bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Critical Examination of Gertrude Bell’s Contribution to Archaeological Research in Central Asia Minor
Authors: Jackson Mark P. C.
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the contribution made by Gertrude Bell to developing archaeological method in the early 20th century and its legacy. The Thousand and One Churches, written with Sir William Ramsay and published in 1909, remains the key study of Byzantine churches in central Anatolia. While it set high standards in the recording of buildings, it also served to reinforce the culture-historical approaches of the early 20th century. Left behind by most archaeologists in the second half of the 20th century, such approaches have continued in some circles. The chapter considers the extent to which Bell was following and contributing to established archaeological practice. It considers also the problems of her methodological approach in order to inform a critique of the legacy of her research and to provide insights into her critical thinking and strategies for networking.
‘Better than Any Ruined Site in the World’: Gertrude Bell and the Ancient City of Assur
Authors: Cooper Lisa
Published: September 2017

During Bell’s first journeys into Mesopotamia, undertaken in 1909 and 1911, she had occasion to visit the ancient sites of Babylon and Assur when they were being excavated by teams of German archaeologists. This chapter discusses in particular Bell’s visit to the ruins of the Assyrian capital of Assur, and her interactions with the site’s German director, Walter Andrae. Bell greatly admired Andrae’s excavation methods, given his attention to stratigraphy, his focus on both elite and non-elite urban contexts and his comprehensive system of architectural recording. She also valued their scholarly exchanges, which included discussions of the development of architectural forms such as the vault and the Parthian iwān. In all, Andrae had a profound effect on Bell’s archaeological scholarship, especially influencing her understanding of later Islamic architectural features such as those exhibited at the castle of Ukhaidir, and her admiration for Andrae would continue up to the end of her life.
Fragments of a Mirror: The Writing of Gertrude Bell
Authors: Chalabi Tamara
Published: September 2017

This chapter proposes to explore the writing of Gertrude Bell through a few prisms: first, her interest in history and archaeology, and second, her private letters. It will examine how Bell’s interest in archaeology mirrored her interest in politics: just as in her political role, in which she was building a state, Bell attempted through her archaeological work and photography to create a mythology about the Orient. Bell’s private letters also provide an insight into how she interacted with men and the role of this interaction in realising her political aims and in shaping her life. The chapter will examine how these interactions were informed by attitudes towards women in the Victorian world she inhabited, whether in England or the Middle East.
Gertrude Bell in the Archive of the Iraq Museum
Authors: Werr Lamia Al-Gailani
Published: September 2017

It is unfortunate that most of what is written and researched on Gertrude Bell tends to give a scant or short account of her work on the Antiquities Department. Most of the documents on her work in the last four years of her life are in the Iraq Museum (1922–1926), and were, until recently, not accessible to the public. This chapter explores the surviving documents to give a picture of the main issues that occupied Bell during this period – from her constant search for a place to store the deluge of artefacts coming from excavations such as Ur and Kish to the legislation of the Antiquities Law. Bell’s legacy for the antiquities of Iraq is as important as the creation of Iraq.
The 12th-Century Renaissance in Anglo-Norman England: William of Malmesbury and Joseph of Exeter
Authors: Wright Neil
Published: September 2017

How did the ‘12th-century Renaissance’ impact on Anglo-Norman authors? This chapter explores the responses of two highly accomplished writers, William of Malmesbury and Joseph of Exeter, to the literary tradition in which they worked (such as epic and satire): by alluding to and skilfully modifying Classical (particularly post-Augustan) and late-Antique models, they masterfully played on their readers' recognition and expectations of familiar conventions of historiography, hagiography, and poetics so as to innovate and entertain, and in this way created something distinctive and fresh for their contemporary audience.
The Latin of the Early English Common Law
Authors: Brand Paul
Published: September 2017

A distinctive feature of the English royal courts created in the last quarter of the 12th century was that they kept a full record of their business in Latin and the clerks who did this developed a distinctive vocabulary to translate the Anglo-Norman French they heard in court. This paper looks at some of that Medieval Latin lexicography for the legal profession: the development of specific terms for litigants and their representatives and judges; for the writs for initiating litigation and to secure the appearance of opponents; for the plaintiff’s claim or complaint and the defendant’s defence; for the modes of proof and judgement. The chapter concludes with a more detailed examination of the specific terminology of a single action (of replevin) which allowed someone whose property had been taken in distraint to challenge the justice of an unjust distraint.
English Music Theory in Medieval Latin
Authors: Holford-strevens Leofranc
Published: September 2017

Medieval English music theory, almost always expressed in Latin, though not isolated from Continental—in particular French—developments, has a strong tendency to resist them and go its own way in both language and content; moreover, despite the early establishment of the name proprius cantus (‘properchant’) for the natural hexachord, it is more characteristically marked by divergence from one writer to another, so that even when doctrines are compatible the same thing may be called by different names and the same name may be applied to different things. This chapter studies the variations in conception, notation, and terminology exhibited in the works of numerous English authors from the 13th to the 16th centuries, noting differences from the far more standardised French Ars nova associated with the names of Philippe de Vitry and Jean des Murs.
‘Go and Look in the Latin Books’: Latin and the Vernacular in Medieval Wales
Authors: Russell Paul
Published: September 2017

In one form or another Latin and Welsh have coexisted and interacted in Wales from the Roman period onwards: whether in the quasi-charters of the Lichfield/Llandeilo Gospels, Braint Teilo ‘The Privilege of Teilo’ in the Book of Llandaf, the verse of the family of Sulien in Llanbadarn, the lament for the Lord Rhys in the Peniarth 20 Brut y Tywysogion (with its quotations from Ovid and Boethius), the various chronicles (such as the Cronica de Wallia), or the Medieval Welsh laws of Hywel Dda (the last two preserved in both Latin and Welsh). This chapter explores some consequences of that coexistence, and in particular how in some contexts Medieval Welsh became distinctively Latinate and how in certain respects the Latin of medieval Wales arguably became Cambricised.
Editorial Policy: Texts and Translations
Authors: Constantine Mary-Ann , Guillorel Éva
Published: September 2017

The ballad texts in Breton reproduce the spelling of individual collectors, and are thus markedly different from each other, since Breton orthography varies across time and across the dialect regions, and collectors had their own ways of noting down songs. The internal division of songs into couplets or verses, on the other hand, has in a very few cases been altered for ease of reading. We have opted for a minimalist approach to punctuation – these words were sung, not written, after all – and we have, for the same reasons, reduced the sometimes dense punctuation of many of the Breton texts. It should be noted here, too, that the songs on the accompanying CD are not always the same versions as the printed text, but variant versions of the same ballad, often collected considerably later. Each ballad text is accompanied by an analysis which provides further context for the song – and, where known, information about the circumstances of its collection. A short bibliography notes any further studies of the piece in order of relevance....
A Note on the Versions on the CD
Authors: Constantine Mary-Ann , Guillorel Éva
Published: September 2017

Thanks to over a century’s worth of sound recordings we can now not only read, but listen to the gwerziou. A few of the songs in this edition are only known from 19th-century collections, and in their written form, but most have been collected and recorded many times since. Some of these continue to be regularly sung today, during social gatherings at ...
Historical Outline and the Geography of ‘Anarchy’
Authors: Creighton Oliver H. , Wright Duncan W. , Fradley Michael , Trick Steven
Published: September 2017

This chapter covers two areas: it provides a sketch of English society and landscape in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, and presents a year-by-year chronology of Stephen’s reign. At the point of Stephen’s accession to the throne in 1135, the longer-term impacts of the Norman Conquest on English society and landscape were still being played out. Ethnicity and identity in the period were fluid, and so mid-twelfth-century England was a developing Anglo-Norman state rather that a subjugated dominion. While ‘the Anarchy’ of Stephens reign is frequently styled as a civil war, the conflict was unusually complex and protracted, and involved more than two opposing sides. The period saw persistent asymmetric warfare on the borderlands of Wales, a succession of incursions from Scotland and Angevin invasions from across the English Channel, while a struggle for control of Normandy dominated the wider strategic landscape. The most characteristic feature of conflict during the period was an unprecedented series of internal rebellions, led by disloyal, disenfranchised or marginalised magnates and underlain by regional grievances.
Waging War: Fields of Conflict and Siege Warfare
Authors: Creighton Oliver H. , Wright Duncan W. , Fradley Michael , Trick Steven
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides an overview of how and with what consequences warfare was waged in the twelfth century, drawing particular attention to the landscape context of conflict. Case studies of the period’s two major pitched battles (Northallerton/the Battle of the Standard, 1138, and Lincoln, 1141) are presented, although the conflict as a whole saw few pitched battles and was instead dominated by siege warfare. The period saw the siege castle cemented as an essential part of the repertoire of Anglo-Norman conflict, mixing psychological and martial functions and favoured by rulers in an era when siege warfare was static and protracted while leaders needed to be mobile. The overall picture is that the conflict saw no radical departure in ways of waging war, and many of its characteristic features — such as the use of mercenaries, the avoidance of pitched battle, devastation of landscapes and the predominance of sieges — were not aberrations but part and parcel of an established pattern of Anglo-Norman warfare.
Architecture and Authority: Castles
Authors: Creighton Oliver H. , Wright Duncan W. , Fradley Michael , Trick Steven
Published: September 2017

This core chapter analyses the archaeological and documentary evidence for the militarisation of the twelfth-century landscape through castle-building. The considerable challenges of identifying and dating castles built and strengthened during the civil war mean that the total picture of fortification in the period will always remain murky at best, irrespective of how much new archaeological evidence comes to light. The proportion of unfinished and lost castle sites is also far higher than for other periods. That Stephen’s reign saw a marked thickening in the distribution map of castles is beyond doubt, but this was probably more tightly focussed in contested regions than a genuinely nationwide phenomenon and is likely to have involved scores rather than hundreds of ‘new’ sites. Overall, archaeology highlights individuality in twelfth-century timber castle design, which went far beyond the ‘motte and bailey’ or ‘ringwork’ labels. ‘Enmotted’ towers were a hallmark of the period, as was the re-activation and remodelling of Iron-Age hillforts as castles and the construction of great masonry donjons, which percolated from being a royal to a magnate prerogative during the period.
Faith and Fortification: The Church
Authors: Creighton Oliver H. , Wright Duncan W. , Fradley Michael , Trick Steven
Published: September 2017

This chapter assesses the consequences of the civil war for religious institutions, communities and structures such as churches, cathedrals, monasteries and bishops’ palaces. The war crimes against churches catalogued by horrified chroniclers and borne out to some extent in the archaeological evidence affected modest numbers of sites in specific geographical zones. Archaeological investigation has revealed very real evidence for the militarisation of ecclesiastical sites, although in many contexts documentary evidence for the apparent transformation of a church into a fortification suggests that the building was garrisoned rather than being converted into something physically resembling a castle. The civil war also had a series of much longer-lasting impacts on the ecclesiastical world in terms of creating the social and tenurial conditions and a spiritual environment where religious patronage became increasingly politicised and where lower-ranked members within the elite had the means and motivation to establish monasteries, which swelled in numbers as never before.
Anarchy on the Fen Edge: Case Study of the Isle of Ely
Authors: Creighton Oliver H. , Wright Duncan W. , Fradley Michael , Trick Steven
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides a detailed case study of the campaigns in and around the Isle of Ely in the twelfth century. The circumstances of a wealthy but isolated region, combined with a rebel heritage, explain the prominent place of the Isle of Ely during the Anarchy, although the region’s experience in the civil war was also unusually severe. Even in the context of a conflict where the ravaging of estates was endemic the fenlands suffered especially high levels of destruction to a fragile agricultural base. Stephen’s response to Geoffrey de Mandeville’s fenland rebellion in 1143–44 also saw the largest-scale programme of royal castle-building recorded in the civil war. The scale and sophistication of individual fortifications, all keyed into local landscapes, are revealed by archaeological evidence, as exemplified by the royal campaign castle at Burwell, Cambridgeshire.
Introduction: Is Theory Good for the Jews?
Authors: Chaouat Bruno
Published: September 2017

This work is the result of a decade of researching and writing about the correlation between the postmodern approach to the Holocaust, the place of Jews in deconstruction and literary theory (the Jew as trope or figure), the fallout of the Arab-Israeli conflict in France, and the resurgence of antisemitism. So far, no book has aimed at tracing the metaphysical, literary, and esthetic roots of French responses to this new manifestation of antisemitism. I do not advocate a clear-cut division between “new” and “old” antisemitism, or even a radical paradigm shift. Instead, I wish to bring into focus the mutual shaping of past and present in our understanding of responses to the resurgence of antisemitism. My contention is that French reactions even to the most lethal incarnations of antisemitism can only be understood if we consider (a) the French construction of the “figural Jew” and the deconstruction of the empirical (political and historical) Jew; (b) the French way of memorializing, estheticizing, and idealizing the Holocaust within the last forty-five years; (c) France's vexed relation to its colonial past; and (d) the modernist French aesthetic grounded in the celebration of anomie and transgression.
Specters of Heidegger
Authors: Chaouat Bruno
Published: September 2017

My first chapter is dedicated to post-Heideggerian thought, and to the unbearable legacy of Heidegger in France and beyond. The decentering of the subject, the recoding of Heideggerian ontology as an ethics of the other, the idealization of the Jews as diasporic beings and ontological strangers (grounded in an operation of Judaization of Dasein), the metaphysical reading of the Holocaust as an event outside of history, the celebration of nomadism and deterritorialization—all that have made it difficult if not downright impossible to think of Jewish national sovereignty and Jewish normalcy. Likewise, French postmodern thought has not been able or willing to engage with the resurgence of antisemitism—an antisemitism that does not fit its theoretical, ideological and metaphysical framework. Derrida's disciples continue to speak the language of existential ontology, albeit with a critical distance, or with serious distortions—a language that is no longer in use except in national literature and cultural studies departments in the U.S. and is now employed to nurture the new antisemitism.
Envoy: Adieu to France?
Authors: Chaouat Bruno
Published: September 2017

At the end of this journey into theory and the new antisemitism, as once again I stand glued to the news in the aftermath of the carnage perpetrated by the Islamic State on November 13, 2015, in the heart of Paris, I wish to add a few words on the most recent theory that has emerged on the new antisemitism and its relationship to Islamophobia....
The Utopian, the Dystopian, and the Heroic Deeds of One
Authors: Schmeink Lars
Published: September 2017

Chapter 6 discusses the TV series Heroes as more optimistic in its depiction of the social consequences of posthuman evolution than the other texts analyzed. The show's premise of posthumanity as a result of evolutionary mutation reflects radical changes in subjectivity not onto an elite few, as in classic superhero narratives, but onto the everyday man. The series consequently emphasizes the potential of the posthuman condition as a catalyst for global social and political change – a solution to the 'big issues' that elude the current institutions of power. The posthuman becomes the site of struggle over the potential changes to the future, in effect over the concept of utopia. In contrasting dystopian futures with the present possibility of change through posthumanity, the show allows a utopian space to emerge, in which global issues such as the war on terror can be solved and attacks such as those on 9/11 could be prevented. In this, Heroes returns to humanist notions and concepts of history as events shaped by exceptional individuals, while at the same time complicating them with communal images of a cooperative and interconnected posthuman subjectivity.
Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel
Authors: Roberts Neil
Published: September 2017

Lawrence’s autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers was written in four drafts between August 1910 and November 1912. During that period Lawrence’s mother died, he finally broke with Jessie Chambers, the original of Miriam, had an affair with Alice Dax, the main model for Clara, had a year-long engagement to Louie Burrows, nearly died of pneumonia, gave up teaching, met Frieda Weekley and lived abroad with her in Germany and Italy. When he began Sons and Lovers he was a schoolteacher in south London writing after work in the evenings; when he completed it he was a full-time professional writer living with Frieda in Italy. The writing of the novel and the life on which it was based were closely intertwined. Moreover, Frieda and Jessie crucially influenced the writing of the book. Jessie wrote sections of it herself and encouraged Lawrence to make it more directly autobiographical. Frieda introduced Lawrence to the concept of the Oedipus Complex. In many ways the book is the result of dialogues with Jessie and Frieda. Jessie was devastated with the outcome, which she considered a slander and a betrayal. But Lawrence incorporated her answering voice, as well as Frieda’s, in the text. This book combines biography and textual scholarship to bring to life the dramatic story of the writing of Sons and Lovers.
From ‘Paul Morel’ to Sons and Lovers, July–November 1912
Authors: Roberts Neil
Published: September 2017

Jessie believed that Lawrence did not rewrite the novel after the version she saw, but he extensively rewrote it, responding to all her objections that have survived and incorporating her new scenarios with little change. Lawrence submitted the novel to Heinemann in June 1912, but it was rejected. With Edward Garnett’s encouragement he completely rewrote it between July and December. Frieda claimed that she wrote 'little female bits' those these have not survived. Her influence is unlikely to have been favourable to Jessie, but here is strong evidence that it strengthened the awareness of the destructive effect of a mother-son love substituting for a failed marriage. It was only in October 1912, during the final rewriting, that Lawrence gave the novel the thematically significant title 'Sons and Lovers'.
Melville's Intervisionary Network
Authors: Haydock John
Published: September 2017

The romances of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor, are usually examined from some setting almost exclusively American. European or other planetary contexts are subordinated to local considerations. But while this isolated approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes swirling around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of expanding literary and technological networks was active that made his writing part of a global complex. Honoré de Balzac, popular French writer and creator of realism in the novel, was also in the web of these same networks, both preceding and at the height of Melville’s creativity. Because they engaged in similar intentions, there developed an almost inevitable attraction that brought their works together. Until recently, however, Balzac has not been recognized as a significant influence on Melville during his most creative period. Over the last decade, scholars began to explore literary networks by new methodologies, and the criticism developed out of these strategies pertains usually to modernist, postcolonial, contemporary situations. Remarkably, however, the intertextuality of Melville with Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. Looking at Melville’s innovative environment reveals meaningful results where the networks take on significant roles equivalent to what have been traditionally classed as genetic contacts. Intervisionary Network explores a range of these connections and reveals that Melville was dependent on Balzac and his universal vision in much of his prose writing.
Hawthorne’s Secret?
Authors: Haydock John
Published: September 2017

Hawthorne’s profound understanding of Balzac’s method developed from his close reading of the “Avant-propos” to La Comédie humaine (1842) and a study of the philosophic novels, Etudes Philosohiques, particularly Louis Lambert and La Peau de chagrin. Comprehending the vision of unité de composition, the consistent makeup of universal forces of consciousness in human and animal life reflected in fictional characters, he developed realistic plots that elevated his popularity and effectiveness as a writer. Of particular importance in this scheme is the place of the genius, a sort of “monster” capable of intense conscious influence but lacking altruistic moral elevation. Examples of the application of unity of composition in Hawthorne are presented in contrast with Balzac.
Transvisionary Translating
Authors: Haydock John
Published: September 2017

By 1850 Hawthorne had developed the ideas he took from Balzac into his first novel and best seller, The Scarlet Letter. Melville, who was exploring similar traits in Redburn and White-Jacket became inspired by Hawthorne’s financial success and took the opportunity through an idea afforded by common affiliation with Young America to review Hawthorne’s work in the context of a unique national literature. His essay emphasized the “blackness” then attributed to Balzac with Hawthorne and hinted that an American author should not “write like a Frenchman,” suggesting Hawthorne may have only adopted this affectation to create “wondrous effects” in his writing. Simultaneously with the publication of Melville’s essay, Balzac died; and French laureate Victor Hugo praised him in a remarkable eulogy of consecration retranslated worldwide. After having met with Hawthorne on a few occasions, Melville decided to move near him and continue literary/ontological discussions. Over the next eighteen months, Melville modified the whaling novel he was composing to reflect as much unité de composition as he could. Together they worked on novels developing the first experiments in what would develop into American Realism twenty years before it articulation by Henry James and William Dean Howells.
The American Legacy of “Prufrock”
Authors: Patterson Anita
Published: September 2017

The essay cluster brings together leading Eliot and modernist scholars to commemorate the centenary of the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Together, they reexamine the circumstances surrounding the poem’s original publication, recontextualize its allusions, and reconstruct its reception over the past century. Patterson examines the American roots of Eliot’s ironic love song, often considered through the lenses of European poetry and philosophy. Dickey returns to the poem’s early reception to challenge the now established narrative that “Prufrock” shocked early readers, showing how often his contemporaries associated the poem with Decadent or Aesthetic precedents. Ricks returns to the poem’s first publication in Poetry Magazine to understand how the poem’s first readers would have encountered the text and how this context would have mediated the reader’s experience. Cuda situates Eliot’s poem vis-à-vis current discourses on late modernism and demonstrates how lateness and belatedness feature centrally in the poem. Finally, Schuchard examines Eliot’s literary and religious allusions, showing that his allusive method is in full force even in his first poetic masterpiece.
Eliot’s Allusive Legacy and Obscurity in “Prufrock”
Authors: Schuchard Ronald , Morgenstern John D.
Published: September 2017

To me, the “revolution” and legacy of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” lies in its unique use of the allusive method and the relative obscurity that purposefully accompanies them. It is the method that accompanies Eliot’s theory of impersonality, a distancing and masking technique that begins in 1911 when the twenty-two-year-old poet projected himself into a persona nearly twice his age for his dramatic monologue. When he was later asked whether Prufrock represented the modern age or if he was a character from ...
T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist
Authors: Pierce April
Published: September 2017

In the middle of the twentieth century, British idealist philosophy was facing a slow but unmistakable decline in popularity. It would be replaced with a hard-nosed, literalist form of language philosophy. One could no longer take The Idea for granted; an analysis of form was required to defend metaphysical claims. Early twentieth-century philosophy had circumnavigated questions of form: How did language attach itself to the world? How did meaning ...
Introduction
Authors: Harutyunyan Angela
Published: September 2017

This book addresses the discursive and representational field of contemporary art in Armenia in the context of the post-Soviet condition, from the late 1980s through the 1990s up until the early 2000s. Contemporary art, I argue, is what best captures the historical and social contradictions of the period of the so-called ‘transition’, especially if one considers ‘transition’ from the perspective of the former Soviet republics that have been consistently marginalized in Russian- and East European-dominated post-socialist studies. Occupying a sphere distinct from other social and cultural spheres of productive activity and yet inextricably connected to social institutions, contemporary art in Armenia has become a negative mirror for the social: art has been viewed as that which reflects those wishes and desires for emancipation that the social world has been incapable of accommodating in both late Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. Contemporary art’s status as a negative mirror is due to its particular historical emergence in transnational (Soviet) and national (post-Soviet) contexts, its peculiar institutionalization in relation to official cultural discourse, and to a prevailing belief in art’s autonomy. Throughout the two decades that encompass the chronological scope of this work, contemporary art has encapsulated the difficult dilemmas of autonomy and social participation, innovation and tradition, progressive political ethos and national identification, the problematic of communication with the world beyond Armenia’s borders, dreams of subjective freedom and the imperative to find an identity in the new circumstances after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These are questions that have occupied culture and society at large, in the post-Soviet context and beyond. Yet the contradictions embedded in these questions are best crystallized in contemporary art, because of its peculiar position within the social sphere. This historical study aims at outlining the politics (liberal democracy), aesthetics (autonomous art secured by the gesture of the individual artist) and ethics (ideals of absolute freedom and radical individualism) of contemporary art in Armenia in post-Soviet conditions from a critical perspective and in ways that point towards the limitations of the aesthetic ...
The ‘painterly real’ of contemporary art: resurrected ghosts, living heroes and saintly saviours on the 3rd Floor, 1987–94
Authors: Harutyunyan Angela
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses the 3rd Floor – an artistic movement of the late Soviet and early independence years in Armenia (1987-94) – in its complex relationship with the cultural politics of the perestroika period, the official art of the Union of Artists of the Soviet Republic of Armenia, and National Modernism. It argues that the 3rd Floor, thought its strategy of hamasteghtsakan art both reproduced the dynamic of the perestroika politics and surpassed it. The 3rd Floor affirmed the separation between autonomous art and all that falls outside this autonomous sphere – the social world replete with antagonism and discontent.
The reign of the ‘painterly real’ and the politics of crisis, 1999–2004
Authors: Harutyunyan Angela
Published: September 2017

This closing chapter offers a reading of the work of two artists of the 1990s and early 2000s – David Kareyan and Narek Avetisyan, both previously members of the group ACT – and discusses their works in the context of social, political, technological as well as cultural shifts in Armenia. The two artists’ works, it argues, epitomize the contradictions of the turn of the century Armenia. This context is defined as a crisis of politics and political subjectivization vis-à-vis the state. This marked a shift from affirmative artistic practices in the conditions of the crisis of negation that characterized the mid 1990s, and gave birth to a politics of resistance. The chapter considers political, economic and art institutional transformations as interlinked processes that bring about an imperative to rearticulate art’s relationship to the social world. It locates the advent of video art, performance and installation within the advent of the media society and the techno utopias of global connectivity.
Gilbert’s Act: workhouses for the vulnerable
Authors: Shave Samantha A.
Published: September 2017

This is the first of two chapters which examine poor law ‘enabling acts’. This chapter considers the importance of Thomas Gilbert’s Act, passed in 1782. Gilbert’s Act was passed with the intention that those parishes adopting it would place the ‘vulnerable’ sections of the poor within a workhouse and allocate employment and distribute outdoor relief to the able-bodied. The Act also intended to promote industry and good morals amongst the poor, allowing parish officers to require them to work within the workhouse and embark on teaching programmes for children. This chapter examines the adoption of the Act in southern England, and then its implementation. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, and the pursuit of more economical modes of relieving the poor became ever more important, the Act was adapted in ways which could have actually contradicted Gilbert’s intentions.
Policies from knowledge networks
Authors: Shave Samantha A.
Published: September 2017

This chapter sets out to develop an understanding of how social policies were disseminated between welfare officials. The first half demonstrates that, before the creation of the Poor Law Commission, there was no central welfare authority to suggest ways in which parishes could cope with the increasing demand on poor relief, resulting in parish officials seeking solutions from one another. The information they passed originated at a specific location, but it was presented and promoted as ‘best practice’. Knowledge was transferred between officials in a number of ways; they conducted correspondence, went on trips to workhouses and published, read and referred to pamphlets detailing workhouse practice. Locally derived knowledge was not insignificant after the passage of the Amendment Act. The Commission was proactive in seeking local precedents and encouraging Boards of Guardians to adopt particularly beneficial practices. In addition, regardless of the presence of a central welfare authority, evidence can be found of local officials continuing the tradition of conferring with one another, without the interference of the Commission. In short, the policy process was not constrained by parish boundaries before 1834, nor controlled by the Commission thereafter.
Policies from scandal
Authors: Shave Samantha A.
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the role of welfare scandals in policy-making after the passage of the Amendment Act. The post-1834 relief system opened the policy-making process to a number of other stakeholders to make their own demands on the relief system, such as the medical profession. These ‘stakeholders’, and notable ‘key actors’ from the anti-New Poor Law movement shaped the direction of social policies during the early years of the New Poor Law, not the Commission alone. The existence of a central authority, to hold the local authorities to account, ensured that policies developed in ways which would resolve problems encountered nationally. This meant that the experiences of the poorest played a role in the policy-making process when their voices were carried to the ears of authority. There was, essentially, a feedback mechanism between policy implementation and policy evaluation and change stages of the policy process under the New Poor Law. The creation of a centralised welfare authority brought with it centralised accountability for local relief administration.
Local history enthusiasts: English county historical societies since the nineteenth century
Authors: Kidd Alan
Published: September 2017

Alan Kidd explores the cultural sphere of amateur local historians and the associational culture of the local historical societies, from their origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries to their evolution in the twentieth. The county historical societies founded in the nineteenth-century were expressions of urban bourgeois culture and their early success owed much to that symbol of modernity, the world’s first national railway network, however, the societies exemplified the persisting social deference of ‘provincial cultural life’ expressed in the very survival of the ancient county identities. The work of nineteenth-century county historical societies contributed to an imagined notion of Englishness whose rural associations was a steadying counterpoint to a rapidly developing urban reality. The shadow of ‘amateurism’ haunted the historical societies as History developed as a university discipline, although a shift in attitudes towards the subject of local history came in the second half of the twentieth-century, chiefly in the form of ‘history from below’, exemplified by the History Workshop movement and the subsequent concepts of community history and public history.
Voluntary action in the ‘welfare state’: the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: September 2017

As state involvement in the provision of social and medical welfare grew during the twentieth-century, it was often seen as antagonistic to the work of voluntary associations which had pioneered many different types of welfare provision. Pat Thane argues that such assumptions are a false dichotomy and develops a case study of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (NCUM), founded in 1918, as a means through which to assess the changing landscape of twentieth-century social welfare and the relationship between voluntary action and public sector welfare. The work of organizations like the NCUM actually intensified with the growth of state welfare provision from the inter-war years onwards; a pattern which was duplicated across the welfare sector more generally Thane contests political arguments that the ‘big society’ should replace the supposed ‘stranglehold’ of state welfare by highlighting the extent to which the historical relationship between voluntary associations and the state has actually been creative and mutually sustaining.
The continuing tradition of civic pride: municipal culture in post-war Manchester
Authors: Shapely Peter
Published: September 2017

It has been argued that civic pride declined after its heyday in the Victorian period but Peter Shapely contests this view, illustrating how in Manchester, a combination of civic pride, social reform and policy rooted in the Victorian period were re-defined over the twentieth-century, albeit retaining a ‘boosterish’ emphasis on the city’s image and reputation, particularly in the 1960s. Postwar planners aimed to construct their own version of a modern cityscape in Manchester delivered through a programme of ambitious building projects whose civic ambitions would have been familiar to their Victorian predecessors. When these aspirations faltered during Manchester’s industrial decline between the mid-1970s and late-1980s, civic pride was maintained by the ambitions of the local press, politicians and prominent figures and eventually harnessed to new regeneration projects, as Manchester’s image was re-invented through high-profile re-development schemes and festivals based on sport and the arts. There were, as Shapely argues, continuities in how governing elites and institutions defined the contours of Manchester’s civic pride and reputation, a cultural hegemony that persisted across two centuries. This was, however, distinct from the sense of civic pride which many ordinary local residents experienced with different kinds of local attachment and identity.
Introduction: we need to talk about Julien
Authors: McCann Ben
Published: September 2017

When the French cinema dies, it might do worse than find his [Duvivier’s] name written across its retina.

(Alistair Cooke 1971: 125)

No one speaks of Julien Duvivier without apologising.

(Dudley Andrew 1997: 283)

Once upon a time, Julien Duvivier (1896–1967) was considered one of the world’s great film directors. He was beloved by Orson Welles, Rouben Mamoulian, Frank Capra, and John Ford, while Ingmar Bergman once admitted that, of all the careers that he would have liked to have had, it would be Duvivier’s. The English novelist Graham Greene, in a much-quoted article from 1938, rated Duvivier and Fritz Lang as ‘the two greatest fiction directors still at work’ (1972: 195). ...
The ‘impure’ auteur
Authors: McCann Ben
Published: September 2017

This opening chapter will contextualise the ‘Duvivier style’. It will look at his chief formative influence, André Antoine, whose influential theories on cinematic naturalism, location shooting, and performance authenticity was cultivated and developed by Duvivier throughout his career.
The chapter will examine what makes a Duvivier film. Historians often make reference to Duvivier’s love of ‘work well done’ as his signature legacy and enduring film-making ethos. The chapter will introduce the key recognisable Duvivier traits: an expressive mise en scène, fluid camera movement and a complex negotiation of décor, strong central performances by stars and new actors, pessimistic narratives, incorporation of melodramatic elements (music, production design), and a film-by-film reliability. This analysis of Duvivier, beyond its historical range, also proposes to engage with key debates in film studies: notably auteurism, stardom and audience reception.
The chapter will also look at how Duvivier fits into a history of both French national cinema and international film production. Duvivier’s genre eclecticism and lack of a coherent corpus should not be seen as a negative; instead, it is necessary to read Duvivier’s wide-ranging approach to genre and subject matter as a response to and engagement with important development in French and international film praxis.
Duvivier’s silent films
Authors: McCann Ben
Published: September 2017

This chapter will look at Duvivier’s first forays into filmmaking, and chart the development of the Duvivier ‘touch’ over a decade of working in silent film. It will explore the visual aspects of the silent films and allow continuities and consistencies to be traced between these early works to show a director developing a singular style and then refining it in the later, more technically accomplished films post-1930. In 1925, Duvivier joined the production company 'Film d’Art’, where he worked for nine years, and where he honed his expertise on collaborating groups of artists and technicians on a number of consecutive projects. Such collaborative working methods would serve him well throughout his career. The chapter also pay close attention to those silent films which had a religious subject - Credo ou la tragédie de Lourdes (1924), L’Agonie de Jérusalem (1927) and La Vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin (1929) - a film about the Carmelite saint Thérèse of Lisieux. The chapter concludes with an in-depth look at Duvivier’s most famous silent film, Au Bonheur des dames (1930), an adaptation of Emile Zola’s classic novel, starring Dita Parlo.
Sound, image, Gabin: Duvivier and the 1930s
Authors: McCann Ben , McCann Ben
Published: September 2017

This chapter will begin with an examination of Duvivier’s first ‘talkie’, David Golder (1930) and its central figure of the Jew. It will also discuss whether, consciously or not, Duvivier’s film – along with his two other 1930s so-called ‘Jewish’ films Golgotha (1935) and Le Golem (1935), are anti-Semitic.
The chapter will place Duvivier’s work within the generic and aesthetic framework of poetic ealism, for three of his films in particular – La Bandera (1935), La Belle Equipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937) – combine elements of populism and melodrama with an expressionistic mise en scène and a pessimistic narrative structure. The chapter will also look at the importance of the actor Jean Gabin, who starred in all three aforementioned films, and demonstrate how Duvivier uses Gabin’s star aura, as well as the defining traits that can be traced across many of his characters – alienation, helplessness, assertive masculinity, romanticism – to amplify the feelings of hopelessness and stalemate that afflicted large portions of French society after the collapse of the Popular Front in 1937.
Duvivier is part of this landscape, and the chapter will explore the interactions between his favoured collaborators like Henri Jeanson, Jacques Krauss, Charles Spaak, and Maurice Jaubert on other technically accomplished and visually impeccable films.
‘Piloting with concentration’: Julien goes to Hollywood
Authors: McCann Ben
Published: September 2017

This chapter will analyse Duvivier’s career in Hollywood. He was first invited to Hollywood by MGM in 1938 to direct The Great Waltz, and then moved to America shortly after the German occupation of France in 1940. He directed four films there during this period, including Lydia (1941) and The Impostor (1944), a loose remake of La Bandera (1935). The chapter explores the various techniques and themes that Duvivier developed during this period, and looks at the critical reception of his films in both French and American trade journals.
The chapter also poses the question of whether a distinctively French cinematic sensibility can be recalibrated within the confines of the Classic Hollywood Cinema (CHC) tradition. Duvivier adapted to a different set of professional and commercial imperatives that enabled him to transcend infrastructural barriers and impose a distinctly French style on the American film industry.
Fragile friendships
Authors: Mai Joseph
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the lesser known, but high quality, films made by Guédiguian during the 1980s. His first film, Dernier été, explores in an original way many of the themes important to friendship: its way of giving meaning to everyday spaces (it thus establishes the importance of l’Estaque in Guédiguian’s work) and seemingly empty time. Subsequent films examine Guédiguian’s Marxist view of History, the history of l’Estaque, and the commemoration of the French bicentennial. These films are highly pessimistic, mainly due to a kind of intellectual exorcism that the director is attempting to perform vis-à-vis Communism and militant politics. But the films have a counterbalancing tendency, especially through the development of Guédiguian’s group of collaborating friends, on screen and behind the camera.
Conclusion
Authors: Mai Joseph
Published: September 2017

The conclusion argues, against critics who have found Guédiguian to be a sentimental maker of ‘fictions de gauche’, that Guédiguian’s project is actually extraordinarily deep and original. It lays out the claim that no filmmaker has had a career in which his or her work has been so closely linked with a set number of deep friendships. The conclusion looks at the entirety of Guédiguian’s career as a project, examining how friendship has informed Guédiguian’s depiction of people, spaces, and time. The conclusion argues that if this monument to particular friendships has attracted a fairly large audience, it is because it serves as a model for how one might live in a different, more flourishing way, a way not acknowledged by most figures of human interaction in the contemporary neoliberal period.
‘[M]anly beauty and muscular strength’: sculpture, sport and the nation at the Crystal Palace, 1854–1918
Authors: Nichols Kate
Published: September 2017

This essay recovers episodes in the wide and varied sporting history of the Crystal Palace in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, and situates it in the context of ideas about the body, nation and empire that were manifest in the 1850s Fine Arts Courts, showing how the Greek and Roman courts in particular were received in changing ways across Victorian and Edwardian culture. The Sydenham Palace brought together ‘Fine Arts’, consumer, and sporting cultures, and allows an examination of the ways in which these three seemingly disparate areas of study were closely intertwined. The essay emphasises the national, racial and gender politics implicit in the relationship between these three categories. Discussing Sandow’s Institute, the 1911 Inter-Empire Games, and the occupation of the Palace by the Royal Navy during the First World War, it relates the Palace’s apparently more formal Fine Arts Courts and Natural History Department to its grassy grounds, its static exhibits to its moving, breathing visitors, art historical education to bodily reformation.