bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ancestry and Ethnicity
Authors: Weaver Carrie L.
Published: January 2023

This chapter reviews the bioarchaeological evidence of non-Greeks in the Late Archaic/Classical Greek world (ca. sixth to fifth/fourth century BCE). Although material from the Greek mainland is the primary focus of this investigation, case studies from earlier and
later periods of Greek history, as well as Greek colonial contexts, are incorporated to illustrate patterns of continuity and/or change. The chapter begins with a discussion of the archaeology of ethnicity and ancestry, which specifies the ways in which migration, ethnicity and ancestry can be identified in burials. Then, burials believed to belong to individuals of non-Greek ethnicity or ancestry are identified and interpreted in the context of contemporary literary and visual sources. The chapter concludes with a consideration of intersectionality and the ways in which the coalescence of multiple marginalising factors (e.g. a person who is both non-Greek and enslaved) can negatively impact social integration.
Life’s Story
Authors: Posman Sarah
Published: January 2023

This chapter starts from Stein’s claim that Darwin was the key intellectual figure of her youth. In Darwin, Stein found an exciting open historical impulse. She also, however, critiqued the evolutionary framework for not thinking that through and constructing a closed narrative. The idea of the history of life as an open system that interested Stein was, however, part of a different discipline, the field of theoretical history. Via William James, with whom Stein had studied, the chapter shows the affinities between Stein’s early project and a hermeneutics of life, as developed by Wilhelm Dilthey. It situates Dilthey’s work in the context of the crisis of historicism and traces the links between that largely European debate and the American intellectual context in which Stein grew up and started writing.
Cinematic Collectivities
Authors: Posman Sarah
Published: January 2023

This chapter zooms in on the portraits and plays Stein wrote in the early 1910s, and specifically on those texts in which she maps a collective experience. The movement she details in those texts – dance movement or the movement of crowds – keeps track with the subject matter of early cinema and also allows her to bring to light new connections that speak of life in the twentieth century: women working and thinking, crowds consuming. In a second movement, this chapter offers a reading of Tender Buttonsas a collection of dynamic life portraits, or ‘dynamic lifes’ as opposed to still lifes. Apart from a thematic link with early cinema, in which living household objects held appeal, Stein again makes use of a cinematic energy to show us hitherto unseen aspects of life, or, in Benjaminian terms, to erase the aura and look beyond the familiar.
Landscapes
Authors: Posman Sarah
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the question of how, in a world in which everything changes, we can also encounter things that stay the same. It reads Stein’s 1920s interest in unchanging things in dialogue with the work of A.N. Whitehead. The chapter sets out from Whitehead’s idea of life as a fissure in tradition and traces how Stein’s tackles the problem of permanence in a changing world via landscape plays, in which saints play a central role. It focuses on Stein’s play, Four Saints in Three Acts,which it reads as a tableau vivant and an ongoing opera.
Introduction Female Religious Authority in Shi‘i Islam : Past and Present
Authors: Künkler Mirjam , Stewart Devin J.
Published: January 2023

The introduction reviews parts of the literature on religious authority in Islam and asks how the place of women has been conceptualized in these. Apart from providing an overview of the conception and composition of the volume, the chapter ventures some tentative comparative conclusions. It appears that – judging from what we know at present – women’s participation in religious authority as jurists has been significantly more important in the Twelver Shiʿi tradition, particularly in modern history, and especially in Iran, than it has in Sunni societies, while their participation in the transmission of hadith during the medieval period was significantly less substantial than that of their Sunni counterparts. The main reason for this difference has to do with relative differences between Twelver Shiʿi and Sunni Islam with regard to the cultivation of the various religious sciences.
Layli as Queen of Heaven by Muhammadi of Herat, c . 1565
Authors: Barry Michael
Published: January 2023

The chapter provides a commentary on the cover illustration of the book, which has been excerpted from a sixteenth-century painting by the Safavid master-painter Muhammadi of Herat. Inspired by the works of Bihzad, who rose to fame at the Timurid capital of Herat and went on to set the foundations of the artistic traditions of the Safavid court, Muhammadi produced his ‘Seated Princess’ c.1565, probably for the Safavid prince Ibrahim, then governor of Khurasan. The chapter argues that Layli, the princess in Muhammadi’s painting and the beloved of Majnun, is portrayed here as the queen of heaven, a manifestation of the divine, in keeping with Ibn Arabi’s theology of the feminine nature of God’s essence (dhāt). Barry suggests that this is one of the rare examples in Islamic art in which a woman is portrayed as a figure possessing religious authority.
Introduction: To Speculate–with Derrida
Authors: Goldgaber Deborah
Published: January 2023

This introductory chapter gives an account of the speculative and deconstructive dimensions of the grammatological project. On the one hand, the project aims to justify the generalization of writing (as speculated by cyberneticists and geneticists). On the other, this speculative project entails the difficult, deconstructive task of generating a truly general conception of writing (a concept traditionally limited to linguistic representation). Most speculative accounts of writing’s generality, including those of the early cyberneticists, involve a too-narrow, graphic conception of writing. This hinders theoretical progress and insight.
Pastimes For The Child Breadwinners: The Sanitisation And Recreation Facilities Of The Hereke Factory Campus 1
Authors: Velipaᶊaoğlu Didem Yavuz
Published: January 2023

This chapter elaborates the conditions children and workers were exposed to in their work in the Hereke Imperial Factory. The wage-earning workers at the factory, mostly children but also some single adults, dwelt in high-density multi-storied cellular dormitories. The chapter focuses on the excluded voices of the Orthodox Greek, Armenian and Muslim orphans and other children who were conscripted into service at the factory. It aims to shed light on the different spatial conditions of these child workers through an examination of their accommodation at the factory campus, particularly their living standards, the regulation of their sanitary conditions, and their recreational landscape. The regulation of the body led to better living arrangements and a work environment where children could socialize and get recreational pleasure.
Borrowing on the Undertaking: Scottish Statutory Companies
Authors: Anderson Ross G
Published: January 2023

In this chapter Dr Anderson focuses on statutory companies (i.e. companies created by private Acts of Parliament) and the creation of security over their undertakings. These companies were vitally important in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for financing large capital projects, particularly constructing and operating key infrastructure such as railways, harbours and tramways, but they are under-researched and often overlooked today. It is shown that these companies could create security that approximated modern floating charges in some respects.
Law and Economics of the Floating Charge
Authors: Hardman Jonathan
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the floating charge from a law and economics perspective. It explores economic conceptions of efficiency, and argues whether Scots law is improved by having a floating charge compared to not. It thus engages with existing law and economics literature in respect of rights in security more broadly, and applies them to the Scottish floating charge to provide a positive economic justification for the floating charge under Scots law.
The Species and Structure(s) of the Floating Charge: The English Law Perspective on the Scottish Floating Charge
Authors: Hardman Jonathan
Published: January 2023

This chapter provides an English law perspective on the Scottish floating charge. It identifies rough equivalences between the two jurisdictions but argues that English law offers parties greater freedom regarding the terms of floating charges. This provides a useful comparative perspective on the Scots law floating charge from its southern neighbour’s point of view.
Kings, Tyrants and Bandy-Legged Men: Generalship in Archaic Greece
Authors: Kucewicz Cezary
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the nature of generalship in archaic Greece, attempting to disentangle the often conflicting, sometimes complementary, public and private factors which characterised the citizen militias of the early Greek poleis. Beginning with the Homeric epics, the discussion traces the changing principles of authority exercised by generals, that mirrored the wider military developments transforming the practice of war in Greece by the end of the Archaic period. In addition, account is taken of the variety of sources dealing with early concepts of generalship, including the poems of Archilochus and Tyrtaeus, which offer a glimpse into the more pragmatic realities of commanding warriors in battle. Looking at Homer’s Hector and Achilles, through the ‘short’ and ‘bandy-looking’ army generals of Archilochus, and finally the elite, publicly-funded captains who marshalled troops in archaic Athens, it is shown that concepts of generalship, and its institutional and ideological foundations, were under constant negotiation reflecting the changing nature of war in early Greece.
Generalship and Knowledge in the Middle Roman Republic
Authors: Taylor Michael
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines generalship in the Middle Roman Republic, from roughly 300-100 BC, largely based on the evidence of Polybius and Livy. It ponders the seeming paradox of the political system and military organization in that the armies of the Roman Republic were devastatingly effective, crushing opponents on three continents, yet generals in the Roman Republic were elected officials, inexperienced politicians who served short terms before they stepped down and were replaced by a freshly elected, untested replacements. It is argued here that while Republican magistrates had limited experience in high command, they possessed enough military and administrative experience to prove largely competent, if not necessarily inspired generals. Furthermore, the Roman military system of the Republic effectively decentralized military authority, so that the failures of a general might be compensated by the efforts of separately elected military tribunes, centurions and Italian prefects, as well as a set of standard operating procedures that guided the conduct and deployment of manipular legions regardless of the general placed over them.
The Best of Men: Cross-Cultural Command in the 630S ad
Authors: MacDonald Eve
Published: January 2023

The 630’s CE witnessed pivotal battles in the history of the ancient Near East resulting in victories of Arabic armies over the forces of the Byzantine and the Sasanian Empires. The sources that have preserved these battles portray the commanders as either heroic or villainous, as men whose decisions have turned the tide of history. Many of the details around the battles are difficult to pin down in terms of date and even location but the commanders who fought and their stories are preserved for us in the extant sources. There are both contemporary and later Islamic versions to compare and contrast. The chief Sasanian commander Rostam, and his Albanian lieutenant Juansher remain celebrated for their heroic efforts against the Arabic armies, even though they lost, while the contemporary Byzantine Armenian commander Vahan is labelled as treasonous for his defeat at/around Yarmouk. This chapter explores the identity and representation of these commanders to assess to what degree the different literary traditions allow them to be heroic or disastrous. The aim is to assess whether we can understand, in the different traditions, the way in which a good general should behave in the 7th century through the accounts of their deeds.
The Politics of War: Virtue, Tyche , Persuasion and the Byzantine General
Authors: Krallis Dimitris
Published: January 2023

Forged on the anvil of conflict and raised in the provinces the strategos leading the armies of Romanía – the Roman polity we have come to call Byzantium – is often conceived as the photonegative of the urbane court official. He was a Digenis Akritas type of character, reveling in manly deeds and sneering at the erudite mandarins that ran the Queen of Cities. This chapter suggests that Byzantine commanders and their craft should also be studied through a different prism. Much like educated officials writing from the safety of Constantinople, Romanía’s strategoi were mindful of tyche and the effect of the unexpected on campaigns and battles. Campaigning and fighting thus emerges in our source material as a process aimed at the effective management of tyche through the deployment of a surprisingly political form of virtue. The chapter focuses on generalship as a discursive practice, relying to a certain extent on brawn but also on the very same skills so valued by the urbane mandarins of the imperial capital: oratory, persuasion, and reasoned argumentation. Faced with fortune’s curveballs the Byzantine general proceeded in battle with a convinced army, reasoned with and politically engaged like a proper Roman assembly.
Epilogue
Authors: Evans Richard , Tougher Shaun
Published: January 2023

The epilogue provides a brief conclusion to the volume, focusing on Arrian’s assessment of the generalship of Alexander the Great.
Introduction: Nonconformities and Unconventional, Unreal Liberties—The Cinema of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata
Authors: Duarte José , Rosário Filipa
Published: January 2023

This chapter is comprised of two parts: part one offers an overview of the directors’ work and career. It also provides a critical analysis and chronological examination of their films while describing the artistic trajectory of JPR and JRGdM’s collaborations, focusing on their obsessions and themes. Particular attention is given to the cultural, industry and production contexts of the filmmakers and their work, along with their importance within the history of Portuguese Cinema. The introduction tackles issues such as the role of the directors as national and international auteurs that bring a unique artistic contribution, placing them within the film world-system. JPR and JRGdM’s work is exhibited in (inter)national theatres, specialized film festivals, university showcases, museums and others, proof that they occupy a relevant role in different creative spaces. Part two is a presentation of the volume’s structure, which is divided into four sections: 1) Queer (Dis)Placements, Exquisite Bodies; 2) Cinematic Landscapes and Territories; 3) Artistic Practices, and 4) Interview.
Plasticity
Authors: Malabou Catherine , James Ian
Published: January 2023

This book gathers a selection of essays and unpublished writings by Catherine Malabou, a contemporary French philosopher whose work merges recent neurobiology and medicinal sciences with the history of philosophy and political theory. Divided into four thematic parts, each of which showcases a major contour of Malabou’s conceptualization of ‘plasticity’, this volume presents central aspects of this concept according to its main domains of relevance: metaphysics, politics, neurology, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. The book displays how the exploration of plasticity opens a range of discussions around issues of tradition, form, spirit, the brain, subjectivity, the psyche, biopolitics, and materialism. Malabou reveals a singular and unique philosophical space between structuralism deconstruction, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and speculative realism without identifying with any of them. By demonstrating the plastic transformability at the heart of these disciplines, Malabou, as a woman philosopher, also articulates the need to “change difference” within patriarchal concepts of tradition itself
Introduction: Exploring the Ecology of World Englishes in the Twenty-First Century: Language, Society and Culture
Authors: Peters Pam , Burridge Kate
Published: January 2023

The 17 papers included in this book are designed to illuminate the key issues of contact between English and other languages for their speakers in the evolution of regional varieties, as well as the social, cultural and political forces in their habitats which stimulate and support varietal differences. The platform paper provided by Edgar Schneider sketches three different kinds of interconnection (nexus) between language, culture and society, which form a cline from the concrete to the most abstract realisation of the connection. The first nexus is expressed through loanwords in the regional variety that identify environmental objects and cultural practices; the second is the presence of “indicator terms” that reflect typical social behaviours such as power positioning, while the third can be found in the distinctive structural schemas which reflect the speakers’ cultural orientation. The chapters are ordered according to which of the three nexuses their data is most aligned with, showing that examples of the first (most concrete) nexus can be found in countries with the highest levels of multilingualism. Whereas examples of the third, most abstract nexus can be found among EFL and ESL speakers in bi- or trilingual contexts of usage, as well as ENL contexts.
Susmaryosep! Lexical Evidence of Cultural Influence in Philippine English
Authors: Lising Loy
Published: January 2023

Loy Lising’s paper on the lexical evidence of cultural Influences on Philippine English uses data from the ICE-Philippine corpus of English. Focusing on indigenous words in the 13 written text types, she found 237 word types in Tagalog or Spanish orthography, which may be regarded as established elements of contemporary Philippine English. They were analysed into a range of socio-semantic categories that reflect material elements of the Philippine environment, as well as the culture, social relationships and traditions. Lising uses the Myers-Scotton (2006) classification of lexical borrowings into ‘cultural’ and ‘core’ borrowings, where cultural borrowings are those for which there are no English equivalents, as opposed to core borrowings which provide indigenous alternatives with connotations in the Philippine speech community which the available English equivalents lack. In her dataset, examples of core borrowings far outnumber the cultural borrowings. Apart from these cultural and core borrowings, Lising found a number of neologisms formed out of English or English+Tagalog elements – striking examples of how multilingual resources in the context are used to create new words that link Philippine English with the contemporary culture.
Across Three Kachruvian Circles with Two Parts-of-speech: Nouns and Verbs in ENL, ESL and EFL Varieties
Authors: Bernaisch Tobias , Götz Sandra
Published: January 2023

Tobias Bernaisch and Sandra Götz present a statistical study of the grammatical properties of the English used by EFL and ESL speakers in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore. Their data for ESL speakers comes from the relevant ICE corpora, and for EFL speakers in the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English. The study focuses on the ratio of words tagged as nouns or verbs in spoken and written data from the two speaker types in the three regions in the two corpora. Using inferential statistics, it finds some overall regional differences in their linguistic cultures in so far as Hong Kong English tended to be more nominal in style and Philippine English more verbal. Yet the ratio of nouns to verbs used by ESL and EFL speakers was similar in all three regions. The research shows the complex interrelationships between region, medium and learner status, when based on abstract linguistic categories such as major word classes.
Rumi, Sufism and Sultans in the Medieval ‘Lands of Rum’
Authors: Renard John
Published: January 2023

A central theme here is the phenomenon of royal support, or patronage, of virtually every aspect of Mawlawi life, initially located chiefly in the central Anatolian city of Konya and gradually expanding with the growth of Rumi’s organization throughout Anatolia and elsewhere in the Central Middle East. And at the heart of Mawlawi institutional growth lies the ongoing posthumous influence of Rumi himself, as mystic, poet, and spiritual guide whose charism lived on in his descendants. Centers on the “first epoch,” in which Rumi’s family settles in Konya, the life of Rumi and the next two generations of the Family Rumi, and Aflaki’s monumental hagiography. As for the second epoch: to appreciate the rationale, sources and impact of the three illustrated Ottoman manuscripts at the heart of this study, I suggest the broad outlines of the nascent Ottoman dynasty’s early fourteenth century rise to power across Anatolia, and the late sixteenth century setting for the imperial patronage that made our three manuscripts possible. [163]
Visualised Hagiography: Manuscript and Method
Authors: Renard John
Published: January 2023

With Chapter Three, the focus narrows to specific royal patronage of visual hagiography in the Second Epoch, with Aflaki-derived works taking center stage. Specific art-historical details of our three manuscripts, both individually and collectively as well as in comparative context, will provide a basis for more detailed discussion of how text and image combine to offer rich and imaginative interpretation of how the grand narrative of the Family Rumi made its mark on Ottoman society and culture.
Essential ingredients begin with 1) Sufis and Sultans: Patronage and Politics; 2) a description of the three sixteenth century texts commissioned by an Ottoman Sultan; 3) images unique or shared: an inventory of the images illustrating assorted anecdotes in each of the manuscripts; 4) comparison of the choices and arrangements of images among the three manuscripts; 5) a summary of key stylistic and iconographic themes; and 6) an approach to visual-verbal hermeneutics.
Appended to the chapter is a table paralleling scenes from the three manuscripts in relation to Aflaki’s accounts and summarizing data comparatively. [171]
Introduction: Associationism, Affect and Literary Authority
Authors: Peter J. Katz
Published: January 2023

The introduction lays out the theoretical groundwork for the book, centred around affect theory, surface reading, and empathy. Through close readings of a debate about Mudie’s library, and the work of Matthew Arnold and Mark Pattison, the chapter historicizes the work of close reading as part of a discipline-shaping discourse that culminates in Victorian literary scholarship. Through this history, this chapter engages with Rita Felski’s “reparative critique” to suggest Associationism and affect as an alternative to the tools of the Victorian academy. Associationism provides a mode of “surface reading” as called for by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, in that it attends to emotion and affect rather than deep reading. This assertion – established through a reading of Victorian ethicist James Martineau – sets up the argument for the rest of the book: that Victorians understood surface reading as an intuitive, populist mode of reading to cultivate empathy.
Feeling Bodies: Associationism and the Anti-Metaphorics of Materiality
Authors: Peter J. Katz
Published: January 2023

This chapter traces an intellectual history of Associationism from Newton to the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on these thinkers’ philosophy of language. Associationist linguistics, the chapter argues through Müller, Locke, and Hume, is fundamentally materialist. This linguistics then offers a way to conceptualise interpretive literary hermeneutics as an ethical problem that divorces language from lived experience. To demonstrate this argument, the chapter turns to Casaubon (Middlemarch) and Wendover (Robert Elsmere), to argue that the “disembodied” scholar is a movement against popular readers who use feeling rather than rational interpretation. Associationists Hartley, Stewart, and Bain make these claims more explicitly in their work; for these Associationists, language is best understood through feeling. The idea that fiction is best read through feelings culminates in the literary criticism of David Masson and Charles Dickens through a close reading of Masson’s review of David Copperfield and Dickens’s preface to Oliver Twist.
Plastic Bodies: The Scientist, Vital Mechanics and Ethical Habits of Character in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone
Authors: Peter J. Katz
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores habit and character through Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and the work of William Benjamin Carpenter. Beginning with an analysis of the mechanism/vitalism debates between Carpenter and Huxley, the chapter establishes the idea of character as central to mid-century Associationism. It then explores reading and writing surfaces in The Moonstone as sites where Carpenter’s “acquired habitudes of thought” play out – particularly in the passages around Ezra Jennings. In the novel, those who believe that they can accurately read bodies tend to inflict violence on those bodies. Characters like Gabriel Betteredge, who treats Robinson Crusoe as a divine text, ignore lived suffering because they believe that they have the right to interpret bodies and texts as they see fit. At the same time, marginalised bodies are harmed in order that the middle-class, male bodies can learn to improve their reading – and thereby their character.
Introduction: Roman Law and Maritime Commerce
Authors: Candy Peter , Ferrándiz Emilia Mataix
Published: January 2023

This chapter introduces readers to the two of the major contributions to the history of Roman commercial law (Paul Huvelin and Jean Rougé). The chapter examines some of the past approaches to the study of Roman commercial law and examines the potential and pitfalls of adopting an interdisciplinary approach.
Roman Documentation Concerning Shipping in Bulk
Authors: Purpura Gianfranco
Published: January 2023

This chapter analyses the important role of documentation in the world of Roman commerce, with a particular focus upon shipping in bulk. The author makes an extensive use of epigraphic, archaeological, papyrological and legal evidence to address how merchandise was identified, accounted, and managed by carriers. It also includes the evidence of samples or deigmata to complement all the wide variety of evidence previously analysed.
The Hidden Half , or the Temporal and Collective Politics of Counter-Memory
Authors: Saljoughi Sara
Published: January 2023

Sara Saljoughi’s contribution »The Hidden Half, or the Temporal and Collective Politics of Counter-Memory« focuses on Tahmineh Milani’s ﬁlm Nīmah-yi Panhān/The Hidden Half (2001) on the delicate situation of a former activist from the period immediately following the revolution. The protagonist’s dissident past, which has been completely hidden from her husband, a prominent judge, »allegorizes the repression of Marxist revolutionary discourse« (p. 33) before and after 1979. Saljoughi discovers in the ﬁlm a network of multidirectional, transgenerational, and transtemporal counter-memories and carves. She shows how the ﬁlm positions the counter-memories at the intersection of class and gender (a) by presenting the intimate sphere of the upper-class couple as a protected space where memories become possible, which in turn transform the boundaries and possibilities of this very space, and (b) by criticising the »ways in which women’s issues were overlooked or marginalized in leftist movements« (p. 41). In addition to this, Saljoughi undertakes a rehabilitation of the ﬁlm genre ›melodrama‹, for it was not least Milani’s use of melodrama elements that led to the ﬁlm being marginalized also in the eyes of ﬁlm scholarship.
Different Time, Different Space: Filmic Forms of Counter-Memory in Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy
Authors: Holl Ute
Published: January 2023

Ute Holl examines Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy in terms of historiography, using genealogical procedures. Taking the cue from Nietzsche and Foucault, she argues that memory is a matter of constant translation, negotiating power relations as well as individual forms of resistance and resilience. It is a changing order whose content is shaped according to cultural techniques, discursive formations, and, above all, prevalent media systems. Memories are made of intrinsic connections between people, techniques, and practices. Holl shows how Kiarostami is examining grand metaphors through very material aspects in confronting different cultural techniques of remembering. In negotiating the power inherent in things, such as the door and the pathway, or in the clash of different media, such as scripture and sounds, cinema and television, or in opposing particular spaces such as a stage and a ﬁlmset, Kiarostami’s ﬁlms bring out moments where memory as a collective or individual cultural technique falters and fails. In such moments of irritation and disturbances, a counter-memory makes its sudden appearance and affects what can be remembered, on screen and beyond.
Esposito’S Transversalities
Authors: Genosko Gary
Published: January 2023

This chapter approaches Esposito’s work through Guattari’s distinction between vertical, horizontal and transversal. A transversal is a line of flight that crosses between different levels, moving in at least two opposite directions at once, and bearing a mutational force of becoming. The chapter applies Guattari’s distinction, made with reference to the organization of relationships in institutions, to the non-linearity of Esposito’s work, especially Third Person. Guattari’s term aligns with Esposito’s own concept and practice of “diagonal” reading. The chapter also takes up transversality with reference to concepts in Esposito’s work, for example the impersonal as a transversal that cuts across the circle of the person.
Third Person And Fourth Person: Esposito And Blanchot
Authors: Schuster Joshua
Published: January 2023

In several books, Roberto Esposito draws heavily on Maurice Blanchot’s work to develop the notion of a “third person,” a figure of impersonality or neutrality that would escape the binary of personhood/depersonalization that structures the law and philosophical concepts of selfhood. Blanchot often viewed impersonality or the neutral as a feature of literary characters in limit-extreme or “last human” situations. I provide a close reading of passages from Blanchot’s The Last Man (1957) to reflect on what happens at the limit-experience of characterization itself. However, these literary examples from Blanchot do not translate evidently into guidelines for an everyday liveable “third” or impersonal personhood that Esposito estimates would follow from an “affirmative biopolitics.” Instead, I discuss what might be instances of “fourth personhood,” where personification is extended to objects or used in situations where the limits of personhood are not clear. These cases of “fourth” personhood point towards a more ecological sense of how personifications can be distributed across landscapes, taking up Esposito’s challenge to imagine a future sense of person and politics that is not subordinated to the logic of a controlling biopolitics.
The Secret Architecture of Shakespeare's Sonnets
Authors: Monte Steven
Published: January 2023

This book makes two main claims: that Shakespeare’s Sonnets contains intricate hidden organization, and that Shakespeare was far more engaged with other poets and with pursuing a career as a poet than is generally assumed. The first claim presupposes that the organizational schemes have been hiding in plain view for over four centuries. The second is literary-historical and biographical, because it speaks to Shakespeare’s cultural milieu and personal ambitions. Although ‘hidden’ and ‘hiding’ may create the impression that Shakespeare wrote in code, the fundamental reason why his schemes have gone unnoticed is historical: within decades of his death, conventions of sonnet sequences became unfamiliar, and they have largely remained so since. The first claim might also be said to follow from the second, because the poets with whom Shakespeare engages most intensely wrote the most complex sequences. In proving these claims, the book approaches Sonnets as three distinct and related things: as a free-standing sequence, as a sonnet sequence among other poets’ sequences, and as a work in Shakespeare’s career as a poet.
The Basic Scheme
Authors: Monte Steven
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses the pyramidal organization of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In its basic form, the scheme invites us to see groups of poems that decrease in size incrementally: 17 sonnets, 16 sonnets, 15 sonnets, and so on. These groups are the pyramid’s “steps” or “stories.” Topics include a discussion of Sonnets 55, 81, and 107 as a precisely positioned trio of poems and as an allegory of a monument that will outlast the pyramids; pyramids in Renaissance culture; Alastair Fowler’s argument for Sonnets’ pyramidal organization and scholarly responses to his argument; analysis of the pyramid’s main features; possible sources for Shakespeare’s pyramid in Daniel’s Delia and The Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594) and the pirated edition of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591); and Shakespeare’s pyramidal structure and “notional structures” in Renaissance art, especially in architecture and formal gardens.
Poetic Rivalry in Late-Elizabethan England
Authors: Monte Steven
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on Shakespeare’s poetic milieu and the rival-poet series. The first half details the “poetry scene” in late-Elizabethan England, a literary marketplace in which rivalry thrived. Particular attention is paid to the 1590s and ways in which poets established careers as poets. The second half centres on “the rival-poet problem” in Sonnets: whether and to what extent the poetic competition alluded to in Sonnet 76–87 is based on historical people and events. Eventually three candidates for the rival are discussed in detail (Barnes, Chapman, and Daniel), along with the interpretive consequences of the rivalry context. The chapter concludes with a detailed reading of Sonnet 87 in relation to Daniel’s poetry.
The Fair-Youth Sonnets, Part 2
Authors: Monte Steven
Published: January 2023

This chapter continues the analysis of pyramid steps in the fair-youth section of Sonnets, focusing on internal organisation and on verbal and schematic allusions. More specifically, it analyses the post-99 sonnets, treating them as poems that are written after a hiatus in writing. In these sonnets, the poet attempts to reconcile with the youth, eventually proposing a ‘marriage of true minds’ to settle their relationship. In these sonnets, references are increasingly made to other poets and to the completion of the sequence. Shakespeare’s ‘marriage plot’ is compared to that of Spenser’s Amoretti. The chapter ends with some discussion of the ‘vulgar scandal’ sometimes associated with Shakespeare and such sonnets as 111 and 112.
Historical Style and the Man of Letters: Macaulay and Carlyle
Authors: Fermanis Porscha
Published: January 2023

Focusing on the reception history of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England and Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution, this chapter rehabilitates prose style as part of a technical discourse that reflects and mediates the domain of historical knowledge production. More specifically, it argues that the stylistic innovations associated with review essays opened official history up to ‘the more visceral language of journalism’, as well as to more idiomatic and anecdotal styles than those sanctioned by the decorous prose of neoclassical history. At the same time, Macaulay and Carlyle’s status as ‘amateur’ reviewers and essayists determined their exclusion from the emerging specialist field of academic history. The chapter concludes, first, that stylistic virtuosity did not negate the gradual and ongoing process of historical specialisation in the period; and second, that we require a looser definition of the ‘professional’ historian in the nineteenth century, one that is detached from the attainment of academic or institutional positions, and which is able to accommodate various historical styles, from the neoclassical and Anglo-British style to Carlyle’s ‘Gothic and Gaelic confection’.
Historical Reviewing: Specialisation and Periodical Culture
Authors: Fermanis Porscha
Published: January 2023

This chapter considers questions relating to the occupational identity of the ‘historian’ in nineteenth-century periodical culture, focusing on the years from 1820-50 before the onset of dedicated historical review journals. In analysing reviews of historical texts in the Edinburgh Review and other organs of ‘higher journalism’ such as the Quarterly Review and the Athenaeum, it demonstrates that changes in historical methodology were intimately connected to the praxis, marketing, and (gendered) reception of written history. Far from being incidental to more bureaucratic and institutional endeavours to define the identity of the historical profession from the 1850s onwards, essayists and reviewers were central to the specialisation, masculinisation, and professionalisation of historical discourse. Book reviews and essays can therefore help us to recover dynamic ‘modes of emergence’ in both periodical and historiographical culture, and to rethink the nineteenth-century historical field as one that developed gradually from within a commercial knowledge industry rather than as one inherently divided between amateurs and professionals
Resonant Bodies in Contemporary European Art Cinema
Authors: Talijan Emilija
Published: January 2023

What does it mean to exist, in our experience of cinema, according to listening? How do sound and ‘noise’ reconfigure relations between spectators and screens, and by extension, spectators and their worlds? How do films raise questions about the ethics and politics of listening to different bodies?
Resonant Bodies answers these questions through an analysis of films by Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, Tony Gatlif, Arnaud des Pallières, Lars von Trier and Peter Strickland. These post-millennial European directors have worked with sound in ways that resist the full-definition and perfect hearing offered by Dolby technology. Instead, they have privileged ‘noise’ – sounds that take us to the limit of what we can hear – in a move that foregrounds the body on screen and constructs spectators as listening bodies.
Conclusion
Authors: Talijan Emilija , Talijan Emilija
Published: January 2023

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
A Poetics Of The Doppelgänger: Beckett As Self-Translator
Authors: Hulle Dirk Van
Published: January 2023

In Damned to Fame (1996), James Knowlson duly pointed out that Beckett’s decision to start writing in French did not coincide with the end of the Second World War because he already wrote in French before the war. In Beckett’s French poems of 1937-39 there is a poem that evokes the scene of the poem “Der Doppelgänger” by Heinrich Heine, set to music by Franz Schubert. This chapter examines how this theme recurs throughout Beckett’s bilingual work as a key to understanding his poetics of self-translation. Starting from an analysis of this early self-translation, this chapter develops the argument that Beckett not only thematizes the notion of the doppelgänger in several of his works – by means of self-reflexive images as in the mirlitonnade ‘rentrer’ or by means of character relationships such as Murphy and Mr Endon, Watt and Sam, Mercier and Camier, Molloy and Moran, O and E, and other pseudo-couples – but also enacts this motif of self-watching and self-consciousness by means of the act of self-translation. This process of self-translation and its enactment of the doppelgänger motif are analysed genetically by means of the drafts of Beckett’s translations in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.
Introduction
Authors: Alexander Neal
Published: January 2023

Drawing upon recent work in the new modernist studies, the Introduction offers a sustained critical engagement with recent theorisations of late modernism. Noting that the three decades following the end of the Second World War saw the publication of dozens of key poetic texts by second-generation modernists, it argues for a revised periodisation of late modernism that accounts for its living on well into the late twentieth century. It also argues that late modernist poetry is distinctive for the complexity of the geographical imaginations to which it gives expression, particularly through a concern for the poetics of place. Where high modernism is essentially an art of cities, especially metropolitan centres, late modernist poets often develop profound material and imaginative engagements with local, marginal, and non-metropolitan places.
David Jones: The Sites of History
Authors: Alexander Neal
Published: January 2023

This chapter argues that David Jones’s profound historical sense is grounded in and given expression by a geographical imagination that foregrounds the concepts of place, site, and locality. For instance, his pessimistic, anti-modern historical vision finds powerful expression through the spatial trope of the waste land, which recur across his oeuvre. Jones contrasts the alienation and decadence of metropolitan modernity with the integrity and authenticity of local cultures, particularly via a series of antitheses between Roman imperialism and Celtic tradition, urban and rural spaces, masculine and feminine principles. However, close attention to the language and forms of Jones’s reveals such oppositions to be profoundly unstable, while his engagements with the matter of Britain acknowledge and draw creative impetus from its cultural difference and diversity. Nowhere is this clearer than through his poetry’s profound but also deeply conflicted imaginative alignments with Wales, a country that he regarded as his homeland and yet from which he also felt irremediably displaced by his circumstances of birth and upbringing.
W. S. Graham: Between Places
Authors: Alexander Neal
Published: January 2023

Born in Greenock, Scotland, W. S. Graham spent most of his life at the other end of Britain, in South-west Cornwall. This chapter argues that experiences of displacement crucially shape his poetics of place, for memories of Clydeside and its hinterlands infuse many of the poems he wrote in West Penwith. Moreover, a distinctive feature of his poetry is the way in which it moves imaginatively between different places, collapsing spatial and temporal distances in the condensed geographies of language and the printed page. Especially in his later work, Graham finds suggestive correspondences between the landscapes, seascapes, and industrial histories of Clydeside and Cornwall, without eliding their differences. His poetry also moves fluently between representations of real places that are familiar and imagined or constructed spaces in which he stages encounters with the unknown.
Charles Olson’s Mappemunde
Authors: Alexander Neal
Published: January 2023

This chapter argues that Charles Olson’s sprawling late modernist epic, The Maximus Poems (1960-75) is informed by a profound preoccupation with geography that is focused upon a particular place: the port city of Gloucester, Massachusetts and the neighbouring peninsula of Cape Ann. The deep history of Gloucester that Olson undertakes in the first volume of his text, focusing upon the city’s origins as a colonial settlement in the early seventeenth century, is a necessary prelude to the more expansive and fragmentary mytho-historical parallels that he draws between places in the Eastern Mediterranean and the North Atlantic in volumes two and three. Moreover, Olson’s fascination navigators’ charts, sea voyages, and westward migrations in The Maximus Poems suggests that we might read his text as a map of the world – a late modernist mappamundi – that has been made by the restless wanderings of what he calls ‘Western man’.
Seriality, Culture Industry, and Digital-Era Popular Culture
Authors: Brinker Felix
Published: January 2023

This chapter situates the book’s understanding of seriality within a broader theory of commercial entertainment. To do so, it develops a new reading of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s theory of the culture industry that can account for the centrality of serial repetition and variation within capitalist cultural production. The chapter then maps central tenets of the ideology of engagement that orients much of commercial screen entertainment today. For this purpose, it reads Jenkins’s work on digital-era participatory culture against Boltanski and Chiapello’s study of The New Spirit of Capitalism. The chapter then proceeds with a discussion of recent conceptualizations of digital-era capitalism which, I argue, can offer a much-needed qualification for some of Jenkins’s claims about digital-era popular culture. The chapter ends by considering the relationship between superhero blockbusters’ enduring popularity and the technological infrastructure of the digital era.
Superhero Narratives between Seriality and Political Meaning
Authors: Brinker Felix
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines the narrative parameters of the superhero genre in greater detail. Drawing on work by Umberto Eco, Shane Denson, and others, it suggests that most superhero narratives combine linear and non-linear types of seriality. The chapter also argues that the genre’s longevity is indebted to the adaptability and flexibility of its basic storytelling formula. Finally, it suggests that this formula – which is itself a serial principle rather than a fixed pattern – informs a shared political imaginary that enables and limits the kinds of messages that can be articulated within the genre.
Short Films as Aesthetic Freedom
Authors: Bernini Emilio
Published: January 2023

This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the short films in Lucrecia Martel’s cinema recover the possibility (typical of the short films of the historical avant-garde and experimental cinemas) of an image that is not regimented in perceptual, narrative and production terms. Lucrecia Martel’s short films are autotelic productions, emancipated from the commercial and narrative impositions of other film formats, such as feature films and television series. The short film can aspire to, or contains in nuce, a kind of aesthetic radicality that is still possible in the very era of post-radicality. In her short films, there are possibilities that are not in the feature films: female freedom (Dead King); a minority language policy as resistance to the intelligibility of the story and the proposal of a perception that does not depend on the narrative (New Argirópolis); the autotelism of the short film, alien to the demands of authorship, the market and the expectations of the critics (Muta); playful experimentation without purpose and without authorial features (Fish).