bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog: Perec, Description and the Scene of Everyday Computer Use
Authors: Wilken Rowan
Published: September 2018

This chapter takes up Georges Perec’s call to ‘question the habitual’ and applies it to the scene of everyday computer use. My questioning of habituated computer use is framed within a consideration, first, of human-computer interaction (HCI) research on skilled typing and, second, in relation to computer-based typing and everyday computer use. The central argument of this chapter is that Perec’s use of description offers an innovative method for generating new insights into the material contexts and conditions of media use, and can assist us in grasping the fuller significance of our ‘infraordinary’ techno-somatic interactions with keyboards and screens, and the places and situational contexts in which these interactions occur.
Introduction
Authors: Faflak Joel , Haslam Jason
Published: September 2018

This introduction defines American gothic historically, thematically, and conceptually, and traces the history of the cultural analysis of the American gothic. It suggests that the definitions of America and those of gothic are so closely related as to be inseparable. For the purposes of this Companion, America is gothic.
Southern Gothic
Authors: Lloyd Christopher
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the history of Southern Gothic through three recent media whose original visual imaginary delineates gothic aberrance. In the broad reach of visual media the Southern Gothic finds its most potent images and narratives. The film Trash Humpers (2009) demonstrates how the Southern Gothic story could not be told anywhere else; the TV series True Blood (2008-14) emphasizes sexuality and difference via its contemporary take on the regional genre; and the film Black Snake Moan (2006) ties these threads together through its long-standing gothic narrative of racial and sexual mores.
American Gothic Television
Authors: Wright Julia M.
Published: September 2018

Examining works from the full history of American television, this chapter focuses on three aspects of American gothic television: first, the entwined relationship between realism and the gothic in early television; second, the focus of gothic series on probable characters in improbable situations; and, finally, the division of gothic television into conventional dramatic domestic and workplace forms, and their challenge to that dramatic division.
Subversive Sound: Gender, Technology and the Science Fiction Blockbuster
Authors: Wilkins Heidi
Published: September 2018

This chapter considers the representation of gender in the late 1970s and 1980s in the so-called blockbuster era, focusing specifically on the science fiction genre. The aural dimension of these types of films immediately conjures up ideas of space, technology and other worlds and thus potentially appear as acoustically distinct from the experimental or avant-garde nature of New Hollywood or the loud, pervasive sounds of weaponry, shouting and male camaraderie in war films, which, as previously discussed, explored alternative representations of masculinity in mainstream US cinema. Financially, the most successful American films to emerge in the post-New Hollywood era were Hollywood blockbusters. These films, which were popular from the late 1970s onwards, saw a return to classical movie formulas and genres which, according to some scholars, also saw the re-emergence of strong male heroes and passive female characters and thus a noticeable return to binary representations of gender.
Conclusion
Authors: Wilkins Heidi
Published: September 2018

Representations of gender have varied greatly during this sustained period of film. Furthermore, it seems that while stable, hegemonic – or stereotypical – notions of gender have arguably always been embedded in American mainstream cinema (including the idea of the strong, silent male and the chatty verbose female), these depictions have frequently been challenged and the audio element of the audiovisual cinematic experience has been key to these subversions. An important contributor to this operation of sound is the ‘acoustic remainder’, discussed in Chapter 2, a hermeneutic category arguably applicable to all films discussed here. The idea of quoting famous lines of film dialogue has become a particularly cherished meta-cinematic practice – a form of entertainment for film enthusiasts. Likewise, the film audience can ‘take away’ musical underscoring (who might repeat the song by playing a recording of the same song at home), thereby extending the sonic life of the film and its messages, potentially eternally. In this way, key sounds such as film dialogue and film music can ‘remain’ with audiences, and thus associative ideas about gender and sound are potentially able to do the same.
Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library
Authors: Hirschler Konrad
Published: September 2018

The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation – the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus – and edits its catalogue. This catalogue shows that even book collections attached to Sunni religious institutions could hold rather unexpected titles, such as stories from the 1001 Nights, manuals for traders, medical handbooks, Shiite prayers, love poetry and texts extolling wine consumption. At the same time this library catalogue decisively expands our knowledge of how the books were spatially organised on the bookshelves of such a large medieval library. With over 2,000 entries this catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting the Ashrafiya catalogue into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles this book opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries.
The Making and Unmaking of a Medieval Library
Authors: Hirschler Konrad
Published: September 2018

This chapter firstly traces the foundation of the Ashrafiya in late Ayyubid Damascus. It argues that the library was set up by two principal patrons one belonging to the political elite (the city’s ruler al-Ashraf) and one belonging to the civilian elite (the prominent secretary and son of al-Qadi al-Fadil). Consequently, it is possible to identify three main regional sources from which the books originated: Rather surprisingly, the plundered former Fatimid palace library in Cairo, Northern Mesopotamia where al-Ashraf had spent his early years and the local context of Damascus. The chapter traces in a second part the subsequent development of the library until its dispersal in the early Ottoman period. This chapter is completed by a brief outline of the subsequent fate of some manuscripts originally held in this library, many of which were taken to Istanbul. The two main arguments of this chapter are thus a) thematic, to see this ‘Islamic’ book collection in its specific regional context and b) methodological, to show in what ways the study of individual manuscript notes can give insights into book circulation.
Plurality and Diversity: The Profile of a Medieval Library
Authors: Hirschler Konrad
Published: September 2018

The third chapter discusses one of the most intriguing aspects of this document, its system of ordering books. Our knowledge of medieval library systems has hitherto been confined to small collections and thus rudimentary systems or incomplete information in narrative sources. The chapter shows the highly-developed system for organising books according to three parameters, alphabetical order of titles, size of the books and their themes. In contrast to the highly philosophical schemes of how to organise and hierarchise the various learned branches of knowledge (such as those by al-Ghazali and al-Kindi) this library gives a very different insight into how knowledge was organised on a practitioner’s level. The organisation of the library, in addition to several other features of the catalogue, allows also an understanding of the spatial organisation of the library (the actual building was destroyed in the early 20th century). We do not have any study of the spatial aspects of a medieval Arabic library yet and the chapter offers the first exploration of this theme.
Introduction
Authors: Guy Josephine M.
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides an overview of critical histories of the fin de siècle outlining some of the key concepts associated with defining this period in literary history. It explores the relationship between global, national and regional understandings of the fin de siècle, and poses questions about the utility of the term ‘fin de siècle’ as marking out a distinct period in literary history. The Introduction also provides brief summaries of each of the following chapters in the volume.
The Matter of Form: Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Poetry and the Periodical Press
Authors: Chapman Alison
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the innovative use of print and illustration in the publishing of poetry in late nineteenth-century magazines. It shows how print and illustration were used to build a coherence or unity of the graphic arts, which in turn helped mark out a distinctive audience for such poetry. It explains the ways in which 1890s poetry was contingent on its graphic treatment in its print context, highlighting the richness of the decorative poetics of this period.
Secularism and Secularisation at the Fin de Siècle
Authors: Lyons Sara
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides a general overview of the meanings of secularism at the end of the century, distinguishing between the declining fortunes of the organised Secularist Movement and the elasticity, at the time, of the general term ‘secularism’. It is argued that secularism should be understood not as a disbelief in God or as an attack on religion, but more as a prioritising of ‘this-worldly’ concerns. It then shows how novels infused with pessimism used theological motifs, and how some poetry of the period constructed a language of secular affirmation and new quasi-religious forms of immanence.
Fin-de-Siècle Scotland
Authors: McCracken-Flesher Caroline
Published: September 2018

The chapter provides an account of the rich variety of literature produced by late nineteenth-century Scots writers, showing how it challenges, and some instances overturns, assumptions about the Anglo-centric nature of the British fin-de-siècle. It shows how the work of Scots writers who took up residence in England looks very different when set in the context of other Scottish, rather than English, literary networks. And how for Scots writers, the fin-de-siècle was a problem posed to place and time, and that far from being obsessed with decline and apocalypse, they figured Scotland as a country looking outwards, optimistically, towards the new and the future.
The Irish Fin de Siècle
Authors: Markey Anne
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides a survey of the range of cultural activity in Ireland during the late decades of the nineteenth century. It points to the importance of Irish writers in defining the Victorian fin de siècle, and the Irish backgrounds of many famous fin-de-siècle writers, especially women. Attention is given to specific forms of Irish writing, such as Land War fiction and experimental Irish drama and a distinct genre of Irish children’s fiction, as well as activities promoted by Irish revivalists, such as the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, the Feis Coil Association and traditional Celtic games. Throughout this body of work, stress is placed regeneration and a looking to the future, rather than on degeneration and endings.
Theatre in the Provinces at the Fin de Siècle: Beyond Outcast London
Authors: Robinson Jo
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the relationship between performance culture in two regional cities in the British Midlands—Nottingham and Birmingham—as compared to that in the metropolis, London. It compares reactions to plays by Ibsen and Pinero in these locales, providing evidence to suggest that regional audiences were knowledgeable about London culture, and that they were less shocked by avant-garde theatre than might be assumed.
Lily Montagu and Liberal Judaism
Authors: Dwor Richa
Published: September 2018

This chapter looks at the role of Judaism in late nineteenth-century culture, focussing on the life of Lily Montagu, whose importance lies in her activism and the unique way that she brought her faith (liberal Jewish) and her politics (socialist) into productive relationship. Montagu’s unorthodox career-path is traced and her social work and theology mapped in relation to larger debates about the Sabbath and sweated industries, at a time of heightened anxiety that Jewry was riven by a socialism in its midst. The chapter shows how models for female independence were in practice more varied than those represented in the press.
The Anglo-African Adventure Novel in the 1890s
Authors: Monsman Gerald
Published: September 2018

This chapter challenges post-colonial readings of late nineteenth-century adventure stories. It shows how this fictional genre engages productively with colonialization, rather than simplistically reproducing its values. A wide range of stories are surveyed and analysed with a view to demonstrating the sophistication and vividness of this neglected body of work.
The Body of the Letter: From Name-of-the-Father to Re-père
Authors: Collett Guillaume
Published: September 2018

Freud considers the Oedipus complex – the classical narrative of the boy’s desire to sleep with his mother and to kill his father – to constitute the ‘peak of infantile sexuality’.1 For Freud, in the Oedipus complex the boy develops an attachment or ‘object-cathexis for his mother’,2 originally related to her breast. The boy deals with the father by ‘identifying himself with him’, and while for a time these two relationships (boy–mother, boy–father) ‘proceed side by side’, the ‘intensification’ of the boy’s ‘sexual wishes’ in regard to his mother portrays the father as an obstacle and it is, for Freud, from this that the Oedipus complex originates.3 Despite emphasising the heterosexual nature of the complex (boy–mother), Freud sees the erogenous zones as ‘subordinated to the primacy of the genital zone’4 only after puberty.
The Three Syntheses of the Body: From the Voice to Speech
Authors: Collett Guillaume
Published: September 2018

Firstly, this marriage of language and the unconscious – or this paradoxical unity of sense and nonsense – appears to allude to the work of the Lacanian school, which he later adds has ‘completely renewed the general problem of the relations between language and sexuality’.2 Secondly, to contribute something original, in light of Lacan’s work – but also, it is implied, because Lacan’s work has not yet reached its own ground (as conceived by Deleuze) – Deleuze is saying here that we need to turn to the work of Carroll, so as to examine ‘what else’ language and the unconscious are connected with. This third term, it is implied, is more fundamental than either language or the unconscious taken separately, underlying them both and accounting for the importance of their relation.
‘You Have Only Seen the Fortunate Few and Draw Your Conclusion Accordingly’: Behavioural Economics and the Paradox of Scottish Emigration
Authors: Alston David
Published: September 2018

This chapter describes the enthusiastic involvement of young Highland Scots, after 1796, in the slave plantations of modern Guyana (the former colonies of Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice). This was despite the high risk of death from disease and the relatively small chances of success. The central argument of the chapter is that historians need the insights of the new discipline of behavioural economics to provide adequate explanations of why, as in this case, so many individuals acted against their best interests in making these choices. The behaviour of these migrants is examined in detail using key concepts from the work of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, namely the availability heuristic, stereotypes and the representative heuristic, anchoring effects, loss aversion and framing effects. These concepts allow us to better understand both how the prospects facing those who chose to migrate appeared to the individuals making the decisions, and why they systematically misjudged the likely outcomes. Finally, it is suggested that this approach may have wider application to the ‘paradox of Scottish emigration’ －the historical puzzle of why so many Scots emigrated at a time when prospects at home were improving.
Scottish Diasporas and Africa
Authors: MacKenzie John M.
Published: September 2018

The Scottish diasporas to Africa occurred in different forms in the varied regions of Africa. There was some settlement in East and Central Africa, but in West Africa and elsewhere in the continent the prime influence, for good or ill, was through Christian missions and their educational, ethnological and medical work. In East Africa, Scots had a major role in the imperial take-over through the foundation and personnel of the Imperial British East Africa Company, while in South and Central Africa, Scots had profound effects upon the economic, educational, scientific and religious dimensions of white rule. Scots, however, were also instrumental in some places in supporting the emergence of African nationalism.
Conflicts of Interest, Crises of Conscience: Scots and Aboriginal People in Eastern Australia, 1830s–1861
Authors: Curthoys Ann
Published: September 2018

The chapter explores the various relationships Scottish immigrants had to Indigenous people in the Australian colonies over three decades. It considers the role of Scots on the violent frontiers of settlement, and in the post-conflict period, looking at pastoralists, journalists, politicians, ethnographers, and clerics. The chapter concludes that Scottish interactions with Indigenous people differed so greatly according to class, purpose, and circumstance that there is little distinctive "Scottish" relationship to Indigenous Australians.
‘Our Old World Diff’rences are Dead’: The Scottish Migrant Military Tradition in the British Dominions during the First World War
Authors: Allan Stuart , Forsyth David
Published: September 2018

Scottish volunteer corps were an established feature of the defence forces of the British Dominions in the decades before the First World War. Displaying and performing the essentials of traditional identity associated with the British army’s Scottish regiments, these military units constituted one form of associational culture for migrant Scots and their descendants. But when, in 1914, the British Dominions joined the imperial war effort, these identities transferred only partially into the expeditionary forces mobilised for overseas service. This chapter considers why it was that, with emigrant Scottish units prominent in the war iconography of Canada and South Africa, the overseas forces of Australia and New Zealand did not similarly embrace the Scottish tradition. The differences are found to lie in administrative arrangements for mobilisation, including conscription, as much as in the relative degrees of Dominion nationalism through which the war was represented and commemorated.
Home is where the Heart is: Affinity Scots in the Scottish Diaspora
Authors: Hesse David
Published: September 2018

The kilted men are a yearly fixture. Visit the Swiss city of Basel during the three days of carnival – and you will come across the Scots. They will be marching in parades, playing bagpipes, wearing tartan – and often wearing other things as well: demonic masks of papier mâché, oversized heads and noses, garish fantasy costumes. They combine the Scottish pipe and drum band tradition with the local carnival aesthetic. These are the men (and only men) of Schotte Clique; their name quite simply means Scottish krewe or band. Founded in 1947, they have performed every year since without interruption. Many consider Schotte Clique one of the finest and most prestigious carnival krewes in the city; sixty-six active and several hundred passive members wear their Scottish gear with pride and meet regularly throughout the year. Carnival in Basel lasts for only three days, but the cliques provide a social identity that delivers all year round. Schotte Clique change their masks and costumes with every season – the production of such material at home or at the clubhouse is one key aspect of Basel’s carnival culture. But every year there will be some Scottish element involved. In February 2014, Schotte Clique marched as a group of kilted Santas, and the year before they were medieval knights, their skirt-like leg wear resembling a Scottish fashion.
Afterword
Authors: Richards Eric
Published: September 2018

Scotland from the mid-18th century found a distinctive place in the international league tables of emigration and imperial involvement. Questions discussed in this chapter include the paradox of Scotland’s precocious industrialisation concurrent with its early and continuing outflows of emigrants and capital exports. These matters also relate to the problem of regional divergence within Scotland during the nineteenth century and the fate of the Highlands. The idea of the ‘diaspora’ generates currently controversial claims about Scottish identity at home and abroad. Quantifying Scotland’s exceptionality on all these issues entails tricky comparisons with other countries and also exposes important immeasurable elements in such comparisons. They all connect with the life’s work of Tom Devine.
Discovery: Old Joy
Authors: Hall E. Dawn
Published: September 2018

This chapter is a study of masculinity within American culture and politics of the late 1990s to early 2000s. Old Joy is the only feature primarily focused on male interactions. Reichardt introduces her audience to male stereotypes found in traditional masculine roles and then deeply complicates them, through intentional ambiguous characterization. In doing so, the film resists cultural constructions of masculinity and continues a tradition of resistance by questioning and offering alternative representations of social norms found in independent cinema. The chapter explores production methods via interviews with Reichardt and producer Anish Savjani and contributes to the content conversation around LGBTQ concerns. In addition to a discussion of masculinity, as portrayed in the film, it analyzes the political context of the film concerning the displacement American liberals felt during the 2000-2009 presidency of George W. Bush and the failure of the democratic party to create an effective consensus.
Expectations: Meek’s Cutoff
Authors: Hall E. Dawn
Published: September 2018

This chapter focuses on Reichardt’s genre mixing, slow cinematic techniques, minimalism, neorealism and her use of the “female gaze” as well as “the open image” or “crystal image” as defined by Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn. Reichardt subtly shifts the environmental and political issues highlighted in her prior films back to the nineteenth century debate of Manifest Destiny and its effects on the landscape and native peoples. Based on historical events during the 1845 “terrible trail” tragedy, Meek’s Cutoff explores contemporary political issues of leadership and community by loosely linking Meek’s violence with George W. Bush era torture tactics and foreign policy. In her feminist Western, Reichardt used an aspect ratio of 1:37:1 creating a claustrophobic framing aesthetic and while this echoes the pioneer women’s vision during their long march in the dessert, it also created distribution concerns.
Solidification: Certain Women
Authors: Hall E. Dawn
Published: September 2018

This chapter is a close reading of the film Certain Women that explores lost and isolated characters who are content to remain outsiders or on the margins. Adapted from short stories by Maile Meloy, the film is divided into three episodes, and this chapter discusses the production methods, form, and content that focuses on working women and their relationships. Laura (Laura Dern) is a lawyer wrangling a volatile client; Gina (Michelle Williams) is a successful entrepreneur struggling to find balance within her family; and Jamie, a Native American rancher (Lily Gladtone) is battling isolation and infatuation with her teacher, Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart). Reichardt’s cinematic auteur characteristics are all showcased as is her thought-provoking social commentary. The expansive Montana landscapes and barren winter setting reflect the emotional state of the characters and Reichardt’s minimalism creates an authentic portrayal of a flawed, complex, and vulnerable humanity. The chapter also explores adaptation theory arguing that Reichardt creates a “new work of art” allowing audiences to add their own interpretations.
The Scottish Catholic Literary Imagination
Authors: Bicket Linden
Published: September 2018

This chapter recovers the submerged literary Catholicism of a Calvinist country. It presents a broad overview of Scottish Catholic writing from the medieval period to the late twentieth century, and discusses the over-determined ways in which religion and religious identity have been shaped by Scotland’s literary critics, poets and writers. The chapter examines the debate over the defining features of Catholic fiction and presents its own definition in relation to the work of George Mackay Brown.
General Introduction: Re-mediating Women and the Interwar Period
Authors: Clay Catherine , DiCenzo Maria , Green Barbara , Hackney Fiona
Published: September 2018

In spite of all the parade that the commercial Press makes of its women’s pages and its women’s supplements, the real substance of what we need is still deplorably absent. They give us fashions in abundance and superabundance, they record society doings which are of little or no interest, they repeat recipes until we are surfeited … and fancy that by doing so they produce the mental food that women need … But they fail to convince us, all the same, that such monotonous and substanceless rubbish is what the female public really ...
‘Tricks of Aspect and the Varied Gifts of Daylight’: Representations of Books and Reading in Interwar Women’s Periodicals
Authors: Battershill Claire
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores representations of books and readers in a variety of interwar periodicals. As Elizabeth Dickens suggests, in the interwar period, the book trade and the periodical press ‘often worked together, providing content, ideas, and promotion for each other’ (2011: 165). This chapter positions itself, therefore, at the intersection of publishing history and periodical studies. Focusing particularly on regular book review columns and advertisements for books and bookshelves this chapter illuminates the ways in which different kinds of interwar publishers and authors targeted female readerships. Drawing on a variety of kinds of periodicals, from feminist magazines like Time and Tide, to political periodicals like Everywoman, to domestic magazines like Good Housekeeping, the chapter shows the ways in which books were advertised by publishers, recommended by reviewers, and displayed as objects that can both indicate and form taste.
Clemence Dane’s Literary Criticism for Good Housekeeping: Cultivating a ‘Small, Comical, Lovable, Eternal Public’ of Book Lovers
Authors: Deen Stella
Published: September 2018

This chapter situates Clemence Dane’s literary criticism for Good Housekeeping within the context of interwar women’s literary journalism and discusses her program for the cultural, social, and civic empowerment of women readers. It argues that, as she modelled a holistic reading pleasure that encompassed sensuous and intellectual experience alike, and as she emphasised readers’ responsibility to bring about good books, Dane’s monthly essays both countered cultural images of indiscriminately consuming women readers and provided the structure for ongoing instruction in literary tradition. The chapter demonstrates that Dane’s middlebrow literary criticism engaged in dialogue with and challenged modernist and academic literary criticism, especially through its conception of a literary heritage that both enhanced enjoyment of literature and empowered ordinary readers to evaluate it. Finally, the chapter argues that Dane’s model of pleasurable reading as a gateway to cultural, social, and political benefits helped to shape a progressive modernity for women.
Making the Modern Girl: Fantasy, Consumption, and Desire in Romance Weeklies of the 1920s
Authors: Sanders Lise Shapiro
Published: September 2018

The 1920s saw the rise of a global discourse about ‘the modern girl’, whose fashions, hairstyles, and behaviors shaped, and were shaped by, changing social and sexual mores. Young working- and lower-middle-class women were the primary market for the romance weeklies of this era, which have been discounted by critics as little more than escapist fantasies. Although the majority of these magazines or ‘pulps’ focused on fashion, glamour, and romance at the expense of explicitly political discourses around suffrage, work, and family, in their pages the figure of the modern girl came to stand in for changing perceptions of women’s cultural roles – particularly in the transformations wrought by modern consumption and leisure practices, such as the burgeoning fan culture around silent cinema. The romance weeklies offered the opportunity for readers to work through both the dangers and the possibilities of social and sexual agency for young women in the 1920s.
‘The Lady Interviewer and her methods’: Chatter, Celebrity, and Reading Communities
Authors: Roach Rebecca
Published: September 2018

This chapter traces the figure of the female or ‘Lady Interviewer’ across the interwar period. A target of satire in the media, the Lady Interviewer was regularly conceived as a garrulous, gossiping figure. Yet she also had her real-life counterparts: women who used this stereotype to break into the print and broadcast media industries in increasing numbers, and who in turn supported the expansion of print media oriented towards women’s professional and social interests. Increasingly close associations between female journalists and Hollywood fan magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, would however, see a decline in the reputation of both the Lady Interviewer and her female readers. This chapter explores the constructions of specific reading communities forged through interviewing in popular media.
Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman): Ambivalent Domesticity in Women’s Welsh-language Interwar Print Media
Authors: Sheppard Lisa
Published: September 2018

This chapter offers a case study of the Welsh-language women’s monthly domestic magazine, Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman). The first magazine called Y Gymraes was founded in 1850 in response to accusations of immorality against Welsh women made in the 1847 Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales. The chapter focuses on the second incarnation of the magazine, published between 1896 and 1934, which was the official magazine of the Temperance movement in Wales. Women’s publications in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Wales have begun to receive critical attention over the past few decades, but little has been written about their development during the interwar years. This chapter seeks to remedy this by examining conflicting notions of Welsh and British womanhood in the domestic ideals presented by the magazine at a time of increased Welsh national consciousness.
Debating Feminism in the Socialist Press: Women and the New Leader
Authors: Hannam June
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the complex and ambiguous relationship of the Labour Party to gender and feminism in the interwar years through a study of the Labour Leader/ New Leader, the official organ of the socialist group, the Independent Labour Party. The paper was aimed at a mixed-sex audience. The chapter focuses on women as journalists, debates on gender differences and women’s nature, and policy questions relating specifically to women, including organising separately, birth control and family allowances. A consideration of these areas highlights the diversity of women’s voices and concerns. It contends that in the new context of the interwar years socialist women did not just abandon their feminist perspective in favour of the class struggle; instead, they were finding ways to work through the complex relationship between the two. The Labour Leader/ New Leader provided a space where issues relating to gender could be debated openly.
Women’s Organisations and Communities of Interest: Introduction
Authors: DiCenzo Maria
Published: September 2018

THE INTERWAR PERIOD saw the proliferation of women’s organisations – voluntary, popular, non-political, party- and faith-based – some of which engaged with feminist discourses and others that deliberately avoided these associations, defining and generating a new array of women-defined collective identities.1 The work of feminist historians in recent decades has been instrumental in redefining the parameters of the women’s movement to include the efforts of non-feminist organisations as advocates for women’s rights. Maggie Andrews captures this tendency in the phrase ‘the acceptable face of feminism’ in her groundbreaking study of the Women’s Institute as a social movement, challenging the ‘jam and Jerusalem’ image so often attributed to these forms of women’s associational culture (1997). Recently Karen Hunt and June Hannam have argued for ‘a new archeology of “women’s politics”’ as a way to reframe and arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the participation and role of women in various areas of public life (2013). While many of the periodicals showcased in this section were not overtly feminist, they certainly engaged in women’s politics and forms of advocacy in this broader sense, and they did so across the political spectrum. It is important to recognise why it might have been more appealing and even more practical for organisations to distance themselves from feminism, particularly in a climate of hostile reaction. As DiCenzo and Eustance note in the previous Part, the ‘demise’ school of interwar history has not always fully recognised the adversarial conditions women faced and the resistance with which their demands were met....
Housewives and Citizens: Encouraging Active Citizenship in the Print Media of Housewives’ Associations during the Interwar Years
Authors: Beaumont Caitríona
Published: September 2018

When considering the print media of popular housewives’ associations during the interwar years it might well be assumed that articles and features on housework would dominate. This assumption appears even more plausible in view of the popular but now mistaken belief that the interwar years were characterised by a prevailing ideology of domesticity limiting the interests of wives and mothers to home and family (Beddoe 1989; Kent 1993). In the 1920s and 1930s the majority of women in Britain did marry and have children. Being a housewife remained the typical experience of married women in the fi rst half of the twentieth century (Zweiniger-Bargielowska 2001: 158). However, recent historical research has revealed that the everyday lives of women in the interwar years were far more complex than previously acknowledged. Consequently, there is now a better understanding of the differing experiences of women – as wives and mothers, but also as single women, widows, workers, consumers, activists, and citizens – in the interwar years.
Women’s Print Media, Fascism, and the Far Right in Britain Between the Wars
Authors: Gottlieb Julie
Published: September 2018

Women were well represented as leaders, activists, and as contributing journalists in the various fascist movements in Britain between the wars. The first movement to adopt the fascist name in Britain, the British Fascisti (1923–35), later the British Fascists (BF), founded by Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman, published the British Fascist and the British Lion in which women’s issues and the activities of women in the movement were generously covered (Durham 1998; Gottlieb 2000). Although the much more successful British Union of Fascists (BUF, 1932–40) was male-led and male-dominated, its publications – Fascist Week, Blackshirt, Action, and its academically oriented Fascist Quarterly – also covered women’s issues and provided women’s pages. Further, for a short time in 1933–4, the BUF published the cyclostyled Woman Fascist, the news-sheet of the BUF’s Women’s Section, at that time under the leadership of former suffragette ‘Slasher’ Mary (Mary Richardson). Indeed, the influence of three former suffragettes on the evolution of the BUF’s women’s policy was decisive, and these veterans of the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) entered into heated polemics with anti-fascist feminists inside and outside the pages of these publications. The BUF’s women’s policy and its stance on feminist-identified issues, from equal pay and the abolition of the marriage bar to the relationship between women and peace/pacifism, was more nuanced and sophisticated than we may imagine. The movement emphasised that its women’s policies differed from those of the Italian Fascist and Nazi German regimes (Passmore 2003). While distancing itself from Nazi reaction and violent misogyny, the BUF claimed it rejected ‘the sex war as it does the class war: as it does the whole political theory of division. It is by unity of purpose alone that our nation can struggle through to great things’ (Blackshirt 5 Oct 1934: 9). This essay surveys the content and the evolving themes and concerns as framed in these print media, with specific reference to women’s issues, the space accorded to women’s political engagement, and the attempted reconciliation between the ultimately irreconcilable creeds of fascism and feminism.
Roma and Sinti as Homo Sacer
Authors: Leeb Claudia
Published: September 2018

This chapter analyzes the case of the Austrian University Professor Beiglböck who led lethal medical experiments on Roma and Sinti in the Dachau concentration camp during the NS regime. It traces the emergence of the “gypsy” as the paradigmatic figure of what Giorgio Agamben termed homo sacer—from being declared as vogelfrei in the fifteenth century to being exposed to death in the concentration camps of the Nazis. It also explains the ways in which Beiglböck and his defense counsel reiterated the racist NS branding of Roma and Sinti as “gypsies” as a means to exonerate Beiglböck from guilt and responsibility, which underlines how NS ideology continued to be present in the post-war trials. It lets surviving witnesses of the experiments speak about the horrors of the deadly experiments.
Writing the Radio War
Authors: Whittington Ian
Published: September 2018

Writing the Radio War positions the Second World War as a critical moment in the history of cultural mediation in Britain. Through chapters focusing on the ‘broadbrow’ radicalism of J.B. Priestley, ground-breaking works by Louis MacNeice and James Hanley at the BBC Features Department, frontline reporting by Denis Johnston, and the emergence of a West Indian literary identity in the broadcasts of Una Marson, Writing the Radio War explores how these writers capitalized on the particularities of the sonic medium to communicate their visions of wartime and postwar Britain and its empire. By combining literary aesthetics with the acoustics of space, accent, and dialect, writers created aural communities that at times converged, and at times contended, with official wartime versions of Britain and Britishness. Though rarely controversial, the broadcasts of these writers navigated an environment of political compromise in order to present new articulations of British and imperial identity that set the stage for the postwar multi-ethnic welfare state to come.
Introduction: Projecting Britain
Authors: Whittington Ian
Published: September 2018

As a central and previously untested mass medium in the context of war, radio served as a resonant chamber through which British writers articulated, on behalf of a series of newly empowered publics, the social and political changes brought on by the Second World War. In mediating the conflict for British citizens, broadcasting bound listeners together in an auditory imagined community—a radio public—that was affiliative and participatory; though cut off from “speaking back” directly via radio, this public made itself known through listener surveys (both internal and external to the BBC), letters to the editors of publications (both radio-specific and non-), and direct correspondence with broadcasters. The affective connections enabled by the medium amplified structural changes underway during the conflict, as the pressures of total war demanded that the BBC modify its top-down model of broadcasting in favour of more demotic forms of address and cultural content. Though complex, the Corporation’s wartime renegotiation of its national role traces a shift away from the paternalism of the interwar BBC, under the direction of Sir John Reith, and towards a postwar model of multiple wavelengths serving multiple audiences in multiple registers.
To Build the Falling Castle: Louis MacNeice and the Drama of Form
Authors: Whittington Ian
Published: September 2018

Collectively, Louis MacNeice’s output of radio dramas and features represents one of the greatest achievements of wartime radio broadcasting in Britain. For MacNeice, already interested in poetic form, radio provided a new medium with its own technical limitations, generic possibilities, and productive constraints. From the early features in the Stones Cry Out series (1941), through his first verse epic, Alexander Nevsky (1941), to the spectacular triumph Christopher Columbus (1942), MacNeice built ever more complex soundscapes in which a listening audience might immerse themselves, if only to rediscover a sense of collective purpose. Within MacNeice’s radio dramas, human examples of effective auditory navigation—in the form of blind characters and other attentive listeners—populate sonic environments structured by distinctions of proximity and distance, the present and the past, and safety and danger. MacNeice’s broadcasts therefore achieve propagandistic goals via modernist means, creating critical listeners as a means of forging good citizens; in the process, the broadcasts demonstrate that Priestley’s demotic approach was not the only means of uniting the radio public around a common goal.
Versions of Neutrality: Denis Johnston’s War Reports
Authors: Whittington Ian
Published: September 2018

As his job with the BBC News Division took him from the deserts of Egypt, through Italy, to the gates of Buchenwald, Irish playwright Denis Johnston struggled with a multiply determined neutrality which inhered partly in his role of war correspondent, and partly in circumstances specific to his own life. In particular, Johnston sought to balance the ideal of journalistic objectivity with the need to convey the emotional horrors of the struggle, all while serving as a politically neutral Protestant Irishman within a semi-autonomous British broadcaster. Johnston’s position as a neutral mediator was intensified by the development of newly compact recording technologies which allowed him to record actuality broadcasts, commentary, and interviews in the field—in a sense, to allow the war to speak for itself. For all these traces of immediacy, after the war Johnston would frame his experience in a heavily embellished and fantastical memoir, Nine Rivers from Jordan (1953). By weaving together Johnston’s war broadcasts, his journals, and his memoir, this chapter illustrates how journalistic objectivity and literary experiment existed in productive tension during the war; at the same time, Johnston’s postwar response to the atrocities of the holocaust reveal a journalist shaken by the moral vacuum revealed in wartime Europe.
Introduction: Sentencing Orlando
Authors: Högberg Elsa , Bromley Amy
Published: September 2018

The introduction advocates for a focus on individual sentences as a fruitful way to read Woolf. It contextualises this approach by outlining the critical history of Orlando, and discusses Woolf’s theorising of the literary sentence in A Room of One’s Own, where Woolf’s emphasis on shape and form converges with her discussion of a gender and genre politics of the sentence. The introduction makes claims for Orlando as enacting this politics aesthetically, and therefore as especially suited for a study of the form and structure (morphology) of its sentences in the wider context of modernist aesthetics. It attends to the legal and discursive meanings of the word sentence, as a way into Orlando’s subversive treatment of reading practices, censorship, sexuality, gender and race – all of which are examined in this volume. The introduction also considers the stakes involved in reading Woolf alongside the new aestheticist critical practices currently shaping the field of modernist studies, delineating thereby the volume’s aim to open up further avenues for exploring a morphology of the modernist sentence.
‘Something intricate and many-chambered’: Sexuality and the Embodied Sentence
Authors: Frøsig Anna
Published: September 2018

In this chapter, Anna Frøsig addresses the Woolfian double entendre and the wildness underlying the supposedly plain style of Orlando. Engaging the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frøsig reads the sentences constructing the novel’s simultaneously sexual and ethical spaces in terms of the female body. In Woolf’s hands, Frøsig suggests, literary form becomes ‘something intricate and many-chambered, which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not verse’ (O 124), and such exploration turns out to be at once intimate and bound up with an ethics of alterity.
Rhythms of Revision and Revisiting: Unpicking the Past in Orlando
Authors: Gay Jane de
Published: September 2018

In this chapter, Jane de Gay invites us to explore a sentence in which Orlando as a Victorian woman writer is urged by the ‘spirit of the age’ to reconsider a few poetic lines she has just written. Voicing a passage from Sackville-West’s The Land (1926), these lines express a barely hidden lesbian eroticism, which is, paradoxically, intensified by intertextual allusions to canonical male writers. Addressing questions of censorship and self-censorship, de Gay demonstrates how Orlando’s sentences, with their accretions of past literary styles, encourage a nonlinear reading movement that ultimately affirms the free expression of same-sex desire.
‘Let us go, then, exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life
Authors: Bahun Sanja
Published: September 2018

In this chapter, Sanja Bahun pursues intertextual echoes in Woolf’s poetic engagement with T. S. Eliot. Bahun’s chosen sentence rewrites the opening of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915) and is embedded in a densely allusive passage that also cites Joyce, Forster and Lawrence. With careful attention to rhythm and syntax, Bahun shows how Woolf’s rewriting of Eliot invokes and transforms the emerging, predominantly male modernist canon in a vibrant exploration of modern subjecthood and the question: ‘How does one represent life?’