammond Michael
Published: January 2019

John Barrymore’s 1922 Hamlet introduced Freudian interpretation as a means of character development into American acting. It also provided Barrymore with a screen star persona that based his acting virtuosity on portraying unstable characters. This chapter explores the way his star persona was articulated through the production and reception of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) and then in The Mad Genius (1931) a decade later.
A Star is Dead: Barrymore’s Anti-Christian Metaperformance
Authors: Stevens Kyle
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores John Barrymore’s performance in three of George Cukor’s films: A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933) and Romeo and Juliet (1936). This chapter examines the verbal aspects of John Barrymore’s performances, and their importance to his persona, a persona that was especially prominent during Hollywood's transition from silent to sound regimes.
“I Never Thought I Should Sink So Low as to Become an Actor”: John Barrymore in Twentieth Century
Authors: Rothman William
Published: January 2019

In Twentieth Century (1934), John Barrymore as Oscar Jaffe gives a performance so stupendous in its theatricality and wit that it ranks as one of the most brilliant – and most profound – in the history of cinema. This chapter argues that in its utterly ironic yet utterly honest way, Barrymore’s performance (to phrase Oscar himself) sums up everything this great actor knew about talent, about the theater, and about genius.
James Dunbar and the Enlightenment Debate on Language
Authors: Berry Christopher J.
Published: January 2019

Dunbar’s contribution to the widespread Enlightenment debate on the origin and development of language is explored. His account is compared to those offered by his contemporaries and his own four-fold development of human faculties outlined.
Hume on Rationality in History and Social Life
Authors: Berry Christopher J.
Published: January 2019

After elaboration of the content and structure of Hume’s notion of human nature, his interpretation of superstition is examined. Hume’s ‘science of human nature’ permits him to label certain practices as depraved and to a discount the societal specificity of these practices. This means that Hume has, what is here called, a substantive theory of human nature with a formal theory of society which is the reverse of much modern (neo-Wittgensteinian) analysis.
Adam Smith’s ‘Science of Human Nature’
Authors: Berry Christopher J.
Published: January 2019

There is no programmatic statement in Smith about the nature of human nature only, rather, a profuse scattering of remarks. However, it is clear that he shared the aspirations of the 'Enlightenment project', within which a self-awareness of a ‘conception of man’ was focal. There was a convergence on the idea that human nature is constant and uniform in its operating principles. By virtue of this constancy human nature was predictable so that once it was scientifically understood then, as Hume argued, a new foundation was possible for, inter alia, morals, criticism, politics and natural religion. While Smith is more circumspect he shares Hume’s ambitions for the “science of man”, which Smith calls the “science of human nature” and which he believes was, even in the seventeenth century, in its “infancy.” What Smith implies about this ‘science’ is explicated.
Contemporary Conversations
Authors: de Gay Jane
Published: January 2019

This chapter demonstrates that Woolf was highly informed about the ways in which Christianity continued to be an important cultural and political influence throughout her lifetime. Acknowledging that Christianity took many different forms – including progressive as well as conservative trends – the chapter shows that Woolf’s reaction varied accordingly. Woolf’s life and career is considered in four stages: the years of her adult life before the First World War; the War years; the 1920s; and the 1930s. In each section, the chapter sets out ways in which the public face of Christianity shifted, and how Woolf reacted to it (for example in Three Guineas), along with exploring ways in which Woolf responded to the faith and witness of people she knew. As the chapter demonstrates, Woolf’s close female friends – Violet Dickinson, Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth – all played a role in shaping her spirituality and her views on religion. The chapter also shows that Woolf was aware of contemporary debates about the existence and nature of God, seen not least in her famous statement in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ that ‘certainly and emphatically there is no God’.
The Purple Triangle and Blue Madonnas: The Virgin Mary
Authors: de Gay Jane
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines Woolf’s appreciation of the complex role played by the Virgin Mary in Western cultures, particularly as she has been represented in art from the Renaissance to the modernist era. The chapter shows that Woolf was deeply critical of the way in which society has used the Virgin Mary as an impossible role-model for women, but also interested in ways in which Mary can be regarded as an empowering figure. The chapter focuses particularly on Woolf’s allusions to the figure of the Madonna in Renaissance religious art in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, and also considers her encounters with ritual and art on her visits to Italy.
How Should One Read the Bible?
Authors: de Gay Jane
Published: January 2019

This chapter reveals the extent of Virginia Woolf’s knowledge and interest in the Bible, both as text and as artefact, starting with an examination of the collection of Bibles in the Library of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, now housed in Washington State University, Pullman. It situates Woolf’s interests within competing scholarly understandings of the role and significance of the Bible that were in circulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Making close readings of Woolf’s use of biblical allusion, the chapter demonstrates that Woolf’s responses to the Bible were both complex and varied. These readings include her use of rhetoric in her essays, ‘Modern Fiction’ in particular, and her engagement with the Passion narrative in her novels as a way of exploring questions about salvation.
‘The Raw Material of History’: John Sommerfield’s May Day
Authors: Hubble Nick
Published: January 2019

Chapter 4 is an extended close reading of John Sommerfield’s experimental proletarian novel May Day, which can be seen as an attempt to both prove the utility of modernist techniques – drawing in particular on the work of Virginia Woolf – for communist ends as well as demonstrating what a communist perspective offers modernist techniques. Sommerfield employs Woolf’s techniques to focus on the seemingly-random connections thrown up by capitalist social relations surrounding the production process and thus sets out an opposition between the concrete possibilities offered by modern intersubjective networks and the barriers set to those by the capitalist framework within which everyone is imprisoned (the upper-class as much as the working-class characters). A significant aspect of his approach lies in his focus on working-class women ranging from married mother, Martine Seton, to the Work’s manager’s mistress, Jenny Hardy, and the Communist activist, Ivy Cutford. Sommerfield is shown to be fundamentally concerned with how to replicate the successful incorporation of female unconsciousness and sexuality by individualist modernist novels into a collectivist novel concerned with society as a whole.
‘A Common Platform’: Male Contributors and Cross-Gender Collaboration
Authors: Clay Catherine
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines another key element in Time and Tide’s rebranding as a more general-audience weekly review: the increase of male writers within its contributor base. Early accounts of the periodical suggest that this shift in the early 1930s represents a weakening of Time and Tide’s feminism. However, this chapter argues that the signatures of male contributors including George Bernard Shaw, St John Ervine and Wyndham Lewis were strategically deployed to advertise the paper beyond its core readership; it also considers the uses of anonymity for women who continued to occupy key editorial and staff positions. Discussing the contributions of Time and Tide’s youngest director, Winifred Holtby, as well as parodies by E. Delafield and short stories by Naomi Mitchison, the chapter explores the strategies by which Time and Tide sustained its commitment to female culture and through cross-gender collaboration created a ‘common platform’ for both thinking women and men.
Engaging Dialogue
Authors: O'Meara Jennifer
Published: January 2019

This book examines the centrality of dialogue to American independent cinema, arguing that it is impossible to separate small budgets from the old adage that ‘talk is cheap’. Focusing on the 1980s until the present, particularly on films by writer-directors like Jim Jarmusch, Noah Baumbach and Richard Linklater, the book demonstrates dialogue’s ability to engage audiences and bind together the narrative, aesthetic and performative elements of selected cinema. When compared to the dialogue norms of more mainstream cinema, the verbal styles of these independent writer-directors are found to be marked by alternations between various extremes, particularly those of naturalism and hyper-stylization, and between the poles of efficiency and excess. More broadly, these writer-directors are used as case studies that allow for an understanding of how dialogue functions in verbally experimental cinema, which, this book contends, is more often found in ‘independent’ or ‘art’ cinema. In questioning the association of dialogue-centred films with the ‘literary’ and the ‘un-cinematic’, the book highlights how speech in independent cinema can instead hinge on what is termed ‘cinematic verbalism’: when dialogue is designed and executed in complex, medium-specific ways. More broadly, the book provides a framework for analysing dialogue design and execution that can be readily applied to other films and filmmakers. It also highlights how speech can be central to cinema without overshadowing its medium-specific components. In so doing, the book develops new connections between film dialogue, reception studies, independent cinema and auteur studies.
Verbal-Visual Style and Words Visualised
Authors: O'Meara Jennifer
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the relationship between dialogue and what is simultaneously shown on screen, in order to develop an understanding of verbal-visual style in contemporary indie cinema. In considering what makes certain combinations of words and images jarring or pleasurable for audiences, the chapter includes analysis of: textual speech; voice-over as a double-layered structure; and textual signposts. The chapter also examines words that are visualised, as with intertitles and text that is embedded in the mise-en-scene. It finds that the six writer-directors considered ‘cinematic verbalists’ can substitute verbal interest for visual interest, or for visual interest that depends on the verbal for its impact. The chapter charts the relationships between visual and verbal synchronicity, as well as between observational styles of viewing and audiences being positioned as eavesdroppers: when they must piece together verbal information.
Gendered Verbal Dynamics: Sensitive Men and Explicit Women
Authors: O'Meara Jennifer
Published: January 2019

This chapter focuses on gendered verbal dynamics in selected American independent cinema. Male and female characters are found to resist internalised ideals of gendered speech, both in relation to cinema and society more generally. Their dialogue, including in voice-overs, offers more nuanced representations of what type of speech is ‘appropriate’ for males or females, revealing a refusal to divide characters’ verbal styles on the basis of gendered stereotypes. The language of male characters is found to advance a complex representation of vulnerable and expressive masculinity. They are allowed to remain silent, to voice their deepest feelings, or to verbally align themselves with homosexuality and alternate forms of masculinity. Through speech that is considered ‘unruly’ or ‘unladylike’, female characters are also found to have a verbal freedom that is at odds with more conservative estimations of female film dialogue. Partly through profane language and an unrepentant discussion of sexuality, women in American independent cinema can break away from the norms for how women tend to speak in more mainstream cinema. Case studies include women’s verbal victories in Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship (2016).
The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual
Authors: Halabi Zeina G.
Published: January 2019

The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual examines the figure of the intellectual as prophet, national icon, and exile in contemporary Arabic literature and film. Staging a comparative dialogue with writers and critics such as Elias Khoury, Edward Said, Jurji Zaidan, and Mahmoud Darwish, Halabi focuses on new articulations of loss, displacement, and memory in works by Rabee Jaber, Elia Suleiman, Rawi Hage, Rashid al-Daif, and Seba al-Herz. She argues that the ambivalence and disillusionment with the role of the intellectual in contemporary representations operate as a productive reclaiming of the 'political' in an allegedly apolitical context. The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual invites us to engage in a practice of criticism that is inherently retrospective and evaluative, putting into question the very foundation of what constitutes the modern Arab intellectual legacy. It suggests a methodology to understand the evolving relations between intellectuals and power; authors and texts and generates a politics of reading that locates the political in the hitherto uncharted contemporary era.
Introduction: In the Beginning was the Word
Authors: Halabi Zeina G.
Published: January 2019

The introduction elaborates on the “contemporary,” as a notion that sets the historical and theoretical framework of the book. It identifies the 1990s as a critical historical juncture of suspended hopes and disenchantment, following which writers began displacing the figure of the intellectual-prophet that had governed Arabic literature since the Nahda. It begins by exploring the canonization of the Palestinian intellectual Mahmoud Darwish in Simon Bitton’s documentary, poetry readings, and interviews that portray him as a nationalist, prophetic, and exilic figure. It embeds the depiction of the Arab intellectual in theoretical frameworks pertaining to temporality, power, and exile on the one hand and recent works in modern Arab thought, on the other.
The Banality of Exile
Authors: Halabi Zeina G.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 3 revisits the archetype of the exilic intellectual. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra had conceived of exile, particularly that of the Palestinian intellectual, as a tragic state of individual displacement that simultaneously works as a catalyst for modernization and change. Jabra’s romanticization of the exilic intellectual, which Said later channelled in his conception of exile and secular criticism, was transgressed by Rawi Hage and Elia Suleiman. This unlikely transnational, cross-generational, and multidisciplinary exchange between Jabra and Said on the one hand and Suleiman and Hage on the other, reveals the ways the contemporary novelist and cineaste turn to metafiction, irony, and play as strategies that ultimately demystify the Arab intellectual in exile.
The Political Remains
Authors: Halabi Zeina G.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 5 shows how the literary unmaking of the intellectual is not an eschewal of the political, but rather a move to redefine and recode the political in ways that are congruent with the contemporary political moment. Specifically, it points to the ways in which the displacement of canonical tropes associated with the archetype of the prophetic Arab intellectual is not a necessary process of destruction and elimination, but rather a means to make visible the complexities and fault lines of the modernist discourse of Arabic literature since the nahḍa. Finally, it briefly probes the ongoing Arab uprisings and ask whether the radical critical and political discourse they have engendered rejected further the archetype of the modernist Arab intellectual or, on the contrary, rearticulated it as an indispensable catalyst for change.
The Worker Class: From Leader to the Margins
Authors: Schultz Corey Kai Nelson
Published: January 2019

Chapter 1 analyzes the representation of the worker figure. This was the class that was created in the Maoist period to develop the nation and serve as the “vanguard” of the Maoist state, but now its members are wretched and are in the process of being replaced by migrant workers (mingong) without the former worker figure’s previous status, skills, or power. It examines the feelings that the figures stimulate in the films, which range from pride to shame, adulation to pity, development to ruin, and progress to decay, and notes how their previous status as “builders” of the nation is juxtaposed with the films’ depictions of the ruin, a motif that is attached specifically to this class. It argues that the film 24 City commemorates the factory and the worker class through its use of “portraits in performance” and “memories in performance,” arguing that, although they commemorate the factory and its members, they produce a structure of feeling of nostalgia that ultimately elegizes this group’s irreversible decline and disappearance in the Reform era and resigns them to the past.
Introduction
Authors: Ober Josiah
Published: January 2019

The introduction to the volume outlines the approaches represented in the following chapters, discusses their importance and identifies running themes and the avenues of research that they open, and sets them into the wider framework of possible forms of fruitful engagement between ancient Greek history and the social sciences. It explores the methodologies employed in recent work, in particular by the author (Josiah Ober), to show that engagement with the social sciences is not just about using quantified data to test explanatory hypotheses. The chapter is also, explicitly, written for two audiences: on the one hand it strives to describe the advantages that thoughtful engagement with the social sciences can bring to the ancient historian; on the other hand, it addresses social scientists and makes the case for the significance of the ancient world (and of the ancient Greek polis in particular) as the source of privileged and (relatively speaking) abundantly documented case studies for testing modern theories.
Patronage in Ancient Sparta
Authors: Mæhle Ingvar B.
Published: January 2019

The ideology of the Spartan homoioi, the “equals”, or rather the “similars” masked vast differences in wealth, prestige and power. In such circumstances, personal patronage thrive, decades of anthropological investigations has shown us. Yet patronage is most commonly associated with Rome, despite the demonstration by several scholars that patron‐client relationships did indeed play a role even in democratic Athens, a society before thought exempt from the universal laws of reciprocity. This chapter discusses the role of personal patronage in classical Sparta, and the differences between unequal reciprocity in the society of the “similars” compared to democratic Athens and Republican Rome. It demonstrates how patronage is a natural part of all ancient societies. Different systems allow patronage different scope and venues, forcing the phenomenon to adapt to various circumstances. This changes the rates of exchange between patron and client, but does not abolish the institution. The aim is to construct a general theory of patronage in the ancient city-states of Greece and Rome.
The Distribution of Wealthy Athenians in the Attic Demes
Authors: Kierstead James , Klapaukh Roman
Published: January 2019

An equable distribution of wealth and of access to political power is often seen as a key condition for democracy. While some scholars of classical Attica (such as Lewis and Ismard) have taken the view that resources and influence were smoothly spread, others (Osborne and Jones, for example) have claimed that there existed significant clusters of privilege. This chapter draws on a dataset on demes compiled by Ober and Teegarden from a number of standard works (by Davies, Hansen, and Whitehead). After considering some methodological problems raised by the nature of the evidence, it focuses on the question of whether wealth and power were distributed in a way that mirrors population density. Using a number of proxies for wealth and political power, it runs regressions aimed at seeing whether these variables were correlated with population across demes. It concludes that most of the indicators for wealth and participation in classical Attica match up very closely with population. A citizen's origins in a particular deme are never a good predictor of his wealth or influence in the classical democratic state.
Hegemonic Legitimacy (and its Absence) in Classical Greece
Authors: Low Polly
Published: January 2019

A recurring concern of Greek writers on hegemony and empire (and of modern commentators on those writers) is the problem of securing the willing – or at least, not actively hostile – consent of those led. But ancient approaches to this question are often fragmented in their focus and limited in their perspective; modern historical analyses have likewise tended to grapple more with specific instances or themes than the wider picture. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to see if it is possible to develop a more systematic framework for assessing the legitimacy (or lack of legitimacy) of Greek hegemonic systems. In particular, it explores the theoretical models for interstate and hegemonic legitimacy developed in recent work in International Theory, especially in reaction to the (alleged) ‘crisis of legitimacy’ of the early years of this century, and assess their applicability (or lack of it) to a deliberately broadly‐ defined set of Classical Greek hegemonies. In doing so, it illuminates the various ways in which legitimacy was developed and defended by these hegemonies; the challenges to legitimacy each faced; and the extent to which the successful cultivation of hegemonic legitimacy correlates with the success of hegemony more broadly.
Speculative Realism and Science Fiction
Authors: Willems Brian
Published: January 2019

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.
Introduction
Authors: Willems Brian
Published: January 2019

The real monsters are not aliens from outer space but humans on Earth. Nuclear radiation poisoning, environmental catastrophes and genetic manipulation gone wrong are only some of the ways that science fiction horrors are being realised. Yet if humans have become the new monsters, what happens when their dominance is removed? Are there other organisations of knowledge, time and space which could lead to a better future than the one now being created? The philosophical field of speculative realism takes this issue to heart by questioning the anthropocentrism of the present. Science fiction literature often complements this trend by imagining alternative worlds in which humans are no longer the only organisers of knowledge. The combination of both of these perspectives can lead to strategies for imagining a world different from the tragedy we are now making....
The Zug Effect
Authors: Willems Brian
Published: January 2019

The Zug effect is part of only certain moments in science fiction which are open to representing ambiguity. Thus the book offers a different definition of sf because it focuses on the roles of ambiguity and the unknowable in the genre; thus it will lead to a different set of questions and answers. In other words, rather than foregrounding the way sf extrapolates current scientific facts into future plots, this book searches out objects which resist incorporation into any past, present or future scientific understanding. Such objects are key for speculative realism because they indicate an independence from human thought or perception. Authors such as Joanna Russ, Damon Knight, Samuel Delany and Kim Stanley Robinson are used to develop this argument.
Ancient (Anti)Heroes on Screen and Ancient Greece Post-9/11
Authors: Tomasso Vincent
Published: January 2019

This chapter looks at how 9/11 has altered our engagement with classical antiquity. The author examines how the heroes of ancient Greece became antiheroes on screen in a post 9/11 world and how at this time period engagement with figures such as Alexander, Leonidas, and Perseus moved away from the behaviors seen in their earlier onscreen counterparts, and how films such as 300, Clash of the Titans, and Alexander, while set in antiquity, provide the distance for audiences to explore issues raised by 9/11. At the same time, the depiction of these new antiheroes reflect a revised approach on screen to the representation of mythical thinking (elements of magic, religion, myth-aspects of ancient Greece that were central to pop culture depictions) that came into question along with the destabilization of American identity.
Emendation List
Authors: Scott Walter
Published: January 2019

This is a full list of emendations made to the base-text following collation of the relevant textual witnesses. It records all verbal, orthographical and punctuational emendations. Emendations to indentations and paragraphing are also presented.
‘Je ne parle pas français’: Reading Mansfield’s Underground Man
Authors: Rampton David
Published: January 2019

Mansfield’s “Je ne parle pas francais”, a story about unrequited desire and its effects, is narrated by its principal character. He is an unscrupulous, unsavoury type, which has helped make Mansfield’s critics quasi-unanimous in condemning him for his role in the events portrayed and questioning the way he describes them. His bitterness and scepticism have reminded some of Mansfield’s readers of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”. The proto-existentialist aspect of the stories, their preoccupation with “good faith”, their scepticism concerning belief systems and grand abstractions more generally, the difficulties of escaping various kinds of isolation, the difficulties of sustained emotional commitment, all these help make the case for reading the stories in conjunction. Mansfield use a number of strategies – literary allusions, thematic echoes, self-reflexiveness –to help readers negotiate the story’s complexities. In the end, the large questions may remain unanswered, but that is as may be. “Je ne parle pas francais” firmly establishes her as an important modernist writer and a valuable link with Dostoevsky and the great Russian forebears in whom she took such an interest.
Post Diagnosis: Bashkirtseff, Chekhov and Gorky through Mansfield’s Prism of Tuberculosis
Authors: Diment Galya
Published: January 2019

The article examines Mansfield’s attitude towards three tubercular Russian writers — Marie Bashkirtseff, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky — before and after she herself was diagnosed with the disease. The case with Chekhov was most dramatic since her bond with him, most powerful and intimate even prior to her diagnosis, became even closer but also more frustrating as she was reading through his letters and notebooks in search of any wise advice he could give her, both as a writer and a professional physician, while oftentimes becoming acutely angry with him for Chekhov’s seeming resignation and lack of hope. It also discusses the difference in the English and Russian words, then in use, for the disease — “consumption” versus “chakhotka” — and how that may have affected the different cultural perceptions of tuberculosis in England and Russia.
Short Story
Authors: Marshall Owen
Published: January 2019

On Thursday morning he walked again from his apartment in Palais Lutetia to the Villa Isola Bella. The quickest way was the low road through the tunnel and past the marina, but he preferred the climb up to the old cemetery where William Webb Ellis was buried, and then the stroll along the Garavan boulevard, past the Pian olive grove park with hunched, ancient trees set against the blue sea, on to the ornate villas of Garavan, some lacking love, but all with wonderful faded colours of green, yellow and rose. He walked slowly because of the heat, and carried the small backpack from his hand, rather than having it in contact with his shirt. On his way home he would buy the few supermarket items that are all a guy living on his own needs....
Katherine Mansfield in a Global Context
Authors: Zimring Rishona
Published: January 2019

Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber (eds), Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016), 280 pp., £72. ISBN 978 90 04 28368 8

Kirsty Gunn, My Katherine Mansfield Project (Devon: Notting Hill Editions, 2015), 148 pp., £14.99. ISBN 978 1 910749 04 3

Andrew Harrison, ...
The Islamists of Morocco’s Party of Justice and Development and the Foreign Policy Problem: Between Structural Constraints and Economic Imperatives
Authors: Seniguer Haoues
Published: January 2019

How Moroccan Islamists have come to a vision of international affairs compliant with the Monarchy’s view of the Moroccan interest? This chapter sheds light on the evolution of the Party for Justice and Development’s discourse in the domain of international relations and foreign policy. Becoming state-builders at the head of a State that they could not reform the way they initially wanted has made Moroccan Islamism more moderate although initial ideals are still present.
“Islam and Resistance”: The Uses of Ideology in the Foreign Policy of Hamas
Authors: Seurat Leila
Published: January 2019

Even though Hamas remains a non-state actor tapping into the register of political Islam, the sources of its international practice are fundamentally the same ones organizing the foreign policies of states: defending its interests as perceived by the movement’s leaders and advocating the values and constitutive norms of this politico-religious player’s ideology. This dual observation remains valid even when its foreign policy defines itself both in relation to the occupying power and by interactions with other actors.
Pixar, Performance and Puppets
Authors: Holliday Christopher
Published: January 2019

As a way of remedying the wider absence of computer-animated film acting within scholarship on film and animated performance, this chapter makes a significant assertion that, in its production, the computer-animated film genre actually cross-pollinates stop-frame techniques with those associated with marionette theatre as part of its style of performance. In the workable geometry of its virtual bodies (skeletal structure, anatomical coherency, joint segmentation and armature), computer-animated films evoke the wealth of string marionettes (as well as rod or hand puppets) moved within a live performance setting. Such puppet-like forms of acting holds the computer-animated film distinct from performances in popular Hollywood cinema achieved through stop-motion frame-by-frame techniques and traditional hand-drawn methods. However, this analysis not only supports the central concept that puppetry has become a more significant concern of the computer-animated film than in other animated media, but also provides a counter-narrative to scholarship that affords generality to motion-capture as the dominant mode of cyber or virtual puppetry. Puppetry can be understood, I argue, as an altogether more inclusive category, and this chapter promotes puppetry as opening up performance in computer-animated films and revealing the sliding scale of puppet processes involved in its creation of acting.
Susanne Bier’s Hollywood Experiments: Things We Lost in the Fire and Serena
Authors: Molloy Missy
Published: January 2019

“Susanne Bier’s Hollywood Experiments: Things We Lost in the Fire and Serena” explores the lackluster responses to Bier’s first English-language productions, often referred to as her ‘Hollywood films’. Author Missy Molloy surveys a variety of sources related to the films’ productions and receptions to reveal the challenges Bier faced transitioning to new production contexts. Moreover, while the films demonstrate Bier’s willingness to experiment with unfamiliar genres and production conditions, they also reaffirm her attractions to specific cinematic subjects, images, and narrative scenarios. Thus, these less successful films provide information relevant to the project of tracing Bier’s authorial influence across a body of extremely varied works. Furthermore, the fact that her authorial influence was somewhat muted in her first ‘Hollywood’ films—due to her signing on late in pre-production as well as complications that arose during post-production— indicates that in Bier’s case, early involvement allows her to affect the characters and narratives to the extent that they reflect career-long preoccupations, which manifested in Things We Lost in the Fire and Serena to a degree that didn’t significantly appeal to either her domestic or international audience. The chapter complements Langkjær’s and Agger’s attentions to more successful films by highlighting that Bier’s approach to genre is expansive, even when it does not produce desirable results. Molloy concludes that less effective elements of Bier’s cinematic strategies are results, at least partly, of bad timing. She further argues that reception prejudices played a role in Things We Lost in the Fire and Serena’s failures to land with audiences.
Cinema of the World and Women’s Film Culture: Susanne Bier’s Transnational Cinema
Authors: Smaill Belinda
Published: January 2019

Chapter 11 employs a feminist lens to situate women filmmakers within a wider global context in which all women’s cinema can be considered to be “world cinema,” set apart from local contexts that fail to encompass women’s film practices in terms of resources, space, and mobility. Advocating a perspective advanced by Patricia White in Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, Belinda Smaill proposes that women filmmakers should be viewed within “whole world approaches” that comprehensively address the context of production, circulation, representation, and image of each director. While tracking the mobility of female directors, Smaill points out that while it is difficult for women to achieve employment as feature directors in the U.S., it is even more difficult to gain access to the industry from outside the U.S. Hollywood is an exclusive domain, making Bier’s transnational American work a critical site for investigation. With Serena, Smaill contends, Bier cements her place as a director who takes on the world by lending her authorial signature to a complex manifestation of world cinema.
From Local to Global: The Bier/Jensen Screenwriting Collaboration
Authors: Moore Cath
Published: January 2019

Cath Moore draws attention to the unique Danish co-writing process that most Danish directors employ, in which a director and screen-writer collaborate on scripts and share writing credit. Bier’s most successful films have been co-written with Anders Thomas Jensen, who also works with actors during the writing process, rewriting lines of story and dialogue after collaborative reading sessions. With a focus on the Bier/Jensen trilogy, Moore delineates the creative divergences between Bier’s solo work and Jensen’s dark satirical and absurdist self-written and directed films. Moore concludes that the critical and commercial success of the unparalleled Bier/Jensen oeuvre is a result of their preference for highly dramatic stories focused on personal conflict that transcends the local domestic space of Denmark. These transnational storylines, she believes, utilize different national settings as an important facet of story construction to visualize a shared humanity.
Judaism and Danish Directors: The Case of Lars von Trier vs. Susanne Bier
Authors: Valsson Pétur
Published: January 2019

“The Case of Lars von Trier vs. Susanne Bier” focuses on the public conflict between Denmark’s leading international film directors, which has developed almost entirely through von Trier’s defamation of Bier in widely published anti-Semitic statements. In this chapter, Pétur Valsson outlines the history of von Trier’s and Bier’s relationship, which includes personal and professional ties that illustrate the closely knit nature of the Danish film industry. Valsson then questions the role of Jewish identity in each director’s work and professional persona, concluding that Bier’s more direct experience of Jewish culture contrasts with von Trier’s fetishization of Jewishness, which was shattered by his late-in-life discovery that his biological father was not Jewish as he had thought. Valsson suggests that the simultaneity of Bier’s career ascendance and von Trier’s discovery of mistaken identity unfortunately resulted in von Trier’s very public misogynist and anti-Semitic comments, to which Bier refused to respond, characterizing them as ridiculous.