bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
New Projects of Faith and Power, 1304–1312
Authors: Kamola Stefan
Published: May 2020

Oljeitu Sultan (1304-1316) continued his predecessor’s pattern of commissioning histories and building programs to demonstrate his legitimacy. This included a new history of the world, which Rashid al-Din completed in 1307. Rashid al-Din also produced a series of theological collections that established an image of Oljeitu as a divinely sanctioned sovereign. These projects drew Oljeitu and Rashid al-Din into a cycle of patronage and production, which allowed Rashid al-Din to fund a series of charitable and intellectual institutions, further cementing his own historical legacy. This chapter outlines these products of the reign of Oljeitu, showing how they established a new format of kingship for subsequent Persianate courts. It also illuminates the role that ʿAbd Allah Qashani played in writing the material included in Rashid al-Din’s world history.
Epilogue Rashid al-Din at the Court of Shahrokh
Authors: Kamola Stefan
Published: May 2020

A century after Rashid al-Din’s death, his works experienced a period of heightened interest at the court of the Timurid ruler Shahrokh (1405-1447). Shahrokh’s court librarian, Hafez-e Abru (d. 1430) was involved in collecting, preserving, and correcting early copies of Rashid al-Din’s Collected Histories (Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh), and he used Rashid al-Din’s collection as a model for his own historical writing. This epilogue traces the basic contours of Hafez-e Abru’s use of Rashid al-Din’s work and shows that, were it not for the world of Hafez-e Abru, our reception of the Collected Histories would look very different than it does.
Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing and Regulating Disruptive Technology
Authors: Phillips Andelka M
Published: May 2020

How many contracts have you read today? This chapter provides an introduction to the work. It sets out the aims of the book and seeks to highlight the reality of contracting online that we all face, ie. the volume of contracts we encounter and our tendency not to read them, mentioning a number of examples of problematic clauses being inserted into contracts, such as GameStation’s Immortal Soul clause. It provides brief guidance for readers from different disciplines, directing them to particular chapters.
It also provides an overview of the sources of law that could be applicable to the industry in the UK and EU.
Future Directions for DTC Governance
Authors: Phillips Andelka M
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses possible future directions for improving governance of the DTC industry. It includes a note directed at readers who are considering purchasing a DTC test, which draws upon guidance released by the Office of the Canadian Privacy Commissioner. It also includes a number of suggestions for reform.
Introduction
Authors: El-Azhari Taef
Published: May 2020

The introduction presents an overview of the status of women before and after Islam. It examines the patriarchal reading of the Qur’an and tradition of the Prophet, which influenced all Muslim dynasties afterward. It discusses how Khadija and ‘Aisha, wives of the prophet, played a vital political roles, which diminished after few decades from the beginning of Islam. In addition, how Fatima, daughter of the Prophet bestowed her political protection over her husband in their attempt to seek the caliphate. The introduction present an Arab Christian queen, which commanded armies herself; A rare model, disappeared by patriarchal reading of the Qur’an in the first century of Islam. That followed by the creation of the harem institution. Thus, caging women in an isolated space. The introduction try to put the question forward: Did Islam improve the status of women? And how.
The Umayyad Empire and the Establishment of a Royal Court, 661–750
Authors: El-Azhari Taef
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the huge and rapid military expansion of the Arab Umayyads and its impact on genders. It resulted in the creation of massive numbers of women taken as slaves- sabaya- which was permitted according to the classical reading of the Qur’an. Men on the other hand, refuse to apply the same right of women according to the Qur’an. The only woman to come forward to fight Umayyad invasion, was Queen Dihya of the Berbers in North Africa. The Umayyad failed to learn from such model, and Muslims who came afterwards did not attempt to follow such example of women rulers. The Umayyads tried to follow the Prophet’s model of political marriage to boost their rule, using women as a trophy. Caliph al-Walid II created his realm of desires gathering thousands of concubines around him, which some had limited political influence. On the other hands, one see the usage of eunuchs as guards to the harem section, following the Prophet’s model.
The Seljuqs from Syria to Iran: The Age of Khatuns and Atabegs
Authors: El-Azhari Taef
Published: May 2020

In this chapter one examines the major change took place under the Turkmen Seljuqs coming from Mongolia to the Middle East. They introduced the unique post of atabeg or (father-prince) to keep their military Turkmen identity. However, Turkish princess were essential to such post to succeed as the sultan divorce one of his wives and marry her to a loyal commander to bring up one of his sons and groom him for future kingship. In fact, what it meant to be an element of preserving the Turkmen identity, turned out as a major one in the disintegration of the dynasty. Almost every atabeg who marry a khatun-princess collaborate to establish his own political dynasties. Such cases took place in Syria, Iran, Azerbaijan where royal mothers contributed to the success of such atabegate. The post had a political impact on other Muslim dynasties in the centuries to come.
The Ayyubids: Their Two Queens and their Powerful Castrated Atabegs
Authors: El-Azhari Taef
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyse the coming to power of the first Sunni Queen in Islam. Dayfa Khatun, niece of Saladin in 1236. How she ruled Northern Syria, forming and leading a political-military pact. She used several eunuchs as her advisors and close courtiers. She was very successful, and paved the way to another queen in Ayyubid Egypt, Shajar al-Durr who confronted the Ninth Crusade in 1250, after the death of her husband. Why she was selected as queen by the commanders in critical period, and why the declining caliph in Baghdad opposed the rule of a female. Despite her short reign, she had remarkable architectural achievements. In addition, she dominated the reign of her husband, whom she elevated to power.
One examine the evolution of the post of atabeg, and how they became eunuchs in most cases, and rule as de facto rulers in the realm. That was against the original aim of introducing such post to the administration.
The Evolution of Economic Interventions and the Violence of International Accountability over the longue durée
Authors: Everill Bronwen
Published: May 2020

Chapter Three: Economic Interventions and the Violence of International Accountability, by Bronwen Everill, explores the different uses of economic interventions and their interlocking relationship with the evolution of humanitarian intervention. It specifically focuses on examples from the African continent, stretching from the eighteenth century to the present, though the cases examined will share broader themes with developments outside of the continent. Additionally, it examines state-level economic interventions—sanctions and aid in both war and peacetime—together as one form of pressure for conforming to humanitarian norms. Individual and corporate economic interventions will be considered separately, as a form of intervention inherent to global capitalism. An examination of economic interventions reveals their interconnectivity, as well as their relationship to compulsion and physical force. By giving or withholding, states are able to intervene in the politics of dependent states, while individuals are able to determine the shape of global production. By looking at the long historical record of humanitarian intervention in Africa, Everill is able to make clear connections between different forms of intervention—economic, military, capacity building, humanitarian, individual, state, and NGO.
Introduction
Authors: Cottrell Anna
Published: May 2020

This book is about 1930s writing and photographs of London; in particular, it is about the ways in which the decade’s writers and image-makers represented the spaces of leisure and home that came to define the capital during the decade. Central London in the 1930s boasted an inclusive and exuberant leisure culture that became central to the period’s notions of what it meant to be a Londoner and of how this London identity was shaping modern life. London was by no means the only prominent setting in the 1930s, but it was the one that most closely aligned with some of its most urgent preoccupations – namely class, mass democracy, the changing modes of sociability, and gender.
Eating Out
Authors: Cottrell Anna
Published: May 2020

In Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), Eleanor Pargiter observes a lower-middle-class couple in a restaurant, enjoying their time off after work. Variations of this scene appear in many novels of the 1930s; the restaurants and teashops where London’s lower middle class spent their lunch breaks and evening outings became the settings in which their behaviour, their cultural preferences and even their dreams could be scrutinised. Eleanor concludes after watching the self-conscious couple that their performance is borrowed from the movies and illustrated magazines. This performance consisted of glamour and ‘nonchalance’ – modes incompatible with their working lives, but perfectly fitting in establishments that offered ordinary people atmospheres far removed from their mundane routines. Although Woolf does not identify it as such, the scene probably takes place in a Lyons Corner House – one of the four grand central London teashops that provided their patrons not only with affordable food, but also with a visual spectacle that could rival the glitter of the West End and the glamour of cinemas.
Conclusion
Authors: Cottrell Anna
Published: May 2020

The confidence with which Pritchett wields the multiple photographic metaphors used to describe both the strengths and the flaws of modern fiction suggests an intimacy between the two modes – even if only in terms of goals rather than technique – that was ubiquitous and would have been immediately understood by his readers. The equation of the novelist to ‘the new story camera man’ is striking, but by the mid-1930s there was nothing unusual about such a comparison; it was commonly assumed that what modern novelists were producing, especially when they were writing about cities, was equivalent to modern photography. The aim of the present book has been to elucidate what this proximity between fiction and photography meant in practice, beyond the generalised comparisons. On the one hand, if ‘photography’ is mainly a metaphor for a literary mode, then what kind of a literary lineage can be said to have influenced it? And on the other, what were the affinities between the two art forms, and, crucially, what kind of photography can the period’s urban fiction be said to have resembled or imitated?
Juvenile Justice in Victorian Scotland
Authors: Kelly Christine
Published: May 2020

This book explores the history of juvenile justice and the day industrial school movement in 19th-century Scotland.
How did Scotland’s criminal justice system respond to marginalised street children who found themselves on the wrong side of the law, often for simple vagrancy or other minor offences? The book examines the historical criminalisation of Scotland’s Victorian children, as well as revealing the history and early success of the Scottish day industrial school movement - a philanthropic response to juvenile offending hailed as 'magic' in Charles Dickens’s Household Words.
With case studies ranging from police courts to the High Court of Justiciary, the book offers a lively account of the way children experienced Scotland’s early juvenile justice system.
The Dream Fades
Authors: Kelly Christine
Published: May 2020

The third chapter moves on to examine the period 1860-84, looking at the impact of the developing statutory system and its central features. Underpinning the whole analysis is examination of cases illustrating the way the system was applied in practice. It demonstrates the unforeseen consequences of this legislative and centralising process: in essence, the distinctiveness of the Scottish day industrial school system was sacrificed, its original welfarist principles undermined as it became aligned to the British system regulating certified residential industrial and reformatory schools of a penal character. The chapter also covers efforts to restore the original elements of the project and the calls for reappraisal, culminating in Watson’s final, poignant public appearance when he passionately denounced the statutory system.
The Politics and Economics of Exile
Authors: Ramadan Yasmine
Published: May 2020

The fourth chapter takes the reader beyond the boundaries of the Egyptian nation, to Europe and the Gulf, to explore the space of political and economic dislocation, and brings together the work of Bahaa Taher and Muhammad al-Bisati. It traces the transformation of the exilic novel from the early decades of the twentieth century: while early Arabic narratives showed a movement beyond the borders of Egypt largely for the purposes of education, Taher’s Al-Hubb fi al-manfa (Love in Exile, 1995) and al-Bisati’s Daqq al-tubul (Drumbeat, 2006) depict Europe as the space of political exile, and the Arab Gulf as the site of economic exploitation. In both cases the novels under examination raise questions about the unity of the Egyptian nation-state in an age where political, social, and economic flows extend beyond the boundaries of the nation. The two works engage not only with issues of national identity and belonging, but also with that of regional affiliation. highlighting how the experience of economic and political dislocation serves to illuminate the failure Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalist dream, and its dissolution under the regimes of Sadat and Mubarak in the following decades.
Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre
Authors: Starks Lisa S.
Published: May 2020

Ovid was a multifaceted icon of lovesickness, endless change, libertinism, emotional torment and violence in early modern England. This collection uses adaptation studies in connection with other contemporary theoretical approaches to analyze early modern transformations of Ovid, providing innovative perspectives on the “Ovids” that haunted the early modern stage, while exploring intersections between adaptation theory and gender/queer/trans studies, ecofeminism, hauntology, transmediality, rhizomatics and more. The chapters explore Ovidian adaptations in the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Mary Sidney Herbert, Lyly, Hewood, among others. The volume is divided into four sections: I. Gender/Queer/Trans Studies and Ovidian Rhizomes; II. Ovidian Specters and Remnants; III. Affect, Rhetoric, and Ovidian Appropriation; and IV. Ovid Remixed: Transmedial, Rhizomatic, and Hyperreal Adaptations.” Focusing on these larger topics, this book examines the multidimensional, ubiquitous role that Ovid and Ovidian adaptations played in English Renaissance drama and theatrical performance. The book contains chapters by Simone Chess, Shannon Kelley, Daniel G. Lauby, Deborah Uman, Lisa S. Starks, John S. Garrison, Catherine Winiarski, Jennifer Feather, John D. Staines, Goran Stanivukovic, Louise Geddes, Liz Oakley-Brown, Ed Gieskes, and Jim Casey.
Introduction: Representing “Ovids” on the Early Modern English Stage
Authors: Starks Lisa S.
Published: May 2020

This introduction explains the overall critical framework of the collection and provides a brief overview of the book’s topics and goals. In so doing, it explores Ovid on the early modern stage; the interconnections between Ovid, the classical concept of imitatio, and contemporary adaptation theory; the relationship between classical reception studies and adaptation theory; the interplay between Ovid and Shakespeare adaptation/appropriation studies. Following this discussion, the introduction describes the organizational structure and rationale of the book and previews the chapters, noting how sections and chapters relate to each other.
Queer Fidelity: Marlowe’s Ovid and the Staging of Desire in Dido, Queen of Carthage
Authors: Lauby Daniel G.
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the staging of Ovidian desire in Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. Much attention has been paid to Ovidian appropriations in Marlowe’s plays and poems as well as to their portrayals of homoeroticism. However, this chapter uses the theory of rhizomatic projection to look beyond linguistic allusion and stylistic imitation to the staging of queer desire that extends beyond the homoerotic and operates against a backdrop of the play’s Virgilian framework and Ovidian adaptation history. A complicated kind of fidelity emerges from the tension between conservative and queer ideologies that take shape through performance and memory. Nonetheless, this chapter argues that the play’s staging of desire through queer erotics, gender reversals, and bodily dissonances ultimately does demonstrate fidelity to Ovid’s ideologies, demonstrating an Ovidian mode that reverberates throughout the rest of Marlowe’s plays and poems.
“Materia conveniente modis”: Early Modern Dramatic Adaptations of Ovid
Authors: Gieskes Ed
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes up various modes of Ovidian adaptation. The poet and his poems operate not only as sources for later works but also as models for structure. The essay looks at the way that Jonson’s play about writing — Poetaster — uses Ovid as a character while also considering his poetic legacy by using a slight revision of Marlowe’s translation of Amores 1.15 to stand in for the Ovidian poetic corpus. Ovid works as both a source and a problem in the play. In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Ovid is an important presence but more as a source of structure than of content. I argue that the way the play defers narrative has much to do with Ovidian techniques of narrative deferral that produce a desire to hear the deferred tale. In both cases, Ovid gets adapted in ways that go beyond retelling stories from the Metamorphoses.
Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture
Authors: Morrison Kevin A.
Published: May 2020

Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture assesses the unexplored links between Victorian material culture and political theory. It seeks to transform understanding of Victorian liberalism’s key conceptual metaphor: that the mind of an individuated subject is private space. Focusing on the environments inhabited by four Victorian writers and intellectuals, it delineates how the commitment of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Morley, and Robert Browning liberalism was shaped by or manifested through the physical spaces in which they worked. The book also asserts the centrality of the embodied experience of actual people to Victorian political thought. Readers will gain new historical and literary understanding and will be introduced to an innovative methodology that links material culture and political theory.
Animal Writing
Authors: Sands Danielle
Published: May 2020

Reading contemporary fiction and philosophy alongside each other, Animal Writingproposes a thinking of and with animals which brings together critical and affective approaches. Aspiring to a critical distancing from the sometimes claustrophobic proximity of empathy – currently the prevailing mode in Animal Studies – this book interrogates the claims made of empathy without exchanging it for the kind of abstract, disembodied reason which has long disavowed the ethical status of nonhuman life. This book is particularly interested in the stories that we tell, and are told, by beings at the edges of animal life, insects, and the possibility that the indifference, even disgust, that these creatures evoke might form the basis for an ethics which is not bounded by empathy. Across five interdisciplinary chapters, it asks: is it possible to read, write and think non-anthropocentrically? How might we develop approaches to nonhuman life which are affectively and critically informed? It contends that reframing the human in relation to the elements of itself which it denounces as inhuman can inform a renewed attentiveness to nonhuman life.
Introduction: Ten Statements about Empathy and Animal Studies
Authors: Sands Danielle
Published: May 2020

The introduction examines the role played by empathy in contemporary Animal Studies within the broader context of the affective turn. Outlining key features of Animal Studies, it contends that over-emphasis on empathy is problematic because it restricts engagement with animal life to sentient beings who share qualities with humans. In order to respond to the current environmental crisis, it argues that we need affective and cognitive responses which acknowledge the ethical value of all living beings, and a new model of cross-species storytelling.
Telling Nonhuman Stories: ‘The secret contours of objects’
Authors: Sands Danielle
Published: May 2020

This chapter puts the novels of Jim Crace in conversation with Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of the development of OOP in contradistinction to Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, it assesses the claims made by Harman for the superiority of OOP over contemporary relational ontologies such as that espoused by Jane Bennett. Turning to Crace, the chapter argues that his fiction enacts a sustained movement away from anthropocentrism, demonstrating the collaborative nature of storytelling and absenting the human from a variety of different landscapes. It argues that, in their examination of the ‘allure’ of objects, these novels espouse a position closer to Harman than Bennett. Finally, the chapter interrogates Harman’s presentation of aesthetics as first philosophy, arguing that the clear alignment between Crace’s fiction and Harman’s work reinforces the claim that aesthetics gives access to the ontological, and demands a reconsideration of agency.
The Sexual Politics of Nature Writing and Lepidoptery: ‘The siren song of entomology’
Authors: Sands Danielle
Published: May 2020

Arguing that the discourse of insect collecting is one of objectification and domination, and that entomological classification and practices continue to reflect concerns about sex and gender which were present in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instantiations, this chapter aligns the objectification of women with that of insects. It interrogates the notion of aesthetic disinterestedness as licence for such objectification, asking whether aesthetic disinterestedness permits an empathetic disengagement which, at its worst, leads to a sociopathic lack of ethical awareness. The chapter has three parts, focusing on John Fowles’s The Collector, insects (particularly butterflies and moths) in contemporary nature writing and, finally, the role of lepidoptery in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. The closing section examines the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, appealing to the simultaneous necessity of both cross-species empathetic engagement and of a distancing that is alert to its own subjective positioning.
Introduction
Authors: Williams James
Published: May 2020

Introduction to the idea of the egalitarian sublime. First definition of the anarchist sublime. Explanation of the problem of rankings and differences in values following from definitions of the sublime.
Nietzsche Against the Egalitarian Sublime
Authors: Williams James
Published: May 2020

This chapter responds to the challenge presented by Nietzsche against the egalitarian sublime. The approach is through the effects of definitions of the sublime, with reference to Burke. The chapter considers how Nietzsche distinguishes the masses and a few sublime individuals whose work creates a new sublime. The chapter connects the sublime in Nietzsche to the idea of the untimely. It rejects the idea that though the sublime is by the few it is for the many.
Introduction
Authors: Ostřanský Bronislav
Published: May 2020

Al-Sayfu aṣdaqu inbāʾan min al-kutubi … fī ḥaddihi al-ḥaddu bayna al-jiddi wa al-laʿbi. (The sword is more truthful than books. Its edge distinguishes between trueness and fiction.) Inna al-dhahaba yujrab bi-l-nār, wa inna al-muʾmina yujrab bi-l-balāʾi. (Gold is tried in the fire, the believer is tried in suffering.)...
Muslim Preachers of the Approaching End
Authors: Ostřanský Bronislav
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the essential constitutive segments of modern Islamic apocalyptic thought and writing, as well as the spiritual developments that led to its formation. The main objective of the chapter is to explain how this popular and, at least from “a theoretical perspective”, widely viewed subject from the last century has become one of the most important parts of current Islamic discourse and how this remarkable transformation took place. This is why the chapter also provides an extensive outline of non-Islamic (i.e. Western) “ideological borrowings” (both religious and secular) that have had a considerable impact on the shaping of contemporary apocalyptic imagination among a substantial part of the Muslim world. The decisive shift in the prevalent Muslim perception relates to the “Portents of the Hour” (i.e. the apocalyptic signs foreshadowing the End). There has been a move away from the level of an intellectually attractive, yet personally distant subject, that was addressed in various bestsellers (e.g. in Egypt, Turkey, etc.), towards the anxieties and great expectations that coalesced with the disintegration of the long-term Middle Eastern order, following the Western invasions of Iraq, which led to concerns in the minds of Moslems throughout the “World of Islam”.
The Topography of the Last Days
Authors: Ostřanský Bronislav
Published: May 2020

This chapter extensively develops considerations related to what could be metaphorically called “an apocalyptic topography of Syria and Iraq”. In such a context, we should be aware that both countries, currently struggling with ISIS inspired violence, are, at the same time, a crucial arena in relation to Muslim apocalyptic cycles. The chapter concisely introduces the natural starting points in the form of the narratives belonging to the historical apocalyptic cycles, as well as reviewing the attitudes of Muslim apocalyptists towards various cities and territories. In this respect, the discussion will also be based on the collection of “praise traditions” (fadaʼil) devoted to particular regions in contemporary Syria and Iraq. The analysis focuses on both the search for the supposed “apocalyptic qualities” of given toponyms, but also, primarily, on placing the current struggles and strategic ambitions of ISIS within the context of Muslim traditions devoted to the Last Days.
A Feeble Folk to Whom No Concern is Accorded
Authors: Ostřanský Bronislav
Published: May 2020

This chapter provides the reader with a different perspective on the apocalyptic visions of ISIS. So far, most attention has been accorded to how ISIS has been able to exploit apocalyptic symbolism and rhetoric and the detail of what they expect to see in the future. However, this chapter entitled “A Feeble Folk to whom no Concern is Accorded” (this subheading is a borrowed quotation from Nuʽaym ibn Hammad´s Kitab al-Fitan, The Book of Apocalyptic Tribulations), illustrates how the activities of ISIS are placed in an apocalyptic context by their opponents (i.e. the vast majority of Muslims). It is perhaps no wonder that such opposing perceptions can be mainly found within the outputs of those Muslim groups and strands that currently feel mortally threatened by ISIS inspired terror, namely Shiites, Sufis, liberals, etc. Let us remind ourselves that the apocalyptic imagination always reveals, at least to a certain degree, the nature of the thinkers and that the millennial content can often implicitly reflect their worldly worries and concerns within the eschatological framework.
The Hour as Goal and Vehicle: A Summary of ISIS Apocalypticism
Authors: Ostřanský Bronislav
Published: May 2020

This final chapter cannot be called an epilogue in the correct sense of the word since we are still not in a position to answer some of the key questions, e.g. whether or not ISIS protagonists really believe their own pronouncements. Of course, reaching to attain the higher (i.e. the millennial) goal can make any earthly suffering more bearable. Islamic apocalyptists have sought to console and encourage, while, at the same time, to warn and frighten. Nowadays, exactly as at the very beginning of Islam, a substantial part of Muslims believe that they are living in the Last Days. However, until now nobody is certain as to the future results of such a widespread apocalyptic conviction. Nevertheless, despite the above mentioned limitations in our knowledge, the stormy terrain of ISIS apocalyptic manifestations enables us to formulate a set of concluding remarks.
Cynicism and the Courage of Truth
Authors: Hershinow David
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes a closer look at Foucault’s unfinished genealogy of philosophical parrhêsia, or fearless speech, arguing that Foucault sees diogenical Cynicism as the logical culmination of an impulse common to post-Socratic Greek philosophy and hence to the critical attitude in the West—the impulse to derive one’s authority as a speaker of truths from living in a manner that is true to one’s words. Foucault helps us to see that a logic of maximization is immanent to this ethical turn, for it follows that the more closely one can match word to deed, the more powerfully one can convey the truth behind both. However, while Foucault is right to view Diogenes as the first philosopher to fully instantiate the Hellenistic ideal of “the true life,” he is wrong to conclude that “the true life” actually imbues its practitioner with the power to change the world.
Shakespeare’s Bitter Fool: The Politics and Aesthetics of Free Speech
Authors: Hershinow David
Published: May 2020

Chapter 3 argues that Shakespeare exposes the formal underpinnings of the fantasy of unstoppable individual critical agency through his depiction of wise fools. In Twelfth Night, Timon of Athens, and King Lear, Shakespeare’s citation of diogeneana gives form to a series of wise fools designed to provoke a collision between his period’s antithetical assessments of Cynic critical activity: one that reckons Diogenes’ freedom of speech to be singularly effective, and one that lambasts Diogenes for being inconsequential, a mere parasite-jester who has renounced all claims to seriousness. This double gesture is most evident in a passage unique to the Quarto Lear in which the Fool defines, and simultaneously performs, the critical activity of a “bitter fool.” Here, especially, Shakespeare’s composite characterization of the Cynic stance challenges viewers to comprehend that the “bitter fool” offers only the appearance of a robust critical practice—that its stridently critique-oriented posture exists in form but not in substance.
Cash is King: Timon, Diogenes and the Search for Sovereign Freedom
Authors: Hershinow David
Published: May 2020

Shakespeare undermines Hamlet’s identification with Cynic melancholy by disclosing his unthinking reliance on princely privilege, a reliance that recasts him as being more akin to Alexander than to Diogenes. Chapter 5 argues that Shakespeare and Middleton align Timon first with the figure of Alexander, then with the figure of Diogenes, in order to formulate a diagnostic response to two related fantasies of sovereign freedom, both of which imagine the possibility of operating entirely outside of money’s influence. In both his philanthropic and misanthropic modes, Timon attempts to set himself above (or outside) the requirements of an otherwise moneyed world, and while it is true that both attempts meet with failure, these failures serve to diagnose two distinct fantasies of sovereign freedom that emerge in symptomatic response to a world in which cash is king. Ultimately, Shakespeare and Middleton reveal the irony of Timon’s two fantasies of sovereign freedom: at the end of the day, no one can single-handedly reshape a world in which cash is king and money talks.
Teenagers on Stage—The Comedy of Elaine May and Mike Nichols
Authors: Freeman Mark
Published: May 2020

Elaine May began her career as one half of a comedy duo in collaboration with Mike Nichols, before both ventured into their own projects in writing and directing. This chapter takes as its focus the capacity for this early partnership to satirise the social and cultural expectations of the late 50s and early 60s, and the development of May’s comedic voice through her association with Nichols. Drawing initially on early biographical information, this will centre primarily on an analysis of their early sketch comedy, and extending through to their (often uncredited) collaborations on Nichols’ later cinema. I will confront the ways that the May/Nichols partnership shaped the writing and comedic sensibilities of May’s career, and the role Mike Nichols played in the development of May’s own distinctive creative perspective.
“Don’t Put A Milky Way in Someone’s Mouth When They Don’t Want It”: A Contemporary Feminist Rereading of Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
Authors: Bastow Clem
Published: May 2020

Is it possible to reclaim certain works as part of the feminist film canon, even if they were never intended as such? If Elaine May ever self-identified as a feminist, her public stance on the topic was one of comical obfuscation. This chapter reclaims May’s second film The Heartbreak Kid from the second-wave feminist critiques that dismissed it as sexist. It reads the film through a contemporary feminist lens, specifically looking at May’s framing of key scenes within the film as a representation of the ‘female gaze’. It looks closely at the contentious character of Lila (played by May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin), who has been dismissed as many critics as a caricatured representation of Jewish womanhood, as key in May’s critique of both the character of Lenny and the filmic canon of her male contemporaries. May looks beneath the caricature represented by Lenny’s resentful and self-loathing gaze, and finds the humanity within Lila.
In/Significant Gestures— Elaine May, Screen Performance, and Embodied Collaboration
Authors: Heller-Nicholas Alexandra
Published: May 2020

In Elaine May’s professional biography, her role as actor tends to traditionally fall somewhere in line after the fields for which she is most immediately recognized – comic, screenwriter, director. Yet across a range of feature films in particular, May demonstrated a clearly highly developed skill for performing a range of different roles to camera. For a figure whose achievements are associated so readily with language, what becomes apparent when watching May act on film is how much she relies on the unspoken for lasting effect: gestures, facial expressions and movement inform her characterizations often just as much as dialogue and script. This chapter considers not only May’s performance in perhaps her most well-known screen role as Henrietta in her directorial debut A New Leaf, but more also in her numerous collaborations with a range of acclaimed directors where her role was solely as actor.
Otto É. May(zo)—Elaine May’s Screenplay of Otto Preminger’s Such Good Friends (1971) as Affirmation that Hell is Other People
Authors: Jeffery Paul
Published: May 2020

In February 1971, while her studio-seized debut feature A New Leaf was being readied its premiere, Elaine May took a job-for-hire – adapting Lois Gould's newly published, fictionalized semi-memoir Such Good Friends for director Otto Preminger. Her work on the film was pseudonymously ascribed to Esther Dale, in keeping with May's general policy of not taking credit for projects for which she lacked authorial control, and has tended to be regarded as little more than a footnote in her career. Yet Such Good Friends is characterized by themes and styles which typify May's oeuvre: betrayal of a partner; the conflict between the roles we play and our ‘true’ selves; abrupt, seemingly spontaneous, tonal shifts; a particularly intellectual, highly verbal brand of New York Jewish humour counterpointed by vulgar farce; the spectre of impending death. Further, the film shows us that, even when working as intermediary between Gould and Preminger, May's outlook remains thoroughly existentialist. This philosophy, popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre, is not merely reflected in the content of her work but also shapes her entire approach to creative endeavours. Indeed, it's fascinating to see how May's inherent spontaneity, manifested as an inescapable subjectivity, merges with Preminger's highly- controlled, deliberately composed objectivity.
Queer Gothic
Authors: Owens Andrew J.
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers recent examples of Queer Gothic literature, television and film that, at first, appear to offer a greater latitude of pleasures than their progenitors, wherein non-normative visibility has ostensibly been liberated from the shackles of subtextual scrutiny. Although this triumphant tone is demonstrated in texts such as the premium cable soap opera Dante’s Cove (2005–7) and the seasonal anthology drama American Horror Story (2011–present), the spectre of a more menacing queerness still looms large. Indeed, Queer Gothic media continues to be inscribed with subcultural anxieties that persist in exhibiting fears that emerge from within marginalised sexual communities rather than from without, such as Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013) and John Logan’s Penny Dreadful (2014–16). This chapter demonstrates that the contemporary Queer Gothic remains committed to negotiating new ways of understanding pain and pleasure as two sides of the same sexual coin.
Gothic Digital Technologies
Authors: Crawford Joseph
Published: May 2020

Gothic media has flourished in the digital world. The internet itself is a deeply Gothic environment, characterised by persistent anxieties of infection, deception, exploitation and surveillance. This chapter explores some of the ways in which digital Gothic media engages with the Gothic potentials of digital technology itself. Opening with a discussion of the Japanese film Kairo (2001), an early and influential example of a narrative which uses the internet itself as a locus of Gothic horror, I shall proceed to consider examples of Gothic digital media including screamers, creepypasta, Slenderman vlogs, Gothic webcomics such as the works of Emily Carroll (2010–16), horror memes such as Zalgo, and social media-based fiction such as the work of _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 (2016), all of which draw upon anxieties regarding corruption and contagion in order to exploit the potential of online technologies to unnerve their users and unsettle their sense of reality.
Contemporary Zombies
Authors: Reyes Xavier Aldana
Published: May 2020

Although traditionally only on the fringes of the Gothic, zombies have dominated the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century thanks to their metaphorical richness. This chapter identifies two main types of zombie narratives that have predominated in film and literature since 2002: viral zombie narratives and sympathetic zombie ones. Analysing the former in texts like World War Z (2006), The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), Z Nation (2014–18), Fear the Walking Dead (2015–) and Feed (2010) allows me to show how the aggressive virulence of new zombies is connected to an inherently pessimistic view of present power structures. I then consider the conscious and humanised zombies in texts like Wasting Away (2007), Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament (2009), Warm Bodies (2013), In the Flesh (2013–14) and Generation Dead (2008) in order to explore how this monster stands in for the social repression of the gendered, sexual or disabled Other.
Contemporary Vampires
Authors: Fhlainn Sorcha Ní
Published: May 2020

This chapter tracks the trends of the contemporary vampire in the twenty-first century, from the vampire’s popular representation as an outsider and anti-hero, a carrier of a fatal plague, through to an idealised figure of desire in Gothic romance. Vampires in literature, film and television evidence their continued struggle as displaced figures caught between the ancient and the modern while remaining perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist. This chapter analyses the cultural assimilation and aggressive marketisation of the vampire narrative into separate strands for multiple audiences and generic configurations (from the Gothic romance to the action film), exposing the plurality of vampiric representation in the twenty-first century, including the tamed Gothic lover of the Twilight saga (2008–12), the ubiquitous and the synthetic nature of contemporary vampire society (HBO’s True Blood(2008–14)), and the persistent updating of popular twentieth-century vampire narratives, including Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula(1897), for a new century.
Black Diasporic Gothic
Authors: Wester Maisha
Published: May 2020

Black Diasporic Gothic can trace its origins back to the nineteenth century at the height of the Gothic’s appearance, when many black writers began to appropriate the genre to describe the real horrors of existence within racially oppressive and enslaving societies. However, many twenty-first-century Black Gothic texts suggest that modifying traditional Gothic monsters is not enough to create subversive work.Rather modern texts such as Jeremy Love’s Baypu (2009-10), Helen Oyeyimi’sWhite is for Witching (2009) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) force Western readers out of their region and tradition entirely by introducing monsters from the African Diaspora, creatures recording the horror of physical and cultural theft even as they demand recognition of a pre-encounter cultural history. In each text, marginalised characters are able to recognise, define and combat monstrous assailants primarily because they exist outside of dominant ideological systems. Thus twenty-first century Black Gothic texts posit the existence of radically alternative, and ultimately liberating, knowledge systems within marginalised locations.
Is Laurence Sterne’s Protagonist Tristram Shandy Embodied, Enacted or Extended?
Authors: Rousseau George
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the ways in which Sterne in Tristram Shandy may have anticipatedaspects of the concepts of 4E cognition. It sets Sterne into his historical-philosophic milieu, especially in the dualist traditions of Locke and Hume, and seeks to understand how Sterne’s narrative and its protagonist are living systems embodying cognitive worlds. Autopoiesis, the term used to describe systems capable of maintaining and reproducing themselves, is shown to be applicable to Sterne’s creation of a protagonist who cannot figure out who he is or how he got to be where he is. The chapter particularly emphasizes the runaway digressive loops driving Tristram’s cognitive mindset and demonstrates how the continual perturbations he experiences whenever he tries to get outside his own head disturb his self-organization. It shows that when Tristram aims to traverse the autopoietic borders he has set for himself, as he often does, he becomes progressively disturbed.
Enacting the Absolute: Subject-Object Relations in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Theory of Knowledge
Authors: Robertson Lisa Ann
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Theory of Life’ (1816/1848) and his theory of knowledge, discussed in Biographia Literaria (1817), through the lens of autopoietic enaction. It focuses on parallels between historical and contemporary theories, particularly their philosophical underpinnings, and argues that Coleridge’s theories are an important alternative to Cartesian accounts of the mind. Interrogating these theories in terms of enactive concepts, such as structural coupling, dynamic co-emergence, and mutual co-dependence, exposes the inherent embodied, embedded, and enacted premises on which Coleridge’s theory of cognition relies. The relationship between the subject and the object implicit in dualist and materialist theories reveals the effects assumptions about this relationship have on the way human beings understand themselves in relationship to nature and their own bodies – effects that are frequently inimical. The chapter concludes that Coleridge and the enactive approach offer valuable options for overcoming the schism between consciousness and nature, mind and world.
The Self in the History of Distributed Cognition: A View from the History of Reading
Authors: Jajdelska Elspeth
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at relationships between reading and writing, decorous speech and self-formation in the eighteenth century. The process of self-formation is understood by psychologists today to be a fluid and dynamic one, with the potential to vary across environments. The chapter considers how increasingly novelised forms of diary writing produced a swift oscillation for eighteenth-century diarists between addressing the reader and being the reader. New conceptions of the relationship between writing and print, meanwhile, produced a split between the face to face encounters of lower class readers, and their self-conception as silent readers of political and other topics. These developments meant that self-formation could be distributed between human subjects and the books and documents which they read and wrote.
The Literary Designer Environments of Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Poetics
Authors: Kukkonen Karin
Published: May 2020

This chapter revisits earlier accounts of distributed cognition in cultural environments and practices. It extends the notion of designer environment (i.e. spatial and procedural arrangements that amplify and scaffold cognition) beyond the usual focus on problem-solving and the task at hand. For outlining the complex capacities that come into play with the linguistic, cultural and literary contexts of literary designer environment, it draws on the critical and literary writings developed by Jesuits in eighteenth-century France. In particular, these literary designer environments enable fictional extensions of thought where immersive experience and abstract reflection can be combined. The article discusses individual literary texts and the larger intertextual net of literature in terms of the designer environment and suggests to broaden the perspectives from distributed cognition, the cognitive niche and scaffolded learning to include these.
Blake and the Mark of the Cognitive: Notes Towards the Appearance of the Sceptical Subject
Authors: Sha Richard C.
Published: May 2020

This essay seeks to understand the implications of the distribution of cognition across the arbitrary boundary of skull and skin into the environment so that cognition can be partly offloaded onto the environment, and in so doing, open up new areas of inquiry for distributed cognition such as subject/object relations and scepticism. It reframes William Blake’s ‘London’ so that we can look afresh at his speaker. Blake’s blurring of where inputs and outputs begin and end make him an ideal candidate for such an inquiry, and he highlights the stiff price to be paid for all this cognitive efficiency: the inability to distinguish between affordances and ideology.
Gaelic Scotland: Bilingual Life in the Twenty-First Century?
Authors: Dunmore Stuart
Published: May 2020

This opening chapter contextualises the key themes of the book within the sociological and historical setting of Gaelic in Scotland, introducing the central issue of language revitalisation. Building on this key theme, the chapter then discusses the role assigned to bilingual immersion education in current initiatives to maintain and renew minority languages. It then outlines the overall structure of the book, with a view to situating the wider study against this conceptual backdrop. Gaelic has been spoken in Scotland for over 1500 years, and was used over a major part of northern Britain in the medieval period, yet the language has now been in a state of decline for almost a millennium. This chapter considers policymakers’ response to this contextual backdrop in order to introduce the key themes of the monograph.