bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Korean War Novel
Authors: Rhee Suk Koo
Published: January 2025

The Korean War Novel examines the ways that novels by Korean and Asian American writers have represented the Korean War. By studying the ideological contours of works by Richard E. Kim, Ahn Junghyo, Susan Choi, Ha Jin, Choi In-hun and Hwang Sok-yong, it documents the range of historical narratives that have alternatively framed the Korean War as an international war, a civil war, a reverse postcolonial war, a war between the genders, and an attempt to de-escalate the Cold War itself. The dual role of North East Asians as both victims and willing agents of the Cold War comes into focus in revisiting the conflict from the post-Cold War perspective of decolonisation. The study brings into discussion a range of diverse views, published in both Korean and English, on such compelling historical issues as the conflict between left-leaning nationalist forces and the anti-communist, pro-Japanese collaborator class during the US military occupation and the Rhee regime, civilian massacres during the Korean War, anti-communist persecutions during the military regimes and the early twenty-first-century mass politics of South Korea. Whenever possible, the book brings to the fore the manner in which each work reinforces the Cold War framework or seeks to challenge or subvert it – in certain cases, the ways in which certain novels even attempt to articulate an alternative political vision. Most importantly of all, this book writes back against the authoritative version of Cold War historiography to explain the contemporary nature of the unfinished conflict on the Korean peninsula today.
Beyond the Cold War?
Authors: Rhee Suk Koo
Published: January 2025

The fifth chapter analyses Choi In-hun’s The Square in terms of a critique of both Korean regimes. The novel concerns a man who escapes from anti-communist persecution in the South in order to seek exile in North Korea, only to end up disappointed with the regime he finds there. In the journey of the protagonist, the novel puts forward a biting critique of the South Korean government for its oppressive politics and its echoing of US ideology as well as the North Korean government for betraying its people’s revolutionary hopes. The Square is thus fundamentally critical of the Cold War. This chapter argues that the novel gropes toward an alternative space beyond its ideological boundaries or what one might call the vision of a decentred Cold War through the protagonist’s choice of a third country during the POWs repatriation interview. This chapter considers the significance of this choice with regard to the neutralisation plan that attracted South Korean attention. The conclusion of this chapter is that the author highlights the difficulty of such a choice in the image of the protagonist’s suicide during his voyage toward an apparently freer life.
Page and Stage Appropriations of Two Gentlemen of Verona
Authors: Kozusko Matt
Published: January 2025

This essay looks at some early rewrites of Two Gentlemen of Verona (Benjamin Victor and J. P. Kemble) and at records of three productions (William Macready and Charles Kean, in the 19th century, and the 2014 RSC staging in Stratford) to trace a kind of tension between fidelity to the Shakespearean text and attempts to manage the difficult or problematic moments in that text. It identifies a tentative sense of continuity in how performance texts and productions deal with the play’s so-called problem moments and argues that what Victor and Kemble do with alterations to the text, later productions do with staging choices. Their projects are best understood, this piece argues, as a fundamentally similar attempt at the recovery and presentation of an ideal Shakespeare. Like Simon Godwin in his RSC production, Macready and Kean could be said to be presenting the “original” play, but such an understanding leans too heavily on simple textual fidelity as a guarantor. In distinction from a “real” or originary Shakespeare, the “ideal” these productions offer is effected through lightly curated versions of the play that attend or respond to identifiable or inferrable demands of the moment of production.
The Dada Chronicles: Jas H. Duke and Barry Humphries
Authors: Carruthers A. J.
Published: January 2025

Harry Hooton inspired Jas Duke, Australia’s first Dadaist poet. Thus a chain of influence comes into view. Avant-garde poets hand the baton to avant-garde poets, generation to generation. But Duke wasn’t the first to do Dadaist antics. He was proceeded by Barry Humphries, famous for creating the character of Dame Edna Everage. Humphries first did Dada in Melbourne in the early 1950s. It was schoolboy stuff, varsity Dada. Duke did it more from the tradition, taking up all sides of Dada, its seriousness and silliness, plus of course the immense skill – nobody else quite did what Duke did in Concrete and Sound poetry through this era. But he was also part of a growing series of collectives and groups in the 1970s that would band together to challenge the literary establishment, like the Collective Effort group, which would include significant figures like Pi O and Thalia. Telling the story of Duke fashions an historical chronicle of Dada and the development of an avant-garde literature. Duke helped establish “Dadaustralia,” as he called it; thereafter the Antipodal avant-gardes enter into a world literary tradition half a century late, while simultaneously challenging the very constitution of Australian national literature.
Truth in Photographs: Marcel Proust
Authors: Grøtta Marit
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the attraction of portrait photographs in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and suggests that Proust ultimately looks for truth in such pictures. It first examines the narrator’s passion for portrait photographs and his efforts to obtain pictures of the women he desires and admires. This inclination demonstrates the importance of photographs in Marcel’s sentimental education and is indicative of a tendency to entertain an intimate, affective, tactile relation to portrait photographs. Next, the chapter studies how the narrator engages in face studies, seeing facial lines and gestures as revealing the truth about a person. In this context, the reading of portrait photographs is associated with a process of subjective “development.” The third section looks at an opposite tendency in the novel: encounters with portrait photographs that give access to otherness and exteriority. The concluding section discusses Proust’s search for truth in photographs in light of the emergence of the illustrated press and considers how the spread of portrait photographs in the mass media reconfigured the relation between the private and public spheres.
Conclusions: Living with Mediated Faces
Authors: Grøtta Marit
Published: January 2025

The concluding chapter summarizes the main findings in the book’s three chapters, while drawing a line from the modernist media culture to today’s digital culture. It first discusses the key features characterizing the modernists engagement with portrait photographs, suggesting that Proust, Kafka and Woolf created scenes that served as fictive laboratories for the study of portrait photographs and their relation to the beholder. Next, the chapter considers the boundaries between the private and the public, between identity and anonymity, and between the familiar and the foreign, stressing how these boundaries were reconfigured in the age of portrait photography and later transformed by phenomena such as the social media, surveillance capitalism, biopolitics and globalization processes. Finally, the chapter discusses how the modernists’ ways of living with technical images and mediated faces both resemble and are different from our mediated lives today.
The Reader in Modernist Fiction
Authors: Richardson Brian
Published: January 2025

Between 1890 and 1938, a large number of significant works of fiction appeared that foregrounded the effects of reading, usually the reading of narrative fiction. The primary project in this book is to assemble and analyze these instances and explore their implications concerning a range of subjects including the implicit construction of the modernist reader, the validity of social pronouncements, intertextual allusions, the reading of the narrative itself, and even perception in general. Though several approaches to the figure of the reader can be discerned, what is most intriguing is the insistence with which Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and other modernists regularly created scenes in which reader characters misread and then come to a painful end. By dramatizing the dangers of misreading, these authors helped create an alternative interpreter, whom I will call the critical reader, who evaluates scenes and discourses more skeptically and can therefore elude the errors that condemn the more naïve, complacent, or uncritical figures in the work.
From James to Conrad and Ford: Suppressed Narratives, Subaltern Reading, and the Drama of Interpretation
Authors: Richardson Brian
Published: January 2025

This provides an overview of the representation of readers in the work of Henry James, with particular attention given to “The Figure in the Carpet.” The rest of the chapter explores the effects of reading and the theme of interpretation in Conrad, especially as it appears in Lord Jim, and unearths the hidden narratives cached within “The Secret Sharer.” It argues that the tale embodies modernist poetics more fully than is generally recognized: its narrator is more fallible and its drama of misinterpretation more extreme than Conrad criticism has acknowledged. It end with an analysis of the deleterious consequences that befall individual readers in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. Here, the kind of situations we find in Conrad also appear, though with an intensely sexualized aspect.
The Dangers of Reading from Edith Wharton to Ralph Ellison
Authors: Richardson Brian
Published: January 2025

This chapter traces several authors’ treatments of the effects of reading, beginning with an analysis of the covert semiotic drama of books, signs, and amorous relations in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920). It is followed by Elizabeth Bowen’s exploration of the ethics and dangers of reading in The Death of the Heart. William Faulkner raises the stakes of the fate of interpretation and adds a crucial racial context by disclosing the fatal consequences of Joe Christmas’ naïve reading in Light in August and by dramatizing the effects of an exegesis of a slave owner’s damning account book in “The Bear.” Katherine Anne Porter aligns deadly sexual repression with constricting master narratives that are uncritically recirculated in “Old Mortality.” In The Heart of the Matter. Graham Greene redeploys Conradian tropes and scenes of reading in a colonial, West African setting. Here too, uncritical reading proves deadly. Ralph Ellison discloses the material effects of reading and being (mis)read in Invisible Man, emphasizing the writing of history and the documentation of those who are usually written out of its pages. Tayeb Salih extends the drama of reading and sex into the postcolonial realm in A Season of Migration to the North.
Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea
Authors: Andreeva Petya
Published: January 2025

Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. These pastoral societies are mostly known to us through the distant echoes on the pages of Classical Greek and Chinese historiographies which mostly paint the nomad as the “Barbaric Other” living in the shadows of sedentary empires. In reality, early Eurasian nomads were capable and independent makers, designers and inventors. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to manufacture the collective memory of reluctant and diverse political alliances organised around shared geopolitical goals rather than kinship. Largely known by the term "animal style", this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. This book shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol, a copying mechanism and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances. The author also argues that animal style was later adopted by sedentary empires to showcase their worldliness and control over the "nomadic Other". In this study of enormous geographical scope, Andreeva raises broader questions about the place of nomadic societies in the art-historical canon. She also offers a new perspective on the role of human-animal interactions in the history of art.
Animal Style in the Xiongnu Era: The Making of a New Elite
Authors: Andreeva Petya
Published: January 2025

Steppe zoomorphic design underwent many changes after the rise of the first Eurasian nomadic empire, that of the Xiongnu. Through trade with far-flung domains like Bactria or more familiar neighbouring cultures like China, the Xiongnu leader and other members of the elite nucleus wished to assert their legitimacy not only to their peers but also to the growing and increasingly diverse nomadic collective. The new self-fashioning strategy among the Xiongnu nobility is exemplified by the decreased presence of animal-style artworks and the growing occurrence of foreign goods, materials and designs in tomb inventories. Still, the Xiongnu elite aimed to strike a balance between two identities: that of a worldly trade partner and astute politician in an increasingly global Eurasian milieu, and that of a proper nomadic warrior with sacral ties to the steppe landscape. It is this balancing act, and the role of the newly formulated animal style in it, that the chapter sets out to investigate. Having established the changing nature of nomadic ornament under the Xiongnu, the author then proceeds to show that a new Sino-Steppe zoomorphic visuality entered the funerary repertoires of both China and its distant spheres of political influence.
Conclusion: Faecal Biopolitics in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

The conclusion shifts from the early twentieth to the twenty-first century and from the global North to South Asia, where “security” plays out in the form of sanitation campaigns premised on, but not necessarily in the spirit of, Gandhi’s dream of Swaraj at every level of the metabolic system, from the human body to the nation-state. It analyses two approaches to open defecation, contrasting a bourgeois state-promoted clean-up campaign with a grass-roots activist-led movement where a “people’s science” prevails among the “meta-industrial” laborers living as pavement dwellers in Mumbai. The chapter then turns to another metabolic crisis on American soil where environmental activist Catherine Flowers takes social justice tourists to rural Alabama. There, inadequate tax bases make it impossible to maintain a modern fecal habitus; the septic systems into which human excrement is deposited are doomed to failure, spewing fecal matter into surrounding yards and ditches. The book concludes by asking readers to contemplate the history of their metabolic existence, including implication in processes of metabolic rift in their environment, or reliance on systems of labor that regulate their movements through the world, or the unconscious ways their body thinks at every peristaltic turn, in hopes that this multi-disciplinary project will be taken up by other scholars of the biopolitical dissidence of the gut.
Alternative Interpretations
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

This Chapter addresses alternative interpretations of Spinoza’s treatment of Reason, which might appear to challenge the exercise of applying his philosophy to contemporary climate change debate. It argues that there are tensions within the text of The Ethics, that allow competing readings. On the one hand, Spinoza presents Reason as governing the whole of Nature; on the other hand, he also talks of it as subject to the immersion of human thought within that totality. The Chapter attempts to resolve those tensions while also acknowledging the force of rival interpretations, engaging especially with Steven Nadler’s in his book Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (2020), which emphasises the resonances of Stoicism in Spinoza’s philosophy.
A Deleuzian Critique of Queer Thought
Authors: Kedem Nir
Published: January 2025

What could queer theory do and become had it not been so entrenched in the notion of sexuality? • A first-of-its-kind implementation of Deleuze’s philosophy to analyse and overcome the critical deadlocks of contemporary queer thought • Provides practical, methodological guidelines for working with Deleuze across multiple disciplines • Demonstrates how Deleuzian critique is a powerful means to transform and enhance our ways of thinking and acting • Performs a metacritical, Deleuzian analysis of the philosophical foundations of queer theory, its evolution, and its power to transform today’s political and cultural discourses Holding queer theory to its promise to revolutionise our ways of thinking, Nir Kedem offers a forceful encounter between Deleuze’s work and contemporary queer thought to provide both critical and practical means to re-evaluate and rework key concepts and methods, especially sexuality. Kedem provides a new pragmatic approach to working with Deleuze across multiple disciplines, a rigorous demonstration of its critical and creative power, as well as extensive analysis of the relations between Deleuze and queer thought. All of which exemplify that despite – if not owing to – the unassuming role of sexuality in his thought, Deleuze proves to be queer thought’s true ally.
Ahead of its Time: Dickens’s Prescient Vision of the Arts
Authors: John Juliet , Wood Claire
Published: January 2025

Dickens’s relationship with the Arts has confounded or silenced some of the most eminent critics from his day to ours. His own reticence on the topic likewise makes the idea of a book on Dickens and the Arts a little odd or dissonant. Though as this volume makes clear, he was well versed in a range of high and low arts, he was seemingly determined to embrace, if not the wrong side of the cultural track, metaphorically speaking, a different track. This chapter is structured around four broad areas which are key to an understanding of both the ideological underpinnings of shifting definitions of the Arts, and to an understanding of the reasons for Dickens’s complex relationship to the idea of the Arts: money/materialism; hierarchies of privilege; yardsticks of criticism or artistic judgement; the public good. There is an uneasy relationship between ‘the Arts’ and all four areas, between Dickens and all four, and between Dickens and the Arts understood via these frames, which are commonly invoked in discussions of the Arts. The contention of this volume is that, far from being a philistine who had no interest in the Arts, Dickens’s apparent reticence in an industrial age where the value and function of the Arts was uniquely important in public debate, masks a complex and sophisticated vision (if not theory) of the Arts in the modern era, which is, and was, ahead of its time. Dickens’s philosophy of art in fact works to complicate in subtle ways the idea of an opposition between idealist and integrationist views of the aesthetic, though its most characteristic thrust is integrationist.
Musical Theatre
Authors: Weltman Sharon Aronofsky
Published: January 2025

Dickens has been a mainstay of musical theatre entertainment since the beginning. Adapted immediately and frequently to the musical stage (until 1843, most London theatres were restricted to musical entertainment), Dickens created scenarios and characters ripe for musical theatre, just as he described in Oliver Twist’s famous passage on ‘all good, murderous melodramas’. To illustrate the profusion of Dickens’s musical theatre adaptations, I first sketch a brief musical stage history of Dickens’s first novel, the Pickwick Papers (1836–37). But because success tells only part of the story, I then consider Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn’s 1981 Broadway flop Copperfield. I conclude with examinations of Lionel Bart’s 1960 hit Oliver! and Rupert Holmes’s innovative 1985 Drood; both help us to see that music, movement, and spectacle are integral to Dickens’s storytelling. Whether flops or triumphs, modern musical adaptations show us that Dickens wrote not only theatrically but also musical-theatrically.
Illustration
Authors: Thomas Julia
Published: January 2025

The majority of Dickens’s novels were published with illustrations. These images set the scene, depict characters, and engage in complex ways with the plot and action of the narrative. While critical attention has focused on the relation between Dickens and the artists who designed these pictures, however, what has been marginalised is the role of the reader in understanding and making sense of the illustrations. This chapter discusses the ways in which Victorian readers engaged with Dickens’s novels as specifically illustrated works. To what extent, and how, did the presence of pictures alongside the words influence and shape how the novels were read? The answer to this question has implications for the cultural status of illustration in the period as well as for conventional notions of reading. Dickens’s illustrated novels challenge the very definition of what it means to ‘read’ by transgressing the boundaries and temporality of this activity: the pictures are viewed in conjunction with Dickens’s words, but they also exist as prior to, and distinct from, the text, and they can linger on after the novel has been laid aside.
Translations
Authors: Lee Klaudia Hiu Yen
Published: January 2025

In this chapter I explore how the act of translating Charles Dickens is a form of textual, and very often creative, practice that engages with both source and target cultures. By focusing on selected Chinese translations of A Christmas Carol (1843) and Oliver Twist (1837–39), I demonstrate how this intensive form of cross-cultural interaction leads to the production of hybridised texts and serves to reveal the literary traditions and assumptions that underline both the original and the translated text at specific historic moments. The Chinese case study, alongside other research and translators’ reflections on their translation practices that I also draw upon in this essay, highlight the challenges and creativity of translating Dickens in different socio-cultural and historical contexts. This chapter demonstrates the important role that translation plays in creating different faces of Dickens, or versions of Dickensian texts that have circulated in different parts of the world since his works were published in mid-nineteenth century England.
Education
Authors: Winter Sarah
Published: January 2025

The chapter examines Dickens’s critiques of Victorian education and support for universal education in his novels, journalism, and public speeches. By championing universal education, Dickens envisioned a more fully inclusive society capable of recognising and fostering the creativity of the poor. He also recommended reforms that would shift Victorian popular education away from rote memorisation and a focus on factual knowledge toward a greater role for the arts and literature in stimulating the imagination of both children and adults. The conclusion examines how the inclusion of Dickens’s writings in the English literature textbooks and curricula of schools and universities in the United States and in colonial Kenya and Uganda, participated in the cultural transmission of Englishness. Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s accounts of his education reveal how Dickens’s works could be repurposed in colonial classrooms in Africa either to support British cultural dominance or to foster an anticolonial historical consciousness.
Placing Dickens
Authors: Mathieson Charlotte
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the legacy of ‘placing Dickens’ through the practice of literary tourism from his death to the present day. The first section situates the interest in Dickens and place in historical context, charting the rise of Dickensian tourism in the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century and identifying dominant themes that were established in this period. Subsequently, the chapter considers the focus upon place during the 2012 bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, during which literary tourism formed a strong focal point for activities in the UK, and took on new forms through the use of digital technologies. The final part looks at how digital engagement resituated Dickens and place in international contexts, suggesting that ‘placing Dickens’ became refigured as a global concept in the digital age. This offers the opportunity for understanding the history of Dickens and place anew, and opens up new directions through which to place Dickens in future scholarship.
Conclusion
Authors: Murphy Paula
Published: January 2025

This chapter reviews the timeframe of the book and the decades in which AI film particularly flourish. The relationship between AI in the real world and AI in film is considered. Films take an interest in specific aspects of AI science but do not on mirror scientific developments. Their focus is on strong AI, which has still not been acquired in the real world, how this might manifest itself and what it would mean for humans and our relationships with technology.
The main types of AI featured in film are reviewed. The central tenets of the imagined relationship between human and AI are set out, the role of the AI as locus for human emotion and existential states is considered, and the prevalent responses of human characters to AI entities are outlined. The chapter concludes with some remarks on the cultural value of AI films.
‘Behold, I tell you a mystery’: Tracing Faust ’s Influences on Giorgio Agamben to and from International Law
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

It is a mystery as to why more is not made of the influence of Goethe’s Faust on Italian Agamben’s body of work. After all, as a great philosophical poet, and tremendously concerned with language, Goethe’s work could not have failed to capture Agamben’s attention, especially given his early and sustained interest in poetry. Indeed, Agamben cites Goethe in at least 12 of his works including: The Use of Bodies, Creation and Anarchy, Pilate and Jesus, The Kingdom and the Glory, Homo Sacer, The Signature of All Things, Stanzas, The End of the Poem, Potentialities, Karman, Adventure and Infancy and History. Crucially, the last five reference Goethe’s Faust directly. Thus, this chapter seeks to remedy the relative lack of explicit engagement and demonstrate the strong, clear and persistent influence of Goethe’s Faust that underpins Agamben’s signature philological and philosophical approach to literarily explicating law’s foundational riddles. Agamben’s Homo Sacer, project – it must be recalled – quite accidentally began in part as a direct response to the legalistic justifications for the 1990–91 Gulf War. The present discussion seeks to demonstrate that Goethean influence ironically enough through a close examination of both Faust’s and Agamben’s attempts at partially translating a biblical phrase: ‘in the beginning was the word’.
Writing the ‘Clash of Civilizations’: Racism, Difference and Terrorism
Authors: Keeble Arin
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses five novels that respond to the so-called ‘clash of civilizations’: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007), Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack (2007) and The Sirens of Baghdad (2005) and Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden (2014). The discourse of an alleged ‘clash of civilizations’ was central to the exceptionalisation of 9/11 and a key rhetorical device in the early stages of the war on terror and I show how these novels variously challenge and resist it. I focus on the way they depict the figure of the terrorist and critique the war on terror and normative logics of 9/11 fiction, from a range of subject positions.
Genre, Policing and Terrorism
Authors: Keeble Arin
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers three contemporary novels of white nationalist terrorism: Ausma Zehanat Khan’s A Deadly Divide (2019), Attica Locke’s Heaven My Home (2019) and Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021). Through detailed close readings I consider the ways these novels depict instances of police violence as terrorism alongside other forms of white supremacist terror. I consider the use of genre and seriality in these novels, and how this relates to and drives their critiques of systemic violence in institutions of government and policing in North America.
“Mirrours more then one”: Spenser, Shakespeare and Generic Change
Authors: Gieskes Edward
Published: January 2025

Chapter 2 examines the influence of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida. If Spenser’s purpose in Book III of the Faerie Queene is to illuminate the virtue of chastity from multiple sides, shining light on it from various mirrors, reflecting it from those mirrors into a variety of more or less recognizable refractions, then Shakespeare’s narrative intentions in such convoluted plays as Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida may be homologous: to reflect on a problem from multiple perspectives. Both Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida resist easy categorizing and the chapter argues that that resistance is a refraction of developments like the emergence of dramatic satire and tragicomedy that blur distinctions between dramatic kinds. This blurring of generic boundaries marks changes in the structure of the field of cultural production attendant on the emergence of new forms, as does the different receptions of the two plays.
“King Cambyses’ vein”: Generic Change in the 1580s and 1590s
Authors: Gieskes Edward
Published: January 2025

Chapter 3 takes up the question of generic change in the 1590s, situating that change within the traditions of public playing, civic and court drama, University neo-Latin drama, and the broader field of cultural production. The chapter addresses such examples as Wager’s Latin play Meleager, Preston’s Cambyses, Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, and Marlowe’s work. The 1580s are conventionally described as a moment of profound change in the drama, a moment that extends into the early years of the 1590s. One purpose of this chapter is to situate and evaluate those changes in a somewhat broader context, looking back into the 1570s and turning part of the critical gaze away from London and to the Universities.
A ‘cacophony of sardine tins’: Yeats and Modern Art
Authors: Haughton Hugh
Published: January 2025

This chapter attempts to address the singularity of Yeats’s position in relation to visual Modernism. Tracing Yeats’s evolving and often complex views on not only French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, but also Cubism and Vorticism from the mid-1910s to the end of his life and career, it goes as far as to describe the poet’s relationship to modernism as a ‘violent’ one,. Despite the surface antagonism and frustration often voiced in Yeats’s accounts of these movements and their values, the chapter identifies a shared dialectical multi-dimensionality and self-conscious fictionality that pitches the Irish poet closer to Modernism than might be expected.
A Swedish Bounty: Yeats, Public Art and European Nationalisms in the Free State
Authors: Quin Jack
Published: January 2025

This chapter shows how Yeats’s exposure to Swedish inflections of the Arts and Crafts movement had an important influence on several of his initiatives as a Senator in the Irish Free State during the 1920s. His visit to Stockholm in 1923 to be awarded the Nobel prize made an aesthetic impression in relation to the contemporary achievements of Swedish National Romantic art. Sweden also offered a model of national cultural transformation via state-sponsored patronage to emulate. Yeats is shown looking directly to this model in his energetic promotion of public art and of state sponsorship of the arts. Under this Scandinavian influence, the poet’s efforts, despite many frustrations, made a palpable contribution to the visual and material fabric of the new state. Such an influence also complicates prior accounts of the politics of Yeats’s sense of cultural nationalism, and of the relationship between culture and state.
The ‘World That Sang and Listened’: Yeats and Florence Farr’s ‘New Art’ of Verse Speaking
Authors: Stuart Isabelle
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers Yeats’s collaboration with the actress and writer Florence Farr, which enabled him to experiment with oral explorations and aural effects through the speaking of verse accompanied by Arnold Dolmetsch’s psaltery. It shows how Yeats and Farr’s verse speaking practices drew on and diverged from Victorian precedent, before also being followed by modernist successors. Demonstrating the wider contexts to these experiments underlines that Yeats’s ideas and performances should be understood in the context of a larger network of verse-speaking practices. The chapter also argues that these practices attractively combined both authority and freedom for Yeats, so illuminating some under-regarded aspects of the formal experimentation of his poetics.
THE LINGUISTIC ASPECT OF “SOFT POWER” IN RUSSIAN-THAILAND RELATIONS
Authors:   Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand, POUNGCHINGNGAM K.
Published: January 2025

This article examines the teaching of Thai in Russia and the teaching of Russian in Thailand as foreign languages at university level. The findings suggest that the teaching of Thai as a foreign language and Thai studies in Russia begins in the 1950s, while the teaching of Russian in Thailand begins in the 1970s and the teaching of Russian studies begins in the early 2000s. The teaching of Thai language in Russia depends on the specific objectives of each educational institution, especially the training of people for diplomatic duties, people working as language interpreters, scholars, and specialists in the field of Thai language. As for Russian language teaching and Russian studies in Thailand, they have some similarities with specific objectives, namely, to enable graduates to communicate with native speakers in the public and private sectors and to create experts in Russia. The development of foreign language teaching is influenced by various factors, one of which is the resumption of diplomatic relations between Russia and Thailand. The introduction of Thai language teaching in Russia comes from the Soviet Union sending diplomatic personnel to Thailand to initiate the development of cooperation. The factor in Thailand is due to the gradual easing of tensions on the international stage in the region, which subsequently leads to the emergence of economic cooperation between the two countries. Among the factors influencing the development of curricula are the dynamics of political relations between Russia and Thailand. Therefore, Russian and Thai educational institutions need to prepare their staff to support the work of government and private sector.
CONCEPTUAL AMBIGUITY IN MYANMAR NATION BUILDING: A SEMANTIC AND THEORETICAL ANALYSIS
Authors:   National Research Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Russian Federation, YE PH.K. , KHAKHALKINA E.V.
Published: January 2025

This article examines the challenges Myanmar faces in creating a cohesive national identity and fostering unity. It argues that inadequate nation-building stems from semantic, epistemological, and ontological ambiguities in reconciling Myanmar’s identity with Western definitions of “nation,” “state,” and “union.” These identity and cognitive dissonances hinder the development of effective nation-building policies. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach and content analysis, this study evaluates the Myanmar constitutions of 1947, 1974, and 2008, policies and discourses in relation to both Western theories and indigenous perspectives. The novelty of the research lies in its exploration of conceptual differences across civilizations through constitutional and policy texts. By integrating primary and secondary sources, the study contributes uniquely to identity studies, emphasizing how conceptual challenges affect national identity formation. It underscores the significance of linguistic and semantic considerations in this process. Ultimately, lacking a sense of collective national identity, Myanmar finds itself navigating a complex relationship with the idea that multi-national races have coexisted on this land, sharing the same water for over a millennium. This coexistence is often framed in terms of preserving the culture and identity of all national races, yet there is no effective nation-building policy centered on the principles of “collectiveness” and “oneness.”
REGIONAL CONFLICTS: FACTORS, ESSENCE, METHODS OF SOLUTION
Authors:   Karachay-Cherkess Republican Institute for Advanced Training of Educational Workers, Cherkessk, Republic of Karachay-Cherkess, Russian Federation, ABDOKOVA L.Z.
Published: January 2025

Regional conflicts represent one of the most acute problems of the modern world. Their occurrence is most often associated with ethnic, economic and political factors. The need to resolve such conflicts is conditioned not only by the desire to achieve peace, but also by maintaining stability in society, preventing humanitarian disasters and ensuring sustainable development of the regions. The article is devoted to the characterization of the nature of regional conflicts, the identification of factors contributing to their occurrence, as well as measures for their prevention and non-proliferation. Effective resolution of regional conflicts requires an integrated approach, including both diplomatic and practical measures. An important stage is the dialogue between the parties to the conflict, which helps to identify the main causes of the confrontation and find possible ways to eliminate them. The participation of third parties, such as international organizations, can help create a neutral platform for discussion. Conflict resolution methods can range from the use of peacekeeping forces to the development of rehabilitation and reintegration programs for affected territories. It is also worth noting the importance of education and public awareness, which help reduce tensions and create a culture of peace. Investments in social projects and economic development also play a key role in preventing the emergence of new conflicts.
ISSUES OF APPROACHES TO THE DEFINITION OF “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE” IN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES AND LAW
Authors:   Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Moscow, Russian Federation, ZAGAYNOV M.R.
Published: January 2025

The author analyzes the issue of approaches to research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). It is difficult not to assess the growing influence of AI on public life today. We can say that in fact, all spheres of human activity, including international relations. The author notes that at the same time there is a tendency in scientific and legal circles to assess and define AI. In this regard, the author sets the goal of analyzing the main approaches to the definition of “artificial intelligence” in international studies and law. The author comes to the conclusion that the historical retrospective of the study of approaches to the definition of AI since the emergence of the first studies in this area demonstrated several periods in the development of this technology. In each of the periods, the definition of the phenomenon varied, based on the prevailing developments in the field under study at that time. The author also notes that the issue of defining and legally regulating AI is on the agenda of international organizations and is catalyzed in scientific discourse. However, the definitions of international organizations vary and do not lead to order in the interpretation of AI.
SOCIO-PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE ESSENCE AND CONTENT OF LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Authors:   University of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation, Moscow, Russian Federation, ZHIGOTSKIY P.E.
Published: January 2025

The proposed article introduces the reader to the socio-philosophical analysis of the essence and content of legal consciousness. It is one of the important elements of the modern legal system of the Russian Federation. This article can be used as scientific material, as a recommendation to the doctoral candidates, postgraduate students, attendees and students studying in various fields (specialties) and studying disciplines containing problems of the history and philosophy of science and theory of state and law, as well as lectures and specialists working in the field of philosophy and jurisprudence.
CHANGING APPROACHES TO FINNISH SECURITY ISSUES AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION
Authors:   St. Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation, FEDOROV R.A.
Published: January 2025

The transformation of the modern world order has led to a change in the relationship between the Russian Federation and Finland. The latter took an unfriendly position towards Russia, which, of course, could not but affect Finland's security policy. On April 4, 2023, Finland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and largely defined a new era in the formation of its defense policy. The author tries to assess this event through the analysis of the transformation of Finnish security issues after the collapse of the Soviet Union. How unexpected was the decision to join NATO? Or was it the result of purposeful attempts to change the internal system of approaches - both to interaction within the framework of the Nordic countries and cooperation with Russia? These are the main questions that the author raises in the article, attempting to analyze the changing approaches in the field of Finnish security issues after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The author's conclusions indicate that the changes in security policy (which led the country to NATO) are the result of a fairly systemic policy of strengthening the joint Northern European defense, pressure from Western allies, and the growth of the «Russian threat». We can also talk about a gradual evolution from the soft aspects of security to its more rigid forms in security policy, which is undoubtedly due to the departure from cooperation with Russia
Undervisning av lässtrategier kan överskugga ämnesinnehållet
Authors: Lunde Torodd , Westman Anna-Karin
Published: January 2025

En studie från Malmö universitet visar att när generella lässtrategier betonas i NO-undervisningen, för att utveckla elevernas läskunnighet, riskerar lärobokstexten att reduceras till pedagogiska exempel på lässtrategier. Därmed hamnar lässtrategierna i förgrunden medan det naturvetenskapliga innehållet hamnar i bakgrunden.
IVF cycle safety when a positive passive air sampling occurs under laminar flow hood in absence of a detectable contamination in the embryo culture
Authors: Omes Claudia , Bassani Roberto , Cambieri Patrizia , Baldanti Fausto , Nappi Rossella Elena
Published: January 2025

Microbiological contamination in the embryo culture media might affect embryo early development and clinical outcomes during IVF procedures. Infections in the genital tract represent the most common causes of culture contamination, but also environmental air quality might have a detrimental effect on reproductive outcomes of infertile couples undergoing IVF procedures. Monitoring microbiological contamination in an embryology laboratory is mandatory and daily tests are performed under laminar vertical flow hood. In this study, we investigated the IVF outcome of procedures carried out during 5 years of laboratory activity when a positive passive air sampling occurs under laminar flow hood in the absence of clear contamination in the embryo culture. We performed 570 air samplings, and we isolated at least 1 CFU of microorganisms in the TSA settle plate in 13 cases (2.28%). No infections were suspected in the culture media given the absence of detectable microorganisms under the microscope or a turbidity/color change of culture media visible to the naked eye (0% contamination rate). There were no statistically significant differences in biochemical pregnancy, live birth rate, and abortion between the “contaminated” Group P and the “negative” Group N. Surprisingly, we found a better outcome in terms of clinical pregnancy rate in Group P as compared to Group N, a finding likely due to the accidental lower age of Group P (p = 0.0133). Data showed that, in the absence of a detectable contamination in the embryo culture media, IVF cycles are safe when an air positive sample occurs in Grade A environment.
Comorbidities and neurosurgical interventions in a cohort with connective tissue disorders
Authors: Ruhoy Ilene S. , Bolognese Paolo A. , Rosenblum Jared S. , Dass Randall A. , Nayyer Navdeep S. , Wood Jeffrey D. , Biggins John B.
Published: January 2025

Background

Connective tissue disorders (CTDs) are a heterogeneous group of disorders often presenting with a variety of comorbidities including musculoskeletal, autonomic, and immune dysfunction. Some CTDs such as hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS), which is one of the most common, have been associated with neurological disorders requiring surgical intervention. The frequency of these comorbidities in these populations and their subsequent requirement for neurosurgical intervention remains unclear.

Methods

Based on our initial experience with this population, we investigated the presentation rates of specific comorbidities and neurosurgical interventions in a cohort of individuals referred to our institution for evaluation and neurosurgical management of issues secondary to diagnosed or suspected CTDs from 2014 to 2023. Primary diagnoses were made by referring physicians or institutions based on clinical presentation and standard-of-care criteria. We evaluated relationships between diagnoses and surgical interventions by multivariate correlation and intersection plots using the UpSetR package.

Results

Of 759 individuals, we excluded 42 based on incomplete data. From the remaining (total cohort, N = 717), 460 (64%) individuals were diagnosed with hEDS, 7 were diagnosed with a CTD other than hEDS, and 250 lacked a formal CTD diagnosis. We found that individuals with hEDS had a higher frequency of certain comorbidities, such as Mast Cell Activation Disorder and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, and neurosurgical intervention compared to individuals without a CTD diagnosis (unaffected). Of the total cohort, 426 (59%) were diagnosed with Chiari I Malformation, which shared a significant overlap with hEDS. Of those who elected to undergo surgery (n = 612), 61% required craniocervical fusion (CCF). Notably, of the 460 individuals diagnosed with hEDS, 404 chose surgical intervention, of which, 73% required CCF for craniocervical instability.

Conclusion

In this retrospective study of individuals referred to our institution for evaluation of CTDs potentially requiring neurosurgical intervention, we defined the frequency of presentation of specific comorbidities that we commonly encountered and revealed the rate at which they required neurosurgical intervention.