bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
1918: Minesweeping and Anti-Submarine Operations during the Final Year
Authors: Robinson Robb
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses the German minelaying assault on the waters around the British Isles that had passed its peak due to the growing effectiveness of British countermeasures. It details the difficulty of Germans to maintain high levels of mine production given the pressing demands of other military priorities. It also focuses on specific objectives that are discerned from a study of minelaying activities during the last year of the Great War. The chapter illustrates the great barrage that the Germans tried to lay on one specific stretch of the Scottish coast during the spring and summer of 1918, which was undertaken on a considerable scale. It examines the German operation that was a key part of an even wider strategy aimed at ensnaring the dreadnoughts of the Grand Fleet amongst the mines of the great barrage.
Old-Fashioned Truth, Telic Truth, and Interreligious Understanding
Authors: Gellman Jerome Yehuda
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents an approach to religious truth and to telic truth while explaining how this strategy functions in interreligious understanding. It then turns to defend the face of three widely held objections to the author's position: the expressionist objection, the nativity objection, and the postmodernist objection. The chapter offers a philosophical analysis of religious truth and own defence of a correspondence-based understanding of truth. It states that the falsity of a core belief of another religion means that to that belief there corresponds no objective, independent state of affairs, hence, a correspondence view of religious truth. The chapter explores the meaning of religious truth within the framework of a broader philosophical discussion that is not particular to Judaism. Judaism provides the specific instance for statements of broader context and appeal. Finally, it elaborates a detailed and careful presentation of Jewish belief in a very rough and schematic way.
The Cosmic Eye and Its Pupil
Authors: Fisher Cass
Published: May 2021

This chapter approaches the question of truth not from the starting point of theoretical considerations but rather from specific textual contexts. It studies rabbinic sources in detail and brings them into dialogue with broader philosophical concerns that pertain to a universal and particular truth. A perfect God must necessarily be the God of all people, and as such, it is inconceivable that human well-being would be dependent on a particular divine revelation. The chapter walks us through a range of rabbinic options. The fuller theoretical articulation of these concerns is found in the works of Moses Mendelssohn and Franz Rosenzweig, and the chapter discovers them also at the heart of midrashic thinking. Reflecting on God's perfection leads one to recognize God's universality, the potential to know God in ways that transcend the particularity of Judaism. The chapter opens us up to the presence of a universal dimension that derives from God's being and his creative act and relationship to all, beyond the particularity of his relationship with Israel. Notions of particular and universal truth are thus refracted or approached through the affirmation of God's perfection.
Da’at
Authors: Yizhak Avraham
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents the teachings of a Hasidic teacher, Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl. The chapter focuses attention on the notion of da'at, knowledge or consciousness, as it appears in Rabbi Menahem Nahum's classic Me'or einayim. The chapter considers it the ultimate goal of the mystical life. Focusing on da'at provides a particular approach to the issue of religious truth. In the chapter, religious truth is viewed from the subjective and cognitive dimension, in terms of human consciousness and its ability to enter the reality of God. It explores the relationship between this cognitive and the conscious dimension of approach to God and the more objective dimensions of religion in relation to the notion of truth. The chapter offers a turn to the subjective, the experiential, and the conscious as a means of safeguarding the foundations of truth, grounded in God, and the quest for da'at. One might almost discern a parallel between the appeal to da'at on metaphysical, cognitive, and mystical grounds and Krajewski's appeal to a kernel of historical truth in tradition. However, da'at is more than a kernel. In fact, da'at is the essence, the goal, and what counts most in the spiritual quest. Getting to the heart of things, therefore, allows us to rebalance perspective and to affirm that which matters most in religion, its ultimate truth, despite the weakening of the historical and other foundations of the religious system.
The Truth Beyond and Beyond Truth
Authors: Goshen-Gottstein Alon
Published: May 2021

The chapter tackles the notion of truth within Hasidic literature. It examines various aspects of the system of Breslav Hasidism, and juxtaposes two stages in Breslav theology: the thought of its founder, R. Nahman, and that of his disciple, R. Nathan. For R. Nahman, truth is to be understood as a state of being in fullness, rather than as an affirmation of specific doctrines and faith tenets. Not all can attain truth, here conceived as the higher state of being in union with the One, the Good, and the True. Truth is a state of being with moral and existential expressions. Truth is rising to God himself. R. Nahman's disciple takes the argument a step further. For him, truth in this world is impossible. We cannot attain truth; hence, we must cultivate faith. For both teachers, the approach to truth ultimately points to a way of being. For R. Nahman it is the way of being in God that constitutes truth, as it is attained by the few, the great masters. For his disciple, R. Nathan, renouncing truth in the cognitive sense leads to a way of being that prefers other values. Ultimately truth, in the sense of true opinions over which one would fight and argue, is more of a vice than a virtue. It is faith we must seek, not truth.
Religious Truth
Authors: Goshen-Gottstein Alon
Published: May 2021

The last chapter surveys the range of issues and positions, and assesses the diversity of the contexts of and approaches to truth. It started from Jerome Yehuda Gellman's affirmation of the validity of truth claims to R. Nathan's renouncing the possibility of the common person attaining truth in a cognitive way, leading one to cultivate instead faith and humility, and to Rav Kook's willingness to forgo realist understandings of truth statements. The chapter discusses the range points to the richness of the subject matter and to the multiple approaches to it, which in turn rely on diverse definitions and understandings. It recognizes that under the rubric of 'truth', different people refer to different issues and aspects of religious and spiritual life. Truth serves as a kind of overarching concept by means of which these diverse issues can be brought under one conceptual framework. The conclusion examines the different discussions, whether philosophical or textual, which allow us to develop an in-depth understanding of what truth means. Ultimately, it highlights thought strands in the chapters that enrich our understanding of truth and that are relevant to appreciating the author's view of how truth plays out in the interaction.
Narrative Preludes: The Calends of Cairo and Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights
Authors: Malcolm William K.
Published: May 2021

Mitchell’s early fiction writing is analysed as a modern take on Arabian Fantasy mixing realism and mysticism and forging a strong spirit of place from memories of his army service in the middle east, particularly his principal posting in post-war Cairo. Mitchell’s story-cycles appear stylistically dated, but his experimentation, particularly with first person narrative, anticipates several of the signature features of his mature fiction style. The social and political temper of this early work is also seen to be reflective of his mature humanitarianism, in the subtle denunciation of colonialism and in the socialist utopianism seen at play throughout the narrative.
The Real Stuff of History: Hanno, Niger, The Conquest of the Maya and Nine Against the Unknown
Authors: Malcolm William K.
Published: May 2021

Mitchell’s abiding interest in history and prehistory was a concomitant of his overarching commitment to human rights. This chapter studies the impulse underlying his dedication to the Diffusionist school of history, which most importantly served as a moral prop for his belief in human goodness. The four full-length history books that he published span his writing career and testify to the continuity of his ideological preoccupations, expressly with the welfare of the ordinary people and with the responsibilities of mankind with regard to safeguarding the rights of ethnic peoples and respecting the natural environment. His anti-imperialist sensibility is evident in his promotion of the rights of the peasant. This runs right through his biography of Mungo Park, with whom the author keenly empathises as son to a smallscale Scottish farmer, and his study of the pre-Columbian theocracies in his most academic treatise The Conquest of the Maya right up to his study of Fridtjof Nansen, which closes his final volume Nine Against the Unknown, hailed as the champion and embodiment of the most inspiring ethical, environmental, political and philosophical values.
Haunted by Horrors: Image and Superscription and Spartacus
Authors: Malcolm William K.
Published: May 2021

Mitchell himself confessed that he was vexed to a near-pathological extent by ‘horrors’ – incidences of human cruelty in past and present – which provided the emotional and ethical drive for his writing. This chapter explores the two novels that most acutely highlight this aspect of the author’s mindset. Image and Superscription, his bracing picaresque novel of Rebirth, is presented as an unsuccessful attempt to dramatise and come to terms imaginatively with mankind’s propensity for cruelty. While visceral scenes depicting human brutality in contemporary times are overstated, however, the graphic treatment of historical atrocities points forward to the success of Spartacus. The historical novel dealing with the legendary uprising of the slaves against the Roman Republic is adjudged a triumph in conception and execution. It is appraised as both a realistic account of an inspirational historical event and an emblem of revolutionary ardour. Further, Mitchell’s permeating humanism is productively allied with a deeper lying philosophical scepticism to sustain a sanguine vision of humankind’s destiny.
Legacy
Authors: Malcolm William K.
Published: May 2021

The final chapter reviews the development of Mitchell’s literary legacy following his death up to the present. Translations of his best work to different genres, including radio, drama and film dramatisations, have had variable success while generically reflecting the growing popular esteem with which the Gibbon fiction is held. Critical appreciation has found a prominent place for A Scots Quair within the history of campaigning working-class writing and within the Scottish tradition in literature. Gibbon’s achievement with narrative focalisation and stream of consciousness combined with the epic grandeur of the trilogy working through Scottish subject matter to address vibrant universal themes has secured his place within the growing body of global criticism as one of the pre-eminent modernist novelists of the twentieth century. While his reputation within the British literary canon has been deemed to have suffered from his subliminal association with a marginalised culture, however, the author’s profound humanitarian principles manifested in his championing of the rights of the individual, irrespective of class, gender, religion and race, together with his prowess as a supreme proponent of ecofiction have a timeless appeal.
Economics, Warfare, and the Sea, c.1650–1945
Authors: Conway Stephen
Published: May 2021

This chapter ranges over the full period considered in the book to exemplify a number of central themes in the relationship between economic activity and naval warfare. It looks particularly at the British experience, as Britain was the major naval power for much of these three centuries. The chapter examines matters such as the role of the Navigation Acts, naval blockades, convoy systems, and the stimulation to industry and agriculture provided by shipbuilding, naval armaments, and the supply of foodstuffs to ships’ crews.
Maritime Power and Economic Warfare in the Far East, 1937–1941
Authors: Kennedy Greg
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses the operational capability and strategic planning of the Royal Navy, United States Navy, and Imperial Japanese Navy in the period between the outbreak of war in China in July 1937 to the beginning of the general Pacific war on December 7, 1941. It outlines the lack of ability of the Western Powers to use naval power effectively to deter Japan in conjunction with Economic Warfare at sea. It also highlights the inability of the Anglo-Americans to prevent an escalation in tensions during the implementation of economic warfare measures due to a lack of credible maritime power to support that deterrence strategy.
Epilogue
Authors: Moran Daniel
Published: May 2021

Economic Warfare in recent times is no longer a strictly maritime concern, but its conduct follows in the wake of its original embodiment as an element of war at sea. In more limited forms it has largely passed from the realm of war to that of diplomacy, where sanctions regimes in various forms remain an established feature of international life. As an element of “total” war, economic warfare now carries considerable moral and escalatory risk, even as the expansion and integration of the world economy have made its effects more difficult to manage. This chapter surveys the contents of the volume in relation to these developments.
Synaesthesia: Tuning in to Carol Watts and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
Authors: Skoulding Zoë
Published: May 2021

Synaesthesia, whether physical experience or a literary device that foregrounds the interconnectedness of the senses, is a starting point for discussion of the Chinese-American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Carol Watts from the UK. The interplay between hearing, listening, sight and touch in their work becomes a means of challenging traditional forms of subjectivity and exploring the ecological dimensions of their poems. Forms of reciprocal and receptive listening are discussed in relation to Berssenbrugge's Buddhist sensibility and Watts's charting of relations between the auditory and the visual. For Watts and Berssenbrugge, music is a means of imagining but also testing and investigating perception of the other-than-human world from a necessarily human auditory perspective.
Echo: Claudia Rankine and Vahni Capildeo
Authors: Skoulding Zoë
Published: May 2021

Considering the effects of harmful speech, as developed by Denise Riley, this chapter considers the after-echoes of speech in relation to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. An emphasis on listening, as opposed to looking, is for Rankine a means of countering the extreme exposure or hypervisibility experienced in the face of racism, as harmful speech is echoed back to the reader. The assumed transparency of the visual is problematised by various forms of noise, while Rankine's echoic practice also draws attention to white listening, and what that sounds like. A contrasting approach to echo is suggested by the work of the Trinidad-born, UK-resident poet Vahni Capildeo, which is read in the context of Édouard Glissant’s échos-monde in order to reveal sonic attention to what bounces back from layers of cultural and linguistic history.
Resounding: Peter Hughes, Jeff Hilson and Tim Atkins
Authors: Skoulding Zoë
Published: May 2021

The listening of translation, an underlying theme in much of the book, is the subject of the final chapter, which describes the noisy reversionings of sonnets by contemporary UK poets Peter Hughes, Jeff Hilson and Tim Atkins, and their work of defamiliarising song so that it can resonate in new relationships. It explores their experimental approaches to translation via the contrasting repetitions and temporalities of recorded song. As the voices of the dead come over the airwaves of their poems, the logic of the cover version makes temporality audible through difference and variation. Rather than narrowing in on myths of Petrarchan obsession, these translations turn outward to the peripheral sociality of song and the new contexts in which it is heard.
Conclusion
Authors: Skoulding Zoë
Published: May 2021

Because listening is a form of attention not only to language but to all physical phenomena, listening to and through poetry is a means of rethinking continuities between human and non-human environments. The poem’s aurality activates a listening that links imagined, remembered, recorded, and live sound, as well as the multiple inferences between them. Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation of listening, to which this argument has returned at several points, points to listening as a turn, even a straining, towards the other and the unknown. Poetry has a vital role in creating and articulating such forms of encounter.
Pacifism, Fascism and the Crisis of Civilization
Authors: Periyan Natasha
Published: May 2021

Natasha Periyan examines the early 1930s’ novels of Nancy Mitford, Storm Jameson (and Jameson’s edited collection Challenge to Death) alongside Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and material from their letters, articles and archives to demonstrate how, through a feminist critique of masculinist, heroic militaristic traditions, these writers also explore the relative appeal of pacifism and fascism. Jameson and Brittain call for the sustained application of the intellect in the ‘war against war’, while Mitford dissects the powerful unifying appeal of fascism as a spectacle and a response to perceived political inertia. Where Jameson’s work reflects the disillusionment of the age, Brittain demands a rational, logical pacifism lamenting the tragic naivety of the ‘lost generation,’ while Mitford’s satire on fascist rhetoric reveals its communitarian ethos. The decline of the British Empire also resulted in the post-war migration of British writers to London, the literary and cultural capital of the empire.
‘The Lure of Pleasure’
Authors: Kennedy Sue
Published: May 2021

Sue Kennedy considers how Marghanita Laski’s provocative novel To Bed with Grand Music addresses the fantasy of fulfillable desires through the story of a young, married woman taking advantage of everything available in the ‘lucid abnormality’ of London during World War Two. This interfeminist counter-narrative of the protagonist’s libidinal life and her failure to perform as a good mother and faithful wife deviates from the propaganda of the People’s War rendering Laski’s undermining of this ideal at a raw moment in the nation’s psyche contentious. The essay considers the representation of the actions of a young woman and questions whether she is deserving of admiration or censure for her refusal to conform to expectations of feminine conduct. It suggests that her progress is in many ways more eighteenth than mid-twentieth century in tone presenting a woman who begins by embracing her own pleasure but later engages in ‘infamous commerce’.
‘We Must Feed the Men’
Authors: Plain Gill
Published: May 2021

Gill Plain interrogates the trend towards domestic heteronormativity post World War Two in the light of the complex and profound disorientation of women’s post-war lives. She identifies a pervasive sense of personal, social and cultural loss, following the ‘smothering’ of wartime expectations, that often extended beyond the heterosexual matrix. Where ‘male’ plots reprogrammed masculine identity through purposeful activity beyond the home, the absence of plot in women’s fiction signals a lack of interest in the post-war rebuilding of the normative feminine psyche. The ‘resistant plotting’ of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s post-war trilogy, and its emphasis on the urgency of maternity, exhibits a turn toward the gothic. Male damage is offset by female guilt and the onset of a second childhood in her male characters, leading to a narrative of remasculinization. The largely absent figure of the child in post war narratives suggests a generation in mourning for its abruptly foreclosed childhood.
Men of the House
Authors: Hall Lucy
Published: May 2021

Lucy Hall examines how three novels by women published before, during and just after the Second World War reframe wider social concerns over gender and power through the prism of the domestic space. The essay suggests that the authors discussed embody a mid-century perspective that characterizes a number of interfeminist texts. The novels express cultural fears alongside wider themes of invasion, tyranny, and power as they expose how the domestic sphere becomes a contested space in which broad-ranging anxieties are played out. In the context of the 1930s and 1940s the essay speculates on the idea that a version of fascism lies beneath the surface of the three domestic narratives in which female characters are constrained and, to a greater or lesser extent, forcibly excluded not only from a male-dominated social order but also from their traditional role in the domestic space itself.
British Women Writing War
Authors: Cooper Katherine
Published: May 2021

Katherine Cooper reveals how contemporary assessments of gender, war and writing are shaped by preconceptions concerning experience and authority. Storm Jameson’s key war novels are at odds with conventional appraisals of war writing, which has contributed to her undeserved critical neglect. Her challenge to such prescribed gender boundaries has led to a perception of her work as ‘unwieldy’ and unrepresentative. Second and third-wave feminist studies, untrammelled by overriding concerns with gender, authority and experience, have reassessed women writers of the period. Nevertheless, Jameson’s critique of the systems of war through the male viewpoint lends her narratives a certain authority leading to their marginalization in those critical endeavours dedicated to the privileging and recovery of ‘female’ experience through women’s writing. Jameson’s exposé of the limits of insular nationalism has also hampered her full and proper reassessment within the canon of war writing.
Southern Irish Loyalists and Imperial Service
Authors: Gannon Seán William
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the enlistment of southern Irish loyalists into the British Colonial Service during the Irish Revolution and its aftermath. First, it assesses the revolution’s impact on their decisions to enlist, focussing on the way in which colonial service provided a convenient route out of Ireland for loyalists (Protestant and Catholic) unable or unwilling to remake their lives under the new dispensation. Secondly, it interrogates their loyalist credentials, arguing that while most were loyalist by birth or conviction, a significant minority had loyalty thrust upon them by circumstance. Predominately Catholics born outside the Irish Unionist tradition, they were unwillingly or unwittingly draped in the loyalist mantle despite their indifference or opposition to the loyalist cause. Finally, the chapter examines enlistment in the 1930/40s, when disproportionate Irish Protestant enlistment derived from a sociocultural communal identity steeped in imperial affinities, and a Colonial Service recruitment policy favouring Ireland’s former loyalist class.
Loyalists in a Garrison County: Kildare, 1912–1923
Authors: Cullen Seamus
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the experiences of loyalists in County Kildare during the Irish Revolution. Up to 1922, loyalists and Unionists in Kildare until 1922 enjoyed a level of security experienced in no other county outside Ulster due to the presence of British army barracks, which included the Curragh camp. Persistently anti-Home Rule, the loyalist and Unionist population – ably led by Lord Mayo and William Goulding – initially resisted concessions to nationalist aspirations. Developments such as the threat of partition resulted in a more compromising viewpoint regarding self-determination. However, fears expressed in 1920 by Lord Mayo that the community would be left to the ‘mercies of a Sinn Féin parliament’ came to fruition. While loyalists and Unionists in Kildare did not experience the same level of violence as loyalists in neighbouring counties, some high-profile incidents occurred during the Civil War. In post-independence Kildare, despite a decline in population, former unionists in the county continued to play a disproportionate role in large scale farming and the professions.
Historians of the Present
Authors: Foss Colin
Published: May 2021

The last chapter shows with how the historical became personal during the Siege. This chapter shows how Siege diarists imagined their amateur contribution to historiography. While professional historians of the Romantic tradition wrote from a personal perspective, they did not privilege experience and anonymity as guarantors of authenticity. The modest perspective of Siege diarists, however, formed the basis of their ability to tell what many of them called the true story of the Siege. Personal claims to historical fact placed anonymous individuals at the heart of history. These diarists wrote the collective history of their present moment, meaning that they can be considered at once historiography and historical documents.
Hong Kong’s Local: Generating and Degenerating Local Relations
Authors: Wu Helena Y.W.
Published: May 2021

Chapter 2 examines different manifestations of the local in the name of local consciousness, localism, local identity and local discourse. With reference to Mieke Bal’s “travelling concepts”, the chapter takes a critical look at both the generative and the degenerative moments experienced by Hong Kong’s local as it travels. Referring to the interactions between things, places and bodies in the making of a cultural icon, “local relations” as the key term of the book is coined in this chapter, revealing different degrees of connectivity and affinity between objects (as things and cultural signs), urban dwellers and their different realms of habitation and activities. The chapter furthers to demonstrate how the pluralistic local can be maintained through hybridizing the affinities shared between agencies such as things, places and bodies across different discourses, realities and fields.
Connecting with the Local, or Not: The Song Emperor’s Terrace
Authors: Wu Helena Y.W.
Published: May 2021

By taking the Song Emperor’s Terrace as the main object of analysis, Chapter 4 takes a step into history. The Terrace was once a popular cultural icon, for that it was valorized as a rock that stood witness to the royal visit paid to Hong Kong by the last two Song emperors at the end of the Song Dynasty in the thirteenth century—because of this event, the terrace became an oft-cited chanting object among the émigré-literati who fled China to Hong Kong during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To vent frustration at the loss of their home(land), nostalgia for ancient (Imperial) China and adherence to virtues such as loyalty and filial piety, the Terrace became a place of gathering for these literati in everyday life and an object that frequently appeared in their creative works, ranging from verses, calligraphy to paintings. With an eye to the special bond between the émigré-literati and the rock and David Der-wei Wang’s notion of “post-loyalism”, this chapter challenges the presumed collectivity of this literati community by unfolding their varying political aspirations, worldviews and connections to “Hong Kong” through the relationships they constructed with the rock.
Another Rock, Another Hong Kong Story: Lion Rock from Below and Above
Authors: Wu Helena Y.W.
Published: May 2021

Chapter 5 brings the book back to the present times. As an actual hill in Hong Kong named after the shape of its ridge, Lion Rock marks its appearance, both physical and textual, in different realities. Meanwhile, Lion Rock still possesses a high degree of cultural currency in today’s Hong Kong. As an emblematic icon since the 1970s, Lion Rock is understood by the local population as a synonym for Hong Kong’s unbeatable spirit, a site of collective memory and a symbol of Hong Kong at large, intersecting cultural representations with real-life scenarios. By tracing the pre-1997 and post-1997 trajectories of Lion Rock, the chapter discusses the experiences of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment in the making of the city’s own myth across generations.
Ethical Humanism and the Animal Question: Vercors’s You Shall Know Them (Les Animaux dénaturés)
Authors: Krell Jonathan F.
Published: May 2021

Vercors’s You Shall Know Them, published shortly after WWII, grapples with the question of how to define humans and how to differentiate them from animals. This “animal question” is closely linked to the “law of the strongest” and a long history of racism, imperialism, and capitalism, as exposed in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Archeologists, looking for fossils, discover a tribe of intelligent ape-like hominids in New Guinea, and no one can determine if they are human or another species of great apes. A businessman wants to castrate most males, intern them in camps, and use them as cheap labor in his wool mills, an ominous reference to the Nazi concentration camps that had so recently shaken Vercors’s humanist convictions, laying bare the bestiality of humans. After a long trial, it is decided that the hominids should be considered human, because, worshipping fire, they manifest a spirit of religion. Like Camus’s “Human Crisis” lecture of 1946, You Shall Know Them is a call for the restoration of human dignity, annihilated by the savagery of the war.
Deep Ecology Gone Wrong: J.-C. Rufin’s Globalia and Le Parfum d’Adam
Authors: Krell Jonathan F.
Published: May 2021

In Globalia and Le Parfum d’Adam J.-C. Rufin explores what could go wrong with the environmentalist movement, if it were co-opted by unwise or greedy leaders. Globalia is the sole country in a dystopian world governed according to the principles of deep ecology: vegetarianism, strict protection of forests and animals, and zero population growth. It is a sterile, climate-controlled world, covered by domes. “Non-zones” outside the domes are homes to mobsters, warring tribes, and resistants. They constitute a feared outside enemy which serves to unite most Globalians in support of their totalitarian government. This novel echoes Alexis de Tocqueville’s fear that a “tyranny of the majority” might someday rule the United States. Le Parfum d’Adam is a thriller about ecoterrorists who, obsessed by the deep ecology principle that world population must decrease, plot to contaminate the water system of a huge favela of Rio de Janeiro. They believe that poor people—too busy surviving to think about ecology—are destroying the planet.
Modulated Masculinities
Authors: Lane Jeremy F.
Published: May 2021

The middle-aged male worker, bridling at the demands of the contemporary workplace has become a recurrent character type in recent French feature films and novels. Often, this male protagonist’s problems at work are mirrored by his difficulties at home retaining his authority as a paterfamilias. These films and novels hence offer a proliferation of narratives featuring middle-aged men struggling to modulate their professional identities and masculine roles in accordance with the demands of the contemporary workplace. As such, these narratives may also reflect the centrality of the male breadwinner and the patriarchal nuclear family to the French social model and hence may represent a series of conservative responses to perceived crises of masculinity and the nuclear family. The chapter shows that this kind of conservative response is epitomised by the novels of Houellebecq, in which laments at the loss of patriarchy are articulated to a critique of contemporary forms of immaterial labour in a particularly insistent fashion. The chapter then turns to a selection of films and novels that offer more nuanced representations of middle-aged male workers and their difficulties with work and family.
Writing and the Preservation of Cultural Identity
Authors: Giacomo Persida Lazarević Di
Published: May 2021

This chapter present the polymath Zaharija Orfelin (1726-85)and his work in preserving the cultural identity of Serbs. This done though an examination of his writing manuals and in particular through the identification of the models that he used for his manuals. When in 1776 the Vienna Court asked for a book on penmanship to be used specifically in the Serbian and Vlach schools it was Orfelin who answered this need. He based his manual, Slavenskaja i valahijskaja kaligrafija (1778) on Joseph Felbiger’s first book on penmanship, a masterpiece in the field of Silesian pedagogy, Eigenschaften, Wissenschaften und Bezeigenrechtschaffener Schulleute (1768). Other calligraphies are also considered as the possible models for an earlier guide to penmanship by Orfelin aimed at teaching Serbian script, Novaja i osnovatelnaja slavenoserbska kaligrafija (1759).
‘The most beautiful hand’
Authors: Underhill Timothy
Published: May 2021

Shorthand is a significant area in early modern palaeography, with systems widespread in the eighteenth century. Some aspired to a place in the gamut of hands taught by writing-masters at a time when multi-script literacy was a necessary accomplishment for many. John Byrom’s ‘Universal English Short-hand’ was one of the most important prior to Isaac Pitman’s. In contrast with those of rivals such as James Weston, Byrom promoted it to potential learners and patrons as a way of writing ‘in the most … beautiful Manner’. In considering some of its manifold uses by his pupils –effectively a scribal community before its publication in 1767 – this chapter focuses on Byrom’s concern for how shorthand looked on the page. This arose from his near lifelong ambition to print in shorthand – a project which at one stage involved William Caslon – and the chapter sketches some reasons why this ambition was thwarted.
Private Pleasures and Portable Presses
Authors: Archer-Parré Caroline
Published: May 2021

In the eighteenth century, non-indentured individuals began to infiltrate the typographic profession and to print for pleasure and sometimes for profit. In doing so they blurred the demarcations between the professional and the layman and, in some instances, challenged the Master Printer at his own game. This chapter considers how printing, one of the most highly skilled, closely policed and most threatening of all the trades became, during the eighteenth century, a craft widely pursued by amateurs. It considers the changing complexion of the lay printer; reflects on what they produced, their motivations for so doing, and the intellectual and technological environment that enabled the emergence of the amateur printer at this time.
Identity, Enigma, Assemblage
Authors: Mugglestone Lynda
Published: May 2021

The Vocabulary, or Pocket Dictionary (1766) printed by John Baskerville has long remained a puzzle as to authorship and intent. An avowedly ‘small performance’, it is nevertheless strikingly distinctive in a range of ways. This chapter traces its intellectual context in ways which confirm Baskerville’s status as lexicographer as well as printer. Salient, too, is its stance on aspects of faith, morality, and salvation in forms closely aligned with Baskerville’s own thinking. Telling absences appear in terms of the expected ordering and inclusion of headwords, as well as in the attendant framing of definitions. Books, Johnson stressed, ‘have always a secret influence on the understanding’ whereby ideas ‘often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them’. The ‘secret influence’ of the Vocabulary is, this chapter argues, a critical aspect of its meaning, and the knowledge that readers might gain.
Marigolds Not Manufacturing
Authors: Mitchell Elaine
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers the printed plant catalogues of eighteenth-century Birmingham nurseryman, John Brunton. More than lists of plants for the horticulturally acquisitive, their pages reflect the exploration, colonisation and commercialisation that brought a flood of new plants into Britain from around the world. Approached as cultural and material objects, the catalogues draw attention to the fruitful connection to be made between garden history and printing history and culture. This exploration illuminates new aspects of Birmingham’s society and culture in the eighteenth century that challenge our perception of a town more readily noted for its manufacturing than its marigolds.
Print Culture and Distribution
Authors: Pellizzari Peter
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses how the essays that made up the Federalist Papers were distributed and the extent of their circulation in 1787–8. It examines the contingent nature of early American transportation infrastructure within the context of print circulation. Because of the many hazards in transporting newspapers, Publius—the pseudonym under which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay published their essays—was not a continentwide spokesman for the entirety of the Federalist cause during the ratification debates, but rather a local phenomenon, whose provincial life was limited by countless contingencies. By examining the circulation of the Federalist Papers, this chapter helps clarify the meaning of the term ‘print culture’ and underscores the importance of material culture to the history of ideas.
Introduction
Authors: Hiddleston Jane , Lyamlahy Khalid
Published: May 2021

In the opening lines of his late autobiographical work, Le Scribe et son ombre, Khatibi makes what can be considered to be a wholehearted declaration of love and commitment to his homeland:

Je vis et travaille au Maroc. Ce pays est de force vive. Je lui dois ma naissance, mon nom, mon identité initiale. Comment pourrais-je ne pas l’aimer avec bienveillance! Une bienveillance critique et vigilante. Une patrie n’est pas seulement le lieu de la venue au monde, mais un choix personnel qui fortifie le sentiment d’appartenance....
Khatibi and Derrida
Authors: Combe Dominique
Published: May 2021

In his article “Décolonisation de la sociologie” (Decolonizing sociology), published as early as 1974 and later reproduced in Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi draws on Derrida to relate the necessary decolonization of thought to deconstruction, against logocentrism and ethnocentrism. A few years before the publication of Said’s Orientalism in 1979, Khatibi calls to “décentrer en nous le savoir occidental” (decenter in ourselves Western knowledge), and “nous décentrer par rapport à ce centre, à cette origine que se donne l’Occident” (decenter ourselves from this centre, this origin that is the West). The dialogue between Khatibi and Derrida would continue over time, from one article or a book to another, since the collective volume Du bilinguisme in 1985 to “Point de non-retour” (Point of no-return) in the Colloquium of Cerisy in 1992, and to “Variations sur l’amitié” (Variations on friendship) in Cahier de l’Herne in 2004, as well as Jacques Derrida en effet in 2007. This article sets out to read Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (1996) in the context of this close dialogue between Khatibi and Derrida on language(s).
Absent the Archive
Authors: Brozgal Lia
Published: May 2021

Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris: The October 17, 1961 Anarchive is the first cultural history devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters. Covered up by the state and hidden from history, the events of October 17 have nonetheless never been fully erased. Indeed, as early as 1962, stories about the massacre began to find their way their way into novels, poetry, songs, film, visual art, and performance. This book is about these stories, the way they have been told, and their function as both documentary and aesthetic objects. Identified here for the first time as a corpus—an anarchive—the works in question produce knowledge about October 17 by narrativizing and contextualizing the massacre, registering its existence, its scale, and its erasure, while also providing access to the subjective experiences of violence and trauma. Cultural Traces of a Massacre is invested in exploring how literature and culture may “do history” differently by complicating it, whether by functioning as first responders and persistent witnesses; reverberating against reality but also speculating on what might have been; activating networks of signs and meaning; or by showing us things that otherwise cannot be seen. This book provokes important questions about the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of representation.
Excavating the Anarchive
Authors: Brozgal Lia
Published: May 2021

Chapter 1 forms the essential foundation of the book, insofar as it names, describes, and thematises the contents of the anarchive—the cultural productions that have represented, directly or obliquely, the stories of October 17. While anarchive is presented in 3 “waves”--the original scene (1961-1963); the return to the scene (1983-1999); and the post-Papon anarchive (1999-)—the chapter nonetheless seeks to tease out the limits of periodization, calling attention to continuities over time. Chapter 1 also looks at trends and problems within the anarchive, investigating, in particular: the “turn,” in the 3rd wave, to visual representation and performance; debates about demands for historical accuracy and truth in fiction; and the anarchive’s relationship to scholarship on cultural production and memory. This analysis is also infused with a concern for epi-phenomenal and meta-textual matters, how issues of circulation, translation, marketing, authorial status, genre, and medium bear upon interpretation.
The Entangled Stories of October 17, Vichy, the Jews, and the Holocaust
Authors: Brozgal Lia
Published: May 2021

In a significant number of works about October 17, roles for Jews, the Vichy regime, and the Holocaust are articulated or imagined, pointing up networks of association that may be historical, apocryphal, real, or romanced. Chapter 6 takes up the question of whether Vichy and October 17 can or should be compared. Beginning a discussion of scholarship that has engaged this question, and with reflections on how Henry Rousso’s “Vichy syndrome” can be mapped onto the October 17 context, this chapter identifies a comparative discourse present in materials collected in the polices archives. After a survey of archival contents and a longer analysis of one particular case, the chapter turns its attention to the anarchive, not to unravel, but rather to observe the cultural entanglements of October 17, Vichy, Jews, and the Holocaust. In analysing works of theatre, film, novels, and young adult literature, chapter 6 speculates about why representations of a massacre of Algerians remain yoked to images and tropes of WWII, while also investigating how such representations function within their discrete literary worlds, and how we might speculate about the payoffs and pitfalls of such entanglements.
Epilogue
Authors: Brozgal Lia
Published: May 2021

The epilogue reflects on the ways in which the October 17 massacre continues to be rendered invisible in public discourse, while also acknowledging key evolutions in the representation of knowledge about the event. Deliberately open-ended, this final chapter of the book also considers the fate of the anarchive, particularly with respect to the now-declassified police archives, to changing attitudes about national memory, and to the demands of the digital world.
A Comparative Perspective: The Problem of Monarchical Authority in National Historiography in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Germany
Authors: Nagle Shane
Published: May 2021

This chapter proposes a comparative study of how ideas of monarchical rule and authority were conceptualised in historical narratives produced by nationalist writers in Ireland and Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Irish and German nationalists, the historical reality of monarchical authority was not always compatible with the historical narratives they wished to articulate; this form of authority needed both to be nationalised and in certain circumstances ‘written out’ of the national(ist) past as something illegitimate or contrary to the authentic national community. In broad terms, the engagement with monarchical authority in the Irish past among nationalists contributed to a political culture that was anti-monarchical even if not philosophically republican, just as in Germany it created within nationalism on the Right (centrist or authoritarian) a political culture that was at best sceptical of and at worst hostile to republicanism, and amenable to the rule of a dictator.
Tracing the Origin of Flora Tristan Studies
Authors: Cross Máire Fedelma
Published: May 2021

Chapter 1 begins with the reasons for the dispersal and obscurity of Flora Tristan papers and their subsequent retrieval in the Puech archives in Castres. The interplay of family and institutional recovery of the past in a regional context of France in the 1980s contrasts with the national and international evolution of history. Such archives elucidate the work of lesser-known actors both in gender and academic terms exploited most effectively by asserting more multidimensional and diverse interpretations than has been the case either in biographical studies or in twentieth-century scholarship on feminism and socialism. The research journey through Flora Tristan and Puech papers occurred over twenty years during which time archive retrieval methods evolved considerably and was as timely as becoming familiar with the Tristan-Puech-Castres context.
The Curious Circumstances of Flora Tristan’s Death
Authors: Cross Máire Fedelma
Published: May 2021

How Jules Puech obtained the papers of Flora Tristan that were on her person when she died in November 1844 in Bordeaux is vital to show the intergenerational transmission of knowledge of ideas and papers among activists that has shaped the construction of this double biography. Until the 1980s, Puech’s papers were kept by his descendants in the family home in Borieblanque, unlike those of Flora Tristan which were removed immediately after her death to Lyon and beyond. Borieblanque held vital clues about the custodial role of Eleonore Blanc, the spiritual daughter who inherited Flora Tristan’s papers. Puech’s account to his family of where Flora Tristan fitted into his busy schedule is invaluable as we read of his response to the opening opportunities from journal editors asking for further publications on Flora Tristan and of the complex network of his acquaintances in activist and university circles that led him to find the Blanc family and their activist connections in the republican and socialist circles of the late nineteenth century.
Conclusion
Authors: Cross Máire Fedelma
Published: May 2021

On 18 June 1925, Marie-Louise Bouglé addressed a letter to the publisher Marcel Rivière:

Monsieur Rivière je ne saurai trop loué [sic] l’auteur et l’éditeur du merveilleux ouvrage sur Flora Tristan. Si, comme je le pense, vous avez l’occasion de voir M. Puech, voudriez-vous lui faire connaître ma bibliothèque et lui dire que sa visite me ferait beaucoup plaisir. Je me trouve avoir l’édition populaire « Promenades dans Londres » de Flora Tristan annoncé comme n’étant pas à la Bibliothèque Nationale et la 3e édition de « l’Union ouvrière ». Ceci ne l’intéresse naturellement plus mais peut lui faire voir que j’ai rassemblé là des documents intéressants. Je serai en vacances à partir du 24 juillet. J’en profiterai donc pour passer chez vous dans la journée et voir si vous avez quelques ouvrages féministes en réserve et pourrait [...