bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

This chapter begins by giving examples of the hostility shown by many literary critics to the whole genre of science fiction. Several reasons for this are discussed, and the test case proposed is the early work by H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau. Moreau, it is noted, deliberately and forcefully rejects the authority of respected traditions, including Classical literature, the Latin language itself, and going on to oppose Darwinian theory to the authority of the Bible, in a way which was seen immediately as blasphemous. The novel describes several struggles for authority, against literary tradition and religious belief, against nineteenth-century imperial values, while finally asserting above all the authority of science, which overrides any consideration of the relativity of cultural values.
Introduction
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

Semiotic ghosts, it has been suggested, are the relics of old beliefs, or – in science fiction – past images of the future, now discredited or disproved, but still present as memories, hallucinations. If science fiction describes the could-bes imagined by authors, semiotic ghosts have become the might-have-beens of literary history. This article discusses the many variations on this overall theme as imagined in the work of Bruce Sterling, leading to the concept of Qualified Reality. Sterling is seen also as a practitioner of literary bricolage, insistently taking motifs and images from many sources, and setting them to work in entirely different contexts, with effects so complex as not to be readily described.
Introduction
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

The four authors considered in this chapter are Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of representatives, Kingsley Amis, and (working in collaboration) Harry Harrison, and the author of this book. All four have produced works of alternate history, set in worlds where events took a different turn. It is argued that this sub-genre has very clear rules and sub-rules, well understood by readers and authors of science fiction alike. These rules do not, however, exclude – indeed they encourage and demand – the individual, original and unpredictable. It is argued also that the sub-genre of alternate history exemplifies concepts of literary theory, such as textuality and Derrida’s différance, better than mainstream works on which critics generally focus.
Alternate Historians: Newt, Kingers, Harry and Me
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

The title of this paper may seem, to a linguistic purist, to be already in error.1 It is true that the science fiction sub-genre of ‘alternate worlds’ or ‘alternate histories’ has already been accepted into the canon of possibilities, as defined, for instance, by the ...
Kingsley Amis’s Science Fiction and the Problems of Genre
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

When Kingsley Amis’s first science fiction novel, The Alteration, was published in 1976, it created an immediate problem. Amis was by then a well-established author, and his book had to be reviewed. But though the editors of literary reviews demanded some sort of response from their reviewers, neither in that case nor in the case of Amis’s second science fiction novel, ...
The Golden Bough and the Incorporations of Magic in Science Fiction
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

Magic exists only in the mind. This is the belief that obviously underlies the Oxford English Dictionary’s authoritative definition, that magic is ‘the pretended art of influencing the course of events … by processes supposed to owe their efficacy to the power of compelling the intervention of spiritual beings, or of bringing into operation some occult controlling principle of nature’ (...
Introduction
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

The major irruption of science into modern life has been the development of fission and fusion weapons, which led to the long armed stand-off between powers known as the Cold War, and also to increasing alarm over issues of security. Many stories set bureaucratic attempts to prevent the spread of knowledge, as seen most violently in the paranoia over Russian spies known as McCarthyism, against the nature of scientific discovery, which cannot be readily checked. Some stories argued that once the conditions for discovery were reached, discovery was inevitable. Others presented brains in hiding, whose contribution could not be duplicated. The tension between the two views resembles the tension between the two views of history elsewhere in science fiction.
Variations on Newspeak: The Open Question of Nineteen Eighty-Four
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

In a letter to The Times on 6 January 1984, Professor Bernard Crick, author of George Orwell: A Life (1980) and editor of the Clarendon Press annotated Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), attacked The Times fiercely for having maintained in a previous editorial that the ‘principal message’ of George Orwell’s novel was ‘about the use and abuse of language for political purposes’. This was ‘body-snatching’, he replied (meaning that Orwell, safely dead, was being appropriated to stand for opinions and institutions he would never have tolerated); it led also to ‘a comfortable, distancing reading of the text’. Worst of all, it presented Orwell as a simple writer, ignored the true complexity of ...
Introduction
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

This chapter opens with a study of Robert Heinlein, an author at once extremely patriotic and extremely critical, whose works often display a violent switch of direction: apparently because Heinlein’s core belief was that the American way, while often at fault, was inherently self-correcting. His work was carefully noted and built on by Kim Stanley Robinson, whose “Orange County” trilogy offers three views of a future America: apocalypse, dystopian capitalism, and utopian socialism. Two other works by Tom Disch and Geoff Ryman move the critique of America into the regions of fantasy and perhaps allegory. All the later works demonstrate science fiction’s increasing sophistication in terms of narrative structure.
The Critique of America in Contemporary Science Fiction
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

As with many people of my age, much of my early science fiction experience came from reading the works of Robert A. Heinlein, both his widely distributed ‘juveniles’ and others. It might be more respectful, and would certainly be more unusual, to try to identify the reason for Heinlein’s appeal at that age,...
Introduction
Authors: Shippey Tom
Published: January 2019

This chapter discusses the ways in which anxiety over future war, or trauma over past wars, are reflected in science fiction, from Victorian works inspired by the Franco-Prussian War to works coloured by the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. A central work in the progression is Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, whose ideas and attitudes were nevertheless openly mocked, or more sympathetically put aside, by veteran authors such as Harry Harrison and Joe Haldeman. The subtlety of commentary within the science fiction community is contrasted with the dumbing-down betrayed by the Starship Troopers movies. Once again, science fiction has shown an intellectual ambition well beyond other forms of mass media, and has proved itself, as this book consistently argues, too hard for some: critics, reviewers, film directors. It deserves greater respect.
Francophone Jewish Writers
Authors: Cairns Lucille
Published: January 2019

Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel explores autobiographies, memoirs, and novels written by French-language Jewish writers in order to get an idea of Francophone Jewish imaginings of Israel. Cairns contextualises her analysis of the texts in this book by drawing on social and political history as well as ideas of philosophy, journalism, psychoanalysis and sociology. The book foregrounds the differing emotional investments in Israel coming from both Francophone Jews physically situated in Israel and from diasporic Jews in France, thus investigating the ‘special’ Jewish relationship between the two countries.
Historical Foundations of Israeli Nationhood
Authors: Cairns Lucille
Published: January 2019

This chapter considers texts that inscribe key historical foundations of Israeli nationhood. It looks at significant literary representations of some key constituents in the historical foundations of Israeli nationhood, and includes discussion on Messianism, the early Zionist pioneers, and memories of the Shoah.
Modern Israeli Paradigms of Identity
Authors: Cairns Lucille
Published: January 2019

‘Modern Israeli Paradigms of Identity’ considers how texts inscribe key elements within paradigms of Israeli identity from 1948 onwards and in doing so provides a general discussion of Zionism, the kibbutzim - old and new, and the self-division of diasporic Jews. Also referred to in this chapter is the cult of the ‘New Hebrew’ and the role of the Israeli army in the formation of Israeli identity. Cairns concludes with an exploration of the influence of the Francophone community in inflecting modern Israeli identities and Israel’s perception of France.
Intra-Israeli Conflict
Authors: Cairns Lucille
Published: January 2019

‘Intra-Israeli Conflict’ examines how the primary corpus represents conflict between different ethnic and political demographics among Jews in Israel. Using cognitive science, social psychology, and cognitive psychology, Cairns attempts to understand how and why conflict comes to be. The chapter takes an in-depth view at the immigrants who form the main constituents of Francophone communities in Israel, namely those of Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian descent, and highlights their intra-ethnic differences and the intense emotions felt between them.
Arab–Israeli Conflict
Authors: Cairns Lucille
Published: January 2019

‘Arab–Israeli Conflict’ explores Francophone Jewish writers’ representations of the Israeli-Palestinian/Jewish-Arab conflict. The chapter focuses in particular on the damage caused by the conflict between the two communities, and includes a discussion on the trauma experienced by survivors and victims, as well as Israel’s resulting vulnerability to attack and its subsequent need for constant military vigilance.
The Metaphysics and Poesis of Israel
Authors: Cairns Lucille
Published: January 2019

‘The Metaphysics and Poesis of Israel’ discusses the potency and ambivalence of Jerusalem as an aporetic ideal. It analyses the many connections relating to Israel, including those between the state of Israel and the Arab-Muslim world; Israelis and Palestinians; diasporic Jews and Israelis; religious and secular Israelis; and finally Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Mizrahi Israelis. The chapter also considers the image of Israel as marked by madness as well as the significance of the Hebrew language. Cairns concludes with a consideration on the frontier between Israelis living within internationally recognized Israeli boundaries and those living in the Occupied Territories.
Coping with Contemporariness
Authors: Rousso Henry
Published: January 2019

‘Coping with Contemporariness’, written by Henry Rousso, is the first chapter within the ‘Conceptualizing the Contemporary’ section. This essay inquires into the meaning of writing contemporary history and deconstructs its definitional boundaries as a category and practice, decoupling it conceptually from relation terms in order to historicize the field of contemporary history in the French academy.
(After) Conceptualism
Authors: Noland Carrie
Published: January 2019

‘(After) Conceptualism: Contemporaneity in Choreography’, written by Carrie Noland, is the last essay in the ‘Conceptualizing the Contemporary’ section, and investigates the study of cutting-edge conceptual choreography and dance performance as an index of contemporaneity. Noland provides a consideration of what comes after the contemporary and assesses performance as a test case for a broader inquiry into the notion of being contemporary.
The Paradoxes of Being Contemporary
Authors: Kritzman Lawrence D.
Published: January 2019

‘The Paradoxes of Being Contemporary’, written by Lawrence D. Kritzman, addresses contemporary crises in the United States. The essay activates Derrida’s reflections on force and justice to think through our contemporary moment, using the 2014 events in Ferguson, Missouri as bellwether for Derridean political philosophy, and building on the philosopher’s work on apartheid in South Africa and the undocumented in France. Kritzman also assesses Derrida’s political praxis within his theoretical and ethical speculations, and demonstrates his vision of responsibility and political engagement as a negotiation between contradictory and irreconcilable demands.
Alain Badiou and Antisemitism
Authors: Samuels Maurice
Published: January 2019

‘Alain Badiou and Anti-Semitism’, written by Maurice Samuels, focuses on current French debates over the ‘new anti-Semitism.’ In his essay, Samuels identifies the resurgence of anti-Semitism as one of the defining features of the contemporary moment in France, and through a series of close readings of Badiou’s writings, explores the ways in which Badiou’s positions on Jewish issues produce what he calls an ‘anti-Semitic effect.’
What Does ‘Vichy’ Mean Now?
Authors: Golsan Richard J.
Published: January 2019

‘What does ‘Vichy’ Mean Now?’, written by Richard J. Golsan, is the first essay in the section, ‘The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives’, and offers an analysis of the changing signification of Vichy in the twenty-first-century imaginary. In his exploration of the Vichy period, Golsan navigates between past and present, bridging contemporary concerns and their origins. Combining a rigorous assessment of political and cultural debates, recent French laws, and new fiction, Golsan contends that the memory of Vichy has become dangerously allegorized, ‘ossified’, and ‘unmoored from historical realities.’
Narrative, Testimony, Fiction
Authors: Lothe Jakob
Published: January 2019

‘Narrative, Testimony, Fiction: The Challenge of Not Forgetting the Holocaust’, written by Jakob Lothe, explores the individual unconscious and its relationship to collective memory. In his essay, Lothe posits the interrelation between memory and forgetting as emblematic of Holocaust testimonies and fictional narratives, and serves to remind us of the epiphenomenal relationships to be found, and cultivated, across survivor literature.
‘La Connaissance par corps’
Authors: Sheringham Michael
Published: January 2019

‘‘La Connaissance par corps’: Writing and Self-Exposure in Annie Ernaux’, written by Michael Sheringham, offers an interpretive framework through which the past and the present in L’Evénement are constantly exposed to each another, thus implicitly commenting on the peculiar contemporaneity of the autobiographical text, and of self-representation.
Choices: Beckett’s Way
Authors: McDonald Christie
Published: January 2019

Choices: Beckett’s Way, written by Christie McDonald, articulates reinvestment in Proust, and meditates on choice within constraint, and how life becomes art. The interweaving of art, text, music, and the act of rereading run throughout McDonald’s essay as it examines three works by Beckett that critique, invoke, or indirectly relate to Proust.
Making L’Etranger Contemporary
Authors: Kaplan Alice
Published: January 2019

‘Making L’Etranger Contemporary: Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête’, written by Alice Kaplan, completes the ‘Novel Rereadings’ section and highlights another facet of rereading by offering a critique of a recent polemical Algerian novel. Through this critique, Kaplan assesses official history and language politics in contemporary Algeria.
A Nest in the Air
Authors: Bouju Emmanuel
Published: January 2019

‘A Nest in the Air: Phantom Pain and Contemporary Narrative’, written by Emmanuel Bouju, is the first in the ‘Memory: Past and Future’ section, and provides a study on the intersection of new narrative and contemporary medical theories. Bouju’s essay posits contemporary European novels about loss and trauma as textual iterations of the ‘mirror-box’— a contraption designed by neuroscience researchers in order to permit amputees to visualize their missing limb through specular inversion, thus attenuating pain by imaginary muscular exercise of the phantom limb. Similarly, for Bouju, the ‘mirror-box of fiction’ allows for a certain form of ‘resolution, through make-believe, of the intractable problem of representation.’
Adrien and Marcel Proust
Authors: Jenson Deborah
Published: January 2019

‘Adrien and Marcel Proust: Fathering Neurasthenic Memory’, written by Deborah Jenson, offers a reinvestment in Proust and foregrounds ideas of Proust as a memory icon by reading the ‘fictions of the son’ against the ‘theories of the father.’ In refiguring Marcel Proust as a ‘memory patient,’ Jenson argues that the author’s ‘singular attention to … the complex storage and retrieval engineering of memory processes’ was developed through his relationship to his father, a theorist of neurasthenic memory.
Vulnerable Times
Authors: Hirsch Marianne
Published: January 2019

‘Vulnerable Times’, written by Marianne Hirsch, is the concluding chapter in both the ‘Memory: Past and Future’ and the volume itself. The essay reconsiders theories of trauma and memory, as well as recent critiques of trauma studies, through the frame of the contemporary. Through her engagement with several writers and artists whose work enacts not only traumatic events but also their transmission, Hirsch asks whether ‘the retrospective glance of trauma can be expanded and redirected to open alternate temporalities that might be more porous and future-oriented.’
Introduction
Authors: Kawakami Akane
Published: January 2019

This chapter introduces Patrick Modiano, as a Nobel-Prize winner but also as an author who has been consistently read and loved ever since his first novel was published in 1968. The enduring themes of his novels – memory and forgetting, forgotten existences, time, Paris, and the Occupation – are discussed briefly as constants also in his most recent work, which are nevertheless characterized by a number of new developments.
Degree Zero Voices: The Empty Narrator
Authors: Kawakami Akane
Published: January 2019

This chapter introduces the concept of the empty narrator, based on Gérard Genette’s theories of ‘voice’; Modiano’s narrators, although they speak in the first person, are paradoxically lacking in information, authority and identity. The all-knowing, self-assured first-person narrator familiar to us from Proust is replaced in Modiano by an unreliable and diffident voice, at times even suffering from amnesia, in both male and female guises. I suggest that this is a postmodern take on the concept of the narrator, which leads us to question the ways in which the first-person narrative has become a form associated with the search for and creation of the self.
Disorderly Narratives: The Order of Narration
Authors: Kawakami Akane
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the order in which events are related in Modiano’s novels; based on Genette’s narratological categories, the analysis shows how Modiano’s narratives are organized around an order based on the psychology of the narrator, rather than chronology or narrative logic. This is why the apparent resemblance of some of his novels to detective stories is, in the final analysis, illusory; it is also why they have an interestingly contrastive relationship to histories, biographies and autobiographies. The chapter ends by suggesting that Modiano’s ‘disorderly’ narration subverts our notions of chronological or historical order, preferring instead the ‘disorders’ of affective or psychological organisations of reality.
Unreal Stories: The ‘effet d’irréel’
Authors: Kawakami Akane
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the apparent ‘realism’ of Modiano’s writing, and shows how it in fact subverts – gently, as is always the case in Modiano – the ‘effet de réel’ model, described by Barthes, of a realist prose based on accumulation of detail. In Modiano’s narratives, details proliferate to a point at which the mood of the narrative tips beyond the real into the unreal or surreal; geographical precisions about certain areas of Paris, for instance, accumulate to create an unreal Paris which divorces the representation from the referent. The chapter ends with a consideration of Modiano’s views on photography as an alternative mode of representation, and his use of it within his narratives with specific reference to the representation of reality.
Being a Woman: Mothers and Lovers
Authors: Kawakami Akane
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the increasingly important role of female characters in Modiano’s novels of the 90s onwards, who divide roughly into two types: mothers and lovers. The chapter argues that Modiano’s interest in the young female lover figure has its roots in his failure to satisfactorily identify the ‘real’ Dora (ever since he was inspired to write a novel based on her, Voyage de noces, in 1990). As for the mother, the chapter suggests that it was the cathartic writing of the quasi-autobiographical Accident nocturne and the explicitly autobiographical Un pedigree that seems to have freed Modiano to write more nuanced and complex portraits of mothers in his more recent work. Last but not least, Modiano’s recent use of female narrators is examined in detail.
A return to the origins
Authors: Martínez del Campo Luis G.
Published: January 2019

I analyse how the changes within the Spanish Embassy in London caused the reorganisation of the League of Friendship in a new Anglo-Spanish Society, which became a non-political institution. After the BSS rejected its previous ideological bias, its members focused on the advocacy of Spanish language and culture in the UK. I also describe the financial difficulties the Society had to face in this period.
Nota del autor
Authors: Martínez del Campo Luis G.
Published: January 2019

En 1916, se cumplía el tercer centenario de la muerte de las dos “glorias literarias” de Inglaterra y España: William Shakespeare y Miguel de Cervantes. A pesar del contexto bélico, las autoridades diplomáticas británicas y españolas aprovecharon este aniversario para realizar una serie de actos conmemorativos y mejorar sus relaciones bilaterales. A finales de ese año, y como complemento a estas celebraciones, se creaba la Anglo-Spanish Society, que, desde entonces, ha contribuido a estrechar los lazos culturales entre ambos países....
De vuelta a su origen
Authors: Martínez del Campo Luis G.
Published: January 2019

Los cambios que se produjeron al frente tanto de la Embajada española en Londres como de la Liga de la Amistad marcaron el inicio de una nueva época en la historia de la asociación. El recién nombrado presidente, John Balfour, planteó una reorganización de la institución para recuperar algunos de sus principios originales, asegurar su estabilidad financiera y limitar su campo de acción a actividades culturales y educativas....
La Anglo-Spanish Society y la democracia
Authors: Martínez del Campo Luis G.
Published: January 2019

En 1973, Hugh Ellis-Rees abandonaba la presidencia de la asociación, que había alcanzado cierta estabilidad durante la última década. Corrían vientos favorables, ya que los cambios políticos que en ese momento se perfilaban en España iban a facilitar la labor de la institución. Y es que el final del régimen de Franco trajo consigo una coyuntura más propicia para el desarrollo de las relaciones hispano-británicas. Por un lado, la transición española a la democracia fue vista con buenos ojos por la opinión pública del Reino Unido. Por el otro, los servicios diplomáticos españoles se adaptaron a las nuevas circunstancias, renovando parcialmente su personal. Al morir el dictador, el entonces embajador español en Londres, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, regresó a Madrid para asumir responsabilidades de gobierno, siendo remplazado interinamente por su tocayo Manuel Gómez Acebo. A partir de 1976, el aristócrata Luis Guillermo de Perinat se puso al frente de la Embajada para afrontar el reto de transformación que los tiempos exigían. En este contexto, la sociedad continuó progresando con firmeza....
Epílogo
Authors: Martínez del Campo Luis G.
Published: January 2019

En estas páginas, hemos analizado la historia de la Anglo-Spanish Society y el papel que desempeñó en las relaciones entre el Reino Unido y España durante el siglo XX. A pesar de ser una organización apolítica, los gobiernos de ambos países trataron de controlarla porque atribuyeron cierta utilidad a la cultura en el terreno diplomático. En una primera época, esta institución sirvió a los intereses de la Foreign Office y tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, pasó a estar controlada por la Embajada española en Londres....
Ecology and Environmental Awareness in 1960s–1970s Terraforming Stories
Authors: Pak Chris
Published: January 2019

Terraforming and its destructive ecological impact began to receive greater attention in the light of environmentalism in the 1960s-1970s. This chapter draws attention to the links between the utopian imagination, the pastoral, and the notion of the communard, a concept that was re-voiced in “New Age” environmentalist discourse. The first section compares and contrasts several significant proto-Gaian works while the second explores terraforming narratives that re-work the 1950s tradition. Citing Val Plumwood’s analysis of dualistic operations in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, the conflict between colonising forces and indigenous populations is considered. This section argues that the popular ecological image of connection and the theme of love is a symbolic attempt to bridge the hyperseparation between dualised concepts; between coloniser and colonised, nature and culture.
Traces of War
Authors: Davis Colin
Published: January 2019

The legacy of the Second World War remains unsettled; no consensus has been achieved about its meaning and its lasting impact. This is pre-eminently the case in France, where the experience of defeat and occupation created the grounds for a deeply ambiguous mixture of resistance and collaboration, pride and humiliation, heroism and abjection, which writers and politicians have been trying to disentangle ever since. This book develops a theoretical approach which draws on trauma studies and hermeneutics; and it then focuses on some of the intellectuals who lived through the war and on how their experience and troubled memories of it continue to echo through their later writing, even and especially when it is not the explicit topic. This was an astonishing generation of writers who would go on to play a pivotal role on a global scale in post-war aesthetic and philosophical endeavours. The book proposes close readings of works by some of the most brilliant amongst them: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Charlotte Delbo, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel, and Sarah Kofman.
Traumatic Hermeneutics
Authors: Davis Colin
Published: January 2019

The chapter develops the notion of ‘traumatic hermeneutics’, which focusses on the problems of interpretation raised by trauma and traumatized writing, when the signs of pain may be far removed from the manifest material available to the interpreter. The chapter considers work in psychoanalysis and neuroscience, and also texts by survivors Semprun and Delbo, to demonstrate the inevitable risks and potential gains of interpretation when faced with texts which reveal or conceal trauma.
Strangling Angel
Authors: Dwyer Michael
Published: January 2019

This book is the first comprehensive history of the anti-diphtheria campaign and the factors which facilitated or hindered the rollout of the national childhood immunization programme in Ireland. It is easy to forget the context in which Irish society opted to embrace mass childhood immunization. Dwyer shows us how we got where we are. He restores Diphtheria’s reputation as one of the most prolific child-killers of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland and explores the factors which allowed the disease to take a heavy toll on child health and life-expectancy. Public health officials in the fledgling Irish Free State set the eradication of diphtheria among their first national goals, and eschewing the reticence of their British counterparts, adopted anti-diphtheria immunization as their weapon of choice. An unofficial alliance between Irish medical officers and the British pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome placed Ireland on the European frontline of the bacteriological revolution, however, Wellcome sponsored vaccine trials in Ireland side-lined the human rights of Ireland’s most vulnerable citizens: institutional children in state care. An immunization accident in County Waterford, and the death of a young girl, raised serious questions regarding the safety of the immunization process itself, resulting in a landmark High Court case and the Irish Medical Union’s twelve-year long withdrawal of immunization services. As childhood immunization is increasingly considered a lifestyle choice, rather than a lifesaving intervention, this book brings historical context to bear on current debate.
Introduction
Authors: Dwyer Michael
Published: January 2019

Prior to the mass social acceptance of childhood immunization in the 1940s, diphtheria was one of the most prolific child killers in history. The formation of a leathery membrane in the lower airways induced death by suffocation and earned diphtheria the moniker ‘strangling angel of children’. It showed scant regard for social status and infiltrated Europe’s royal palaces as sinuously as her slums and hovels. For parents and children of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland, diphtheria represented the ‘most dreaded disease of childhood’ however, for their modern-day counterparts’ diphtheria has been relegated to a somewhat obscure disease. Few Irish doctors have seen a case of diphtheria, let alone treated one. In Ireland, diphtheria has been consigned to history, and so too have the horrors and mass fatalities once associated with it. But how was this achieved? Was active immunization received with open arms by public health authorities, the wider medical community, and the general public? This book tackles these questions by undertaking the first historical examination of the issues that underpin the origins of active immunization in Ireland. It explores the driving forces that shaped the national childhood immunization programme, and those that opposed them. In addition, it examines the complex social implications attendant on the introduction of this mass public health intervention.
Conclusion
Authors: Dwyer Michael
Published: January 2019

This book is important as it is the first comprehensive study of the origins of the childhood immunization programme in Ireland. It portrays Irish public health authorities as being progressive regarding their willingness to accept and employ new public health initiatives, and importantly, it highlights how this attitude differed from the sluggish response of their British counterparts. The book explores the radical public health interventions which pitted efforts to achieve communal health against the rights of the individual. It presents a historical precedent where the actions of one medical practitioner undermined public confidence in the immunization process itself. In an era when childhood immunization is increasingly considered more of a lifestyle choice than a lifesaving intervention, this book may bring some historical context to bear on a current public health debate.
Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies Publication Peers and Analytical Antagonists
Authors: Runia Robin
Published: January 2019

This chapter reexamines Maria Edgeworth’s relationship to Thomas Day through the lens of her intended first publication of de Genlis and of Edgeworth’s careful engagement with his Sandford and Merton to demonstrate that Edgeworth rejected perceived essential association between women and emotion or intellectual inferiority and that she denied domestic utility in arguments on behalf of a woman’s education that went beyond the typical feminine accomplishments. In addition, Edgeworth targeted Mary Wollstonecraft’s endorsement of Day through her deliberate 1798 revision of Letters for Literary Ladies and its invocation of Wollstonecraft’s ‘rights,’ exemplifying the potential for women writers to speak to their peers, both women and men, while they negotiated the business of eighteenth-century publishing.
Baskerville’s Birmingham
Authors: Hinks John
Published: January 2019

Using Peter Borsay's idea of an English Urban Renaissance, alongside other ideas including the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, this chapter discusses the context within which Baskerville and other provincial printers worked during the eighteenth century. The Printing (Licensing) Act had restricted printing to London, Oxford and Cambridge; its lapse in 1695 allowed printing to develop in other provincial towns, though London continued to dominate the trade. Birmingham, as a manorial town, was free of the trade restrictions which operated in incorporated towns and printers and other businessmen were free to set up in business without formality. The context of Birmingham as a developing industrial town is outlined and cultural aspects of the town's history are discussed.
Place, Home and Workplace
Authors: Demidowicz George
Published: January 2019

John Baskerville’s place of birth in Wolverley, Worcestershire and the buildings where he lived and worked in Birmingham have never been subjected to systematic historical investigation. This chapter attempts to address this omission and is divided into two parts: ‘A New Birthplace for John Baskerville’ and ‘The Buildings of John Baskerville in Birmingham’. A combination of archival research, topographical analysis and archaeological evidence is used to provide a clearer picture of where he was born and the location and nature of his residences and business premises. New Baskerville material corrects traditional accounts and enhances our knowledge and understanding of his background in Wolverley and Birmingham. His modest rather than previously supposed gentry status in Wolverley helps explain why he left for Birmingham and perhaps why he revealed little of his origins once he had established himself as one of the town’s leading industrialists. The uncovering of the sequence of his places of work and residence in Birmingham charts his rise to become one of the leading printers of the time, casting light on the manner of this progress and the opportunities available to an able and ambitious young man newly arrived in a rapidly industrialising town.
Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature
Authors: Juárez-Almendros Encarnación
Published: January 2019

The book examines, from the perspective of feminist disability theories, the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses in order to show how these inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of the female embodiment. The book also examines concrete representations of deviant female characters, with a focus in the figure of the syphilitic prostitute and the physically decayed aged women, in a variety of literary texts such Celestina, Lozana andaluza and selected works by Cervantes and Quevedo. The analysis of the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila, a nun suffering neurological disorders, complements the discussion of early modern women’s disability. By expanding the meanings of present materiality/social construction disability theories, the book concludes that femininity, bodily afflictions, and mental instability characterize the new literary heroes in paradoxical contrast with the Spanish apex of imperial power. The broken female bodies of pre-industrial Spanish literature reveal the cracks in the foundational principles of established masculine truths such as physical and moral integrity and religious and ethnic intolerance.
Historical Testimony of Female Disability: The Neurological Impairment of Teresa de Ávila
Authors: Juárez-Almendros Encarnación
Published: January 2019

The objective of this chapter is to study Libro de la vida (The Book of Her Life), the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila (1515-1582), a nun suffering neurological disorders, possibly epilepsy, in order to demonstrate how the author creates a textual resistance to external labelling and social segregation. In her autobiography, Teresa explains her frequent physical problems in relation to mystical graces, involuntary and uncontrollable raptures, beatific and devilish visions, hearing of voices and prophetic messages. In a period in which both the experience of epilepsy and of having visions were stigmatized and suspected of devilish intervention in women weaken body and soul, Teresa successfully defends her right to explain her own body occurrences contravening the accepted explanations.
The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture
Authors: Solheim Jennifer
Published: January 2019

The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture argues That globalized media has allowed for efficient transmission of transnational culture, and in turn, our everyday experiences are informed by sounds ranging from voices, to music, to advertising, to bombs, and beyond. In considering cultural works from French-speaking North Africa and the Middle East all published or released in France from 1962-2011, Solheim’s study of listening across cultural genres will be of interest to any scholar or lay person interested in contemporary postcolonial France. This book is also a primer to contemporary Francophone culture from North Africa and the Middle East. Some of the French-speaking world’s most renowned and adored artists are the subject of this study, including preeminent Algerian feminist novelist, filmmaker and historian Assia Djebar (1936-2015), the first writer of the Maghreb to become part of the Académie Française; celebrated Iranian graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis, Chicken with Plums); the lauded Lebanese-Québecois playwright and dramaturge Wajdi Mouawad (Littorial, Incendies), and Lebanese comic artist and avant jazz trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, whose improvisation with Israeli fighter jets during the 2006 Israeli War, “Starry Night,” catapulted him to global recognition. An interdisciplinary study of contemporary Francophone cultures, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in literary studies, performance studies, gender studies, anthropology, history, and ethnomusicology.
Introduction
Authors: Solheim Jennifer
Published: January 2019

I introduce the call to listen, the term she has coined for the cultural phenomenon in French texts of North African and Middle East origins that portray characters and figures listening as a narrative strategy across cultural media to bring forth stories of marginalized experience. I also introduce sounding, the central methodologies in The Performance of Listening, which is situated in Francophone studies, performance studies, and to a smaller degree sound studies. An overview of the social, political, and cultural stakes of these works, which span from the 1960s through 2010, includes Tahar Ben Jelloun, Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and J.M.G. LeClézio. Issues include feminism, the question and definition of Francophonie, French Republicanism (or universalism), laïcité, mixité, postcolonialism, and subalterity.
Covering French Universalism
Authors: Solheim Jennifer
Published: January 2019

Readings of the CD liner notes of Idir’s Identités (1999) and the lyrics to his song ‘La France des couleurs’ [‘The France of Colors’] (2007) as well as the memoir The Veil of Silence by feminist singer-songwriter Djura (1991), demonstrate how these musicians of Algerian-Kabyle origin have created an alter-globalist culture within French world music. Kabyle music in French is often introduced to the public with a ‘split consciousness,’ with one address to a French-speaking audience and another to a Kabyle audience. While this split consciousness in framing can be seen as a conscious act of promotion, it also creates the rhetorical problem that Abdelkebir Khatibi might call dédoublement, a splitting and fragmentation of public identity. Nonetheless, I argue, Idir and Djura play ably on universalist representations of North African immigrants in France—the men as violent toward and oppressive of women, the women as either victims or complicit aggressors toward other women—in order to call these representations into question. These artists offer an alternative vision of French universalism—an act of ‘covering,’ or reinterpreting French universalism, much like one interprets a song in a cover version. The alter-globalist ‘cover’ expands the definition of French to include a range of languages and cultural practices.
Assia Djebar
Authors: Hiddleston Jane
Published: January 2019

Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria is a book about expatriation, and the constant, necessary revisiting that follows. In the book, Hiddleston seeks to conceptualise Djebar’s progressive struggle and dissatisfaction with the notion of Algerian identity by referring to a number of contemporary theoretical concepts. Hiddleston’s analysis of the Djebar’s gradual and partial ‘expatriation’ is shaped heavily by the writer’s participation in crossroads between French philosophy, multiple Algerian traditions, and Anglo-American postcolonial theory. The study also situates Djebar’s thinking in recent French philosophy, making connections between her understanding of subjectivity and individuation and those produced by contemporary thinkers working in France.
Conclusion
Authors: Hiddleston Jane
Published: January 2019

This concluding chapter gives a final comment on Djebar’s development as a writer and her methods of writing. It focuses on her representation of the suffering felt by Algeria, and the ways in which war and loss can affect identity and belonging.
Patrick Chamoiseau
Authors: McCusker Maeve
Published: January 2019

This study discusses how the ways in which Chamoiseau’s work attempts to recover (bring back) the memory of the past have contributed to a collective and individual coming to terms with, and, potentially, a recovery from its effects. In bringing the theme of memory to the forefront of her analysis, and in considering this highly memorial writing alongside work done in a wider context, McCusker generates insights which have resonance in the broader field of postcolonial literary studies. The first and last chapters focus on a single work, Chronique des sept misères and Biblique des derniers gestes respectively, with the chapters in-between counterpointing several texts, so as to suggest recurring and significant themes and issues on Chamoiseau’s literature.
Beginnings: The Enigma of Origin
Authors: McCusker Maeve
Published: January 2019

This first chapter argues that Chamoiseau’s first novel, Chronique des sept misères, constitutes an extended meditation on the notion of ‘beginnings’, announcing and crystallizing many of the ideas explored in later works. It also introduces trauma theory as a way of exploring the presentation of slavery in the text.
Afterword
Authors: McCusker Maeve
Published: January 2019

In the transition that has been traced in this monograph, from an æsthetics of re-collection and transcription to a poetics of materiality, the body has emerged as a primary site of both fictional and autobiographical memory, an archive and an active witness. It is appropriate that this study should end with further consideration of ...
The Lure of Celtic Languages, 1850–1914
Authors: Charles-Edwards T. M.
Published: January 2019

‘The Lure of Celtic Languages, 1850–1914’, written by T. M. Charles-Edwards, asks what drew Johann Caspar Zeuss and Holger Pederson to work on the Celtic and what, more importantly, kept them working in this field even after, very often, their initial concerns had been satisfied.
Nature, Masculinity, and Suffering Women The Remaking of the Flower and the Leaf and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Phillips Helen
Published: January 2019

‘Nature, Masculinity, and Suffering Women: The Remaking of the Flower and the Leaf and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women in the Nineteenth Century’, written by Helen Philips, examines particular links between Chaucer the Nature poet and gender issues in the Nineteenth Century.
Riding with Robin Hood
Authors: Marshall John
Published: January 2019

‘Riding with Robin Hood: English Pageantry and the Making of a Legend’, written by John Marshall, address the character of Robin Hood – whether fact or fiction – and his contribution to the outlaw narrative in the middle ages. In this chapter, Marshall also defines the ways in which visualizations of Robin Hood in terms of character, costume and scenery, have created an image and evocation of the middle ages. While no doubt one of the best-known and most enduring secular figures in the western world known for adventures that epitomized the middle ages, this essay attempts to determine how closely the tales of Robin Hood adhered to medieval themes.
Early Nineteenth-Century Liverpool Collectors of Late Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts
Authors: Morris Edward
Published: January 2019

‘Early Nineteenth-Century Liverpool Collectors of Late Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts’, written by Edward Morris, describes the pioneering phase of the collecting of illuminated manuscripts that began in the early nineteenth century and came to an end in the mid-nineteenth century.
Belonging and European Identity
Authors: Stråth Bo
Published: January 2019

This chapter, the first in the ‘Theoretical Perspectives on Belonging’ section outlines a framework within which to understand the processes that have led to narratives of national and European belonging, and explores the exclusionary tensions upon which they are predicated. It was written by Bo Stråth, distinguished Professor in Nordic, European and World History at Helsinki University, whose research focuses on the issue of modernity of Europe in a comparative context.
Dilemmas of Secularism: Europe, Religion and the Problem of Pluralism
Authors: Delanty Gerard
Published: January 2019

Gerald Delanty’s ‘Dilemmas of Secularism: Europe, Religion and the Problem of Pluralism’ argues that contemporary discussions of migration, exclusion, and belonging must be understood in the context of broader tensions around religion, secularism, and transformations in the liberal conception of the social order.
What Space for Migrant Voices in European Anti-Racism?
Authors: Aykaç Çağla E.
Published: January 2019

Çaǧla E. Aykaç’s ‘What Space for Migrant Voices in European Anti-Racism?’ investigates the development of a critical policy analysis of the European Union.
Towards a Theory of Structural Discrimination: Cultural, Institutional and Interactional Mechanisms of the ‘European Dilemma’
Authors: Burns Tom R.
Published: January 2019

Tom R. Burns’ ‘Towards a Theory of Structural Discrimination: Cultural, Institutional and Interactional Mechanisms of the ‘European Dilemma’’ draws on a wide range of material in order to interrogate the concepts of structural and institutional discrimination, which the author argues are particularly pertinent concepts when attempting to understand the nature of the discrimination faced by many migrants.
Non-Place Identity: Britain’s Response to Migration in the Age of Supermodernity
Authors: Hanauer David Ian
Published: January 2019

Chapter ten, written by David Ian Hanauer, uses the controversial cultural component of UK ‘citizenship criteria’ – the so-called ‘Britishness test’ – to draw out general themes of migration, territoriality and national identity relative to the nation-state.