bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Betwixt and Between
Authors: Thomas Shenique S. , Christian Johnna
Published: November 2018

This chapter draws from a qualitative study of incarcerated men to investigate the social processes and interactions between both correctional authorities and family members that inform their sense of belonging and legitimacy. It reveals that prison visitation rooms present a complex environment in which incarcerated men have access to discreet periods of visibility and relevance to their family members and the broader community. There are, however, several precarious aspects to these processes. The family members who are central to enhancing men’s visibility and legitimacy are primarily women from economically disadvantaged, racial, and ethnic minority groups, resulting in their own marginalization, which is compounded within prison spaces. By illuminating both the challenges and opportunities of familial connections, this chapter informs a social justice framework for understanding the experiences of both incarcerated men and their family members.
An Amazon in the Renaissance
Authors: Cox Fiona
Published: November 2018

This is one of the few chapters in the present volume that address the role of women in Virgilian translation practices. More specifically, Cox focuses on Marie de Gournay’s translation of Aeneid 2. While de Gournay’s translation is marked by imprecisions, it also conveys her sense of pride—a pride she takes in breaching the stronghold of men as she places herself into the lineage of French translators of Virgil. The author argues that de Gournay uses her translation as part of a struggle for sexual equality, a struggle that is especially intensified by her loneliness and sense of alienation within her own time and culture.
Virgil after Vietnam
Authors: Braund Susanna
Published: November 2018

The focus of this chapter is the major American verse translations published in the last fifty years. These translations were inevitably framed by Virgil’s attitude to empire, since that resonated with each translator’s stance on the war in Vietnam. Braund situates Mandelbaum’s, Fitzgerald’s, Lombardo’s, Fagles’s, and Ruden’s translations in the larger context of American classical scholarship and previous translations of Virgil’s epic. Furthermore, Braund offers an interesting juxtaposition in gender perspective between the male translators, who, as professors, were all influenced by scholarly debates, and Sarah Ruden, who, as a woman and as a professional translator, undertakes her task on the margins of the academic controversies and provides the reader with an altogether different and more distanced perspective.
The Aeneid and ‘Les Belles Lettres’
Authors: Clément-Tarantino Séverine , Braund Susanna
Published: November 2018

This chapter walks us backwards on the path of French prose translations of Virgil, from Paul Veyne to Jacques Perret. While Clément-Tarantino emphasizes that Veyne’s fluid and vivacious translation rekindled the interest of the French-reading public in Virgil, she also analyses the principles behind Perret’s translation of the Aeneid in the context of his book Latin et culture. In this work, which elaborates on the ?art of translation?, Perret considered attention to the philological and prosodic intricacies of the source text to be the main goal for the ‘ideal translator’; yet he decided to translate the Aeneid in prose. Perret’s translation of the Aeneid for Les Belles Lettres serves the goal of facilitating the reading of Virgil in Latin; by contrast, Veyne distanced himself from philological scrutiny, offering instead the renewed pleasure of reading Virgil in French.
Domesticating Aesthetic Effects
Authors: Thomas Richard F.
Published: November 2018

Domestication of ancient epics appears to be a focal theme in recent translation studies. This chapter explores a specific aspect of this theme by focusing on the domestication of aesthetic, linguistic, and metre-specific effects. Thomas raises the question of whether or not it is possible to translate language-specific idioms into the target language without losing the poignancy of the source text; and his discussion provides copious examples drawn from English translations of Virgil’s works. By juxtaposing and evaluating different translations of the same highly marked passages of Virgil, he asks whether adherence to or departure from the dynamics of the source texts leads to the ideal translation.
Limiting Our Losses
Authors: Fo Alessandro
Published: November 2018

In this chapter (translated and reprinted here with kind permission), the arduous path of challenges faced by one of Virgil’s translators is mapped out with painstaking detail. Alessandro Fo, author of a recent translation of the Aeneid into Italian, offers an account of the main principles and criteria he adopted in approaching his task. From a metrical point of view, the translator opted for the ‘barbaric’ hexameter, striving to render the rhythmic flexibility of Latin verse. At a stylistic level, he decided to stick as close as possible to the epic and elevated (at times even alienating) diction of Virgil’s poem, without attempting to ‘gloss’ solemn coinages, metaphors, or enallagē for the Italian reader. After acknowledging his inescapable debt to previous Italian translators of the Aeneid, the author highlights his effort to situate his translation among those ‘oriented towards the source text’ without undermining its readability.
Afterword: Let Go Fear
Authors: Balmer Josephine
Published: November 2018

This is a personal and fascinating chapter, which serves as a perfect conclusion to a multifaceted and complicated volume. While this volume is the first one to offer a detailed look at translations of Virgil’s poems across world cultures, the attempt is far from exhaustive and hopes to open the floodgates for further discussions along the lines presented here. Balmer’s essay looks precisely towards ‘future Virgils’ of this kind, reimagined and adapted to contemporary contexts where women translators will not be an oddity and where Virgil’s stories of victory and defeat will inspire a creativity readily understood by contemporary audiences.
Salvation in Counselling and Comedy
Authors: Marsh Clive
Published: November 2018

This chapter scrutinizes the many ways in which positive psychology contributes to therapeutic understandings of salvation. Building on attention to the way in which the work of Martin Seligman has influenced approaches to happiness and forms of counselling, the chapter examines two Christian examples (one Protestant—Joel Osteen, one Roman Catholic—Christopher Kaczor) of positive psychology’s influence on Christian practice and critically explores the appropriateness of such use. It then explores a second example of positive mood through examining how television comedy is received and used as a contribution to fostering well-being. Using The Big Bang Theory, the chapter notes how religion appears as a marginal but meaningful element within the series, and examines the significance of the main thrust of the series in both its content and reception.
Salvation in Capital and Money
Authors: Marsh Clive
Published: November 2018

This chapter explores what one receives for being ‘saved’, and presents the contentious insight that it is important to consider directly what is gained, with respect to the concept of ‘capital’. Through examination of the relevance for theology of the concepts of social, cultural, and spiritual capital, the chapter highlights, first, non-material but not simply spiritual ways in which salvation is participated in and received. Sociocultural and sociopolitical dimensions of salvation become apparent through such analysis. In the chapter’s second part, the economic and material aspects of salvation are acknowledged and explored. The chapter builds upon recognition of the extensive attention paid to money and material matters in the canonical Gospels in defending the view that material well-being has to be seen as a key feature of salvation when understood as human flourishing.
Interoceptive signals, brain dynamics, and subjectivity
Authors: Babo-Rebelo Mariana , Tallon-Baudry Catherine
Published: November 2018

The self has long been hypothesized to be rooted in the neural monitoring of bodily signals. We propose here to focus on visceral inputs, which present some key characteristics. Inputs from the heart or the gastrointestinal tract are continuously produced, and can reach multiple cortical targets. In addition, cardiac inputs elicit a neural response at each heartbeat that can be recorded non-invasively in humans, even in the absence of measurable changes in bodily state. We review the recent experimental evidence that neural responses to heartbeats are related to the self, in situations where the self is explicit or reflective (bodily awareness, thinking about oneself) but also when the self is implicit (the self as the agent, the self experiencing a visual input). These results are compatible with our proposal that the integration of visceral signals generates a subject-centered reference frame underlying different facets of the self.
From physiology to experience: Enriching existing conceptions of “arousal” in affective science
Authors: Colombetti Giovanna , Harrison Neil
Published: November 2018

This chapter examines the notion of “arousal”, an influential notion in affective science referring to the degree of an individual’s “activation” or “excitement” during an emotional state. It considers this notion specifically in relation to interoception, defined broadly as “sensitivity to stimuli arising inside the organism.” “Physiological arousal” is distinguished from “experienced arousal” and it is argued that both need to be characterized more broadly than commonly done. Physiological arousal cannot be reduced to sympathetic activation, as it involves complex interactions between multiple functionally distinct pathways within sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the autonomic nervous system, as well as endocrine and immune systems, and even the gut microbiota. Relatedly, experienced arousal does not reduce to the perception of changes in the body sensed by visceral afferents in response to autonomic nervous system activity but also includes humorally mediated interoceptive pathways, somatic sensations of various kinds, and “background” bodily feelings.
Subjectivity as a sentient perspective and the role of interoception
Authors: De Preester Helena
Published: November 2018

This chapter argues that the most basic form of subjectivity is different from and more fundamental than having a self, and forwards a hypothesis about the origin of subjectivity in terms of interoception. None of those topics are new, and a consensus concerning the homeostatic-interoceptive origin of subjectivity is rapidly growing in the domains of the neurosciences and psychology. This chapter critically explores that growing consensus, and it argues that the idea that the brain topographically represents bodily states is unfit for thinking about the coming about of subjectivity. In the first part, four inherent characteristics of subjectivity are discussed from a philosophical phenomenological point of view. The second part explores whether a model of subjectivity in which interoception maintains its crucial role is possible without relying on topographical representations of the in-depth body, and giving due to the inherent characteristics of subjectivity.
Inside insights: A phenomenology of interoception
Authors: Leder Drew
Published: November 2018

This chapter undertakes a phenomenology of inner-body experience, starting with a focus on visceral interoception. While highly personal, such experience also reveals a level of the lived body that is pre-personal, beyond our understanding and control. In contrast to exteroception, elements of the visceral field can be inaccessible, or surface only indistinctly and intermittently to conscious awareness. Nonetheless, interoception is more than just a series of such sensations. This chapter argues for the “exterior interior”—that is, we interpret inner body experiences through models drawn from the outer world, and interoception itself is bound up with emotion, purpose, and projects. In the West, we tend to valorize the interiority of rational thought; by contrast, experience of the inner body is a kind of “inferior interior,” often overlooked or overridden, yet inside insights—gained from attending to messages from the inner body—may preserve our health and wellbeing.
Starting with the Self
Authors: Pattison George
Published: November 2018

Seeing the devout life as a practice of the self connects the enquiry to recent philosophical discussions of selfhood. A prominent theme in such discussions is autonomy. Theology and religion have typically reacted negatively to strong versions of autonomy that suggest the self is capable of complete self-determination, although more moderate versions of autonomy as self-governance are actively endorsed by Christian thinkers, from de Sales, through Bishop Butler, to Paul Tillich. Another important theme is that of agency and the chapter notes Frankfurt’s insistence on activity as a feature of the self but questions whether consideration should not be given to more passive features of selfhood, as We finds in much religious literature.
The Whole Self
Authors: Pattison George
Published: November 2018

This chapter addresses the question as to how the Christian devout life is related to contemporary holistic spirituality, taking C. G. Jung as representative of holistic spirituality’s quest to balance the binary elements of the self. By way of contrast, Christian spirituality might seem to require the hierarchical subordination of one part of the self to another, reinforcing suspicions as to its essentially heteronomous nature. Nevertheless, the devout life can be shown to be a life involving the coordination of ‘body, mind, and spirit’. Where contemporary holism emphasizes the spatial balancing of the self the devout life integrates spatial and temporal dimensions of selfhood seeking to be focused on the sacrament of the present moment as it moves forward in tranquillity and equanimity.
The Tempted Self
Authors: Pattison George
Published: November 2018

As a complex relational entity, the self is exposed to constant centripetal pressures that it experiences as temptations. However, temptation is not primarily seen as the lure of sensual pleasures threatening the rule of reason. The primary source of temptation is other people, wanting to be like them, and to win their favour. Resisting temptation is made all the more difficult by the way in which choices are mediated through language, which facilitates dissembling and therefore requires keen interpretation. The situation of temptation reveals the self as surrounded by possibilities and having to choose itself in responsible freedom. One such possibility is to do more than God asks of it and to become what Kierkegaard called ‘the exception’. Awareness of error and its own limits is therefore a constant accompaniment of devotion.
Basic concepts
Authors: Launay Jean-Pierre , Verdaguer Michel
Published: November 2018

The electronic structure of molecules is described, starting from qualitative Molecular Orbital (MO) theory. After the case of simple atoms and molecules, one treats molecular solids and develops the relation between Molecular Orbital theory and band theory. In both cases, one shows that the electronic structure can influence the geometrical structure, through Jahn–Teller effects or Peierls distortion. The effect of interelectronic repulsion, the central problem of Quantum Chemistry, is put in perspective by a synthetic presentation of different approaches: Hartree–Fock Self-Consistent Field with treatment of electron correlation, Valence Bond models, and finally Density Functional Theory methods (DFT). The last section is devoted to quantum tunnelling and its dynamical aspects.
The excited electron: photophysical properties
Authors: Launay Jean-Pierre , Verdaguer Michel
Published: November 2018

After a review of fundamental notions such as absorption, emission and the properties of excited states, the chapter introduces excited-state electron transfer. Several examples are given, using molecules to realize photodiodes, light emitting diodes, photovoltaic cells, and even harnessing photochemical energy for water photolysis. The specificities of ultrafast electron transfer are outlined. Energy transfer is then defined, starting from its theoretical description, and showing its involvement in photonic wires or molecular assemblies realizing an antenna effect for light harvesting. Photomagnetic effects; that is, the modification of magnetic properties after a photonic excitation, are then studied. The examples are taken from systems presenting a spin cross-over, with the LIESST effect, and from systems presenting metal–metal charge transfer, in particular in Prussian Blue analogues and their molecular version.
A Comparative Classification and Assessment of Governance Indices
Authors: Haber Matthias , Kononykhina Olga
Published: November 2018

For decades, academic scholars and multinational organisations have been assessing how ready governments are to meet the various political and socioeconomic challenges they face. These benchmarks of good governance have led to the creation of well-known composite indices such as the Human Development Index and the Rule of Law Index. Today, there are dozens of different governance indices, but few attempts have been made to properly classify them. We still know surprisingly little about what different kinds of indicators the indices contain and how much impact they have had. This chapter introduces and classifies thirty-seven governance indices and analyses their impact on academic research, the news media, and policy-making. The results provide new insights for the comparative analysis of composite indices and offer a useful resource for index creators.
Extractive Revenues and Government Spending
Authors: van der Ploeg Frederick , Venables Anthony J.
Published: November 2018

This chapter looks at the prescription of optimally managing natural resource revenue windfalls by smoothing consumption across generations using an intergenerational sovereign wealth fund that only invests in foreign assets and is not appropriate for resource-rich developing economies. It is better for these economies to use their windfalls to boost investment in the domestic economy, especially when they confront capital scarcity and have poor access to international capital markets. However, it is important for such economies to have a parking fund to temporarily ‘park’ funds until absorption constraints are alleviated, and a stabilization fund to smooth out volatile budgets given the high stochastic volatility of commodity prices, especially if the economy is inflexible and has few other ways of adjusting to price shocks.
Oil and Gas Companies and the Management of Social and Environmental Impacts and Issues
Authors: Tomlinson Kathryn
Published: November 2018

This chapter provides an overview of social and environmental performance and management practices in the oil and gas industries, outlining the evolution of international companies’ approaches over the last twenty years within the wider extractive industries context. The chapter reviews what social and environmental management amongst such companies means in practice, and highlights some of the unresolved issues emerging. While most companies now model their approach to social and environmental management on international norms, they face a variety of drivers to their practices. These range from complying with international standards in order to gain access to finance, to complying with new host country legislation and regulation, and gaining and maintaining a good reputation and a ‘social licence to operate’. This chapter argues that the complexity of these drivers problematizes the portrayal of the industry’s social and environmental performance as ‘voluntary’ corporate social responsibility, and renders the latter term somewhat misleading.
Climate Change and the Extractives Sector
Authors: Addison Tony
Published: November 2018

Climate change is one of the world’s most complex and urgent global problems—many argue that it is the greatest challenge. Climate change adaptation and mitigation are fundamental to the evolution of our economies and societies over the rest of the twenty-first century and beyond. The extractive industries are in many ways at the heart of the challenge. The extractives sector must support national and international efforts to respond to climate change, by adjusting exploration and production to shifting patterns of demand for energy and minerals—as policies and new technologies encourage progress along low-carbon pathways. None of this is easy; success is not assured. This is a large topic, and the task of this chapter is to set out some of its main issues as they relate to the extractives sector.
Framework
Authors: Roe Alan , Round Jeffery
Published: November 2018

This chapter discusses the channels of impact of an extractives activity on an economy by describing the different routes through which the direct economic and social impacts of these activities might be enhanced. These routes include those that often have the highest political profile, namely spending of government revenues. It also discusses other channels that arguably are far more important, such as the direct effects of corporate spend in local supply chains; the immediate ‘multiplier’ effects of this; the further multipliers that follow from significant income growth; the new downstream activities that may be built on the primary extractive activity; and the externalities that may accrue from the direct boost that a large extractive investment is likely to provide.
Donor-supported Approaches to Improving Extractives Governance
Authors: Buckley Joanna , McCulloch Neil , Travis Nicholas
Published: November 2018

Donor interest in the natural resources extractives sector is based upon the premise that it represents an opportunity to improve a country’s development prospects. However, in many cases the presence of extractive resources is associated with poor economic performance. As a result, some donors are trying a radically different approach. This chapter explores one such programme funded by the UK Department for International Development: the Facility for Oil Sector Transparency and Reform in Nigeria. The chapter outlines five lessons learned from this example. First, continual analysis is essential to understand the underlying incentives of key actors. Second, interventions need to be locally led in order to provide legitimacy for reform. Third, interventions need to be flexible and adaptive. Fourth, acceptance of an element of risk is necessary. Fifth, donors need to develop a new way of measuring impact.
The Role of Participation in Sustainable Community Development Programmes in the Extractive Industries
Authors: Macdonald Catherine
Published: November 2018

A major challenge for almost all activity of the extractive industries is that benefits accrue predominantly at the national level while disruptions are invariably highly localized close to the resource. Recently, extractives companies have intensified efforts to correct this imbalance. The aim of this chapter is to identify the optimal approach for companies to encourage sustainable local community development. The role that government and civil society actors can play in supporting this process is also addressed. Community participation is central to the discussion, which makes reference to case studies, particularly that of the community development programmes of a gold mine in Tanzania over a period of fifteen years.
Monarchy or Republic?
Authors: Forlenza Rosario
Published: November 2018

This chapter examines the meanings of “monarchy” and “republic,” explores how these meanings were modified in the wake of critical events during the civil war, and gauges the range of expectations held by ordinary people and political actors that affected the outcome of the referendum of June 1946. By 1943, while the lofty memories of the Roman republic or the medieval city-states were limited to a small circle of enlightened elites, to the majority of the population the republic meant confusion and chaos, revolution and anarchy. However, after the armistice and the King’s ignominious departure from Rome in September 1943, monarchic loyalism began to crumble and fade away in various sectors of Italian society. Furthermore, the war was also a social revolution, which in different areas of the country subverted traditional subordination and modified meanings, beliefs, and ideas that shaped the final outcome of the referendum.
America is Coming, America is Coming!
Authors: Forlenza Rosario
Published: November 2018

This chapter analyzes the importance of “America” (effectively synonymous with “the West”) as an idealized goal of the political, social, and individual imagination, and examines how the American model of democracy shaped the democratic aspirations of millions of Italians. The arrival of the American armies exerted a great fascination on Italians. However, the myth of America as land of freedom and plenty had been already introduced within the fabric of the Italian society by the power of cinema and literature, and, most importantly, by the culture of letters produced by millions of Italian emigrants. The attraction of America was not only an existential alternative to the backward and poor Italy, further demoralized by the failure of Fascism, but also an effective carrier of the decisive electoral triumph of Christian Democracy over the leftist Popular Front in the parliamentary elections of 1948.
Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems
Authors: Thurner Stefan , Klimek Peter , Hanel Rudolf
Published: November 2018

This book is a comprehensive introduction to quantitative approaches to complex adaptive systems. Practically all areas of life on this planet are constantly confronted with complex systems, be it ecosystems, societies, traffic, financial markets, opinion formation, epidemic spreading, or the internet and social media. Complex systems are systems composed of many elements that interact with each other, which makes them extremely rich dynamical systems showing a huge range of phenomena. Properties of complex systems that are of particular importance are their efficiency, robustness, resilience, and proneness to collapse. The quantitative tools and concepts needed to understand the co-evolutionary nature of networked systems and their properties are challenging. The intention of the book is to give a self-contained introduction to these concepts so that the reader will be equipped with a conceptual and mathematical toolset that allows her to engage in the science of complex systems. Topics covered include random processes of path-dependent processes, co-evolutionary dynamics, the statistics of driven nonequilibrium systems, dynamics of networks, the theory of scaling, and approaches from statistical mechanics and information theory. The book extends well beyond the early classical literature in the field of complex systems and summarizes the methodological progress over the past twenty years in a clear, structured, and comprehensive way. The book is intended for natural scientists and graduate students.
Probability and Random Processes
Authors: Thurner Stefan , Hanel Rudolf , Klimekl Peter
Published: November 2018

Phenomena, systems, and processes are rarely purely deterministic, but contain stochastic,probabilistic, or random components. For that reason, a probabilistic descriptionof most phenomena is necessary. Probability theory provides us with the tools for thistask. Here, we provide a crash course on the most important notions of probabilityand random processes, such as odds, probability, expectation, variance, and so on. Wedescribe the most elementary stochastic event—the trial—and develop the notion of urnmodels. We discuss basic facts about random variables and the elementary operationsthat can be performed on them. We learn how to compose simple stochastic processesfrom elementary stochastic events, and discuss random processes as temporal sequencesof trials, such as Bernoulli and Markov processes. We touch upon the basic logic ofBayesian reasoning. We discuss a number of classical distribution functions, includingpower laws and other fat- or heavy-tailed distributions.
Networks
Authors: Thurner Stefan , Hanel Rudolf , Klimekl Peter
Published: November 2018

Understanding the interactions between the components of a system is key to understanding it. In complex systems, interactions are usually not uniform, not isotropic and not homogeneous: each interaction can be specific between elements.Networks are a tool for keeping track of who is interacting with whom, at what strength, when, and in what way. Networks are essential for understanding of the co-evolution and phase diagrams of complex systems. Here we provide a self-contained introduction to the field of network science. We introduce ways of representing and handle networks mathematically and introduce the basic vocabulary and definitions. The notions of random- and complex networks are reviewed as well as the notions of small world networks, simple preferentially grown networks, community detection, and generalized multilayer networks.
The Future of the Science of Complex Systems?
Authors: Thurner Stefan , Hanel Rudolf , Klimekl Peter
Published: November 2018

The chapter is a mini outlook on the field. The classic achievenments in complexity science are mentioned, and we summarize how the new directions contained in this book might open new doors into a truly twenty-first-century science of complex systems.We do that by clarifying the origin of scaling laws, in particular for driven non-equilibrium systems, deriving the statistics of driven systems on the basis of driving and relaxing processes, categorizing probabilistic complex systems into universality classes, by developing ways for meaningful generalizations of statistical mechanics, and information theory so that they become useful for complex systems, and finally, by unifying the different approaches to evolution and co-evolution into a single mathematical framework that can serve as the basis for understanding co-evolutionary dynamics of states and interactions. We comment on our view of the role of artificial intelligence and our opinion on the future of science of complex systems.
Education Policymaking at National Level
Authors: Cameron Robert , Naidoo Vinothan
Published: November 2018

When one looks at the arrangements that have been put in place for managing performance in South Africa’s public sector since 1994—and specifically in the education sector—they are enormously impressive. But in general these efforts have not translated into strong performance. We find that policies for managing performance in basic education could best be explained as the outcome of a strategic interaction among three sets of actors: technocratically oriented public officials in the bureaucracy, teacher labour unions (especially SADTU, as the dominant union), and the African National Congress, in its dual role overseeing the education bureaucracy and as head of a ruling political alliance. In practice, the political strength of organized labour has resulted in outwardly impressive initiatives to promote performance management being diluted and falling well short of the aspiration of robust performance management.
Provincial Governance of Education—The Western Cape Experience
Authors: Robert Cameron , Levy Brian
Published: November 2018

The focus of this chapter is the management and governance of education at provincial level—specifically on efforts to introduce performance management into education by the Western Cape Education Department (WCED), and their impact. Post-1994 the WCED inherited a bureaucracy that was well placed to manage the province’s large public education system. Subsequently, irrespective of which political party has been in power, the WCED consistently has sought to implement performance management. This chapter explores to what extent determined, top-down efforts, led by the public sector, can improve dismal educational performance. It concludes that the WCED is a relatively well-run public bureaucracy. However, efforts to strengthen the operation of the WCED’s bureaucracy have not translated into systematic improvements in schools in poorer areas. One possible implication is that efforts to strengthen hierarchy might usefully be complemented with additional effort to support more horizontal, peer-to-peer governance at the school level.
The Clash of Legitimacies
Authors: Gamberini Andrea
Published: November 2018

This book aims to make an innovative contribution to the history of the state-building process in late medieval Lombardy (thirteenth–fifteenth centuries), by illuminating the myriad conflicts attending the legitimacy of power and authority at different levels of society. Through the analysis of the rhetorical forms and linguistic repertoires deployed by the many protagonists (not just the prince, but also cities, communities, peasants, and factions) to express their own ideals of shared political life, the work proposes to reveal the depth of the conflicts in which opposing political actors were not only inspired by competing material interests—as in the traditional interpretation to be found in previous historiography—but were often also guided by differing concepts of authority. From this comes a largely new image of the late medieval–early Renaissance state, one without a monopoly of force—as has been shown in many studies since the 1970s—and one that did not even have the monopoly of legitimacy. The limitations of attempts by governors to present the political principles that inspired their acts as shared and universally recognized are revealed by a historical analysis firmly intent on investigating the existence, in particular territorial or social ambits, of other political cultures which based obedience to authority on different, and frequently original, ideals.
Northern Italy in the Central Middle Ages
Authors: Gamberini Andrea
Published: November 2018

This chapter focuses on the political change that took place in the post-Carolingian age, when the collapse of empire encouraged the jurisdictional separation of cities and countryside, until then subject to the same authorities and to the same destiny. Thus, while in the city the community of cives gathered first around their bishop and then around the new communal institutions, the countryside saw the beginning of a proliferation of lords of castles and manorial lords. The result was the development of very different political cultures that were destined to come into conflict with each other as, starting from the 12th century, the citizens of the commune began their political expansion into the surrounding countryside.
The Foundations of Seigneurial Power in the Countryside
Authors: Gamberini Andrea
Published: November 2018

This chapter investigates the relationship between landed aristocracy and peasants in the later Middle Ages. The language of lordly power is no longer one of violence, just as its political culture is not that of the inferiorization of rural people. The emergence of the lexicon of friendship on the one hand conveying an idea of power liberated from its most brutal manifestations, on the other embeds that power within an explicit framework of reciprocity, in which obedience corresponds to the protection (military and fiscal) of the dominus and his mediation with central authorities (the duke). While this is a real re-establishment of the political bond on a consensual basis, it does not seem to generate shared representations: in fact, it is precisely the opposing elaborations that actors offer of the cause/effect nexus (which comes first, obedience or protection?) that reveal a clash between ideas with very different backgrounds.
The Moment of History
Authors: Brazil Kevin
Published: November 2018

John Berger is widely recognized as one of the most influential and idiosyncratic British art critics of the twentieth century; less well known is that many of his ideas about art were first explored in novels responding to Cold War politics. This chapter analyses the engagement with art in Berger’s fiction and criticism of the 1950s and 1960s, situating it within broader debates among British New Left writers such as Raymond Williams and Doris Lessing. It argues that Berger used novels like A Painter of Our Time and G. to explore the limitations of postwar social realism and to articulate a return to the unfulfilled promise of visual and literary modernism, or what Berger called in his novels and criticism the ‘moment’ of Cubism.
Ecclesiastical Gothic
Authors: Milbank Alison
Published: November 2018

The nostalgia for the Catholic past comes full circle in Chapter 14 in an assessment of clerical ghost stories with their interest in ecclesiastical architecture, fittings, and texts. In M. R. James, antiquarian protagonists show little respect for holy objects and thus invoke demonic invasion. James is concerned with the effect of a world which refuses to admit the spiritual power of objects, and thus has no ways of mediating their causal power. His tales question this boundary between subject and object. J. Meade Falkner shares this desire to restore the sacramental and psychic efficacy of objects by showing their negative power in The Lost Stradivarius and positively in the novel of Gothic usurpation, The Nebuly Coat, in which Cullerne Minster is a living thing and agent of Providential judgement through the ‘speaking’ arches of its moving tower, and by the bells, which mediate past and present and enact providential judgement.
Climate Change and People on the Move
Authors: Thornton Fanny
Published: November 2018

The book applies a justice framework to analysis of the actual and potential role of international law with respect to people on the move in the context of anthropogenic climate change. That people are affected by the impacts of climate change is no longer doubted, including with implications for the movement of people (migration, displacement, relocation, etc.). The book tackles unique questions concerning international responsibility for people movement arising from the inequities inherent to climate change. Corrective and distributive justice provide the analytical backbone. They are explored in a substantial theoretical chapter and then applied to subsequent contextual analysis. Corrective justice supports analysis as to whether people movement in the climate change context could be conceived or framed as harm, loss, or damage which is compensable under international law, either through fault-centred regimes or no-fault regimes (i.e., insurance). Distributive justice supports analysis as to whether such movement could be conceived or framed as a disproportionate burden, either for those faced with movement or those faced with sheltering people on the move, from which duties of redistribution may stem. The book contributes to the growing scholarship and analysis concerning international law or governance and people movement in response to climate change by investigating the bounds of the law where the phenomenon is viewed as one of (in)justice.
Authorship, Inscription, and ‘The Great American Interviewer’
Authors: Roach Rebecca
Published: November 2018

This chapter begins in the late nineteenth century and argues that the interviewer becomes a powerful foil for realist writers in this era of celebrity. The new figure of the interviewer raised difficult questions around processes of inscription, both mechanical and aesthetic, provoking anxieties around boundaries between public and private, bodies and machines, and about the credibility and authority of information communication via these networks. Drawing on the writings of Henry James and William Dean Howells, amongst others, this chapter demonstrates that the interviewer becomes bound up with debates about the limitations of the realist project and also comes to represent the excesses of optical scrutiny to which the realist author does not succumb. For Henry James in particular, interviewing becomes a crucial site for him to reflect on the embodied nature of communication in general.
Conversing with Purpose in the Interwar Years
Authors: Roach Rebecca
Published: November 2018

Chapter three examines the implications of the rise of sociology for literary understandings of the interview in the interwar years. Sociology’s emphasis on the interview as a process by which information could be extracted and meaning jointly produced made the interview appealing to authors in a period in which the public sphere was increasingly conceived as a fragmented arena wherein the author might struggle to communicate with his or her readers and critics. As a case study, the chapter examines a series of interviews written by American academic and journalist Louise Morgan, published in the London-based Everyman and later anthologized by Chatto & Windus. Drawing on the archives of Morgan and the publisher, the chapter elucidates the ways in which Morgan’s experiments in interviewing were conceived as both middlebrow and as engaging with the new methods of ‘Practical Criticism’ and ‘close reading’.
Legacies of Impersonality
Authors: Roach Rebecca
Published: November 2018

The fifth chapter examines the roles of interviewer and interviewee, exploring debates around objectivity and personality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was a period in which these roles came under pressure, partly as a reaction against the interrogative interviewing that dominated in previous decades. Drawing on the famed series of interviews in The Paris Review and the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and colleagues, the chapter illustrates how the interview emerged as a site where authors could discuss those topics such as methodology, market orientation, and intention that had been largely dismissed by New Criticism. These writers and publications, while beholden to a canonical modernist tradition, reject this older conception of the interview. In so doing, they enabled the interview to be conceived by authors, including ageing modernists, as an aesthetically and critically engaged activity in an age of celebrity authorship.
Uncreative Writing
Authors: Roach Rebecca
Published: November 2018

This chapter demonstrates that, thanks to the heavy reliance of publishers’ marketing departments on author interviews as a means of promotion, today interviews are increasingly conceived through their opposition to creative writing. Drawing on the examples of Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and J. M. Coetzee, the chapter demonstrates that interviews have become the quintessential example of uncreative, instrumental, authorial labour. However, in a time in which literature is frequently conceived in opposition to information, interviews also become a productive site for authors to reflect on the nature of literary representation and contemporary creative work. In their opposition to creative writing, interviews can also become an example of ‘uncreative writing’. As information surplus and networked digital computing make traditional, primarily print-based, norms of authorship, creativity, and inscription less tenable, for some of the authors discussed here the interview offers a generative site for exploring new modes of creative expression fit for the twenty-first century.
Coda
Authors: Roach Rebecca
Published: November 2018

This coda looks to the future of the interview. With the advent of so-called Web 2.0 the threshold of public and private is radically shifting. For the interview, historically positioned on this boundary, the possibilities are manifold, if not yet certain. Methodologically, the long-standing dominance of interviewing within the social sciences is being called into question as web-based and social media platforms generate big data pools. The chapter discusses the import of chatbots and formats such as Reddit’s AMA for the interview’s future. It speculates that as the interview method becomes less tethered to data collection, within the literary field it may well become more overtly associated with the life writing tradition, recognized for its aesthetic features and creative possibilities.
Dressing Moses
Authors: Elm Susanna
Published: November 2018

Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses is central to the conceptualization of a perfect Christian life. Especially the second part, theoria, where Gregory provides an extensive allegorical reading of the life of Moses, has been studied in great depth, in particular from the perspective of the unknowability of God, on the soul’s ascent, and questions of mysticism, but also in the context of the late antique priesthood and masculinity more generally. This chapter takes its cue of such discussions to focus instead on the first part, historia, and on a detailed analysis of Moses’ dress to argue that Gregory here wished to intervene in the manner in which elite Christian men and officeholders ought to dress; how they should display their status through clothing, especially in the context of ‘barbarian’ male fashion at a time of heightened tensions regarding the presence of Goths.
Gregory of Nyssa on the Metaphysics of the Trinity (with Reference to his Letter To Ablabius)
Authors: Marmodoro Anna
Published: November 2018

This chapter explores Gregory’s metaphysics of the Trinity, which used an innovative distinction between stuffs (e.g. gold), which cannot be counted, and individuals (e.g. rings), which can. Gregory identifies the nature of any kind with the totality of its instances: the nature of man is the totality of men; the nature of gold is the totality of gold. For Gregory, the totality is more ‘real’ than the individuals into which it is articulated, which are merely the way in which the kind is present in the world. God is then identified as the total quantity of divinity in the world, and is thus one, and real. The Persons of the Trinity into which God is articulated are the ways God is in the world, and can be comprehended by us. Thus, the problem of the Trinity is solved as a special case of the philosophical problem of the One and Many.
The Years of Victory, 1939–1940
Authors: Brodie Thomas
Published: November 2018

This chapter analyses how German Catholics responded to the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, and continues its analysis until the fall of France in summer 1940. It explores how clergymen understood the conflict theologically, and the forms of patriotism embraced by laypeople and clergymen alike to justify involvement in the war. A particular focus of this chapter is on German Catholics’ responses to the Nazi regime’s treatment of Polish co-religionists—both in Poland itself, but also the Rhineland and Westphalia, where many Polish POWs and forced labourers were based as of autumn 1939. This chapter concludes by examining German Catholics’ responses to the defeat of France, and their attitudes at this height of the Nazi regime’s successes. Throughout its analysis, the chapter unpacks the diversity of Catholic perspectives, through the diaries and letters of laypeople as well as the pastoral letters and sermons of the clergy.