bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Smith, Rousseau and the True Spirit of a Republican
Authors: Rasmussen Dennis C.
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores the meaning of Adam Smith’s claim that Jean-Jacques Rousseau embodied ‘the true spirit of a republican carried a little too far’, ultimately concluding that Smith was not referring to Rousseau’s ‘republican’ or ‘positive’ conception of liberty but rather to his claim that commerce is invariably corrupt and corrupting. It also explores these thinkers’ conceptions of liberty, arguing that their views are nearly diametrically opposed, but not (only) in the way that is generally assumed. On the level of politics, as is well known, Smith advocated negative liberty while Rousseau advocated positive liberty. Yet on the level of the individual Smith regarded a kind of positive liberty—namely, self-command—as a necessary component of a moral life, while Rousseau regarded negative liberty as a supreme good for those who are sufficiently free of destructive passions that they will refrain from abusing it.
Formative Influences
Authors: Radner Hilary , Fox Alistair
Published: September 2018

In this section of the interview, Bellour describes how he began to engage in film analysis in the 1960s, beginning with a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, with the aim of establishing the way it worked as a “text.” He proceeds to describe his personal encounters with major figures like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and his friendship with Christian Metz, suggesting how his interchanges with them helped to shape his own thinking, and how it diverged from theirs.
Film Analysis and the Symbolic
Authors: Radner Hilary , Fox Alistair
Published: September 2018

Raymond Bellour explains the difference between Christian Metz’s semiological approach and his own approach to film analysis, and the degrees by which he became disenchanted with psychoanalysis, despite his debt to Lacan’s notion of the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic. With reference to his analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, he proceeds to comment on how he evolved such key notions as “symbolic blockage” (“le blocage symbolique”) and “the undiscoverable text” (also referred to as “the unattainable text” or “le texte introuvable”). He then describes the influence of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and his interest in American cinema and filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Curtiz, and Fritz Lang.
Arrested Images and “the Between-Images”
Authors: Radner Hilary , Fox Alistair
Published: September 2018

Raymond Bellour explains his concept of “the between-images,” and comments on the status of the arrested image in relation to the time-image, suggesting how video was an instrument of transformation at a brief historical moment that is already in the past because of the advent of the digital. In the contemporary world, he suggests, the computer now enables a continuous, ideal passage between all the domains of words, images, painting, and photography, obliterating the boundaries that formerly distinguished them. He concludes this section by speculating on the nature of images, ways of forming them, and how they only make sense when related to psychic and physiological factors.
‘For pleasing imitation of greater men’s action’: Nano the Anamorphic Ape
Authors: Hui Isaac
Published: September 2018

Discussing Volpone with the paintings of Velázquez, Holbein, and Shakespeare’s King Richard III, this chapter argues that the dwarf is an important character as he relates to concepts such as anamorphosis, imitation, death, castration, and the Lacanian concept of the gaze. Not only is there a dwarfish quality within Volpone, it suggests that the signification of the ape is related to the ‘gold’ in Volpone’s shrine, meaning that the dwarf’s representation can be read as the play’s critique of nascent early modern capitalism.
‘Think me cold, frozen, and impotent, and so report me?’: Volpone and His ‘Castrone’ Complex
Authors: Hui Isaac
Published: September 2018

Reading Jonson with the Fabliau, Boccaccio and Chaucer, this chapter, with the help of Lacan’s theory, rereads Volpone Act 3 scene 7, explaining why Volpone ‘delays’ his ‘rape’ of Celia. While Volpone is commonly known for his love of theatrical performance and transformation, the chapter suggests that this cannot be thought without the concept of his being ‘castrated’. Although ‘castration’ is usually regarded as a censoring force, Volpone is empowered and thrives on it. Moreover, this chapter compares the scene in Volpone with another similar one in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, discussing how the subject of castration is used in early modern comedy and tragicomedy.
‘I fear I shall begin to grow in love with my dear self’: The Parasite and His ‘Mirror Stage’
Authors: Hui Isaac
Published: September 2018

In Act 3 scene 1, we see Mosca’s narcissism for the first time. In the language of Lacan, narcissism is inseparable from the concept of ‘mirror image’, which is how a subject gains his (mis)recognition. This chapter analyses the parasite’s joy and the connection between the ‘mirror image’ and comedy, examining the parasite’s role and how his self-indulgence constitutes an integral part in the study of Volpone. Even though the parasite may think that he is different from the dwarf, the androgyne and the eunuch, he may just be another Volpone’s bastard. Drawing references to the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, this chapter examines how comedy plays upon the logic of the ‘para-site’. Finally, it compares the use of the ‘mirror stage’ in comedy and tragedy by making a brief discussion of Hamlet.
The Persistence of Place
Authors: Smith Jennifer J.
Published: September 2018

Building on correspondence, essays, and public statements, the second chapter examines the ongoing significance of place to contemporary cycles. Although Winesburg, Ohio did not originate the genre, it has had the most enduring and wide influence on cycles in recent decades, a period which has seen the resurgence of the cycle because community itself is being reimagined in response to the volatility of the economy. This chapter focus on texts whose authors explicitly cite Anderson’s influence: Russell Banks’s Trailerpark (1981), Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter (2004), and Rebecca Barry’s Later, at the Bar (2007). Anderson hails Winesburg as enabling “a new looseness” in fiction; that sense of novelty and innovation recurs in authors’ statements about reading Winesburg for the first time, citing its transformative and revelatory power. These contemporary writers narrow even within the small town settings to focus on a particular, marginalized population, thereby amplifying the pervasiveness of alienation in contemporary America.
Writing Time in Metaphors
Authors: Smith Jennifer J.
Published: September 2018

Coherence of place often exists alongside irregularities in time in cycles, and chapter three turns to cycles linked by temporal markers. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) follows a linear chronology and describes the exploration, conquest, and repopulation of Mars by humans. Conversely, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984) jumps back and forth across time to narrate the lives of interconnected families in the western United States. Bradbury’s cycle invokes a confluence of historical forces—time as value-laden, work as a calling, and travel as necessitating standardized time—and contextualizes them in relation to anxieties about the space race. Erdrich’s cycle invokes broader, oppositional conceptions of time—as recursive and arbitrary and as causal and meaningful—to depict time as implicated in an entire system of measurement that made possible the destruction and exploitation of the Chippewa people. Both volumes understand the United States to be preoccupied with imperialist impulses. Even as they critique such projects, they also point to the tenacity with which individuals encounter these systems, and they do so by creating “interstitial temporalities,” which allow them to navigate time at the crossroads of language and culture.
Atomic Genre
Authors: Smith Jennifer J.
Published: September 2018

The final chapter theorizes the atomic structure of short story cycles by analyzing the production, structure, and reception of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Egan describes the stories in A Visit from the Good Squad as atomized—in the way that discrete songs, part of a bigger album, define contemporary music production and consumption. Many purists lament that such atomization can limit producing a wholly realized album, vision, or book. But, her book shows that it is also liberating. In a cycle about time, music, and subjectivity, nothing could be more important than the pauses that happen in the in-between, most powerfully rendered in her now-famous short story told in Power Point, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses.” Her term “atomic” implies that isolating the most basic part generates power, and it implies a logic in which a proposition, sentence, or formula cannot be analyzed into a coherent structure.
Novellas-in-Flash and Flash Cycles
Authors: Smith Jennifer J.
Published: September 2018

The coda places the book in a larger discourse about new formalisms, which see form as a way to understand political, social, and ethical issues as intrinsic to aesthetic practice. The coda offers a theory of how the short story cycle inverts, displaces, and combines elements of the short story, the short story collection, the novel, and ancient story cycles. The long history of the cycle suggests a unique generic compulsion—which unsettles expectations of closure, development, revelation, and explanation—that revolutionized modern and contemporary fiction.
A Free Hand: The Art Film versus the Art of Documentary
Authors: Thomson C. Claire
Published: September 2018

This chapter focuses on the short art film, a genre which emerged around 1950 to mediate the visual and plastic arts, often for international exchange. Danish films about national cultural heritage and the applied arts were the focus for state-sponsored film. These often circulated very widely: the production and distribution of Shaped by Danish Hands (Hagen Hasselbalch, 1948) and Thorvaldsen (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1949) are detailed as examples of Danish films seen by millions of international viewers. The chapter also highlights the artistry of the informational filmmakers themselves, as institutional practice: the principle that the director should have a ‘free hand’ to interpret the brief. An example of an alternative circuit for the screening of art films in Denmark is detailed: art film screening series at Thorvaldsen’s Museum. Debate about the extent to which state-sponsored filmmaking should pursue art and to what extent documentary itself was an art form marks the late 1950s, as changes in leadership and funding shift practice and priorities within Dansk Kulturfilm. The chapter ends with a discussion of one of the agency’s final productions, Herning 65, which captures a site-specific artwork in a factory in the town of Herning.
Symphony of a Short Film: A City Called Copenhagen
Authors: Thomson C. Claire
Published: September 2018

This chapter is devoted to a detailed account of the life cycle of one film, arguably the high water mark of Dansk Kulturfilm’s production: Jørgen Roos’ 1960 short A City Called Copenhagen. This film was nominated for an Academy Award in the Short Subject category. The commissioning process and funding negotiations for this film were prolonged and complex, and are referred to in the film itself, an example of its use of humour. The film was shot on the cusp of the 1960s, and so documents changes to the cityscape, including the presence of Arne Jacobsen’s SAS Hotel. A City Called Copenhagen also circulated very widely and in multiple languages, offering a rich history of distribution and reception. Shot on Eastmancolor stock, the film is an exemplar of how the material instantiation of informational films impacts on their life cycle, and illustrates how the use of digital restoration techniques can recover films for a new digital dispositif.
Conclusion
Authors: Thomson C. Claire
Published: September 2018

The conclusion returns to Actor-Network Theory to consider how its methodologies can reveal hitherto hidden aspects of the making of films and the making of facts. It further discusses three avenues for future research, as suggested by the case studies in the book: the analysis of multiple language versions of films, for example using Digital Humanities techniques; the possibilities afforded by digitisation ans streaming for the creation of a new dispositif for informational films as national heritage, and the limitations imposed by national intellectual property law; and the difficulties of tracking and evaluating the impact and cultural value of informational films.
What Can a Neoi Gwei Teach Us? Adaptation as Reincarnation in Hong Kong Horror of the 1950s
Authors: Tsang Raymond
Published: September 2018

Many Hong Kong horror films of the 1950s were pedagogical in nature, and subsequently had a great influence on the Hong Kong New Wave (1980–90). Without examining these earlier films, we cannot fully understand the practice of adaptation and the depiction of the neoi gwei (female ghost) in New Wave horror. Because of the criticism from both intellectuals and cultural elites, earlier Cantonese filmmakers had tried to elevate Cantonese cinema since the 1930s, by the means of making films with ‘healthy’ themes of nationalism and anti-superstition. In the 1950s one of the means was adaptation of classic literary novels and folk tales. Interestingly, mainly dominated by stories of female ghosts, horror films – forbidden subjects in promoting ‘healthy’ Cantonese films – were often used so as to mount social and cultural interventions.
This chapter predominantly focuses on two Cantonese horror films, Beauty Raised from the Dead (1956) and Nightly Cry of the Ghost (1957), in order to examine the reincarnation of neoi gwei. I argue that the little-studied Hong Kong horror films of the 1950s can be understood as a site of political and cultural intervention and dialogue. Most of these films are about reincarnation. The production of these films can also been understood as a process of ‘reincarnation’. The practice and choice of adaptation are always a matter of politics. These filmmakers not only gave new life to various literary sources, but also created social interventions in the 1950s, exploring women’s liberation, the enlightenment of science and revolutionary potentiality.
The White Snake in Hong Kong Horror Cinema: from Horrific Tales to Crowd Pleasers
Authors: Luo Liang
Published: September 2018

Considered one of the four legends in the Chinese oral tradition, the legend of the White Snake and its theatrical and popular cultural metamorphoses played an important role in the pre-cinematic origins of Hong Kong horror cinema. This chapter surveys the changing representation of gender and horror in a series of films based on the White Snake legend from the 1920s to the 1970s. Centred on a very horrific concept (a monstrous snake disguised as a beauty and married to a human male), these films nonetheless enrich or even challenge our understanding of the genre of horror cinema in their service to a wide range of other genres: operatic performance, romantic melodrama, fantasy adventure, slapstick comedy, and social and political commentary. In addition to challenging the very concept of horror, this cluster of White Snake films poses further challenges to the idea of “Hong Kong cinema,” as it ranges from a Tokyo production, a Shanghai production, a Hong Kong-Japan coproduction, to a production based in Hong Kong with South Asian distributors, and a Hong Kong-Taiwan coproduction with a Shaw Brothers director.
The Enduring Cult of The Bride with White Hair: Chivalry and the Monstrous Other in the Hong Kong Fantasy-Horror
Authors: Martin Daniel
Published: September 2018

The Bride with White Hair (Ronny Yu, 1993) tells the tale of a heroic swordsman’s ill-fated love affair with a woman transformed by hatred into a white-haired killer, elevated the figure of the frosty-follicled executioner into one of the most enduring icons of the Hong Kong horror film. The timelessness and mysticism of the story lends itself to a highly hybridized type of horror, offering wuxia (swordplay), magical fantasy, romance and erotic scintillation alongside bloody fights, savage violence, and a monstrous depiction of malevolent conjoined twins. This chapter examines this film as emblematic of a particular cultural moment in the development of the Hong Kong fantasy-horror, appealing to a global fanbase for its supposedly transgressive and erotic content, and analyses the film in terms of its generic hybridity, its depictions of disability and morality, as well as in the context of the international marketing and reception of cult Hong Kong horror of the 1990s.
Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee Films: Police Procedural Colludes with Supernatural-Martial Arts Cinema
Authors: Chan Kenneth
Published: September 2018

Through a close analysis of Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010), this chapter argues that the film’s successful appeal to local and global Chinese audiences is based on a conservative reading of the familiar cultural trope of modernity versus tradition, as mirrored in the supposed tensions between the police procedural and the horror/supernatural elements in the wuxia shenguai genre. These tensions are problematic precisely because their narrative and rhetorical purpose is to shore up the deterministic logic of Chinese cultural history, the interpellative call of Chinese political power, and the cultural nationalist logic of being Chinese. However, the film is also capable to generating counter-readings of its politics by recasting itself as a global cinematic text of political irony and oppositional resistance.
Ghostly Returns: the Politics of Horror in Hong Kong Cinema
Authors: Lee Vivian
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the trend towards Hong Kong-China co-productions, during which Hong Kong horror films have been in decline due to censorship restrictions in Mainland China. While this mega-market direction is likely to continue in the foreseeable future, Hong Kong filmmakers have made fresh attempts to revitalize this popular genre and inject it with new meanings in the changed and changing context of cultural production and cultural politics in the city. Between 2012-2014, several low to medium budget horror films were released. Local audiences responded enthusiastically and many saw these as a sign of the resilience of the local popular culture to counter or at least deflate the hegemony of the Mainland market. This chapter traces the trajectory of Hong Kong horror through the pre- and post-handover decades, situating horror within the evolving discourse of identity and the issues of local histories and collective memory. It also elaborates on the politics of horror as seem from horror films produced and released in the midst of escalating social and political tensions attributable to a popular/populist “anti-China localism”. The chapter further reflects on the cultural politics of delocalization and relocalization in the context of “re-occupying Hong Kong screens.”
Introduction: ‘A condition more abject …’ Meat City and Nonhuman Objects
Authors: Geier Ted
Published: September 2018

Engages with literature negotiating population and domestic spaces to articulate a biopolitical form. Suggests an anthropocentric ‘improvement’ trope of diet and animals. Introduces the multispecies urban proximities and abjection of London that literary works negotiated in diverse ways.
Mass Production: Impossible London’s Criminal Subjects
Authors: Geier Ted
Published: September 2018

Considers mass readership and the ‘tastes’ it produces. Maps the history of criminals and execution spectacles, particularly as addressed by the London ‘public’ voices of Defoe and Dickens. Connects these mass events to the new mass print culture and circulation forms, such as the penny dreadfuls and their Newgate novel precursor. This shows the development of the public’s ‘taste for blood’, anxieties at an encroaching nonhumanity, and an infatuation with the inhuman from Jack Sheppard to Sweeney Todd and Dracula.
The ‘Essence’ of Egypt
Authors: Schotter Jesse
Published: September 2018

The fourth chapter restores hieroglyphs to their historical and cultural context in post-Revolutionary Egypt, exploring how interpretations of the Pharaonic past and its hieroglyphs intervened in Egypt’s twentieth century struggles for cultural and national identity. The first novels by Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim, from the 1920s and 30s, draw on the ‘Pharaonicist’ movement of the period, co-opting the European Orientalist discourses with which Egypt was defined in order to forge their own definitions of the racial and cultural ‘essence’ of Egypt. Yet these national concerns remain linked with an interest in the ontology of media forms; the chapter concludes by focusing on Shadi Abd al-Salam’s film al-Mummia, from 1969, which looks back to early twentieth century Pharaonicism and connects its attempt to reclaim the past with film’s ability to record and preserve Egyptian hieroglyphs and artifacts.
Matrices and Metaverses
Authors: Schotter Jesse
Published: September 2018

The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that the association of hieroglyphs with universal languages and mixtures of media gets passed down to the newest of new media, digital code. From the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon through the literary-inflected sci-fi of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, from the Afro-Futurist works of Ishmael Reed to the mass market novels of Dan Brown, this pairing of hieroglyphs and digital code recurs across genre and style. By linking code with Egyptian writing, these writers emphasize the performativity of their language; just as code can create a simulation of reality, so words can call characters and settings into being.
Coda: The Rosetta Stone
Authors: Schotter Jesse
Published: September 2018

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....
Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism
Authors: McElvenny James
Published: September 2018

This book is a historical study of influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, explored from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889–1957). Although no ‘Great Man’ in his own right, Ogden had a personal connection, reflected in his work, to several of the most significant figures of the age. The background to the ideas espoused in Ogden’s book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I.A. Richards (1893–1979), is examined in detail, along with the application of these ideas in his international language project Basic English. A richly interlaced network of connections is revealed between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics, all inevitably shaped by the contemporary cultural and political environment. In particular, significant interaction is shown between Ogden’s ideas, the varying versions of ‘logical atomism’ of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Ludwig Wittgensten (1889–1951), Victoria Lady Welby’s (1837–1912) ‘significs’, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) of the Vienna Circle. Amid these interactions emerges a previously little known mutual exchange between the academic philosophy and linguistics of the period and the practically oriented efforts of the international language movement.
Nation, Locality and Radical Identity
Authors: Petrie Malcolm
Published: September 2018

Concentrating upon the years between the 1924 and 1929 general elections, which separated the first and second minority Labour governments, this chapter traces the rise of a modernised, national vision of Labour politics in Scotland. It considers first the reworking of understandings of sovereignty within the Labour movement, as the autonomy enjoyed by provincial trades councils was circumscribed, and notions of Labour as a confederation of working-class bodies, which could in places include the Communist Party, were replaced by a more hierarchical, national model. The electoral consequences of this shift are then considered, as greater central control was exercised over the selection of parliamentary candidates and the conduct of election campaigns. This chapter presents a study of the changing horizons of the political left in inter-war Scotland, analysing the declining importance of locality in the construction of radical political identities.
Radicalism and Respectability in Working-class Political Culture
Authors: Petrie Malcolm
Published: September 2018

Class, for some on the radical left, and especially those in the Communist Party, was not just an economic identity. It was also one earned through conduct, particularly a commitment to political activism, sobriety and self-improvement. This was, of course, a culture that had always enjoyed a limited appeal; during the inter-war period, however, this appeal was restricted further by the rise of mass democracy, which undermined the necessary sense of political exclusion. This chapter charts the social and cultural limits of Communism in Scotland, exploring the Party’s appeal by focusing on the criminal trials of activists charged with sedition, the role played by religion and gender within the Party, and the changing nature of independent working-class education, especially within the labour college movement, during the 1920s and 1930s.
Popular Politics and Electioneering between the Wars
Authors: Petrie Malcolm
Published: September 2018

Disruption and rowdyism at political meetingswas a feature of Victorian and Edwardian electioneering. The advent of mass democracy, and the rise of Communism in Europe, ensured that such behaviour came to be portrayed as evidence of political extremism and a threat to political stability. As a result, Labour candidates, keen to position their party as one capable of governing for the nation as a whole, distanced themselves from popular electoral traditions now synonymous with a confrontational, and unacceptable, politics of class. Heckling, rowdyism and disruption came, by the 1930s, to be associated primarily with the Communist Party.
Conclusion: Popular Politics, Radicalism and Inter-war Democracy
Authors: Petrie Malcolm
Published: September 2018

Scottish popular politics was transformed during the inter-war decades. Local political identities, and especially those connected with the radical tradition, were subsumed within a more uniform national political contest. Further, the arrival of the mass franchise altered the way in which the relationship between the people and parliament was understood. The means by which politics was conducted duly changed: popular traditions of public involvement in politics came to be tarnished by association with political extremism in general, and Communism in particular. This occasioned a change in relations on the political left, and in the approach of the Labour Party. Equally, it differentiated inter-war politics in Scotland and Britain from that witnessed elsewhere in Europe.
King James’s Scotland
Authors: Raffe Alasdair
Published: September 2018

This chapter introduces the political culture and summarises the main events of James VII’s Scottish reign. It traces the continuities between the Restoration settlement of 1661–2 and the 1680s, especially in the crown’s attempts to enforce religious uniformity and to increase its power. After examining James’s rejection of uniformity in favour of toleration, it argues that he aggressively asserted his authority as an ‘absolute’ king, but lacked a systematic programme to increase his power.
James’s Religious Experiment
Authors: Raffe Alasdair
Published: September 2018

This chapter analyses responses to James VII’s Scottish indulgences of 1687, which granted freedom of worship to the great majority of the population. The king’s initiative was a radical break from earlier royal policies – pursued with vigour until the mid-1680s – which used penal laws to enforce religious uniformity. The chapter begins by summarising the previous policy of uniformity, and the terms of the indulgences. Its main focus is then on the responses of the religious groups that gained freedom – Catholics, Quakers and mainstream presbyterians – as well as the attitudes towards the indulgences of the Cameronians, a small group of presbyterian extremists excluded from toleration.
The Revolution Settlement of 1689–1690
Authors: Raffe Alasdair
Published: September 2018

This chapter analyses the attempts of the Scottish convention of estates to solve the problems generated by James VII’s experimental rule and his revolutionary overthrow. It begins by assessing the reasons why the meeting of the convention in March 1689 led swiftly to a decisive victory for William of Orange’s monarchical ambitions. The chapter then examines the ‘revolution settlement’ proposed by the convention’s Claim of Right and Articles of Grievances. The appearance of an assertive political opposition ensured that it was not until the summer of 1690 that all aspects of the settlement were agreed. In the meantime, the overthrow of James had provoked a short civil war, which nevertheless had little impact on the revolution’s outcome.
Conclusion: Revolutions, Settlements and Scotland’s Political Development
Authors: Raffe Alasdair
Published: September 2018

THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT OF 1689–90 repudiated many of the principles and policies of royal government in the Restoration period. But while their responses were different, James VII and the makers of the settlement sought solutions to the same fundamental problems. By studying the upheavals of the 1685–90 period, we have focused on two sets of challenges confronting the rulers of seventeenth-century Scotland. The first concerned the character of the established Church. How was it to be constituted and what was the appropriate role for the monarch in its government? How should the civil magistrate deal with religious dissent? A second cluster of problems involved the crown’s power and authority. Was the king ‘absolute’ and what did this mean in practice? To what extent was local government in Scotland autonomous, and how far was it amenable to central direction?...
Femininity
Authors: Young Emma
Published: September 2018

Femininity resides at the heart of feminist debates regarding sex, gender and sexuality. As such, this chapter engages with a plethora of ways in which femininity has been defined, resisted, challenged and critiqued in contemporary short story narratives. Space, and a woman’s right to occupy space, provides the opening point of analysis through a reading of the narratives of Byatt and Tremain. The second section shifts to the notion of ‘behaving appropriately’ and examines the ways in which a selection of short stories depict and reflexively critique femininity in order to make visible and problematize societal expectations of women. Through these discussions, the female body emerges as an important motif and this is an image that will be drawn upon across the subsequent chapters. Finally, the discussion illuminates the ways in which femininity is often understood through association with a young and white female body. Subsequently, the closing section pays attention to narratives which foreground bodies “other” to this normative model and asks how this challenges the concept of femininity and, in turn, what this can tell us about contemporary feminisms.
Masculinity
Authors: Young Emma
Published: September 2018

Since the 1980s masculinity, more specifically ‘hegemonic masculinity’ has been a focal point of gender and sexuality discourses. The short story writings of Mantel, Hislop, and most particularly, Tremain, reflect, critique and problematize such understandings of masculinity. This chapter is shaped around three key areas that are often seen as defining masculinity: work, sexuality and the differences between male and female bodies. As with the historical strand of chapter three, in this chapter there will be a focus on history and one particularly significant historical moment for men and masculinity: the 1980s. It is through this analysis that questions will be addressed about how and why masculinity is a part of contemporary feminist discourses and, through the work of Judith Halberstam, will consider the ways in which queer theory and postmodern feminism have informed such debates. The momentary nature of the short story will be explored in greater depth too, in order to understand how the contemporary and historical moments interact in this narrative space.
Sexuality
Authors: Young Emma
Published: September 2018

Extending the theoretical lens further, this final chapter moves beyond the initial discussions of gender to consider the significance of sexuality in contemporary feminisms. After some initial reflection on the political significance of sexuality, the main sections of literary analysis engage with how sexuality has been conceptualised and continually re-positioned in feminist discourses. The notion of choice is central to this analysis and through a reading of Kalbinder Kaur’s story this chapter considers the implications of sexuality and women’s choice in the context of race and ethnicity. As such, this first section takes a range of short stories as individual textual moments and scrutinises the dialogue these narratives purport between seemingly diverse feminisms. The section on ‘Sexual Transgressions?’ examines sexuality as a site of political resistance for women, and considers how the ageing and culturally “othered” body is positioned in relation to sexuality. The final part of this chapter questions how the politics of queer theory interact with feminisms via the locus of sexuality in the writings of Kay and Smith.
Mallarme and the Politics of Literature
Authors: Boncardo Robert
Published: September 2018

Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature: Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou, Rancière recounts the radical readings of Mallarmé’s seminal poems by some of France’s most important 20th century thinkers. The book attempts to answer the question of why Mallarmé — one of modernity’s most ingenious yet obscure poets — was so important to French philosophers. With in-depth studies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, along with shorter analyses of Jean-Claude Milner and Quentin Meillassoux, Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature situates Mallarmé with these thinkers’ philosophical and political projects. As the first work of English-language scholarship on each of these thinker’s readings of Mallarmé, Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature is also the first to bring these thinkers into dialogue, locating the points of contact and difference between their readings of the great Symbolist poet. Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature also includes a sustained reflection on the various ways literature has been conceived of politically by 20th century French thinkers, and argues that these modalities of reading literature politically have today reached a point of exhaustion. Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature thus culminates in a plea for renewed formulations of the link between politics and literature.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Mallarmé: Hero of an Ontological Drama, Agent of the Counter-revolution
Authors: Boncardo Robert
Published: September 2018

This first chapter presents an in-depth study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s career-long engagement with Mallarmé. Beginning with a discussion of Sartre’s notorious side-lining of poetry in favour of committed literature, the chapter asks why Sartre nevertheless chose to devote so many pages to Mallarmé, particularly in his incomplete existential biography Mallarmé, or, The Poet of Nothingness. The chapter begins with an extensive reading of this latter work, tracking Sartre’s trenchant Marxist analysis of the post-1848 literary field in France before exploring his account of Mallarmé’s personal trajectory. Finally, it turns to the third volume of Sartre’s The Family Idiot and argues for the consistency of Sartre’s reading of Mallarmé as a nihilist and as a political quietist.
Jean-Claude Milner’s Mallarmé: Nothing Has Taken Place
Authors: Boncardo Robert
Published: September 2018

This fourth chapter introduces Jean-Claude Milner’s reading of Mallarmé, and offers a critical exegesis of his 1999 book Mallarmé au tombeau. The chapter argues that Milner presents Mallarmé as a committed nihilist who refused to recognise the existence of the 19th century’s revolutionary events, from 1848 to the Commune. Milner transforms Mallarmé into a figure strictly opposed to the Mallarmé of Badiou, or indeed of any reader hoping to include the poet in their pantheon of progressive or revolutionary writers.
Jacques Rancière’s Mallarmé: Deferring Equality
Authors: Boncardo Robert
Published: September 2018

This fifth chapter presents Jacques Rancière’s reading of Mallarmé through a critical exegesis of his 1996 book Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren. By exploring Rancière’s studied opposition to the critical tradition that has framed Mallarmé as a hermetic recluse concerned exclusively with literature’s relation to itself, this chapter shows how Rancière presents Mallarmé as a thinker deeply engaged with the political crises of his times and committed to equality. The chapter explains how Rancière reformulates Mallarmé’s proposal for a poetic religion in terms of his famous account of the aesthetic regime of art, and closes with the argument that Rancière ultimately considers Mallarmé a conservative figure whose poetic utopia is infinitely deferred.
The Concept of Conversation
Authors: Randall David
Published: September 2018

The Concept of Conversation traces the rise of conversation from a minor mode of rhetoric to the point where rhetoric as a whole was redefined as conversation, and argues that this was the most important change in rhetoric during the centuries between 1400 and 1700. In the classical period, conversation referred to real conversations, conducted in the leisure time of noble men, and concerned with indefinite philosophical topics. Christianity inflected conversation with universal aspirations during the medieval centuries and the ars dictaminis, the art of letter writing, increased the importance of this written analogue of conversation. The Renaissance humanists from Petrarch onward further transformed conversation, and its genre analogues of dialogue and letter, by transforming it into a metaphor of increasing scope. This expanded realm of humanist conversation bifurcated in Renaissance and early modern Europe. The Concept of Conversation traces the way the rise of conversation spread out from the history of rhetoric to include the histories of friendship, the court and the salon, the Republic of Letters, periodical press and women. It revises Jürgen Habermas’ history of the emergence of the rational speech of the public sphere as the history of the emergence of rational conversation and puts the emergence of women’s speech at the centre of the intellectual history of early modern Europe.
The Classic Origins of Conversation
Authors: Randall David
Published: September 2018

In antiquity, the Greeks and Romans linked together several concepts whose history we will trace throughout this narrative. These were familiarity, its sometimes-tense analogue friendship, the friend’s doppelgänger, the flatterer, and conversation, the mode of speech inquiring after truth that articulated both familiar style and friendship. All these concepts found expression not only in conversation but also in the letter, the written analogue of conversation. The Romans in particular also began to emphasize during their Silver Age the concept of conversatio, the mutual conduct of mankind. This last concept stood at some intellectual distance from the constellation formed around familiarity, friendship, and conversation, but from the beginning it possessed conceptual associations that would allow it to be linked with them more tightly in ensuing centuries.
Sociabilitas
Authors: Randall David
Published: September 2018

Conversatio, mutual conduct, had possessed loose affiliations with sermo in ancient and medieval times. During the Renaissance, conversatio shifted far closer to sermo and its constellation of cognate concepts. Stefano Guazzo elaborated an influential theory of civil conversation in his eponymous late-sixteenth-century dialogue, which reconceived conversatio in secular terms as the realm of society. This Italian conception of civil conversation then received a universalizing spin from the natural law jurisprudential tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf, transforming it into an amoral disposition toward sociability shared by all humanity. The long parallel tracks of sermo and conversatio now finally converged: sermo became conversation as conversatio became sociability. The convergence of sermo and conversatio made possible the establishment of a causal connection between the two concepts. This connection appeared viadoux commerce, the application of sociability to the realm of economics: sociability, by the means of economic self-interest, became the conceptual and historical predicate to conversation—and, as the Enlightenment progressively tied together manners with the civic humanist tradition, the predicate in turn for both virtue and liberty. Sociability thus at last substituted for Platonic love an amoral, entirely human motivation for conversation—the discourse of reason found its base in human passions.
Introduction
Authors: Gorman Anthony , Monciaud Didier
Published: September 2018

The press occupies a crucial place in the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. Its interest and significance lies in its importance not only as a medium of representation that a society produces of itself but also of what a society produces ...
News Publishing as a Reflection of Public Opinion: The Idea of News during the Ottoman Financial Crises
Authors: Karagöz-Kızılca Gül
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the financial crises of the Ottoman Empire and how through press representations, reformers advocated for a ‘public’ that would unify fragmented and multiple actors to improve Ottoman society. Then in its early stages of development, the Ottoman press was used to establish a new political and social order. The discussion analyses how dissident newspapers, Tasvir-i Efkar, İbret, Hadika and İstikbal, all published in Istanbul, significantly influenced the establishment of a politically and economically engaged public. In conceptualising newspaper representations of the economic crises as an outcome of conflicting interests, it resituates the tension existing not only between state and society but also among other interests. The interpretations of the financial crises competed, coexisted and were utilised to promote particular interests and reveal how the press provided an arena of contestation for diverse groups and individuals.
Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s
Authors: Booth Marilyn
Published: September 2018

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.
The Arabic Palestinian Press between the Two World Wars
Authors: Kabha Mustafa
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses the development of the Arabic press in Palestine during the years 1929–39, a period that saw the emergence of the Palestinian national movement in its struggle with the Zionist movement and the administration of the British mandate to prevent the fulfilment of the programme for a Jewish national home. The press played a critical role in this process, from its beginnings in the mid-1920s through a period of growing strength following the events of 1929 which peaked during the Great Strike of April–October 1936. In its examination of the development of the Palestinian national movement and its cultural and social characteristics, the chapter addresses the background of the growth of the press, the reading public, the operating political forces and the extent of press influence in the shaping of public opinion in Palestinian society.
Falastin: An Experiment in Promoting Palestinian Nationalism through the English-language Press
Authors: Lawson Fred H.
Published: September 2018

This chapter offers a focused study on the Jaffa-based daily Filastin, arguably the most influential Palestinian newspaper of the 1920s and 1930s, published in Arabic by ‘Isa al-‘Isa and edited by Yusuf Hanna. In 1929, an English-language edition, Falastin, was launched initially consisting entirely of denunciations of Zionist activities and appeals to the British mandate authorities for redress with little news reporting. As time passed, however, both its tone and content changed in significant ways. News reports displaced blanket condemnations on the front pages, while complaints to the authorities gave way to stories that offered reasons for the mandatory government to take action. Such shifts reflected not only the growing journalistic professionalism of the staff of Falastin but also a transformation in the attitude of Palestinian nationalists towards both the British and the broader international community.
A Voice from Below in the 1940s Egyptian Press: The Experience of the Workers’ Newspaper Shubra
Authors: Monciaud Didier
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the emergence of a labour newspaper in the context of the industrial struggles of the 1930s and 1940s in the Cairo suburb of Shubra-al-Khayma, a stronghold of the textile sector and scene of a dynamic workers’ movement. The fight for official recognition and better economic conditions was only part of the workers’ struggle. From April 1942 until January 1943 the General Union of Mechanical Textile Workers of Shubra al-Khayma produced Shubra, one of the few papers in Egypt managed and edited by trade unionists and aimed specifically at an audience of workers. The chapter examines the workers’ voice expressed in the ideas, values and conceptions of labour, discussing the launch and management of the newspaper before dealing with its content and focus on specific issues such as textile labour in Egypt, union matters, ‘labour culture’ and the national struggle.