bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Maori and Great War Commemoration in New Zealand
Authors: Smits Katherine
Published: January 2020

When Lord Liverpool, the Governor of New Zealand announced from the steps of Parliament in Wellington on August 5, 1914 Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, there was no sign of doubt among the large crowd gathered that the former colony would enthusiastically support the campaign. Prime Minister William Massey had a few days before offered London a New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and announced to Parliament that he had ‘no fear of volunteers not being forthcoming.’...
Resénégalisation and the Representation of Black African Troops during World War One
Authors: Rechniewski Elizabeth
Published: January 2020

It is only very recently that recognition has been given to the massive and possibly decisive contribution made by troops from France’s Empire to its ultimate victory in both World Wars. The ‘rediscovery’ of their role afforded them belated acknowledgement in the commemorations of the centenary of World War One. The original plans for the centenary barely acknowledged the role of colonial troops, an omission challenged by Rachid Bouchareb and Pascal Blanchard who successfully proposed the addition of the commemorative project ‘Frères d’armes’. This rediscovery invites reflection on what factors may have contributed to the long neglect of their participation in combat. This chapter explores the immediate historical context of the deployment of one segment of these colonial troops during World War One: the ...
The First Circle of Memory
Authors: Teulié Gilles
Published: January 2020

“‘Marsels!’ ‘We have reached Marsels!’ ‘Hip Hip Hurrah!’ The sepoys were shouting excitedly on deck. Lalu got up from where he sat watching a game of cards and went to see Marseilles”.1

The opening lines of Muluk Raj Anand’s well informed and celebrated novel ...
Aesthetic Form and Political Function
Authors: Prosser Cherie
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines selected examples from collections of First World War posters from across British India and French Algeria. Current historiographies of colonial participation in the First World War provide an important cultural context for understanding why poster artists used stereotypes as a form of public mediation....
Situating the Belgian Congo in Belgium’s First World War Centenary
Authors: Ypersele Laurence van , Ngongo Enika
Published: January 2020

As in other countries, the surge of interest in Great War commemoration in Belgium has taken many by surprise. Public engagement in 2014 was undeniable: exhibitions were visited, special newspaper editions were bought, documentaries were watched and elaborate commemorations attended. Public demand for knowledge of the First World War was driven by a desire to situate family and local history within wider themes of the War. In the course of such commemoration, Belgians rediscovered the horror of the trenches, the massacres of civilians in 1914 and the harshness of the German occupation, whilst attempting to situate their own family histories in the grand narrative of the conflict. In contrast, it is clear that the participation of the Belgian Congo in the First World War received neither official nor media attention. Only modest private initiatives saw the light of day during the Centenary. But with a significant Congolese diaspora resident in Belgium, how can we explain the ‘forgetting’ of the Belgian Congo in the Centenary commemorations? What indeed was the Belgian Congo’s actual contribution to the War? Who organised those rare initiatives of commemoration and for whose benefit? These are the questions that will frame this chapter, which examines the two major issues that pertained to the Belgian Congo in 1914-1918: the question of the colony’s neutrality and then the major military operations in central Africa. In light of this, the chapter then examines and explains the lack of commemorative activity in Belgium concerning its former colony. This chapter concludes that the regional administrative division of commemorative organisation combined with the historical conditioning of Belgian colonial memory created this absence in Belgium’s Centenary commemorations....
Lessons from Said
Authors: Harrison Nicholas
Published: January 2020

One purpose of this chapter is to place the book’s core Algerian material in a wider intellectual context, inviting readers to pursue comparisons with their own experiences of teaching/criticism, or with other histories. It extends the Introduction’s discussion of Edward Said, treating his work as paradigmatic in its equivocal relationship to literary education and humanities education more widely, a mixture of enduring commitment and deep scepticism. Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India is treated briefly as another example. The chapter explores critically Said’s promotion of the work of the ‘intellectual’ as a possible path to political legitimacy for the literature professor, then examines Orientalism’s hesitations over literary aesthetics and his uncertainties over how to place literature politically and historically. [125]
Teaching in a Time of Crisis
Authors: Harrison Nicholas
Published: January 2020

Against the broader backdrop of histories and debates sketched out in earlier chapters, Chapter 3 focuses in detail on the life and work of Mouloud Feraoun, touching on other important figures including Jean Amrouche and Albert Camus. Feraoun was a successful novelist who remained dedicated to his work as a teacher in a French primary school, even when his work placed his life at threat from both sides in the Algerian war of independence (during which the FLN at one point called a boycott of French schools). He finished his life working for the CSEs (Centres sociaux 裵‎catifs) established by the French authorities during the war. The chapter tries to shed light on this heroic/anti-heroic commitment to education, and how we can understand, and perhaps justify, his decision to remain part of the colonial education system in the context of a violent anti-colonial war, despite his commitment to Algerian independence. [150]
Unfamiliar Worlds
Authors: Harrison Nicholas
Published: January 2020

Drawing more deeply than previous chapters on literary texts, including novels by Mouloud Feraoun, Albert Memmi, Mohammed Dib and above all Assia Djebar, this chapter explores some of the experiences offered to ‘colonized’ students in colonial schools. It emphasizes the unfamiliarity of French culture to many Algerians and other colonized populations, and the tendency of French/colonial schools to discriminate against their ‘colonial’ students and to leave them with feelings of deracination and alienation. Through Djebar it examines in detail a particular example of how a French/colonial education alienated – and politicized – female students from a Muslim background. That example, I suggest, raises wider questions about the relationship between lat瞼‎(secularism, especially in education), Islam and French Republicanism, an issue that is repeatedly invoked in debates today around gender equality and the Islamic veil in French education, and is also pertinent to post-independence Algeria. [142]
French Lessons
Authors: Harrison Nicholas
Published: January 2020

This chapter extends Chapter 4’s examination of the impact of colonial schooling on Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, Albert Memmi and other writers. It reflects on what went on inside the classroom, and speculates on what it was, even in a colonial education, that made it fruitful, at least in some respects, for some students. It begins by considering the dynamics – inadvertent and perverse from a colonial perspective – that sometimes made French schooling positively politicizing for colonized students, notably in relation to notions of nationalism, national identity and language politics. It then focuses on writers’ accounts of studying the French language and French literature, evidently a key part of the process, educational and psychological, that brought into being their ‘francophone’ works, which duly reflect back on their colonial/literary/educational experiences. In these ways the chapter explores how some of the children subjected to colonial schooling became some of its most astute critics, as well as its greatest success stories; and how French/colonial schooling helped shape the forms and fictions of self-reinvention for which many of the writers are known. [177]
‘Splendid testemunhos’: Documenting Atrocities, Bodies, and Desire in Roger Casement’s Black Diaries
Authors: Uriarte Javier
Published: January 2020

This essay performs an analysis of the highly controversial and rarely studied personal diaries of this Irish diplomat and traveler. Within the Black Diaries it is possible to find the description of bodies in intense suffering, of dismemberments, torture, and death, alongside descriptions of beautiful near-perfect bodies that provide the narrator with moments of intense pleasure. These are, to a certain extent, the same bodies; bodies of indigenous peoples living in the Casa Arana’s reign of terror. Reconciling the simultaneity of bodily pain and pleasure in this writing is one of the centers of Uriarte’s analysis, which links the Black Diaries to the more traditional utopian discourse about Amazonia of which the myths of El Dorado ––and the violence the promise of untapped, virginal riches provoked––are a significant part.
The Western ‘Baptism’ of Yurupary: Reception and Rewritings of an Amazonian Foundational Myth
Authors: Bolte Rike
Published: January 2020

The myth of the Yurupary [yërëparí] is the foundational story of a patriarchal Amazonian religious system, and was widely spread and highly diversified among the language families of the Tupí-Guaraní, Tukano and Arawak from the Vaupés River in the northeast Amazon. In the midst of both Missionary expansion in the region at the end of the 19th century and capitalist penetration, the Italian jurist, geographer and explorer Ermanno Stradelli published an account of the Yurupary entitled “Leggenda dell’ Jurupary” (1890). In this essay Bolte visibilizes the political, literary and cultural mediations between the myth —inaccessible in its “pure” form— and the reappropriation it suffered by missionaries and local and European travellers during the 19th century. In view of the highly debatable nature of a historical-literary event such as that of a non-Western story being put into writing by European hands, Bolte proposes that we should systematically accept that we have no way of reaching the Yurupary story in its original form, prior to its Westernization. We should also bear in mind that Stradelli’s version is a mere selection of a great variety of episodes from different oral stories, and even different cycles of Amazonian myths.
Photography, Inoperative Ethnography, Naturalism: On Sharon Lockhart’s Amazon Project
Authors: Quin Alejandro
Published: January 2020

This essay aims to examine the photographic work carried out by American artist Sharon Lockhart over the course of two anthropological expeditions to the Brazilian Amazon in the 1990s. This work is comprised of two sets of photographs, taken among rural communities of the Aripuaná River and the Apeú-Salvador Island respectively, and a short film shot in the Manaus Opera House. By focusing primarily on the group of photographs titled Interview Locations/ Family Photographs —pictures of empty “interview locations” produced right after the interaction with local informants, and family pictures belonging to the interviewees— the author explores Lockhart’s photography as an original intervention into the historic imaginary that constructed the Amazon as a purely natural space destined to either await or resist cultural and civilizing inscriptions.
Human Rights Reporting on Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: A Story of Stagnation and Failure
Authors: Thorne Benjamin , Viebach Julia
Published: January 2020

Building on legal anthropology and performance studies, this chapter analyses the Gacaca law talk and performances to evidence the wider context of changes in Rwanda post-1994 due to national and international pressures. The Rwandan government legally mandated Rwandans to actively participate in the gacaca courts from 2004 to 2012 for crimes committed during the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi. Every citizen was required to attend the local level courts to provide testimony and to serve as judge, witness and testifier on a weekly basis. In total, 15,300 courts ruled over nearly two million cases. Based on a 'kaleidoscopic' reading of optical illusions, or a slight shift in perspective to integrate the multiplicity of performances within the gacaca system, we demonstrate the dramaturgic nature of gacaca through gacaca law, policy and practices. Ultimately, such visual metaphors provide important interpretative tools to grasp how gacaca scripts were performed for different audiences with different effects and functions depending on micro to macro politics, and the resulting performances of competing narratives and the variances within the gacaca system.
Rebranding Rwanda’s Peacekeeping Identity during Post-Conflict Transition
Authors: Holmes Georgina , Buscaglia Ilaria
Published: January 2020

Drawing on recent theorising of 'nation branding', this article examines how mediatised security narratives are used as part of the current Government of Rwanda's public diplomacy strategy to establish post-conflict Rwanda's peacekeeping identity and brand image as a Troop Contributing Country. It does so by undertaking an analysis of media discourse published by the state-owned English language national newspaper The New Times between 2008 and 2018, and two 'twitter storms' that occurred in March 2017 and 2018 in response to the Central African Republic Sexual Exploitation and Abuse scandal involving French military peacekeepers and a second scandal involving Ghanaian police peacekeepers in South Sudan. Specifically, we ask, how does the Government of Rwanda use mediatised security narratives as a nation branding tool after genocide and civil war? We argue that mediatised security narratives are employed to erase Rwanda's negative brand informed by the frameworks of victimology, poverty and violence and reposition Rwanda as an emerging strategic player in international peacekeeping. The RPF achieves this by 'niche building' and mimicking the public diplomacy strategies of middle-powers in order to present Rwanda as a catalyst and facilitator of contemporary peacekeeping policy and practice.
Writing as Reconciliation: Bearing Witness to Life after Genocide
Authors: Gilbert Catherine
Published: January 2020

Yolande Mukagasana is well known as the first survivor of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda to publish her testimony in 1997. Almost 20 years later, she published a new testimonial narrative focusing on life after the genocide. Similarly, survivor Annick Kayitesi-Jozan published a first testimony in 2004 and a second thirteen years later. Why this decision to return to writing after so many years? In order to explore this question, this chapter focuses on their two recent testimonies: Mukagasana's L'Onu et le chagrin d'une négresse (Aviso, 2014) and Kayitesi-Jozan's Même Dieu ne veut pas s'en mêler (Seuil, 2017). Both these narratives oscillate between the past and the present, intertwining painful memories of the past with reflections on these women's active roles in post-genocide society and the legacy they are building for future generations, both in Rwanda and across the diaspora. Through close analysis of their narratives, this chapter interrogates the ways in which their thinking about reconciliation in post-genocide Rwandan society has changed, pointing to shifts in understanding of the role of writing in the post-genocide context and how its potential in facilitating reconciliation might be harnessed.
Decolonizing Trauma Therapy in Rwanda
Authors: Sinalo Caroline Williamson
Published: January 2020

Prevailing theories of trauma in the Western Psychological Sciences attend primarily to trauma's negative emotional, cognitive and behavioural consequences, which are interpreted as pathological and labelled 'posttraumatic stress disorder' (PTSD). Besides importing potentially culturally alien practices, technologies, and narratives, a significant problem with the Western medical model in the post-colonial, post-genocide context of Rwanda, is its narrow understanding of what constitutes 'traumatic'. Specifically, its focus on events fails to capture the complex traumatic experiences of Rwandans which, in addition to the genocide, include the long-term destruction of indigenous culture at the hands of European colonizers. Drawing on evidence from survivor testimonies and an interview with traditional Rwandan trauma therapist, Muganga Rutangarwamaboko, this chapter advocates an alternative approach to trauma therapy in Rwanda, reconciling posttraumatic growth theory and postcolonial theory with home-grown ideas about Rwandan identity, known as Ndi Umunyarwanda, or Rwandicité. Such an approach attempts to recognize and encourage existing stories of positive change among survivors while avoiding the imposition of diagnostic labels based on a discourse of individual psychopathology.
Imbabazi, Kwicuza and Christian Testimonials of Forgiveness
Authors: Hron Madelaine
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores thorny issues related to reconciliation and forgiveness in post-genocide, post-gacaca Rwanda. Specifically, it deliberates Christian notions of forgiveness along with Rwandan understandings of kwicuza (remorse) and imbabazi (pardon), and juxtaposes theological conceptualizations of forgiveness with psychosocial research on reconciliation in post-conflict areas. The chapter highlights noteworthy forgiveness projects in Rwanda, including those by the NGOs Twungubumwe Collectif and Just.Equipping. Most of this chapter however, delves into the representation of forgiveness in Christian testimonial accounts that are readily available in the West. Specifically, the chapter examines Led by Faith by controversial AiMA Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana; Immaculée Ilibagiza's "Catholic" bestseller Left To Tell and Frida Gashumba's more evangelical but also more realistic Frida: Chosen to Die, Destined to Live.
Planetary Ambitions
Authors: Armstrong Joshua
Published: January 2020

This chapter reads Lydie Salvayre's Portrait de l’écrivain en animal domestique (2007). In this novel, Salvayre’s anxieties about allowing oneself—and even herself as author—to be domesticated by the logic of global capitalism are condensed into the pathological relationship between her narrator avatar (who incarnates politically-engaged literature) and the satirical Jim Tobold, the richest man on the planet and ‘uncontested champion of globalization’—a character who, incidentally, bears more than a passing resemblance to Donald Trump. Tobold sees the world at the level of the master, corporate map, from which he can make boardroom decisions in perfect disregard for their harmful, ground-level side effects. This chapter revisits and further explores Bruno Latour on cartographic megalomania, and draws on Fredric Jameson on cognitive mapping, and David Harvey on the self-defeating contradictions of the infinite expansion paradigm of capitalism in a world of increasingly finite resources. Moreover, it develops the Salvaryean notion of the paralipomenon, offering a new perspective on Salvayre’s underlying (engaged) literary strategy, one that, by focusing on the seemingly insignificant details of a hegemonic discourse—such as that of free-market capitalism—reveals its inherent contradictions and flaws.
Décalage Permanent
Authors: Armstrong Joshua
Published: January 2020

This chapter turns to Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Fuir [Running Away] (Prix Médicis, 2005), which takes place in the overcrowded and fever-pitched territories of industrial hubs of Shanghai and Beijing of the 2000s. There, even Toussaint’s perennially laconic narrator finds himself caught up in the frenzy and panic of the compressed space-time of impending catastrophe that prevails. Toussaint’s narrator, like a postmodern Angel of (the end of) History, following the example of his muse Marie, discovers in an epiphany that ‘adequation’ with a world cast into the accelerated flight of globalization is not harmonious like its cartographic or commercial representations, but, rather, chaotic, always already beyond itself; true adequation with such a world turns out to be, paradoxically, a permanent state of décalage. This chapter reads Fuir in light of Bruno Latour’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Angel of History. Moreover, it demonstrates the importance and after-effects of Toussaint’s narrator’s epiphany in Fuir for the subsequent novels in the Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte (MMMM) tetralogy.
Asymmetrical Tactics
Authors: Armstrong Joshua
Published: January 2020

Chapter Seven, ‘Asymmetrical Tactics,’ reads Jean Rolin’s Ormuz [Hormuz] (Prix de la langue française, 2013), a novel taking place in the Strait of Hormuz, gateway onto the Persian Gulf. In this oil-rich, high-stakes territory, center stage is taken by international commercial, political, and military positionings for power, while, behind the scenes, war and oil spills invisibly affect the local ecologies where people, animals, and plants (Rolin is attentive to all of these) carve out their lives. Rolin employs a set of asymmetrical literary tactics that allow him to re-center his chosen environments around their most peripheral elements in order to reveal the unseen underside of modernity’s decor. Idiosyncratic micro- and macro-features of his prose, from digressive sentence structure to eccentric plot premises and a dual narrative perspective allow Rolin’s novel to make room for expansions of various kinds. As such, the present-day territory he scrutinizes becomes a haunting confluence of places, times, and possibilities, revealing not only how the local and the global mutually involve one another, but also how the present moment retains its past and foretells its possible futures. This chapter reads Rolin in light of Edward Casey’s writings upon edges, environments, and the ‘topologics’ of place.
Sense of Planet
Authors: Armstrong Joshua
Published: January 2020

Chapter Eight, ‘Sense of Planet,’ reads Marie Darrieussecq’s Le pays (2005), whose narrator is fascinated with geography and constantly ponders her place on this planet. Whereas the cartographic nature of traditional, typically masculine, geographical thinking radically divides the subject from the world by reducing the former to a two-dimensional representation, Darrieussecq’s narrator’s geographical musings begin with a simple fact that explodes the two-dimensional: ‘But the world is a sphere.’ Pregnancy provides a mise en abyme situating her as contained within but also containing a world. Darrieussecq establishes a liminal space of narration that ultimately resists what is for Peter Sloterdijk the ‘basic neurosis of Western civilization’ at the source of today’s spatial crisis: namely, the necessity to ‘have to dream of a subject that watches, names and owns everything, without letting anything contain, appoint or own it.’ Le pays defies this paradigm of globe-alizing encompassing mastery, insisting on sphericity and volume, producing senses of place that are as placental as they are planetary. This chapter reads Darrieussecq in light of Sloterdijk’s theories on spheres of belonging and Ursula K. Heise’s notion of sense of planet.
Conclusion
Authors: Armstrong Joshua
Published: January 2020

The Conclusion summarizes the most prominent aspects of the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism, as these have been encountered in the corpus. It draws parallels between these and current events—including U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate, and his creation of a Space Force. It draws the conclusion that French novels written in the second decade of the new millennium—post-2008-recession, perhaps—become increasingly dystopian, as they move away from the personal existential crises of protagonists finding themselves awkwardly lost in translation toward portraits of societies at large facing more palpably existential threats (financial collapse, war). Indeed, a host of more recent novels depict the near-future demise of the Fifth Republic, if not of France (as a nation) itself. However, these near-future dystopian versions of France also become the occasion for social awakenings and revolution. This is demonstrated by a brief reading of Marie Darriuessecq’s Notre vie dans les forêts (2017).
Introduction
Authors: Barr Rebecca Anne , Buckley Sarah-Anne , O’Cinneide Muireann
Published: January 2020

This introduction considers the ways in which literacy in nineteenth-century Ireland has previously been analysed, noting that these discussions have tended to relate to education and state institutions, and argues that a more nuanced grasp of reading experiences might have important implications for our historical understanding of the relationship between education, identity, status, and the much-contested capacity to bestow a common meaning upon signs. It argues that encounters with the printed page took place across manifold physical forms and through often-conflicted intellectual contexts, as well as in conjunction with less established, more easily-overlooked non-print nodes of communication and interpretation. The introduction then previews the individual contributions to the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate the value of a multi-perspectival approach to the history of Irish literacy.
Varieties of Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Gender, Religion and Language
Authors: Ciosáin Niall Ó
Published: January 2020

This chapter aims to complicate the once-dominant narrative of language loss, in which English literacy displaces Irish orality. Re-examining works printed in Irish, in phonetical ‘anglicised’ forms rather than traditional orthography, it suggests that literacy in English activated and enabled, rather than closed down, literacy in Irish. Using a comparative framework, the chapter explores the ways in which denominational, gender, and regional differences are expressed in the varieties of literacies in Ireland. This conception of the nineteenth century as a period of considerable bilingual literacy, in which print actively textualised and promoted the reading of Irish, amplifies Nicholas Wolf’s description of an island composed of multiple speech communities and adaptive bilingualism.
Douglas Hyde (1860–1949): The Adolescent Behind the Diarist
Authors: Bhaird Máire Nic an , Mathúna Liam Mac
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the diaristic and linguistic development of Douglas Hyde through an examination of his early journals. As the founding President of the Gaelic League, first Professor of Modern Irish in UCD and first President of an independent Irish state, Hyde’s linguistic ideas were integral to his literary and cultural nationalism. His inner thoughts and ideas, his linguistic development and his coming of age in Co. Roscommon are articulated through thirteen diaries housed in the National Library of Ireland. Personal, affective encounters with the Irish language are shown to be an integral part of his personal and political self-development, as Irish language becomes the written mode of both self-expression and self-creation. Hyde’s diaries use phonetic, anglicised transcriptions to chart his early encounters with Irish and experiments in writing in the language. Intriguingly, Hyde’s early writing in Irish utilises diacritical marks from French, suggesting how available textual models affect literacy acquisition when there is little access to works written in the language under study.
The Nation, History, and the Making of National Citizens
Authors: Quinn James
Published: January 2020

This chapter on the Nation newspaper showcases nationalist belief in the value of education – particularly education in history – in forging a self-governing citizenry. It argues that many nationalists – in particular the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s – saw it as their patriotic duty to give the Irish people the ‘national’ education that the British government was deliberately preventing them from receiving. The core subject of this education was history, which they believed would help to create the ‘imagined community’ of the nation by nourishing collective memory and reinforcing national allegiances and obligations, so that the Irish would see themselves as a distinct people rooted in the struggles and sacrifices of the past. This they attempted to do by propagating a heroic and celebratory narrative of Ireland’s struggle for independence through cheap and accessible ballad collections, historical works presented in the ‘Library of Ireland’ and in newspapers such as the Nation. Hand in hand with the provision of reading materials, Young Ireland also sought to promote literacy through the establishment of reading rooms stocked with nationalist literature to supplement or supplant official educational initiatives. Literacy was envisaged as catalyzing an informed citizenry who would insist that they should govern their own destiny.
The Dublin Penny Journal and Alternative Histories
Authors: Tilley Elizabeth
Published: January 2020

This examination of the Dublin Penny Journal shows how antiquarian history was reshaped along nationalist lines by the penny magazines. These ephemeral publications are unexpected and under-examined repositories of cultural identity and indigenous knowledge. Part of the mandate of the Penny Journal was to popularize and explain to a general audience the ancient chronicles of Ireland. One of the magazine’s early editors was George Petrie, Head of the Memoir Section of the government’s Ordnance Survey in Ireland and prominent member of the Royal Irish Academy. Petrie had procured for the Academy the Annals of the Four Masters, a record of Irish history from the deluge (dated as 2,242 years after creation) to AD 1616, and it was extracts from the Annals that Petrie used as a way of reuniting his audience with their own past. The Annals retold the story of Ireland’s birth and death, a story filled both with glory and with ignominious defeat at the hands of the English. Though ostensibly listing the achievements of the Gaelic nobility, in Petrie’s hands the Annals also suggested that the Irish peasantry might, revenant-like, reclaim their own history, and the penny journal format — cheap, conversational, nationalist – made manifest this reconstruction of reality.
Room with a View: Reading Ireland in the Irish College Old Library, Paris c.1870–1900
Authors: Gannon Darragh
Published: January 2020

Looking at reading culture beyond the geographical boundaries of Ireland, this chapter examines interpretations of contemporary and historical Ireland through the eyes of Irish students resident at the Irish College in Paris, c. 1870-1900. It interrogates the extensive print holdings of the Old Library, in addition to select items in the Irish College Archives, to illuminate student perceptions of Ireland’s past and present. This study locates the experience of ‘reading’ Ireland in the Irish College, Paris, at the intersection of seminal political changes in Ireland and France, the epicentre of European debate between religion and secularism and along the frontier of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
‘May God Bless You and All at Home’: Mid-Nineteenth Century Irish Views on Italy through the Letters of Albert Delahoyde, 1860–1870
Authors: O’Driscoll Florry
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores the case-study of Dublin-born Albert Delahoyde as an instance of transnational language learning. Delahoyde was not yet eighteen years of age when he volunteered to fight with the Papal Battalion of St Patrick in 1860, in an ultimately futile attempt to maintain Pope Pius IX’s control over the Papal States. Through his letters, one can assess the individual, but also the communal significance of both the Papal Battalion and the Papal Zouaves, and the many contacts between Ireland and Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Delahoyde provides a perfect example of practical literacy in action, as the correspondence of the Irish soldier reveals much about the links between writing, identity, and nation at the midpoint of the nineteenth century.
‘Good Translations’ or ‘Mental Dram-Drinking’? Translation and Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Authors: Milan Michèle
Published: January 2020

While Irish newspapers and magazines such as the Nation and the Dublin University Magazine featured a variety of both ‘original’ and reprinted translations, a number of Irish printers and publishers also contributed to the dissemination of translated works. This chapter illustrates the role played by translators and other actors in the process such as printers, publishers and booksellers. Throughout the nineteenth century, Irish printers and publishers such as Richard Cross, James Duffy and M. H. Gill and Sons contributed to the dissemination of what they identified as ‘good reading’ – an undertaking which also involved a careful selection of ‘good translations’. Translation in the nineteenth-century Irish literary marketplace was therefore inextricably interconnected with discourses of morality, education, and national virtues.
From Dublin to Dehra Dun: Language, Translation and the Mapping of Ireland and India
Authors: Cronin Nessa
Published: January 2020

This chapter highlights the visual literacy of national territory and colonial space and makes clear the links between cartographic and scientific modes of reading colonial landscapes and the interpretation and containment of colonial peoples. The monetary value of English literacy within the British economy was doubtless an inducement to learn for many Irish. Literacy in English equipped the Irish to work and move throughout the British Empire, as well as allowing many to access the means for transatlantic immigration. This chapter argues that the history of the making of empire is also inextricably bound to the histories of science and cartography in the nineteenth century. Looking at the visual literacy of national territory and colonial space through the national surveys of Ireland and India undertaken in the period, it shows that the discourse and practice of map-making was shaped by the introduction of instruments known as ‘Colby’s Compensation Bars’ used to accurately measure baselines under challenging climatic conditions. The language and techniques of science were translated from Dublin’s Ordnance Survey to Dehra Dun where George Everest would use them in his baseline survey of India in the 1830s.
Writing for the State
Authors: Brown Katie
Published: January 2020

Chapter 1 examines how Chulapos Mambo (Méndez Guédez, 2011) and Bajo las hojas (Centeno, 2010) condemn the connections between a successful or unsuccessful writing career and Bolivarian politics. Chulapos Mambo explicitly criticizes the populist measures put in place by the Bolivarian government to make Venezuela a nation of writers, as well as suggesting that Bolivarian cultural policy rewards those who are loyal to the Revolution. The novel also demonstrates the polarization of literary field, which reflects the polarization of all aspects of society under the Bolivarian Revolution. Bajo las hojas, meanwhile, reflects criticism among certain writers and critics that Bolivarian cultural policy views writing more as a hobby than a profession, and does not offer writers the cultural capital required to make a successful career of writing, particularly in a globalised literary market. Protagonist Julio’s complaints echo claims among writers that Bolivarian cultural policy has instrumentalised reading and delegitimised literary experimentation.
Writing and Distinction
Authors: Brown Katie
Published: January 2020

Chapter 2 considers both the protagonists and the authors of the novels in this study as ‘writer-critics’ who share their ideas about literary quality through discussion of both their own writing and other people’s. As institutions set up during the Punto Fijo period (1958-1998) to endow writers with literary capital and raise the reputation of Venezuela in international literary circles have been subsumed into the Bolivarian ‘Platform for the Book’, some writers and critics are concerned that a focus on ideology will undermine literary quality. In Transilvania unplugged (Sánchez Rugeles, 2011), Todas las lunas (Kozak Rovero, 2011) and Rating (Barrera Tyszka, 2011), characters both attest to the significance of well-written literature for them and display their literary knowledge and tastes as a sign of distinction. As professional writers move away from the state, they are faced with new challenges, in the form of the demands of international literary markets. Throughout La fama, o es venérea, o no es fama (Castañeda, 2012), the author-narrator is caught between an aspiration to write challenging and experimental fiction and a desire for commercial success.
Challenging the National Narrative
Authors: Brown Katie
Published: January 2020

With the resurgence of nationalism in Venezuela instigated by Hugo Chávez, cultural policy posits reading and writing as tools for building a national community. Chapter 3 examines how (auto)fictional writers counter this national narrative by asserting the place of the individual or the family (El niño malo cuenta hasta cien y se retira [Chirinos, 2004], Todas las lunas [Kozak Rovero, 2011] and Rating [Barrera Tyszka, 2011]), or exploring the complexities of national identity (Círculo croata [Zupcic, 2006] and Transilvania unplugged [Sánchez Rugeles, 2011]). This trend mirrors the ‘subjective turn’ which characterised the texts written in opposition to the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948-1958). The chapter concludes that some characters define themselves as ‘writers’ to circumvent issues of national identity.
Fiction and Reality
Authors: Brown Katie
Published: January 2020

Chapter 6 demonstrates how fiction that highlights its own constructed nature is not only a reaction against the delegitimisation of the author as an individual talent in Bolivarian cultural policy, but also a challenge to the grand narratives of nationalism and socialism propagated by the government. These metafictional texts encourage readers to recognise the blurring of the boundary between truth and fiction at the heart of the increasingly violent and destructive polarization of Venezuelan society. The metafictional aspects of Bajo las hojas (Centeno, 2010), Rating (Barrera Tyzka, 2011) and El niño malo… (Chirinos, 2004) are a message to readers to detect fiction outside of the novel: in official histories, ‘reality’ television, news reports and political rhetoric.
‘Soothing Thoughts’
Authors: Pladek Brittany
Published: January 2020

Chapter three begins the book’s survey of palliative poetics developed by Romantic writers, comparing Wordsworth’s ideas about poetic therapy with medical beliefs of the late eighteenth century. The therapeutic holism later ascribed to Wordsworth by literary critics was held by Romantic medicine to be a restorative power of nature, a ‘vis medicatrix naturae’ that could repair a broken constitution in ways doctors could not. But as medicine professionalized, they saw how claims that nature was the real healer could damage their reputation. Their compensatory shift to a palliative ethic was driven in part by a need to renegotiate medicine’s relationship with nature. Similarly, Wordsworth initially hoped his own poetry could replicate nature’s holistic therapy. But in Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection whose Wordsworthian lyrics extol the superiority of natural medicine, Wordsworth realized his own art could not mimic nature’s healing power. As a result, he turns towards a poetics of palliation grounded in the ‘delight’ outlined by Edmund Burke’s 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
John Keats’s ‘Sickness Not Ignoble’
Authors: Pladek Brittany
Published: January 2020

Chapter five argues that John Keats, usually read as Romanticism’s most ardent poet-physician, had knowledge of British medical ethics that led him to deny any neat congruity between the humanitarian duties of physicians and poets. While the former are ethically bound to dull pain, the latter are tasked with furthering the painful, pedagogical process of ‘Soul-Making’ Keats outlines in an 1819 letter. By reading Keats’s two Hyperion poems against an 1816 medical ethics text written for students of Guy’s Hospital like Keats, this chapter argues that by the end of his life, Keats dismissed the idea that poets, like physicians, must above all spare pain to their patients. Fallen from deity to mortality, the Titans of Hyperion develop distinct selves as they acquire individual histories of suffering. Their agony, re-presented in the metapoetic Fall of Hyperion, represents the ideal effect of art on readers: a pedagogical ‘sickness not ignoble’ whose infection is essential to crafting an individual subject. Anticipating a key mandate of narrative medicine, Keats enlists poetry in the rich but difficult mission of exploring how pain shapes an individual’s life story.
Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s ‘Fictitious Condition’
Authors: Pladek Brittany
Published: January 2020

Chapter six reads Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s 1849 gothic drama Death’s Jest-Book as a cynical insider’s take on Romantic medicine’s approach to death. A graduate of Göttingen and Würzburg medical schools, Beddoes harbored early hopes that medicine might solve the mystery of death. But he was disappointed by medicine’s failure to deliver on this promise and disillusioned by doctors who turned a profit in the burgeoning palliative care market. As doctors became more regular presences at the deathbed, patients worried that they were sacrificing agency over their own deaths for the sake of palliative ease. Beddoes satirizes these developments through a harrowing portrait of a failed suicide, denied his chosen death by the imperious decision of a medical professional. Looking ahead to health humanists who advocate for patients’ control over the stories that survive them, Beddoes offers writing as a way to preserve agency over life’s end when death cannot be prevented. When death is a ‘fictitious condition’, it cannot be coopted by rapacious physicians. Beddoes’s critique of managed death is a forward-looking defense of patients’ narrative sovereignty.
Introduction to Part I
Authors: Thiess Derek J.
Published: January 2020

This brief essay clarifies the central theses outlined in the introduction and places them in the wider context of science fiction studies. Emphasis here is on the greater critical attention to embodiment in contemporary science fiction studies and the need for an approach that is both intersectional and biopsychosocial. This discussion includes an analysis of the 2017 film Life.
Graying the Playing Field
Authors: Thiess Derek J.
Published: January 2020

Using both SF literature and film, this chapter indicates age as the clearest challenge to the social construction of the embodied athlete. Within age studies, such constructions often display an escapist quality—the desire to avoid aging and death, to posit aging as a narrative that may be re-written—also sometimes reflected in the fantastic. In much science fiction, however, one also sees a mindful acceptance of the embodied limitations that age places upon us, even in the figures of athletes so often held up as the epitome of youth and health. These limitations are explored in a wide variety of sf literature.
SF Sport and the Individual Talent
Authors: Thiess Derek J.
Published: January 2020

While related to the third chapter’s healthy acknowledgement of bodily limitations, this chapter outlines in more detail the predominance of systemic thinking in the context of sport and the allied forgetting of the experience of the individual athlete. Against this trend, the sf stories, films, and even video games in this chapter highlight the experiences of individual athletes, even in team sports, and the positive role that sport may play in their lives. In this way, it highlights the biological humanity of the athlete over and against the abstraction to which much social criticism condemns them. How, it asks, is sport important to the identity of the individuals who engage them?
Sport, Institution, and the Devil
Authors: Thiess Derek J.
Published: January 2020

This chapter continues the discussion of individuality in sport, but also places the athlete in direct discussion with the institutions that organize and manage sports. Criticism of sport institutions such as the NCAA, NFL, and Olympic Committee are very popular, particularly within sociological constructivism. This chapter places this criticism in a historical context, suggesting it bears a relationship with a longer history of denigrating the athlete as idolatrous. Engaging stories and films that highlight the interaction of athletes with political, religious, and financial institutions the monstrous athlete emerges as a worthy victim caught in a kind of culture war between those who denigrate them and those who exploit them, sometimes one and the same.
The Voice of the Provinces
Authors: Doughan Christopher
Published: January 2020

This book provides a comprehensive depiction of Ireland’s regional press during the turbulent years leading up to the foundation of the Irish Free State following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. It investigates the origins of the regional papers that reported this critical period of Irish history and profiles the personalities behind many of these publications. Furthermore, this book presents case studies of seventeen newspapers – nationalist, unionist, and independent – across the four provinces of Ireland. These case studies not only detail the history of the respective newspapers but also closely scrutinises the editorial commentary of each publication between 1914 and 1921. Consequently, a thorough analysis of how each of these regional titles responded to the many dramatic developments during these years is provided. This includes seminal events such as the outbreak of World War I, the Easter Rising of 1916, the rise of the Sinn Féin party, the War of Independence, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. During this time many of Ireland’s regional newspaper titles faced censorship, suppression, and in some cases, violent attack on their premises that threatened their livelihood. In some instances, newspaper owners, editors, and their staff were arrested and imprisoned. Their experiences during these years are meticulously detailed in this book.
Conclusion
Authors: Doughan Christopher
Published: January 2020

This chapter returns to the research questions posed in the introduction and reflects on some of the most notable features of the regional press that are detailed in the book. This includes the devout religious faith that was evident amongst so many editors and proprietors and the involvement of so many journalists in organisations such as the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and the Gaelic League. It also includes the remarkably lengthy editorial tenures that was so common within the regional press and the high degree of prolonged family ownership of newspapers. Also reviewed is the frequently fractious relations between the British authorities and Irish newspapers. Finally, this chapter recognises the predominantly conservative nature of Irish regional newspapers and concludes by emphasising the importance of the historical gap that this book fills.
Introduction
Authors: Harvey-Kattou Liz
Published: January 2020

This introductory chapter defines what being tico means in Costa Rica, demonstrating its equation with an exclusive and exclusionary national identity that revolves around race, class, religion, and the myth of a common ancestry. It goes on to detail those groups and communities that have traditionally been excluded from the normative conception of Costa Rica’s national identity, such as people of colour, women, and LGBTQ+ peoples. It includes the book’s key arguments and outlines the chapter structures.