bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: Nordic Genre Film and Institutional History
Authors: Gustafsson Tommy , Kääpä Pietari
Published: May 2020

The demand for all areas of Nordic film and television culture outside the borders of the Nordic countries may come as no surprise. The popularity of television shows such as The Killing (Forbrydelsen, 2007) and The Bridge (Bron|Broen, 2011) both domestically and internationally have increased the profile of Nordic media while the crime novels of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson have penetrated the American market – the barometer for global Commercial ‘relevance’. The Guardian in the UK has published several articles on the craze, noting how the protagonist of the original Danish version of The Killing, detective Sarah Lund, has become an unlikely fashion icon with her knitted sweaters. While a certain type of Nordic film – the existential artistry of a Dreyer, a Bergman or a Kaurismäki – has existed at the periphery of this global consciousness, such perceptions are clearly shifting as the contemporary situation seems to be more characterised by Nordic contributions to global popular culture instead of the more traditional frameworks of artistic or experimental relevance. How did we get to this situation? In short, how did the media products of this small region of the world become part of global popular culture?
Crime Up North: The Case of Norway, Finland and Iceland
Authors: Norðfjörð Björn Ægir
Published: May 2020

In this chapter I hope to account for the international (literary and filmic) origin of recent Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic crime films and television series as well as their particular local specificity. I will thus not only be assessing them in relation to their Swedish and Danish counterparts, but also to what I will be simply referring to as the international crime film. It is a norm mostly associated with Hollywood (albeit not limited to it) that is, as regards style, form and narrative structure, for the most part devoid of regional or national specificities. My use of the word ‘generic’ is intended to emphasise this dual nature by referring both to the essentials of a particular genre (crime) and a broad universality. Of particular concern is whether one can pinpoint any particular trajectory in the development of contemporary Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic crime films made with international aspirations during this dramatic rise of Nordic noir – that still shows no sign of abating.
Bridges and Tunnels: Negotiating the National in Transnational Television Drama
Authors: Åberg Anders Wilhelm
Published: May 2020

In a globalised world, the notions of neatly defined, homogeneous ethnies or national identities are difficult to sustain, especially if they are construed as organic features of social organisation and historical development. Instead, the present moment is characterised by hybridisation, multiculturalism and all manners of transnational movement, flux and entanglement. It has even been argued that we are now situated in a postnational condition, where the construction of supranationals, such as the European Union, and the transnational, ‘deregulated’, cross-border movement of capital, cultures and people is indicative of a decline of nations and traditional concepts of the national as key factors. Although the relation between the ‘transnational’ and the ‘postnational’ is not absolutely clear in this line of argument, the terms can be understood as connoting progressive stages in the decline of the national in the face of the challenges of globalisation. In this chapter, I will discuss the Swedish/Danish television series Bron|Broen (The Bridge, 2011–) as a transnational media phenomenon, where conceptions of nation are thematised. I will argue, against the backdrop briefly introduced above, that the discourse of nation in Bron|Broen is a vital part of its adaptability.
The Private Life of the Prime Minister? Politics, Drama and Documentary in Pääministeri and Palme
Authors: Lehtisalo Anneli
Published: May 2020

Palme and Pääministeri can be considered exceptional films in their respective national contexts. Politics and public figures have not been a typical subject for contemporary feature films in Sweden or in Finland, although similar topics have thrived in Anglo-American media culture. Films like The Deal (UK, 2003), Looking for Fidel (USA, Brazil, 2004), The Queen (UK, France, Italy, 2006) and Margaret (UK, 2009) have depicted the political past and present by portraying the experiences or actions of known politicians in different generic modes, such as documentary dramas, documentaries and fictional biographical films.
The film Palme differentiates itself in the Swedish context with its extremely controversial main character and sensitive topic. In Finland, as well, politicians have rarely been depicted in recent years. The documentary drama Pääministeri exemplifies such Finnish films. Although the docudramatic mode was not unprecedented in Finland, Pääministeri exemplified a new, international trend in television production by depicting a dramatised account of a living person and a relatively recent political incident.
The Nordic ‘Quirky Feel-Good’
Authors: Rees Ellen
Published: May 2020

In this chapter I want to propose the ‘quirky feel-good’ as a particular Nordic film genre. What exactly is meant by the term ‘feel-good’ is poorly defined within film studies, and it is often used to dismiss superficial films that lack intellectual or emotional depth. Yet as Mette Hjort suggests in her booklength study of Lone Scherfig’s Italiensk for begyndere (Italian for Beginners, 2000) – itself perhaps the most widely recognised example of what I am calling the Nordic quirky feel-good – a film that makes its viewers feel good does not preclude it from having significant depth. Hjort proposes the term ‘ethical feel-good’ as a genre delineation for Italian for Beginners, but I think such a term underplays the importance of humour. As I see it, generally speaking a ‘feel-good’ is a film that combines drama with comic effects in order to establish emotional connections between viewers and characters, and among characters, rather than simply to generate laughter or for the purposes of ridicule. A feel-good will thus by definition have an ethos that emphasises emotional connections.
Nordic Vampires: Stories of Social Exclusion in Nordic Welfare States
Authors: Hakola Outi
Published: May 2020

Nordic vampire films, comprising films produced in Denmark, Sweden and Finland, are not a coherent or regular phenomenon. Although they are familiar with and even borrow the conventions of Anglo-American vampire lore, their features often differ from the international horror mainstream in specifically Nordic ways. Rochelle Wright (2010: 56, 67) describes Nordic cases as being characterised by a fusion or hybridity of genres, including both the Anglo-American horror genre and Nordic socio-psychological drama, and argues that as a consequence, in Nordic vampire films the supernatural merges with realism. Internationally most vampires are social outcasts whose blood-desire and unnatural relationship with death mark them as evil, yet the Nordic vampires are not necessarily evil, but sympathetic characters whose social exclusion is often unrelated and prior to their vampirism (Wright 2010: 59).
Knowing the Unknown Beyond: ‘Italianate’ and ‘Italian’ Horror Cinema in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Walker Johnny
Published: May 2020

Since the year 2000, European horror cinema has undergone a major revival. After the 1990s, which saw very few European horror films made, the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century witnessed a groundswell in production from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Serbia and the UK. Italy was also part of this ‘new wave’, though its horror films typically did not reach as wide an audience, nor experience the critical recognition, of its continental neighbours. Italian horror during this period also faced a great irony. Whereas several filmmakers from America and Europe pastiched the Italian horror boom of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s with films that were widely distributed and commercially well received, Italian directors shooting horror films either in Italy or elsewhere typically lacked access to ‘formal’ distribution (Lobato, 2012) and therefore their films were not as widely seen.
The Argento Syndrome: Aesthetics of Horror
Authors: Landy Marcia
Published: May 2020

The Argento Syndrome is my term for discussing filmmaker Dario Argento’s consistent, even obsessive, explorations on film of the nature and effects of creating and viewing violence. Argento’s films are an unrelenting investigation of the cinematic uses of memory, trauma and distorted vision, and the cinematic body as threatened site of attack, mutilation and death. The films are symptomatic of a politics and aesthetics that invoke the powers of internalised and externalised forms of horror, particularly tied to the twentieth century and to the uses of media technology, including computer-generated effects. In their blurring of fact and fantasy, challenges to representation, hallucinatory quality and particular strategies to incorporate the viewer into their images, they address a world where the real and illusory have lost their clarity and where art is as dangerous as life. Argento is a filmmaker whose cinematic work is very self-conscious of the uses of horror ‘as a meditation on the aesthetics of filmmaking itself’ (Schneider, 2007: 60).
The Giallo/Slasher Landscape: Ecologia Del Delitto, Friday The 13Th And Subtractive Spectatorship
Authors: Lowenstein Adam
Published: May 2020

How Italian is the American slasher film? How American is the Italian giallo film?
I begin with these questions not because they have never been asked, but because the answers that are usually offered have not encouraged us to take the relationship between these two important horror film sub-genres as seriously as we should. By examining a seminal Italian giallo, Mario Bava’s Ecologia del delitto/The Ecology of Murder (1971, also known as Antefatto, Reazione a catena, A Bay of Blood, Carnage, Last House – Part II and Twitch of the Death Nerve) alongside a phenomenally popular American slasher film that bears an uncanny resemblance to it, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), I will argue that we have more to learn about these well-known sub-genres than we might have imagined. More specifically, the centrality of natural landscape to both films suggests that the giallo and the slasher film can cross-pollinate to enable what I will call a ‘subtractive spectatorship’ that challenges some of our conventional assumptions about what watching graphic horror is all about.
Kings of Terror, Geniuses of Crime: Giallo Cinema and Fumetti Neri
Authors: Hunt Leon
Published: May 2020

Any attempt to nominate this or that film as the ‘first’ giallo has to negotiate the question of which version of this notoriously slippery term is being used – the giallo in its more inclusive Italian sense, ‘a metonym for the entire mystery genre’ (Koven, 2006: 2), or as a more particular B-movie filone that surfaced intermittently in the 1960s, blossomed more fully in the early to mid-1970s and has continued to appear sporadically, particularly in the films of Dario Argento.1 Either way, Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva troppo/The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Italy, 1962; refashioned as The Evil Eye, 1964) and particularly Sei donne per l’assassino/Blood and Black Lace (a co-production involving Italy/West Germany/France, 1964) are often accorded seminal status in teleological accounts of the giallo as a cinematic cycle. Both have at various times had the distinction of being identified as the first ‘proper’ giallo; the former with its tourist-eyewitness heroine and the latter with its bodycount narrative, eroticised violence and overheated visual stylisation.
Introduction
Authors: Hofer Nathan
Published: May 2020

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
The Emergence of the Shādhilīya in Egypt
Authors: Hofer Nathan
Published: May 2020

The Sufi order known as the Shādhilīya was one of the most popular Sufi movements of the Islamic Middle Ages, counting adherents across north Africa, Egypt and Greater Syria.1 The order’s eponymous ‘founder’, Abū l-Óasan al-Shādhilī (d. 656/1258), was born in the Maghrib but eventually settled in Alexandria in the 1240s with the explicit sanction of the Ayyubid regime. While al-Shādhilī and his cohort rejected overt state sponsorship, they did cultivate warm relations with Ayyubid and early Mamluk rulers, as well as many of Egypt’s most prominent ʿulamāʾ. These alliances permitted al-Shādhilī to intercede on behalf of his disciples and clients and to travel freely across Egypt to teach his form of Sufism– advantages he did not enjoy in his previous home in Tunis. Al-Shādhilī met with great success in Egypt, establishing a reputation as a powerful Sufi master and an ally of people across the socio-economic spectrum, attracting a large numbers of followers in the process. Indeed, within roughly fifty years of al-Shādhilī’s death, a nascent social movement tied to his name had emerged that persists to the present day in multiple branches and sub-orders. But how did this informal and localised teaching circle become a trans-regional voluntary association of Sufis who conceptualised themselves as a coherent social body tied together by the teachings of an eponymous master?
Al-Iskandarī’s Image of the Shādhilī Ṭarīqa
Authors: Hofer Nathan
Published: May 2020

In the previous chapter I argued that Ibn ʿA†āʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī’s Hagiographical image of al-Shādhilī and al-Mursī precipitated the institutionalisation of a collective Shādhilī identity linked to an eponymous method, or †arīqa. In order to bolster his credentials and cement his status as the authorised spokesperson for and representative of the Shādhilī †arīqa in Egypt, al-Iskandarī publicised in speech and writing a specific image of the masters that became authoritative for the emergent Shādhilī collectivity. Importantly, al-Iskandarī’s construction both reflected and shaped the doctrines and practices of the nascent community. By textually standardising the doctrines and practices of the Shādhilī masters in line with communal expectations about the †arīqa, al-Iskandarī discursively mapped the identity of the collectivity onto the biographies of al-Shādhilī and al-Mursī, who thus functioned metonymically as the communal ideal.
The Regional Context of Upper-Egyptian Sufism
Authors: Hofer Nathan
Published: May 2020

The first Sufis in Upper Egypt appear in the historical record at the end of the Fatimid period.1 By the early Mamluk era the region’s towns and villages boasted some of the most famous and enduring personalities of medieval Egyptian Sufism. But despite their prominence in medieval Arabic sources, these Sufis have received almost no attention in studies of Sufism or in Mamluk studies more broadly. There is no monograph in a European language on Upper-Egyptian Sufism. Apart from a few studies in Arabic there are only a handful of articles on the subject.2 This state of affairs is regrettable, although perhaps not surprising given that these Sufis left very little in the way of literature or enduring social formations. The most important source for Sufism in Upper Egypt during this period is Ibn Nūª al-Qū‚ī’s (d.708/1308) al-Waªīd fī sulūk ahl al-tawªīd (‘The Unique Guide Concerning the Comportment of the People of Unity’). This text is a large compendium of diverse biographical and doctrinal material, the publication of which is a major desideratum for the study of medieval Sufism.3 And as far as I know the existence of Sufi-related manuscripts at the shrines and mosques of Upper Egypt has not been explored. Thus, other than Denis Gril’s preliminary studies, without which my work here would have been impossible, the subject of Upper-Egyptian Sufism is mostly terra incognita.
Wonder-working Sufis
Authors: Hofer Nathan
Published: May 2020

One of the more puzzling historical questions of this study is why no
organised order linked to an Upper-Egyptian tarīqa developed during this period. Given the facts– that Sufism was well established there by the Mamluk period, that there were numerous Sufi masters who maintained ribā†s across the landscape, and that these masters enjoyed widespread fame and recognition– it
is surprising that not a single initiatic lineage was institutionalised
and organised around one of these masters. Some of the early circles in Qinā would seem to have been ripe for such a development, but in each case the collectivity of Sufis around a particular master ceased to exist in the first or second generation after his death. We find instead that the master’s charismatic authority was itself institutionalised rather than any socially reproducible doctrine or praxis (i.e. a †arīqa). In terms of Blumer’s symbolic interactionism, we might say that these Sufi masters became the objects of veneration and not emulation. Thus, instead of organised (informally or otherwise) collectivities linked to an eponymous †arīqa, localised shrine cults emerged at the physical site of interment. The fact that a Sufi’s tomb would become the object of regular veneration and visitation was certainly not unusual or unique to Upper Egypt; this happened with most Sufi masters across Egypt during this period. But the specific form of Upper-Egyptian Sufism in this period seems to have completely displaced or foreclosed the possibility of other potential social formations. The answer to why this should be the case is inextricably linked to the way in which the Sufis of Upper Egypt produced.
Concluding Remarks
Authors: Hofer Nathan
Published: May 2020

In the preceding pages I hope to have offered an alternative, however modest, to what I call the reactionary paradigm concerning the growing popularity of Sufism in medieval Egypt. According to this paradigm, the widespread popularity of Sufism after the sixth/twelfth century occurred as a reaction to the socio-political upheavals of the time and/or because of the inadequacy of certain forms of Islam to meet the religious needs of the populace. The latter explanation relies on anachronistic assumptions about religion and is simply untenable. If the former events played any role in the spread and popularisation of Sufism, they were not the cause ...
Who Instigated Violence: A Rebelling Devil or a Vengeful God?
Authors: Kristó-Nagy* István T.
Published: May 2020

The contrast between the attitude towards violence of the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament was already explored by Marcion (d. c. 160 ad) before the advent of Islam and has been rediscovered again and again since.1 Marcion saw the former as the creator of the world and God of the law and the latter as the good God, the God of love.2 The character of the former reflects a community’s need for sanctified social norms, while the character of the latter shows the community’s and the individual’s longing for the hope of salvation.3 The God of the Qurʾān is also one of punishment and pardon. This chapter investigates the former aspect and focuses on: (1) the appearance of evil and violence in the universe as described in the Qurʾān; (2) the philosophical-theological questions revealed by this myth; and (3) its social implications.
Reading the Times
Authors: Stevenson Randall
Published: May 2020

From the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884 to the celebration of the millennium in 2000; from the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf to the novels of William Gibson and W.G. Sebald, Reading the Times offers fresh insight into modern narrative. It shows how profoundly the structure and themes of the novel depend on attitudes to the clock and to the sense of history’s progress, tracing their origins in technologic, economic and social change. It offers a new and powerful way of understanding the relations of history with narrative form, outlining their development and demonstrating – through incisive analyses of a very wide range of texts from late C19th to early C21st – their key role in shaping fictional narrative throughout this period. The result is a highly innovative literary history of the twentieth-century fiction, based on an inventive, enabling method of understanding literature in relation to history – in terms, in every sense, of its reading of its times.
‘Wheels within Wheels’: D. H. Lawrence, Industrial Time and War Time
Authors: Stevenson Randall
Published: May 2020

Many factors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – to an extent, ever since the industrial revolution – extended throughout everyday life forms of the rationalised temporality Conrad encountered so exactingly at sea. These included clocking-in for factory work, F.W. Taylor’s time-and-motion studies, and Ford’s introduction of production lines. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love illustrate the spread of reifying forces involved, aptly summarised by Georg Lukács in 1923. The Great War added further to temporal rationalisations imposed on modern life, through military operations requiring still stricter co-ordination than industrial ones, and measures on the Home Front including the introduction of Summer Time in 1916. By 1919, when Armistice Day arrested the entire British population at 11am on 11 November, life and death in the modern world were controlled by the clock more stringently than ever previously. In broadly historical terms, too, the Great War had shattered a sense of continuity in ways reflected in the more fragmented or non-serial forms of fiction developing in the years that followed.
Conclusion: Millennial Times, Perennial Times
Authors: Stevenson Randall
Published: May 2020

The millennium and fears of its ‘bug’ confirmed how far the modern world remained in thrall to exacting temporalities. Some early C21st-century novels – e.g. by W.G. Sebald– extended the resistive strategies of modernism, alongside recent ones described in Chapter Six. Others – by Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon – suggested different strategies for evading temporal constraints, and also some of the latter’s origins in the eighteenth century ‘Age of Reason’ and Industrial Revolution. Examining this age clarifies how far the rise of the novel (in its modern mode) may be attributed to newly-exacting influences of the clock on contemporary life, and how extensively these were resisted by early practitioners of the form, particularly Laurence Sterne. Resistance to the clock’s orderings can of course be further retraced, though Shakespeare’s plays – even back to Roman times – with much C20th writing suggesting it shares in wider, perennial antinomies between human reason, or agency, and nature. Though perhaps perennial, such antinomies should be seen as historically specific in scale and nature, and particularly inflected within C20th imagination. Tracing this inflection, as this study has shown, offers a powerful means of understanding the century’s history and the ways this has shaped its imagination and narrative forms.
Introduction
Authors: Lim Edna
Published: May 2020

This chapter establishes the historical context and theoretical framework of this study on Singapore and its cinema. It introduces the fragmented history of the cinema and resulting discursive fracturing that Celluloid Singapore will address. The chapter also explains the book’s approaches to national cinema as a reframing of the relationship between nation and cinema; the transnational and national as constitutive rather than mutually exclusive conceptions; identity as performative; and films as cinematic performances that produce multiple Singapores. Each of these Singapores adds to and negotiates with the myriad ways that Singapore can and has been performed on screen and elsewhere. As such, the Singapore we see on screen are not only transformed versions of material reality, or different from the Singapores performed in other contexts. Celluloid Singapore is essentially already (an)other Singapore.
Revival Cinema: ‘Other’ Singaporeans in (An)other Singapore
Authors: Lim Edna
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that films of the revival engage the national through a relational force of counter-performative strategies present in the narrative, film style, use of language such as Singlish, depictions of spaces like the Housing Development Board’s heartland, and the prevalence of heartlanders as ‘other’ Singaporeans left out of the state’s performance of success. Together, these films not only produce different Singapores. They perform (an) other Singapore.
Singapore Cinema in Singapore
Authors: Lim Edna
Published: May 2020

By way of conclusion, this last chapter discusses current developments in Singapore cinema through recent films like Ilo Ilo (Anthony Chen, 2013), Meeting the Giant (Tay Ping Hui, 2014) and To Singapore with Love (Tan Pin Pin, 2014). It also examines the 7 Letters anthology of films (2015) and Eric Khoo’s In the Room (2015) as tributes against the context of Singapore’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. Analysis of these films shows that although the industry has grown, the heartland is still a site of contestation and the existence of other Singaporeans in (an)other Singapore continues to persist. The chapter also develops and expands on my prior argument on Singapore cinema’s position as (an)other cinema in Singapore.
‘Speaking in a forked tongue’: Anna May Wong’s linguistic cosmopolitanism*
Authors: Wang Yiman
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores early American-Chinese star Anna May Wong’s self-reflexive enactment of the ‘Oriental’ (or other exotic) roles through her multi-faceted vocal performance (English with British accent, French, German and Taishan dialect) in a transnational context from Hollywood to Europe, as a way to ridicule the stereotypical roles imposed on her. By analysing Wong’s linguistic performances and the resulting lingua-ethno cosmopolitanism, the chapter explores the strategies employed by minority/marginalized performers to negotiate with the restrictive racial politics in Euro-America and China during the colonial era.
‘I want James Deen to Deen me with his Deen’: the multi-layered stardom of James Deen
Authors: Smith Clarissa , Taylor-Harman Sarah
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the alternative economy of porn stardom through the career and performances of James Deen. It draws attention to the previously un-acknowledged acting and performance involved in doing sex for the camera, and analyses Deen’s multi-layered performance style in his pornographic scenes. It also looks at Deen’s effort to expand his stardom outside his film performance which is little valued, by discussing his involvement in adult industry activism and various charity work, and his use of social media and engagement with his fans as a way to supplement or correct his onscreen persona.
Reading for differentiation: the family romance plot
Authors: Michie Helena , Warhol Robyn
Published: May 2020

Despite George Scharf’s professional success and eventual social status, most people who have heard the name are thinking of his father. It is George Scharf Sr’s urban sketches– tracking street by street and demolished house by demolished house the emergence of Regency London and of the city we know today–that were brought together in the 1980s as an exhibition and a book, both entitled George Scharf’s London. If George Jr does not get to possess, in the contemporary imagination, the city in which he, too, lived and worked, he did in his own time manage to surpass his father in reputation and class, to leave behind the slightly pathetic figure, the chronically underemployed immigrant debtor who shared– that is to say, anticipated– his name. The remarkable story of George Jr’s class and professional ascendancy, marked by increasing signs of public respect, achieved its apotheosis in the nominal change that shortly preceded his death: the not-quite- posthumous creation of ‘Sir George Scharf’, the addition of ‘Sir’ to the name of the son, marked the distance between the two men for posterity.
Reading for success: the professional plot
Authors: Michie Helena , Warhol Robyn
Published: May 2020

In the last two chapters we have read some key moments in Scharf’s life with and against two dominant cultural narratives: the romance plot and the differentiation plot. These plots are intimately but complexly related to literary genres– the marriage-plot novel and the Bildungsroman. This chapter focuses not so much on a single plot as on a culturally privileged place that has generated a variety of literary plots. By telling the story of Scharf’s relationship with two great country houses only seven miles apart, we cannot help invoking the frisson-inducing spectre of the Gothic and sensation novel and the linked cultural and literary plot of inheritance. Scharf’s relationships with Knole, the home of the Sackville family, and Chevening, the seat of the earls of Stanhope (both located in Sevenoaks, Kent), brought up for us some of the central questions of Gothic and sensation novels: who belongs to the house, and who does not? Who is absorbable into the household, and who, finally, is foreign to it and must be thrust out into a different space, whether that be a prison, an asylum or another country?1
Coda: our archivist, ourselves
Authors: Michie Helena , Warhol Robyn
Published: May 2020

But perhaps George Scharf would not have wanted us to end with him at rest. He was, after all– and this is a modern term for an old-fashioned value– a hard worker. This was, for both of us, another point of identification with Scharf, although we suspect he would be as puzzled by the kind of work we do as we sometimes were by his professional activities. By the end of our work on and with him, however, we realised that our jobs–Scharf’s job and our own– had something in common and that this commonality might produce a final attempt at an identity term to add to bachelor, diner, sketcher, fat man, extra man and the other categories we tried out for Scharf. It took us arguably too long to realise that Scharf, too, was an archival researcher subject to the exigencies and fantasies of the archive. That realisation came to us after Helena’s trip to the Laing archive at the University of Edinburgh, whose holdings include letters from Scharf to David Laing, librarian of the Signet Library in Edinburgh and member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
The Theory of Faculties
Authors: Carr Cheri Lynne
Published: May 2020

Prior to Foucault’s articulation of anti-fascism as the Deleuzo-Guattarian ethical project, Deleuze described his work as a contestation of the “dogmatic” or “moral” image of thought. For this contestation, Deleuze turned in Difference and Repetition to a Kantian notion of critique as the examination of the limits and powers of the faculties. Deleuze’s theory of faculties is a theory of how the subject is produced as an identity through active syntheses that are themselves the produce of passive syntheses. The critical analysis Deleuze undertakes in Difference and Repetition builds on the analysis of habit formation in the process of subjectivation insofar as it offers a method of analysis that is itself disruptive of habits and identities. Deleuze’s “immanent critique” describes in facultative passive synthesis not only the genesis of experience from sensibility, but the breakdown of experience in the violence of encounter. Critique reveals that the movement from the empirical to the transcendental or “heautonomous” forms of the faculties, which happens via an internalization of the violence of encounters that rupture ordinary experience, can be cultivated toward the ends of moving beyond the constraints of rule-governed, limited ways of thinking through the practice of critique itself.
Immanent Critique
Authors: Carr Cheri Lynne
Published: May 2020

From a practical point of view, immanent critique is the evaluation of our selves at the level described by the faculties. It is the evaluation of our “subjective presuppositions,” the goal of which is moving “beyond” them. Yet, because the presuppositions that limit our experiences and judgments are constitutive of all our experience, such a “beyond” slips through our fingers the harder we try to grasp it. This is why Deleuze emphasises the centrality of the experience of the violence of encounters that rupture ordinary experience. Encounters allow us to glimpse the limits of thought and routes towards its tangible transgression. And while immanent critique cannot generate the experience of encounter, its lived practice cultivates habits of sensitivity and openness to encounters, operating as a form of anti-fascism within the self. Such sensitivity allows for the production of problematic ideas as vehicles for the reinvestment of critical practice into the selves’ passive flows. Deleuze’s use of Kantian critique to articulate a theory of faculties thus simultaneously provides the foundation for an ontology and points to a new model for a way of living.
Conclusion: Ethics and the Richness of the Possible
Authors: Carr Cheri Lynne
Published: May 2020

By drawing connections between Deleuze’s thought and the thought of Immanuel Kant, a space is allowed to emerge for exploring the development of an ethics from Deleuze’s immanentist reading of Kantian critique. This space calls for an adjustment in expectations surrounding what counts as ethics. For ethics is not merely the articulation of sets of rules or hierarchies of the good. It is also, and perhaps primarily, an attitude toward life that is habituated and cultivates a character. This character – dramatised by figures such as the Apprentice and the Russian idiot in Deleuze’s early work, and expanded to include the nomad, becoming-woman and the minor in his work with Guattari – expresses a way of living Deleuze’s ontology of intensive becoming. Moreover, the space created is one that could not be mapped without the comparison to Kant. The deep logic of the faculties that expresses the dynamic of powerlessness becoming power, the transcendental subject for whom a preparatory education of sensibility in culture is tantamount to the formation of a non-fascistic identity, the connection to the long tradition of critical thinking in education as ...
‘The Celtic Century’ and the Genesis of Scottish Gothic
Authors: Groom Nick
Published: May 2020

The Celtic, insofar as it is applied to Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Cornish identity and culture, is, like traditional Scottish tartans, an invention. Barry Cunliffe describes the word in its current Anglophone usage as an ‘ethnonym’, and dates it to the eighteenth century (2003: 5). Seamus Deane (1997: 77) likewise places ‘Celt’ within scare quotes and suggests it is a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century term carrying an antimodernist agenda ‘transposed from its nationalist, antiquarian origins of the eighteenth century into a pan-European combinatoire of evolutionary destiny, the preservation of difference, even of anachronism, as a refusal of those adaptations needed to survive into the world of international capital and the nation-state.’ (Deane 1997: 88)
The Politics and Poetics of the ‘Scottish Gothic’ from Ossian to Otranto and Beyond
Authors: Davison Carol Margaret
Published: May 2020

As Murray Pittock has cogently argued, the eighteenth century was ‘the historic battleground of the formation of Great Britain’ (1997: 1). In terms of Anglo-Scottish relations during this era, a shift occurred that saw the military battlefields of Culloden and Prestonpans give way to more intellectual battlefields and ‘culture wars’ (Moore 2003a: 46) where the question of national superiority rested upon the quality and innovation of cultural productions both ancient and modern, some of which, like James Macpherson’s Ossian, notably chronicled martial struggles. Nationalist statements proliferated about literature, especially at mid-century, such as David Hume’s comment in private correspondence in 1757 in the wake of the theatrical production of John Home’s Douglas (1756), that Scots had become, despite the devastating losses of their ‘Princes, … Parliaments, … Independent Government’, in combination with the fact that they spoke ‘a very corrupt Dialect of the [English] Tongue’, ‘the People most distinguish’d for Literature in Europe’ (1932, vol. 1: 255).
Robert Burns and the Scottish Bawdy Politic
Authors: Mathison Hamish
Published: May 2020

Oft-times, Lowland Scots wrote of death in the eighteenth century without engaging in what we now call ‘Scottish Gothic’. Witness Robert Blair, above, Edinburgh-born, as he brings the adverb ‘complexionally’ to an otherwise straightforward example of the ancient and melancholy ubi sunt trope.1 Blair’s melancholy is here expressed in a fantastically influential poem called The Grave (1743). Blair’s fascinating poem, to which this chapter will return at its conclusion, is rightly held to be foundational for the study of what until recently was thought of as a pan-British ‘Graveyard School’ of poetry. That label describes an extremely loose collection of mid-eighteenth-century authors whose poems were written in a more or less ‘standard’ English, and often troped the graveyard. The category invokes such disparate poets as the English-born Thomas Gray and Edward Young or the Scottish-born James Thomson and James Beattie.
Scottish Gothic Drama
Authors: Bell Barbara A. E.
Published: May 2020

Scottish theatre, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, has been characterised by a distinctive performance culture that values anti-illusionist techniques, breaking the fourth wall, music and song, strongly physical acting styles and striking visual effects. These were accepted traits of the Georgian theatre as a whole; however, they endured in Scotland through the music hall and pantomime traditions, when late nineteenth-century Western theatre was focused on realism/naturalism. Their importance to the search for a distinctive Scottish Gothic Drama lies in the way that the conditions of the Scottish theatre during the Gothic Revival valued these skills and effects. That theatre was heavily constricted in what it could play by censorship from London and writers were cautious in their approach to ‘national’ topics. At the same time a good deal of work portraying Scotland as an inherently Gothic setting was imported onto Scottish stages.
Gothic Hogg
Authors: Brewster Scott
Published: May 2020

As Angela Wright has noted, in Scottish Gothic literature, graves and manuscripts are ‘warmly contested sites of authenticity and authority’ (2007: 76). The burial ground excavated at the end of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is just such a contested memorial: the grave that harbours an uncanny tale of religious fundamentalism, or diabolical possession, does not readily give up its secrets. Robert Wringhim’s corpse preserves a manuscript whose provenance, and legacy, cannot be determined. The exhumed body releases its enigmatic text into circulation, and this final resting place becomes an opening to future readings. In his antiquarian or archaeological – and thus typically Gothic – effort to authenticate Wringhim’s memoir, the Editor’s narrative draws on ‘history, justiciary records, and tradition’ (Hogg 2002c: 64) to frame the ‘singular’ document whose ‘drift’ (2002c: 174) he cannot comprehend. Yet the ‘sequel’ to these narratives (it is actually a beginning) returns us to Hogg’s home territory of the Borders.
Gothic Stevenson
Authors: Watson Roderick
Published: May 2020

When Stevenson tackled Scottish subjects for the first time in his fiction it was, as Stephen Arata has observed, ‘by way of the Gothic’ (2010: 59). ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Body Snatcher’ and ‘The Merry Men’ were all written on the author’s return to Scotland from North America, during a sojourn in Pitlochry and Braemar in the wet summer of 1881. This chapter will propose that from these Scottish roots Stevenson went on to develop the Gothic genre to explore his sense of the nature of human identity and, beyond that, the conditions of material existence itself. It will trace such mutations at work in three specifically ‘Gothic’ texts, ‘Thrawn Janet’ (1881), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and ‘Olalla’ (1885), in order to demonstrate Stevenson’s evolving engagement with the genre, and its importance to any critical understanding of his work.
New Frankensteins; or, the Body Politic
Authors: Baker Timothy C.
Published: May 2020

In the introduction to his 2001 anthology of ‘New Scottish Gothic Fiction’, Alan Bissett argues that Gothic ‘has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic’ (2001: 6). While virtually every contemporary Scottish author has made use of Gothic elements or tropes in some part of their work, many of the most important recent texts to be labelled ‘Scottish Gothic’ are centrally concerned with such a re-examination of the past. For many authors, however, the past is not to be found in historical events or cultural contexts, but specifically in the interrelation between established Scottish and Gothic literary traditions. Beginning with Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978), one of numerous twentieth-century reworkings of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), many contemporary Gothic novels have explicitly relied on earlier texts; adapting the work of Hogg, Stevenson or even Shelley becomes a way of challenging preconceived notions of stable national and individual identities.
Authorship, ‘Ghost-filled’ Islands and the Haunting Feminine: Contemporary Scottish Female Gothic
Authors: Germanà Monica
Published: May 2020

While scholars are certainly indebted to Ellen Moers’s pioneering work on women’s writing, it would be difficult to agree, with almost four decades of Gothic criticism behind us, that ‘Female Gothic is easily defined’ (1977: 90). The topic has been the subject of contested definitions and critical revisions informed by both the contentious boundaries of the critical category in question, and the changing perspectives in feminist and gender studies (Fitzgerald 2009). While the link between Female Gothic and the biological sex of its authors has been frequently challenged, in one of the most recent works, we are also reminded that ‘Gothic and feminist categories now demand a self-criticism with respect to their totalising gestures and assumptions’ (Brabon and Genz 2007: 7).
Introduction
Authors: Waddell Calum
Published: May 2020

What is an exploitation film?

This may seem like an obvious question with an equally obvious answer. The term itself perhaps conjures up the carny marketing of old, low-budget movies – typically generic – offering gory or sexy thrills. A beautiful bound woman having her tongue pulled out in the West German production ...
Exploitation-Horror Cinema
Authors: Waddell Calum
Published: May 2020

An introduction to what the book defines as exploitation-horror – tracing the term back to Robin Wood and discussing how the style of this demarcation might be seen to hold similar aesthetic and thematic pretensions to that of the post-classical sexploitation movement. Historic appreciation of the key films is introduced alongside how some of the films were received at their time of release.
Slash and Burn: The Exploitation-Horror film in Transition
Authors: Waddell Calum
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter about exploitation-horror cinema focuses on how the form evolved in the 1970s before concluding when the advent of more ‘gruesome’ special effects wizardry prepared the wider genre from a period of change at the end of the decade. I ascertain that George Romero’s film ‘Martin’ was the prelude to this factor – with ‘Halloween’ predicting a new market for stylish productions that could compete against Hollywood’s biggest and best. As with hardcore sex films, horror films would develop into a VHS staple in the 1980s – arguably the true lineage of the gritty, confrontational horror of such classics as ‘The Last House on the Left’.
Exploitation as a Movement
Authors: Waddell Calum
Published: May 2020

The concluding chapter of ‘The Style of Sleaze’ enters into a discourse about how the term ‘exploitation’ has entered into the pubic and critical discourse to reference a myriad of different motion pictures, some of them major Hollywood productions. In conclusion, the book argues that exploitation cinema deserves further exploration – especially given how little has been explored, academically, as regards the cinema of this type that has emerged from other countries and which warrants similar investigation.
Introduction: Onna Monogatari
Authors: González-López Irene , Smith Michael
Published: May 2020

The introduction presents an overview of Tanaka’s life and career vis-a-vis the history of twentieth-century Japan, emphasising how women participated in and were affected by legal, political and socio-economic changes.
Through Tanaka’s professional development, it revisits the evolution of the Japanese studio system and stardom, and explains the importance of women as subjects within the films, consumers of the industry, and professionals behind the scenes.
This historical overview highlights Japan’s negotiation of modernity and tradition, often played out through symbolic dichotomies of gender and sexuality. By underscoring women’s new routes of mobility, the authors challenge the simplified image of Japanese oppressed women.
The second part of the introduction posits director Tanaka as an outstanding, yet understudied, figure in the world history of women filmmaking.
Her case inspires compelling questions around labels such as female authorship, star-as-author, and director-as-star and their role in advancing the production and acknowledgement of women filmmaking.
Tanaka and Mizoguchi: Politics and Rebellion in the Early Post-war Era
Authors: Smith Michael
Published: May 2020

Smith’s chapter uses My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1949) as a case-study for an analysis of Tanaka’s embodiment of feminine subjectivity. Grounded by an examination of the postwar gender reforms and their application, he argues that Tanaka and Mizoguchi’s creative partnership is complex to define politically, often expressing conflicting ideas on gender equality which in turn reflected the moral, social and practical paradigms which underpinned gender politics in Japan. Although produced in the postwar period, the film’s plot is set in the Meiji era and the chapter bridges these crucial periods in the history of Japanese women, using Tanaka’s star image to illuminate ideological connotations within both settings. The close reading of Tanaka’s feminist character in the film complicates the critical conception of her star persona as being tied to the Japanese stereotype of yamato nadeshiko - a type of conservative, restrained, traditional femininity.
Female Authorship, Subjectivity and Colonial Memory in Tanaka Kinuyo’s The Wandering Princess (1960)
Authors: Armendáriz-Hernández Alejandra
Published: May 2020

Tanaka’s fourth film, The Wandering Princess (Ruten no ōhi, 1960), is the subject of Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández’s chapter.
Based on the autobiography of Saga Hiro (1914-1987), a Japanese aristocrat who married the younger brother of the emperor of Manchukuo, The Wandering Princess was marketed as a ‘women’s film’ by highlighting the three women who occupied key positions in the production: scriptwriter Wada Natto, star Kyō Machiko and director Tanaka Kinuyo. With this in mind, Armendáriz-Hernández examines Tanaka’s work against more prevalent representations of women and national history in postwar Japanese cinema in order to argue that the film and, crucially, Tanaka herself occupied a liminal gendered position within early 1960s Japanese cinema.