bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Who Speaks for Welsh Children? Early Welsh Children’s Periodicals
Authors: Rosser Siwan M.
Published: January 2025

When the first Welsh-language children’s periodical was launched in 1823, children in Wales had very few books that they could call their own. The Welsh popular press was still very much in its infancy, but a radical peripatetic schooling system and a wave of religious revival, inspired a new interest in childhood and a new concern for children. The Addysgydd (‘Educator’) aimed to create a reading culture and community that would sustain the young members of the church. It was a prescriptive literature, an attempt to imprint particular behaviours and habits. But it was also a creative literature, engaging the reader with visual, biblical, and contemporary manifestations of the child. Its marginal position as a Welsh-language children’s publication, on the fringes of an emerging British state ideology, opened a new space to claim for Welsh children their own distinct identity. This chapter explores the space created by the Addysgydd and subsequent Welsh periodicals for children not only to discuss childhood but to position the child both as linguistically distinct from England, and inextricably tied to the culture and politics of Britain and empire.
Conservationists or Conquerors? Children, Nature, and the Environment in the Juvenile Companion and Sunday School Hive (1845–1888)
Authors: Sue Chen Shih-Wen
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on religion and natural history in The Juvenile Companion and Sunday School Hive (1845-1888), a children’s periodical published in London by the United Methodist Free Churches. Although the periodical contains Bible stories, reports from missionaries, and other religious content, it also features a substantial number of articles on science. The chapter argues that despite some inconsistences in the positioning of children in relation to nature, the Juvenile Companion and Sunday School Hive is representative of mid-Victorian religious children’s periodicals in its promotion of natural theology. While some articles encouraged children to be advocates for the environment, others promoted the idea of man’s superiority over creatures. Regardless of the different stances, the periodical overwhelmingly promoted the study of natural history as a means for children to strengthen their faith in God.
‘What Becomes of the Colored Girl?’: Shifts in the Culture of Black Girlhood within the Brownies’ Book
Authors: Awanjo Amanda
Published: January 2025

Looking through the lens of W. E. B Du Bois’ complex systems of racial uplift and Black aesthetic and rhetorical creation, the space of the Brownies’ Book is a generative one for Black childhood and the futures Du Boisian Futurity sought to cement. Through a careful consideration of Black girlhood as a stand-alone community, this chapter explores how Du Bois’ the Brownies’ Book makes room for Black girls to reimagine themselves through their correspondence to the periodical. It shows how the children’s periodical uses the voices of the girls to counter dehumanising and patronising nineteenth-century narratives crafted during and in the afterlives of enslavement. In addition to focusing on the ways that the Brownies’ Book offered Black girls space to write counter narratives to cultural understandings of Black girlhood, this chapter also explores how Black girl visual culture created in the magazine aligns with a Black feminist literary history wherein Black girls are able to present life narratives in which their stories and points of view are centred.
J. M. Coetzee's Politics of Life and Late Modernism in the Contemporary Novel
Authors: Farrant Marc
Published: January 2025

Surveying the full breadth of J. M. Coetzee’s career as both academic and novelist, this book argues for the necessity of rethinking his profound indebtedness to literary modernism in terms of a politics of life. Isolating a particular strain of late modernism, epitomised by Kafka and Beckett, Farrant claims that Coetzee’s writings consistently demonstrate an agonistic engagement with the concept of life. This literary agonism involves an entanglement of politics and ethics which supersedes the singular theoretical frameworks often applied to Coetzee, such as postcolonialism, posthumanism and animal studies. Running throughout Coetzee’s engagement with questions of modernity and colonialism, storytelling and life writing, human and non-human life, religion and post-Enlightenment subjectivity, a politics of life emerges that suggests a new literary cosmopolitanism for the twenty-first century, one rooted in a powerful sense of how finitude and contingency are fundamental to the way we live together.
Introduction: The Politics of Life in J. M. Coetzee
Authors: Farrant Marc
Published: January 2025

This theoretical introduction positions Coetzee’s relation to late modernism, notably with regard to the writings of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka. The introduction also elaborates on the politics of late-modernism in relation to life and the ‘material turn’ in contemporary scholarship. What is ultimately at stake in Coetzee’s late modernist account and depiction of life is a thinking of the co-implication of ethics and politics; a thinking that, this study argues, has not been adequately theorised in either the newer materialist and historicist readings of Coetzee, nor in the prior scholarship of the ‘ethical turn’ in Coetzee Studies.
1644–1660: Armenia and Azerbaijan
Authors: Güngörürler Selim
Published: January 2025

Chapter 3 covers the period between 1644 and 1660, with a focus on the strategic regions of Armenian highlands and Azerbaijan, where the fragile peace between the Ottomans and Safavids was regularly tested. The Ottomans strengthened their eastern frontier by creating military commands and imperial armies in Erzurum and Van, while managing diplomatic tensions with the Safavids. At the same time, local conflicts in these borderlands, often exacerbated by external actors like the Republic of Venice, complicated relations. The Ottomans and Safavids navigated these challenges through diplomatic missions and military actions, maintaining a balance of power despite ongoing tensions. This chapter underscores the importance of diplomacy in addressing regional conflicts while managing broader geopolitical issues.
Mapping the ‘Ungeographic’ in Jesmyn Ward’s Where the Line Bleeds
Authors: Smith Beth Beatrice
Published: January 2025

This chapter places Where the Line Bleeds and Black studies into critical conversation with geography, drawing on the work of theorists such as Kathryn McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Kathryn Yusoff, and Herman Beavers. It argues that Where the Line Bleeds presents the South as reflective of the human body, eroded and reshaped by time and by the natural elements of the environment. This chapter explores the depiction of several characters who call Bois Sauvage home and make consequential decision there which lead to greater opportunity and/or awareness. Ward’s novel suggests hope for the future by presenting alternative ways to survive in the world and the reader sees how both natural and man-made environments serve as destructive forces as well as healing spaces. It is where these elements cross—where the line bleeds—that Ward focuses her readers' attention. Boundaries are an integral part of the novel and the ways boundaries alter as humans do is a key consideration of this chapter. The passage of time and the use of creativity, such as mythmaking and imagination, appear to disrupt historical and familiar narratives and redraw the lines of communication and community, ultimately recognizing alternative scenarios for the future.
‘Something like praying’: Syncretic Spirituality and Racial Justice in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
Authors: Arnold Lucy
Published: January 2025

This chapter reads Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing in relation to African-American spiritual traditions including Hoodoo, and Haitian and Louisiana Vodou. It argues that it is these systems of belief and the practices associated with them, including root work and medicine, conjuration, and the invocation of loas and other deities, which structure the metaphysical landscape of the novel. It maps Ward’s depiction of the practices, language and iconography of Hoodoo, and Haitian and Louisiana Vodou, a deployment that is neither a straightforward documentation, nor uninterested in historico-social specificity. This strategy constitutes an effort to produce a new ontology specifically capable both of identifying the ways violently oppressive racial ideologies impose ‘creaturely’ existences on marginalised subjects and of accommodating modes of knowing and being in the world (child-like modes, animal modes) potentially capable of dismantling such ideologies. In so doing, it places Ward’s literary strategy in conversation with wider contemporary trends in the intersections between political activism and African-American spirituality.
Reclaiming the Ghosts of Trauma’s Past: Witnessing and Testimony as Healing in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
Authors: Lewis Apryl
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) in the context of trauma studies. It argues that Ward’s novel depicts an aggregation of personal, collective, and generational traumas, occurring at metaphorical, ghostly, and unconscious levels. Ward’s novel shows just how pervasive generational trauma can be within one family and, by extension, within the Black community. This chapter analyses Ward’s novel to explore testimony and witnessing, as well as historical and recurring traumatic experiences such as slavery, police brutality, and wrongful imprisonment. It argues that examining the representation of overlaps in traumatic experiences between Black men, women, and children can advance the study of African American literary trauma studies, as well as demonstrate how other forms of trauma such as racism and incarceration stem from white supremacy. Drawing on concepts of witnessing and testimony theorized in Felman and Laub’s Testimony (1992) it seeks to bridge the gap between Eurocentric trauma theories and more inclusive and agile formations. Given the intersectional impacts of trauma in society, African American literature foregrounds portrayals of traumatic experience from marginalised communities. Ward’s depictions of trauma, filtered through a mother, her child, and a ghost, provide potent angles for unraveling such traumatic experiences.
Heroism in the Middle in Sophocles’ Philoctetes
Authors: Austin Emily
Published: January 2025

The Sophoclean Philoctetes articulates a unique and personal type of heroism. Abandoned for years on an island, he suffers isolation and sickness, with no possibility of heroic action. Yet he construes his endurance in active terms: his survival is a heroic achievement, surpassing the deeds of the Greek generals at Troy. This essay uses the category of the Greek ‘middle voice’ to articulate Philoctetes’ unique understanding of his heroism. Despite his enormous sufferings and inhibited actions, Philoctetes is not simply a sufferer. In enduring what he has endured, Philoctetes achieves a form of excellence. This excellence through endurance is something in between doing and experiencing; we could call it ‘heroism in the middle.’
The Whetstone of Love: Helen’s Blemished Beauty
Authors: Dixon Dustin W.
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the unorthodox tradition of depicting Helen, who is traditionally a paragon of perfect beauty, with physical imperfections. This unusual version of Helen appears across several works of ancient literature, including Euripides’ tragedy Helen, Cratinus’s fragmentary comedies Dionysalexandros and Nemesis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, as well as in ancient vase-painting. Her appearance in these works is inconsistent. At times she is depicted with a small facial scar, or with a more prominent wound, or as wrinkled in old age or even as what the ancients would categorize as grotesque. Tracing this tradition in the context of ancient ideas about beauty and ugliness, this chapter argues that, whatever form her imperfections take, her blemished beauty manifests the horrors of the Trojan War.
‘Mirth’ and ‘Fun’: The Comic Annual and the New Graphic Humour of the 1830s
Authors: Maidment Brian
Published: January 2025

The central concern of this chapter is a consideration of the variety of ways in which comic annuals– a small, interconnected and highly visible group of publications from the 1830s– began self-consciously to debate, develop and enact the modes of graphic humour available within late Regency print culture. A further interest is the extent to which such re-conceptualisations of humour were gendered in order to accommodate women within the marketplace for graphic humour. This chapter further explores the redefinition of graphic humour as “fun” rather than the more literary “mirth” that characterized the Regency period. Like literary annuals, comic annuals were richly illustrated and were designed to appeal, in part, to a female readership; however, instead of incorporating steel-cut engravings, they employed wood-cut illustration to achieve humorous effects– a method that would soon dominate Victorian comic illustration. This chapter highlights the self-consciousness of the comic annual genre through an analysis of a mock-heroic poem, The Battle of the “Annuals” (1835), and through analysis of the frontispieces to The Comic Offering.
Invincible Brothers: The Pen and the Press in The Compositors’ Chronicle , 1840–43
Authors: Baillet Françoise
Published: January 2025

The Compositors’ Chronicle (1840–43) was a trade publication launched in September 1840 as a monthly and later continued as the Printer (1843–45). Produced by the London Union of Compositors and printed by R. Thompson, office keeper of the organisation’s headquarters in Fleet Street, it pledged to protect its readers from “misconduct and tyranny” on the part of those invested with authority. At a time when many print workers and artisans remained outside the pale of British citizenship, Thompson’s journal provided them with a space for political and social debate as well as literary creation. This chapter investigates the Chronicle as a collaborative project in which literary creation–letters, poetry, essays and short stories– supported the development of a professional trade identity through a common and shared language. The Chronicle also included a correspondence column that encouraged reader engagement along with contents designed to provide instruction and entertainment for artisan workers and their families. In doing so, it reinforced the respectability of workers in the compositing trade, underscoring their domestic virtues, respectability and literary attainments.
The Literary Public Sphere in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day
Authors: Dikova Stanislava
Published: January 2025

The concept of the ‘public sphere’, coined by Jürgen Habermas, interestingly problematises the relationship between the literary and the political. For him, the emergence of the novel, the rise of political journalism, and the professionalisation of the critic transformed print communication from an information-sharing tool into a formidable structural force that facilitated debate and shaped social opinion for the bourgeoisie. The early twentieth-century advance of industrial capitalism, however, coupled with the weakening hold of liberal ideas and increased demands for democratising civic relations necessitated some further changes. This chapter reads Woolf’s novel as an experiment in creating a literary public sphere that responds to these pressures by turning its characters’ lives, in all their romantic, familial, professional, and public settings, into marketplaces of exchange.
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her.
Authors: Wilson Kabe
Published: January 2025

'work cut out' comprises a list of every occupation noted in Mrs Dalloway in order of their occurrence, from the opening sentences with Lucy (maid) and Rumpelmayer's men (coming to remove the door in advance of Clarissa's party), to Sir William Bradshaw (the psychiatrist who ultimately brings news of Septimus' death to the guests). As Clarissa moves through her day and encounters or muses upon different types of people identified through their occupation, Woolf creates a demographic map of London in that era that reveals the stratification of British society, as it appears from the perspectives of the novel's central characters. In order to bring the social structures of British interwar capitalism into sharper focus, all Clarissa's party guests are italicised in the list. Thus, as we move through the text in anticipation of the party we are gradually able to discern the shape of the classed society that Woolf depicted in the work.
Staging Collective Action for an Anthropocene Audience in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts
Authors: Sultzbach Kelly
Published: January 2025

Between the Acts (1941) stages important questions about the power of collective action and its limits. The topics the novel thematises are not only pertinent to the era of existential crisis Woolf was writing in between two world wars but also resonate with Western Anthropocene readers grappling with contemporary climate questions and the threat of societal collapse. Crucially, it meditates on the role of art in provoking self-awareness around such topics. Deep time is juxtaposed with potential extinction events, solastalgic reveries frame questions of what might be lost, and a chorus of dialogue from cows, swallows, and trees voice more-than-human perspectives. At the same time, the novel engages with many of the concerns and difficulties that face those wishing to consider collective action in the face of planetary change. Woolf’s struggle with her own positionality as a writer might resonate for a contemporary Anthropocene reader who remains complicit in capitalist structures that impede climate mitigation. Examining how Woolf theorises and presents these ecological and social tensions, this chapter argues that we find in Between the Acts an alternative form of what ‘collective action’ can be—something akin to thinking like the mycelium of tree roots through fertile mud and stones, change rising with the fungal surprise of mushrooms towards an uncertain future.
Conclusion: The Digital Outside
Authors: Deane-Freeman Timothy
Published: January 2025

The conclusion recapitulates the account given throughout the book. Deleuze takes up the concept of the outside from Blanchot and Foucault, putting it to work in the context of thought, images and cinema. However the unique noetic potentials of cinema are menaced by the emergence of “information,” which risks taking over the image as an instrument of communication. In this context, the book advanced a new conception of the outside, rooted in the idea of noise, itself taken from information theory. In its “failure to communicate,” noise constitutes a creative potential immanent to the digital image, and no longer tied exclusively to cinema’s capacities for framing. The conclusion reiterates these ideas, making the case for the ongoing utility of Deleuze’s philosophy in an analysis of digital media.
Living in Feminism: Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford
Authors: Roberts Luke
Published: January 2025

This chapter begins by considering the position of feminist poetry in relation to what Clare Hemmings has termed ‘the political grammar of feminist theory’. It goes on to discuss some of the literary critical distinctions made on behalf of experimental and avant-garde poetry by women in the 1970s. While arguing for the central importance of Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford, this chapter reads across several different affiliations and contexts related to Women’s Liberation in Britain. At the centre of the chapter is an extended reading of Riley’s ‘A note on sex and the reclaiming of language’, and an examination of the poem’s allegorical deployment of racial figures. The chapter goes on to discuss Mulford’s poetics of citation, suggesting that it parallels a political commitment to coalition building. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the bibliographic gaps and absences of writing by women of colour in post-war Britain, and presents brief readings of a collaboration by Jayaben Desai and Peggy Seeger and a poem by the Jamaican Communist Elean Thomas.
The soundscape
Authors: Pearce Michael
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines the ways in which the North East soundscape is represented on RTG. It begins with some general remarks on the orthographic creativity to be found on the site before focussing on the representation of vowels, consonants, connected speech processes and suprasegmental features. While respelling is the most obvious way in which information about accent is conveyed, posters often comment on local sounds of speech, so the chapter also considers metalinguistic commentary about this aspect of variation.
Reconciliations
Authors: Ouaknine-Yekutieli Orit
Published: January 2025

After a long period, during which al-Glaoui’s story was reduced to a single-dimensional account, more complex representations of him began to surface toward the end of the 1990s, first in the Moroccan diaspora and then in Morocco itself. These shifts in sentiment, connected with the transition of power from Hassan II to Mohamed VI, and in parallel with occurrences such as the struggle for Amazigh rights, set the backdrop for the publication of the main book discussed in this chapter, Abdessadeq Glaoui’s, Le ralliement; Le Glaoui, mon père (“The Rallying: The Glaoui, My Father”). Abdessadeq (1924 - 2017), al-Glaoui’s son, published his account of his father’s life story, attempting to remove the enduring label of traitor appended to the Pasha. This book aligns with a surge of contemporary publications written by the descendants of past Moroccan local leaders (qa’ids), which collectively have triggered an expansive public debate about the legacy of al-Glaoui and his fellow tribal leaders. Simultaneously, Thami al-Glaoui’s story has attained new prominence in the wake of the increased reach and influence of social media, with amateur documentaries, debates, and blogs being key components of this trend. The chapter documents and analyses these interventions, emphasizing the extent to which these new formats have enhanced accessibility to history with a populist orientation, and their role in the renewed relevance of al-Glaoui’s story.
Race and Intelligence: African-Americans and the Secret Life
Authors: Griffin Martin
Published: January 2025

Chapter examines espionage fiction that has a central focus on African-American political identity and the experience of being Black in America. From early short stories by Richard Wright to novels by Sam E. Greenlee and John A. Williams, the racial structure of America makes daily life similar to being on a covert mission behind enemy lines, demanding secrecy and dissembling. The threat of the Black revolutionary survives to disrupt narratives of consensus, even in contemporary dramas such as Homeland.
The Soldier’s Song: Britain’s Irish War in Gerald Seymour’s Trilogy
Authors: Griffin Martin
Published: January 2025

Chapter reads Gerald Seymour’s trilogy of novels, Harry’s Game, Field of Blood, and The Journeyman Tailor, set in Northern Ireland during the so-called ‘Troubles’ from the 1970s to the 1990s as exploring the uncomfortable reality of armed conflict within the United Kingdom itself. Protagonists of these novels are English characters plunged into covert operations and asymmetric warfare in a place that is both foreign and looks like home. Nationality becomes blurry and, because of this reality, the intelligence war in Northern Ireland is merciless and can be fatal.
Reprint Poems in Francisco P. Ramírez’s El Clamor Público
Authors: Bonifacio Ayendy
Published: January 2025

This chapter shifts from the East to the West coast, and from English to Spanish, recovering the transamerican Spanish-language poems in Francisco P. Ramírez’s El Clamor Público (1855-1859), the first Hispanophone newspaper published in California after the U.S.-Mexico War. In this chapter, a poetics of paratextuality signifies Ramírez’s own editorial practice of altering reprint poems culled from periodicals, books, and anthologies from across the Hispanophone world and reprinted in Southern California. By critically engaging Ramírez’s reprint practices, isolating El Clamor Publico's poems, mapping their potential citational provenance and/or place of publication, and comparing reproductions to originals, the chapter shows how Ramírez’s poetics of paratextuality shaped authorship and genre in El Clamor Público. El Clamor Público is an important example of the print-culture norm of editing reprint poems to centralize the reading public’s interests and experiences. Ramírez deliberately changes titles, bylines, and geographical references, editing cultural signifiers to Spanish and Latin American. As a result, he unbinds many reprint poems from the nation-making artifact of the author, book, and anthology, warping and, in some cases, erasing popular poetry genres like satire and the dedication. Ramírez’s editorial practice, the chapter argues, made his reprint poems more understandable to, and relevant for, a Californio audience, while at the same time facilitating an intellectual and cultural sense of belonging that resists the reproduction of knowledge and aesthetics from a non-Californio episteme. This chapter (and chapter 5) contributes to the book’s reading of anglophone and Hispanophone newspaper poems as related acts of public discourse.
Reimagining Israel and Palestine in Contemporary British and German Culture
Authors: Hesse Isabelle
Published: January 2025

The book identifies an important relational turn in British and German literature, TV drama, and film published and produced since the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). This turn manifests itself on two levels: one, in representing Israeli and Palestinian histories and narratives as connected rather than separate, and two, by emphasising the links between the current situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the roles that the United Kingdom and Germany have played historically, and continue to play, in the region. This book shows how Israel and Palestine are used as geopolitical and imaginary spaces to discuss social and political concerns in the United Kingdom and in Germany. Isabelle Hesse argues that this relational turn constitutes a significant shift in representations of Israel and Palestine in British and German culture as these depictions move beyond an engagement with the Holocaust and Jewish suffering at the expense of Palestinian suffering and indicate a willingness to represent and acknowledge British and German involvement in Israeli and Palestinian politics.
Libidinal Relationality: Humour, the Holocaust and Palestine/Israel in German Culture
Authors: Hesse Isabelle
Published: January 2025

The works discussed in the third chapter, entitled ‘Libidinal Relationality: Humour, the Holocaust and Palestine/Israel in German Culture’, are Theresa Bäuerlein’s Das war der gute Teil des Tages (That was the Good Part of the Day, 2008) and Markus Flohr’s Wo samstags immer Sonntag ist (Where Saturday is Always Sunday, 2011). They consider the idea of a rapprochement between Germany and Israel, and reflect on Germany’s ‘special’ relationship with Israel and the ways in which this has precluded a productive engagement with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. Hesse shows that the trope of the libidinal relation between German and Israeli Jewish characters, together with the use of humour, allows Bäuerlein and Flohr to create a framework for critical engagement with the connections between Germany and Israel. However, this chapter also draws attention to the limitations of these relations through the failure of the libidinal relation between a German and an Israeli Jewish character in Flohr’s book, and the inability to critically engage with Israel’s occupation of Palestine in Bäuerlein’s novel.
Orientalism and the Cold War
Authors: Rhee Suk Koo
Published: January 2025

The third chapter discusses Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student in terms of the Cold War and American Orientalism. The novel has been noted by several critics for its condemnation of the South Korean political system and the US-led Cold War waged on the Korean peninsula in the wake of national liberation. Yet, this chapter directs attention to moments when Choi significantly fails to sustain a critical acumen in diagnosing the political situation of southern Korea during the first few years of the postliberation era. This lapse causes the author to gloss over a crucial, postcolonial dimension to the peasant riots and workers’ strife of the time. By attributing the political instability of the period to communist agitation rather than to the decolonising aspirations of the Korean people, the author, this chapter maintains, ends up aligning herself with the anti-communist episteme of the Cold War. This chapter concludes with an analysis of the political implications of the author’s portrayal of Japan Town in Chicago. Contrary to claims that Choi’s depiction of the ethnic enclave upholds a new vision of inter-Asian solidarity, this chapter asserts that the novelistic rendering of Japan Town represents a displaced form of American Orientalism.
Mythical Geographies: Race, Nationalism and Shakespeare’s Pronunciation
Authors: Klippenstein Chris
Published: January 2025

Far from being exclusively a question of linguistics, pronunciation offers a crucial lens through which to negotiate both the performance legacies of Shakespeare, and the reproduction of institutional hegemonies over classical texts more broadly. Situated at the intersection of performance and appropriation, the two phenomena at the core of this paper — the legend of an Appalachian Shakespearean accent, and the linguistic reconstruction practice known as Original Pronunciation — use pronunciation as a means of claiming privileged identification between Shakespeare and contemporary members of certain intersectional backgrounds. The paper explores the urgent social, racial, and nationalist paradigms that are propagated alongside these visions of Shakespeare’s pronunciation. The folk legend of Appalachian Shakespeare — that is, the claim that Appalachia’s rurality has preserved Shakespeare’s own accent, unchanged for hundreds of years — produces a rural, lower-class vision of Shakespeare with a profoundly white nationalist philosophy. In contrast, OP is a scholarly linguistic reconstruction that emerges from Britain, spearheaded by team David Crystal and Ben Crystal, and is only accessible to an educationally and geographically elite theatrical community. This paper complicates the claim that OP democratises Shakespeare through pronunciation, instead making the messy proposition that OP upholds British imperial legacies even as it may indeed encourage a wider range of audiences to identify with Shakespeare in performance.
Transition to a Reconstruction of The Ages of the World : Metaphysics and the Theory of Predication
Authors: Hogrebe Wolfram
Published: January 2025

The chapter conceives a method of metaphysics according to the standards of contemporary philosophy. The metaphysics that has driven philosophy of language to avoid or embrace it holds that the structure of a singular judgment (Fa) models the structure of the world, such that propositions, combining sense and understanding, form an “epistemic metabolism of world and mind”. Exploring the conditions of predication via Goodman, Quine, and Wittgenstein, the chapter then follows The Ages’ turn to predication’s relation to autopoietic structures. Further, as in Schelling’s philosophy of nature and his critical engagement with Kant’s ‘ideal of pure reason’, the constructivism familiar from e.g. Carnap and Wittgenstein is embraced as a function not just of predicators but of any world supporting it.
Afterword
Authors: Hogrebe Wolfram
Published: January 2025

“The fascination issuing from Schelling’s metaphysics is due to the circumstance that his excavating thought reaches strata in which beings are no longer rooted, but all roots decompose”: Hogrebe’s final chapter addresses the “abyss for reason” that is the unavoidable risk of a philosophical approach to the meaninglessness of being. What is needed is a guide through this “semantic underworld”, a fundamental heuristics which, the book argues, in a self-organizing universe is best provided by the phenomena of feedback, wherever discovered. An wholistic metaphysics as argued for here becomes, in an autopoietic universe, the search for transfinite, hence universal search models, as required in a non-final universe.
Imagining the Future
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

This Chapter discusses literary aspects of Spinoza’s writing strategies, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s observations on Flaubert’s enthusiasm for Spinoza, and comments by Gilles Deleuze on the direct emotional appeal of The Ethics. Spinoza’s integration of reason, imagination and emotion is brought into engagement with recent creative writing on climate change – including works of Science Fiction. By way of illustration of the contemporary relevance of his philosophy, the Chapter also considers its bearing on current ways of thinking of borders and mass people movements, under conditions of accelerating climate change.
Queer Theory’s Image of Thought
Authors: Kedem Nir
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the genesis of ‘queer’ as a manner of thinking – what Deleuze calls an ‘image of thought’ – informing what came to be known as queer theory. What does it mean to think queerly? What way of thinking has made queer theory possible? The chapter traces the beginning of queer theory and how queer theory articulates its own beginning, analysing introductory texts to queer theory as a first example. The discussion then shows that queer theory’s image of thought was founded on a conflation of the two senses of queer: the indeterminate (the strange, unknown) and the sexual, thereby subjecting the indeterminate to the sexual. This conflation has functioned as the presupposed grounds for any theoretical move under the banner of queer theory, leading to queer theory’s undermining its own critical force to the point of indifference (the disappearance of the difference between gay and queer) and paradox (an overdetermination of queer’s so-called indeterminacy resulting in queer becoming a universal and an identity). This framework also reveals a common thread traversing criticisms of queer theory (such as the appropriation of its proper object, its swift institutionalisation and normalisation).
Dickens and Drama
Authors: Piggott Gillian
Published: January 2025

Through examination of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby (1980), this chapter points to historically specific performance styles and culture’s processing of the past as two key issues in the understanding of how adaptation works. The aim is to anticipate what version of Britain’s great author might persist into the twenty-first century. From the outset, Dickens was adapted for the stage; his novels were consumed through adaptation, collective readings, reading aloud. It is as if Dickens wrote precisely for dramatic adaptation. But as the material conditions of performance change, as aesthetic tastes alter and patterns of consumption evolve, will important aesthetic and theatrical elements in Dickens be tamed or left behind? Forty years ago, the RSC production treated Dickens as a classical text, for performance by classical actors. But such an approach is no longer possible. What is argued is that an evolution in acting styles, and a tendency towards chastisement of the past, prevents us from fully opening onto the radical nature and Otherness of Dickens’s work.
Puppets
Authors: Ellison David
Published: January 2025

For his severer critics, Dickens’s interest in puppets and marionettes underscored the essentially immature nature of his – and by extension, his reader’s – imagination. While manifestly unfair, the idea that puppets might act as a touchstone for Dickens’s interests in, for example, popular culture, or his childhood experiences with uncanny toys, is not itself unreasonable. As objects of uncertain animation, they occupy a particularly fertile, and sometimes volatile place in Dickens’s wide-ranging investigation of subject-object relations. It is the occasionally violent and peculiarly obdurate character of puppets that forms the subject matter for two extended studies of what might be called the problem of puppet life found in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and in the Genoa chapter of Pictures from Italy (1846).
Landscape
Authors: Andrews Malcolm
Published: January 2025

Cityscapes are Dickens’s forte, not landscapes. Such is the common response when any question is raised about Dickens’s attitude to natural scenery and his representation of the countryside. Indeed, Ruskin and other critics were contemptuous of Dickens’s early set-piece descriptions of rural scenes. But was Dickens susceptible to the appeal of landscape? If so, had he any language for it other than the hackneyed picturesque-pastoral formulae? Was he at all sensitive to landscape painting? He was a vigorous tourist to famous beauty spots – the Alps, The Roman Campagna, Niagara Falls: did they stir his feelings and stimulate his creative imagination? This essay addresses these questions through an investigation of the range of Dickens’s response to and representation of landscape, in his private and published writings. In closing, it turns to the mature novels, arguing that here Dickens finds a language for landscape that goes beyond the picturesque simplicities of the early works, becoming both powerfully impressionist and expressionist as it is made to articulate the dramatic energy of the narrative.
Photography
Authors: Novak Daniel A.
Published: January 2025

While Dickens did not feature photography prominently in his fiction, he and his critics turned to photography as an analogy for his approach to the representation of visual detail, social structure, and character. Photography, however, was understood in radically contradictory ways in the nineteenth century – as both transcendently realistic and a medium of illusion. Yet, because of this, photography serves as a fitting analogue for a Dickensian realism which laid claim both to a principled attention to unappealing details and forms of romance and theatricality. Dickens’s contemporaries drew links between his style, photography, and theatre. This essay extends those links to questions about narrative time and character development in Oliver Twist (1837–39).
High Art
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: January 2025

Dickens’s response to ‘high art’ – the art acceptable to the Royal Academy, and to the new museum culture of the 1820s and 1830s – is reviewed here with attention to specific topics, and with a rejection of the view that his sense of art lacked depth. His knowledge of art, and his response to the Pre-Raphaelites, and to Turner, is examined, and the chapter speculates on him as an artist of the baroque, and as allegorical in what he presents, but as confronted in Britain with a realist mode of art from which he holds back. Special attention is given to his use of the ‘dance of death’ motif, which aligns with the attention to caricature and the grotesque in his work.
Silent Dickens
Authors: Marsh Joss
Published: January 2025

Through a series of propositions and a concluding case study of three silent versions of David Copperfield (1849–50), this essay untangles the complex nature and inheritances of Dickens adaptations, from brief sketches to feature-length films, during all phases of the silent era, 1895–1928. The propositions centre on: the specific aesthetics and the audience expectations of silent-film Dickens; national and international production; emphases on character and setting (at the expense of plot and ‘faithfulness’); the importance of childhood reading in developing the ‘Dickensian’ qualities of many film directors (often most powerfully expressed in films which are not Dickens adaptations); and the relationship between silent film adaptation and the Dickens of the magic lantern show, the illustration (especially posthumous Dickens illustration), theatrical adaptation, and the music hall sketch.
Political Art and the Art of Politics
Authors: Rainsford Dominic
Published: January 2025

Dickens represented politicians, real and imaginary, in many of his works. He involved himself personally in many of the political questions of his time. Since his death, he has become a resource for both the Left and the Right. The roots of all of this lie in Dickens’s early years as a reporter in the Commons, where his name has since been invoked more than 1,000 times. Dickens’s direct political satire can sometimes seem crude, but the broader political force of his writing is not so easily dismissed: there are things about his ways of seeing, his sense of language, and even of aesthetic form, that are themselves politically insurgent. This chapter examines how these various personal, collective and artistic elements interact in Dickens’s work, giving it continuing relevance to our political present.
AI in the Movies
Authors: Murphy Paula
Published: January 2025

AI in the Movies analyses film representations of artificial intelligence from their first emergence in the 1950s up to 2020. These fictional representations shed light on human attitudes to AI: how we think about it and understand it, what excites and terrifies us about it, and how it helps us to understand our relationships with technology and the lines we draw between the biological, mechanical and digital.
The strong or general artificial intelligences analysed in this book take different forms: some are digital AIs, some robot AIs, some move between material and digital forms. Some are indistinguishable from humans, and some have no material existence at all.
The book identifies the aspects of AI science that fascinate filmmakers and outlines the key themes and tropes in AI film, including parent-child relationships, the female robot, human-AI doubles, parallels and hybrids, AI death and mortality, and more.
Chapters are arranged chronologically by decade, allowing socio-cultural factors that impact on the representation of artificial intelligence to be made visible, such as the Cold War, the Internet, gaming culture, smart technology and social media. Thematic strands are identified that reappear, more developed and more nuanced, in later chapters.
Analysis of these representations demonstrates filmmakers eroding the division between human and AI, by presenting character doubles, narrative parallels and eventually, identities in which the biological and artificial overlap and intersect in new hybrid forms.
The 1950s and 1960s
Authors: Murphy Paula
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers AI films from the 1950s and 1960s, which are primarily technophobic in attitude and present a predominantly white, patriarchal worldview. AIs are linked to contemporary issues like nuclear power and space flight. Excessive ambition and arrogance are common flaws in AI scientists and inventors from The Invisible Boy, Forbidden Planet and 2001: Space Odyssey.
The disruptive potential of the AI in terms of gender is indicated through Robby the Robot. Robby and HAL 9000 present affective intelligences for the first time. Alpha 60 in Alphaville demonstrates the most dystopian vision of this era as a supercomputer who has risen to power and rules humans by logic alone.
The 1980s
Authors: Murphy Paula
Published: January 2025

This chapter concerns digital AIs in the 1980s. The rise in home computing, networked computing and gaming are important contexts for this chapter. Hackers appear for the first time in Tron and War Games, able to interact with both AIs and humans. The boundary between digitality and materiality is eroded in Tron – an AI and a human character can operate in both realms. Electric Dreams demonstrates AIs’ potential for creativity for the first time. Female characters – human and AI - continue to be underrepresented and relegated to secondary status, such as HAL 9000’s counterpart, SAL in 2010: The Year We Make Contact, who is presented as inferior to her famous predecessor.
Dissolution of the Archê
Authors: Nelson Bryan
Published: January 2025

Having established the important distinction between politics and rule, chapter 2 explores the antinomies of politics in its most universal or general form: a democracy against the archê. Following both Arendt’s and Rancière’s readings of Plato’s Laws, this chapter demonstrates that the archê represents the underlying theoretical principle that functions to both establish and justify the essential divide that separates governor and governed, ruler and ruled. Whether it installs the rule of the king (monarchy), the rule of a wealthy few (oligarchy) or the hypothetical rule of the wisest among us (Plato’s own ideal city), the logic of the archê is the same. In all its forms, it is this very logic that democracy renders problematic wherever and whenever it appears. Democracy’s defiant claim of an “anarchic” equality functions to undermine those very hierarchies assembled upon the foundation of the archê itself. Unlike monarchy, oligarchy and Plato’s own utopian city, democracy cannot therefore simply be conflated with other models of rule. Rather, this chapter contends that democracy functions to frustrate the very division between ruler and ruled. Democracy not only lacks an archê, it is against it. This reveals much about democracy’s political objectives and claims of equality.
Conclusion: ‘ Hic et nunc ’ – the Use of Philosophy and the Critique of the Present
Authors: Nelson Bryan
Published: January 2025

The Conclusion largely serves to summarise and review the principal arguments and concepts of the book, touching upon a number of interrelated topics and themes discussed in the preceding chapters including: the antinomies of politics; savage democracy; the tradition of political philosophy; the Greek polis and the meaning of politics; the demos and the identity of the political subject; anarchy and the archê; the police and the State; while at the same time, recapping the most significant contributions of Rancière, Lefort and Abensour to this theoretical study of democracy. In addition, the Conclusion revisits the argument that despite its long, often problematic history, political philosophy is most productive and useful when it organises itself as a critical tool, offering a systematic critique of the present and the conditions and situations of today. This, it is argued, is what makes philosophy itself political.
Does Electoral Integrity Matter for Vote Choice?
Authors: Toros Emre
Published: January 2025

This chapter concentrates on the consequences of electoral problems, arguing that voters may alter their voting decisions if they believe the election is seriously flawed. Although the electoral integrity literature has touched upon many dimensions of the phenomenon, we still have minimal knowledge of how citizens respond to failures of electoral integrity when voting is considered. This chapter analyses how and when electoral malpractice shapes citizens' voting perceptions by focusing on the dynamics of the 2019 İstanbul repeat elections.