bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Khārijism from the Second Fitna until the Death of ʿAbd al-Malik
Authors: Hagemann Hannah-Lena
Published: January 2022

Chapter Six examines the material on the Khārijites for the period of the second civil war (fitna) and the caliphate of ʿAbd al-Malik. It returns to a thematic structure, identifying five main concerns: (1) the reputation of al-Muhallab b. Abī Ṣufra and his family as formidable warriors who save the early Islamic community from the most violent Khārijite faction, the Azāriqa; (2) the volatility of Khārijism as antithesis to the importance of communal togetherness; (3) criticism of the Umayyads and their agents, especially the governor of Iraq, al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf; and (4) the interactions between the Khārijites and Ibn al-Zubayr, who challenged Umayyad rule during the second civil war. The fifth theme is peculiar to al-Ṭabarī, who utilises his accounts of Khārijite military prowess to fashion a military manual of sorts for the prudent field commander. This final chronological chapter follows the preceding ones in underlining the literary features of the examined accounts, putting into question the possibility of a straightforward positivist reconstruction of Khārijite history.
Divine Speech and the Qur’an
Authors: Harvey Ramon
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on the divine attribute of speech and its relationship to the Qur’an, which has always been one of the most important and controversial aspects of Islamic theology. The chapter starts by exploring the theology of Abū Ḥanīfa and the reception of his ideas. Next, there is a detailed exposition of al-Māturīdī’s theology on this question, as well as that of his main classical successors and their interlocutors. Finally, the question is given a contemporary treatment, drawing on the theological resources already introduced over the course of the study.
Conclusion
Authors: Harvey Ramon
Published: January 2022

From the first pages of this book, I have set out to tackle the theological problem of finite human reasoning about God, eternal and transcendent. The mode of thought that I have pursued is couched within a specific, venerable intellectual tradition, the Māturīdī school of Islamic ...
Soft Power and Cinema: A Methodological Reflection and Some Chinese Inflections
Authors: Lim Song Hwee
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides more than a case study of Chinese cinema’s soft power (or lack thereof) by drawing out wider implications for the interrogation of the relationship between soft power and cinema on both conceptual and methodological fronts. It proposes a three-pronged approach to the study of soft power by introducing affect— beyond the two usual lenses of agent and effect—as a missing but crucial factor in mediating soft power transactions. It uses the example of The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016) to demonstrate how the very making of the film can be perceived as an occasion in which affective resonances towards the emergence and march of China coalesce to generate an environment that would undermine the reception of the film. Finally, it suggests that the Chinese case inflects the study of soft power in three ways—namely, perception, policy, and propaganda—and concludes that China’s hard power manoeuvres have rendered the performance of its soft power efforts rather flaccid precisely because affect is intrinsic in, rather than external to, agent, atmosphere, and effect.
Building BRICS: Soft Power and Audio-visual Relations in Transnational Context
Authors: Dennison Stephanie
Published: January 2022

This chapter investigates the relationship between both state and non-state actors in the film industries of BRICS countries, and national and transnational soft power strategies. It takes as a case study the BRICS film festivals (India, 2016; China, 2017; South Africa, 2018 and Brazil 2019), and the three BRICS co-productions that have been made to date: Where has the Time Gone? (2017), Half the Sky (2018) and Neighbors (2019). It considers the potential significance of festivals and BRICS-sponsored filmmaking for the soft power kudos of these emerging nations. It argues that China serves as cultural “facilitator” within the BRICS grouping, promoting a wide range of cultures as well as its own.
Popular Geo-politics, Strategic Narratives and Soft Power in Viking (2016) and Guardians (2017)
Authors: Saunders Robert A.
Published: January 2022

This chapter analyses on two recent big-budget Russian films, Viking/Викинг (2016) and Guardians/Защитники (2017), with the aim of interrogating contemporary examples of filmic fantasy. Its focus is these films’ respective roles as influencers of geopolitical codes and geographical imagination, both at ‘home’ (i.e. within Russian cultural space) and ‘abroad’ (i.e. Europe, North America, and East Asia). Situated at the nexus of soft power, nation branding, and popular geopolitics scholarship, this chapter employs and expands Saunders and Strukov’s analytical framework of the ‘popular geopolitics feedback loop’ (2017) as it applies to the Russian Federation. By examining the (geo)visual representations and (geo)politically pregnant content of these two films in relation to their ‘Hollywood’-based counterparts (Viking bears a great semblance to HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-) and The History Channel’s Vikings (2013-) while Guardians’ is a clear adaptation of Marvel’s The Avengers series (2012-) and its adjuncts [Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, etc.]), this study seeks to explore the ways in which soft power flows can be more effectively employed using pre-established modalities of popular cultural persuasion
The Christian Regime of Literary Comfort: From Boethius to Dante
Authors: Pieters Jürgen
Published: January 2022

Taking its cue from two recent bibliotherapeutic publications on Dante (by Joseph Luzzi and Rod Dreher, respectively), the chapter tries to identify Dante’s central ideas on the consolatory effects of literature, which it takes as characteristic of the Christian regime of literary comfort. These ideas are illustrated in a reading of Purgatorio 2 (the Casella scene) and traced back to Dante’s fascination with Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, whose famous opening scene is also analysed: Lady Philosophy driving away the Muses of Poetry. The chapter also discusses Boethius and Dante’s interest in the figure of Orpheus, iconic consoler.
The Religion of Despair: George Sand and Gustave Flaubert on Reading and Writing
Authors: Pieters Jürgen
Published: January 2022

The chapter starts off from a reading of Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, which it considers as a reflection on the limits of bibliotherapy. The novel is then related to the correspondence between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert (Winter 1875), in which the two writer friends take opposing sides in the debate on the consolatory purposes and effects of literature. Sand famously reproaches Flaubert of only being interested in the production of ‘desolation’.
Stain Resistance: The Parlour and Reading-Room
Authors: Moore Robbie
Published: January 2022

Chapter 2, centred on James’s early short fiction and his overlooked comic novel The Reverberator, examines late nineteenth-century hotel parlours and reading-rooms. The chapter examines the materiality of these spaces, and the commercial and public health considerations that created a blank, hard, shiny hotel aesthetic. These surfaces resisted the stains and accretions of inhabitation. The chapter connects the stain resistance of hotel public spaces with the amnesiac practices of consumption and disposal that were carried out here. Reading-rooms rarely contained permanent book collections; instead, they fostered a trade in abandoned Tauchnitz editions and odd volumes of serial fiction. In The Reverberator, these amnesiac spaces are set against the suffocating permanence and curatorial obsessions of old Parisian families. In this minor novel, James explores the emancipatory potential of the hotel’s disposable culture – and the pleasures of minor, interstitial experience.
Hotel Angst: The Corridor and Elevator
Authors: Moore Robbie
Published: January 2022

This chapter reads Elizabeth Bowen’s first novel, The Hotel (1927), in light of the hotel schtick of Charlie Chaplin’s early comedies and the mobile framing of hotel space in F. W. Murnau’s Der Letze Mann (1924). Bowen understood the blankness of corporate hotel space as analogous to a studio set: looking around an empty drawing-room, one of Bowen’s characters begins to find ‘the mise en scène queerly important’. The cast of Bowen’s cinematic hotel are out of date for the 1920s: country vicars, officers, and old administrators of the Indian empire. Their power – as a class and as narrative agents – is expressed spatially, whether that be through the occupation of bigger rooms on better floors of the hotel, or through the occupation of the narrative foreground. Their power therefore relies on a static, pre-cinematic visual language. Bowen’s cinematic hotel, however, with its roaming camera-eye, dizzying focal effects, comic doubles and slapstick routines, unsettles that static visual order, collapsing these characters’ careful demarcations of territory, and confusing the distinction between major and minor characters. Bowen’s novel finds the spatialised class relations of the hotel to be a brittle construct, ripe for collapse.
The Hotel Auteur: The Manager’s Office
Authors: Moore Robbie
Published: January 2022

This chapter follows the rise of the hotel corporation and hotel managerialism from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1930s, through the work of Henry James (The American Scene), Arnold Bennett (The Grand Babylon Hotel and Imperial Palace), Sinclair Lewis (Work of Art), Henry Green (Party Going), and corporate movie studios (BIS and MGM). The chapter starts with the observation that the newly professionalised role of hotel manager gained cultural authority through the rhetoric of scientific management, even as the hotel manager in this period was repeatedly figured as a kind of artist and the hotel as a work of art. Moving from James’s figuration of the Waldorf-Astoria’s management as a shadowy rival author, to Bennett’s and Lewis’s manager-poets of the 1930s, and the managerial eye of MGM’s Grand Hotel, the chapter considers the hotel manager as a classed and gendered fantasy figure of authorial power and omniscience within corporate modernity. Henry Green’s resistance to managerial and narratorial authority in Party Going, set in the near-bankrupt Grosvenor Hotel at the end of the grand hotel era, brings the historical narrative of the book to a close.
W. B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones and the Limits of Global Modernism
Authors: Parsons Cóilín
Published: January 2022

This piece attempts to reconcile specificity with abstraction, Ireland with Japan, the present with the past in The Dreaming of the Bones. The landscape works as a historical palimpsest of a contested history, a balancing of the poetics of place and non-place. Yeats maps his world using different scales of measurement.
Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border
Authors: Ellmann Maud
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines the impact on recent Irish fiction of the border dividing British Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic, ‘the most militarised border in the archipelago’. This border is deplored as a spatial heresy by Irish nationalists who envision a united Ireland, but defended as an orthodoxy by Unionists who insist on their political allegiance to the British state. This chapter compares two thrillers set in borderland territory, Eugene McCabe’s Victims and Benedict Kiely’s Proxopera, with Anna Burns’s deconstructed bildungsroman No Bones, set in Belfast. While McCabe’s and Kiely’s novellas rework the conventions of the Big House novel, with its traditional focus on domestic space, at once imprisoning and open to invasion, Burns shows how the border spreads division through the home, the city, and the mind, undermining the distinction between outside and inside, public strife and private madness.
Rage’s Brother: The Bomb at the Centre of Wilde’s Trivial Comedy
Authors: Conrad Kathryn
Published: January 2022

This chapter argues that Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, described by its author as an ‘amusing thing with lots of fun and wit’, contains an explosive undercurrent of social critique. The funniest of Wilde’s plays, Earnest satirizes the subterfuge (‘Bunburying’) demanded of sexual heretics in Victorian society, where marginal identities and desires were excluded, suppressed, or in Wilde’s case, brutally penalized. Conrad investigates Wilde’s ambivalent attitude to direct revolutionary action such as the Fenian dynamite campaign of 1881-85 and French anarchist activities of the 1890s, attending particularly to the 1884 bomb explosion in the cloakroom at Victoria Station, the ‘terminus’ where Miss Prism left the infant Jack Worthing in a handbag containing her three-decker novel. As Conrad argues, ‘texts, bodies, and bombs all meet at Victoria Station’, and Wilde, as an Irishman and a homosexual, could himself be seen as ‘a potential bomb right at the terminus of Victorian society’.
Modernist Heresies: Irish Visual Culture and the Arts and Crafts Movement
Authors: Sullivan Kelly
Published: January 2022

This chapter shows how the Irish Arts and Crafts movement introduced a bold new aesthetic in the visual arts that scandalised orthodox opinion. The early years of the twentieth century saw a renewed focus on the applied arts – including metalwork, stained glass, tapestries, and printed materials – designed and made for Catholic churches, state buildings, even domestic patrons. Such art reflected existing tensions between conservatism and innovation, by turns echoing and challenging competing cultural nationalist views. The work of Harry Clarke, Evie Hone, the Cuala Press, and others combined traditional materials, skills, and Irish symbolism with innovative aesthetics and sometimes shocking or offensive scenes of modern Irish life. Though church and state institutions that had briefly supported such cultural nationalist work ultimately came to view it as heretical, the chapter demonstrates the profound influence of such work on Irish visual arts modernism.
‘Stolen fruit is best of all’: The Pleasures of Subversive Consumption in the Late Novels of Molly Keane
Authors: Rich Lauren
Published: January 2022

This chapter argues that Molly Keane’s heretical late novels violate every possible standard of good behaviour, especially in their scandalous emphasis on the unsavoury aspects of eating and excreting. Mesmerised by these nauseating details, critics have tended to overlook Keane’s affirmation of the pleasures of food and its redemptive value for her Anglo-Irish heroines, trapped as they are in the crumbling Big Houses of the moribund Protestant Ascendancy. Keane insists on the uncomfortably close relationship between the grotesque and the delicious in a context where denial of physical pleasure and suppression of appetite are important markers of class and gender, as elements of good behaviour. In Keane’s Big Houses, women seek out forbidden food as private consolation for their confinement and alienation.
Gendered Narratives of Transgressive Politics: Recovering Revolutionary Rubina
Authors: Berberian Houri
Published: January 2022

A report issued by the Ottoman commission investigating the 1905 attempted assassination of Sultan Abdülhamid II describes Rubina (Sophie Areshian), who helped plan and carry out this act of political violence, as “Armenian, originally from the Caucasus, 32 years old, hysterical, not tall, skinny, brown, large dark eyes, vague look, pronounced and hooked nose, thin bloodless lips...” Similar depictions of Rubina as prone to nervousness, easily roused and distressed are echoed in contemporary Armenian-language accounts by her male comrades. Some even attempted to blame her for the failed assassination, citing the unsuitability of her “crisis”-prone character. This chapter attempts to recover Rubina from obscurity within the context of a male-dominated revolutionary discourse through an exploration of published and unpublished documents and correspondence and predominantly nationalist narratives of her role. Rubina's act of political violence in a masculinist-nationalist setting may be viewed as a transgressive and challenging act that has been depicted in gendered terms. Furthermore, the chapter seeks to recover and insert Rubina's story into the larger Armenian revolutionary narrative as well as the broader context of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century revolutionary terror, a predominantly masculine world of revolution, and an age of rogues.
Racketeers in Politics: Theoretical Reflections on Strong-man Performances in Late Qajar Iran
Authors: Gölz Olmo
Published: January 2022

During the Constitutional Revolution in Iran, the horse dealer Sattar Khan and the bricklayer Baqer Khan from Tabriz became the most famous heroes of their country. Insofar as they are heroes and representatives of a prominent interpretation of the revolution, they are figures of collective memories that stand for a certain perspective on the historical processes themselves, in which the ‘simple man’ is held responsible for political action. This chapter argues that the success story of the two revolutionary leaders forged a masculinity ethos that put strong emphasis on political action and ‘tough-guy’ performances at the same time. By drawing on the racket theory of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, this paper will offer three theoretical arguments that might shed light the luti masculinity ethos: (1) the constant references to the luti status of the two racketeers Sattar Khan and Baqer Khan helped to ‘Iranise’ the Constitutional Revolution and obfuscate its transnational entanglements; (2) their example helped to reshape gender discourses in general and notions of hegemonic masculinity in particular; and (3) this had distinct consequences for Iran’s history in the course of the century, for the ‘simple man’s’ obligation to contribute to national politics is valorised.
Conspiracy, International Police Cooperation and the Fight against Anarchism in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1878–1908
Authors: Yılmaz lkay
Published: January 2022

This paper discusses the new legislative and administrative security reforms and practices in the Ottoman Empire, influenced by the anarchist fear in Europe and the anti-anarchist regulations against “propaganda by deed.” The Ottoman reform process was in line with the global synchronization of the modern states, but it cannot be seen only as a part of this global process. While the reform schemes regarding Macedonia and Eastern Anatolia became a battleground between the Great Powers and the Ottoman Empire after Berlin Treaty (1878), the Ottoman threat perceptions also created a new security discourse against revolutionaries, rebels and rogues. This paper examines how Hamidian state elites defined security concerns, the ways in which processes of securitization were operated and legitimised with discursive methods, and how these discursive strategies were produced globally and implemented in the Ottoman Empire. Particularly after 1878, the Ottoman government started to ground the threat perception based on the notion of a probable association between Armenians and revolutionary organisations. Besides the security discourse, this paper examines the concept of security as an embedded process in administrative regulations and their practices that open the discussion on routinized bureaucratic decisions and acts which created the normalization of internal security measures.
Between Ruler and Rogue: Sayyid Talib al-Naqib and the British in Early Twentieth-century Basra
Authors: Schlaepfer Aline
Published: January 2022

Sayyid Talib al-Naqib was born in Basra in the late 1860s to a family of nuqabāʾ, traditional leaders and marshals of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (ashrāf). After he was shortly considered a serious candidate for the crown of Iraq, his candidacy was eventually rejected in favor of Faysal, son of Husayn of Mekka. While Talib’s story has often been relegated to the margins of national and colonial histories, British sources give a stunning impression of the complexity of Talib’s strategies, and the challenges he presented for British administrations in Iraq, Egypt and India. By exploring British correspondence and reports on Talib – from Basra, Baghdad, Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus, Delhi and Bombay – as well as Iraqi historiography, press and memoirs, this chapter shows Talib’s deliberate use of his liminal position – between rogue and ruler – to maintain the balance of power in his favour. I use his story to show how the presumably clear-cut distinction between rogue and ruler, or the law and the outlaw characteristic of Hobsbawmian reading of social banditry, can prove to be problematic.
Chemistry of Revolution: Naum Tyufekchiev and the Trajectories of Revolutionary Violence in the Late Ottoman Europe
Authors: Öztan Ramazan Hakkı
Published: January 2022

This study charts the life of Naum A. Tyufekchiev, a chemist who hailed from the Ottoman Macedonian town of Resen. Educated in Belgium, Tufekchiev participated in multiple assassination plots against figures such as the Bulgarian prime minister and cabinet members, the Bulgarian ambassador to Istanbul, the Ottoman Sultan, and the Iranian Shah. A skillful chemist-turned-revolutionary, he designed his own hand grenades and secured illicit transfer of weapons for a range of revolutionary organizations such as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Young Turk committees, Macedonian revolutionaries, and the Bolsheviks. While Tyufekchiev became an asset for various intelligence agencies at different times, he had also cultivated an ideological and materialist agenda of his own. By reconstructing his life story, I hope to utilize Tyufekchiev as a lens to understand the late trans-imperial politics from the late 1880s to the First World War. The goal is to reconstruct the life of a revolutionary figure that is layered, complex, and resistant to simple historical categorizations. In doing so, I would not only be challenging nationalist histories which had dominated the study of Balkan revolutionaries, but also re-assert the central roles played by such entrepreneurs of violence in the construction of identities in Southeastern Europe.
1 The First Sound and the Curiosity
Authors: Chattopadhyay Budhaditya
Published: January 2022

The introductory chapter consists of four broad sub-chapters that present a framework for understanding the topic, namely the mediation of the sonic environment, and defines ambient sound and ambience through their various connotations and associations. This introductory section examines the book’s context through a review of existing literature on research in the field. The book’s conceptual approach is clarified in terms of in-depth discussion of a number of keywords and concepts such as mediation, diegesis, mimesis, presence, soundscape theory, ambience, sound studies, digital aesthetics, through a historical analysis of relevant works. The chapter delineates how the investigation is drawn through the study of various generic and ordinary sites that have been recorded and (re)produced in film and media works. The chapter also underscores the methodology addressing the similarities and differences between ambient sound recordings made to reconstruct the site within the film production’s interior world and field recordings used in certain site-driven sound and media artworks. Relevant new knowledge is proposed about the extent to which sonic environments are mediated. From a practical standpoint, such knowledge challenges the idea of best practice in sound production. The book’s structure and methodology is also explained.
2 The Auditory Context and Signification
Authors: Chattopadhyay Budhaditya
Published: January 2022

From the very advent of sound in cinema, ambient sound has been a practical production concern. Initially, it was considered negatively, as unwanted ‘background noise’ from the location, and then positively, as site-specific information to be included in the film’s diegesis. The latter clearly explains ambient sound’s relevance and considered role within film sound production. Every site depicted in a cinematic narrative contains distinct and subtle sounds emanating from its environment. These sound sources can include, for example, wind, rain, running water, rustling leaves, distant traffic, aircraft and machinery noise, the sound of distant human movement and speech, creaks and pops from thermal contraction, air conditioners and plumbing, the noise from fans and motors, the hum of electrical machines, room tone, etc. Although film sound has received extensive academic interest, much of this attention has been invested in explaining the role of voice and music in relation to the visual image (...
6 Stereo Sound and the Expanded Space
Authors: Chattopadhyay Budhaditya
Published: January 2022

As I have shown in the previous chapter, ‘dubbing’ was introduced in cinema in order to avoid camera noise emanating from the popular and affordable Arriflex 35 III cameras along with other incidental background noises from the location of shooting. Dubbing, like ‘looping’, quickly became a norm in the sound techniques of producing the auditory setting primarily inside sound studios. Such sound practices in the dubbing era, with an emphasis on post-synchronisation, effectively destroyed perspective in cinema as argued by many film writers like ...
9 Forest, Jungle
Authors: Chattopadhyay Budhaditya
Published: January 2022

When I was seven years old, I once got lost in the forest. I had been following my father, who walked faster than me, on our way through the trees behind our house to meet someone in the tribal village. At a certain point, I realised that I couldn’t hear my father’s footsteps in front of me – sounds that I had been tracing while looking around in curiosity. I had been taken by the sunlight as it played on the leaves and butterflies as they passed by in solemn unison with the green leaves and dark tree branches. Then, I found myself alone. The murmurs of wind blowing through leaves and the friction between movement and stasis had already drowned out my father’s footsteps – my lone sonic navigational tool in the forest. Their absence accentuated other sounds. The intimate whispering wind carrying news of fallen leaves, its intensity and proximity suddenly sounded ominous and dreadful. Surrounded by this maze of sound, I lost my sense of orientation and security. I wanted to escape this estranging sonic immersion to find familiar voices that would ground me. By retracing my footsteps, I gradually found a way out of the vibrating forest. My guiding force had been a heightened relationship with the forest’s sound world and my isolation. Ambient sounds and the reflection of my own anxious voice among the dense trees had allowed me to navigate through the labyrinthine green and escape....
14 Public Transport
Authors: Chattopadhyay Budhaditya
Published: January 2022

The seat next to me is unoccupied. Someone drops her glance after momentary eye contact. The subtle vibration of the moving train progresses rhythmically; the city’s trace slips backwards beyond the partly soundproofed window. Dark, heavy clouds are gloomy in the sky, but I can’t hear any incoming thunderstorm. I drop a hint in the hope of opening a conversation with the person sitting opposite to me. In response, the face turns opaque. The look of most co-passengers is fixed on nowhere as if they are waiting for a catastrophe to happen. The shared space in the compartment is speechless. The absence of any preconceived dialogue in the faces around me renders our environment one of soliloquy. Sporadic announcements cause everyone to focus intensely on the disembodied voice, but it disappears, leaving some information about the direction of the train and the name of the next stop in an automated voice to evaporate. What do the boy and woman sitting in opposing seats think about one another? Their numb glances say that they are completely oblivious to one another’s presence. As if separated by a pane of glass and joined by loneliness, the young woman moves her glance from the child to concentrate on the open book lying in her lap instead. Interaction is at a standstill. The air doesn’t carry any odour of adjacent bodies. Someone turns a page in one moment and another moment enters the gap. The proximate faces look isolated and dead, reflecting only the recurring and rhythmic vibration of the train compartment....
The conservative turn: Nixon, Ford and the beginning of the end, 1971–76
Authors: Mclay Mark
Published: January 2022

This chapter analyses the conservative turn of the Nixon White House and how this impacted the War on Poverty. It shows how Nixon decisively turned against his own FAP proposal and how he sought to bring Johnson’s anti-poverty initiatives to an end by finding ‘horror’ stories to discredit existing programmes. In doing so, the chapter argues that Nixon’s conservative shift has mistakenly been cited by historians as taking place after the 1972 elections, when in actual fact it occurred two years earlier. The chapter also charts the role anti-poverty politics in the 1972 elections, in which Nixon defeated McGovern in a landslide – partly by claiming that McGovern’s anti-poverty proposals were unrealistic. Finally, the chapter shows how the arrival of Gerald Ford in office did little to revive the War on Poverty’s fortunes.
Future Contingencies: Sir Robert Howard and John Boys
Authors: Calvert Ian
Published: January 2022

Chapter 7 begins by discussing the works of Sir Robert Howard and John Boys, both of whom published translations of Virgil within a year of the Restoration. Howard’s translations and imitations of Virgil contained proclamations of his long-standing loyalty to the Stuarts, but they also expressed concerns over the stability and longevity of the new regime. Boys, by contrast, saw in Virgil a means of providing confident predictions of a glorious future for the nation under Charles II under the guidance of his chief counsellor, the Earl of Clarendon. Such predictions, however, were compromised even prior to the publication of Boys’s translations, and further undermined by events later in the decade. The chapter ends with a sketch of the continued connections between Virgil, providing political counsel to the Stuart monarchy and predicting its future from the period between Clarendon’s fall and the end of the seventeenth century, with a focus on the writings of John Dryden.
‘We Return Home in Glory’: Chinese Networks and Gold Seeking in Otago
Authors: Davy Daniel
Published: January 2022

Chapter Five draws on the diary of Alexander Don, a Presbyterian missionary to the Chinese in Otago. It charts the migration of Chinese prospectors and the means by which they attempted to maintain connections to home and kin. It also maps Chinese societies onto the diggings when individuals lived and worked with migrants from the same family or village. The second half of the Chapter maps the responses of European colonists to Chinese gold seeking in Otago after the European gold rushes, and the ways in which debates about Chinese migration to Otago drew on similar debates occurring in California and Australia.
Masculinities in Banietemad’s Tales: Reshuffling Gender Dynamics under Socio-economic Pressures
Authors: Khamsy Nina
Published: January 2022

This chapter shows how Banietemad exposes social crisis in its reordering of gender relations. By examining the vignettes of everyday life which make up Tales, Khamsy discusses how Banietemad’s camera lyrically conveys gender reshuffling, thereby confronting the bigger question of imbalance in studies of gender in Iranian cinema.
Representing Sexuality on Screen in Walled Societies: A Comparative Analysis of Iranian Film (The May Lady) and Chinese Film (Army Nurse)
Authors: Han Yunzi
Published: January 2022

This chapter offers a comparative study of contemporary Iranian and Chinese cinema since the late 1980s from a trans-Asia perspective. Through a close reading of the two films, Han discusses how they situate their protagonists in their respective societies and analyzes the similarities between the two films’ aesthetic approaches in the representation of the sacrificing mother and single motherhood.
Embracing All My Trees: An Ecocritical Reading
Authors: Khansalar Fatemeh-Mehr
Published: January 2022

This chapter offers a unique ecocritical perspective on Banietemad’s documentaries and filmmaking. In particular, the chapter considers the independent Karestan project that Banietemad co-established and undertakes a close reading of the documentary All My Trees, which portrays Mahlagha Mallah, mother of Iran’s environment.
Spaces of Consumption Replace Spaces of Production
Authors: Zou Hongyan
Published: January 2022

This chapter outlines two competing styles of cinematic Chengdu and its adjacent cities: primitive and modern. The primitiveness of Chengdu results from its geographical isolation and underdeveloped economy before the 1980s, while the modern facet of Chengdu started to take shape under the Third Front Project between the 1960s and the 1980s when mainland China was confronted with the Cold War. The cityscape of Chengdu, accordingly, was featured by an array of state-owned socialist “units” involving in the production of military and heavy industry. Focusing on these socialist spaces and relevant policies (household registration), this chapter shows that the unit, represented in Jia Zhangke’s 24 City [Ershisi chengji] (2008), functioned as centripetal spaces attracting talent, resources and capital with their promises of decent payment, city household registration and life-long career. Moreover, it argues that the spatial transition of Chengdu from a space of production into a space of consumption is characterised by generational gaps in characters’ consuming and appropriating urban spaces. It finally concludes that the 1980s becomes a watershed that breaks the centripetal space under the socialist economic system and witnesses the formation of a centrifugal space created by a socialist market and facilitated by interprovincial highways and railways.
‘A shriek so terrible!’: Charles Brockden Brown’s Sensational Ventriloquists
Authors: Murray Hannah Lauren
Published: January 2022

Charles Brockden Brown populates his gothic fiction with racially ambiguous characters to ask what constitutes national identity and who can be a citizen at a time when these concepts are shifting, unsettled and still contested. This chapter examines how Brown communicates liminal Whiteness through sensational ventriloquism, which marks marginalised White men as non-White noncitizens along the frontier. Through their unusual vocal abilities, itinerant Frank Carwin in Wieland and cognitively impaired Nick Handyside in ‘Somnambulism’ become less than White figures. Their transgressive cries disturb the senses of White middle class families who serve as prime fictional examples of rational White citizens in the early republic. Written as pieces of irrational yet instructive entertainment, Brown transcribes these disruptive and powerful speech acts within his fiction to test the senses and rationality of his republican heroines and gothic readers.
‘I say to you that I am dead!’: Edgar Allan Poe’s Protesting Cadavers
Authors: Murray Hannah Lauren
Published: January 2022

In his fantastical tales, Edgar Allan Poe employs scientific and medical experiments as narrative devices to voice anxieties of White male civic fragility. For Poe, the dying and dead body, in the hands of the doctor or scientist, offers an opportunity to both explore and exorcise fears of social exclusion and loss. Written in a context of early US graverobbing, Poe’s medical narratives realise the frightening possibility that White middle-class, educated or propertied man could also be controlled and manipulated in the name of medical progress. In subjecting his protagonists to near-death or fatal experiences, Poe asks what it means for citizens to lose their self-possession and instead become the property of others. Speaking of and protesting their suffering, the conscious voices of the dead and dying undermine the expectation of a rational and self-possessed early US citizenship represented by the professional White male doctor.
The Body as Apparatus: Doris Wishman’s Double Agent 73
Authors: Gorfinkel Elena
Published: January 2022

The chapter considers Wishman’s Chesty Morgan films, Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, in relation to feminist psychoanalytic theory by analyzing how the female body acts as both a prop and a technology within the films’ modes of address. Discussing the film in context of exploitation as filmic category defined by its mode of production and marketing, the author contends that Morgan’s body is the films’ primary prop and exploitation “gimmick.” However, the implantation of a camera into Morgan’s breasts complicate the actress’s as simply an object of the gaze; she becomes both a screen and a memory technology, assaulting the male characters and arguably the viewer in the process.
The Girls in the Mirror: Women’s Horror Filmmaking and Doris Wishman’s Each Time I Kill
Authors: Heller-Nicholas Alexandra
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines Each Time I Kill in specific relation to the similarities it shares with other U.S. women-directed horror films that bookended it, Mirror Mirror (Marina Sargenti) and The Dorm (Rachel Talalay). Analyzing the film through a dual focus on gender and genre analysis, Each Time I Kill is discussed as part of the tradition of women’s horror filmmaking that interrogate the effects of gendered power relations on identity, alienation, and constructions of femininity. Sidestepping the easy reducibility of feminism with women’s authorship, the chapter uses comparative formal and textual analysis of the film’s engagement with mirror imagery in relation to the trope of the “transforming girl-outsider.”
Bad Bis Go to Hell: Bisexuality as Transgressive and Lucrative in Doris Wishman’s Roughies
Authors: Freibert Finley
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines the presence of bisexuality in the content and marketing of Wishman’s roughies of the 1960s and frames Wishman’s engagement with bisexuality though tracing the cultural history of bisexuality within the historical context of the American sexual revolution. Reviewing gay and bisexual histories to show that queer audiences and urban spaces of sexual media consumption formed a significant and overlooked social context for the sexploitation film, Wishman’s earlier roughies, The Sex Perils of Paulette (1965) and Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), are examined for formal and narrative techniques that centralized bisexual female protagonists. Wishman’s later roughie Too Much Too Often! (1967) is argued to reflect a bisexual address in not only its formal and narrative elements, but also its advertising techniques spanning newspaper ads, pressbook details, and the film’s trailer.
Depicting Female Bodies: Doris Wishman, Carolee Schneemann, and Legacies of Subversion
Authors: Greenberg Hannah
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores the work of Doris Wishman and Carolee Schneemann, two women whose work explores the implications of being a woman, and what it meant to inhabit a body coded female. While the chapter addresses Wishman’s work in the context of exploitation cinema, and her cinema’s relationship to the more established avant-garde and the ways in which her work deserves placement in the avant-garde, it primarily initiates a conversation between Wishman and Schneemann’s work by analyzing the ways they both centralize female bodies in their films and demonstrate the complexities of depicting female nudity.
Recreating the Godly Commonwealth: Urban Mission and Social Reform
Authors: Mallon Ryan
Published: January 2022

Chapter Seven examines the social activism of the dissenting churches both within Scotland’s cities and in reform societies, in particular focusing on how Thomas Chalmers’ ideal of the godly commonwealth was reinterpreted in its new voluntary context, following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1845. That Act removed an important pillar of the Church of Scotland’s control over Scottish society and placed Scotland’s dissenters on an equal footing with the Establishment, providing an opportunity for co-operation – and competition – on social issues, in particular urban evangelisation. However, the results were decidedly mixed. Did the increasingly urban middle-class character of the Free Church, traditionally associated with Scotland’s older dissenting churches and at odds with the new church’s claim to represent all Scots, hamper Chalmers’ aim to instil the godly commonwealth ideal throughout Scotland and create a national church that appealed to all classes? By assessing the attempts to recreate Chalmers’ dream of a church-led urban mission and the co-operative efforts made by dissenters on social issues such as housing, this chapter examines the attempts of the dissenting churches to reclaim Scotland’s ‘sunken’ masses, and questions whether a dissenting social vision was possible in the post-godly commonwealth period of the mid-nineteenth century.
Liturgy in Scotland before 1560
Authors: Holmes Stephen Mark
Published: January 2022

This chapter gives a sketch of the forms of public worship in Scotland before the overthrow of the Latin liturgy, based primarily on surviving liturgical books and fragments. Liturgy in Scotland, before the Protestant Reformation of 1559-60, was simply a series of variants of the Latin liturgy of the West adapted in various ways for local use. These liturgical variants, uses or rites, were taken from places or groups outside Scotland such as Salisbury, Rome and the religious orders. When James IV’s 1507 licence to print the Aberdeen Breviary and other liturgical books speaks of ‘our awin Scottis use’, this sounds more like a wish than a description, unless it simply means the local reception and adaptation of these rites from elsewhere. This reception and diversity is the subject of this chapter
The Episcopalian Community in Aberdeen in the Jacobite Period
Authors: German Kieran
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores the Episcopalian community in Aberdeen with a focus on the meeting-houses and chapels which were legally established following the Toleration Act (1712) by congregations which had refused to accept Presbyterian governance of the Church of Scotland since 1689. These congregations were able to use the English liturgy and worship in a fashion which accorded with Episcopalian manners. The chapter is concerned with how Episcopalians behaved during comparatively settled political establishments between the major Jacobite uprisings, showing how Episcopalians would flit between qualified and non-juring congregations in the Jacobite period. In so doing it investigates the organisation of the Episcopalian community, the nature of their worship and what this can tell us about the relationship between juring Episcopalians and Jacobitism. On the latter point, for example, the chapter shows that jurors in Aberdeen were as remiss as non-jurors in omitting or ignoring the legislative requirement for prayers for the incumbent British royal family, especially after the Hanoverian succession in 1714. But rarely, if ever, did jurors go so far as to pray for the Jacobite Court in exile.
Neighbourhoods and the Workplace
Authors: Spolsky Bernard
Published: January 2022

The neighborhood enters the home through young peers who are perhaps more influential than parents. Evidence of the common languages in the neighborhood are the public signs, but the spoken varieties are even more diverse. Choice of a neighborhood can be important in the future of children raised in it. Similarly, home language policy can be influenced by the prospects for employment. Various occupations set language proficiency requirements for hiring or otion, and some employers attempt to manage the language use of workers.
Economic Pressure and Neoliberalism
Authors: Spolsky Bernard
Published: January 2022

Language ideology assigns values to specific languages, which establishes motivation for language shift towards powerful or global varieties. Languages are widely regarded as commodities, with monolingualism preferred to multilingualism. Economics is thus a major force in language management.
Introduction
Authors: Alharthi Jokha
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on the ways in which stories and narratives about the poets and events of the 9th and 10th centuries gave rise to certain compositions that in effect established a tradition and reconstructed a past. Among the issues raised in this chapter will be the sensual ghazal - vs. al-ghazal al-‘udhri, and moral and ethical issues and their effect in reconstructing the past, with special reference to the Kitab al-aghani.
Forms and Genres in Contemporary Iranian Literature
Authors: Nanquette Laetitia
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses the formal and generic characteristics of contemporary Iranian literature, with a focus on prose fiction. It gives an overview of its main genres and forms, focusing on those that do not have equivalents in western literary fields, or whose dynamics of production are distinct. I focus first on genre fiction (crime stories and romances) and then on politico-religious genres (‘Sacred Defence’ texts and literary texts on religious figures)
The Iranian Literary Field: An Overview
Authors: Nanquette Laetitia
Published: January 2022

This chapter first examines the polarisation of the independent and government sectors according to political orientation and explains the history of this division in the Iranian literary field. The next section considers the restrictions to the market, both those internal to Iran (from censorship to material constraints on paper supplies) and those external to Iran (sanctions, lack of copyright agreements). Finally, I analyse two institutions that represent how the field works on its margins: the Saadi Foundation, a recently founded cultural institution that focuses on Persian language, and the Union of Tehran Publishers and Booksellers.
Introduction
Authors: Cook Daniel
Published: January 2022

Walter Scott’s career as a professional short story writer was brief and, by his high standards, unsuccessful. Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), his only collection of shorter fiction, sold so poorly that the planned second series was quickly rejigged to include instead a more familiar full-length novel, ...
Wandering Tales
Authors: Cook Daniel
Published: January 2022

Extracted from Redgauntlet, ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ is often presented in anthologies and formal surveys as the first modern short story in English, loosely defined. It is not even Scott’s first major short story. That would be ‘The Fortunes of Martin Waldeck’, an interpolated tale included in the second volume of his third novel, The Antiquary. Like ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’, ‘Martin Waldeck’ has been anthologised as a self-contained work, though far less frequently. After that, two pieces appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine (1817–18) that have been securely attributed to Scott: ‘Alarming Increase of Depravity Among Animals’ and ‘Phantasmagoria’. In The Shorter Fiction volume for the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, Graham Tulloch and Judy King include an even earlier work, ‘The Inferno of Altisidora’ (Edinburgh Annual Register, 1811), as well as ‘Christopher Corduroy’ (The Sale-Room, 1817). Resembling eighteenth-century periodical sketches, they are not short stories as such. Read as sketch-like tales, though, they can ground our understanding of Scott’s early experimentation in the shorter form.