bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cursing-Prayers and Female Vengeance in the Ancient Greek World1
Authors: Matthews Lydia , Salvo Irene
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyses women praying for revenge in ancient Greece in literary texts (such as Homer’s Iliad, and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus) alongside thirteen prayers for justice written exclusively by women and found in Knidos (Caria, modern Turkey). It argues that because women did not have direct access to legal forms of retribution and often had complaints that fell outside the normal judicial system (such as a husband’s adultery), cursing-prayers prayers had an important psychological and social function for women, providing a legitimate outlet for potentially disruptive feelings through an established ritual that was recognized as meaningful by the civic community. Like lamentation, cursing allowed women to express anger and hatred within socially acceptable roles and practices, providing women with a legitimate, communal medium in which to air grievances and to rectify or revenge the injuries done to them.
‘Women’s Weapons’: Education and Female Revenge on the Early Modern Stage
Authors: Preedy Chloe Kathleen
Published: May 2020

Female revengers feature in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and George Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois. Rather than pursuing vengeance by proxy these women become the active agents of their own revenge, taking a variety of weapons into their own hands. As they do so an implied dialectic between education and revenge emerges, with their ability to articulate revenge in their own terms linked to their wielding of the fatal dagger or vial. This paper will examine that dialectic by exploring the relationship between women’s words and women’s weapons on the early modern stage, as it pertains to the figure of the female revenger. While acknowledging the problematic morality (and the high cost) of vengeance, the chapter proposes that female revengers, rather than being simply trapped within misogynistic stereotypes, are instead active agents who interrogate stereotypes about women and determine their fates.
‘Nursed in Blood’: Masculinity and Grief in Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge
Authors: Yearling Rebecca
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the relationship between grief, revenge and masculinity in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge. Unlike other contemporary revenge dramas, the play ends with Antonio alive and unpunished, which critics have tended to interpret either as evidence of Marston’s lack of artistic skill or as a uniquely positive depiction of revenge as necessary and just. This chapter rejects both interpretations, arguing instead that the jarring ending is characteristic of Marston, who frequently pitches genre conventions against perplexing ethical questions in order to unsettle the spectator’s aesthetic expectations and moral judgements. The play also questions the characters’ fantasy of extreme manliness, and its equation of masculinity with violence and death. Although Antonio moves from ‘tears to blood’, coming to embody a vengeful hyper-masculinity, Antonio’s new version of manliness is monstrous and not far from psychosis.
Outfacing Vengeance: Heroic Dying in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Ford’s The Broken Heart
Authors: Dawson Lesel
Published: May 2020

Revengers, as has been frequently observed, are artists who devise intricate tortures both to overreach the crimes that have come before and to invest their acts of violence with specific meanings. But what happens when the revenge does not go to plan? Both John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and John Ford’s The Broken Heart feature victims who take charge of their suffering, seizing theatrical power in a manner that challenges the meaning of their punishment. The shift in focus encountered in these plays – away from the witty plotting of the revenger and towards the courage of the victim – corresponds to a wider shift that Mary Beth Rose has identified in the construction and gendering of heroism in the early modern period, in which there is a move away from the heroics of action towards the heroism of endurance. The chapter maintains, however, that the heroics of endurance are gendered: while in both plays heroic dying functions as a form of self-authorship, nevertheless differences between the portrayal of the Duchess of Malfi and Ithocles suggest that masochistic self-sacrifice is perceived to be natural for women and unnatural for men.
Playing the Breeches Part: Feminist Appropriations, Biographical Fictions and Colonial Contexts in Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry (1999)
Authors: Carroll Rachel
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines a fictional reconstruction of the life of the Irish-born and Scottish-educated colonial military surgeon James Miranda Barry (c. 1799–1865), whose memory has been irrevocably shaped by reports that he was discovered after death to be female bodied. It argues that the feminist narrative of strategic gender crossing which characterises most versions of Barry’s life emerges in displaced form in the novel; in this way, Barry’s transgender (or intersex) identity serves as a vehicle through which women can express agency and pursue ambition in vicarious fashion. Barry’s career took place in the theatre of empire but the racial politics of this era of British history are often overlooked in both biographical and fictional accounts of Barry’s life; close attention to the treatment of colonial contexts will serve to demonstrate the role of white privilege and the construction of racial ‘others’ in these narratives.
Two Beings/One Body: Intersex Lives and Transsexual Narratives in Man into Woman (1931) and David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl (2000)
Authors: Carroll Rachel
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl, a historical fiction based on the life of Lili Elbe (1882–1931), reputed to be one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment treatment. Genres of life writing have played a prominent role in the representation of transgender lives; the relationship between historical record, autobiography and historical fiction is complicated by the possibility that Elbe may have been an intersex person. This chapter examines the extent to which conventions of transsexual life writing obscure narratives of intersex existence, investigating the novel’s relationship to a formative source text, a generically hybrid auto/biography. The implications of the novel’s reliance on the binary categories of identity prevalent in Man into Woman will be explored in relation to categories of sex, gender (especially femininity) and sexuality (specifically male homosexuality).
Advocating Auricularisation: Virginia Woolf’s ‘In The Orchard’
Authors: Vandevelde Tom
Published: May 2020

Unlike the physicist, the musicologist or the sociologist studying the intricacies of real-life sound, all of whom have a number of solid methodologies at their disposal, the literary scholar assessing a fictional soundscape is decidedly underequipped. Phrases like ‘point of view’ or ‘looking through a character’s eyes’ exemplify the ocularcentricity that has unfortunately tended to reduce a valuable narratological tool such as ‘focalization’ to a largely visual concept. In an attempt to revalue the other sensory modes, the auditory chief among them, several narratologists have recently come up with a number of new terms in order to differentiate between the different sensory experiences, thereby rethinking the concept of focalization. By cross-examining concepts such as ‘auricularisation’ (William Nelles and Sabine Schleckers, following film theorists François Jost and Michel Chion) and ‘auscultation’ (Melba Cuddy-Keane), and indicating how these differ from, yet intertwine with the visual aspects of narrative perspective scholars have hitherto tended to prioritize, this chapter aims to provide the first stepping stones towards a coherent theory for the study of sound in narrative. The writings of Virginia Woolf, in whose work sound more often than not fulfils a crucial function, will then serve to put the theory into practice.
How to Listen to Joyce: Gramophones, Voice and the Limits of Mediation
Authors: Groth Helen
Published: May 2020

Writing in 1932, Christina Stead described the disappointing experience of listening to ‘a gramophone record of James Joyce the English litterateur, reading from his own works, a rare thing costing 200 francs’. The recording Stead was listening to was Joyce’s reading of the ending of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake, a double-sided 12-inch gramophone disc made at C. K. Ogden’s Orthological Institute in 1929. T. S. Eliot, in contrast to Stead, responded positively to the recording expressing the hope that recordings of authors’ voices would soon supplant printed editions of their work. That Eliot’s hope was never realised suggests that many shared Stead’s disappointment. Hearing rather than reading Finnegans Wake only intensified its unsettling affects for Stead, and exposed the technical limitations of the gramophone as a means of enhancing literary experience. This chapter considers Stead’s dilemma as a listener to and reader of Joyce as an exemplary instance of the way early gramophone recordings of modernist texts only served to heighten the experience of modernism’s inaccessibility to the readers that Eliot had hoped it would engage.
Body and Soul: Modernism, Metaphysics, Rhyme
Authors: Pryor Sean
Published: May 2020

This chapter approaches the problem of rhyme in modernist poetry by considering a longer history of ideas about rhyme, in which sound and sense are mapped against body and soul. This dualism encourages the suspicion which has so often been directed at rhyme as a poetic technique. Sketched out through analyses of classical verse and popular song, the metaphysics of rhyme is then tested through close readings of poems by W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence, written and published in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The chapter concludes that modernism resists inherited dualisms when its rhyming practice suggests a kind of song. For modernism, the soul in song, and of song, is not disembodied but embodied, not individual but collective.
Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel
Authors: Mosher Jerry
Published: May 2020

A discussion of Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel
Peter Lorre in M
Authors: Bergstrom Janet
Published: May 2020

A discussion of Peter Lorre in M
Marcello Mastroianni in 8½
Authors: McLean Adrienne L.
Published: May 2020

A discussion of Marcello Mastroianni 8 1/2
Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love
Authors: Marchetti Gina
Published: May 2020

A discussion of Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love
Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde in Mortal Inheritance
Authors: Tsika Noah
Published: May 2020

A discussion of Jalade-Eikeinde in Mortal Inheritance
Machine-oriented Architecture: Oikos and Ecology
Authors: Bryant Levi R.
Published: May 2020

In this chapter, following his ontology that focuses on what it means to give an account of something, Levi R. Bryant not only defines building as a machine, but building as a void and an enclosure where architecture operates in, through and on it. After elaborating on his argument that all of being is composed of machines, calling this metaphysics or ontology ‘machine-oriented ontology’, he goes onto sketching the outlines of a machine-oriented architecture and the ways in which distributions of space operate on bodies, create subjectivities and form communities. He concludes by asking what a revolutionary enclosure would be to connect it with our ability to create enclosures that act upon us and potentially enhance our becoming and movement.
‘I Am the Law’: District Commissioner Fiction and the State of Exception
Authors: Baxter Katherine Isobel
Published: May 2020

Chapter Two identifies and anatomizes an important subgenre in the adventure tradition in literature: District Commissioner fiction. This subgenre is significant because, while in the nineteenth century the colonial hero was typically represented as a buccaneer outside the law, District Commissioner fiction repositions the hero within and as the law. Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River series is read alongside works by Arthur E. Southon in relation to theories of the state of exception, to demonstrate how the District Commissioner and the policy of indirect rule that he represents are figured exceptionally, standing outside the law as the force of law.
Living in Technical Legality
Authors: Tranter Kieran
Published: May 2020

Successive transformations have resulted in the emergence of a total technological world where old separations about ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ have declined. With this, the tendency towards technicity within modern law has flourished. There has often been identified a mechanistic essence to modern law in its domination of human life. Usually this has been considered an ‘end’ and a loss, the human swallowed by the machine. However, this innovative book sets out to re-address this tendency
By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, Living in Technical Legality journeys with the partially consumed human into the belly of the machine. What it finds is unexpected: rather than a cold uniformity of exchangeable productive units, there is warmth, diversity and ‘life’ for the nodes in the networks. Through its science fiction focus, it argues that this life generates a very different law of responsibility that can guide living well in technical legality.
Making Mongol History
Authors: Kamola Stefan
Published: May 2020

Making Mongol History examines the life and work of Rashid al-Din Tabib (d. 1318), the most powerful statesman working for the Mongol Ilkhans in the Middle East. It seeks to integrate his most famous work, the historical compendium, the Collected Histories (Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh), into two contexts: a developing genre of Persian historical writing and Rashid al-Din’s broader political and intellectual projects. Opening chapters offer an overview of administrative history and historiography in the early Ilkhanate, culminating with Rashid al-Din’s Blessed History of Ghazan, the indispensable source for Mongol and Ilkhanid history. Later chapters lay out the results of the most comprehensive study to date of the manuscripts of Rashid al-Din’s historical writing. Also explored is the complicated relationship between Rashid al-Din’s historical and theological writings, as well as his appropriation of the work of his contemporary historian, ʿAbd Allah Qashani. Their rivalry, as well as other personal alliances and conflicts at the court of the Ilkhans, continue to shape our understanding of Mongol history.
The Science Behind that Click of the Mouse
Authors: Phillips Andelka M
Published: May 2020

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the scientific developments that have enabled the personal genomics industry to develop. This is intended for a general audience and those with a background in genetics could skip this chapter.
Changing Patterns of Social Connection across Interventions: Unravelling Aberrant Globalisation
Authors: Battersby Paul
Published: May 2020

International armed interventions in intrastate conflicts are planned with the expectation that order will be restored through the controlled application of limited military force. This persuasive orthodoxy, Paul Battersby argues in his Chapter Changing Patterns of Social Connection across Interventions: Unravelling Aberrant Globalisation, endures despite the erratic course of foreign interventions in the Middle East over the past two decades. Notions of order, equilibrium or stasis imply systemic balances that, where disturbed, can be restored through counteraction. Yet, while we can gather abundant conflict data, observe events from different vantage points, correlate variables and calibrate possibilities, the calculation of future trajectories of conflict events remains an imprecise and hazardous exercise. Thus, to anticipate only positive change from the rapid assertion of overwhelming military power into faraway places is to downplay the threads of happenings, decisions, ideas and beliefs that shape the subjective realities of global security. Globalisation is aberrant in its complexity, and global dynamics do not yield simple choices between binary opposites of order and disorder, control or chaos. The search for a more nuanced understanding of security leads inescapably towards the analysis of global patterns of connection and organisation that generate and sustain multiscalar supply chains of violence.
Interventions and the Limits of the Responsibility to Protect: Regional Organisations and the Global South
Authors: Hongoh Joseph
Published: May 2020

In Chapter Eight, Sovereignty versus Responsibility to Protect, Joseph Hongoh argues that the struggle in navigating the tension surrounding sovereignty as responsibility to protect actually obscures rather than enables productive engagements with the concept and practice of intervention. Referring to case studies from Africa, Hongoh suggests that integrating regional organizations (ROs) within the international-regional-national axes of R2P potentially restricts the broader conception of intervention. In undertaking this examination, he begins by providing an alternative reading of sovereignty as a responsibility. In this regard, he demonstrates how regional organizations in Africa have perennially engaged with the questions of sovereignty, responsibility, protection and human solidarity within the broader frames of political and economic empowerment and emancipation. In the last two sections of his chapter, Hongo shows how the broader conception of intervention has the potential effect of producing transnational sovereignty, and in ways that are not imagined within R2P. The result, he suggests, may lead to implementation of R2P within the conditions of sovereignty that are determined by ROs.
Regulating the Abstraction of Violence: Interventions and the Deployment of New Technologies Globally
Authors: Warren Aiden
Published: May 2020

Aiden Warren argues in Chapter Nine:
The Changing Face of Interventions and the Deployment of New Technologies that the continual advancement of new technologies in theaters of conflict, and more specifically in the context of interventions, pose some very distinct challenges. These challenges are examined in relation to notions of regulation, associated moral, ethical and legal debates, as well as logistical dimensions. As the most topical form of new technology, the chapter looks at the increase in the use of drones as well as debates regarding their viability as an option in humanitarian contexts. Warren also considers the implications surrounding their utility and the ‘dehumanization of death,’ including those actors who are complicit in their science and construction. In the context of humanitarian interventions, the chapter interrogates the varying debates pertaining to the potential of drone usage and the security dilemmas that could arise should they continue to become a significant option in a states’ repertoire of intervention. Lastly, he argues, as technology rapidly advances and drones become wholly “off the loop” in the form of “killer robots,” additional complexities may arise in future security scenarios and the need for new regulations.
Who Rebuilds? Local Roles in Rebuilding Shattered Societies
Authors: Allen Susan H.
Published: May 2020

The focus in this chapter is on local roles and local-international partnerships in recovery from disaster in shattered societies. The chapter does not discount the roles that external actors can usefully play but rather, as Susan Allen writes in Chapter Eleven, to highlight the opportunities for local actors to intervene in their own societies. In addressing this question, Allen considers the case study of rebuilding Georgian–South Ossetian relationships so as to consider who in practice rebuilds shattered societies, how this rebuilding unfolds as an ongoing process, and how the skills and abilities that come to the foreground in the aftermath of traumatic evolve. In turn, the chapter examines the various actions that are part of rebuilding and the different ways people contribute to such a process. Third, considered are the varied actors, the partnerships, and finally the roles of individuals involved in rebuilding. Finally, even while acknowledging partnerships, the chapter also considers individual agency and the ways that a recognised or emergent leader can exercise what John Paul Lederach (2005) refers to as the ‘moral imagination’.
The Young Offender
Authors: Kelly Christine
Published: May 2020

The first chapter places the book in its historical, theoretical and cultural setting, exploring the background against which juvenile justice reform occurred in Scotland and placing this in the wider context of exchange between reformers on the international front. The aim here is to explain the way in which children evolved as a distinctive group in terms of criminalisation, providing a fuller understanding of the legal processes of reform analysed in the book.
Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction
Authors: Ramadan Yasmine
Published: May 2020

In 1960s Egypt a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction argues that this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of rural, urban, and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment in the project of the postcolonial nation-state in post-revolutionary Egypt. If the countryside ceased to be the idealized space of the nation, neither the Cairene metropolis nor the city of Alexandria took its place. Moreover, the transgression of borders to an exilic space served to unsettle categories of national and regional belonging. At the heart of this book is an argument about the disappearance of an idealized nation in the Egyptian novel. It provides a full examination of the emergence and establishment of a group of the most significant writers in modern Egyptian literature across six decades, while also attending to the social, economic, political, and aesthetic changes during a pivotal moment in Egypt’s contemporary history.
Re-imagining the Rural: The Mystical and the Mythical
Authors: Ramadan Yasmine
Published: May 2020

Chapter Three centers around works by Abd al-Hakim Qasim, Yahya Taher Abdullah, and Yusuf al-Qaid. Here we move to the villages of the Delta and Upper Egypt, the latter appearing in Egyptian novels for the first time. These novels are read in opposition to the social realist works of the previous generation, with their concentration upon the countryside as the space of revolutionary struggle and political mobilization. The rural here is transformed into a space of suffering and degradation, in which the villagers struggle to contend with the difficulties of their daily life. The village is thus represented as mystical and mythical space, with the writers employing literary techniques from fantastic literature and magical realism, in order to represent the ongoing marginalization of the Egyptian village and its separation from the rest of the nation. These works of fiction are situated within the broader socio-economic context of the period, particularly Abdel Nasser’s agricultural reforms begun in the 1950s. The failure of the policies is reflected in the literary output of the generation, who grappled to come to terms with the continued marginalization and exclusion of the Egyptian village.
Queer Gender Informants in Ovid and Shakespeare
Authors: Chess Simone
Published: May 2020

How might queer moments in Ovid be in conversation with Shakespeare? This essay pairs three queer Ovidian characters-- Tiresias, Caenis/Caenus, and Iphis-- with three Shakespearean characters-- Mardian the eunuch from Antony and Cleopatra, Portia/Balthazar from Merchant of Venice, and Viola/Cesario from Twelfth Night. Functioning more as rhizomatic associations than direct adaptations, these pairings show that Shakespeare uses Ovidian strategies in positioning his eunuch and crossdressing characters as code switchers who are especially poised to make crucial judgements and give critical insights. Through the juxtapositions of textual queerness, I find that Shakespeare, in the tradition of and seemingly in conversation with, Ovid staged nonbinary characters as queer gender informants whose insights and experiences add value to the plays.
“Let Rome in Tiber melt”: Hermaphroditic Transformation in Antonius and Antony and Cleopatra
Authors: Uman Deborah
Published: May 2020

This essay uses Ovid’s tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as a vehicle for considering the connections between the theme of gender fluidity and the practice of literary transformations in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation of Robert Garnier’s Antonius. The characters in both versions demonstrate the desire for and resistance to transformation, presenting a worldview that parallels Hermaphroditus’s own contradictory hatred of his disempowering metamorphosis and his prayer for anyone who bathes in Salmacis’s fountain to be similarly changed. This contradictory interpretation of the union of opposites serves as a lens through which to understand both plays, which fluctuate between anxieties over female power and recognition of the loss of clear markers distinguishing men and women, Rome and Egypt, conqueror and conquered, original and imitation. The two plays finally reject notions of masculine rigidity in favor of a more flexible view of gender and artistic creativity.
Medea’s Afterlife: Encountering Ovid in The Tempest
Authors: Garrison John S.
Published: May 2020

Scholars continually return to Shakespeare’s debt to Ovid in order to draw new insight into the playwright’s work. However, the relationship between The Tempest and Ovid has received relatively little critical attention. In the play’s final act, Prospero delivers a powerful speech that is taken from the sorceress Medea’s incantation in Book 7 of Metamorphoses. With these two iterations of the speech in mind, this chapter explores how performativity and literary history intertwine in the play. This line of inquiry calls into question the distinctions that scholars have previously seen between Prospero and the witch Sycorax, as well as opens opportunities to explore the effects of casting a female lead as “Prospera” in Julie Taymor’s recent film adaption The Tempest (2010).
Power, Emotion, and Appropriation in Ovid’s Tristia and Shakespeare’s Henry V
Authors: Feather Jennifer
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyzes a relatively weak allusion to Ovid – Shakespeare and Ovid’s shared use of natural metaphors for emotional states – to understand the operation of authority in early modern dramatic adaptation. Both Ovid’s Tristia and Henry V are deep examinations of the workings of state power that analyze human feeling in terms of natural metaphors associated with particular locales. This chapter compares the language of cruelty in Ovid’s Tristia to Henry’s rhetoric of power in Henry V,arguing that Shakespeare appropriates Ovidian metaphor to imagine the emotive operation of hegemonic power. This appropriation enables audiences to see cruelty and sympathy operating in the register of emotional experiences that are geographically defined and provokes a consideration of the politics of appropriation.
Nineteenth-Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria
Authors: Saraçoglu M. Safa
Published: May 2020

This book explores Ottoman local governance during the liberal-capitalist state formation of the long 19th century (1789-1922) with a particular focus on the administrative and judiciary councils of the Vidin County in the second half of the 19th century. It explains the structure and procedures of these councils and provides an analysis of their function in local politics and economics in addition to an examination of their correspondence and people who worked in the governmental sphere dominated by these councils. Between 1396 and 1878, Vidin was a town under Ottoman administration and became a county centre in the Danube Province when an imperial reform restructured provincial governance and redefined imperial administrative divisions in 1864. The processes explored here focus mostly on the individuals’ rights to the means of production because a majority of the disputes within and petitions from the provinces during the nineteenth century were concerned with property and taxation. Local agents and groups engaged with each other within the judicio-administrative sphere dominated by these councils and sought to advance their interests by using the language, rules and practices of Ottoman governance. This book argues that in 19th century Vidin, we do not see a binary opposition between a state that coerces transformation against a society that opposes reforms. Vidiners, including the notables and the less wealthy inhabitants utilized the judicio-administrative sphere as a hegemonic domain to pursue their strategies as they problematized proper governance (debating matters of property, security, market order and population) as part of Ottoman biopolitics.
Introduction
Authors: Saraçoglu M. Safa
Published: May 2020

This chapter explains the primary focus and the theoretical devices for the book, introduces Vidin region and provides a brief outline for the chapters. Provincial councils were key offices of Ottoman governance from 1840s onward. In the broader context of Ottoman liberal-capitalist social formation during the long 19th century (1789-1922), local councils provided a venue for local agents pursue competing political and economic strategies. Conventional historiography on 19th century Ottoman state-society relations puts a lot of emphasis on an imperial regulation from 1864 in explaining provincial councils as an extension of imperial centralization policies. This study shifts the focus of research on provincial documents produced by such councils to reveal how these offices and practices of Ottoman governance served as a platform for the political and economic negotiations of provincial agents pursuing their interests. The documents produced by the provincial councils in Vidin County in Ottoman-administered Bulgaria provide a rich source to explore the dynamics of 19th century Ottoman governance in its full richness focusing on property rights, security matters, market order and population management.
Sitting Together: Local Councils and the Politics of Election in the County of Vidin
Authors: Saraçoglu M. Safa
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the organizational structure of a key provincial administrative unit, the county (liva or sancak) and the politics of administering this unit. It includes a general summary of its organizational structure, including the offices within Vidin County and people associated with those offices. By exploring the connection between the offices and the people who occupy them, the chapter defines the judicio-administrative sphere of provincial governance in Vidin: the space occupied by people and offices associated with provincial judiciary and administration. The main argument is that counties were key units of provincial administration and local notables dominated their councils, which were central to the larger provincial judicio-administrative sphere. The chapter provides a summary of how the county and its key judiciary and administrative councils were structured by two key regulations (issued in 1864 and 1871), relates these councils to the earlier provincial councils and explains how he election and appointment of council members took place. The election process in the local judicio-administrative sphere was a charged process that was impossible to untangle from the provincial power dynamics. Local notables maintained their prominence by consistently remaining as members of this judicio-administrative sphere, which was key to Ottoman governance.
Once Inside the Chamber … Participation in the Politics of Local Administration
Authors: Saraçoglu M. Safa
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the members’ involvement with the provincial councils to identify the patterns in member participation. These councils handled majority of the local administrative and judiciary issues, yet they did not keep meeting minutes. Their copy registers, where they kept a copy of their correspondence, serve as the single most important source on the members’ participation in the politics of Ottoman administration. When read against the provincial yearbooks that provided a detailed account of the composition of Vidin’s judicio-administrative sphere, the changes and irregularities in the local record keeping procedures and the structure of the written entries reveal details of council members’ attendance and participation. The main argument of the chapter is that council members did not participate in the meetings regularly and equally. Rather, political groupings among the members, reflective of the provincial dynamics among notable families, affected the members’ level of participation, occasionally resulting in irregularities. Furthermore, higher-ranking officials at the provincial administration seem to be aware of these dynamics and irregularities at the county level.
Conclusion
Authors: Saraçoglu M. Safa
Published: May 2020

This chapter presents the general conclusion of this book:
Although the highest tier of Vidin’s local dynasties gradually lost their power vis-à-vis the imperial administration by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the lower-tier elite benefited from cooperation with the Ottoman administration.
The Ottoman transformation during the long nineteenth century focused on legitimating the imperial order by establishing limits to governance. Part of this change was the establishment of provincial councils by 1840 as part of an Ottoman governance, which aimed to protect the ‘natural’ market order through civil law.
The 1864 and 1871 regulations organised the provincial administrative and judicial councils as separate bodies where the elite’s influence was restrained with term-limits. Yet the notables dominated Vidin’s councils by moving between offices. This led to a connected judicio-adminisrative sphere, dominated by the local elite and reflecting the political dynamics among them. Different agents/groups problematized issues pertaining to security, territory and population within this sphere using technologies of Ottoman governance to pursue their strategies.
These councils and Ottoman governance was not serving the elite alone but provided a negotiation platform for different people and alliances in Vidin county in conjunction with economic liberalization of the long-nineteenth century.
John Morley’s Impersonal Domesticity
Authors: Morrison Kevin A.
Published: May 2020

Chapter three analyses John Morley’s suburban residences from 1886 to 1923 as reflections of his belief that the home should be inhabited in ways that nurture an optimal liberal life. Morley sought to effect a highly controlled environment that, largely shorn of bric-a-brac, ensured mental serenity. This serenity was achieved through an arduous practice of impersonal domesticity.
Robert Browning’s Domestic Gods
Authors: Morrison Kevin A.
Published: May 2020

Chapter four rereads the interior spaces of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Florentine residence, Casa Guidi. Instead of seeing it as a space that exemplifies middle-class Victorian domestic practise, as has been traditionally understood, this chapter posits it as a religiously inflected liberal space.
Introduction
Authors: Kishore Shweta
Published: May 2020

In India, ‘independent documentary film’ is a term that signifies a body of films that first appeared in 1975 during the Constitutional Emergency, a period when the repressive exercise of state authority threatened the democratic political foundations of the nation. The initial usage of the term ‘independent’ to denote a production category located outside of state structures is now a misnomer. In the post-economic reform landscape, independent filmmakers operate with greater flexibility and various interdependent and mutually cooperative forms of organisation between filmmakers, the state, international and domestic NGOs, private institutions and individuals are commonplace. My attempt here is to construct an ongoing critical dialogue between broader concepts of documentary studies and the situated perspectives that emerge from individual accounts and the analysis of films produced and circulated using diverse modes and architectures. Emphasising the historical significance of documentary as a space of oppositional representation, the accounts produce a grounded theory of independence structured in relation to institutions, industry practices, individual subjectivities and technology in post-reform India. Combining the study of independent film practice and textual analysis, the mixed methods study investigates how independent Indian documentary is a practice that not only produces political representation but opens up new material relations between culture, society and the individual.
Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art
Authors: Shaikh Fariha
Published: May 2020

Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary criticism, art history, and cultural geography, to argue that the demographic shift in the nineteenth century to settler colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand was also a textual one: a vast literature supported and underpinned this movement of people. Through its five chapters, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration brings printed emigrants’ letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers, and settler fiction into conversation with narrative painting and novels to explore the generic features of emigration literature: textual mobility, a sense of place and colonial home-making. Authors and artists discussed in this book include, among others, Ford Madox Brown, James Collinson, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Susannah Moodie, Catherine Helen Spence, Catharine Parr Traill and Thomas Webster. The book’s careful analysis of the aesthetics of emigration literature demonstrates the close relationships between textual and demographic mobilities, textual materiality and realism, and the spatial imagination.
Assimilation and the Problems of Sex, Violence, and Sickness unto Death
Authors: Furlotte Wes
Published: May 2020

This chapter intensifies the problem of the animal organism’s over-determination by external variables. The chapter concentrates on Hegel’s analyses of eating, sex, violence, sickness and, ultimately, death. These phenomena exemplify how the animal organism is perpetually given over to external circumstances that threaten its self-perpetuating activity. Taken together they indicate, for Hegel, the truth of organic life: it must die. Organic life must prove a necessary yet insufficient condition for the life of conceptuality proper. In other words, the life of spirit requires embodiment and more. Conceptuality can only come into a robust self-relation in something that is, simultaneously, anticipatorily grounded in nature and yet, irreducible to those grounds. The space in which such self-mediation occurs is what Hegel refers to as the life of spirit (Geist). The self-grounding system of thought proper does not find sufficient existence in the natural world because the radical exteriority of the latter is hostile to the auto-dictates of conceptuality, its self-grounding basis. The chapter concludes with a question: what must this ‘monstrous’ conception of nature mean for human culture, specifically finite subjectivity and socio-political freedom?
Anthropomorphism and the ‘Ends of Man’ in the Anthropocene: ‘My chimp nature’
Authors: Sands Danielle
Published: May 2020

Examining Donna Haraway’s critique of primatological practices and narratives, and Karen Joy Fowler’s fictional account of primate relations, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,alongside humanist figures of Man, this chapter explores the relationship between accounts of nonhuman primates and perceptions of human identity. Comparing Fowler’s ambivalence towards anthropomorphism to the recent resurgence of scientific interest in anthropomorphism, it develops a parallel between anthropomorphism and empathy. Contending that empathy, like anthropomorphism, is an inescapable component of cross-species relations, it argues that both should be cultivated only insofar as they stimulate new ethical and political responses to nonhuman life. The chapter concludes by outlining how different modes of primatological reading and writing might generate alternatives to the figure of Man which are better able to acknowledge and respond to our responsibilities to nonhuman life.
Defining the Egalitarian Sublime
Authors: Williams James
Published: May 2020

This chapter gives a detailed definition of the egalitarian sublime. It distinguishes this anarchic definition from Rancière’s political philosophy while taking inspiration from Balibar’s work. The chapter claims that the sublime is always at risk of leading to inequalities. The chapter finishes by repudiating the idea that we can arrive at a state free of the sublime. This involves a critical reading of the shift from the sublime to wonder in Genevieve Lloyd’s philosophy.
Conclusion: The Sublime as Crisis
Authors: Williams James
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter reflects on the idea of the sublime as crisis. It rejects the idea of the sublime as a pure experience and instead insists that the sublime is always constructed. This construction always involves crisis in the sense of the definition of new values and in the sense of a critical definition of the sublime itself. The chapter and the book end with the idea that the sublime should always be multiple: many anarchic sublimes, not one.
The Jihadist Preachers of the End Times
Authors: Ostranský Bronislav
Published: May 2020

Focusing on apocalyptic manifestations found in ISIS propaganda, this book situates the group’s agenda in the broader framework of contemporary Muslim thought and elucidates key topics in millennial thinking within the spiritual context of modern Islamic apocalypticism. Based on the group’s primary sources as well as medieval Muslim apocalyptic literature and its modern interpretations, the book analyses the ways ISIS presents its message concerning the Last Days as a meaningful, inventive and frightening expression of collectively shared expectations relating to the supposedly approaching the End Times. Key features The first comprehensive study of ISIS primary sources, previously only discussed as part of the background to broader interpretations of the ISIS campaign Introduces and analyses the key topics of ISIS propaganda Places particular manifestations of ISIS apocalypticism in a consistent and meaningful framework
Based on a coherent critical approach to the primary sources, both in Arabic and Western languages, including new media and social network sources Interpretations are interspersed with extensive quotations from ISIS sources, providing the reader with the specifics of the Jihadist approach to apocalyptic rhetoric. Includes an appendix containing an ISIS ‘apocalyptic reader’ of primary source material
The Quest for the Portents of the Hour
Authors: Ostřanský Bronislav
Published: May 2020

This chapter introduces in general terms the phenomenon of Islamic apocalyptic thought within the spiritual framework of Muslim theology and eschatology (with a focus on its Sunni element). In particular, it focuses on the historical background and medieval writings, as well as the key terms applied in the book and the key notions that are necessary for further explanation. Starting with the ambiguous Quranic eschatological references, as well as the scattered and more-or-less mysterious passages within the Sunna, the introductory survey attempts to depict a broadly accepted “chronology of the End-times”. This includes explanatory remarks on the epistemological limits of the related research, as well as exegetical stereotypes that are relevant to the major “episodes” of the given “scenario”. Brief notes will also be provided on the historical manifestations of Muslim millennialism, spanning the period from Medieval times to the contemporary period. However, the emphasis is placed on those features essential for an accurate understanding of contemporary Muslim millennialism. Simply put, the main intention of the introductory explanation is to make the following chapters fully intelligible to readers interested in ISIS but who have limited awareness of Islam.
Cynicism, Melancholy and Hamlet’s Memento Moriae
Authors: Hershinow David
Published: May 2020

Chapter 4 follows Shakespeare as he explores the lines of affiliation between the Cynic-inspired fantasy of unstoppable critical agency and his period’s romanticized portrait of intellectual melancholy. Drawing support from a range of early modern sources, including Robert Burton’s similar appropriation of Diogenes in his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy, it shows that Shakespeare has Hamlet lay claim to a specifically Cynic form of thoughtful sadness, one that posits contemplative self-enclosure as public activism’s final frontier. After linking both Hegel’s and Marx’s philosophies of history to the legacy of Hamlet’s Cynic melancholy, the chapter shows how Shakespeare’s ultimate interest in problematizing this stance allows us to turn the tables on Hamlet’s modern philosophical reception: instead of using modern philosophy as a lens for better understanding an early modern Hamlet, we can use an early modern Hamlet as a lens for better understanding the conditions and limits of modern philosophy.
Cartographies of Catastrophe— Elaine May’s Ishtar (1987)
Authors: Brandum Dean
Published: May 2020

If there is a single moment of ‘fame’ that can be ascribed to Elaine May, it is one clouded by notoriety. So savage was the response to her 1987 comedy Ishtar that it effectively ended May’s directorial career. Siskel and Ebert’s declaration that it was the worst film of 1987 and May’s ‘winning’ the Worst Director award at the Golden Raspberry Awards seemed to only add insult to injury, the film’s flaws thoroughly out of whack with the scale of the derision it received. In 1987, Ishtar-hating was the critical sport of the year. This chapter maps the context and details of this initial career-ruining treatment of May, through to the determination of its fans and the recent reclamation of it by high-caliber film critics, art curators and other representatives of highbrow culture, positing questions and theories as to why this film and the director in particular triggered the response that it did
Postcolonial Gothic
Authors: Ilott Sarah
Published: May 2020

Contemporary postcolonial Gothic provides a language for reengaging with the political realities of the post/neo-colonial present, speaking truths that are structurally repressed elsewhere,especially the lived realities of twenty-first-century postcolonial societies in the face of systemic violence and the structural exclusion of minority voices. This chapter explores how the irrealist aesthetics of twenty-first-century postcolonial Gothic function as critical commentary on the systemic failings of the contemporary moment, linking these failings to a history of colonisation, yet going further than the critique of colonial discourse or epistemology that predominated in twentieth-century postcolonial Gothic literature and criticism. The subgenre of postcolonial Gothic has evolved to encounter new contexts wrought by environmental disaster and resurgent nationalism that require action in the present in order to create a usable future, to address new racisms emerging from neo-imperial and nationalistic movements, and to repurpose new monsters suited to systemic critique.