bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Reassessment of Civilisation in Pontic-Caspian Eurasia
Authors: Feldman Alex M.
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses in depth the broader implications of the book. First and most importantly is the exploration of the processual concept of monotheisation (encompassing Christianisation, Islamisation and/or Judaisation), and their accompanying features when imposed top-down, which together neatly encapsulate both the formations of dynastic sovereignties and the top-down internalisations of confessional identities at the frontiers of each respective ecumenical domain. Understanding religious identity as a substructure of recent national identity instead of as a simple milestone in a given “national” history, challenges the way history is typically understood – not as a “national” story, but as an “ecumenical” story, in which a given ecumenical faith is the archetype for the modern nation-state, instead of some primordial ethnicity. This requires untying the Gordian knot of tribalism, ethnicity and nationalism, which have been conflated for generations based on Western-centric periodisations. Finally, the discussion critiques the lazy historiographical assumptions about the tripartite division (ancient, medieval, modern) of the history of “Western civilisation.” Instead, it combines these periodisations and locations (Europe and Asia) together to forge a more fully contextualised Eurasian history to contribute to the politics of time.
‘Peace need not be poison at the polls’: John F. Kennedy and the Challenge of the Right in the 1962 Midterms
Authors: Eastwood Mark
Published: September 2023

In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1962 midterm election appeared to be a success for President John F. Kennedy. Whilst on the surface, the results bucked the trend of incumbent midterm losses, this chapter argues that in many ways the midterm results papered over emerging fissures in the electoral position of Kennedy’s Democrats. Based on detailed archival research, the chapter instead argues that triumphalist narrative of the 1962 midterms obfuscated a small but significant story about the fracturing of the Democratic Solid South and rise of the New Right. President Kennedy sought to offset this with a more direct appeal to African Americans on civil rights and ‘peace’ voters on anti-nuclear issues. However, the 1962 midterms really marked the beginning of electoral problems for the Democrats which would see Richard Nixon – his political career seemingly finished by defeat in the California gubernatorial election of 1962 – sweep to power in the 1968 presidential election.
Joyce’s Reader
Authors: Corser Sophie
Published: September 2023

This chapter tracks how the form and content of Ulysses demands we move through and beyond the text. Bringing together many aspects of earlier chapters, it begins with one sentence of ‘Calypso’ – before developing a questioning of how authority functions within the role of the author, reader, and critic, and how the intertextuality and styles of Ulysses provoke such questions. Looking at how we read Ulysses and, by focusing then on the narrative of ‘Wandering Rocks’, the effects of the novel’s ‘difficulties’, this chapter asks what we mean by and what we can do with a Barthesian dead author, a deified genius author, and our own authority as readers of texts. It thus brings readings of Ulysses to bear upon readings of how authority is formed in Joycean criticism, playfully testing a tenuous comparative reading of Ulysses with Stella Gibbons’ 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm and Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia: how do we authorise such a link? This chapter shows how a freedom of author-less reading and a god-like genius author co-exist within the text we create while reading Ulysses – and how we might derive authority from this fecund instability.
‘The James Joyce I knew’: Legacies and Travesties
Authors: Corser Sophie
Published: September 2023

The final chapter addresses the autobiographical elements of Joyce’s work by exploring how Joyce has been read and written outside his own texts. It continues a mode of querying begun earlier in The Reader’s Joyce, where boundaries of author, reader, reality, fiction, or the logics of time and place can be bent. As a result, this chapter reads the Joyce of approved-anecdote and canonical biography, the Joyce of recollected memoir, and the Joyce of Tom Stoppard’s 1974 play Travesties alongside one another: comparing biographical and fictional portrayals of the author. This discussion of written Joyces looks at works including those by Frank Budgen, Richard Ellmann, Arthur Power, and Stoppard. It asks yet further questions about how the way we read an author has an impact on how we read a text, and vice versa – and about the endlessly complex entwined interactions of critics with author, reader, and text. Through its analysis of the biographical Joyce in Joyce studies via the fictional Joyce in Travesties, this chapter plays with the notions that we the readers construct the author and that convenient versions of the author are crafted to suit a critic’s purposes.
Conclusion: The Reader’s Joyce
Authors: Corser Sophie
Published: September 2023

This conclusion restates and draws together the arguments of the monograph’s six chapters, focusing ultimately on a pair of queries that run through those earlier pages: is Ulysses a special case, an unusual text? And, are the questions Ulysses prompts of author, reader, and text relevant to the wider literary field? More than just a type of academic due diligence, these linked queries are an important strand of The Reader’s Joyce’s arguments. As this conclusion reiterates, Ulysses and our reading of it make the inherent apparent: how all texts are formed of other texts, all readings are creative, and yet all authors are given authority, and how – as confirmed by criticism and popular culture – the link between an author’s life and work continues to fascinate many. Reading Ulysses is an activity germane to any literary encounter because it draws attention to how we read and how that relates to our notions of the author; it is relevant because it raises questions which have been left in the background of literary studies, and affirms their continuing significance.
Visionary Company
Authors: Bratton Francesca
Published: September 2023

This book examines the poetry of Hart Crane and his circle within transnational modernist periodical culture. It reappraises Crane’s poetry and reception and introduces several lost works by the poet, including critical prose, reviews and ‘Nopal’, a poem written in Mexico. Through its exploration of Crane’s close engagement with periodical culture, it provides a rich and detailed panorama of twentieth-century literary and artistic communities. In particular, this monograph offers a vivid portrait of forgotten periodicals and their artistic communities, examines the periodical contexts in which modernist poetry fused material and aesthetic experimentation and explores Crane’s important and neglected influence on modern and contemporary poetry. The appendices contain an overview of Crane’s periodical publishers, a timeline of Crane’s periodical publications and a timeline of Crane’s periodical rejections.
‘Are you Futuristic or are you not?’: Adversarial Editing and European Avant-Gardes
Authors: Bratton Francesca
Published: September 2023

Chapter Two situates Crane within the European avant-garde of the 1920s, examining transatlantic connections between the U.S. and post-war Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Rome. This chapter discusses Crane’s debts to Dada and proto-Surrealist artistic experiments in his development of both his theories about the long poem and his playfully termed ‘the logic of metaphor’. The concept of ‘adversarial editing’ is coined to convey and explain the aesthetic identity of certain little magazines formed in agonistic opposition to other magazines. In these cases, disagreement and the deliberate pursuit of distance (both geographically and in terms of ideas) was key to the magazine’s operation and to the exploration of ideas within their pages. Based on archival discoveries, this chapter suggests that the fragmentary form of ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’ mediates between the aesthetic positions of two journals, Broom (broadly associated with Dada) and Secession (aligned with proto-Surrealism). Finally, I discuss the significance of the fragmentary publication of ‘Faustus and Helen’ and ‘Voyages’ in Broom, Secession, 1924 and The Little Review. The chapter argues that this moment was a watershed in Crane’s realization that publishing might become part of a poem’s form, or emphasize its collage and fragmentation — an experiment fully realised in The Bridge. Finally, the chapter introduces readers to a new piece of prose by Crane and a ‘Voyages’ variant missed by his bibliographers.
‘They Have Been Lost’: A Year in Mexico City
Authors: Bratton Francesca
Published: September 2023

Chapter Five reassesses Crane’s final year, introducing a lost poem, ‘Nopal’ from his unrealised Mexican epic. By examining Crane’s publications from the late 1920s, Key West and his literary networks in Mexico during his Guggenheim Fellowship I am able to challenge the myth of the self-destructive poet in a year of creative drought. In the last years of his life, Crane published in nationally distributed, mass-circulation magazines, featuring in Vanity Fair in 1929, with poems in these periodicals consolidating his reputation. This chapter discusses Crane’s attempts to raise his profile as a reviewer, and his increasing interest in writing on visual arts, as demonstrated by his early essay on the photographer H.W. Mimms, pamphlet on David Siqueiros and Mexican murals – written following conversations with Ernie O’Malley, a leading republican intellectual in the Irish revolution and Civil War. Crane’s friendship with O’Malley provides a remarkable insight into Crane’s Mexico years and the literary and artistic networks between the Global South, the U.S. and the Irish Republic. Finally, I introduce a lost poem by Crane written in Mexico, ‘Nopal’.
Found footage horror and televisual actualities
Authors: McMurdo Shellie
Published: September 2023

This chapter engages with how found footage horror cinema has responded to new representations of reality on television and speaks to the speed at which the subgenre adapts to and adopts new reality aesthetics. Opening with an examination of the troubled release history of The Poughkeepsie Tapes (Dowdle, 2007), this chapter details the noted surge in found footage horror production in the late 2000s, before discussing how The Poughkeepsie Tapes recreates the conventions of true crime programming and uses an aesthetic of VHS decay to emphasise a quality of illicitness in its footage. This chapter then moves on to present a brief survey of audience response to the film and examines how the narrative’s truth status was debated online. This chapter then shifts focus to Grave Encounters (The Vicious Brothers, 2011), presenting the film as one that simultaneously emulates and critiques the performative reality of ghost hunting television shows. This case study analysis includes an examination of spectator positioning and privilege within Grave Encounters, and how this relates to the found footage horror subgenre more broadly. This chapter concludes with an examination of how these two films connect American history through their focus on traumatic spaces that still haunt the North American cultural landscape.
‘You have committed a fatal error’: social media horrors
Authors: McMurdo Shellie
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the specific way that internet-based aesthetics have been adopted within found footage horror and the recent emergence of social media based horror – a distinct but growing part of the subgenre. A chronological examination of social media horror allows connections to be made in this chapter between three case study films, different forms of online death mediation, and how these films forefront anxieties around our increasingly online world. A section on The Den (Donohue, 2013) examines the rise of real death websites and attendant anxieties around this. Following this, the next case study section discusses Unfriended (Gabriadze, 2014) and how this film connections to concerns around cyberbullying and digital anonymity. Finally, a section focused on Spree (Kotlyarenko, 2020) investigates how concepts of celebrity and selfhood have evolved since the widespread adoption of social media.
Just One Word
Authors: Anidjar Gil
Published: September 2023

The word Muselmänner has been recorded, inscribed and translated, disseminated, sometimes even read, though not without problems, of course. It is a word that we will come to understand as both ordinary and literary, at once a rigid, or petrified, designator and a floating signifier; a word that signals and carries a certain history and a definite enumeration as well, that has multiplied and proliferated, acquired a strange ubiquity, and a persistent illegibility. It has done so in a vast but specific archive — Holocaust literature — and beyond it too On my way to Islam in World Literature, I shall experiment with that word, an ordinary word, or rather, a word that is at once more ordinary and more literary that has otherwise appeared. I shall proceed without assurance that I stand on the same enumerative or rhetorical ground I otherwise attend to, or indeed that I read from a demonstrably different grid or frame (Economy, Science, Politics, Religion — and the rest is Literature). Just one word, then: the word Muselmänner, which can certainly be, and has in fact been, read and translated — Muslims.
The Place and Function of Imagination in Fulani Mystical Poetry (Massina, Mali)
Authors: Seydou Christiane
Published: September 2023

For the Fulani people of Mali, Islam is one of the anchor points of their culture. Their religious poetry, transmitted orally in zāwias, is deeply influenced by mystic interpretation. This can be perceived in two major points: at the level of the signified with the description of personal mystic experiences; and at the level of the signifier, through images and metaphors. Indeed, symbolic, allegorical and metaphorical expressions are, as this chapter endeavours to show, the best way to convey and transmit a message that borders on the ineffable.
This poetry, always sung, conforms to a metric borrowed from classical Arabic poetry and a traditional stylistic system relying on phonic plays. This chapter argues that the mediation of song adds to the evocative power of poetry by bringing into unison the very being of both the one who delivers the message and the one who receives it. Both spiritually merge in this communion of faith, which indeed is the ultimate goal of these poets, who are spiritually engaged.
Introduction
Authors: Leberg Dan
Published: September 2023

This chapter briefly outlines the lacuna of knowledge around western realist film acting as a practice within mainstream Film Studies. Although performances by film stars are widely theorized and productively analysed for their resonances with cultural paradigms like race, class, and gender, the actor’s creative processes which generated those performances is at best a historical afterthought. This chapter calls for the critical methodology through which to frame film actors’ creative practices through the kinds of cognitive and phenomenological models of acting found in Theatre Studies; a call which the rest of the book seeks to answer.
Empathetic Work Prior to Shooting
Authors: Leberg Dan
Published: September 2023

This chapter analyses common script analysis tactics used by film and television actors once they are cast in a role. Actors reconstruct their character’s cognitive scaffolding in preparation for their days on set. The author’s interviews with professional Canadian film and television actors suggested three broad approaches to script analysis. First, a “bottom-up” approach relies on the actor’s relatively direct transposition of her quotidian memories into her character’s affective experiences. Second, the “top-down” approaches encourage actors to layer personally evocative imaginary filters, from Jungian archetypes to literary and mythological references, on top of the scripted character to give a vocabulary to character goals and shifts in power dynamics within their character’s scenes. Third, the common and versatile “balanced” approach encourages actors to freely blend personal recollections and imaginary images during script analysis to connect to a scripted character’s lived experiences. Actor Antonio Cayonne likens this kind of bodymind configuration and conceptual blend to the mythical Minotaur: a creature with the body of one beast and the head of another. Ultimately, the actor is free to develop her Intrasubjective appresentations of the scripted character however she deems appropriate, on the firm understanding that whatever empathetic appresentations she develops must be actionable on set.
Coda: Stein’s Democratic Authorship in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Authors: Parkinson Isabelle
Published: September 2023

The book ends with a short examination of Stein’s construction of herself as author in relation to images of inclusion and exclusion in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. The Coda argues that, in the Autobiography, Stein’s desire to control conceptions of her authorial identity is both more overt and, ultimately, more successfully achieved than in her earlier attempts. It offers an idealised vision of her authorship that is asserted in the presentation of the Rue de Fleurus as a democratic space aligned with mass culture forms, the identification of Alice B. Toklas as the ideal average audience of mass democracy, and the location of democratic liberation in an Americanness that frees Gertrude Stein the American citizen from biological constraints. The Coda also argues, however, that these features are subtended by the differentiation of racialised unAmerican others constrained by biology, and by an obfuscation of strategies of exclusion.
‘A gap in your library, Madam’: The Lives of Professional Women
Authors: Reus Anne
Published: September 2023

This chapter focusses on the gaps in Woolf’s canon, as I argue that Woolf ignores changing modes of female authorship and systematically silences and misrepresents mid- and late-Victorian novelists to maintain the illusion that Victorian women’s writing was solely carried out by domestic amateurs. It explores Woolf’s engagement with George Eliot as well as popular writers Mary Augusta Ward and Margaret Oliphant to demonstrate that Woolf excludes the high-art woman of letters alongside bestselling popular writers to create a narrative of artistic exceptionalism.
Politics and the English Essay
Authors: Robbins Bruce
Published: September 2023

This chapter reflects on the political and social contexts in which the essay arises and by which it is determined. Focusing primarily on George Orwell’s writing about the theme of atrocity, but also referring to several other historically important as well as contemporary political writers, the chapter investigates the seeming contradiction in the idea of an essay
being political when it is usually expected to be ‘tentative, modest, provisional – anything but absolutist’. This may initially seem like an unsurpassable challenge, but ‘politics’ and ‘good writing, essayistic or not’ are by no means irreconcilable. Indeed, the essayistic, which often provides context and complexity while pushing the writer toward self-scrutiny, can help steer us away from the ‘ignorance’ of firmly holding on to certain political positions as if they were absolute truths. In the
hands of good writers, then, the essay can certainly contribute to ‘the large question of how well society is constituted – the question of politics’.
Everybody’s Protest Essay: Personal Protest Prose on the American Internet
Authors: Hopper Briallen
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses a selection of contemporary ‘personal protest essays’ – often written by women – that employ the ‘mix of narration and reflection’ of the personal essay to explore ‘intersections between individual experience and structures of injustice’. Starting from an outline of the American context for the personal protest essay, Hopper then focuses on essays by Rebecca Solnit, Kiese Laymon, Chanel Miller and Seo-Young Chu. These essays belong to the subgenre of what is termed ‘everybody’s protest essay’, a mashup between the protest essay and the ‘confessional first-person’ form often found on the internet. Such essays show the potential of the essay to be dynamic and relational in unprecedented ways as well as to form connections that can coalesce into a community or a movement.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Contemporary Women Essayists and Their Golden Moment
Authors: Spinner Jenny
Published: September 2023

This chapter surveys the booming landscape of women’s essay writing in the twenty-first century, examining that work in light of cultural and marketplace expectations regarding what it means either to be a woman or to write as one. It argues for a nonlinear construction of the female tradition of the essay, examining the ways in which contemporary women essayists both embrace and resist the essay tradition as a whole, as well as evoke other women essayists in their work. For contemporary women essayists, resistance most often comes in the form of speaking the unspeakable, in interrogating what an essay can do when the body is female. When those bodies belong to women of color, lesbian and transfeminine essayists, that resistance is all the more complex, as are expectations for these writers.
The Lyric Essay: Truth-Telling Through Reader Participation
Authors: Peterson Beth
Published: September 2023

This chapter asks what it means to label an essay ‘lyric’, and it makes a case for why the lyric essay is both distinct and essential in the nonfiction canon. Though the term ‘lyric essay’ has been in wide circulation for over twenty years, not unlike the larger genre of the essay itself, the subgenre has had a complicated and sometimes contentious history. The chapter begins with the history of the term ‘lyric essay’, locating it in both lyric poetry and the traditional essay traditions. It ascribes a series of formal qualities and conventions to lyric essays: a move towards poetic rather than fictional techniques; juxtaposition and association in lieu of direct denotation; and the use of form to mirror and inform content. Finally, offering a range of textual examples, the chapter argues for the lyric essay as particularly generative of truth-telling when there are complex and fragmented situations; when there are gaps in knowledge, memory or experience; and when the reader’s perceptions, rather than the writer’s, must be centered.
The Essay as Trans Body
Authors: Gordon Glenn Michael
Published: September 2023

The body of the essay has been described as “a warm body”, a “she”, a “queer” body, and so it is no wonder that trans writers have turned to the essay as a genre that can account for their body or even count as a body. If “to trans” is to cross and “to essay” is to try, then both are movements of the body that bend toward self-expression. This expression is especially crucial since trans bodies are bodies that are frequently read “wrong.” Essaying the trans body can offer such bodies the opportunity to be read with intention, care, and lesser precarity, as well as facilitate a newfound agency in the essayist to author previously unknowable forms and evolving truths. This chapter reads the embodied trans essaying of T. Clutch Fleischman, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, CeCe McDonald, Janet Mock, Paul B. Preciado, j wallace skelton, Susan Stryker, and Riki Wilchins, among others, to understand how they have transformed the essay and been transformed by it.
Claudia Rankine on the Essay
Authors: Wallack Nicole B.
Published: September 2023

Presented in the form of an essay, or a series of essayistic passages in Claudia Rankine’s voice, this experimental chapter is an edited and curated version of an interview conducted by the editors of the volume with Rankine. In it, Rankine talks about her journey towards becoming a writer and essayist; the literary influences that shaped her character and writing; and her views on the essay form and its role in the Public Sphere.
Emotion, Mission, Architecture
Authors: Ebrahimi Sara
Published: September 2023

Missionary medicine flourished during the period of high European imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was considered as the best and surest way to overcome the distrust of and gain access to the homes of the indigenous population. Through studying the medical activities and infrastructures of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Persia and north-western British India and building upon existing works on missionaries in the Middle East and British India, this monograph examines the practice of obtaining trust. The themes explored in the monograph include dispensary and medical itineration work, hospital architecture, patients’ visitors, women’s work, and the relations between missionary objectives and wider imperial policy. A synthesis of Christian mission history, architectural history, emotions history, and history of medicine and empire, it raises broader historical questions about the process of mobilising and regulating emotions in the Christian missionary contexts, contributing in turn to discussions on hybridity, missionary and local encounters, women’s role, and the interactions between mission and empire.
Colorblindness on the Post-Racial Stage: Hip hop, Comedy, and Cultural Appropriation in Othello: The Remix
Authors: Corredera Vanessa I.
Published: September 2023

Chapter 2 examines the colorblind narrative approach to Othello taken in the Q Brothers’ “ad-rap-tation” Othello: The Remix (2012). This production serves as a complex site displaying the friction caused when employing hip hop for reimagining Shakespeare by situating Othello: The Remix’s use of hip hop through Imani Perry’s, Tricia Rose’s, and Michael Asante Jr.’s respective discussions of the genre’s history as a Black, polemical art form. This history clashes with the Q Brothers’ decision to highlight comedy within Othello so as to appeal to conservative white theatregoers. The merging of these genres results in two forms of racial distortion: a colorblind approach to race paired with supposedly comedic racial stereotyping. The Q Brothers thus create a toothsome version of hip hop, which mirrors white society’s cultural appropriation of the genre. Paying homage to but methodologically extending conversations about colorblind casting and Shakespeare, the chapter concludes that countering appropriative, colorblind Shakespearean reanimations entails an emphasis on the idea of the color-conscious, not only as applied to casting, but just as importantly, at the narrative level.
“No tools with which to hear”: Adaptive Re-Vision, Audience Education, and American Moor
Authors: Corredera Vanessa I.
Published: September 2023

Chapter 4 explores Keith Hamilton Cobb’s play American Moor (2012) and its confrontation of how the white gaze stereotypes and therefore delimits Black masculinity’s relationship to Shakespeare and American culture. The play uses Othello as a touchstone, for as the actor auditions to play “the Moor” for a young, white director, overlaps appear between his experience and Othello’s. The chapter’s argument thus builds on the work of Peter Erickson and Margaret Jane Kidnie to contend that American Moor champions a turn to what “adaptive re-vision.” This term expands on Kidnie’s important assertion that “adaptation” is the standard against with “authentic” or “original” performance is established. Adaptive re-vision pushes back against the racialized nature of this commitment to authenticity by describing a performance that may approximate whatever is deemed “original” but that intentionally takes a critical point of view, embracing instead of rejecting adaptation as a mode for critiquing the white-oriented perceptions, traditions, and standards shaping Shakespearean theatre. This recuperative adaptation thus embraces Erickson’s concept of re-vision, accepting adaptation at the level of perspective, namely, a perspective that does not need to conform to the right/white one that has so long shaped the authoritative standard for performance. Importantly, Cobb models how to undertake this journey through audience education; essentially, strategies that strive to help audiences be receptive to the racial adaptive re-vision that American Moor poignantly encourages.
Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Whiteness and Universality in Key & Peele and Get Out
Authors: Corredera Vanessa I.
Published: September 2023

This concluding chapter demonstrates how disrupting white audience expectations depends on approaching narratives through an interpretive perspective contesting the idea of universal storytelling, which is very often, as Richard Dyer argues, de facto white storytelling. Though an analysis situated within discussions about universality as whiteness across storytelling modes, the chapter demonstrates how comedy show Key & Peele’s sketch “Othello ’Tis My Shite” (2013) and horror-thriller Get Out (2017) defy whiteness’s perspectival dominance. The sketch upends the myth of Shakespearean universality through two “Moors” who watch Othello at the Globe, their reactions indicting Shakespeare’s representation of Blackness. The sketch’s twist ending, however, imagines appropriations that take a Black perspective seriously as potentially rehabilitating this caricaturing. Jordan Peele makes real the challenge posed by the sketch in his film Get Out, a direct response to America’s post-racial fantasy. In its reimagining of both the horror genre and Othello’s basic narrative structure, Get Out literalizes the “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe)—the physical and psychological violence and threat of literal and metaphorical death—enacted on Othello. Specifically, the film confronts America’s necropolitics through its emphasis on microaggressions, the concept of the coagula, and the idea of the sunken place. These two examples thus provide powerful frameworks for transforming Othello into a story about white supremacy’s alienation and appropriation of Blackness, a gesture that resists the universal white perspective in favor of a particular Black one.
Epilogue
Authors: Corredera Vanessa I.
Published: September 2023

This epilogue examines approaches to race and racism post-2016 and closes the monograph with a brief list of recommendations for more ethical approaches to race and representation both within the field of Shakespeare studies and in culture at large.
Waiting at the Heart of Colonial Time Regimes
Authors: Lagji Amanda
Published: September 2023

Chapters 1 anchors the discussion of waiting and colonial time in two novels: Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness and Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s 1962 novel Ambiguous Adventure (L'Aventure ambiguë). Heart of Darkness locates the temporality of waiting in the colonial context, creating a genealogy for “waiting” that extends from the turn of the twentieth-century to the present day. Beyond its canonical status in world literature, the novel is remarkable for its early mobilization of waiting to register the ambivalences of temporal difference and conflict that become implicit in critiques of colonialism and later postcolonial theory. Ambiguous Adventure, on the other hand, is a disaffected bildungsroman, set in Senegal after World War II and in the twilight of French colonial rule. Complicating the representation of colonial time in Heart of Darkness, contrasting Kane with Conrad offers a more expansive view of the social life of time and “colonial” time specifically in Ambiguous Adventure by examining the various syncopations and dissonances produced by Islamic temporalities, modernization discourses, and precolonial cosmologies, which are all activated in the novel’s timescape.
Conclusion
Authors: Lagji Amanda
Published: September 2023

The book’s conclusion extends the study of waiting and postcolonial fiction to the twenty-first century and the challenges that confront a still-decolonizing world. The conclusion reflects on the significance of waiting in the post-9/11 rhetoric of preemptive military strikes, which frame national security in terms of refusing to wait. The conclusion weaves into the discussion a synthesis of the texts throughout the body of the manuscript to expand the implications of the project to spaces elsewhere. Waiting, the book argues, has a particular resonance with colonial discourse and anticolonial nationalist movements, taking on additional textures in conjunction with post-independence disillusionment, truth and reconciliation commissions, and other temporalities in complex timescapes—including the acceleration that appears to characterize globalization as well as the discourses of preemption and preparedness that undergird the United States’ foreign policy under the sign of the war on terror.
Plain Plasticity: Thomas Ellwood’s The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714)
Authors: Seymour Laura
Published: September 2023

Analyses Thomas Ellwood’s 1714 autobiography in terms of theories of cognitive plasticity. Argues that Ellwood trains his body to act in a Quaker manner, making this easier with time. Focuses on the philosopher Catherine Malabou’s theories of plasticity and their Aristotelian and early modern roots.
Bosnian Hajj Literature
Authors: Karić Dženita
Published: September 2023

This is the first critical and theoretically grounded book-length study of Hajj literature (written texts about the experience of the Hajj) and Hajj practices of Bosnian Muslims. It redefines the ways pilgrimage can be understood and offers new methods for investigating the meaning and importance of Hajj for generations of premodern and modern believers. It also throws light on Balkan communities previously ignored by modern scholarship in Islamic, religious, and area studies. Breaking with the predominant academic trends of focusing on nationalism and ethnic conflict in the region, it instead puts the spotlight on the richness of texts, and visual and archival material, and focuses on genres that challenge the established literary canons.
What Artistry Can Do
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

This book collects theoretical essays written between 1996 and 2017 on art and aesthetics. The first section deals with critical art and artistic criticism, and cognitive aspects of art-making. The second section addresses specific topics related to the agency of art, such as laughter, mockery and artistic freedom; the special ontological status of the art object that is compared to a gift; how the art maker becomes an artist; and the possibility of an ‘intimate’ reading of art works. The third section offers a phenomenological description of the aesthetic gaze and of experience of (kinds of) beauty, and analyses the meaning and complex origin of ugliness.
Notes on the Work of Art as a Gift
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

The relationship to the artwork is sui generis. It is an object that is made and traded, that one can and wants to own, and is collected. Yet it is no ordinary object. The collector owns it, yet it always remains the artist's work as well. It also remains the property of its creator. This shows - with what Marcel Mauss writes in his Essai sur le don - that the work of art predates the order of exchange, and is a remnant of the order of ancient, pre-industrial making, and of gift-giving.
Fatal Truths: Notes on the Beauty Experience
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

This article discusses the relationship of aesthetic judgement, and the basis on which it is expressed, and aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experience is distinguished from the ability to recognise 'aesthetic objects' and value them aesthetically. The beauty experience itself is sui generis and in itself an existential - and thus a fatal - experience. The beauty experience, characterised here using texts by Paul Valéry, is, first of all, a revelation of what beauty is and means in a life, and not a valuation of a particular aesthetic object, (and it certainly does not decide on the value of a work of art).
The Idler's Club
Authors: Fiss Laura
Published: September 2023

Poking fun at Victorian social clubs became a way of asserting and redefining social belonging. At the turn of the century, amid intense social change, the club became the subject of sustained humour in the Idler magazine and its circle, from editors Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr to J. M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Barry Pain, Israel Zangwill, and even P. G. Wodehouse. Rather than doing away with the club itself, these authors embraced the paradoxes of the club and re-defined it as a space of possibility. Their humorous, fictional clubs aided the social mobility of the authors who created them, who in turn served as models for the readers who might never cross the literal thresholds of Clubland. As depicted in the fiction and non-fiction of the Idler circle, clubs provide a sense of belonging fundamentally rooted in exclusivity, particularly by gender. The Idlers use humour to point out the ways in which Victorian print culture itself both is and is not like an exclusive club.
Introduction: ‘Evil Lurks in California’
Authors: Murphy Bernice M.
Published: September 2023

This introductory chapter defines the ‘California Gothic’ and outlines its relationship with California history and culture. The relationship between the California Gothic and the wider American Gothic tradition is discussed. The perception that California is simultaneously an Edenic and a nightmarish locale is considered, as is the sense that something went very wrong with California at the point when it also became the nation’s most populous and influential state. The contents of this volume are briefly outlined and prior critical work on and around this subject area and related areas is acknowledged. The rationale behind the book’s primary focus on contemporary fiction and film is outlined, as is the criteria by which narratives were selected for discussion. The relationship between the ‘California Dream’ and the ‘California Nightmare’, which is a key facet of the book, is also discussed, as is the relationship between the California Gothic and previous books by the author on the Suburban Gothic and The Highway Horror Film.
Conclusion: ‘It’s Our Time Now’: Us (2019) and Desierto (2015)
Authors: Murphy Bernice M.
Published: September 2023

Here, the California Gothic is discussed in relation to its tendency to privilege the perspectives of white characters of Anglo-American descent. It is argued that Jordan Peele’s 2019 film Us subtly reminds us from the outset that it is a narrative with California-specific resonances. It also reminds us that the California Gothic is overwhelmingly associated with white creators, white protagonists and the dramatization of middle-class white anxieties. Here, a revolution which begins in California is again one that will soon expand far beyond the spatial boundaries of the state.
The final film discussed in this volume is the Mexican-made survival horror movie Desierto (2015), directed by Jonás Cuarón. In Desierto, the desperate immigrant’s journey towards the ‘Promised Land’ of California is relayed from a twenty-first century genre-movie perspective. It overlaps with (and updates) many of the themes discussed during the first chapter, particularly the feeling that the ‘right’ to enter the Eden of California is often won at a high cost. Here, however, the travellers in peril here are modern-day migrant workers desperate to make it across the border to be reunited with family members.
‘A mine yet to be explored’: Romanticism and Anglo-Danish Literary Exchanges
Authors: Duffy Cian
Published: September 2023

British interest in Classical Scandinavian literature has been well-documented by British and Nordic scholars working on eighteenth-century antiquarianism, philology, and related areas of enquiry. But hardly any scholarly attention at all has been paid to British interest, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in contemporary Danish Romantic literature. This chapter explores the various ways in which the translation of contemporary literature formed a vehicle of cultural exchange between Britain and Denmark, examining not only the reception of Danish Romantic-period literature in Britain but also the transmission of British literature to Denmark during the Romantic period. A particular focal point is British responses to the reception of Shakespeare in Denmark and the first translations of Shakespeare into Danish, a process which contributed appreciably to the development of Romanticism in Denmark.
Winners and Losers: The Political Economy of Edinburgh
Authors: McCrone David
Published: September 2023

Edinburgh is often described as a highly socially segregated city with distinct neighbourhoods, each with their own cachet. This chapter explores whether this is true, and if so, why. It accounts for the economic history of the city, with a focus on the decline of manufacturing, and its social and political implications, and the rise and fall of the Edinburgh banks, the financial sector, and the investment industry. Edinburgh is difficult to ‘read’; what you see is not always what you get. Robert Louis Stevenson, famous son of the city, once observed: ‘Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence.’.
Enlightened City: Cultural Power and University Life 1
Authors: McCrone David
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the centrality, or otherwise, of the University of Edinburgh, founded as the ‘town’s college’ in the 16th century. Often accused of being in Edinburgh, but not in essence of it, ‘the university’, while nowadays one of four in or near the city, but primus inter pares, has had an awkward relationship to the city, periodically accused of using the city for its own ends, especially with regard to urban redevelopment. Edinburgh University, however, does not define cultural power in the city, but ramifies into the ‘knowledge industry’ more generally, for Edinburgh is a city of medicine and science, at least as important as law and finance, and historically deeply rooted.
Dynastic Politics in the Age of Diocletian, AD 284-311
Authors: Waldron Byron
Published: September 2023

In AD 293 the Roman world was plunged into a bold new experiment in government. Four soldiers shared the empire between them: two senior emperors, Diocletian and Maximian, and two junior emperors, Constantius and Galerius. This regime, now known as the Tetrarchy, engaged with dynastic power in thoroughly unconventional ways: Diocletian and Maximian presented themselves as brothers despite being unrelated; Diocletian and Galerius repeatedly thwarted the dynastic ambitions of individual Tetrarchs and their sons; the sons themselves were variously hostages, symbols of imperial unity and possibly targets of assassination; and the importance of women to imperial self-representation was much reduced.This is the first book to focus on the Tetrarchy as an imperial dynasty. Examining the dynasty through the lens of Rome’s armies, it presents the Tetrarchic dynasty as a military experiment, created by a network of provincial career soldiers and tailored to the needs of the different regional armies. Mustering a diverse array of evidence, including archaeology, coins, statuary, inscriptions, panegyrics and invective, the author provides bold new interpretations of Tetrarchic dynastic politics, looking at brotherhood, empresses, imperial collegiality, military politics, hereditary succession and the roles of sons within Roman dynasties.
What is Understanding?
Authors: Turner Bryan S.
Published: September 2023

The famous philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, writing in war-torn Germany, recognised that understanding is conditioned by the stability or instability of its political context. Our modern understanding of Islam is severely conditioned by the global instability and conflict of our times including 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, and the crisis in Afghanistan. Understanding Islam should not however present western observers with special problems. One stumbling block is the trinitarian theology of the Christianity. However, Christianity and Islam share many ‘family resemblances’ that are grounds for dialogue and mutual respect.
Insiders and Outsiders
Authors: Turner Bryan S.
Published: September 2023

There is a well-established issue in sociology, and much discussed in the work of Robert Merton, regarding insiders and outsiders in empirical sociological research. However, a person’s position is never simply that of a single ascribed status. People typically have many status positions. Outsiders can frequently produce major works that are insightful such as Gunner Myrdal, a Swedish sociologist, in his An American Dilemma. The work of Muslim exiles has often been significant in producing new insights into society. The chapter examines significant contributions by exiles such as Edward Said, Ali Shariati, and Mohammad Arkoun. For the many western Muslims, are they outsiders?
Postmodernism, Globalisation and Religion
Authors: Turner Bryan S.
Published: September 2023

Postmodernism was a movement in the humanities and social sciences that challenged the idea that there is a uniform notion of rationality shared by all societies. It is often equated with relativism, but postmodernism was a wider development that included architecture. It was also seen to emerge out of American pragmatism. As a movement coming after modernity, it was often connected to globalisation. It was defined eventually as ‘the death of grand narratives’ by Francois Lyotard. It is seen to be a threat to religions which are major examples of such grand narratives. Postmodernism can be seen therefore as a dimension of secularisation
Orientalism and Islam
Authors: Turner Bryan S.
Published: September 2023

Islam has been understood through the lens of orientalism which often depicted Islam as strange and exotic. Muslim cultures were examined through paintings of exotic harems. Muslim societies were treated as stationary and backward. This tradition was challenged by Edward Said in his famous Orientalism in 1978. Although Said’s perspective was highly influential, it was criticised insofar as he concentrated on novels and the work of explorers, thereby ignoring developments in anthropology and sociology. He did however adopt the claim of Karl Marx that the Orient could not represent itself, it had to be represented. With the slow erosion of colonialism, the question is: have we moved into Post-Orientalism?
The Problems of Positionality
Authors: Turner Bryan S.
Published: September 2023

Positionality is the idea that all knowledge is a function of the position or positions held by the participants in research and debate. Previous chapters have examined the origins of this idea in Orientalism and its modern version – the West versus the Rest. To some extent, this divide has been challenged by globalisation and growing cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, the western notion of rationality stemming from the Enlightenment often questions the role of religion in public discourse. Western philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Juergen Habermas have questioned the place of religion in public debate. Habermas established the ‘proviso’ that religious participants in public discourse must express their position in a language that is intelligent to secular participants. The religious reforms in the Roman Catholic Church through Vatican II opened the door to religious dialogue. The ’strong programme in sociology’ was defended by Pierre Bourdieu that includes the standard that sociology must be impartial to the truth or falsity of statements uttered by subjects of empirical research.