bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Interlude: Translating
Authors: Ryan Derek
Published: May 2022

‘Much of Anglophone modernism was constituted by translation’ (Piette 2018: 371). In his entry on ‘Translation’ in The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism, Adam Piette underlines the dizzying array of cultural and linguistic translation activity that influenced or was produced by modernists, primarily, though not exclusively, in Britain and Ireland. As Piette recounts here, and more fully in his introduction to an earlier special issue on ‘Modernism and Translation’ for ...
On Unknowing French? Rhythm and Le Rythme on a Cross-Channel Exchange
Authors: Davison Claire
Published: May 2022

Early-twentieth-century British intellectuals are usually considered reliable guides to new French rhythms arriving from over the Channel and encapsulating soundly modernist aesthetics. Near transparent spelling of many key notions and concepts in the two languages further enhances such convictions. Whether evoking Bergson, the Ballets russes, or Post-Impressionism, ‘rythme’ is instantly translated ‘rhythm’, and accorded due respect . But can language really cross borders unscathed? Not according to Woolf, who in ‘On Not Knowing French’ reminds her (French) readership that ‘nobody knows French but the French themselves’ (EVW5: 5).
Recontextualising and redefining ‘rhythm’ in early-twentieth century French academic and intellectual circles, this chapter explores what’s at stake when ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’ French. ‘Rythme’ suddenly proves rather different, and decidedly less vibrant. Setting tside-by-side the little magazine Rythme and the now iconic Rhythm, both launched in spring 1911 in the Latin Quarter where new rhythms supposedly flourished, it compares iconography, editorial policy, contributors, and arts coverage. It then turns to definitions and examples of ‘rythme’ in Bergson’s key works, French music and musicology, tracing what might be one of the most serendipitous misunderstandings of Anglophone Modernism.
Betray to Become: Departure in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Authors: Toth Naomi
Published: May 2022

Leaving family, faith and fatherland is both an act of betrayal and a condition for creation in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This article situates the hero’s final departure from Ireland in the economy of betrayal staged within this künstelroman, an economy in which the surplus value is the work of art itself. This art does not, however, transcend this economy; it neither cancels out nor neutralises betrayal. Rather, it is imagined as perpetuating the very processes that engendered it. Betrayal is first discussed as a moment within the temporal movement of belief, the adhesive essential to the construction of individual and collective identities. It is then analysed as key to the dialectical relationship between concealing and revealing secrets in the text, where it is linked to motifs of confession and to figures of the artist as priest and confessor. This allows us to see why departure forms the condition for writing only the self, but also the rejected nation. Indeed, writing Ireland involves the unauthorised exposure of the secret confessions of the ‘bat-like’ national soul, confessions that can only be extracted by adopting the posture of the outsider, the one on the other side of the confessional’s lattice, on the other side of the Irish Sea. The writer is then to narrate the obscure secrets of the national community in order to decompose it, all the while recognising membership of the nation whose confidence he betrays. This sheds light on why, in Joyce’s early work, departure, while necessary, can never be complete nor final. Betrayal thereby proves a useful prism through which to re-read the importance of exile in Joyce’s conception of literary creation and in modernist crossings more broadly.
Interlude: Mediating
Authors: Goldman Jane
Published: May 2022

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Coda: ‘You, who cross the Channel’: Virginia Woolf, Departures and the Spectro-Aesthetics of Modernism
Authors: Muscogiuri Patrizia A.
Published: May 2022

In Woolf’s writings, the sea and the marginal space of the coast unexpectedly bring about the apparition of material aspects of history – gunfire, warships, the war departed – remarkably prefiguring the Derridean notion of the spectre as political dead. From aural haunting to vision, a Derridean spectro-aesthetics arises here in the context of a cross-Channel modernism troubled by the carnage and futility of war. Touching on Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), in constellation with works by Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Mulk J. Anand, C.R.W. Nevinson, among others, this chapter draws on three cross-Channel essays by Woolf: ‘Heard on the Downs: The Genesis of Myth’ (1916), ‘The Royal Academy’ (1919), ‘To Spain’ (1923). It recontextualises Woolf’s wartime/post-war writings about the Great War, Channel-crossing, sound, hearing, bodies, the visual arts. Woolf’s historical-materialist treatment of the sea merges history with vision in ways departing from, and subverting, the visual rhetoric prescribed by the British War Propaganda Bureau to official war artists. The Channel was used as political barrier during WWI, facilitating state suppression of information whilst pacifist voices were silenced. Woolf’s strategic liminal stance is informed, instead, by a cross-Channel perspective that is historical, political, aesth-ethical.
Introduction
Authors: Bacon Henry , Laine Kimmo , Seppälä Jaakko , Bacon Henry , Laine Kimmo , Seppälä Jaakko
Published: May 2022

After briefly introducing the background of the Latvian Theodor Tugai, who after starting a career in filmmaking in Finland changed his name to Teuvo Tulio, current debate on melodrama is examined from the point of view of its relevance for our understanding of his art. The introduction concludes with a summary of the structure of the study
Tulio and Traditions of Melodrama
Authors: Bacon Henry , Laine Kimmo , Seppälä Jaakko , Bacon Henry , Laine Kimmo , Seppälä Jaakko
Published: May 2022

Some of the major traditions of melodrama that can be considered to have influenced Tulio or which form pertinent parallels or points of comparison are examined in relation to his own brand of melodrama. These traditions are romantic opera, nineteenth-century melodrama, silent cinema, European film melodrama of the 1940s and American film melodrama of the 1950s. Each tradition and its relevance to our understanding of Tulio is explored in terms of five crucial aspects of melodrama: pathos, overwrought emotions, moral polarisation, non-classical narrative structure and sensationalism.
Outsider as an Independent Filmmaker
Authors: Bacon Henry , Laine Kimmo , Seppälä Jaakko , Bacon Henry , Laine Kimmo , Seppälä Jaakko
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses the modes of film production in Finland during the studio era. Most of Tulio’s films were made at a time when Finnish film trade was dominated by a few vertically integrated companies. Operating as an independent producer outside of these companies required imagination and inventiveness. Among Tulio’s survival tactics were the avoidance of large sets, use of amateur actors, as well as recycling of shots and music from his previous films. Furthermore, Tulio made both Finnish and Swedish language versions of most of his films, aiming to reach also the Scandinavian markets.
All that Melodrama Allows – Tulio’s Films and Principal Obsessions
Authors: Bacon Henry , Laine Kimmo , Seppälä Jaakko , Bacon Henry , Laine Kimmo , Seppälä Jaakko
Published: May 2022

Tulio’s entire surviving cinematic output is explored in terms of his principal obsessions: temptation and reconciliation; loss of innocence; mad jealousy, destructive passions, and female decadence. Two films are discussed as examples of anomalous side tracks of his career. The examination follows a rough chronological order thus allowing for tracking how his approach gradually became increasingly excessive and how he gradually lost his appreciative audience. Major emphasis is given to the development of his highly idiosyncratic visual style as well as to the constant recirculation narrative themes.
Tulio’s Legacy
Authors: Bacon Henry , Laine Kimmo , Seppälä Jaakko , Bacon Henry , Laine Kimmo , Seppälä Jaakko
Published: May 2022

This chapter provides an overview on how Tulio’s films have been received at different periods. Though never an unambiguous figure, in his early career Tulio was generally regarded as a welcome innovator within Finnish cinema. From the late 1940s on, critics had more and more mixed feelings about Tulio’s excessive and sensationalist melodramas. However, after hitting a low point in the 1960s and 1970s, Tulio’s critical reputation started gradually to rise again. This chapter charts the ups and downs of Tulio’s critical standing, from fame to oblivion and finally to an established cult figure
William Gladstone Reads His Contemporaries
Authors: Ferguson Christopher
Published: May 2022

W. E. Gladstone brought in twelve budgets and served as Prime Minister four times, yet he never described himself as a politician: he was more than that. Whether in or out of office, Gladstone always engaged in wider debates about religion, history, and classical and modern literature, an engagement which expressed itself in a daily quota of correspondence and, above all, reading. Using Gladstone’s diaries and the copious marginalia in his library of over thirty thousand volumes, this chapter is the first to engage in detail with Gladstone’s marginalia as significant indices of the nuanced dynamics of Victorian intellectual history.
Reading While Travelling in the Long Nineteenth Century
Authors: Ferguson Christopher
Published: May 2022

This chapter analyses the traces of reading habits left behind by travelling readers in the long nineteenth century, now collected in the Reading Experience Database 1450-1945. It argues that many recent critical deconstructions of 19th-century images of and cultural anecdotes about travelling reading and its attendant dangers are more useful as examples of cultural anxiety and ideology than as evidence of real readers’ experiences. The chapter demonstrates that women, the working classes, and children (the demographics thought to be most at risk of unfettered access to literature in this period) were all easily able to ignore or even laugh at the widespread negative publicity, and instead continued to get happily lost in a book to while away the tedium of travel.
The Empire Reads Back: Travel, Exploration and the British World in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Authors: Ferguson Christopher
Published: May 2022

This chapter demonstrates that when 18th and 19th-century travellers engaged with the world, they also engaged with the written word, arguing that historians of Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world therefore need to consider the ways in which people read about it. First, it considers the responses of readers in Britain to books of travel and exploration that followed the contours of the British World at the time. Engaging with these texts, which were extraordinarily popular in their day, opened new vistas on the Pacific, Oceania and Africa in particular. The second half of the chapter explores the kinds of books people travelled with and what benefits they expected to derive from reading them, focusing on the reading practices of voyagers on the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, as well as explorers in Africa. It suggests that the history of reading sheds important light on the history of Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world.
‘Knowledge of books’ and ‘Appreciation of literature’: Reading Choices of Aspiring American Librarians in the Progressive Era
Authors: Pawley Christine
Published: May 2022

Drawing on the records of Wisconsin’s full-time library school (opened 1906), this chapter analyses the choices made by the mostly young white women (from 18 states) who were asked to list their recent reading experiences as part of their preparation for the librarianship entrance exam. Lists compiled by a sample of 120 students (all female but one) who graduated between 1907 and 1927 yielded a combined total of over 2,400 books read for pleasure. These women were shortly to fan out to their first professional positions, and the chapter suggests how they might go on to communicate their aesthetic, social, and moral judgments about reading to public library patrons across the country.
Papers, Posters and Pamphlets: UK Readers in the Second World War
Authors: Eliot Simon
Published: May 2022

One of the main jobs of the UK’s Ministry of Information (MOI) during the Second World War was to sustain the morale of the British public. This it did in part by producing a quite remarkable range of outputs: books, pamphlets, magazines, comics, postcards, lapel badges, transfers, stickers, flyers, posters, broadcasts, films, and fixed and touring exhibitions. But it was not enough to communicate information and opinion, the MOI needed to know how all this material was received and what, if anything, the receivers did with it. This chapter explores the various approaches to reading evident in the Home Intelligence Reports, which have recently been digitised by the AHRC-funded project ‘The Communication History of the MOI’. This digitisation initiative unlocks a huge quantity of previously difficult-to-use materials, and shines a searchlight on reading experiences that until now have been almost completely blacked out.
‘A bolt is shot back somewhere in the breast’ (Matthew Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’): A Methodology for Literary Reading in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Davis Philip , Billington Josie
Published: May 2022

Drawing on research by scholars based in the ‘Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society’ at the University of Liverpool, this chapter analyses the psychological and neurological effects of reading Victorian literature on people who would not normally be involved in reading literature at all. These new readers include people in drug and rehabilitation centres, prisons, hospitals, drop-in medical centres, dementia care homes, facilities for looked-after children, schools, and libraries. The chapter combines qualitative and quantitative research methods, and provides rare empirical insights into some of the private processes of reading. In so doing, it indicates that ‘old’ literature can cross boundaries, both appealing to and even helping to create ‘new’ readers, for whom the experience can be life changing.
Obama v. Trump
Authors: Harrington Clodagh , Waddan Alex
Published: May 2022

This monograph examines how Trump’s election as President signals a rollback of the Obama years. In 2008, in what seemed a seminal moment for the country’s politics, the United States elected an African American as President. Yet, eight years later, in the form of Donald Trump, the nation put in office a man who was the very antithesis of his predecessor. The book determines what can legitimately be regarded as the legacy of the Obama presidency and investigates how far the Trump administration has reversed it. The analysis is embedded in a historical context, based on examination and scrutiny of how, and how successfully, presidents in the modern era have overturned the work of their predecessor when they have attempted to do so. The authors focus on meaningful priority shifts, policy changes and the imprint of presidential leadership, providing a framework for assessing Obama’s legacy, which in turn affords context to a discussion of the Trump administration’s capacity to fulfil its promise to reverse the direction taken by the Obama White House. Looking beyond the noise and hyperbole, the book examines how robust the Obama legacy has proved to be in the face of Trump’s challenge. Clodagh Harrington is Associate Professor of American Politics at De Montfort University. Alex Waddan is Associate Professor in American Politics at the University of Leicester.
Scottish Presbyterianism Re-established
Authors: Muirhead Andrew T.N.
Published: May 2022

In 1690, the Church of Scotland rejected episcopal authority and settled as Presbyterian. The adjacent Presbyteries of Stirling and Dunblane covered an area that included both lowland and highland communities, speaking both English and Gaelic and supporting both the new government and the old – thus forming a representative picture of the nation as a whole.
This book examines the ways in which the two Presbyteries operated administratively, theologically and geographically under the new regime. By surveying and analysing surviving church records from 1687 to 1710 at Presbytery and parish level, Andrew Muirhead shows how the two Presbyteries filled their pulpits, related to civil authorities, how they dealt with problematic discipline cases referred by the Kirk Sessions, their involvement in the Union negotiations and their overall functioning as human, as well as religious, institution in late 17th- and early 18th-century Scotland. The resulting study advances our understanding of the profound impact that Presbyteries had on those involved with them in any capacity.
The Courts of the Church and the Business of Presbytery
Authors: Muirhead Andrew T.N.
Published: May 2022

While kirk sessions hardly changed in their roles and responsibilities after the re-establishment of Presbyterianism. Presbyteries were no longer responsible to bishops, elected their own moderators and included elders. Attendance is shown to be patchy, with very few elders attending, and such elders as did attend failed to attend their own kirk session. Attendance at both presbytery and synod is shown to be patchy and proportionate to distance. This could lead to an imbalance at synod whose seat revolved around five constituent presbyteries. The numerical strength of the ‘home’ presbytery affected the conduct of business. Non -attendance at either could lead to absent ministers being allocated unpopular tasks ‘as a censure. Decisions were always recorded as being by a ‘plurality’ if not unanimous. External evidence shows that if the numbers were equal the moderator had the casting vote, but it was still ‘by a plurality’. Formal dissent was allowed, but the dissenter could be fairly roughly dealt with as the experiences of the minister of Alva showed.
The Prehistory of Private Property
Authors: Widerquist Karl , McCall Grant
Published: May 2022

This book examines the origin and development of the private property rights system from prehistory to the present day to debunk three widely accepted false beliefs about the private property system: that inequality is natural, inevitable, or incompatible with freedom; that capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other conceivable economic system; and that there is something “natural” about the private property system. That is, the normative principles of appropriation and voluntary transfer applied in the world in which we live support a capitalist system with strong, individualist, and unequal private property rights. The book reviews the intellectual history of these claims and demonstrates their importance in contemporary political thought before reviewing the history and prehistory of the private property system to address their veracity. In so doing, the book uses thorough anthropological and historical evidence to refute these three claims. The book shows that societies with common-property systems maintaining strong equality and extensive freedom were initially nearly ubiquitous around the world, that their claims to common ownership were consistent with appropriation-based theories, and that the private property rights system was established through a long series of violent state-sponsored aggressions.
Introduction
Authors: Widerquist Karl , McCall Grant S.
Published: May 2022

This chapter previews this book (which examines the origin and development of the private property rights system to debunk three false claims: that inequality is inevitable; that capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other system; and that there is something “natural” about the private property system). This chapter explains the importance of debunking these three claims, the usefulness of examining the intellectual history of how they became so important in political thought, and the value of reviewing the prehistory and early history of the private property system to debunk them.
Hierarchy’s Apologists, Part One: 5,000 Years of Clever and Contradictory Arguments that Inequality is Natural and Inevitable
Authors: Widerquist Karl , McCall Grant S.
Published: May 2022

This chapter reviews the history of the belief that inequality is natural and inevitable, showing that different versions of it played a role in differently unequal societies from prehistory to modern times. Inequality has been attributed to the divine favor of gods, to leaders actually being gods, to the belief that only hierarchies are capable of maintaining peace; to the intellectual, moral, or genetic superiority of the upper class; to the need to reward useful behavior; and to many other questionable beliefs. The parallels between the uses of the inequality hypothesis are striking. Although predominant ideologies in virtually all unequal societies agree that inequality is natural and inevitable, they can’t agree why inequality is natural and inevitable, and they all use this natural-inequality hypothesis to justify force in order to maintain inequality.
The Negative Freedom Argument for the Hunter-Gatherer Band Economy
Authors: Widerquist Karl , McCall Grant S.
Published: May 2022

This chapter presents an empirical argument that the hunter-gatherer band economy is more consistent with negative freedom than the market economy. Although freedom is difficult to measure, the freedom of people in band societies dominates the freedom of the least free people in capitalist societies. There is no form of coercion, interference, force, non-contractual obligation, involuntariness, or aggression, to which people in band societies are subject and from which lower- and middle-class people in capitalist society have been freed. Lower- and middle-class people in capitalist societies are subject to forms of coercion, force, and so on that do not exist in band societies. The independently wealthy might have more liberties than people in band societies, but if so, their additional liberties come at the cost of fewer liberties for middle- and lower-class people. Therefore, the market economy—as usually conceived—fails to deliver the highest equal freedom. The potential advantage of large-scale societies is in promoting opportunity, not in protecting freedom. If the private property system is to be justified against other systems, it must be justified on the basis of opportunity, not on the false claim that it promotes negative freedom.
Property Systems in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern States
Authors: Widerquist Karl , McCall Grant S.
Published: May 2022

This chapter shows that no period of private, individual appropriation is found in the formation of states. Early states had land-tenure systems in which political elites—kings, pharaohs, lugals, etc.—were considered the owners of all of the land in their kingdoms and subjects had various forms of usufruct rights for farming or other practices. The beginnings of individual private property occurred gradually, long after the formation of states, not with individual acts of appropriation but with elites using their political power to name themselves or their underlings as owners of assets. Even then, private landownership did not become the dominant property rights system in ancient or medieval times. Communal village agriculture remained the most common system in state societies throughout the world until the early modern period.
Conclusion
Authors: Widerquist Karl , McCall Grant S.
Published: May 2022

This book has told six histories: the intellectual histories of three widely believed empirical claims, and the political and economic histories that refute those claims. The natural-rights-based argument for strong, unequal private property rights relies on false empirical claims about equality, freedom, and the origin and nature of property rights in the past and as a stand-in for some kind of imagined universal human nature. A society that will be more consistent with the protection of all individuals from violence, coercion, and interference will have to find some way to ensure that each individual has direct and unconditional access to the resources necessary to survive.
A Genealogy of Rhythm
Authors: Crespi Paola , Manghani Sunil
Published: May 2022

Building on the conceptual account offered in the Introduction, this chapter provides an extensive survey of critical literatures in which rhythms and ideas about rhythm are significant, and which have been influential for later thinking. Offering key extracts from all of the major thinkers surveyed, it maps philosophical thinking on rhythm from the turn of the twentieth century through to the present, but with specific focus on how these materials come together within critical literatures of the 1970s and the varying shifts up until the present.
City Rhythms: An Approach to Urban Rhythm Analysis
Authors: Nevejan Caroline , Sefkatli Pinar
Published: May 2022

This chapter presents the results of the exploratory study City Rhythm, a project of the Deft University of Technology, in collaboration with AMS Institute and six cities in the Netherlands. City Rhythm constructed different rhythmanalyses by combining social sciences and architecture methodologies such as interviewing techniques and visualisations, for analysing social issues related with sense of safety in neighbourhoods. Examples for carried out case studies are integrating migrants in a residential area (The Hague); motivating older people to go out of their homes (Rotterdam); identifying why single mothers do not make use of the facilities that are provided to them (Amsterdam); changing perception about youngsters who socialize in the open every day (Zaanstad); and enhancing the atmosphere in a specific street and square (Helmond and Zoetermeer), from the perspective of trust (Nevejan 2009, Nevejan 2012). It will be argued that the results indicate that rhythmanalysis in societal contexts can function as boundary object in policymaking processes.
Introduction
Authors: Taher-Kermani Reza
Published: May 2022

This book sprang from my desire to study Victorian poetry alongside classical Persian poetry. My initial plan was to examine nineteenth-century English translations of medieval Persian poetry, to explore the ways in which some of the more ‘exotic’ ideological and aesthetic elements of classical Persian poetry (that is, the poetry written in Persia from the tenth to the sixteenth century) were introduced and assimilated into the poetry of nineteenth-century Britain. But during the course of my preliminary research, I came to realise that the presence of Persia in nineteenth-century English poetry transcends the mere category of translation, that Persia to the Victorians stood not just as the poetry of Hafiz or Omar Khayyám (though this formed a substantial part of their conception of the country), but as a complex and paradoxical embodiment of different notions, created and crafted by a range of oral and written stories, themes, and tropes. Knowledge of Persia had reached the discursive realms of the British imagination through many centuries and from a variety of sources, including classical and biblical texts, histories, and travel-writings. This effectively transformed the word ‘Persia’ into something more than the name of a territorial entity. Persia became a cultural imaginary, a mental landscape formed over time and subject to change. The Victorians responded to this landscape from different perspectives, marked by every shade of social class, religious affiliation, and political allegiance....
Persia in the West
Authors: Taher-Kermani Reza
Published: May 2022

This chapter surveys a range of sources from which the British derived their knowledge of Persia, and emphasises the persistent influence of some of these sources, most notably the Bible and the literature of ancient Greece. Moving forward from the Greek and Biblical representations of Persia, the study traces the persistence of this ancient understanding in the Early-Modern period, particularly as against the gradual emergence of first-hand contacts with the country, such as those of the Sherley brothers. An analysis of the British growing interest in Persian studies in the final quarter of the eighteenth century also forms part of the design of this chapter. The chief figure here is Sir William Jones, the founding father of the academic study of Oriental literatures. The chapter examines Jones’s ‘A Persian Song of Hafiz’ (1772) as one of the earliest examples of the scholarly treatment of Persian poetry in English, before moving on to explore the dynamic between the nineteenth-century politicised vision of Persia and the narrative of its decline and decay through studying James Morier’s popular fiction, The Adventures of Hajjî Baba of Ispahan (1824).
Persia and Nineteenth-Century English Poetry
Authors: Taher-Kermani Reza
Published: May 2022

This chapter provides the first systematic analysis of the presence of Persia in nineteenth-century English poetry. In doing so, the chapter relies on the categories of texts and typologies that are outlined in Chapter One in The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry as a conceptual basis to describe the environments of knowledge within which the image of Persia was defined and disseminated in the nineteenth century. Using the chronological arrangement of Chapter One, this chapter is able to suggest some thematic correlations between nineteenth-century ‘Persianised’ poems. In order to discern the image of Persia, the chapter employs keyword searches of literary databases, principally Literature Online (LION), with additional data from the British Library Catalogue. The focus is not limited to a corpus of works that were written specifically on or about Persia, but takes account of a broader selection of material. Poems are identified primarily through the use of certain keywords: besides ‘Persia’ itself, and its cognates, such as ‘Iran’, the names of persons (Cyrus, Xerxes, Esther), and places (Shiraz, Isfahan, Nishapur), together with a selection of words commonly associated with Persian literature and culture (e.g. qazal, bulbul, dervish) are utilised.
‘Sohrab and Rustum’
Authors: Taher-Kermani Reza
Published: May 2022

This chapter approaches Matthew Arnold’s poem from various angles: it first considers the poem’s Persian origin, looking at Firdausi’s background, his Shāhnāmeh, the history of its composition and the political context in which it was created. It then focuses on the episode of ‘Sohrāb’. Knowledge of Firdausi’s ‘original’ is crucial in this context not because Arnold knew it, but because he did not. Arnold never read Firdausi. He wrote his version of ‘Sohrāb’ after he read, in French, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s ‘Le Livre des Rois’ (1850), a review of Julius von Mohl's translation of Firdausi’s Shāhnāmeh. In the chain of interpretation from Mohl to Sainte-Beuve to Arnold, only Mohl had read the Persian text. Arnold’s appropriation of Firdausi’s characters, setting and mythical substance is conditioned by this complex transmission, in which Mohl’s poetics, and Sainte-Beuve’s cultural politics, play a significant role. The aim here is to unravel and explore the complexity of this process of literary appropriation, exposing the paradoxical nature of Sainte-Beuve’s role, since he both enabled Arnold to write the poem and implicitly challenged the ‘authority’ of any modern poet to rival a ‘primary’ epic poet such as Firdausi.
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Authors: Taher-Kermani Reza
Published: May 2022

The claim in this chapter is that FitzGerald, without being literal in his rendition of the quatrains attributed to Khayyám, succeeded in transmitting a Persian spirit in his Rubáiyát. In its detailed comparison of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát to his Persian original(s), the chapter as such offers new insights into FitzGerald’s translation practice and the poetics of his creation. The emphasis is almost wholly on these specific comparisons, which enrich and supplement the work done on the poem by previous critiques such as Arberry’s The Romance of the Rubaiyat (1959). But the argument here goes beyond a comparative literary analysis. FitzGerald succeeded in transfusing a Persian soul into his re-writing of the rubáiyát by importing matter of peculiar Persian significance, elements that may look foreign to English readers of the poem, but quintessentially Persian to those who are acquainted with the particulars of Persian literary and cultural traditions. In order to unearth these hidden peculiarities, the Rubáiyát ought to be read with, so to speak, a Persian eye; it has to be read as a native critic would, for instance, study the poetry of Hāfiz.
Surfaces in Jackie : Representing Crisis and the Crisis of Representation
Authors: Harvey James
Published: May 2022

Jackie captures that disorienting period in the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in the days between the murder and funeral of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. Like Andy Warhol before him, Pablo Larraín dwells on the iconicity of Jackie O., regularly operating along the thin line between sincerity and cosmeticism. In ways very similar to No, the film implies that the life of government is a life of performance – success contingent upon presenting the most effective façade. This chapter argues that Larraín mobilizes the poetics at the heart of history, framing the representation of a real-life event as a negotiation between aesthetic experience and empirical veracity. This chapter argues that while developing themes locatable in Larraín’s earlier films, Jackie increases the self-conscious poeticism of these earlier films, reminiscent of Warhol’s sardonic take on American culture. As well as creating a dialogue between Jackie and Warhol’s series of silkscreens on Jackie O., the chapter discusses the film’s formal style, its subversive potential within the biopic genre, and the self-conscious impersonation-style of Natalie Portman’s performance.
Introduction
Authors: Austin Thomas , Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: May 2022

In 2004 Visions of Europe, a compilation of twenty-five shorts by selected film-makers, one from each member country of the European Union, was released. Each director had been given a budget of $41,000 and asked to ‘make a film featuring a personal vision of current or future life in the EU’....
The Resurgence of Modernism and its Critique of Liberalism in the Cinema of Crisis
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: May 2022

Many of the contemporary film-makers who have recovered a modernist aesthetic sensibility combine this with a critique of neoliberal capitalism, and this is why their work can be classified under the umbrella term ‘cinema of crisis’. I pursue this argument by looking at three contemporary films: Béla Tarr’s short Prologue (2004), Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps (Time Out, 2001) and Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017). My claim is that this resurgence of modernism in the cinema of crisis is not a nostalgic reiteration of formal principles associated with the past, but a political gesture – a restoration of the modernist critique of modernity and
liberal democracy.
Re-Evaluating Crisis Politics in the Work of Aku Louhimies
Authors: Moffat Kate
Published: May 2022

This chapter unpacks the thematic and ideological representations of crisis in Louhimies’s feature films Paha maa (Frozen Land, 2005) and Vuosaari (Naked Harbour, 2012). Both explore contemporary life in Helsinki through a patchwork of interconnected and parallel narratives where the characters’ lives are marred by domestic violence, alcoholism, unemployment and social alienation. However, despite the clear contrasts between dominant historical conceptualisations of social unity in Finland and the stark realities represented in these films, I argue that Louhimies appears to reappropriate the theme of continuity. I claim that the central tension in these films revolves around whether they ask us to view crisis as an external affliction of an underlying and established social order, or whether they suggest that crisis is, in fact, a fundamental component of the Finnish social model itself. We can use this debate to explore the depth and meaning of Louhimies’s relationship with the contemporary political landscape.
Crisis of Cinema/Cinema of Crisis: The Car Crash and the Berlin School
Authors: Landry Olivia
Published: May 2022

I revisit some widely known films of the Berlin School: Valeska Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing , 2006) and Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008). In their diverging narrative treatment of the car crash, these three examples offer a striking cycle. They were all released within a three-year period leading up to the global economic crisis. Each film portrays the promises, aspirations and failings of neoliberalism via the literal drive for the good-life fantasy, which turns sour. A return to the car crash in German cinema leading up to a moment of heightened financial crisis and in an era of post-cinematic digitisation and new media trends offers a double commentary on the age-old kinship of cinema and crisis. Incurring violence and even death, the crash in these Berlin School films introduces a new level of impact and precarity that is so far gone that it has often already hit bottom.
The Future is Past, the Present Cannot be Fixed: Ken Loach and the Crisis
Authors: Hall Martin
Published: May 2022

A binary is traced across Loach’s films: a Gramscian War of Manoeuvre is represented in the revolutionary time of his historical films, but in the contemporary period texts, we have a working class that is atomised and ground down, with any victories only on an individual level. Alain Badiou’s work on the constitution of the subject is used to suggest that what is missing from Loach’s worldview is faith in what Badiou calls ‘the Idea of Communism’, which he situates as one ‘related to the destiny of generic humanity’ (2009a: 79). I argue that the films of the director considered to be the most left-wing in Britain show no faith in a contemporary transformative paradigm. The spectator is presented with a despairing, mournful subject, one either permeated with capitalist realism or destroyed by it. I concentrate on I, Daniel Blake and It’s a Free World in order to provide a temporal framework that is as close as possible to the current manifestation of the crisis.
It Could Happen to you: Empathy and Empowerment in Iberian Austerity Cinema
Authors: Álvarez Iván Villarmea
Published: May 2022

The unexpected outbreak of the Great Recession, and its long
duration, challenged the self-image of Iberian societies: the set of wishes, fictions and self-representations associated with an inclusive middle class fell apart overnight. Allegory has become the main rhetorical figure in austerity cinema of Portugal and Spain at a time when collective certainties are constructed from individual feelings and perceptions. Life stories have allowed film-makers to establish an empathic bridge between the characters and the audience in order to promote an inter-class identification with the victims of austerity, who usually play the role of civil, secular martyrs in these films. Accordingly, this technology of political imagination, as Germán Labrador Méndez has called it (2012), must be regarded as a counter-hegemonic strategy against self-blaming discourses that has ultimately helped reinforce social bonds.
The Double Form of Neoliberal Subjugation: Crisis on the Eastern European Screen
Authors: Batori Anna
Published: May 2022

Without doubt, no other region has embraced neoliberal policies as enthusiastically as the postsocialist states. Yet three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Europe still faces severe economic problems. This chapter investigates patterns of neoliberal crisis in contemporary Eastern European cinema. By positing a post-2010 Eastern European narrative structure called the ‘double form of neoliberal subjugation’, this essay examines heavily gendered visual formations in four films from four different Eastern European countries: the Slovenian Damjan Kozole’s Slovenka (A
Call Girl , 2009), the Romanian Ruxana Zenide’s Ryna (2005), the Czech Matěj Chlupáček and Michal Samir’s Bez doteku (Touchless, 2013) and the Hungarian Szabolcs Hajdu’s Bibliothèque Pascal (2010) . The study pursues a visual-narrative analysis of neoliberal (self-) colonization and argues that, along with the resurrection of the socialist male figure, there is a tendency in the region’s cinema to feature Western male figures as powerful, authoritative and often violent characters who exploit Eastern European women by sexual trafficking and/or other forms of corporeal violence that render these females obedient to them.
Housing Problems: Britain’s Housing Crisis and Documentary
Authors: Sborgi Anna Viola
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores recent documentary production on the housing crisis
in the UK and sets it within the wider context of social and economic crisis at the European level and beyond. I argue that this output not only provides an in-depth representation of growing social and economic inequality in housing, but also (through different channels of distribution and in its interconnection with the world beyond the screen, housing activism in particular) increasingly shapes the debate on the home, opening a potential platform for discussion that goes well beyond the national level.
Mongrel Attunement in White God
Authors: Galt Rosalind
Published: May 2022

This chapter begins from the question of where we might locate political aesthetics in contemporary European cinema, and in particular the challenge of escaping the various modes of liberal realism that dominate representations of economic crisis and migration. My argument avoids the kind of neo-neorealist films that invoke a distancing spectacle of imperilled bodies. It considers instead the cinematic potential of an aesthetic of attunement, drawing on contemporary theories of mood. White God constructs an allegorical tale in which Hungary orders the registration, taxation and rounding up of mongrel dogs, that is, those whose blood is not purely Hungarian. I argue that the film’s elaboration of non-human attunement offers an opportunity to see its politics in ambiguous terms. What does it mean to be attuned to (and reattuned via) the dog, as non-human animal?
Labour and Exploitation by Displacement in Recent European Film
Authors: Parvulescu Constantin
Published: May 2022

This chapter analyses the presentation of labour at the geographical and social margins of Europe in four recent European films. It offers a commentary on the way these films invite viewers to reflect on practices of labour displacement, the opportunities for exploitation this displacement generates and, more generally, on the violence generated by what Marx calls the ‘silent compulsion of economic relations’ (1990: 899). Under scrutiny are cinematic texts made in the post-2008 era. As such, they even more acutely record the increasingly competitive and oppressive post-crisis work environment, as well as a growing scepticism among Europeans regarding the capitalist free market. While Mediterranea’s observational (realist) drama is the predictable format for such recording, I have also chosen films that surpass this framework of representation. Capital is a financial thriller with a touch of black humour, Toni Erdmann a comedy-drama, and Moon is a science fiction film. In the first part of this chapter, I discuss Mediterranea and Moon and their inquiry into the condition of capitalism’s underdogs. The second part analyses Toni Erdmann and Capital, and reflects on the condition of the apparent winners in capitalist displacement processes.
A Hushed Crisis: The Visual Narratives of (Eastern) Europe’s Antiziganism
Authors: Iordanova Dina
Published: May 2022

In Eastern Europe, publicly and legislatively Roma are supposed to be treated equally, in terms of housing, education or health, even though there are investigative films that show this is not the case. Yet there is widespread racism that proclaims the Roma to be a major social problem. States do not normally engage in direct Roma-bashing, but at the same time they tolerate it and normally leave citizens from the main ethnic group to practise it at will. First I discuss some films that aim to combat the prevalent antiziganism and that remain hushed in the ghetto of arthouse cinema. Secondly, I analyse an antiziganist film trilogy from the Czech Republic and the inventive ways that have been deployed for its silencing. And third, I discuss the presence of racist and antiziganist videos on YouTube.
Law Reporting, Authority and Precedent: the Common Law Paradigm
Authors: Ibbetson David J
Published: May 2022

This paper traces the development of law reporting in England between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, hand in hand with the crystallisation of a doctrine of authoritative precedent related to the printing of law reports.
‘It ain’t natural her not having a husband’: Spinsters and the Post-war Settlement
Authors: Mortimer Claire
Published: May 2022

The spinster is one of the most pathologized characterisations of female ageing in cultural texts, continuing to be a source of social unease for much of the twentieth century. This chapter establishes the broader social and historical contexts underlying such representations, before considering how representations of the spinster evolved in British films of the post-war era. The problematic status of the spinster was implicit in the predominant polarised representations of the type as either a comic device or a warning of the perils of single life. The chapter starts by exploring how unease about the middle-aged spinster was articulated in British films of the 1930s, whereas the elderly spinster could be a heroic martyr as in The Lady Vanishes (1938).
Battleaxes and Chars: Working-Class Matriarchs
Authors: Mortimer Claire
Published: May 2022

The working-class grotesque was a perennial figure in British cinema, informed by a tradition of the female grotesque and the unruly woman in popular culture. The middle-aged working-class woman was a character type frequently deployed in British film as a comic figure, often in the guise of the battleaxe. This chapter explores the representations of working-class communities in the era of kitchen sink realism, and the ambivalent status of the matriarch in a culture increasingly centred on youth. The chapter explores two films from the 1960s, Ladies Who Do (1963) and Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), wherein the working-class matriarch manifests anger, faced with the loss of community, having to fight for all they hold dear, in the tradition of Pieter Bruegel’s Dulle Griet.
‘Senior-bait cinema’: Female Ageing in Contemporary British Film
Authors: Mortimer Claire
Published: May 2022

This chapter gives an overview of how typologies of female ageing have endured in British cinema of the 21st century, demonstrating how many of the roles available for older women reiterate the types which can be traced back through the history of British film to before the Second World War. Cultural types of female ageing have evolved since the twentieth century, the older woman gaining greater visibility although the ageing woman of colour is largely absent. Some archetypes such as the spinster and the working-class battleaxe are less visible, reflecting wider social changes. Mature stars enjoy extended careers in roles that are founded in the archetypes of female ageing that have endured through time. British cinema continues to rely on its older female stars and character actresses.