bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
There’s No Crying in Government: Romulus, Brutus and the Toxic Suppression of Grief
Authors: Neel Jaclyn
Published: October 2024

Jaclyn Neel examines the role played by visible grief in the early Roman exempla of Romulus and Brutus and its relation to hegemonic and toxic masculinity in the Roman world. These exempla are contrasted with the historical case of Cicero’s strong reaction to the death of his daughter Tullia. Although the cases of Romulus and Brutus, who respectively killed a brother and had sons executed, are extreme, their refusal to show grief highlights the restraints placed on ideal male behaviour. Later Romans show extreme discomfort with the killings and the non-emotional reactions to them, which suggests that they were viewed as toxic behaviours in the late Republic.
(Toxic) Masculinity between Hegemony and Precariousness: Alternatives to Heteronormativity in Briseis’ Portrait of Achilles (Ov. Her. 3)
Authors: Martorana Simona
Published: October 2024

Simona Martorana demonstrates how Briseis’ description of Achilles, traditionally the embodiment of a martial masculinity that ultimately destroys self and others, in Ovid’s Heroides offers a more ambiguous and nuanced reading of the hero. The inherent generic mixing of Heroides 3 allows readers to look beyond the gender binary and reassess the stability of masculinity as a category. The poem thus reveals unexplored (and unexpected) angles of masculinity in the ancient world, allowing for a reassessment of the sociological concept of toxic masculinity according to a more fluid, and less binary, view of gender relationships.
‘Angry, reckless, savage’: Problematising the Hypermasculine Germani
Authors: Evans Rhiannon
Published: October 2024

Rhiannon Evans considers the nexus of gender, ethnicity and social order to explore Caesar’s depiction of the Germani and Tacitus’ renegotiation of it. In Caesar’s work, the rash and violent Germani display a toxic hypermasculinity which subverts any claim to something like Roman humanitas. But Tacitus depicts them as both exemplary and toxic in the Germania, a text which itself has fuelled a disturbing and aggressive form of masculinity in modern Europe. These ‘written Germani’ appear during times of tectonic social change: the breakdown of the republic and the aftermath of a hated dictator’s murder. In each context the Germani allow the author to comment on how outrageous masculinity breaches the limits of libertas and damages society irreparably.
Scipio Africanus and the Construction of Fascist Italian Masculinities
Authors: Agbamu Samuel
Published: October 2024

Samuel Agbamu discusses the reception of the figure of Scipio Africanus in the formulation of an idealised, Fascist Italian masculinity. The primary focus is Carmine Gallone’s 1937 film Scipione l’Africano, a historical epic based on Scipio’s victory over Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE. In this little-studied film of Fascist Italy, receptions of Scipio from a number of ancient sources coalesce into a deeply ideological representation of the Roman general as an idealised masculine subject of Fascist imperialism, an image of masculinity disseminated by the modern technology of cinema. This representation propagated a toxic masculinity informing and informed by Italy’s colonial policy, and mythologised through the lensing of classical antiquity.
Violence, Victimhood and the Rhetoric of Erotic Curses
Authors: Ager Britta
Published: October 2024

Britta Ager examines the rhetoric of love curses in the context of classical scholarship and modern discussions of toxic gendered behaviour. The language of ancient love curses (defixiones) is puzzlingly violent, with magicians wishing harm upon women they claim to want relationships with. Modern manifestations of toxic masculinity suggest that the main benefit of erotic defixiones was that they offered their users an emotional outlet through which to voice their sense of grievance and sexual entitlement. Comparisons with the online discourse of MRAs (Mens Rights Activists), incels, etc. offers some specific ways to think about the emotional satisfaction gained by violent and misogynistic sexual discourse, and how those satisfactions have marked similarities to these magical tropes.
Toxic Masculinity in the First-Year Classics Classroom
Authors: Knight Jayne , Wallis Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Jayne Knight and Jonathan Wallis consider how teachers might use the concept of toxic masculinity to facilitate student engagement with ancient texts and topics in a first-year classics classroom. In response to the ways the contemporary concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ resonates in the ancient sources and topics taught in Classics classrooms, Knight and Wallis consider the crucial role of teachers in selecting and introducing students to this material. Dialogue about how societies encourage and reward destructive models of masculinity is at the forefront of today’s public discourse, and the chapter argues that it must also have a place in the first-year Classics classroom. Teachers are responsible for presenting the elements of ancient culture and history which illustrate harmful masculine ideals and behaviours in a socially conscious way that encourages critical engagement with the past and its relationship to the present.
From Postmodern to Metamodern Slasher
Authors: Jones Steve
Published: October 2024

Chapter 1 delineates what metamodernism is, contrasting it with postmodernism and other 'post'-postmodern frameworks. The chapter then outlines the metamodern slasher film’s major distinctive features: its rejection of the postmodern slasher’s ironic, inward facing, fatalistic cynicism, and its adoption of sincerity, outward-facing inclusivity, and optimism about the possibility of subgeneric innovation. Metamodern slasher films echo the zeitgeist, reflecting a shift in the dominant sociocultural mindset. These films continue to use irony and focus on stylistics, form, and conventions, but these elements are married with sincerity and optimism, suggesting that coherent meaning and subgeneric innovation are possible. This emphasis on optimism and future potentialities is also indicative of the metamodern outlook. These premises are the foundation for the book’s analyses of key contemporary slasher films.
Investment (Epistemology)
Authors: Jones Steve
Published: October 2024

Chapter 2 argues that the metamodern slasher’s connotative deliberations on subgenre are integrated into its approaches to narrativisation and characterisation. Taking Shrooms (2007) and Triangle (2009) as case study films, the chapter demonstrates that metamodern slasher films depart from the postmodern slasher’s ludic trickery, which involves withholding information from viewers. Metamodern slasher films instead prioritise epistemic alignment with their protagonists to emphasise subjective experience, intimating that subjective epistemic access is intrinsically valuable because our experiences are the bedrock of lived reality. Because of this emphasis on subjectivity, neither Shrooms nor Triangle grant an objective stance on their narrative events. Metamodern slasher films leverage unresolved ambiguities, offering multiple simultaneous interpretive possibilities that invite viewers to actively collaborate in meaning-making.
Coherence (Ontology)
Authors: Jones Steve
Published: October 2024

Chapter 3 evinces two ways metamodern slashers foreground coherence and collaboration. First, in contrast to the postmodern slasher’s supposed ontological disruptions, metamodern slasher films such as Detention (2011) integrate metafictional devices into their narratives, reinforcing investment in the characters' experiences and generating coherent narrative worlds. These films recognise that viewers can derive authentic pleasure from fiction, even when its constructed nature is highlighted. Second, Happy Death Day (2017) illustrates another way metamodern slasher films can overtly play with structure while maintaining a coherent narrative world. Here, a seemingly disruptive time-loop structure is intertwined with the protagonist’s personal growth and her assent to a standard subgeneric character type: the Final Girl. This cohesion between narrative shape, diegetic reality, character, and subgeneric typing is coloured by the film’s tone, especially its optimism about the possibility of positive change (both for the protagonist and for the subgenre).
Conventionality
Authors: Jones Steve
Published: October 2024

Chapter 4’s case studies – Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) and You Might Be the Killer (2018) – illustrate how metamodern slasher films provide new insights by viewing conventional situations from idiosyncratic perspectives. Together, these case studies illuminate three attributes of the metamodern slasher film. First, conventions are naturalised because they are congruous with the characters and the fictional world. Second, conventions need not consistently and inevitably play out in normative ways; they are not fixed elements that 'trap' filmmakers and fatally constrain the subgenre. Third, in metamodern slasher films, the expectations engendered by conventionality are opportunities to illuminate the subgenre’s operations. In the metamodern slasher film, meditating on conventions grants opportunities to innovate and surprise.
Nostalgia
Authors: Jones Steve
Published: October 2024

Chapter 7 explores how metamodern slasher films recall and incorporate the past to offer meaningful developments in the subgenre’s present and future. Its first half concentrates on 'throwback' slasher films, which express nostalgic fondness for the subgenre’s boom-period by distilling the slasher formula or recollecting the fashion, music, formal stylistics, or temporal setting of early-1980s slasher films. Nostalgic metamodern slasher films acknowledge that fashions and aesthetic standards transform over time in accordance with changing values and concerns. The second half focuses on Getting Schooled (2017), which rewrites the boom-period slasher film according to a metamodern mindset, sincerely depicting seemingly typed characters growing and grieving. This case study illustrates how the subgenre’s past can be figuratively recast to illuminate its present.
Introduction
Authors: Alpert Robert , Eisenberg Merle , Mordechai Lee
Published: October 2024

The introduction presents the key ideas of the book with its examination of disease movies as a genre that has emerged over the last century and that includes both realistic disease outbreaks and zombie apocalypse films. The genre’s narrative has changed over three broad time periods: the beginning of film through the 1980s, the 1990s through the mid-2000s, and the late 2000s and afterward. The introduction provides an overview of this evolution of disease movies through historically notable films, as well as remakes and franchises. The introduction then analyses changes to disease movies in the context of the development of American, global capitalism and the fragmentation of the social contract. Finally, it explains the role of disease movie narratives in the American experience of Covid.
Post-Apocalyptic Disease Movies: Pandemics and Posthumanity
Authors: Alpert Robert , Eisenberg Merle , Mordechai Lee
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on the contemporary wave of disease films that accept catastrophic, global disease as a given and focuses on how to respond to the inevitable disease apocalypse. Movies became more pessimistic about American society. Community and the public good have disappeared, and science is often the cause of the disease. Individuals face the threat of disease by themselves as the state and its institutions fail in efforts to contain, let alone cure, the pathogen. Social norms and cohesion are rarely remarked upon, since no one believes in them anymore. If a film does not end apocalyptically, then only individuals acting heroically, against all odds and outside stifling incompetent government bureaucracies, prevent the End Times. Among the films this chapter examines are Contagion (2011), World War Z (2013), and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011).
A New Form of Criminal Realism
Authors: Van den Troost Kristof
Published: October 2024

Chapter 3 tracks the emergence of the modern Hong Kong crime film in the late 1960s and 1970s. The censors’ reluctance to tolerate depictions of crime and other social problems in contemporary Hong Kong arguably increased the commercial appeal of criminal realism, with filmmakers constantly pushing boundaries to show more of Hong Kong’s sordid side to viewers. This trend was further reinforced by moral panics surrounding crime and juvenile delinquency, and by the fact that crime was constantly in the news: the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise and fall of major drug lords and corrupt policemen, as well as the government’s launching of annual Fight Crime campaigns and the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). After a cycle of problem youth films in the late 1960s and of kung fu crime films in the early 1970s, these circumstances mid-decade gave rise to a fad for so-called shehui qiqingpian, which often purported to offer an honest look at sensational true crimes. Contrary to its popular perception as being stuck in the past, the Shaw Brothers studio played a pioneering role in the local crime film during these years.
Crime Films and Hong Kong Identity
Authors: Van den Troost Kristof
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on how, by providing a discursive space in which different perspectives on Hong Kong society, politics and culture could be voiced indirectly and ambiguously, the crime film forged a close connection with Hong Kong identity that has lasted to the present. Marked by the move away from the studio to Hong Kong’s mean streets and by the increasing return of Cantonese (after a brief disappearance of the language in the early 1970s), these films were prime participants in the localisation of Hong Kong cinema. This chapter also asks why the modern Hong Kong crime film came to focus on the figures of the cop and the gangster, suggesting that, besides local news headlines and Hollywood influences, the nature of the triads and the police as groups with distinctive cultures and power dynamics made them fertile ground for storytelling. The chapter concludes with a closer look at films featuring the figure of the immigrant gangster, usually from mainland China. The complex Self/Other dynamic at work in these films is one of the most obvious ways in which the genre has been used to engage the broader discourse on Hong Kong identity.
Afterword: The Uncertain Present and Future of Criminal Realism in Hong Kong
Authors: Van den Troost Kristof
Published: October 2024

The Afterword brings the discussion of criminal realism up to the present moment, which undoubtedly is another turning point for Hong Kong and its cinema. Following the massive protests of 2019, the introduction of a National Security Law in 2020 and the drastic 2021 changes in film censorship legislation, Hong Kong filmmakers are figuring out ways to survive in an increasingly politicised and restricted environment. Since the new censorship rules prohibit the representation of certain aspects of the Hong Kong experience – such as the memory of the 2019 protests – several Hong Kong films have been released overseas but cannot be screened in Hong Kong itself. The Afterword compares one of these films, May You Stay Forever Young (2021), to some of the problem youth films discussed earlier in this book, arguing that criminal realism has become very relevant once again, albeit in a radically altered form.
Redirecting Radical Democracy
Authors: Helander Sofia Anceau
Published: October 2024

Today, alienation manifests itself primarily as precarisation and deprofessionalisation. When the subject’s work security or professional autonomy is undermined, relations – not only to others, but also to one's self – can become inhibited. This book shows that while alienation poses serious problems to modern democracies, it is a form of social suffering that is particularly difficult for democratic theory – preoccupied by the political – to address.
The book highlights that not even radical democracy, which emphasises the importance of social resistance, can include the alienated. The author shows this is not merely due to the historical emergence of radical democracy and its turn away from traditional socialism, but also to a deeper problem in the theory itself. Anceau Helander argues that in order to address alienation, radical democracy – as both normative theory and political strategy, must be reformulated starting with its deep assumptions about the subject.
Antagonism or alienation?
Authors: Helander Sofia Anceau
Published: October 2024

The chapter critically examines Chantal Mouffe’s theories of radical and agonistic democracy, focusing on their underlying conception of the subject. What prevents Mouffe’s radical democracy from including a theory of alienation – and why is that a problem? The chapter argues that radical democracy, aiming at the open and radical mobilization of marginalized groups, should be particularly able to address marginalization in the form of alienation. However, it cannot. Its concepts of lack, antagonism and hegemony, although initially promising, cannot capture the problem of alienation. Instead, precisely in its exclusive focus on antagonism, radical democracy comes to rely on a conception of the subject that, under conditions of alienation, becomes insufficient. It assumes the subject to be naturally flexible, strong and conflict-seeking. The subject thus conceived is perfectly suited to ‘flourish in the midst of dislocation’, to straddle today’s conditions of precarity. As a result, radical democracy comes to exclude those who experience marginalization in the form of alienation. Radical democracy is thus left with a challenge: to find a subject who can be both open and radical, but who is also capable of experiencing alienation.
Redirecting the radical democratic strategy
Authors: Helander Sofia Anceau
Published: October 2024

The chapter examines new possible directions for radical democratic politics in light of the problem of alienation. Having reformulated the deep assumptions of radical democracy, a potential political strategy opens up: the possibility of uniting people - precarious youth, routine workers, professionals and semi-professionals – in a common struggle against alienation. At the same time, we are also in a better place to grasp the challenges that such a struggle would involve. Today, people from many different social milieus are precarized, and some of these are also alienated. Efforts to unite these people risk turning alienating in and of themselves, reproducing existing forms of domination and producing new forms of disorientation. The struggle against alienation thus requires a complex set of strategies. For this, Mouffe’s populist movement – wherein the participants’ relationships to each other mainly consist of a common, symbolic adversary – might no longer suffice. Calling for alienated people to act without constructing any new, empowering relations risks turning into what Lauren Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’ – adding pressure to individuals who are already overburdened. For radical democracy to make itself relevant today, the chapter argues, it must thus reconsider some of its strategic choices, including who to include, how to organize and what to demand.
Introduction
Authors: Moffat Michelle
Published: October 2024

The introductory chapter sets the scene by providing background information and establishing the central ideas that underpin Scottish Society in the Second World War. It introduces the themes of legacy and identity, tension and discontent, and the transformation Scotland had undergone at the start of the Twentieth Century. The introduction sets out the key research questions for the book: how did everyday life and work look in wartime Scotland? How did Scots respond to war’s influence on their lives? Did pre-war tensions and divisions shape wartime experiences? How was Scottish national identity conceptualised at a time when messages of British unity were promoted? The chapter then introduces two underlying themes: community and national identity. It argues their importance in making sense of Scottish experiences of the Second World War. It finishes with a discussion of the range of archival sources upon which the book is based, the methodologies used to interrogate these sources, and a brief chapter outline.
‘A War of Their Own’: Discontent and Subversion on the Scottish Home Front
Authors: Moffat Michelle
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores elements of wartime subversion and discontent in Scotland, challenging dominant contemporary narratives of sacrifice and cooperation. It begins with an investigation of wartime workplace discontent, particularly in the industrial heartlands around Glasgow and the Clyde. The chapter examines strikes and stoppages, and explores the effects of these activities on war production. The chapter also uses recently uncovered archives to chart the activities of anti-war and anti-English groups operating in wartime Scotland. This includes sections on communism, and its prominence in the wider Glasgow area; Scottish nationalism and the SNP; Jehovah’s Witnesses; and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Additionally, the chapter explores the responses of Britain’s intelligence community to these groups and activities. Through this investigation, this chapter challenges the popular nostalgia of the ‘People’s War’, arguing that Scottish identity and pre-existing social grievances shaped wartime experiences in Scotland, exacerbating disharmony and destabilising the home front.
‘We Here in Scotland Can Also Take It’: Morale in Scotland, 1939–45
Authors: Moffat Michelle
Published: October 2024

This chapter makes a broad analysis of home front morale in Scotland during the Second World War. It sets the scene with a discussion of the history and development of popular cultural narratives about high morale, ‘Blitz Spirit’, and united British communities. The chapter argues that this traditional approach is London-centric, overlooking other regions and nations on the British home front. To address this historiographical oversight, the chapter focuses on Scottish archives to assess morale in Scotland. To assist in gauging Scottish morale, the reader is made familiar with the history and contemporary definitions of morale. Following this, the chapter splits into three sub-sections, each oriented around a factor that may have influenced morale: home front conditions, including responses to the Clydeside Blitz of March 1941; frontline events, including the Battle of El Alamein; and ‘Scottish concerns’, including the legacies of Depression and Whitehall’s perceived indifference towards Scotland.
Epilogue
Authors: Moffat Michelle
Published: October 2024

The epilogue summarises the previous chapters, noting that while they highlight areas of similarity with studies of Britain, they also draw out areas of cultural difference that distinguish Scottish experiences of the Second World War. The epilogue discusses these key points of difference, grouping them under four themes: conflict; tension between resistance and conformity; Scottish cultural traditions; and identity and nationhood. It asserts that the war years were a period of transformation, opening conversations around national and cultural identity, reshaping communities, and offering the prospect of recovery to a country deeply wounded by the Great War and the interwar depression.
Standing up to the Nazis
Authors: Steir-Livny Liat
Published: October 2024

This chapter shows that focusing on personal stories of resilience or standing up to the Nazis does not mean representing the atrocities of the Holocaust. These acts of bravery indeed took place, and their representation sheds more light on girls’ and young women’s behavior under Nazi rule. However, at the same time, these acts dominate the movies and marginalize the atrocities.
Resourcefulness
Authors: Steir-Livny Liat
Published: October 2024

Another form of bravery depicted in several movies is the victims’ resourcefulness. These movies tell the stories of girls, teenagers, and young women and broaden the visualization of women’s responses to the Holocaust. However, their acts are not defined as gender related. They center on incidents that suggest “a ray of light in the darkness” of that era but obfuscate the atrocities in doing so.
The Exceptional—Representing the Horrors
Authors: Steir-Livny Liat
Published: October 2024

A handful of movies have taken advantage of the power of animated documentary to deal with horrific events without recourse to graphic or pornographic violence.
‘Arrows in the Hand of a Mighty Man’: Children’s Burials
Authors: Salminen Elina M.
Published: October 2024

Chapter 3 discusses the first of the ‘social personae’ included in the monograph: the child. After a brief introduction to the study of childhood in historical and archaeological contexts, ancient literary sources on Macedonian children are summarised. The bulk of the chapter highlights different variables to tackle questions of the personhood, status and gender of children: osteological data is compared to demographic models, leading to the conclusion that children of certain ages are underrepresented in cemeteries; grave goods are quantified to note a particularly sharp divergence in the treatment of high-status and low-status children; and certain object categories are identified as a window into the gendering of children. Several case-studies are discussed to illustrate the especially great variance we see in Macedonian children’s burials.
War and Wine Sacks: Macedonian Men
Authors: Salminen Elina M.
Published: October 2024

Chapter 5 concludes the section on ‘social personae’ with men. The chapter begins by defining the common tropes identified with Macedonian masculinity, here called the Homeric model. It then looks at mortuary evidence to find both similarities but mostly divergences from these tropes. Osteological evidence is studied, followed by several analyses of weapons. Weapons are found to be relatively uncommon, and the sets do not match ones known from textual sources. Evidence for feasting and drinking is present, but once more not quite aligned with literary descriptions. After brief summaries of evidence for athletics, medicine and literacy, the chapter concludes with case-studies.
Visible Monuments, Hidden Value: Hierarchy
Authors: Salminen Elina M.
Published: October 2024

This chapter moves away from gender and age, and instead focuses on status. To provide context, some models for social organisation developed by historians are summarised and the creation of a wealth index as a proxy for status is described. This wealth index is then used to analyse relative inequality. Interestingly, inequality increased when looted treasures from the East would have been arriving in Macedonia – in other words, this wealth did not benefit many. An entirely different approach is used to study status at the geographical scale: viewshed analysis. Here, a surprising lack of concern for visibility is found, and it’s suggested that perhaps tumuli served as something more similar to property markers than symbols dominating a landscape.
Conclusion: Intersections and Crossroads – an Invitation to the Reader
Authors: Salminen Elina M.
Published: October 2024

The Conclusion summarises the main arguments and findings of the book. It closes with a warm invitation for the reader to conduct their own analyses, using the database freely available online.
Introduction: Psychic Speculations and the Porous Self
Authors: Taylor Mark
Published: October 2024

The introduction explores how literary criticism has assumed that the novel’s subject must be an individuated self who feels, thinks, and develops in isolation. The chapter suggests that late nineteenth century parapsychology is a trigger for the emergence of novels which offer a porous self. Where nineteenth century advocates of mesmerism imagined the complete control of one individual’s mind by another, begetting a strain of Victorian literature of mental domination like George du Maurier’s Trilby, the paradigm shift to telepathy sees researchers suggest more diverse and more nuanced forms of mental connection and immaterial communication, a change reflected in literature. The introduction outlines the developments in psychical speculation across the twentieth century, and their conversation with literature. Finally, it discusses why many writers informed by psychical speculation span ‘literary’ and speculative fiction, often within single novels. It suggests that for these writers addressing the porous, connected self is necessarily a matter of speculation, as the boundaries of the self are uncertain – if they indeed exist. As such, the novel becomes innately speculative project.
Aldous Huxley, Telepathy and the Decentring of Personality in the Novel of Ideas
Authors: Taylor Mark
Published: October 2024

This chapter sees Huxley’s firm belief in telepathy as the spur for innovation in his literature. In part thanks to a friendship with J. B. Rhine, whose research at Duke University convinced a wide audience that telepathic phenomena were real, Huxley comes to doubt the limits of the self. The chapter links a process of ‘decentration’ Huxley suggests can assist telepathic transmission with a decentration in Huxley’s literary rendering of personality. As the integral, individuated character is seen as false by Huxley, the development of ideas replaces the development of the individual as the structuring force in Huxley’s fiction. As such, where Huxley’s novel of ideas has typically been seen to stem from an inattention to human character, they can instead be seen to reproduce the forces Huxley deems to shape character. The chapter also considers other novelists of ideas in this light, including Iris Murdoch and A. S. Byatt.
Doris Lessing, Deindividuated Characters and Hybrid Identity
Authors: Taylor Mark
Published: October 2024

This chapter connects the narrative innovations of Lessing’s fiction with her belief in psychic connection. It examines the extensive use of first person plural we-narration in The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 and The Cleft, finding that in each Lessing intends a genuinely collective selfhood, underscored by collective consciousness. It also considers how, across her career Lessing challenges the identity of subjecthood with bodily individuality, offering, for example, hypothetical societies in which names are bound to roles rather than physical individuals. The chapter particularly highlights Lessing’s investment in the ideas of anthropologist Edward T. Hall, especially his idea of tools and cultural artifacts as extensions of the mind, suggesting that Lessing’s fiction develops this idea to its logical conclusion, finding that people’s use of one another binds them together as extensions of each other, with concomitant fusion of personalities and minds. Further, the chapter draws on the ideas of Homi K. Bhabha to explore how other writers invested in hybrid identity, including Salman Rushdie, also use telepathy as a device to speak to a mind attuned to multiple cultures.
The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History
Authors: Eldem Edhem
Published: October 2024

Throughout the ‘long’ 19th century, a steadily growing flow of visitors turned the Alhambra into a tourist destination and a major trope of Medievalism and especially Orientalism, created by Western authors and artists from François-René de Chateaubriand to Owen Jones and from Washington Irving to Jean-Léon Gérôme. Yet behind this Western infatuation lie scores of ‘Oriental’ observers of the monument, as revealed by its visitors’ book, kept since 1829. The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History uses this untapped source to capture and analyse the perceptions of the Alhambra by a wide range of actors and observers, including Westerners and Spaniards, but more importantly a vast array of ‘Orientals’, such as Moroccans and other Maghrebi subjects, culturally Turkish Ottomans, a few Greeks and Armenians, and growing numbers of Christian and Muslim Arabs from the Mashreq, especially from Egypt. The book thus reveals the existence of significant variations and interconnections between Western and Oriental perceptions of the monument, from Orientalism and Romanticism to Arab nationalism and Ottoman Orientalism. Based on an exhaustive perusing of the visitors’ book, combined with a systematic examination of contemporary memoirs, travelogues, photographs, periodicals and newspapers, it uses the Alhambra as the nexus of a history of the complex and entangled relations between East and West, North and South, Islam and Christianity, centre and periphery during the heyday of Orientalism and Western hegemony.
North: Western and Spanish Visions of the Alhambra
Authors: Eldem Edhem
Published: October 2024

Following a brief reminder of the discovery of the Alhambra in the eighteenth century by Spanish scholars and artists, the chapter sets the scene by focussing on the romantic and exotic image of the monument created and diffused by predominantly French and British authors and artists throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Laborde, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Jones, Irving, to name the a few, were responsible for the creation and diffusion of this image in literature, art, and architecture. It also examines the impact of ‘northern’ perceptions of the Alhambra and Al-Andalus on Spanish intellectuals, such as Julián Juderías, who considered some of these visions as yet another embodiment of the powerful leyenda negra, or ‘black legend’, which portrayed Spain as a violent and colourful backwater of Europe, and an extension of the Moorish world. By the second half of the century, the myth of the Alhambra was fully incorporated into the wider scope of Orientalism. Authors and artists like Gautier, Gérôme, or Regnault combined architectural elements with the legend of the Abencerrages and with African themes to create a visually powerful image, which culminated in the 1900 Paris Exposition’s section devoted to ‘Andalusia in the times of the Moors’.
East: Ottomans at the Alhambra
Authors: Eldem Edhem
Published: October 2024

If we know so much about Fuad Efendi’s visit to the Alhambra in 1844, entirely ignored by Ottoman and Turkish sources, it is because it made the headlines of the Granada press, partly due to the Ottoman ambassador’s unexpectedly Western looks and attitude. Like him, many of the early Ottoman visitors were high-profile bureaucrats and statesmen of Turkish culture, such as the famous Midhat Pasha, whose limited knowledge on the Alhambra and Al-Andalus came largely from Western sources. True, from the 1860s on, a relative interest for the Andalusian past had begun to inspire a few works in Turkish, including tragedies in the 1870s and 1880s about the fall of Al-Andalus, probably derived from a sense of impending doom in the Ottoman Balkans. Nevertheless, the Ottoman-Turkish discovery of Al-Andalus turned out to be a short-lived and superficial fad, soon overridden by Western-inspired clichés. Even the craze for Moresque architecture witnessed in Istanbul in the 1860s, which some scholars have interpreted as a conscious historicist effort at appropriating a Medieval Islamic past, consisted rather of a stylistic and cosmetic transfer from Europe, with no other aim than to give an easily identifiable Oriental touch to the imperial capital.
The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704-1894
Authors: McAuley Louis Kirk
Published: October 2024

At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, this book invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, it offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature of empire building. This includes analyses of texts composed by (or about) persons residing at, or just outside, the edges of the British and American Empires, including St Kitts and Nevis, Haiti, Cuba, Hawaii and Samoa, which were built around the global transfer of animals and plants. Offering biotic readings of said literature, this book highlights the human place in nature and provides practical literary examples of the ways oceans facilitate the confusion of time and place. If Empire is, as Neel Ahuja suggests, a “project in the Government of species,” then it stands to reason that empire writing must either implicitly or explicitly acknowledge the potential unruliness of particular natures. And it is through close attention to such unruliness that these texts acknowledge the co-productive agency of animals and plants, offering a transoceanic view that troubles geopolitical (and geographical) boundaries, and presents world literature as integral to world-ecology. For the fate of such unruly natures – from Selkirk’s cats and Crusoe’s English barley to Sansay’s female land crabs and Stevenson’s sensitive plant – remains inextricably linked to our own.
Introduction: Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death
Authors: Gasston Aimée
Published: October 2024

During Katherine Mansfield’s life she experienced abortion, miscarriage, peritonitis, rheumatism and tuberculosis, and would take up a peripatetic existence constantly in search of more favourable climates. The First World War of 1914–1918 and the influenza pandemic of 1918–20 informed the zeitgeist of her times. This volume of essays explores the extent to which this resonant context of disease and death shaped Mansfield’s literary output and her modes of thinking. Illness both stimulated and limited Mansfield’s creativity: her personal writings document the increasing influence of tubercular literary predecessors such as Anton Chekhov and John Keats, while her stories function compellingly as dialogue with loved ones who have been lost – her brother, her mother, her grandmother – and endow them with life in the process.
The Deadliest Game of Snooker: Katherine Mansfield’s Great War Revisited
Authors: Kascakova Janka
Published: October 2024

This essay is a contribution to the growing body of work that argues for Katherine Mansfield’s seemingly non-war-related stories to be read as profoundly affected by it, acting as a means of processing its ramifications and facilitating mourning. It examines selected aspects of ‘Prelude’ (1917) and ‘At the Bay’ (1921) and points out how death and war inform their form as well as content and are deeply imbedded in their symbolism. I shall focus mostly on one of the most intriguing yet usually neglected characters appearing in both stories, the dog Snooker, recognising his presentation as a rather unconventional yet genuine and moving tribute to Mansfield’s brother Leslie and his fellow soldiers. The analysis of the presentation of Snooker will demonstrate how its complex symbolism links it to Mansfield’s most acclaimed war story ‘The Fly’ (1922); how similar they are in their main elements and intricate connection to Shakespeare. It shall also reveal the crucial importance of Snooker’s name in connection to the eponymous game and its military background, underscoring the main argument that Snooker represents the absent Leslie of ‘Prelude’ the way the fly epitomizes the boss’ dead son.
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History
Authors: Ryan Derek
Published: October 2024

In a letter written to her father at the end of December 1922, Katherine Mansfield remarked upon the therapeutic effects of inhaling ‘the smell of cows’ while at George Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau. That Mansfield died from her tuberculosis just over a week later has tended to negatively skew how critics view her time there, just as her contemporaries had been sceptical about her decision not to pursue more conventional medical treatment. Yet Mansfield’s letters reveal valuable insights into the holistic approach she favoured, which not only affected her relationship to illness but also radically altered her sense of being human and led to a more intimate understanding of animal life. This essay contends that she had, in effect, already started writing ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ in her letters. It argues that Mansfield’s distinctive and intimate engagement with cows, recorded and animated in her late correspondence, refocuses our understanding of her experience with illness in the last months of her life – including her decision to spend them in Gurdjieff’s Institute – and opens onto an exploration of interspecies medical history.
Poetry
Authors: Griffiths Martin
Published: October 2024

‘Praeludium Chopins’ – a prose-poem and a reworking of ‘Vignette: I look out through the window’ – was published in the ramblingly titled ‘Cremona’ – with which is incorporated ‘The Violinist’: A Record of the String World in London in July 1909. The appearance of concert reviews by ‘Caesar’ alongside the poem by KM suggests that Arnold and Garnet Trowell –– cellist and violinist, respectively ––were intermediaries between the writer and the London music magazine. Notably, the title of this newly-discovered work invokes the piano preludes of Frédéric Chopin, as well as the master works of the German baroque (including the preludes of J. S. Bach). Venezuelan/American pianist Teresa Carreño – the dedicatee ‘T. C.’ – appears to be the inspiration for the revision, and by extension, her performances of the famous ‘Raindrop’ Prelude, Op. 28, No. 15. Similar covert musical references are found, alongside experiments in musical punctuation, in other early works by KM including the poem ‘In the Church’ and ‘The Story of Pearl Button’ and all these prefigure the musical and literary convergences found in the mature works of KM, including her short story ‘Prelude’ (1917).
Introduction
Authors: Berghahn Daniela
Published: October 2024

The Introduction outlines the scope, aims and structure of this book. It proposes that Exotic Cinema contributes to the agenda of decolonising film studies in three ways: first, because its focus on world cinema de-Westernises the canon; second, because many of the films discussed prompt a critical reassessment of Western values and epistemes; and third, because it interrogates regimes of visuality such as the imperial, the ethnographic and the exotic gaze. It interrogates how contemporary world cinema negotiates the historical legacy of exoticism’s white supremacist assumptions and asks: What happens when cultures that have for centuries been the object of the exotic gaze become both the subject and the object? The Introduction also engages with scholarly debates surrounding the competing and overlapping terms ‘transnational’, ‘world cinema’, ‘global art cinema’ and proposes ‘films from elsewhere’ as an alternative term to emphasise the spectator’s positionality as a cultural outsider, which is a constitutive feature of the exotic gaze.
Ethnographic Salvage and Cosmopolitan Exoticism
Authors: Berghahn Daniela
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on one of the most enduring tropes of exoticism, ethnographic salvage. It explores how the project of ethnographic salvage, once the prerogative of Western ethnographers, has been taken up by Indigenous filmmakers who aim to recuperate and preserve their own cultural memory. The chapter examines four Indigenous films, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Ten Canoes, Embrace of the Serpent and Tanna. By exploring the conceptual convergences between exoticism, local authenticity and cosmopolitanism, this chapter aims to rehabilitate what Berghahn theorises as ’cosmopolitan exoticism’, through demonstrating how contemporary Indigenous cinema appropriates familiar exotic tropes (e.g. the Noble Savage, the ‘primitive’, the South Sea paradise) only to put them at the service of new cosmopolitan agendas. These include empowering marginalised Indigenous communities, demanding the atonement of colonial guilt and calling ‘the white man’ to responsibility for the looming environmental catastrophe he has caused. These Indigenous films demonstrate that certain contemporary forms of exoticism contribute to the important project of decolonising the lens.
Landscape Poetics
Authors: Szuba Monika
Published: October 2024

Landscape Poetics seeks to place Scottish writers in relation to their landscape, by investigating how the self is entwined in place. The study offers a re-evaluation of Scottish writing and ‘landscape textuality’ in the context of current debates in the environmental humanities. It explores the ways in which landscape functions in Scottish writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By examining the writing and practice of particular modern and contemporary authors in the light of environmental thought, the study explores their lived, organic connection to the landscape. Landscape Poetics presents an argument that the relationship between author and world is expressed through the language of vibrant and engaged experience. Nan Shepherd, Norman MacCaig, Kathleen Jamie, Thomas A Clark and Alec Finlay are seen as reinventing the perception of the landscape by proposing that the subject is no longer involved in the act of objectification, but is instead an embodied self that enters place, perceiving it more fully.The study discusses various forms and genres, emphasising crossings between different media and landscape. In order to examine each work in critical detail, the book is divided into five chapters, each addressing the essays, poetry and practice of a single author and offering readings that are theoretically informed, and presenting critical analyses of modern and contemporary Scottish writers.
Introduction: Towards a Phenomenological Reading of the Scottish Landscape
Authors: Szuba Monika
Published: October 2024

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Morally acceptable madness: psychiatry, Catholics and censorship at the Legion of Decency
Authors: Snelson Tim , Macauley William R. , Kirby David A.
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the negotiations between the Legion of Decency and Hollywood studios in the 1960s to understand their struggle over what constituted acceptable stories about the nature of human behaviour and the ‘psy’ sciences as a personal, social, political, and cultural force. The chapter details the Legion’s censorship decisions for a number of films including The Bad Seed (1956), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Psycho (1960), Through A Glass Darkly (1961), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Shock Corridor (1963), A Child is Waiting (1963), Marnie (1964), The Pumpkin Eater (1964), Repulsion (1965) and A Fine Madness (1966).
Freud goes to Hollywood: translating psychoanalysis to cinema
Authors: Snelson Tim , Macauley William R. , Kirby David A.
Published: October 2024

This chapteruses a case study of John Huston’s Sigmund Freud ‘biopic’ Freud (1962) to consider different types of conscious and converging interactions between cinematic and psychiatric genres, ideas, technologies and expertise. It details the complex and contested production and censorship processes involved in making the film, involving legal battles with the Freud family, lengthy deliberations with the Hays Office and Legion of Decency and extensive consultation with a wealth of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and theologians. It demonstrates how the film transformed the American cinematic field, creating a favourable production and censorship environment for a range of new psychiatric films that challenged as much as celebrated scientific knowledge.