bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Of Swords, Sandals, and Statues: The Myth of the Living Statue
Authors: Adriaensens Vito
Published: May 2020

As sculpture is the classical art par excellence, statues abound in films set in Greek or Roman antiquity. Moreover, many of the mythological tropes involving sculptures that have persisted on the silver screen have their origins in classical antiquity: the Ovidian account of a Cypriot sculptor named Pygmalion who falls in love with his ivory creation and sees it bestowed with life by Venus, Hephaistos’s deadly automatons, the petrifying gaze of the Medusa, and divine sculptural manifestation, or agalmatophany, for instance. This chapter investigates the myths of the living statue as they originated in Greek and Roman literary art histories and found their way to the screen. It will do so by tracing the art-historical form and function of classical statuary to the cinematic representation of living statues in a broad conception of antiquity. The cinematic genre in which mythic sculptures thrive is that of the sword-and-sandal or peplum film, where a Greco-Roman or ersatz classical context provides the perfect backdrop for spectacular special effects, muscular heroes, and fantastic mythological creatures.
Introduction: Beginnings and Endings
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: May 2020

Assassination is a hyperbolic way of describing the toppling of political leaders in a parliamentary democracy. Perversely, through the 1990s, the person in Britain most vulnerable to actual assassination was a writer: Salman Rushdie. His novel The Satanic Verses had been published in 1988 to critical acclaim (winning the Whitbread Best Novel prize) and almost instant attack from sections of the Muslim community in Britain and beyond. The Satanic Verses was banned in India and South Africa, and burned publicly in Bradford in the late 1980s. Some Muslims regarded the book as a slur on Mohammed specifically and on their religion more generally. Because Islam is a global religion, the fury unleashed spread around the Muslim world, culminating in Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwah, or formal opinion, in February 1989, calling on devout Muslims to kill Rushdie.
New Ethnicities
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: May 2020

The previous chapter suggested that the United Kingdom was less united, and perhaps less of a kingdom, in 1999 than 1990, partly the result of the redistribution of political power via the different acts of devolution that opened up new forms of self-determination to the constituent nations of Britain. That chapter also argued that these political and bureaucratic changes reflected complex and often subtle changes in the ways that Britons understood themselves as Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and English. These developments were not solely the product of the decade, but were accelerated by some of the cultural energies and arguments that came to the fore in the 1990s.
Making Over: Gender and Class at the High School Prom
Authors: Smith Frances
Published: May 2020

The high school is one of the most recognisable features of the Hollywood teen movie, one whose setting itself usually guarantees a focus on its teenage inhabitants rather than on the adults that attend to them. However, prior to the mid- 1980s, the genre largely focused on its protagonists’ activities outside of the school, in youth-oriented spaces such as the drive-in cinema and, latterly, the mall. Even Grease, ostensibly set at Rydell High, has one of its narrative’s key junctures – the final reunion between Danny and Sandy – occur at the carnival, an event staged to celebrate the conclusion of the characters’ schooling.
That teenagers are now more often portrayed within high school can largely be attributed to the work of John Hughes, who wrote, directed and produced a significant number of teen movies in the 1980s. Chief among these was The Breakfast Club, which established a set of archetypal figures that have remained largely intact to this day.
‘Now I am Medea’: Gender, Identity and the Birth of Revenge in Seneca’s Medea
Authors: Winter Kathrin
Published: May 2020

In Greek and Roman antiquity, revenge is represented as a masculine duty, which is usually carried out by relatives or intimate friends. In Seneca’s drama, Medea adopts this masculine role by exacting revenge for her father and brother, which marks her as a transgressive woman. However, Medea also describes her revenge through language that aligns vengeance to the process of giving birth, a quintessentially female act; as Medea herself proclaims in the first act: parta iam, parta ultio est: peperi (‘My revenge is born, already born: I have given birth’). These birth metaphors contribute to Medea’s formulation of a new vengeful subjectivity, complicating Medea’s status as a transgressive woman and demonstrating how Senecan female characters can appropriate forms of self-definition that are often assumed to be male.
‘The Power of Our Mouths’: Gossip as a Female Mode of Revenge1
Authors: McHardy Fiona
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines gendered methods of revenge as depicted in ancient Greek literature and court trails. While men favour physical attacks or judicial processes when taking revenge on an enemy, women are typically thought to be too weak to attack in these ways and are shown using persuasion or trickery to achieve revenge or bringing up their children as future avengers. Gossip provides another mechanism by which women and other disempowered individuals, such as slaves, can take revenge: either directly, by damaging an individual’s reputation, or indirectly, by provoking others to violent behaviour. Focusing on literary texts (such as Aeschylus’ Choephori, Euripides’ Andromache and Hippolytus, and Chariton’s novel Chaereas and Callirhoe) and legal revenge narratives (such as Lysias’ On the Murder of Eratosthenes) the chapter demonstrates how women find circuitous and covert ways to achieve revenge, while simultaneously showing how women’s reputation for gossip allows them to be used as scapegoats for men’s violence.
The Vengeful Lioness in Greek Tragedy: A Posthumanist Perspective1
Authors: Abbattista Alessandra
Published: May 2020

This chapter reinterprets the animal metaphors used in ancient Greek tragedy to describe revenging women from a posthumanist perspective. Whereas critics have commonly regarded such metaphors as indicating the female revenger’s inhuman savagery and otherness (whereby a woman’s attempt to assume a male heroic role transforms her instead into a monstrous beast), posthumanism challenges conventional distinctions between animal and human, male and female. Drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti, it argues that female revengers similarly challenge these distinctions. The metaphorical metamorphosis of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra and Euripides’ Medea into lionesses reveals their complex figuration as male-female hybrid beings, recalling the tragic suffering and protective violence of the Homeric lion within a new context of interfamilial conflicts. These transformations engender terror but also compassion, evoking new ways of conceptualising humans-as-animals that invite recognition of our own unstable and hybrid nature.
A Phrygian Tale of Love and Revenge: Oenone Paridi (Ovid Heroides 5)
Authors: Michalopoulos Andreas N.
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores how lamentation operates as a covert means of revenge in Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of fictional epistolary poems written as though by women from Greek and Roman mythology to the lovers who abandoned and mistreated them. It interprets the fifth letter, in which the nymph Oenone writes to Paris, her former lover, as a letter of revenge that expresses Oenone’s frustration and anger. Ovid’s language and imagery alludes to events that await Paris in the dramatic future of the letter, hinting at her revenge to come. Countering the view that the female speakers of the Heroides offer a consistent view of women as pathetic and passive victims, the chapter thus shows how Ovid’s female letter-writers can exploit socially prized roles as a means of expressing their anger and preparing for vengeful action.
Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing
Authors: Carroll Rachel
Published: May 2020

Drawing on the insights of leading scholars in the field of transgender studies, the Introduction provides extended consideration of critical and cultural frameworks essential for the project of rereading representations of transgender in twentieth-century literary fiction, including: transgender historiography; feminism and queer theory; LGBT activism and identity politics. More specifically, it examines the following topics: questions of historical representation in relation to historical fiction; the influence of genres of transgender life writing, including memoir and biography; the legacies of Second Wave feminist critiques of transsexuals; the impact of narratives of gender crossing on the interpretation of transgender lives; the relationship between transsexual narratives and intersex bodies; the role of colonial contexts and discourses of ‘race’ in the construction of gender normativity. It concludes with an overview of the book structure, providing summaries of each chapter.
Reading Cosmopolitanism in Yusuf Zaydan’s Azazeel and Muʿtazz Futayha’s Akhir yahud al-iskandariyya
Authors: Youssef Mary
Published: May 2020

Foregrounding the histories and experiences of ethno-religious minorities, the Copts’ in fifth-century Egypt in Azazeel and the Jews’ in the twentieth century in Akhir yahud al-iskandariyya, both novels simultaneously challenge conventional cultural and historical narratives of Egypt and highlight these groups’ global particularities. This beyond-the-nation literary reflection situates these groups within a larger, all-too-familiar, and fallible humanity and underlines the interplay between empire, nation-state, religion, and power. Examining these intricacies, this chapter pays attention to how both novels speak to rising exclusionary nationalisms and puritanical isolationism on the basis of religion—whether practiced in historical imperial or modern nationalist contexts.
Set in Alexandria, which is celebrated as a cosmopolitan center, the novels disclose the city’s historical instabilities by mirroring the tumult lives of its fictional inhabitants. The characters’ uncertainties, global vagrancy, and subversion of established bodies of knowledge are connected to Rebecca Walkowitz’s conceptualization of a critical strand of cosmopolitanism.
Heart Deserts: Memory and Myth between Life and Death in Asharaf al-Khumaysi’s Manafi al-rabb and Miral al-Tahawi’s The Tent
Authors: Youssef Mary
Published: May 2020

The principality of the desert and Bedouin figure in Manafi al-rabb and The Tent mark their new-consciousness departure from anchoring Egyptian modern selfhood to predominant imaginings and conjectures of Egypt as deeply entrenched in agrarian roots and/or urbanized spaces in colonial and postcolonial contexts. While Manafi al-rabb challenges the disjunctions between life and death, body and spirit, and reality and myth through the its main character’s discovery of their connectedness in the magical desert realm, The Tent re-inscribes female inspirational and creative enterprise in contemporary male-dominated Bedouin culture. It also contrasts the value of women’s creative work in Bedouin cultural memory and heritage—as they appear in legends and folktales—with their current subordination. This chapter examines how both novels emphasize the significance of human love and unity between the self and the other by highlighting the destructive effect of the modern cultural conditions that split and disjoin them.
Introduction
Authors: Strain Virginia Lee
Published: May 2020

This introduction provides an overview of the extensive work of legal reform in the later sixteenth century. Through close readings of Nicholas Bacon’s parliamentary speeches, the topic is organized into efforts to ‘perfect’ the law and to administer or ‘execute’ it. As Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper for two decades, Bacon repeatedly emphasised the importance of the law’s perfection through the reform of its form and content and the surveillance and correction of the officers in charge of the law’s execution. While Bacon’s speeches illuminate the proper targets of reform, establishing priorities and speech patterns for his successors, the literary works that are subsequently examined develop the problematics of legal reform in practice.
Snaring Statutes and the General Pardon in the Gesta Grayorum
Authors: Strain Virginia Lee
Published: May 2020

Chapter 2 examines the Gesta Grayorum, an account of the 1594-5 Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn, one of the English common-law societies and educational institutions. The Christmas revelers mounted a large mock court, and the elaborate entertainments for their fictional Prince of Purpoole were performed by and before a community of Inn members and associates that included common-law students, legal professionals, courtiers, parliamentarians, and statesmen. In their abridged parliament, they mock the general pardon that historically compensated for the numerous ‘snaring’ statutes that had accrued over the course of the sixteenth century. These statutes, which turned subjects into unintentional lawbreakers, found their way into Shakespeare’s comedies, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Comedy of Errors, and John Donne’s satires. In parodying the terms and structure of the Elizabethan general pardon, the revelers target a legal-political device that publicly forgave select statutory infractions and broadcasted the sovereign’s merciful character. If the revels open with a mock parliament, Francis Bacon’s subsequent orations on government redirect the entertainments away from the comical errors of lawmakers and legal representatives toward the systematic reform of the fictional state.
Partial to Opera: Sounding Willa Cather’s Empty Rooms
Authors: Plotz John
Published: May 2020

According to Walter Pater the absorbing qualities of music’s formal perfection mean that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’ In her remarkable not-quite-kunstlerroman, The Song of the Lark (1915), Willa Cather responds to the notion that opera might be an ‘absolute art form’ by formulating a notion of the omnipresence of partial (rather than utter) absorption. Wherever her characters turn, their experiences are always composites. In articulating that alternative way of understanding art’s teleology, Cather also rethought the virtues and dangers of opera as a platonic artform, and posed a series of fascinating questions about prose’s relationship to the formal claim lodged by both live and recorded music. Cather’s early novels are a significant site to explore the ways in which the complex modernist textual experiments of the 1910s are shaped by live opera’s afterglow—a European cultural telos Cather both reveres and distrusts. But the chapter also proposes that Cather is making sense of a new sonic universe in which recorded music, in grooves or over the airwaves, comes to demarcate a kind of reproduction that serves both as type and antitype of the novel’s own formal aspirations.
Elliptical Sound: Audibility and the Space of Reading1
Authors: Napolin Julie Beth
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes up the central categories of narrative theory to ask how they can be “sonified” through an attention to racial signifiers in text. The chapter argues that, in eliding the experience of sound in reading, Gérard Genette and other literary theorists often presume a racially neutral reader and narrative space. Though narrative voices cannot be physically heard, racially marked voices nonetheless borrow from writer’s and reader’s implicit hypotheses and memories of listening. A reading of Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, and Ernest Hemingway addresses how these hypotheses of listening closely collaborate with the invisible bodies of narrators and characters to produce a sense of “race.” Traditionally, an ellipsis is a quality of narrative temporality (a gap or elision in chronology). The chapter instead turns to typographical ellipses in text to show how reading itself generates an elliptical space between a text’s inaudible voices and invisible bodies. The chapter reveals the elliptical narrative acoustics that indirectly mediate and reinforce the sounds of racially marked speech.
Harsh Sounds: George Gissing’s Penetrating Literary Voice
Authors: Hone Penelope
Published: May 2020

This chapter tracks the emergence of a distinctive critical discourse in the 1890s intent on distinguishing the acoustic particularities of the literary voice. Taking the uneven oeuvre of George Gissing as its focus, this chapter positions his work as exemplary of this preoccupation with the problems of hearing the ‘right’ critical voices above the noise of non-literary discourse. It has long been acknowledged that Gissing’s antagonistic relationship to his subject––the English lower middle classes––renders reading his writing an unpleasant, discomforting task: as Virginia Woolf was to observe in 1912, Gissing’s hatred for the poor is ‘the reason why his voice is so harsh, so penetrating, so little grateful to the ears.’ The harsh penetration of Gissing’s literary style is largely understood as a reflection of his politics (Jameson) and, in turn, of his commitment to a ‘vitriolic’ and ‘aggressive’ realism (Matz). Complicating such critical approaches, this chapter thinks through how this literary dissonance might be understood as a reflection of the tensions between Gissing’s political impulse to show, and his aesthetic investment in a more (technically) restrained literary voice.
Michel Serrault in La cage aux folles
Authors: Stevens Kyle
Published: May 2020

A discussion of Michel Serrault in La cage aux folles
Affirming Divergence
Authors: Tissandier Alex
Published: May 2020

Leibniz is a constant, but often overlooked, presence in Deleuze’s philosophy. This book explains three key moments in Deleuze’s philosophical development through the lens of his engagement with Leibniz. In doing so it hopes to offer a focused framework for understanding some of the most difficult aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy. Part One examines Deleuze’s account of the “anti-Cartesian reaction” of Spinoza and Leibniz which culminates in their two competing theories of expression. It argues that in some key respects Deleuze favours Leibniz’s interpretation of this key concept over Spinoza’s. Part Two looks at Deleuze’s critique of representation and his attempt to create a theory of difference that will underlie, rather than rely upon, conceptual opposition. It examines the crucial role played by the Leibnizian concepts of incompossibility and divergence in Deleuze’s theory of ‘vice-diction’, created in order to offer a sub-representational, or pre-individual, substitute for Hegelian contradiction. Part Three looks in detail at one of Deleuze’s last major works, The Fold. It argues for Leibniz’s central place in this text, and shows how Deleuze uses concepts from across Leibniz’s philosophy and mathematics as a framework to articulate a systematic account of his own mature philosophy.
Material Folds and the Lower Level of the Baroque House
Authors: Tissandier Alex
Published: May 2020

This chapter turns to one of Deleuze’s last major works, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. It argues for Leibniz’s central role in the text, and explains the book’s complicated interplay between Leibniz’s philosophy and mathematics, and Baroque art and architecture. It rediscovers all the major elements of the Leibnizian structure outlined in the previous chapter, and finds them united by the new concept of the “infinite fold”. It then looks in detail at the opening chapter of The Fold, where Deleuze uses Wölfflin’s theory of Baroque architecture and Leibniz’s theory of preformism and biological evolution to introduce the parallelism between the repeated folds of inorganic matter and the interior, enveloping folds of organisms. The interiority of the latter eventually forces us to posit monads, or souls, which exist elsewhere and serve as the principle of their unity.
Tangible versus Intangible Materiality: Interpreting Gaudí and the Colliding Forces of Traditional and Innovative Construction
Authors: Burry Mark
Published: May 2020

For architects, stone is the most enduring of all materials available to construct their dreams. Mark Burry’s chapter draws on critical aspects of Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudí's personal development, and life on the construction site for the Sagrada Família Basilica during and after his death. Insights into the paradox of tangible versus intangible materiality are explored: interpreting Gaudí’s position with regard to the colliding forces of traditional and innovative construction in a time of rapidly increasing industrialisation and material invention. It does so by building a matrix to explicate aspects of the continuation ‘framework’ developed by Gaudí, which was posthumously handed down to his successors. Human and nonhuman intelligence are deployed not only to gain insights into how the past building methods of the original creator were conducted, but also to find threads of continuity to creatively complete the emblematic building afresh.
Internalising Continuous Variation
Authors: Oosterhuis Kas
Published: May 2020

The chapter engages with the idea that nonhuman creativity is fostering a new architecture based on continuous variation both in its theoretical and in its technical and material dimension. The chapter depicts the trajectory of ONL, the author’s practice, and how with this mission it has moved to the third industrial revolution that has altogether revolutionised architecture as a whole. In this chapter Kas Oosterhuis redefines the fundamentals in three phases; phase A: mass production, phase B: mass customisation - in which phase ONL’s built projects are positioned - and moving into the upbeat of phase C: distributed robotic design, production, assembly and operation, in which phase the achievements of Hyperbody’s interactive architecture are positioned. He concludes by challenging the traditional role of the architect that has shifted, nowadays, to that of an expert.
A Vital, Architectural Materialism: A House-person’s Escape from the Anthropocentric
Authors: Ednie-Brown Pia
Published: May 2020

In this chapter Pia Ednie Brown takes a vitally materialist approach to discussing the nonhuman creativity that comes from the house which, like any creative project, is like a living creature whose personality changes in time and whose vitality of matter is wild. Architecture as assemblages of forces, humans as a force that becomes part of a tangled ecology and the house, acting like any personality, perpetually evolving and being discovered, while in relation to us humans, it is yet another responsibility for which we are never utterly in control of. The chapter attempts to approach anthropomorphising without falling into its indisputable dangers. As the author suggests, new forms of value can be generated if things can be thought of as persons. That way we may manage to usher their activity to attention.
The Intelligence of Computational Design
Authors: Parisi Luciana
Published: May 2020

Luciana Parisi in her chapter goes on to discuss the creative act towards novelty that comes from the nonhuman computational synthesis of logics and granular calculation of variations away from human cognition and perception based on given premises. The essay proposes an instrumental approach to design as a technology or a cognitive activity able to transform the environment by inducing new correlations of vast amounts of varied data flows. This chapter addresses the emergence of this neo-materialist approach as a symptom of a new conceptualisation of nature that no longer corresponds to the cybernetic view of an artificial system of feedback relations. It further suggests that there are some important inconsistencies between the computational conception of nature and the new rationality of the natural. Computational materiality implies a naturalisation of design intended as techne, or instrumentality, and defined not by logical aims, but operations, procedures and means that cut across strata, rules, forms and go beyond the specific constraints of each and any form.
Vicarious Architectonics, Strange Objects, Chance-bound: Michel Serres’s Exodus from Methodical Reason
Authors: Bühlmann Vera
Published: May 2020

Vera Bühlmann in this chapter inhabits Serres’s position on philosophy for architecture, suggesting that chance and necessity are not in conflict as necessity originates in chance and chance comprehends necessity. Matter in its quantum physical character is controlled by computational and chance bound calculation, but how can knowledge be new if it is rule-based. Serres’s exodic knowledge is capitalised in the case of this chapter as a way of looking at elements as coded, discretised and distributed while unaccountable and inaccessible, allowing building as an autonomous entity to be a function of rarity that is compatibility with the totality of economic and political power without dominating or being harnessed by them. Paris Hermitage project by Pa.La.Ce studio is the vehicle to discuss materiality, as this is initiated in the field of recent architectural theory, that incorporates code and a formality that is computational.
Imagined States
Authors: Baxter Katherine Isobel
Published: May 2020

Imagined States examines the significance of the law in colonial and postcolonial fiction from and about Nigeria between 1900 and 1966. The book argues that in the discrete period of the final half-century of British colonialism in Nigeria through into the early years of independence prior to the Biafran War, the law provided a key site for fiction’s negotiations with the increasingly complex realities of the colonial project. Attending to the representation of the law in that fiction provides important insights not only into the realities of the historical period but, equally importantly, into the dominant and emergent discourses and ideologies that shaped those realities. Imagined States explores a range of texts including popular, middle-brow and acclaimed postcolonial novels, as well as newspaper stories and memoirs, by both British and Nigerian authors (including Chinua Achebe, Joyce Carey, Cyprian Ekwensi and Edgar Wallace), focusing in particular on how the state of exception and ideas of civilisation were negotiated imaginatively in the law and fiction. These explorations are organised chronologically and thematically, moving from the law ‘upcountry’ (focusing on pre- and inter-war British representations of the District Commissioner), through the law in the city (focusing on late colonial and early postcolonial Nigerian fiction), to law and politics (focusing on postcolonial Nigerian representations of treason and violence).
‘Beast of No Nation’: Bribery, Corruption and Late Colonial Administration in
Authors: Baxter Katherine Isobel
Published: May 2020

Chapter Four explores the competing demands made upon young Nigerian civil servants in the colonial administration, through an examination of Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease. The chapter contextualizes the social and sexual pressures under which the novel’s protagonist, Obi, buckles through discussion of contemporary popular culture and the experiences of real-life Nigerian colonial administrators. The novel is also discussed in relation to the British colonial texts to which it responds, notably Joyce Cary’s Mr Johnson and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. Achebe’s own reflections on the social uses of fiction are also considered. The chapter argues that as readers we are invited by Achebe into judgement of Obi, and in doing so we are brought into larger debates about the nation state and the law.
Battlestar Galactica, Technology, and Life
Authors: Tranter Kieran
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the forms of life made by technical legality, through the re-imagined series Battlestar Galactica. It is argued that Battlestar Galactica deals directly with the triumph of technology and in so doing charts a way for living within technical legality.This chapter opens with the sovereign and moves to the personal. Battlestar Galactica, however, does not invite a return to the public. Rather the personal is the technical and the distinction between essence and artefact becomes blurred. Here Battlestar Galactica seemingly performs Heidegger’s foundational account of technology that sees technology as consuming humanity leaving a false, destructive and empty shell. Battlestar Galactica does not quite follow this script. It affirms that living remains after the end. Humanity as it has been known has been changed but agency and ‘life’ remains. This location, identified by Haraway, and developed by Braidotti, offers the possibility for living well in technical legality through knowing and feeling the ‘networks of the present.’
Xenogenesis and the Technical Legal Subject
Authors: Tranter Kieran
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that a detailed reading of Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ series clarifies how, notwithstanding the challenges to its being and its agency by technical legality, responsibility to becoming can allow the technical legal subject to live well in the present. The technical legal subject is revealed as a node within the networks, a blob of natureculture, a nexus point for biopolitical operations. Through Butler’s narrative of Lilith and her monstrous, hybrid human-alien children possibilities for the technical legal subject to be ‘embodied’ within a ‘location’ and ‘navigate’ the networks of the present emerge. Not only is agency empowered, notwithstanding the weight of the technical networks and the inclination to automation, but so is a form of ethics. Butler’s afrofuturism present a powerful affirmation that knowing and acting well to nurture life remains ever present, even in technical legality.
Mad Max and Mapping the Monsters in the Networks
Authors: Tranter Kieran
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines living in technical legality from the location of the legal scholar. Technical legality means that thinking about law and especially law and technology, has to escape the circularity of the Frankenstein myth, through coming to know the complex networks of technical legality. In this chapter George Miller’s classic Australian post-apocalyptic film Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior provides a map of the functions of a very familiar manifestation of technological humanity, the human-automobile in Australian law, politics and culture. What is shown through this cartography is a way of thinking law and technology that goes beyond the closed metaphysics of the Frankenstein myth. In mapping complexity, complicity, collusions and surprises within the networks of the present, the law scholar-nodes functions as a privileged location whereby the technical legality can be self-reflective; where the effects and affects of the continually changing world are seen. Further, in generating knowledge about the networks of the present, law-scholar-nodes can empower others, other embodied nodes in the networks, the monsters that have come to inherit the Earth, to live well in technical legality.
Mongols in a Muslim World, 1218–1280
Authors: Kamola Stefan
Published: May 2020

The conquest of the Middle East by the family of Chinggis Khan between 1220 and 1260 was a major disruption in the lives of the native population. It also created conflict among branches of the Mongol royal family, who competed over the resources of the region. This chapter traces the contours of that conflict, as the descendants of Chinggis Khan’s sons Jochi and Tolui vied for prominence over the eastern Islamic world. In the end, Tolui’s son Hulegu secured command of the region for himself. In this, he was aided by a group of Persian-speaking administrators, who took the first steps to integrate their new patrons into the local political landscape through a series of building projects in Northern Iran.
Mongol Dynastic History, 1302–1304
Authors: Kamola Stefan
Published: May 2020

The Blessed History of Ghazan (Tarikh-i Mubarak-i Ghazani) marked the culmination of several decades of historical writing that worked to integrate the Mongol ilkhans into historical and cultural patterns indigenous to the Middle East, but it was one of the first works produced under direct Ilkhanid patronage. This chapter surveys the historical writing of the early Ilkhanate before focusing on a series of works commissioned by Ghazan Khan (1295-1304) during the latter years of his reign. Of these, Rashid al-Din’s Blessed History provides the most concise, streamlined narrative, with the most compelling argument for the ilkhans’ legitimacy in the region. This chapter shows that to be a conscious production by Rashid al-Din for his Mongol patrons.
Privacy, Data Protection and Security in the Context of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing Services
Authors: Phillips Andelka M
Published: May 2020

This chapter provides a broad overview of privacy, data protection and security issues raised by DTC services. This includes discussion of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the UK’s Data Protection Legislation, and a brief discussion of US and Canadian Privacy Law. It also covers secondary use of genetic databases, the Future of Privacy Forum’s Privacy Best Practices for Consumer Genetic Testing Services, and Indigenous Peoples and Data Sovereignty.
Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History, 661-1257
Authors: El-Azhari Taef
Published: May 2020

The book provides a critical and systematic analyses of the role of queens, eunuchs and concubines in medieval Islamic history. Spanning over six centuries. It explores gender and sexual politics and power from the time of the Prophet Muhammad through the Umayyad and Abbasid empires to the Mamluks in the 15th century.
Based on primary sources, documents, the study looks at the role of women, mothers, wives, concubines, and their close political relationship with eunuchs and atabegs to secure their interests.
The book examine in details how, despite the male dominated society, women managed to come to power under the Abbasids and their impacts. The creation of the eunuch institution, and its transformation from a body associated with the –Harem- to eunuch rulers under the Abbasids. The book unravel the military-political power of eunuchs and their relations with women under the Abbasids and the appearance of the first sovereign eunuch ruler and army commander. Also the gradual rise of female power under the Fatimids, and the appearance of the first queen in Islamic history.
The book also examines the power of the Turkmen women in politics and how and why they introduced the unique post of atabeg.
Examines the role of the first Sunni queen in Islam, Dayfa of Aleppo and how she paved the way for another queen, Shajar al-Durr in Egypt in mid 13th century. This book is the first comprehensive study of sexual politics in medieval Islam. It challenges the traditional Muslim institutions spread in vast area in the Muslim world, which think of women as children of a lesser God according to their patriarchal readings of Islamic laws, and exposes the misogynist doctrine of organizations such as IS, Qaida, Buko Haram.
Fatimid Royal Women and Royal Concubines in Politics: The Rise of the First Queens of Islam
Authors: El-Azhari Taef
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the impact of Fatimid Shi‘i women on political and religious affairs, in collaboration with the other two genders; men and eunuchs. In Early 11th century, Sitt al-Mulk seized the rule in the Fatimid empire by assassinating her brother caliph and instated his young son. By 1036, Concubine Rasad became queen regent for her five years old boy, and dominated political affairs for decades, until she named herself as queen in state documents. One examine how the first sole queen came to power in Yemen in 1098 and remained for four decades. She not only was a ruler, but also became second religious authority after the caliph himself.
Why and how she managed to do that? Why her model has not repeated under the Fatimid dynasty? Why 11th century Yemen and Arabia was much more progressive than 21th century? Ironically, Queen Arwa never attempted to use any of her gender in the state affairs, and continued to count on the other gender. The Egyptian chancery kept for us few official correspondents between the Queens of Fatimid Egypt and queen of Yemen in an extremely rare case.
Transforming the Discourse of Civil-Military Interaction in Humanitarian Environments
Authors: Harris Vandra
Published: May 2020

In offering insight to the limits and considerations needed when undertaking an intervention, Vandra Harris in Chapter Twelve: Who is the Force Multiplier? Transient Military Insertion and Enduring NGO Engagement, explores the key non-governmental and military approaches to intervention, the interaction between the two, and how it can be reframed to improve outcomes for communities. Drawing on qualitative research with NGO and military personnel as well as an examination of civilian and military guidelines, the chapter illuminates the importance given to NGOs, though points to ways in which military goals appear to have precedence. Reflecting on the claim that NGOs are the military’s “force multipliers”—additional tools that increase the impact of the military force—the chapter argues that what is needed instead is greater clarity around humanitarian and humanitarian-like action and actors. With governments funding both defence and development—the latter increasingly under a foreign affairs banner and with an explicit “national interest” agenda—it can be understood that they view both as valuable in shaping international environments. Harris, therefore concludes that it is imperative to have a clear understanding of how these two entities relate to each other, and how that relationship can function best.
Out on the Town
Authors: Cottrell Anna
Published: May 2020

All roads led to the West End in interwar London. The area of roughly one square mile in the metropolitan Borough of Westminster boasted London’s brightest street lights, the largest concentration of electric advertising, the most lavish restaurants and cinemas, and the biggest crowds. This nocturnal cityscape could rival Paris or New York, and for any writer set on modern London life as her subject matter, it was the place to be. Above all, this was where one went to look at quintessentially modern Londoners – the office workers and suburban commuters, the women and men who laboured in London’s offices and shops by day, and walked the streets of the West End by night.
Soho Nights
Authors: Cottrell Anna
Published: May 2020

For the author who had grown tired of the frenetic life of the West End, the teashops and the red-lipped girls, Soho seemed to be the natural refuge. As the West End’s shabbier cousin, tucked away in the narrow streets behind Piccadilly, Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, Soho was often seen as an anomaly, an island of heterogeneity and irregularity in the very heart of the commercialised central London where everything and everyone appeared to be increasingly standardised. By the 1930s Soho had long enjoyed a reputation as London’s most mixed quarter, home to a heady variety of nationalities and professions.
Going to the Cinema
Authors: Cottrell Anna
Published: May 2020

Going to the cinema was the single most important pastime in 1930s Britain. Cinemas boasted ‘some eighteen to nineteen million attendances every week’, with ‘nine hundred and three million cinema tickets . . . sold in 1934’. ‘From flea-pits to fairy-palaces’, cinemas were everywhere. The picture-palaces were styled as Grecian temples, Spanish villas, baroque mansions and art deco ocean liners. One patron described the Astoria in Finsbury Park as a Moorish paradise: ‘the air was faintly perfumed . . . overhead one could see what appeared to be a night sky with stars twinkling’. Going to the cinema, then, was not just about seeing films. In recent decades a number of studies have explored the multi-sensory nature of the movie-going experience, especially its tactile, olfactory and aural dimensions. Jeffrey Richards pioneered the empirical, case-based approach to writing the cultural history of interwar cinema-going in his monumental The Age of the Dream Palace (1984), which not only discussed the significance of the films themselves to the 1930s generation, but also drew on his own personal sensory memories of cinemas.
Introduction
Authors: Kelly Christine
Published: May 2020

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the main themes discussed in the book and its key insights. It highlights the legacy of reform, commenting on some of the connections between the nineteenth-century history explored in the book and later developments in twentieth- century Scotland, including the links between the earlier history and the seminal Kilbrandon Report in 1964.
Pressure for Reform
Authors: Kelly Christine
Published: May 2020

The second chapter analyses the growing pressure for reform in the mid-century, examining the pioneering diversionary systems for young offenders and the pressure for legislation. As throughout the book, this analysis is set in the legal context with examination of relevant case law, legislative and procedural factors.
Women in Trees: Adapting Ovid for John Lyly’s Love’s Metamorphosis (1589)
Authors: Kelley Shannon
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers rhizomatic adaptation from an ecofeminist perspective in John Lyly’s Love’s Metamorphosis (1589), which begins with an unconventional scene. A wounded stage tree protests her assault with a long speech concerning two other Ovidian tree heroines, Daphne and Myrrha. This surprising moment in the theater disrupts centuries of lyric tradition wherein women who turn into trees become mute plants, especially since she speaks with grafts of Ovidian verse and wax writing tablets positioned as though they grew from her branches. After discussing how grafting complicates the arboreal model for adaptation, this chapter turns to history of the book scholarship to explore what exactly wedges into the crevice of Ovid’s early modern bark, and how Deleuze’s assumptions about material books fall short of the variety of texts and composition practices that comprise early modern literacy.
Ovid’s Ghosts: Lovesickness, Theatricality, and Ovidian Spectrality on the Early Modern English Stage
Authors: Starks Lisa S.
Published: May 2020

This chapter applies Maurizio Calbi’s concept of Shakespeare’s contemporary spectrality, based on Derridean “hauntology,” to Ovid in the early modern era. It explores Ovid as an icon of lovesickness and theatricality, with interconnections between these terms, in early modern representations of and debates on the theatrical experience itself. The chapter moves from the height of Ovidian theatre to its shadowy afterlife – focusing primarily on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Jonson’s Poetaster, and the obscure interregnum closet drama Ovids Ghost – to explore the uncanny returns of spectral Ovids in related discourses concerning metamorphic illusion and the “self-shattering effects of painful love.”
Remnants of Virgil, Ovid, and Paul in Titus Andronicus
Authors: Winiarski Catherine
Published: May 2020

Employing Linda Hutcheon’s analogy between biological and cultural adaptation, this chapter analyzes how the survivors of the Roman-Gothic war in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus adapt figures and narratives of the survivor—or remnant—from Virgil, Ovid, and St. Paul as strategic models in the covert, post-war feud of the play’s action. Titus assumes Virgil’s model of the remnant as non-regenerative and stoic; Tamora, on the other hand, employs Ovid’s regenerative and vengeful model, and eventually converts Titus to it. Their violent conflict and absorption in their revenge plots form the conditions for the emergence of a different kind of remnant: the remaining Romans and Goths who, according to a Pauline model, form a new incorporated community. The formation of this community arguably speaks to the context of the Protestant Reformation in Shakespeare’s England, in which violent excisions were made in the name of a latter-day Pauline community.
Worse than Philomel, Worse than Actaeon: Hyperreal Ovid in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
Authors: Casey Jim
Published: May 2020

This chapter engages with various postmodern theories of adaptation (Douglas Lanier’s Shakespearean Rhizomatics in particular) in order to explore how Shakespeare reshaped his source material from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to construct the horrific body trauma of Titus Andronicus. Shifting the typical focus of adaptation theory from recent adaptations of “Shakespeare” to Shakespeare’s own adaptation of Ovid, this essay examines specific moments from both Titus Andronicus and the tales of Philomela and Actaeon in the Metamorphoses—especially in connection to the performance of the “unspeakable,” the “obscene,” and the “irreligious”—in order to better understand the early modern play, the classical poem, and the very act of adaptation itself.
Writing Politics: Ottoman Governmentality and the Language of Reports
Authors: Saraçoglu M. Safa
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the official correspondence between Vidin’s administrative council and the provincial capital, Ruse. These reports pertaining to events in Vidin County were a part of the political procedures of the local judicio-administrative sphere. As such, politics of local administration influenced the official correspondence and our understanding of the events in Vidin County. The writing of reports and petitions and other provincial administrative/judicial practices (such as interrogations) constituted a significant part of Ottoman governmentality. Those who could shape how the official correspondence was constructed gained advantage in local political economy. Such correspondence was an essential component of how provincial Ottoman government functioned; therefore, reports, petitions, false accusations, and interrogations became important tools for agents and groups who were engaged in hegemonic negotiations. Both elite and non-elite agents were able to utilize Ottoman governance to pursue their own strategies against other local agents or imperial government. People who refused to use these bureaucratic tools in making claims and negotiating were presented in this correspondence as defiant stubborn and violent. This perspective is critical of the state–society divide, as the case studies reveal a more complex singular government of state and society.
John Stuart Mill’s Ascent
Authors: Morrison Kevin A.
Published: May 2020

Chapter one focuses on John Stuart Mill’s thirty-five-year career with the East India Company. It details how Mill’s views on cognitive individuation, a culture of merit that might nourish it and, ultimately, the production of truth developed in accord with a system of rank and apportionment according to intellect and merit that he experienced while employed by the company.
Matthew Arnold’s Beatitude
Authors: Morrison Kevin A.
Published: May 2020

Chapter 2 explicates the material environment of the Athenaeum Club, London, as Matthew Arnold would have experienced it, to show that many of his key ideas were shaped by his embodied experience there. It focuses, in particular, on his relationship to the club library in order to demonstrate his conversion to culture.
Conclusion: ‘Presentness Is Grace’
Authors: Morrison Kevin A.
Published: May 2020

The conclusion reflects on questions of evidence in writing about historical interiors that either no longer exist or have been fundamentally altered.