bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Another Tale of Two Cities: Lviv and Łódź
Authors: Cinquegrani Maurizio
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores the cinematic image of Lviv and Łódź in wide range of documentary films. It also offers comparisons between fictional and factual films of these places. The chapter also explores physical remnants of the past in the form of buildings which were occupied by Jewish schools, hospitals or homes, and on the role played by these places and ruins in the processes of memorialisation enacted in film.
British Women Amateur Filmmakers
Authors: Motrescu-Mayes Annamaria , Norris Nicholson Heather
Published: May 2019

In the rapidly growing study of amateur film, this groundbreaking book addresses the development of British women's amateur visual practice. Drawing upon social and visual anthropology, imperial and postcolonial studies and British, Commonwealth and gender history, the authors explore how women in Britain and overseas, used the evolving technologies of moving imagery to create visual stories about their lives and times. Locating the making, watching and sharing of women's recreational film-making against wider societal, technological and ideological changes, British Women Amateur
Filmmakers discloses how women from varied backgrounds negotiated changing lifestyles, attitudes and opportunities as they created first personal visual narratives about themselves and the world around them. Using non-fictional films and animations, the authors invite readers to view films through different interpretative lens and provide detailed contexts for their case-studies and survey of over forty women amateur filmmakers. Whether in remote communities, suburban homes, castles, missionary or diplomatic enclaves, or simply travelling as intrepid sightseers, women filmed their companions, other people and their surroundings, not only as observers but often displaying agency, autonomy and aesthetic judgment during decades when careers, particularly after marriage, were often denied in film and other professions. Research across Britain on films in private hands and specialist archives, interviews and extensive study of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC's) collections enable the authors to reposition an activity once thought of as overwhelmingly male and middle class.
Inconclusions
Authors: Claes Koenraad
Published: May 2019

This chapter provides a summary of the argument of the book and of the history developed therein of the little magazine genre in Britain from 1850 (the Germ) to 1901 (the folding of the Page). A glance ahead at the coming Edwardian interlude and the later modernist period indicates that early-twentieth-century titles such as Rhythm (1911–13), BLAST (1914–15) and the Little Review (1914–29) were faced by the same challenges as their Victorian predecessors. As is shown, some of the most famous modernist detractors of the Victorian age were actually aware that their journals were part of the legacy of the Fin-de-Siècle periodicals treated in this book, even though they often disowned this connection.
Art and Exploitation: Crossover, Slippage and Fluidity
Authors: Hobbs Simon
Published: May 2019

Using Paul McDonald’s, Barbara Klinger’s, and Jonathan Gray’s work on the home entertainment industries, this chapter positions the DVD and Blu-ray as a fundamental paratextual form. Establishing it as a bearer of meaning capable of changing the commercial identity of the film, the chapter stresses the role these objects play in shaping the cultural persona of a film. The chapter then outlines the marketing practices that have historically defined art and exploitation cinema. The chapter highlights the consistency in which art film distributors have promoted the figure of the auteur and the country of origin on marketing materials, while foregrounding existing critical acclaim and any film festival success (such as awards, nominations or appearances). The chapter then explores exploitation marketing, charting the frequency with which distributors opt to use ballyhoo dares and promises in blurbs or taglines, the regularity with which they knowingly select images that disgust and provoke, how they will act quickly to milk cinematic trends, and effectively turn critical condemnation into hyperbole. Finally, the chapter places the book’s discussion of the home entertainment product alongside other studies of taste slippage, extending the histories established by the likes of Mark Betz, Joan Hawkins and Kevin Heffernan.
Weekend and Cannibal Holocaust: Art, Ballyhoo and Remediation
Authors: Hobbs Simon
Published: May 2019

This chapter starts with an assessment of Jean-Luc Godard’s auteur status, before focusing on Weekend, a film frequently overlooked in discussions of extreme art cinema. By drawing attention to the film’s depiction of cannibalism, rape and real animal slaughter, the chapter highlights the similarities it shares with other extreme texts, repositioning it within the boarder extreme art film tradition outlined throughout the book. To find out whether this reputation impacts the commercial identity of the film, the chapter moves on to explore the paratextuality of the film. Ultimately concluding that the film’s distributors (Artificial Eye) offer a hybridised object that flirts with extremity, the chapter then examines Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. Noting similarities between the films, the chapter provides a detailed analysis of Shameless Screen Entertainment collectors’ edition DVD. Showing how the paratextual material re-constructs the film’s history, the analysis argues that Cannibal Holocaust’s remediation moves it away from an exploitation film ghetto by employing traditionally highbrow marketing techniques. By complicating existing ideas regarding the commercial function of extremity, the chapter illustrates the extent to which home entertainment objects obscure long-standing taste distinctions.
Contemporary Extremity on DVD: Trends, Hard-core and Geographic Mobility
Authors: Hobbs Simon
Published: May 2019

This chapter continues the selective history of extreme art cinema instigated in Chapter 3. Focusing predominantly on the releases of Artificial Eye and Tartan Video, the chapter details the re-emergence of extremity in France during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and looks at the paratextual treatment of Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, and Claire Denis. Thereafter, the chapter expands its geographic lens, and examines extreme art production across Europe, with analysis of The Idiots, Man Bites Dog, Tesis, A Hole in my Heart and Dogtooth. The separation of New French Extremity from other forms of European extremity allows the French films’ impact to be appropriately measured. In essence, the chapter argues that the success of the New French Extremity changed paratextual representations of extremism, making them more popular, common and commercially viable. Thereafter, the chapter considers extreme horror narratives such as Martyrs, Frontier[s], and Switchblade Romance, outlining the way they influence and become influenced by paratextual images of extreme art cinema. By adopting this structure, the chapter again exposes the importance of both highbrow and lowbrow taste within the conceptualisation of extreme art cinema.
Framing Empire
Authors: Hollyfield Jerod Ra'Del
Published: May 2019

This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.
Postfeminist Whiteness
Authors: Marston Kendra
Published: May 2019

This book is the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist popular cinema. It analyses a selection of Hollywood films dating from the turn of the millennium, arguing that the character of the ‘melancholic white woman’ operates as a trope through which to explore the excesses of late capitalism and a crisis of faith in the American dream. Melancholia can function as a form of social capital for these characters yet betrays its proximity to a gendered history of emotion and psychopathology. This figure is alternately idealised or scapegoated depending on how well she navigates the perils of postfeminist ideology. Furthermore, the book considers how performances of melancholia and mental distress can confer benefits for Hollywood actresses and female auteurs on the labour market, which in turn has contributed to the maintenance of white hegemony within the mainstream US film industry. Case studies in the book include Black Swan (Darren Aronofksy 2010), Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014) and Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton 2010).
The World Is Her Oyster: Negotiating Contemporary White Womanhood in Hollywood’s Tourist Spaces
Authors: Marston Kendra
Published: May 2019

This chapter analyses Hollywood tourist romances Eat Pray Love and Under the Tuscan Sun as examples of texts in which the burdened white woman transcends her melancholic state as a result of travelling beyond US borders. The female protagonists in both films are creative writers who feel stifled by their urban environments and discover that the value systems they encounter outside the US allow them to feel creatively reinvigorated as well as liberated from societal dictates that declare true happiness to reside in marriage, upward mobility, and bodily discipline. In these films, the tourist zone must appear to exist independently of the globalising forces of neoliberal capitalism, with the heroines’ belief that they are divinely guided on a spiritual journey of self-discovery constituting a shift away from the secular ideologies of neoliberalism and postfeminism, while also operating as a form of white exceptionalism within the foreign space.
Neoliberalism, Female Agency and Conspicuous Consumption as Tragic Flaw in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine
Authors: Marston Kendra
Published: May 2019

Chapter Three analyses the 2013 film Blue Jasmine as an example of a text in which the protagonist’s melancholia appears misplaced and is thus unable to be alleviated by a journey away from home. Jasmine operates as a social outcast who exemplifies value systems that are temporarily deemed morally reprehensible, based as they are upon the over-valuation of economic income and enthusiastic participation in consumer-capitalism. Blue Jasmine’s narrative and its protagonist must be understood as signifying at a temporary period of ideological weakening for neoliberalism and its associated political rhetoric. It is this moment of instability that allows for the privileged race and class status of the postfeminist representational subject within this film to be configured as an ethical problem to be debated, even if on superficial or temporary terms, rather than a conditional aspect of the aspirational ideal.
Paranoid Attachments to Suburban Dreams: Reading Pathological Femininity in Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train
Authors: Marston Kendra
Published: May 2019

Chapter Four analyses the suburban melancholia evident in the psychological thrillers Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, arguing that the films are examples of an emerging subgenre in which audiences are tasked with assessing whether the heroine’s melancholia harbours an inner violent pathology. Neoliberal postfeminist ideology, here depicted as inciting middle-class female malaise, lends itself to a new kind of (lucrative) cinematic puzzle in which readers or viewers guess the effects on women of a failed social promise. In these two films, the suburban environment, the gothic genre, and the conventions of other quintessentially postfeminist texts provide clues as to the melancholic heroine’s true state of mind.
The Case of Sherlock Holmes
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, combining close reading with historicism, to read the stories afresh, sceptically probing Dr Watson’s narratives and Holmes’s often barely credible solutions. Drawing on Victorian and Edwardian history, Conan Doyle’s life and works, and Doyle’s literary sources, the book offers new insights into the Holmes stories and reveals what they say about money, class, family, sex, race, war and secrecy.
The Fall of the House of Musgrave
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

In Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle recounted how his Edinburgh lecturer, Joseph Bell, provided the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes’s methods of reasoning: ‘It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.’ But Bell was not the only source for Holmes. His literary model was Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘masterful’ Parisian detective, Le Chavalier C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), and reappeared in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844). Poe was one of the most powerful literary influences on Doyle’s writing.
The Rock of Gibraltar
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

Marital unhappiness is a persistent theme of the Holmes stories, from the first (A Study in Scarlet) to several of the last (‘The Adventure of the Retired Colourman’ and ‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’, both published in 1927). A Study in Scarlet begins as a detective story but its backstory is, as we have seen, a melodrama of forced marriage and domestic tyranny. ‘A Case of Identity’ concerns a courtship that is an elaborate deception, and the story opens with a digression on the ‘Dundas separation case’. This is reported in a newspaper as a ‘husband’s cruelty to his wife’, prompting Watson to claim that he knows the details without even reading the article: ‘There is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent nothing more crude.’ However, Holmes has investigated the case and reveals that it is actually more unusual: ‘The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife’ (Adventures, 31).
The Discreetly Shadowed Corners
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

In a famous passage at the beginning of ‘A Case of Identity’, Holmes imagines surveying the inner workings of the households of London from the air: If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. (Adventures, 30) Besides the clear reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this passage alludes to a French reinterpretation of an ancient myth which, as Anthea Trodd and others have shown, fascinated Victorian writers: Alain-René Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (1707) takes the figure of Asmodeus from Hebrew myth and turns him into a satirical figure who leads ‘a favoured human companion on a roof-top excursion of Madrid, and lifts the roofs of the houses to expose the secret crimes habitually being enacted beneath’.
The Whole Queer Business of Wisteria Lodge
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

‘Wisteria Lodge’, published in the Strand in 1908 and collected in His Last Bow (1917), is in two parts. The first, entitled ‘The Singular Experience of Mr John Scott Eccles’, covers the client’s narrative of a most unusual dinner at Wisteria Lodge, a house near Oxshott in Surrey; the dinner is given by a Mr Garcia, who is found murdered the following morning. The second part, ‘The Tiger of San Pedro’, tells the story of the investigation of Garcia’s murder. ‘Wisteria Lodge’ turns out to be a story of revolution and tyranny: Don Murillo, the former kleptocratic dictator of a South American country, has escaped with his loot and his life, adopted a new identity in Surrey, but is being pursued by a syndicate of his surviving victims led by Garcia.
The Heat of the Amazon Was Always in her Blood
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

For a man who never set foot there, South America seemed to exert an unusual degree of influence over Conan Doyle’s imagination. His great post-imperial romance The Lost World was his most sustained exploration – in every sense of the word – of the imagined continent, and much can be read into his decision to locate a dinosaur-inhabited plateau in the centre of the Amazonian rainforest. For the British explorers under the leadership of Professor Challenger who set off in search of evidence of prehistoric life in the modern age, the interior of Brazil is one of the last remaining blank spaces on the map: only in such unexplored terrain can prehistory survive, untroubled by the twentieth century. The blank space exerts an irresistible appeal over the Challenger expedition, which comprises men who long to add to the world’s knowledge, to their own celebrity and to their own wealth (they discover diamonds, inconveniently located in the lair of some particularly aggressive pterodactyls).
Do We Progress?
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

James Mortimer, Holmes’s client in The Hound of the Baskervilles, is no ordinary general practitioner. Consulting the Medical Directory, Watson finds him to be the author of several learned essays: ‘Is Disease a Reversion?’, winner of the Jackson Prize for Comparative Pathology, and ‘Some Freaks of Atavism’ and ‘Do We Progress?’, published in The Lancet and Journal of Psychology respectively. It thus hardly seems fair for Holmes to characterise him as a mere ‘country doctor’ (6). Mortimer’s publication history is highly revealing, both about his own scientific world view and that of the novel. Keywords in the essays’ titles – ‘reversion’, ‘atavism’ and ‘progress’ – clearly indicate that these are investigations in evolutionary biology. More specifically, Mortimer is interested in the possibility that human evolution can actually go into reverse, producing degenerate specimens of the human race, descending down the evolutionary ladder into the animal kingdom, or afflicted by genetic conditions that cause abnormalities (‘freaks’) or disease.
That Secret History of a Nation
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’, in which the design of a new and devastating type of submarine is stolen from Woolwich Arsenal and sold to a foreign spy, came at an ominous moment in British history. When it was first published in the December 1908 issue of the Strand Magazine, the war that would consume Conan Doyle’s attention – and several members of his family – was still more than five years away. But Germany had already become Britain’s principal geopolitical adversary: Britain entered strategic ententes with France (1904) and Russia (1907), alliances which would endure into – and help precipitate – the First World War; a naval arms race, centred on Dreadnought-class battleships but including the new, disruptive technologies of submarines and torpedoes, was in full swing; and Germany was widely believed to be conducting espionage in Britain on an unprecedented scale.
Navigating Shakespeare’s Moral Compass
Authors: Parvini Neema
Published: May 2019

At a time when some feel that Western civilization is at a moment of crisis – and in which many are taking stock and looking for meaning – this chapter introduces a book which looks, as so many previous generations have looked, to the great literature of the past for some insight, and perhaps even for some guidance. Crucially responding to the call to update the methods and assumptions of literary analysis, this chapter builds on the author’s previous books, Shakespeare’s History Plays (2012) and Shakespeare and Cognition (2015) in seeking to move beyond historicism by adapting concepts taken from latest psychological research. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first outlines history Moral Foundations Theory (“MFT”), pioneered by Jonathan Haidt. The second refines the latest thought on literary character and cognition, before expanding on how it might be usefully employed in approaching the question of morality in Shakespeare’s plays.
Sufi Cosmopolitanism in the Seventeenth-century Indian Ocean: Sharīʿa, Lineage and Royal Power in Southeast Asia and the Maldives
Authors: Peacock A. C. S.
Published: May 2019

Peacock’s chapter examines the circulation of Seventeenth-century Sufi scholars to the ‘contested peripheries’ of the Indian Ocean. He argues that notable Muslim Sufi shaykhs did not travel to maritime kingdoms such as Banten, Aceh, and the Maldives to learn from locals, but rather to propagate ‘shariʿa-minded piety’ focused on ‘commanding the right and forbidding the wrong’. Peacock describes how the ambitions of religious scholars like the Syrian Qādirī preacher Muḥammad Shams al-Dīn intersected with early modern state-building in the Indian Ocean world. This chapter chronicles how Shams al-Dīn not only gained great political influence in Aceh, but was even made the actual ruler of the Maldives after his followers overthrew the sultan there. Peacock concludes that the cosmopolitanism of Sufi itinerants relied less on the fusion of pre-Islamic and Islamic practices than on universalist agendas of social transformation founded upon prophetic Sunna and enacted through the mechanisms of political coercion.
The White Heron Called by the Muezzin: Shrines, Sufis and Warlords in Early Modern Java
Authors: Kemper Simon C.
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores two modalities of Sufi warfare on the Indonesian island of Java; a reputed cosmopolitan one deriving from courts as well as religious scholars and a seemingly localized one centred on shrine polities. The latter indeed proves intrinsically embedded in Java through holy graves and miraculous sites of worship. This does not entail, however, that their armed endeavours were stirred by local concerns only. To the contrary, overseas trade networks and elaborate diplomatic ties shaped the military interventions of shrine polities like that of Giri in East Java and also bolstered their armies. On the other hand, the scripture-based campaigns of ‘holy war’ made by sultanates like that of Banten and scholars like al-Maqassārī, faltered due to their inability to connect to political concerns of the wide range of Islamic polities and actors involved.
Afghanistan’s Cosmopolitan Trading Networks: A View from Yiwu, China
Authors: Marsden Magnus , Ibañez-Tirado Diana
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores Afghan trading networks that are active across a variety of Eurasian contexts. These predominantly, but not exclusively, Muslim traders have come to fill important niches in the forms of economic activity often identified by anthropology as representing ‘globalisation from below’. This chapter emphasises ethnographically the culturally flexible dispositions of Afghan traders, while also bringing attention to the analytical issues that are raised when they are thought of as ‘Muslim cosmopolitans’. In particular this analysis highlights how 'armoured' forms of cosmopolitanism have been frequently visited on Afghanistan during its modern history, often meaning that mobility has been experienced by the country's people in the context of violence and coercion. We explore these issues through a focused ethnographic examination of the lives and activities of Afghan traders in the Chinese international trade city of Yiwu - a critically important node for this and other trading groups, communities and networks.
‘Unconscious of her own double appearance’: Fanny Burney’s Brighton
Authors: Landau Leya
Published: May 2019

Better known for her literary representations of Georgian London, Fanny Burney’s final, post-revolutionary novel, The Wanderer (1814), extends a more complex and radical geography than her earlier works. Opening on a rough sea off the coast of France, the mysterious protagonist, Ellis/Juliet, feels the gravitational pull of Brighthelmstone (Brighton), the celebrated Regency seaside town that provides the setting for most of the novel. This chapter examines the representation of Brighton in The Wanderer, a novel in which the inhabitants of Brighthelmstone quite literally turn their back on the ocean, alongside Burney’s descriptions of the town in her private writings over a number of decades. What emerges from these different genres is a double vision of Brighton that counters contemporary and popular depictions of the town in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Henry Brougham and the Invention of Cannes
Authors: Ashton Rosemary
Published: May 2019

This chapter traces the origin of Cannes as a resort, particularly for English visitors, to a chance visit in 1834 by Lord Brougham, ex-Lord Chancellor in Lord Grey’s reforming parliament of 1830 to 1834. It charts the progress and prosperity of Cannes through Brougham’s adoption of the place and his attracting members of the British political and social elite. Brougham’s relations with French politics and culture are a little-known element of his extraordinarily busy career as a politician, lawyer, educational reformer and inventor. The progress of both Brougham and Cannes is discussed by means of memoirs, letters and diaries written by Brougham himself, and by some of the many observers of his career and personality – as well as numerous Punch cartoons, poems and articles of the 1840s and 1850s.
Seats and Sites of Authority: British Colonial Collecting on the East African Coast
Authors: Longair Sarah
Published: May 2019

For over a thousand years, the Swahili culture of coastal East Africa had developed by synthesising myriad influences from the African continent, Arabia and across the Indian Ocean. By the mid-Victorian period Zanzibar was a key Indian Ocean commercial centre, and in 1890 was established as a British Protectorate. This chapter examines, through writings, collections of material culture and photographs, the British encounter with Zanzibar and the island’s cosmopolitan culture. British officers described themselves as going to ‘the East’ when departing for the island. The word itself epitomised mysterious otherness and exoticism, while its Arabian-Nights charm contrasted with the stereotypes about the African interior. Yet its skyline was criticised for lacking minarets and domes and being insufficiently Islamic. It was also described as unhealthy and dirty, making British intervention necessary to transform it into ‘an island paradise’. This chapter analyses how the British response to Zanzibar as a liminal space between Africa and the East shifted in this period of economic and political transformation on the coast.
Reflections on the Truth about Abū Lahab (the Judas of Banū Hāshim)
Authors: Amin Hussein Ahmad
Published: May 2019

This chapter provides a new interpretation of Chapter III of the Qur’an. It refutes the traditional exegetical material by grounding itself in historical facts. This new reading is supplemented by primary Islamic historical sources which answer many of questions that the reading of this chapter raises when compared to traditional exegetical interpretations (tafsir).
The Awaited Mahdi in Contemporary Times
Authors: Amin Hussein Ahmad
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses the figure of the Mahdi, who in Islamic eschatology is the prophesied redeemer of Islam, ridding the entire world of all evil as a kind of Messiah for Muslims. The chapter critically engages with this idea and ties it to Bedouin traditions and the role of hope versus reality.
Foreword to the Tenth Edition
Authors: Amin Hussein Ahmad
Published: May 2019

The translation is of the book’s 10th edition published in 2006, which includes a valuable foreword by Hussein Amin. Written twenty years after the publication of the first edition, the author added a discussion of two topics which he considered timely at the time, namely Islamic terrorism and democracy, thereby almost predicting the events of the ’Arab Spring’. In addition, he discusses ways to address both of these issues.
Artful Experiments
Authors: Erchinger Philipp
Published: May 2019

What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds.
Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.
Introduction: Experiment and the Art of Writing
Authors: Erchinger Philipp
Published: May 2019

The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this end, it provides a brief exposition of relevant work in science studies, sociology and anthropology while emphasising the literary critical perspective of the book. Moreover, the introductory chapter situates Artful Experiments in the field of Victorian literature and science scholarship, showing, by means of two examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Robert Browning, how it deviates from the well established ‘two-way traffic’ approach and what it has to offer instead. The relation between experiment and writing is also introduced and clarified here.
William Morris’s ‘Work-Pleasure’: Literature, Science and Fine Art
Authors: Erchinger Philipp
Published: May 2019

This chapter seeks to elucidate nineteenth-century conceptions of art as fine art. Taking its cue from Raymond Williams’s account of a divorce of (fine) art from (technical) work, the chapter pursues various attempts to define the aesthetic specificity of the fine arts, including literature in the narrow sense, in relation to other ways of exercising skill, including the use of experimental methods in the sciences. In this way, it seeks to show that the idea of the aesthetic, despite all attempts to purify it, remained deeply entangled in a net of work, in which experiences of pleasure (or beauty) and playfulness had not yet been separated from material practices of making useful things. As is further explained, the idea of a mutual inclusiveness of pleasure and use was pivotal to the arts and crafts movement, especially to the creative practice of William Morris. Finally, the chapter pursues Morris’s concept of “work-pleasure”, as derived from his News from Nowhere, through a wider debate about the complex relations between the sciences and the (fine) arts.
Seated between ‘Geniuses’: Conrad Aiken’s Imaginative and Critical Responses to Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
Authors: Kaplan Sydney Janet
Published: May 2019

The writing of the American poet, fiction writer and critic, Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) significantly affected the critical receptions of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. His personal encounters with them during his time of involvement in the production of the Athenaeum is reflected not only in his incisive reviews of their fiction, but in his own creative writing as well. His short stories and experimental memoir, Ushant, (1963) reveal the two women's differing forms of influence upon him. In his memoir, he portrays the relations between Woolf and Mansfield as representative of the ‘merciless warfare’ that prevailed in the London literary world in 1920. If his creative legacy from Woolf was stylistic and psychological, from Mansfield it was inspirational. He was in love with the spontaneity and life-enhancing vitality of her prose, her ‘genius’ for making her characters ‘real.’ The sense of an intuitive connection between himself and Mansfield underpins his imaginative efforts to recreate his encounters with her, as is exemplified most powerfully in his short story: ‘Your Obituary, Well Written,’ (1928) in which he creates a thinly veiled portrait of characters uncannily similar to Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry.
‘Not the kind to die’: Katherine Mansfield and the Unquiet Ghost of ‘little brother’
Authors: Mitchell J. Lawrence
Published: May 2019

This article documents the longstanding and special bond of affection between Katherine Mansfield and her brother Leslie Heron Beauchamp (known as ‘Chummie’ and ‘Bogey’ by family) and the often oblique but artful ways this bond is reflected in her stories. With the aid of War Office records, contemporary New Zealand newspaper reports, and Beauchamp family letters in the Alexander Turnbull Library, the essay specifically addresses hitherto unknown, yet biographically significant, issues concerning Leslie’s education, his social life and military training in England, and his accidental death in Flanders. In so doing, the essay thereby corrects some misapprehensions about Leslie and the nature and extent of Mansfield’s relationship with him.
Craigbank: Amateur Dramatics?
Authors: Damer Seán
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses the development of an experimental “Ordinary” scheme built under the provisions of the 1946 Housing Act. The experiment was a district central heating system, which predicated high rents. Tenants were largely self-selecting in that they had to have enough regular income to pay these high rents. But the houses were built in tenemental form with flat roofs, and there were numerous complaints about poor noise insulation and leaks. Although its external perception was “élite,” it was still a substantially skilled manual working-class scheme, but one with several active voluntary organisations, and very popular with its tenants.
High-Throughput Field-Phenotyping Tools for Plant Breeding and Precision Agriculture
Authors: Chawade Aakash , van Ham Joost , Blomquist Hanna , Bagge Oscar , Alexandersson Erik , Ortiz Rodomiro
Published: May 2019

High-throughput field phenotyping has garnered major attention in recent years leading to the development of several new protocols for recording various plant traits of interest. Phenotyping of plants for breeding and for precision agriculture have different requirements due to different sizes of the plots and fields, differing purposes and the urgency of the action required after phenotyping. While in plant breeding phenotyping is done on several thousand small plots mainly to evaluate them for various traits, in plant cultivation, phenotyping is done in large fields to detect the occurrence of plant stresses and weeds at an early stage. The aim of this review is to highlight how various high-throughput phenotyping methods are used for plant breeding and farming and the key differences in the applications of such methods. Thus, various techniques for plant phenotyping are presented together with applications of these techniques for breeding and cultivation. Several examples from the literature using these techniques are summarized and the key technical aspects are highlighted.
A Simple and a Reliable Method to Quantify Antioxidant Activity In Vivo
Authors: de Torre María Pilar , Cavero Rita Yolanda , Calvo María Isabel , Vizmanos José Luis
Published: May 2019

The characterization of compounds with antioxidant activity is of great interest due to their ability to reduce reactive oxygen species production and, therefore, prevent some age-related diseases. Its antioxidant capacity can be analyzed by different methods both in vitro and in vivo. Caenorhabditis elegans is an in vivo model widely used in ageing research. Until now, available tests analyze functional effects in the worms, so the antioxidant activity of the compound is indirectly monitored. We have developed a simple and a reliable method to quantify internal antioxidant activity in vivo. To validate this method, we analyzed an aqueous green tea extract and two other compounds with a well-known antioxidant activity and without this activity. The results obtained (EC50 green tea = 21.76 ± 1.28 µg/mL; EC50 positive control = 8.50 ± 0.33 µg/mL; negative control EC50 > 500 µg/mL) can help in the design of further in vivo experiments. Thus, our method can be used as a previous screening capable of reducing the gap between in vitro and in vivo assays.
Non-Invasive Morphological Characterization of Rice Leaf Bulliform and Aerenchyma Cellular Regions Using Low Coherence Interferometry
Authors: Kim Hyeree , Du XiaoXuan , Kim Sungwook , Kim Pilun , Wijesinghe Ruchire Eranga , Yun Byoung-Ju , Kim Kyung-Min , Jeon Mansik , Kim Jeehyun
Published: May 2019

Non-invasive investigation of rice leaf specimens to characterize the morphological formation and particular structural information that is beneficial for agricultural perspective was demonstrated using a low coherence interferometric method called swept source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT). The acquired results non-invasively revealed morphological properties of rice leaf, such as bulliform cells; aerenchyma, parenchyma, and collenchyma layer; and vascular bundle. Beside aforementioned morphologic characteristics, several leaf characteristics associated with cytological mechanisms of leaf rolling (leaf inclination) were examined for the pre-identification of inevitable necrosis and atrophy of leaf tissues by evaluating acute angle information, such as angular characteristics of the external bi-directional angles between the lower epidermis layer and lower mid-vein, and internal angle of lower mid-vein. To further assist the pre-identification, acquired cross-sections were employed to enumerate the small veins of each leaf specimen. Since mutants enlarge leaf angles due to increased cell division in the adaxial epidermis, healthy and abnormal leaf specimens were morphologically and quantitatively compared. Therefore, the results of the method can be used in agriculture, and SS-OCT shows potential as a rigorous investigation method for selecting mutant infected rice leaf specimens rapidly and non-destructively compared to destructive and time consuming gold-standard methods with a lack of precision.
Are There Circadian Clocks in Non-Photosynthetic Bacteria?
Authors: Sartor Francesca , Eelderink-Chen Zheng , Aronson Ben , Bosman Jasper , Hibbert Lauren E. , Dodd Antony N. , Kovács Ákos T. , Merrow Martha
Published: May 2019

Circadian clocks in plants, animals, fungi, and in photosynthetic bacteria have been well-described. Observations of circadian rhythms in non-photosynthetic Eubacteria have been sporadic, and the molecular basis for these potential rhythms remains unclear. Here, we present the published experimental and bioinformatical evidence for circadian rhythms in these non-photosynthetic Eubacteria. From this, we suggest that the timekeeping functions of these organisms will be best observed and studied in their appropriate complex environments. Given the rich temporal changes that exist in these environments, it is proposed that microorganisms both adapt to and contribute to these daily dynamics through the process of temporal mutualism. Understanding the timekeeping and temporal interactions within these systems will enable a deeper understanding of circadian clocks and temporal programs and provide valuable insights for medicine and agriculture.
Computational Simulation of Adapter Length-Dependent LASSO Probe Capture Efficiency
Authors: Liu Jingqian , Shukor Syukri , Li Shuxiang , Tamayo Alfred , Tosi Lorenzo , Larman Benjamin , Nanda Vikas , Olson Wilma K. , Parekkadan Biju
Published: May 2019

Multiplexed cloning of long DNA sequences is a valuable technique in many biotechnology applications, such as long-read genome sequencing and the creation of open reading frame (ORF) libraries. Long-adapter single-stranded oligonucleotide (LASSO) probes have shown promise as a tool to clone long DNA fragments. LASSO probes are molecular inversion probes (MIP) engineered with an adapter region of user-defined length, flanked between template-specific probe sequences. Herein, we demonstrate that the adapter length is a key feature of LASSO that influences the efficiency of gene capture and cloning. Furthermore, we applied a model based on Monte Carlo molecular simulation in order to study the relationship between the long-adapter length of LASSO and capture enrichment. Our results suggest that the adapter length is a factor that contributes to the free energy of target–probe interaction, thereby determining the efficiency of capture. The results indicate that LASSOs with extremely long adapters cannot capture the targets well. They also suggest that targets of different lengths may prefer adapters of different lengths.
Analysis of Cylindrical Masonry Shell in St. Jacob`s Church in Dolenja Trebuša, Slovenia—Case Study
Authors: Uranjek Mojmir , Lorenci Tadej , Skrinar Matjaž
Published: May 2019

This paper focuses on identifying key reasons for the damage of the cylindrical masonry shell structure in St. Jacob`s church in Dolenja Trebuša, Slovenia. Typical damage patterns which can be formed in shell structures and may affect the load bearing capacity are outlined. Several stress states (membrane, bending and also combined stress state) that can occur in the shell structure are described. Load cases such as the vertical displacement of the support structure, temperature loading, weight of maintenance team and also seismic loading are taken into account in order to identify the actual cause for the registered crack pattern in the shell structure. Analysis of the shell structure is performed using the SAP2000 structural software. Based on the obtained results, which highlighted key reasons for registered damage, the monitoring of cracks is recommended in the first phase, and, in continuation, the most appropriate repair and strengthening measures are proposed.
Seismic Strengthening of the Bagh Durbar Heritage Building in Kathmandu Following the Gorkha Earthquake Sequence
Authors: Adhikari Rabindra , Jha Pratyush , Gautam Dipendra , Fabbrocino Giovanni
Published: May 2019

The so-called Greco-Roman monuments, also known as neoclassical monuments, in Nepal represent unique construction systems. Although they are not native to Nepal, they are icons of the early 19th century in the Kathmandu valley. As such structures are located within the heritage sites and historical centers, preservation of Greco-Roman monuments is necessary. Since many buildings are in operation and accommodate public and critical functions, their seismic safety has gained attention in recent times, especially after the Gorkha earthquake. This paper first presents the background of the Bagh Durbar monument, reports the damage observations, and depicts some repair and retrofitting solutions. Attention is paid to the implementation of the different phases of the structural characterization of the building, the definition of reference material parameters, and finally, the structural analysis made by using finite element models. The aim of the contribution consists of comparison of the adequacy of the finite element model with the field observations and design of retrofitting solutions to assure adequate seismic safety for typical Greco-Roman buildings in Nepal. Thus, this paper sets out to provide rational strengthening solutions compatible with the existing guidelines rather than complex numerical analyses.
Removal of Organic Micropollutants from a Municipal Wastewater Secondary Effluent by UVA-LED Photocatalytic Ozonation
Authors: Chávez Ana M. , Ribeiro Ana R. , Moreira Nuno F. F. , Silva Adrián M. T. , Rey Ana , Álvarez Pedro M. , Beltrán Fernando J.
Published: May 2019

Numerous contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) have been found in different water bodies. Directive 2013/39/EU and Decision 2018/840/EU are consequently being implemented in the field of water policies. Twelve CECs (e.g., isoproturon, ciprofloxacin, and clarithromycin are among those listed) were detected in a municipal wastewater secondary effluent by means of solid phase extraction and ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry (SPE-UHPLC-MS/MS). Different advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), based on the combination of ozone, UVA-LED and powdered TiO2, were investigated for their removal in a semi-batch operation. In addition, TiO2-coated glass rings (P25R) were characterized with different techniques (SEM, WDXRF) and used for continuous mode operation in a packed bed reactor (PBR). Among the AOPs studied, ozone-based processes were found to be more efficient than heterogeneous photocatalysis. A kinetic study was performed showing that direct ozonation is the main oxidation pathway for CEC removal. Ozone was successfully decomposed in combination with UVA-LED and P25R, resulting in an apparent rate constant of 3.2 × 10−2 s−1 higher than in the O3/LED system (1.0 × 10−3 s−1) or with ozone alone (8.6 × 10−5 s−1). Hydroxyl radical reaction could prevail over direct ozone reaction for the most refractory compounds (e.g., isoproturon).
Ceria–Zirconia Mixed Metal Oxides Prepared via Mechanochemical Grinding of Carbonates for the Total Oxidation of Propane and Naphthalene
Authors: Shah Parag M. , Burnett Joseph W. H. , Morgan David J. , Davies Thomas E. , Taylor Stuart H.
Published: May 2019

A series of ceria–zirconia mixed metal oxides with varying metal ratios were prepared by the calcination of precursors synthesized by mechanochemical grinding of the metal carbonates, and tested for catalytic naphthalene and propane total combustion. The mechanically-mixed metal oxides were more active for both propane and naphthalene total oxidation compared to the parent metal oxides. Ce0.95Zr0.05Ox was the most active catalyst for the total combustion of propane and naphthalene. Catalysts were characterized by x-ray diffraction, BET surface area, laser Raman spectroscopy, temperature programmed reduction, scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive x-ray analysis and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy techniques. Formation of ceria–zirconia solid solutions was observed for catalysts with a zirconia content of 10% or lower, whereas ceria and zirconia phase separation was observed when zirconia content was above 25%. Surface area increased when ceria and zirconia were mixed, and the reduction temperature of the bulk shifted to lower temperatures upon increasing zirconia content. Incorporation of zirconia was found to increase the relative concentration of surface oxygen defects compared to pure ceria, with low amounts of zirconia showing the greatest increase. The concentration of oxygen defects correlates with propane and naphthalene total oxidation activity. The enhanced total oxidation activity occurs as a result of the increased number of oxygen defects and the higher surface area. The results demonstrate that mechanochemical preparation from carbonate precursors was an effective route to make active catalysts.