bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Balada triste de trompeta: Of Ghosts and Clowns
Authors: Yarza Alejandro
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus, Alex de La Iglesia, 2010) nominated for fifteen Goya awards, the most prestigious Spanish film awards. Balada is a self-conscious kitsch re-elaboration of the traditional theme of the sad clown, a traditional motif of kitsch aesthetics. It traces the protagonist´s transformation from sad clown to serial killer against the background of Spanish popular culture—particularly popular music and Television programs—a pseudo-official kitsch culture closely monitored by Franco’s censors, whose ideological contradictions are exposed in the process. In Hitchcock-like fashion, the film reaches its climax at the top of the gigantic cross at The Valley of the Fallen, Franco´s monumental mausoleum and his burial site. There the film symbolically reclaims Spain from Franco´s Kitsch, fascist grasp.
The Politics of Slavery
Authors: Brace Laura
Published: September 2018

This book asks what it means to describe someone as a slave and explores the political dimensions of that question. It argues against the search for a transhistorical and timeless definition of slavery, and offers a critical interrogation of the dominant liberal discourse on slavery from the Enlightenment to the present. It pays particular attention to the meanings of the slavery / freedom binary and to the connections between the past and the present in understanding ‘old’ and ‘new’ slavery. The book is about what it means to think about slavery as a historical process and as a political relation, both in the history of political thought and in present debates about trafficking and incarceration. It argues that we need to bring the concept of slavery back into our understandings of freedom, labour and belonging, and unravel the assumptions behind the meanings we ascribe to personhood, sub-personhood and humanity. From Aristotle and the idea of natural slavery, through Locke’s conception of civil society, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and J.S. Mill’s analogy of slavery and marriage to the discourse of modern abolition and the idea of trafficking as slavery, the book interrogates what it means to think about the idea of freedom as the opposite of slavery, and draws attention to the significance of the tensions, ambiguities and silences that surround that conception.
Aristotle and the Strangeness of Slaves
Authors: Brace Laura
Published: September 2018

This chapter focuses on Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, in particular the idea of the slave as a living tool. It explores psycho-ethical slavery, the entangled relations between political servitude and chattel slavery, the complications of manumission, and what it means not to be a slave. The chapter asks where the slave fits into the polis, and how Aristotle understands the relationship between slavery, citizenship and freedom. It goes on to explore his theory of the incompleteness of the slaves’ humanity and the significance of the idea that those who are ‘naturally’ slaves do not qualify for full personhood. In Aristotle’s theory, and in this chapter, slavery emerges as a complex set of social relations and as an unstable marker of both property and personhood. The chapter concludes by arguing that slavery has to be understood as a matter for politics, and is always concerned with boundary-setting and keeping.
Empires of Property, Properties of Empire
Authors: Brace Laura
Published: September 2018

This chapter focuses on the colonists’ claim to property in persons. It looks at the arguments of Kant, Diderot and Cuguano contesting the progressive narrative of civilization and refinement and condemning the ways in which the European spirit of conquest created barbarity and ignorance, and allowed the process of commodification to develop. The chapter explores the contested discourse of improvement and what it meant to be ‘fit for freedom’. The complications of the debates over the abolition of the slave trade in the 1790s show us some of entanglements of the relationship between property, slavery, morality and the law. The unjust and uncertain tenure that owners held in their slaves undermined the stability of their landed property in the metropolitan centre, but also drew attention to the uncertain tenure that slaves held in themselves. The radical antislavery of the Haitian revolution was itself a contest over land and ownership, which at the same time as affirming the enslaved people as agents of change and subjects in their own right, also drew attention to the fuzzy boundaries and unclear content of the categories of slavery and freedom which are the subject of this chapter.
The Subjection of Women: Loopholes of Retreat?
Authors: Brace Laura
Published: September 2018

This chapter focuses on gender and slavery, and in particular on the rhetoric of thinking about wives as slaves in both the pre and post abolition contexts, and in the different and parallel conversations about empire that went on through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the process of transforming humanity into moral beings, gender as a register of difference played out in complex ways that troubled the concept of personhood as a status and redrew some of the boundaries of enslavability. The complications of home, the ‘collapsed geography’ of the plantation household and the contested meanings of the private /public divide require us to think about the power relations within the household, between women and men, but also between women and women living in constant contact with one another. Through a critical analysis of Wollstonecraft, Thompson and Mill and the analogy of marriage and slavery, and of the characterisation of white women as the survivors of slavery, this chapter argues for the importance of looking at the disavowals and occlusions of those narratives, and thinking instead about the indebtedness of freedom to notions of property, possession and exchange that are predicated on race as well as gender.
Trafficking and Slavery: A Place of No Return?
Authors: Brace Laura
Published: September 2018

This chapter seeks to interrogate what it means to claim that the brutally exploited and the radically excluded are the property of others, and to understand the victims of trafficking as slaves. The current discourse around trafficking and slavery brings us back to the limits of enslavability, and questions of self-possession, labour power, race and property that structure the meanings of slavery and freedom. This chapter critically interrogates the trafficking-as-slavery discourse and the ways in which women who migrate for work or who sell sex are not seen as engaged in the market as market actors, but are placed outside the pathways and webs of trade unless they are deceived or coerced. The female figure of the migrant in the anti-trafficking campaigns is defined by the violence she has suffered, and she is positioned outside the labour market and its social connections, and outside the ethical life of the family. The underlying suggestion is that labour migration is always risky or reckless for women, and that their inviolability is always threatened by moving abroad, so that ‘the safest option is to remain home’.
Glimpses of Slavery
Authors: Brace Laura
Published: September 2018

Bringing the slaves back into our conversations about freedom and modernity, and giving slavery a history and a politics of its own, alters our conceptual frames much more radically than the discourse of new slavery allows. Racial and gendered domination and violence, and the production of vulnerability, are structured and constituted through the complicated pasts, presents and futures of slavery. The freedom and status of personhood and its roots in property, possession and exchange can only be understood through the lens of slavery and the uneven distribution of the category of the human. In order to understand how it is that our ideas of universal human freedom can separate some people whose liberties matter from others who are not to included in the category of full personhood, we need to step into the space between personhood, subpersonhood and humanity and confront the ways in which the zone of freedom is rooted in property rights, and in the codification of persons as property.
Georges Perec’s Enduring Presence in the Visual Arts
Authors: Ribière Mireille
Published: September 2018

A former student of Roland Barthes, Perec rejected the dogmatism of the French avant-garde and the oppressive nature of theory in the late 1960s and 1970s, while dismissing the myth of the inspired artist and upholding those aspects of modernism that enabled art to assert itself as constructed intentionality. When he reconsidered the issue of the subject in its relationship to history and society, to the real, and to time and space, he managed to steer clear of expressivity, psychology and conventional mimesis. The co-existence of autobiographical and sociological concerns with formal constraints that both challenge and integrate the notion of chance, as well as his particular brand of formal pre-composition, which does not exclude humour, playfulness and immediacy, constitute further aspects of his enduring presence in the visual arts. This chapter argues that Perec practised literature both as a craft and as a form of conceptual art, and examines how the fundamental questions he raised, the conversations he initiated and the various methodologies he proposed have made, and continue to make him relevant to contemporary artists.
Invoking the Oracle: Perec, Algorithms and Conceptual Writing
Authors: Wolff Mark
Published: September 2018

Although Georges Perec did not make use of computers in his writing, he employed algorithmic processes for structuring various formal and thematic elements of his texts. As a member of the Oulipo, he worked with others to develop new ways to write using constraints based on mathematics. In considering the effect of computational methods on writing, the Oulipo wanted to avoid the influence of chance without devising procedures that automated the writing process. Perec addressed this challenge by resorting to what he and other Oulipians, drawing on Lucretius, called the clinamen, a kind of randomizing function that promotes creativity through unpredictability. If constraints can be applied with a machine to writing (and many of the constraints used by Perec can be easily coded), the clinamen disrupts this computation and forces the writer to make unanticipated choices. Purposely thwarting the determinism of mechanical calculation, Perec’s irregular use of constraints on writing invokes what Alan Turing called an oracle, a resource outside the machine for performing uncomputable operations. Unlike a computer scientist who seeks to eliminate any need for an oracle by developing sufficient algorithms, Perec manipulates algorithms erratically in order to intervene in subverted computations and provide revelatory solutions that escape the machine.
The Architecture of Constraint and Forgetting
Authors: Kaji-O’Grady Sandra
Published: September 2018

Georges Perec’s importance for architecture is twofold. First, Perec was interested in architectural space and the organization of the city. In his book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Perec attempted a systematic documentation of buildings, of apartment dwellers and the streets of Paris. Architectural students are referred to Species of Spaces because the techniques of observing or ‘stalking’ the ordinary that Perec developed in that text yield significant insights into how built space is composed and used. Perec’s stubborn empiricism, his attention to things and spaces-as-they-are is a useful antidote to much of the sensationalist and apocalyptic writing about the city, including that of his friend, Paul Virilio. Second, Perec approached writing with the deliberation of an architect approaching the problem of design. He established geometrical frameworks, numerical constraints and structural parameters. Perec’s practice of working with predetermined constraints should be a useful model for architects yet there is little evidence of engagement with this, despite the current practice of parametric architecture. This chapter will address architecture’s engagement with Perec, both in terms of what has been and what is yet to come.
Georges Perec: A Player’s Manual
Authors: Apperley Thomas
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores the well-established attribute of playfulness in Georges Perec’s work, a quality exemplified in his 1978 novel, Life A User’s Manual. In Perec’s oeuvre, Life is the culmination of experimentation with writing through play, games, rules, constraints and contingency. The themes and structure of the novel resonate with contemporary discussions of player agency, through the creative use of contingency and constraint in relation to an algorithmic structure, and this attribute of playfulness and experimentation in his work suggests an unintended and enduring afterlife for Perec’s work in Game Studies and critical literature on digital games. Perec’s work also flags an important and enduring issue for Game Studies: the contentious role that the digitally coded algorithm has in shaping player agency. This chapter begins by fleshing out the contexts from which Perec’s attentiveness to the ludic arose: his childhood and early experiences; his day job as an archivist and database designer; and his experimentation with constrained writing through his association with Oulipo. The chapter then proceeds to examine the writing process he used in Life, and how these processes are emphasised through the themes of the novel, particularly the failed attempts by the novel’s protagonist to create an overarching, programmatic vision of life.
The Afterlives of a Writer
Authors: Bellos David
Published: September 2018

When Perec died in 1982 he had published only 17 books and around 50 shorter pieces in periodicals and collective volumes. Over the past thirty years a dozen more books under Perec’s name have appeared—an unfinished novel, collections of published and unpublished articles and exercises, and in fine, a previously unpublished work written in youth and which the author himself believed lost. The ‘Perec corpus’ that we now read is therefore substantially larger and rather different from what Perec himself could have conceptualized as his contribution to literature. This chapter describes the evolution of the corpus over the last thirty years and seeks to understand what the ‘afterlife’ of a modern writer consists of—not just in terms of reception, use and appropriation, but in the very dynamic of retrospective publication.
Gothic Monstrosity: Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and the Trope of the Bestial Indian
Authors: Yao Christine
Published: September 2018

This chapter reads the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the American gothic’s monstrous tropes, concluding with 1799 novel Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown, acclaimed as the pioneer of American gothic. If for Brown the American equivalent to Gothic castles are the perils of the western wilderness, Native Americans are the monstrous equivalent of that setting’s mythical chimera. Both inhuman and antagonistic Other, for Brown the Indian, at once integral and liminal, is a quintessential element of the American gothic genre.
Doppelgamers: Video Games and Gothic Choice
Authors: Hancock Michael
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores gothic elements encoded into the narrative and the very act of choice that govern video games. These elements both reinforce and expose the lie of rational choice that undergirds the neoliberal economy that saw games rise to media dominance. Videogames may be simulacra, but not just virtual realities: they are the uncanny symptom of how the neoliberal subject recognizes its own lack of identity. Games are thus the gothic double of the Enlightenment self, the prime image of the hollow American neoliberal consumer mass-marketed as self-fashioning individual.
Screening the American Gothic: Celluloid Serial Killers in American Popular Culture
Authors: Fhlainn Sorcha Ní
Published: September 2018

This chapter situates the American gothic in post-1960 cinema and TV by exploring the distinctly American lineage of the modern serial killer. Landmark films chart seismic shifts in post-classical American cinema after the success of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973) to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), American Psycho (2000), and Dexter (2006-13). This Drawing upon the influence of real/reel American serial killers (Ed Gein, Ted Bundy), this chapter argues that the serial killer embodies the counter-narrative American Dream: the consumerist and consumption-driven American nightmare.
Consumed out of the Good Land: The American Zombie, Geopolitics and the Post-War World
Authors: Blake Linnie
Published: September 2018

This chapter argues that post-WWII zombie narratives offer a terrifying allegory of national selfhood. The traumatic dislocations of post-war geopolitics range from 1950s’ fear of communist infiltration and nuclear annihilation to Vietnam’s neo-colonialist catastrophe, and from 1970s’ consumer fetishism and economic collapse to the contemporary dominance of globalization. In the zombie horde’s total disregard for national borders, reducing survivors to traumatized sub-humans huddled in the wreckage of civil society, we see the gothic interrogation of our current economic problems, specifically the transformative impact of global neoliberalism.
Talking Back: Voice in Screwball Comedy
Authors: Wilkins Heidi
Published: September 2018

Film had always been accompanied by sound in one form or another, but the ‘talkies’ introduced the prospect of a wider variety of film genres within mainstream narrative cinema that had not been possible during the silent era: genres that were reliant on language and verbalisation rather than mime and gesture. This development marked a change in film performance and acting style. As noted by Robert B. Ray: ‘Sound and the new indigenous acting style encouraged the flourishing of genres that silence and grandiloquent acting had previously hindered: the musical, the gangster film, the detective story, screwball comedy and humour that depended on language rather than slapstick.’ Although silent slapstick comedy remained in Hollywood, championed by the Marx Brothers, among others, the ‘talkies’ created great demand for a new generation of actors, those who could speak; it also generated a near-panic when these proved to be not that easily obtainable. Writers and directors of screwball comedy seized this opportunity, recognising that the comedy genre needed to incorporate the possibilities offered by synchronised sound.
Brothers in Arms: Masculinity and the Vietnam War Movie
Authors: Wilkins Heidi
Published: September 2018

The general perception of Hollywood at this time is that studios were reluctant to make films about Vietnam because the war was so publicly contentious. Furthermore, the industry itself was still in economic crisis and attempting to appeal to younger viewers, many of whom were largely opposed to America’s involvement in the war. Drawing on Tom Englehardt to explain the impact of the Vietnam War on the American public, Steve Neale notes that the ‘defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam in the early 1970s challenged the tenets of America’s “victory culture” [and] ensured that its participation in the war remained deeply controversial’. It was, therefore, a complex task to find effective ways in which to portray this conflict. The first solution was found in the mode of allegory. At this time, a number of successful films made attempts at portraying the underlying anxieties about the conflict through allegorical depiction and indirect association.
Girl Talk: The Postmodern Female Voice in Chick Flicks
Authors: Wilkins Heidi
Published: September 2018

In this final chapter, I revisit my discussion of the female voice in mainstream cinema to explore the aural representation of women in contemporary chick flicks. In examining this category of films, it is clear they have some evolutionary links with the screwball comedy genre discussed in Chapter 1. This is evident in the female characters we encounter in modern chick flicks who, like their screwball predecessors, are often strong, confident and quick-witted, engaging in verbal battles to achieve their ‘happily ever after’ either with their lead male character or with fellow female characters, or sometimes with both.
Organising the Library: The Books on the Shelves
Authors: Hirschler Konrad
Published: September 2018

The second chapter discusses the thematic profile of the books held in the Ashrafiya. The teaching in this institution was focused on Koran recitation and its patron al-Ashraf has been depicted in modern scholarship as a rather narrow-minded Sunni ruler. Consequently, one might expect a run-off-the-mill diet of books emanating from a small number of disciplines. The chapter challenges such assumptions and shows that books relating to disciplines such as Koran, ḥadīth and even law are small in number. Rather we find a broad range of topics covered, including the antique knowledge (e.g. Aristotle and Galen), medicine, pharmacology, pre-Islamic poetry, theology and mirror for princes. This is also reflected in the content of those works that were held in multiple copies: the library’s most popular book were the Maqāmāt by al-Ḥarīrī with 15 copies. The chapter is also challenge dominating assumptions about madrasa-libraries with regard to sectarian issues (the library had many Shiite works) and issues of high culture vs low culture (it contained many ‘low-culture’ works).
The Ashrafīya Catalogue: Edition
Authors: Hirschler Konrad
Published: September 2018

The diplomatic edition of the catalogue’s unique manuscript aims at representing to some extent its organisation and the edition thus includes information such as line breaks and the various rubrics that the scribe used. For the sake of legibility, the orthography has been standardised to bring it into a form familiar to modern readers. The text is thus reproduced with full diacritical marks, although they are rather rarely used in the manuscript. The organisation of the catalogue according to alphabet, size and themes is indicated by the catalogue’s writer in display script and indicated in the edition by setting these structural terms in bold.
The Claims of Kinship: Humanitarian Ideals at the Century’s End
Authors: Stokes John
Published: September 2018

This Chapter examines the self-styled late nineteenth-century humanitarians and their formal organization, ‘The Humanitarian League’. It stresses the visionary zeal of the movement, and examines the wide range of topics discussed in the League’s two main journals, such as vegetarianism and vivisection, pointing up the tensions and paradoxes in humanitarian thinking at the time. It concludes by noting the holistic nature of the humanitarian vision and its echoes in later phenomena such as eco-criticism and the green movement.
‘Truth About Russia’: Russia in Britain at the Fin de Siècle
Authors: Vaninskaya Anna
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines British cultural interest in Russia at the end of the century. It documents the variety of ways in which the British came to know Russia at the time, drawing attention to an obsession with the melodrama of Russian politics, typically mythologised as a stand-off between the autocratic Tzarist regime and the Nihilist revolutionaries. It surveys a wide range of Nihilist inspired literature, looking in detail at the contrasting responses to Russia to be found in the works of W. T. Stead, and those of the Russian exile Sergey Stepniak.
When a Bestselling Author and a West End Actress Made a Spiritualist Performance: Collaboration, Networks and Theatre at the Fin de Siècle
Authors: Hindson Catherine
Published: September 2018

This chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of the performance of a piece of avant-garde drama to highlights the prominent role of women in theatrical culture at the time, as both dramatists and actresses, and the professional opportunities that were then opening for them. It also shows the importance of a growing celebrity culture, and the complexity of the interactions between theatre, politics, religion, gender and theatrical production. It shows that even avant-garde theatre, concerned with such archetypal fin-de-siècle concerns as the occult and mysticism, were still deeply implicated in, and made possible by, a growing leisure industry.
Intergenerational Collaboration and Conflict: Women’s Periodicals at the Fin de Siècle
Authors: Easley Alexis
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines conflicts between different generations of women in the late decades of the nineteenth century as played out in the popular press, including the burgeoning market for women’s magazines. It shows how print culture, including in new feminist magazines, constructed and then exploited divisions between the ‘old lady’, ‘new woman’ and ‘new girl’, often for the purposes of advertising new products. It shows how at this time the modern woman was represented in the periodical press as a consumer and advertising commodity, as a sensationalist figure of controversy, as well as a symbol of the new age.
The Psychoanalysis of Sense
Authors: Collett Guillaume
Published: September 2018

Guillaume Collett questions to what extent we can locate Deleuze within the Lacanian School during the late-1960s, prior to Guattari. In so doing, he offers a new, integrated reading of Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969) by understanding it as a ‘psychoanalysis of sense’, and gives a new interpretation of Deleuze’s conception of philosophy itself. The Psychoanalysis of Sense shows that Deleuze was not merely aware of the debates animating the Lacanian School during the 1960s: he sought to contribute to them. Emphasising his appropriation of the work of post-Lacanian Serge Leclaire, Collett shows how Deleuze constructed a more singular and immanent theory of the linguistic structure of the unconscious – granting the erogenous body a larger structuring role.
Introduction
Authors: Collett Guillaume
Published: September 2018

While subtitled ‘Deleuze and the Lacanian School’, the primary aim of the present book is to provide a close reading of Deleuze’s 1969 work The Logic of Sense faithful to the text. This presents an immediate difficulty in that the text is itself highly fragmentary, being comprised of thirty-four miniature chapters or ‘series’ whose interrelations are never fully spelled out – indeed, the form and content of the work aligned, the text’s series are ‘nonsense’ yet collectively as a ‘structure’ generate sense as their superficial (yet not insignificant) by-product. The wager of the present book is that ‘sense’ can be made of The Logic of Sense by approaching this structure as a psychoanalysis of sense. Although I will be primarily focusing on the latter portion, the so-called ‘dynamic genesis’ which provides a psychoanalytical account of language acquisition, by reading it in parallel with a number of the book’s earlier series I will show how psychoanalysis underpins the larger project.
The Speculative Univocity of Being and Language: From the Verb to Univocity
Authors: Collett Guillaume
Published: September 2018

There are many ways to view the genesis of sense in The Logic of Sense. One way that has been emphasised in the secondary literature is as the emergence of consciousness from the body’s affects.1 There is, however, a more interesting and important genesis at stake beneath this one. If the first genesis takes us from the verb to the logical proposition and empirical consciousness, the second off-piste route goes from the verb to the univocity of being. As Deleuze writes, playing on the literal meaning of the scholastic term univocity2 – one voice (voce) – ‘The univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice, that it is said.’3
A Tribute to Sir Tom Devine
Authors: MacKenzie John M.
Published: September 2018

No Scottish historian has ever had as prominent a profile as Tom Devine who is widely considered to be the most influential modern historian of his generation. This chapter provides a succinct overview of Devine’s career and research interests into modern Scotland and the global significance of its diaspora, and includes an assessment from Christopher Smout, Scotland’s Historiographer Royal. It concludes with an overview of Devine’s personality, character, and plans for the future.
Introduction Global Migrations: The Scottish Diaspora since 1600
Authors: McCarthy Angela , MacKenzie John M.
Published: September 2018

This introduction provides an overview of the remarkably long timescale of Scottish migrations from 1600, suggesting that during that period an estimated 3.6 million people left Scotland. It provides a historiographical review of the issues associated with this migration and examines debates about such concepts as ethnicity, diaspora and culture. There are also discussions of reciprocal influences upon Scotland, about investment, and comparative studies, for example with the Irish. Ethnic survival at the periphery is seen as being about the dislocations of dispersal, the maintenance of boundaries, and orientation to home.
‘Have the Scotch no Claim upon the Cherokees?’ Scots, Indians and Scots Indians in the American South
Authors: Calloway Colin G.
Published: September 2018

This chapter traces intermarriages between Scots and Indians and the families they established in the matrilineal indigenous societies of the American Southeast. It examines the roles played by Scots in the deerskin trade and in the British Indian department, and by their children in Creek and Cherokee history. It reconstructs the historic connections between Scots and Cherokees that endured after the Cherokees were forced west by US policies of Indian removal.
Understanding Scottishness among Sojourners, Settlers and Descendants in Hong Kong and New Zealand
Authors: Watson Iain
Published: September 2018

Identities and their construction are often complex processes for migrants who in an increasingly globalised and transnational world may have a number of identities upon which to draw. Mary Waters, researching white ethnic identity among multigenerational groups in suburban California, describes the choice as ‘a social process that is in flux . . . a dynamic and complex phenomenon’.1 Additionally, it is a process that can change dependent on age, time and environment. Nor is it based on a set of rules structured along primordial ancestral lines. This chapter seeks to evaluate identity selection and the use of Scottish identity or ‘Scottishness’ among Scottish migrants to New Zealand (labelled ‘settlers’) and Hong Kong (‘sojourners’) and the multigenerational descent group in New Zealand. It does so by deploying the responses generated by a small sample of 145 respondents who answered a complex questionnaire, circulated through the New Zealand Society of Genealogists Scottish Interest Group and the Hong Kong St Andrew’s Society, designed to identify potential oral history interviewees. These responses are supported by in-depth, semi-structured life-story oral history interviews.
Encountering an Imaginary Heritage: Roots Tourism and the Scottish Diaspora
Authors: Paul Tawny
Published: September 2018

Around the world, some 40 million people claim Scottish ancestry. Every year thousands of members of the Scottish diaspora travel to their imagined homeland. They come to Scotland to experience the culture of their ancestors and to walk in the places where their forebears walked. They come to Scotland because, like many diasporic populations around the globe, they imagine that their home is somewhere other than in the place they reside, and they travel in order to connect with their roots. Scotland is, of course, not the only country with a strong tradition of roots tourism. Cultural heritage trips, in which participants seek out an embodied experience of culture and connection, are part of a growing global fascination with heritage and genealogy. Nations with significant migration histories, including Israel and China, have, like Scotland, recognised the power inherent in their global communities and actively promote heritage tourism programmes.
Kelly Reichardt as Auteur
Authors: Hall E. Dawn
Published: September 2018

Referencing Laura Mulvey, Andre Bazin and Andrew Sarris, this chapter discusses auteur characteristics and explores how Kelly Reichardt is contributing to a definition of feminist avant-garde cinema through her production methods, content, and form. Reichardt offers a 21st century alternative to traditional mainstream cinematic ideologies and her filming style politicizes her cinematic form. While discussing differences between Hollywood and independent filmmaking practices, this chapter also posits alternatives to mainstream cinematic pleasure.
Precursor: River of Grass
Authors: Hall E. Dawn
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides an overview of River of Grass, Riechardt’s first feature film, production details via interviews, a close reading of the film with applications of Marxist-Feminist film theory, and an exploration of issues ranging from environmental concerns to the negation of heterosexual romance in a road movie genre. In contrast with her other features, River of Grass’s more overt feminist and experimental themes and gender role reversals align the film within an older feminist counter-cinematic tradition. Reichardt addresses theoretical film concepts such as the “male gaze” by emphasizing the female look and employs Godardian techniques to remind viewers they are watching a construction of reality.
Breakthrough: Wendy and Lucy
Authors: Hall E. Dawn
Published: September 2018

This chapter is a close reading of Wendy and Lucy, a film loosely based on the depictions of disaster victims and the perceived governmental failing to provide and protect those affected by Hurricane Katrina. It is Reichardt’s political statement about being homeless and female in America. Highlighting distribution details, the chapter explores the necessity of a micro-budget that dictate and contribute to many independent filmmakers’ aesthetics. The chapter discusses her use of “slow cinema,” ecofeminism, and the rejection of a capitalistic and patriarchal “American Dream.” Reichardt highlights the overlooked or marginalized in America: women, the working classes, and the poverty stricken. Influenced by the Italian Neorealists of the 1940s, the film addresses current issues of poverty juxtaposed with consumerism in America. Finally building on work of Anita Harris and Sherry Ortner’s analysis of lower class women’s representation in independent film, the chapter situates Wendy and Lucy in relation to post-feminist and third wave feminist concerns.
Expansion: Night Moves
Authors: Hall E. Dawn
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses Night Moves as a political thriller about ecoterrorism, and focuses on Riechardt’s adjustments in form, style, and content as compared with her prior body of work. While on the surface, Night Moves appears to have more commercial intentions, it is an overt challenge to cinematic commercialisation. Although the thriller genre promises sex, action, and special effects, Night Moves, in true independent cinematic fashion, never shows these events on screen. Night Moves invites ethical questions through the ecoterrorist actions of the protagonists and the gender commentary supplied through the sparse dialogue and character interactions. Through interviews with Reichardt and her cast and crew the chapter covers production methods and makes connections with contemporary environmental activist groups, such as the Earth Liberation Front, the Occupy Wall Street movement and to terrorist acts such as the Oklahoma City bombing.
An Interview with Kelly Reichardt
Authors: Hall E. Dawn
Published: September 2018

In this chapter, Reichardt answers questions concerning her career, film production and methods and provides insights into filming River of Grass, Night Moves, and Certain Women. She talks about the environmental and political threads woven into her films and elaborates on how script and adaptation writing. The interview closes with comments on the filmmaker, Peter Hutton.
A Biography of Faith
Authors: Bicket Linden
Published: September 2018

This chapter concentrates on three major biographical strands in order to obtain a clear idea of Brown’s literary Catholicism. It explores the trajectory of Brown’s religious life through his unpublished early manuscripts, autobiographical fiction, and letters to various correspondents. It examines his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, in relation to the traditions of spiritual self-writing by other literary converts. The chapter also investigates the intertextual connections between George Mackay Brown’s work and the autobiographical writing of John Henry Newman, Edwin Muir, and Muriel Spark, among others.
Mary
Authors: Bicket Linden
Published: September 2018

This chapter investigates Brown’s engagement with Mariology in three ways. First, the chapter discusses Brown’s creative use of the Virgin Mary’s various iconographical depictions and cults, in order to restore her image to Orkney’s landscape. The chapter examines Brown’s ‘apocryphal’ texts, which reveal that he was more politically-engaged than is often thought. Last, this chapter provides a new reading of enculturation in Time in a Red Coat (1984), the novel that represents the high point of Brown’s Marian corpus.
Magnus
Authors: Bicket Linden
Published: September 2018

This chapter considers the ways in which Brown adapts, develops, and treats the cult of St Magnus in literary terms. It examines Brown’s creative use of history, hagiography, and the cult of St Magnus as first seen in the Icelandic Sagas. It discusses Brown’s complex fusion of hagiographic, apocryphal, biblical and saga writings in his novel Magnus (1973) and in other devotional poetry. The chapter contends that Brown resituates a largely forgotten Norse saint within a Scottish and Scandinavian hagiographical context, while simultaneously reintroducing St Magnus into twentieth century Scottish literature.
The Nativity of Christ
Authors: Bicket Linden
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores Brown’s depiction of the babe of Bethlehem in his winter ‘homilies’, or festive journalism. The chapter examines Brown’s fusion of the folkloric and magical rituals of late medieval popular religion with the modern short story form. It outlines Brown’s knowledge of nativity poetry, fine art, and drama, and studies the ways in which he inserts these earlier traditions into his nativity poetry and prose. It focuses especially on the Eucharistic implications of Brown’s nativity poetry.
The Last Things
Authors: Bicket Linden
Published: September 2018

The book’s epilogue revisits the key features of Brown’s Catholic sacramental universe. It notes the significance of biblical echo, allusion, and Brown’s saints, martyrs, reformers, and transformative moments of grace. The epilogue stresses the importance of Brown’s use of ceremony and ritual, and emphasises his interest in (and create use of) apocrypha, midrash, and folklore. The epilogue contends that Brown’s work has been critically framed in incomplete and even damaging ways, but that Brown was a Scottish Catholic artist whose grammar of devotion was global.
‘A Journal of the Period’: Modernism and Conservative Modernity in Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial (1919–29)
Authors: Plock Vike Martina
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines and puts into context the ‘modernist turn’ of Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, a popular fashion magazine marketed to middle-class female readers in the interwar period (1919-1929). While many of its society columns and features unquestionably endorsed traditional, patriarchal values, the fact that editors also reviewed and commissioned work by modernist women writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf, shows that the magazine was fashioned as a dialogic space that aimed to address the various, at times contradictory, experiences and interests of women in the interwar period.  By analysing the particulars of this productive dialogue between conservatism and progressiveness in Eve, the chapter advances research on interwar periodical culture, suggesting that some existing critical designations such as ‘little,’ ‘smart,’ or ‘service’ inadequately describe the heterogeneity of the printed materials found in this particular 1920s magazine.
Styling Modern Life: Introduction
Authors: Green Barbara
Published: September 2018

THE ASSOCIATION OF fashion with the modern runs deep, permeating both popular and academic culture as the one enduring truth within an environment that values the novel above all else. Rita Felski defined fashion as a key element in modernité’s ‘general experience of the aestheticization of everyday life’ (1995: 13)...
Now and Forever? Fashion Magazines and the Temporality of the Interwar Period
Authors: Sheehan Elizabeth M.
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the relationship between the temporalities of periodicals and of fashion as they shape fashion magazines of the early interwar period. While periodicals are often associated with the standarisation of time, Sheehan argues that representations of fashion in the initial issues of Eve and British Vogue draw out, complicate, and exemplify the multiple temporalities that periodicals imagined, managed, and enacted. Analyzing texts and images from these leading magazines and drawing upon theories of fashion and periodicals, Sheehan shows how Eve and Vogue teach readers to read time as it inheres in texts and garments. In doing so, these fashion magazines establish themselves as key tools for navigating the shifting terrain of gender, sexuality, politics, and nation in the interwar period.
The Picturegoer: Cinema, Rotogravure, and the Reshaping of the Female Face
Authors: Beegan Gerry
Published: September 2018

The Picturegoer, published by Odhams Press, was the most popular British interwar film magazine. It was a pioneer in the use of rotogravure, a technique that brought high-quality color images to popular periodicals. The gravure process, in which both letterforms and photographs were fundamentally pictorial, challenged the text/image hierarchy, a radical shift reflected in the magazine’s layouts. Rotogravure had no definable matrix and images were smooth, continuous, and delicate; photographic portraits of stars were visually akin to cinematic close-ups. The magazine’s heavily retouched images, alongside articles on fashion and make-up, and an increasing dominance of cosmetic advertising, enabled women to develop an empowering visual expertise. Appearance became democratized and malleable, helping women to negotiate the contradictions of modern female subjectivity. Female readers were able to develop a photogenic face, influenced by Hollywood, shaped by make-up, and modeled on the smooth retouched colour rotogravure
Labour Woman and the Housewife
Authors: Hunt Karen
Published: September 2018

The chapter discusses how Labour Party women engaged with the newly-enfranchised housewife between the wars. It focuses on how Labour Woman represented the working-class housewife and the degree to which it enabled her to speak for herself. It chose everyday domestic life, traditionally assumed to be beyond politics, as the way to connect with unorganised women in their homes. In its Housewife Column the relevance of politics to women’s daily lives was explored through domestic topics such food prices, housework, washing and making clothes. Even with the increasing dominance of recipes and dress patterns in the 1930s, the journal continued to see the housewife as having agency and a distinct experience shaped by class. For Labour Woman interwar domesticity was neither cosy nor rationalised and modern, it was a space which provided the means to engage with the everyday lives of ordinary women.
Friendship and Support, Conflict and Rivalry: Multiple Uses of the Correspondence Column in Childcare Magazines, 1919–39
Authors: Holden Katherine
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines a variety of ways in which correspondence columns of the childcare magazine Nursery World and two in-house nursery nursing college magazines were used by readers during the interwar years. The columns offered editors useful ways to communicate with readers and discover what aspects of the magazine they preferred. Publishing letters where readers shared views and answered one another’s problems kept debates over maternal authority, nannies’ class and education, and social isolation alive and relevant to readers. However, letters to the college magazines tended to be more uncontroversial, most commonly featuring letters from abroad often commissioned by the editor. Overall, ways in which editors responded to complaints and praise mediated between warring factions and encouraged their ‘imagined community’ of readers to feel less isolated are clear both in the selection of letters published and the responses given to them.
Feminist Media and Agendas for Change: Introduction
Authors: DiCenzo Maria
Published: September 2018

THERE HAS BEEN a concerted effort in recent years to reassess the accounts of demise and defeat that figure so prominently in the history of interwar feminism. The tendency to characterise reform efforts in these years as conservative, compared with the insurgency of the pre-war suffrage campaign, has obscured the breadth of feminist activism and the attempts to politicise the domestic sphere in the aftermath of war and suffrage. The Representation of the People Bill in 1918 granted the vote to women over thirty (those who met the property requirement). It was regarded as a major victory by the women’s movement and provided further impetus to advocate for equality of rights and opportunities. It took another ten years of campaigning before women were granted the right to vote on the same terms as men, and in the process groups worked tirelessly for the emancipation of women on a variety of fronts – from birth control, family allowances, guardianship rights, equal pay, and abolition of the marriage bar, to an equal role for women in the League of Nations. Rather than deactivating feminism, the war generated new problems and complicated old ones. At the national level, demobilisation intensified competition between women and men in the workforce in the 1920s, leading to major public policy debates around labour-related and family welfare issues. At the same time, postwar political diplomacy fuelled the involvement of feminists in international campaigns to intervene in conflicts and to promote world peace. As the following chapters reveal, these causes drew support from existing and new constituencies of participants. In a landscape of radically changing social and economic conditions, feminists embraced political opportunities in the face of challenges and opposition....
The Essay Series and Feminist Debate: Controversy and Conversation about Women and Work In Time and Tide
Authors: Forster Laurel
Published: September 2018

This chapter considers the ways in which the feminist periodical, Time and Tide, founded by Lady Margaret Rhondda along with the Six Point Group, used the adaptable journalistic device of the essay series to engage its readers in current and pressing debates about women. In the uncertainties and upheavals of postwar Britain, roles for women were unclear and undetermined, and the capacious form of the essay series, combined with skilful editorship, facilitated a range of experts and varied voices to discuss sometimes contentious issues of women's leisure, education, motherhood and working lives. Time and Tide made full use of the journal's periodicity to ensure that it became a forum for debate about women's domestic and professional occupations, and determinedly engaged its readers by printing extensive reader and expert correspondence and then providing editorial responses to those letters and interventions. There was even a staged public meeting, broadcast on BBC radio.