bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Method and Meaning
Authors: Kishore Shweta
Published: May 2020

Independent filmmakers have crafted non-standard methods and artistic vocabularies to realise a form of “independence” that frequently runs counter to commodity relations which position cultural production in terms of consumption and cultural producers as industry professionals. I argue that as a practice, independent Indian documentary has developed an artisanal mode of production that is deprofessionalised in contrast to the focus on professional specialisation and standardisation of creative processes in industrial modes of media production. This is a critical feature as it permits a radical re-imagination of documentary as signifying practice existing in the everyday that produces a system of references to interpret social process and actors, dismissed by mainstream media representation.
Introduction
Authors: Shaikh Fariha
Published: May 2020

During the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of men, women and children left Britain in search of better lives in the colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand and in North America. This demographic shift was also a textual enterprise. Emigrants wrote about their experiences in their diaries and letters. Their accounts were published in periodicals, memoirs and pamphlets. The Introduction argues that emigration literature set into circulation a new set of issues surrounding notions of home at a distance, a mediated sense of place, and the extension of kinship ties over time and space. Emigration produced a monumental shift in the way in which ordinary, everyday people in the nineteenth century, regardless of whether or not they emigrated, thought about relationships between text, travel and distance. Emigration literature has contributed to the shape of the modern world as we know it today, and it provides a rare insight into Victorian conceptualisations of globalization.
Printed Emigrants’ Letters: Networks of Affect and Authenticity
Authors: Shaikh Fariha
Published: May 2020

Chapter One looks at printed emigrants’ letters, a genre that has hitherto been neglected in both literary and historical studies of emigration on account of their dubious authenticity. Nineteenth-century publishers saw emigrants’ letters written to friends, family, emigration societies and philanthropists as a valuable source of information on emigration. Letters were often printed and circulated in a wide array of places, from periodicals to emigration society reports, pamphlets to edited collections. This chapter explores the ways in which printed emigrants’ letters manage the text’s transition from manuscript to print. It focusses on collections of edited letters which were published by an emigration scheme or society, such as the New Zealand Company, Thomas Sockett’s Petworth Emigration Scheme, and Caroline Chisholm’s Family Colonisation Loan Society. These letters provide first-hand accounts of emigration, of the colonies and of settling. They exude an intimate, personal tone and provide readers with a vicarious experience of emigration. At the same time, however, printed letters have been taken out of the context of small, personal networks of circulation and placed in the larger, and more public circulation, of print. Editors were keen to impress upon a suspicious reading public that the letter’s mobility, as it travelled from the colonies back to Britain and into print, had not compromised its authenticity. Producing the effect of being authentic was an integral part of these letters’ commodity status: potential emigrants had to be convinced that the tales of the colonies in the letters really were true if they were going to buy them.
Emigrant Shipboard Newspapers: Provisional Settlement at Sea
Authors: Shaikh Fariha
Published: May 2020

Chapter Two takes up the concerns of the first chapter regarding the grey areas between public and private spheres and the binaries of manuscript and print in the context of two manuscript shipboard periodicals, the Alfred (1839) and the Open Sea (1868). These were periodicals that emigrants had made themselves during the voyage to Australia. Whereas success is the inevitable conclusion of printed emigrants’ letters (and other propaganda), shipboard periodicals remain distinct from these genres because of their ostensible lack of participation in these narratives. Manuscript shipboard periodicals aim to invest themselves with the qualities of printed, land-based periodicals through their mimicry of them. Thus, rather than focussing on the colony as a place of settlement, these periodicals produce a culture of settlement on board the ship. In constructing the voyage out as a preparatory stage to the actual task of settlement in the colonies, these periodicals participate in the colonial push to turn emigrants into successful settlers.
Emigration Paintings: Visual Texts and Mobility
Authors: Shaikh Fariha
Published: May 2020

Chapter Four looks at representations of emigration in narrative paintings. The chapter explores how even in the visual realm, emigration is rendered into its textual components. It focusses in particular on five paintings of the mid-century: Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England (1855), Richard Redgrave’s The Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home (1858), Thomas Webster’s A Letter from the Colonies (1852), James Collinson’s Answering the Emigrant’s Letter (1850) and Abraham Solomon’s Second Class–the Parting (1854). In each of the paintings, emigration manifests itself through the texts of emigration literature, be it an emigrant’s letter, a map, a shipping advertisement or the name of the ship. However, the chapter argues that these emigration paintings eschewed the standard emigrant success story that circulated in print. Instead, these paintings construct a dynamic between image and text in order to emphasise the pain and uncertainty of emigration.
Embodiment: Spirit, Material– Maternal Dependence, and the Problem of the in utero
Authors: Furlotte Wes
Published: May 2020

Chapter six, in turn, begins to critically read Hegel against Hegel. It reads his notion of spirit (beginning with finite subjectivity) in terms of the concept of nature established in Part I. The chapter argues that the problem nature poses for subjective spirit presents itself in two ‘symptomatic’ moments of Hegel’s anthropology. First, in his analysis of subjectivity’s embodiment, its “primordial grasp on the world.” Second, in his analysis of the fetus-mother dynamic. Reconstructing both analyses, the chapter argues that they reveal spirit as over-immersed in exterior determinations and unable to assert itself as an autarkic center, as subject. Over-immersion in its environmental milieu, the chapter argues, is the problem of spirit’s origins, i.e. the problem of nature. It must move beyond this displacement in externality. However, there are no facile guarantees that this will transpire in the concrete actuality of life. Therefore, the origin of spirit is a developmental confrontation with nature and a protracted attempt to break with it.
The Return to the Sublime
Authors: Williams James
Published: May 2020

This chapter studies the return to the sublime in recent philosophy and culture. It analyses and rejects the technological sublime defended by David Nye and the environmental sublime put forward by Emily Brady. There is a consideration of the link between the sublime and nostalgia, and an explanation of the link between the sublime and values.
The Countdown to the Apocalypse
Authors: Ostřanský Bronislav
Published: May 2020

This chapter is in its own way also devoted to providing a certain kind of “apocalyptic chronology”. The discussion systematically introduces the proclaimed ISIS expectations (both public announcements and various commentaries) in the form of the portents of the Hour that remain to be fulfilled, either the lesser or the greater ones. The ultimate goal of all millennial Muslim predictions is undoubtedly the final victory of the powers of good, as embodied in the redeemer, al-Mahdi. Let us add here that the apocalyptic expectations of ISIS also clearly reflect their deeply-rooted hatred of Shiites (whose millennial ideas are, in many respects, considerably different from the Sunni mainstream view) and it is precisely this point, as well as an analysis of related sectarian violence associated with the Last Days, that will be the subject of attention.
Dangerous Business—Elaine May as Existential Improviser
Authors: Wilson Jake
Published: May 2020

Before Elaine May was a film director, she was famous for her improvised comedy skits with Mike Nichols. While May's subsequent films may not be improvised in the literal sense, this essay will argue that in many respects they can be seen as extensions of the principles guiding her early work with Nichols, in particular the notion of performance as a shared act of creation in the moment. This chapter establishes connections between the sketches of Nichols and May and two aspects of May's filmmaking above all. First, all of her films are built around double acts, implying a complicity between performers even when the characters they are playing are at odds or deceiving each other―an extension of the “yes, and...” principle associated with the tradition of theatre improvisation founded by Viola. Second, the allegedly “troubled” production histories of all her films can be seen as implying a commitment to filmmaking as existential adventure which places her at odds with standard Hollywood practice―and which can be linked to the way the films explicitly question conventional notions of success and failure.
Contemporary Serial Killers
Authors: Murphy Bernice M.
Published: May 2020

This chapter surveys selective twenty-first century serial killer narratives and outlines their most significant recurrent themes and tropes. The most notable twenty-first century trend considered here are the depiction of the serial killer as a sympathetic anti-hero, as in Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter novels and the TV series of the same name, the TV series Bates Motel (2013–) and the YA novel/film I Am Not a Serial Killer (2009/2016), all of which depict disturbed teenagers struggling to repress their seemingly innate bloodlust, and the pre-eminent serial killer TV show of the past decade, Hannibal (2013–15). This chapter also defines the popularity of serial killer narratives as a truly global phenomenon by examining ‘Nordic Noir’, the Korean films Memories of Murder (2003) and I Saw the Devil (2010) and the Hong Kong film Dream Home (2010). Finally, the chapter concludes by considering the representation of serial killing in post-2000 biopics and true crime narratives.
Ecogothic
Authors: Deckard Sharae
Published: May 2020

Reading Ecogothic depictions of nature from cultural traditions outside of Euro-America reveals how socio-ecological relations are inextricably bound up with hierarchies of race, class and gender, but also how environmental catastrophes intersect with wider geopolitical contexts such as imperialism. This chapter compares contemporary examples of ‘resource Gothic’ fictions that figure the socio-ecological violence of extractivism, plantation and ecological imperialism in postcolonial nations, including the sugar Gothic of Roger McTair’s ‘Just a Lark (or the Crypt of Matthew Ashdown)’ (2000), set in Jamaica, the oil Gothic of HelonHabila’sOil on Water (2010), set in Nigeria, and the toxic nuclear Gothic of Robert Barclay’s Meļaļ (2003), set in the Marshall Islands. It also examines Ecogothic aesthetics in contemporary television and video games, exploring the oil and sugar imaginary of the first season of HBO television series True Detective (2014) and the nuclear magnetism of Bethesda Game Studio’s Fallout 4:Far Harbor DLC (2016).
Aboriginal Gothic
Authors: Althans Katrin
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how, by combining European Gothic traditions and elements of Indigenous belief systems, Australian Aboriginal artists reclaim their own cultural heritage and reject the coloniser’s construction of Aboriginal people as the demonised Other. Aboriginal Gothic texts such as Her Sister’s Eye (2002) and ‘The Little Red Man’ (2011) defy their European predecessors’ traditional and stereotypical cast as well as their commodification of Indigenous culture, thus creating a counter-discourse to the master-discourse of European Gothic. This challenge, however, takes place within the plots and in the mode of transmission itself. Therefore, Aboriginal Gothic in the twenty-first century is not limited to the written word, but includes other forms like films, such as Karroyul (2015), and interactive media, such as Warwick Thorton’sThe Otherside Project (2014). In this way, the Gothic’s shape as a literary mode, as opposed to Indigenous oral traditions, is questioned just as much as its history of Othering.
Distributed Cognition and the Humanities
Authors: Anderson Miranda , Wheeler Michael , Sprevak Mark
Published: May 2020

The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate readers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within the distributed cognition framework and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities. A distributed cognitive approach recognises that cognition is brain, body and world based. Distributed cognition is a methodological approach and a way of understanding the actual nature of cognition. The first section provides an overview of the various competing and sometimes conflicting theories that make up the distributed cognition framework and which are also collectively known as 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition. The second section examines the ways in which humanities topics and methodologies are compatible with, placed in question or revitalised by new insights from philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences on the distributed nature of cognition, and considers what the arts and humanities, in turn, offer to philosophy and cognitive science.
Barthold Heinrich Brockes and Distributed Cognition: The Delicate Flux of World and Spirit
Authors: Lee Charlotte
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses Barthold Heinrich Brockes, a prolific German poet of the eighteenth-century, as a precursor of theories of distributed cognition. It argues that developments in anti-dualist and radical Protestant thought around 1700, together with Brockes’ own commitment to the ‘mixed-science’ of physico-theology, cause his poetry to resonate with modern approaches to cognition. Through close readings of individual poems from the collection Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, the chapter examines Brockes’ presentation of the flux between mind, body and world, and of the productive use which, through what we might call ‘epistemic engineering’, humankind can make of its environment. It also remarks on the compatibility of this religious work, geared towards the celebration of God, with modern, essentially secular understandings of our world.
Eighteenth-Century Antiquity: Extended, Embodied, Enacted
Authors: Slaney Helen
Published: May 2020

Sir William Hamilton’s Greek vase collection, assembled at Naples between the 1760s and 1790s, became a turning point in the reception of ancient material culture and hence in perceptions of classical antiquity. This chapter compares three angles of approach to the collection, each corresponding to a strand of distributed cognition. Extended cognition is represented by the catalogue which made the collection available to the reading public; embodied cognition is represented by the dance performances of Emma Hamilton, Sir William’s wife, who based her tableaux vivants of ancient life around the images represented on the vases; and enactive cognition by the aesthetic theory of the ‘feeling imagination’ developed by philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who visited the Hamiltons at Naples and commented unfavourably on Emma’s performances. I argue that Herder’s rejection of Emma’s kinetic reception of ancient artwork was predicated in part on his reluctance to place physical limitations on simulated movement.
Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Authors: Dickson Melissa
Published: May 2020

Aladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Scheherazade winding out her intricate tales to win her nightly stay of execution: the stories of the Arabian Nights are a familiar and much-loved part of the English literary inheritance. But how did these tales become so much a part of the British cultural landscape? This book identifies the nineteenth century as the beginning of the large-scale absorption of the Arabian Nights into British literature and culture. It explores how this period used the stories as a means of articulating its own experiences of a rapidly changing environment. It also argues for a view of the tales not as a depiction of otherness, but as a site of recognition and imaginative exchange between East and West, in a period when such common ground was rarely found.
‘For a time their world made mine’: Childhood Encounters with the Arabian Nights
Authors: Dickson Melissa
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on acts of reading, and on the nature and circumstances of childhood encounters with the Arabian Nights in Britain, both as a collection of narratives and as a series of objects such as books, pictures, and toy theatres. Despite their association with the innocent joys of childhood throughout the nineteenth century, the tales of the Arabian Nights were neither written nor designed for children. It was their abiding attraction to children that led to their designation as children’s literature, and also to their continued use as metaphors for adult fantasies and constructions of childhood. As the time and space of childhood were increasingly associated with the time and space of these Oriental tales, the Arabian Nights came to operate not only as a souvenir of childhood, but as metonymic of childhood itself: exciting, unpredictable, and culturally and temporally other.
The Kid with a Bike and the Reframing of Ethics
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

This third chapter shows, primarily through The Kid with a Bike (2011), how the Dardennes have evolved their film style in recent years and how we can read this in terms of an evolving approach to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics and film. Whereas in earlier films such as La Promesse and Le Fils the style was relentlessly focused on a protagonist’s struggle to be ethical and involved abundant use of close-ups and fast movement so as to convey the character’s struggles largely through physical action, more recent Dardenne films have exhibited a somewhat less frantic style, deploying a number of more ‘conventional’ cinematic tropes, such as establishing shots, soundtrack music and a focus on a larger number of characters. The result is a change in focus, but not a reduction in ethical concerns. I relate this more conventionally classical use of film style to Judith Butler’s notion of ‘reinscription’, the reusing of linguistic terms for new socio-political ends. In doing so, I highlight the ways in which the Dardennes use this more classical film style to explore their Levinasian concerns in new ways, deploying classical cinematic tools so as to ‘reinscribe’ them as ethical with in their films’ fictional worlds.
Revolution
Authors: Gutman David
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the aftermath of the 1908 ‘Young Turk’ Revolution in the Ottoman Empire that resulted in the reinstatement of the Ottoman Constitution and the lifting of most restrictions on both domestic and international mobility. As the Chapter demonstrates, the lifting of the migration ban resulted in a sharp increase in both out-migration and return migration. At the same time, the United States and other migrant-receiving states were strengthening restrictions on immigration, stranding many Ottoman migrants in transit ports throughout Europe. Also, Istanbul was forced to balance its commitment to freedom of movement with its growing demand for military-aged men and its increasing concern about the effects of migration on the empire’s economy. The chapter concludes with the Armenian genocide, its aftermath, and the legacies of migration.
The Henri Meschonnic Reader
Authors: Meschonnic Henri
Published: May 2020

Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language and all that depends on it. His work has had a shaping influence in various fields and its importance is growing. Here, for the first time, some of the key texts are made available in English for a new generation of scholars in the humanities. By introducing key works of Henri Meschonnic, this Reader will enrich, enhance and challenge your understanding of language. This book includes fourteen key texts which cover the core concepts and topics of Meschonnic’s theory. It explores his key ideas on poetics, the poem, rhythm, discourse and his critique of the sign. Meschonnic’s vast oeuvre was continuously preoccupied with the question of a poetics of society; he constantly connected the theory of language to its practice in various fields and interrogated what that means for the individual and society. In exploring this fundamental question, this book is central to the study and philosophy of language, with rich repercussions in fields such as translation studies, poetics and literary studies, and in redefining notions such as rhythm, modernity, the poem and the subject. The Reader is accompanied by introductory texts to Meschonnic, his key concepts and his poetics of society, as well as by a glossary, index and bibliography.
Oh! You Pretty Things: The Egotistical and Feminine Sublimes in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides
Authors: Devereaux Michelle
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the effects of the ‘egostical sublime’—a subjective version of sublimity that builds on Kantian notions of the sublime and is reserved as the province of masculine imagination—on female subjectivity and emotion in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. In the world of the film the expression of emotion is constantly thwarted by gender and class hypocrisy; characters fail to communicate despite undercurrents of deep feeling. The film engages with the egotistical sublime in its idealised aesthetic portrayal of a group of teenage girls, who serve as objects of sublimity for the local teenage boys. However, it also portrays a reverence for a ‘feminine’ or ‘everyday’ sublime by valorising a feminine aesthetic Rosalind Galt terms the ‘pretty’. Ultimately it creates an ambivalent presentation of this femininity through dreamlike yet kitsch imagery of the girls, which speaks not only to the celebration of femininity but also to its commodification and degradation.
“I’ll eat you up I love you so”: Adaptation, Authorship, and Intermediality in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are
Authors: Falvey Eddie
Published: May 2020

Falvey contrasts critical work on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are with its role at the epicentre of a series of intermedial adaptations, including Jonze and Dave Eggers’ screenplay, Eggers’ novel The Wild Things and, chiefly, Jonze’s 2009 film. The chapter observes how critical frameworks used to explore the novel’s conceptualization of child psychology can be mapped onto Jonze’s story and his aesthetics; Falvey details Jonze’s exploration of the shifting spaces of identity, existence and nature using filmic means.
Converging Indiewood: Spike Jonze, Propaganda Films, and the Emergence of Specialty Film Giant USA Films
Authors: Tzioumakis Yannis
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the production background of Jonze’s first feature film, Being John Malkovich. Jonze put Being John Malkovich together with the participation of both production companies and music labels (such as Michael Stipe’s Single Cell Pictures), and a new distribution company, USA Films. Although largely unrecognized at the time, USA Films also released Traffic and The Man Who Wasn’t There, before merging with other companies to become Focus Features. As Being John Malkovich went on to become a quintessential ‘indiewood’ film, this chapter examines the film’s role, and indeed the role of Jonze more broadly, in the shift toward the incorporation of global finance and distribution structures within the independent film sector. The chapter posits that Jonze’s diverse media background and ability to traverse entertainment sectors can be seen as a key example of indiewood’s drive to push independent filmmaking into new arenas in the late ‘90s.
The “tedious yammering of selves”: The End of Intimacy in Spike Jonze’s Her
Authors: Smith Richard
Published: May 2020

Spike Jonze’s unusual career trajectory, from the outer edges of popular culture to the center of indiewood, has resulted in a distinctive body of work that spans several genres and forms. This chapter traces Jonze’s career to ground a stylistic reading of his fourth feature film, Her (2013). Presented in three parts—Jonze’s short works, Gilles Deleuze’s “implied dream” and the “sound-image,” the lonely social world of Her—the chapter argues that Jonze’s cinematic style is an elaboration of a very simple image of a body in motion. As his style develops the relation of body and world becomes more central and more uncertain. In Her, the world is replaced by media affect and the body experiences itself as an aesthetic form. Smith explores a terrain of loneliness that sits at the center of much of Jonze’s work.
Civil Judicial Cooperation: A Scottish Experience
Authors: Wisdahl Nicola
Published: May 2020

This chapter presents an overview of the historical circumstances leading to a division of competence between “making” private international law in foreign affairs terms; and giving effect to (“doing”) private international law domestically. Drawing on this dichotomy, the chapter reflects on a Scottish experience of judicial cooperation in practice. Using an anthropological lens this chapter reflects on identifying the required “Other” for cooperation - a binary requiring some aspect of “foreignness” of another law. This is considered both in the context of the UK as a multi-jurisdictional state; and as part of a nascent field within attempts to create a European area of freedom, security and justice. These reflections provide a practical overview of an era which seems certain to see some change in the near future.
Demystifying Private International Law for International Commercial Contracts
Authors: Argerich Guillermo , Capalbo María Laura
Published: May 2020

Demystifying the difficulty in understanding the theoretical approach that private international law has traditionally adopted and translating this into a suitable framework for drafting relevant contractual clauses in international commercial contracts is the focus of this chapter, considering the perspective of the Argentinian and the Uruguayan laws.
Most lawyers are used to applying the law of the legal system in which they have trained as practitioners. Faced with cross-border cases lawyers need to become familiar with private international law methodologies and techniques.
Understanding the challenges of choosing the “appropriate” courts is important for raising awareness of any possible pitfalls in drafting contracts. The applicable framework in the case, the conditions required for an eventual enforcement judgement, the place where the evidence is located, the cost of the lawyers and transfers of parties and witnesses and the need for documents to be translated, are relevant facts to choose the competent courts, when it is allowed. Therefore, private international law has a facilitative role for contractual parties giving appropriate solutions in jurisdictional issues and offering efficient alternatives for the selection of the applicable regime, that must be known for all legal operators.
Bridging and Balancing: Diversity and Integration in Private International Law
Authors: Abou-Nigm Verónica Ruiz
Published: May 2020

This chapter calls for the mobilization of private international law, reflecting on the pitfalls of private international law’s outreach and the lack of awareness of the potential that its methodologies and techniques have in contributing to the necessary accommodation of different legal cultures. Bridging legal diversity is more often than not a complex task. Private international law thinking, however, is developed to do just that. The challenge is how to tailor the streaming of private international law thinking in a manner that becomes relevant to the day-to-day life of lawyers and ordinary people. The question is how to do so openly and effectively. To this purpose, this chapter introduces the concept of ‘pluralistic thinking’ as developed in social psychology, with the aim of grasping where the cognitive barriers to fully understand the potential of private international law come from, and of generating ideas in relation to the building blocks for further embracement of diversity.
This final chapter engages with culturalist approaches to provide insights that could prove enlightening to private international law practice, particularly in the context of regional integration. Bringing together several threads in this book, this final chapter portrays private international law as a methodology that embraces multiplicity and pluralism in the accommodation of legal diversity.
Hardy, Conrad and the Senses
Authors: Epstein Hugh
Published: May 2020

The first book-length study of connections between these two major authors, this book reads the highly descriptive impressionist fiction of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared attention to sight and sound. By proposing ‘scenic realism’ as a term to describe their affinities of epistemology and literary art, this study seeks to establish that the two novelists’ treatment of the senses in relation to the physically encompassing world creates a distinctive outward-looking pairing within the broader ‘inward turn’ of the realist novel. This ‘borderland of the senses’ was intensively investigated by a variety of nineteenth-century empiricists, and mid- and late-Victorian discussions in physics and physiology are seen to be the illuminating texts by which to gauge the acute qualities of attention shared by Hardy’s and Conrad’s fiction. In an argument that re-frames the ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ containers by which the writers have been conventionally separated, thirteen major works are analysed without flattening their differences and individuality, but within a broad ‘field-view’ of reality introduced by late-classical physics. With its focus on nature and the environment, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses displays the vivid delineations of humankind’s place in nature that are at the heart of both authors’ works.
The Visible World
Authors: Epstein Hugh
Published: May 2020

This two-part chapter, underpinned by nineteenth-century theories of light and vision and the empirical researches of Hermann von Helmholtz, is primarily concerned with light and its disclosures, first as it operates in the physics of two major novels, Far From the Madding Crowd and Lord Jim, and then its place in the act of seeing as explored in two less widely read works, A Laodicean and ‘The End of the Tether’. The discussion of Far From the Madding Crowd shows that the medium of light is an agent in extending perception in a scene beyond the ‘comings in’ of a particular eye. Light in Lord Jim bears a more metaphysical significance, and is associated with the search for a single unifying truth which in contemporary physics was found in the luminiferous ether. The lighting of various scenes continually poses the question: in what medium can the truth of Jim’s reality be found? The characters in A Laodicean and ‘The End of the Tether’ seek ‘the cogency of direct vision’, but only find insight, as with Helmholtz’s optics, by indirection. The appetite of the eye is not in these novels, whether comic or tragic, granted natural and uncomplicated gratification by the light that falls upon it.
Prelude: The Wooden Egg Made Me Sick By Nakakut Barbara Gibson Nakamarra
Authors: Glowczewski Barbara
Published: May 2020

Warlpiri ritual leader from Lajamanu, Central Australia, Nakakut Barbara Gibson Nakamarra, recounts her dream revelation of two songs for totemic ancestors of the Rain and Emu Dreamings (Jukurrpa). She explains how the dream took her on a journey from her country in the Tanami desert, where she was living hunting and gathering until she was moved to a reserve. The dream takes her up dancing with ancestral women up North where one Emu songline disappears in the Ocean. The testimony ends with the magic reunion of the narrator and the book’s author at the birth of her second baby in Broome, Western Australia.
A Topological Approach to Australian Cosmology and Social Organisation
Authors: Glowczewski Barbara
Published: May 2020

Aboriginal kinship has stimulated many mathematicians. In the 1980’s, Glowczewski showed that there is a non euclidian ‘topologic’ that is common to what Indigenous Australians call their “Law”: a non hierarchical system of classificatory ritual kinship, a projection of the mythical travels of totemic ancestors (the Dreamings) into the landscape and a system of ritual obligations taboos. In other words, the social valorisation of heterogeneity recognises irreducible singularities shared by humans, non humans and the land as a condition for a commons that in no way homogenises society into a hierarchical order. The topological figure of the hypercube was used here to illustrate some complex Aboriginal relational rules that exclude the centralisation of power both in social organisation and in the totemic cosmology. To translate Indigenous spatio-temporal concepts Glowczewski was partly inspired by science fiction, that speculates about the 4th dimension. When shown the hypercube as a tool to account for the kinship logic of their Dreamings, the Warlpiri elders thought it was a ‘good game’! First published in 1989.
Resisting the Disaster: Between Exhaustion and Creation
Authors: Glowczewski Barbara
Published: May 2020

This chapter responds to debates on the anthropocene, by transversalising planetarian social, technological and natural disasters suffered in Africa, the Pacific, Brazil, Haïti and elsewhere, through past and present colonisation. ‘Anthropologist of micropolitical hope, Barbara Glowczewski, is among the vanguard of key global Guattarian thinkers. Deploying Guattari’s three registers of ecosophy to understand the foliatedness of disaster in the anthropocene, she provides a range of examples, from artists’ responses to crises and neoliberal betrayals, collective intelligence marshalled against the violence of privatisation, experimentations leading to micro-social innovations challenging the criminalisation of asylum seekers, and political actions against the endo-colonialist policies of settler states. Eschewing victimal discourses traded like stocks by big media, she eviscerates the dehumanising logic of humanitarian care in the form of ‘assistancialism’ and as some Aboriginals know it, ‘sit down money’.’ (Gary Genosko, 2017). First published in French in 2011.
Questionable Borders
Authors: Broers Laurence
Published: May 2020

This chapter situates today’s reluctance to contemplate territorial compromises in the multiple and contested territorialisations of both republics throughout the twentieth century. Loosely deploying the concept of the ‘geo-body’, meaning the bordered space of the national homeland, it tracks different territorial traditions of ‘Armenia’ and ‘Azerbaijan’ over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows how these traditions generated different commitments to borders within each nation’s geopolitical culture. These in turn resulted in overlapping conceptions of homeland that supply the historical, ideological and moral weight behind contemporary territorial claims, and resistance to compromise.
Truncated Asymmetry
Authors: Broers Laurence
Published: May 2020

This chapter engages with the puzzle presented by the apparent sustainability of an asymmetric rivalry. Across most material parameters Azerbaijan is significantly larger than Armenia, establishing an asymmetric dynamic between a larger challenger and a smaller status quo power. The chapter explains how Armenia ‘truncates’ this asymmetry through local parity, a strategy of deterrence and balancing with Russia. Pushing back against the realist logic permeating much of the policy discourse about Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry, this chapter argues that it is precisely its asymmetric nature that makes this rivalry both enduring and dangerous.
Afterword: Rivalry Unending?
Authors: Broers Laurence
Published: May 2020

This afterword reflects on the book’s main findings, arguing that the persistence of the Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry needs to be explained by the convergence of international, strategic, domestic and leadership factors. Acknowledging the weight of each of these layers, the afterword argues for the necessity of change within Armenian and Azerbaijani societies for the rivalry to one day be de-escalated and resolved.
Wandering in the Open World: Kenneth White’s Poetics
Authors: Szuba Monika
Published: May 2020

Covering vast geographical and cultural areas, the wingspan of Kenneth White’s poetic programme covers a cross-cultural, transdisciplinary field of study. The chapter examines White’s work, focusing on the interconnectedness and intertwining of the poetic subject with the natural world. It analyses White’s concepts of intellectual nomadism and the open world by means of tracing the main philosophical influences that inform his writing. It examines the poet’s explorations of landscape and mindscape, stemming from philosophical contemplation and spiritual realisation. The analysis attempts to follow the poet’s mapping of extensive territories of the globe in the context of the problem of proper dwelling, investigating the ways in which it mediates place in a phenomenological relationship. It explores the poetic subject’s self-identification with its surroundings, which stresses the interfolding of a mind with the natural world. Finally, the chapter also considers the syncretism of poetic forms employed by White, ranging from haiku to ‘diamond’ poems, to polyphonic itinerary poems.
‘Buried in the flesh’: Home, Embodiment and Interanimality in John Burnside’s Work
Authors: Szuba Monika
Published: May 2020

The chapter discusses the role and significance of concepts such as home, dwelling, language and the question of embodied Being in relation to John Burnside’s writing. Developed through the thinking of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty specifically, and phenomenological thinking more generally, but with reference to other modes of critical apprehension, the discussion expands the examinations of the idea of dwelling and the place of human animals within the living world (as part of an attempt to decentre the human), which constitute predominant themes in Burnside’s work, complicating the notion of ‘nature poetry’. The analysis focuses on the relation between human selfhood and the non-human world, Mitsein, or Being-with other animals, and the question of naming things. In this respect, this chapter provides not only a particular way of reading Burnside’s poetry, but also a more detailed investigation of the way in which the concept of dwelling relates to certain aspects of place, understood as a dynamic nexus of relationships, as well as the concept of the creaturely. It argues that these themes, together with the problem of language dominate Burnside’s poetic work.
‘A word will set the seed / of life and death’: Robin Robertson’s Protean Lyric
Authors: Szuba Monika
Published: May 2020

The chapter discusses Robin Robertson’s poetry, stretched between the existential and the material, oscillating around edges, junctures and transitions. Focusing on legends and folk tales that are forged in the Scottish landscape, Robertson, for whom the sense of place is ‘absolutely crucial’, combines them with classical myths. The analysis centres around Robertson’s preoccupation with these themes, arguing that the inherent order of the world as evoked in his poems is governed by chaos and change. In various forms of being volatility dominates, occurring in transfigurations of the material world, standing against the claims about the inertness of matter. Vitality connects with epidermal vulnerability revealed in the poems’ frequent focus on metamorphosis. The apprehension of the temporality of the body is captured in Robertson’s enfolding of the subject into the seasonal cycle. The chapter thus investigates the corporeal drive as co-temporal with the rhythms of the non-human world.
Hume and Ancient Academic Scepticism
Authors: Fosl Peter S.
Published: May 2020

Chapter One of Hume’s Scepticism sets out a short history of Academic scepticism, tracing its development from Socrates and Plato’s ‘Old Academy’, through Arcesilaus’ ‘Middle Academy’, into Carneades’ ‘New Academy’, and Philonian scepticism, as well as Cicero and the divergent stream breaking off from the Academy that would become Pyrrhonist thought. Academic scepticism is set off from its stoic competitors. Chapter One crucially describes both the development of sceptical probabilistic thinking and, anticipating Hume, the non-dogmatic doxastic position developed by Clitomachus of Carthage in contrast to the dogmatic doxastic and probabilistic theory of Metrodorus of Stratonikiae, which anticipates Locke.
Phûsis: The Fatalities of Appearance
Authors: Fosl Peter S.
Published: May 2020

Nature is the first component of the Pyrrhonian Fourfold; and Chapter Five argues that Hume’s naturalism is constitutive of his scepticism, rather than opposed to it or distinct from it. The chapter’s excursus describes a properly sceptical naturalism, a naturalism stripped of epistemic and metaphysical claims and import. Chapter Five grounds its argument first upon Hume’s ideas about animality and the association of ideas and proceeds to lay out the subtle interplay of necessity and contingency in Hume’s theories concerning causality, reason, perception, and imagination. The chapter interprets the reassertion of nature at the end of Treatise 1.4.7 as a crucially Pyrrhonian-Apelleticmoment moment that presents atûchikos finding about human fortune and fate. Nature more generally is rendered in Hume as the press of humanity’s fatedness to impressions or appearances in common life. The text compares Hume’s ideas with those of various rationalists, as well as with the work of Immanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Stanley Cavell.
The Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī fihrist: Edition
Authors: Hirschler Konrad
Published: May 2020

The diplomatic edition of the catalogue’s unique manuscript aims at representing to some extent its organisation and the edition thus includes information such as the various rubrics that the scribe used. For the sake of legibility, the orthography has been standardised to bring it into a form familiar to modern readers. The text is thus reproduced with full diacritical marks, although they are rather rarely used in the manuscript.
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration
Authors: Murfin Audrey
Published: May 2020

Robert Louis Stevenson, Collaboration, and the Construction of the Late-Victorian Author argues that understanding literary collaboration is essential to understanding Stevenson’s writings. Stevenson often collaborated with family and friends, sometimes acknowledged, and sometimes not. Early collaborations include three plays with his friend W. E. Henley. Later, he and his wife Fanny co-authored a volume of linked stories, More New Arabian Nights, also titled The Dynamiter (1885). Fanny also contributed to other work that did not bear her name, significantly the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and he drew on her diaries for his Pacific writings. He collaborated most extensively with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, with whom he wrote three novels: The Wrong Box (1889), The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894). Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne typify the critical problem my project addresses. Like Fanny Stevenson’s, Osbourne’s literary reputation has not been notable. Furthermore, there is evidence that Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne became frustrating. The core question this book addresses is this: why would this famous and successful author of Scottish literature practice a creative process that burdened him with inexpert collaborators? The answer to this question can be found in Stevenson’s novels, essays and plays, which dramatize the process of collaboration. Stevenson creates an alternate narrative of what it means to write—one that challenges commonly held assumptions about the celebrity cult of the author in Victorian literature, and notions of authorship more generally.
‘A kind of partnership business’: The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide
Authors: Murfin Audrey
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers the last two, and best known, Stevenson-Osbourne literary collaborations. After The Wrong Box, the pair went on to write The Wrecker (1892) together, but privately Stevenson emphasized Lloyd Osbourne’s subordinate role and expressed his growing frustration with the creative process. Finally, they undertook The Ebb-Tide (1894), but by then the process had failed. Stevenson’s growing dissatisfaction with the collaboration forms the argument of both The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide. In particular, The Wrecker is a novel about partnerships and the compromises they require—of ethics, art, and self-interest, written at a moment when Stevenson himself was the most challenged by his own difficult partnership with Osbourne.
Urban Experiences: Memphis
Authors: Colburn Henry P.
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on Memphis and its associated necropoleis. Memphis served as the seat of the satrap, based in the Palace of Apries, which continued its military and administrative functions. The cult of the Apis bull was maintained, and perhaps even expanded. Likewise, the practice of building shaft tombs among the Old Kingdom royal pyramids at Saqqara, Abusir and Giza also continued; some of these tombs are among the most impressive of the Late Period. Thus Memphis remained an important place, both in the physical landscape of Egypt, and also in the cultural memory of the Egyptians themselves. At the same time it was also a great cosmopolis, and Achaemenid rule only added to its diversity. The sealings and bilingual tags recovered from the Palace of Apries attest to a social environment in which multiple traditions of material culture were valued and utilized side by side. Even the names recorded in Demotic and Aramic papyri found at Saqqara feature combinations of Egyptian and foreign names within single families, pointing to a social climate of interaction and diversity rather than strict divisions between Persians and Egyptians.
Social Practices: Drinking Like a Persian
Authors: Colburn Henry P.
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers how Achaemenid rule may have affected the decisions people made about identity on a daily basis by examining culinary practices, especially those related to alcohol. Culinary practices are closely linked to identity and status, and the introduction of new vessels forms suggests changes to how Egyptians viewed their positions in society in this period. After discussing dining practices in the Achaemenid Empire, both at the royal court and in the Persian heartland more broadly, this chapter surveys the evidence for Persian vessel types in Egypt. It focuses on three specific types – the Achaemenid phiale, the rhyton, and the Achaemenid bowl. The adoption of these vessel forms in Egypt suggests that Egyptians began to participate in the social hierarchy of the empire. Moreover, versions of them were made in faience and ceramic, indicating that their use was not limited to social elites. The introduction and adaptation of these foreign drinking vessels, and perhaps also the drinking practices associated with them, illustrate the ways that Achaemenid rule may have altered social life in Egypt, even if only on a limited scale.