bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Godard’s suburban years
Authors: Faucon Térésa
Published: September 2018

Far from a simple backdrop, the lived environment was for Jean-Luc Godard capable of eliciting specific modes of cinematographic thought; choice of locations could impact the shape and feel of a film more than its screenplay. Prevalent in his works of the 1960s are suburban landscapes and locales, from the villas, cafés and roadways frequented by the characters of Bande à part (1964) to the high-rises of La Courneuve shown in the essay in phenomenology 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967). Without positing an equivalence between suburban heterogeneity and Godard’s jarring late-modern aesthetic, the author argues for the generative, transgressive capacity of a capitalist space in the throes of transformation and shot through with fragments of history. Shooting near Joinville-le-Pont and Vincennes in Bande à part, Godard pays homage to those pioneers who came before him, like Mack Sennett or Louis Feuillade. In other contexts, like the science-fiction sendup Alphaville (1965), he finds signs of the future in the present, showing Lemmy Caution moving through sleek, well-lit neighbourhoods of high-rises. The spatio-temporal rupture characteristic of Godard’s approach to suburban space resurfaces to surprising effect in Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012).
Peace, but not at any price: British socialists’ calls for peace on the eve of the First World War
Authors: Morris Marcus
Published: September 2018

Moving beyond simplistic assumptions of a pro-cuts to defence spending ILP (and their allies) and a jingoistic, verging on pro-war Labour right, Morris invites us to reconsider how the common goal of peace could be pursued through seemingly divergent means. On the one side stood those who viewed military spending as inevitably leading to war – why improve one’s military, after all, not to use it – but on the other emerged a ‘patriotic Labour’ who urged Britain not to remain defenceless in the face of German aggression
‘Industrial unionism for women’: Ellen Wilkinson and the unionisation of shop workers, 1915–18
Authors: Perry Matt
Published: September 2018

Perry’s chapter focuses on another important woman organiser, Ellen Wilkinson. Best known as a leading figure in the 1936 Jarrow March and as Education Secretary under Attlee’s government, her First World War organising has largely been forgotten. But as national organiser for the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees, Wilkinson had particular responsibility for recruiting new female entrants into the workforce. She fought for ‘substituted’ female labour (replacement on grounds of equivalent skills and hence justifying equal pay for equal work) as opposed to ‘dilution’ (replacing skilled labour with less skilled, and hence less pay).
Irish Labour and the ‘Co-operative Commonwealth’ in the era of the First World War
Authors: Mulholland Marc
Published: September 2018

Mulholland walks us through the divergent beliefs and tactics of collectivised unskilled urbanised labour in Ireland, and the craft based cooperative tradition. His analysis then turns to the question of a ‘Cooperate Commonwealth’, its potential organisation, and the role of labour during the struggle for independence. Throughout we see the distinctly Irish dimension to the debate over collectivism versus the cooperative.
The Stanford connection: David Starr Jordan, eugenics and the Anglo-American anti-war movement
Authors: Baird Gavin , Hart Bradley W.
Published: September 2018

Gavin Baird and Bradley W. Hart’s consider David Starr Jordan, a largely forgotten figure in Britain, but someone with significant academic and political clout in the United States. Although Starr Jordan’s fame largely rested on his role as the first President of Stanford University, his interventions into diplomacy lent heavily on his belief in eugenics. As Baird and Hart illustrate, during the lead-up to the war and in the period before America entered the Allied side, Starr Jordan used his academic prominence to stress the dysgenic impact of the conflict on both sides of the Atlantic. Tracing his story from California to the corridors of Westminster, this chapter chronicles the interactions of an American pacifist with the Snowdens, Ramsay MacDonald, and Fabian thinkers like Graham Wallas.
The problem of war aims and the Treaty of Versailles
Authors: Callaghan John
Published: September 2018

John Callaghan walks the reader through the various debates and contradictions seen in the Labour movement prior to the end of hostilities, as well as the dilemmas soon posed by the march of events thereafter. Along the way, he discusses Labour’s reactions to the diplomatic path pursued by Edward Grey in the summer of 1914, the subsequent impact of the Union of Democratic Control, and then Labour’s relationship with the Lloyd George government and Wilsonianism abroad. Callaghan also includes vital discussion of the continuation of hostilities beyond 11 November 1918. Here his article may be of particular use to those considering Labour’s later attitudes to colonialism and the League of Nations too.
Nature and reason
Authors: O'Daly Irene
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses the significance of the term natura in John’s works and the notion of ‘living in accordance with nature’ - a guideline borrowed from the works of Cicero. It compares John’s views to those of his contemporaries, illustrating how he transformed the Ciceronian trope into one that had direct application in a Christian context. It examines the role played by reason in this transformation, and looks particularly at the example of intention to illustrate how the interior character of the individual was the principal factor in determining the worth of an act.
Moderation and the virtuous life
Authors: O'Daly Irene
Published: September 2018

This chapter looks at a fundamental aspect of John’s recommendations for life in the political sphere, namely the role played by moderation - a moderation that is heavily influenced by Roman Stoic theory. It introduces the question of the appropriate goal for life in the polity, suggesting that John requires the ruler of the polity, but also all of its members, to live in accordance with virtue. It examines the presentation of the virtues in John’s work, looking in particular at prudence and temperance, with a particular focus on John’s critique of avarice and recommendation of frugal living.
Co-constituting Fijian identity: the role of constitutions in Fijian national identity
Authors: Mudaliar Christopher
Published: September 2018

This chapter focuses on the role that constitutions play in national identity, particularly in states that are recently independent and constrained by a colonial legacy. It uses Fiji as a case study, exploring how British colonialism influenced conceptions of Fijian national identity in the constitutional texts of 1970, 1990 and 1997. The chapter explores the indigenous ethno-nationalist ideals that underpinned these constitutions, which led to the privileging of indigenous Fijian identity within the wider national identity. However, in 2013, Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama introduced a new constitution which shifted away from previous ethno-nationalist underpinnings towards a more inclusive national identity through the promotion of a civic nationalist agenda. In doing so, Bainimarama’s goal of reducing ethnic conflict has seen a constitutional re-imagining of Fijian identity, which includes the introduction of new national symbols, and a new electoral system, alongside equal citizenry clauses within the Constitution. This study offers a unique insight into power and identity within post-colonial island states.
Gendered identities in peacebuilding: an analysis of post-2006 Timor-Leste
Authors: Smith Sarah
Published: September 2018

In 2006 and 2007, Timor-Leste experienced a violent political crisis, mostly centred in the capital Dili, which led to a renewed UN peacekeeping presence. While the catalyst for the crisis was the spill-over of tensions within and between Timor-Leste’s security institutions – the national police force (PNTL) and the national defence force (F-FDTL) – there was significant impact on the broader population, resulting in over 100,000 internally displaced and the widespread destruction of property. However, the subsequent UN peacebuilding activities and policy outcomes all took on a male-centric focus, especially via the focus given to Timor-Leste’s security institutions. Although a number of women worked to alleviate the societal tensions that had been exposed as a result of the crisis, they were excluded from high-level negotiations. Several theorists have suggested that despite women’s complex and highly differentiated roles in conflict and peacebuilding, they are often essentialized as victims, limiting the remit of their recognised contributions. The approach to gender work undertaken in Timor-Leste from 2006 can be understood through two theoretical frameworks: the connection between the ‘gendering’ of women, or assigning essentialist roles to women as part of being ‘gender aware’; and the victim-narrative that dominated institutional policy discussions on gender and women in post-crisis Timor-Leste.
Agents of peace: place, identity and peacebuilding
Authors: Visoka Gëzim
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides a new account of identity and practices of agents in the context of post-conflict peacebuilding. It investigates how place, habitus, and fields of interaction alongside the performative roles shape the identity of agents and their socialization in practice. To explore the relation between the agents’ presence and their impact on peacebuilding, this paper bypasses the exclusionary dichotomies between local/international and liberal/indigenous agents, and develops a typology of six types of agents horizontally arranged around their insideness and outsideness towards a particular conflict-affected place. Using human geography and critical hermeneutics, this paper categorises ‘agents of peace’ in six different types: existential insiders, subjective insiders, empathetic insiders, behavioural insiders, objective outsiders, and existential outsiders. The core argument of this article is that the differentiation of agents around the geographical and performance towards a particular place facilitates the exploration of pluralist forms of agency and a more nuanced understanding of dynamics in post-conflict societies. An expanded and plural view of agents captures better the fields of interaction and hybridization, agential knowledge and narratives, modes of governance, and various everyday practices that enable or inhibit sustainable peace.
A space for identity: the case of Lebanon’s naturalised Palestinians
Authors: Ghandour Hind
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines a segment of Palestinians who were granted citizenship in Lebanon through a process of tawtin, a naturalization strategy underpinned by notions of national belonging and identity. It draws upon interviews and observations with naturalized citizens and refugees to illustrate and reveal patterns of citizenship practice that challenge national discourses of tawtin, and suggest the emergence of a paradigm that posits citizenship-as-rights, and not identity.  Despite the dichotomous discourse that posits Palestinian identity in dialectic to citizenship, naturalized Palestinians constructed dynamic spaces for both to exist, somewhat harmoniously. Despite the globalization of human rights and the rise of universal personhood, access to rights remains inextricably bound and dependent upon access to citizenship. Analyses of citizenship practice remains, for the most part, conscripted to frameworks that posit citizenship-as identity on the one hand, and the subsequent emergence of citizenship-as-rights on the other. Belying these existing frameworks is a negotiation and re-negotiation of citizenship by individuals that inherently challenges them from within. This necessitates a paradigmatic shift from the top-down lens within which tawtin of Palestinians in Lebanon is presented, towards a bottom-up approach that explores the individuals’ agency in its conceptualization.
Telling terrorism tales: narrative identity and Homeland
Authors: Pears Louise
Published: September 2018

Drawing on narrative theory, this chapter bridges understandings of security, popular culture and identity to show how stories matter. It argues that television shows are a site where gendered, raced, and nationalised identities are narrated, and particular subjectivities created. It applies this critical narrative approach to an analysis of the television series Homeland, a popular drama that tracks the efforts of the CIA to thwart the latest terrorist threat to America. This analysis considers both the meaning within Homeland and the process of meaning-making by members of the show’s British audience; in doing so, it moves away from understanding audiences as passive consumers of ideological messages contained in texts, to understanding how audiences negotiate their understanding of the show and themselves. It also considers how these terrorism stories articulate gendered and racialized boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. This links security and identity, politics and culture, texts and audiences. Although it demonstrates the articulation of identity within security stories, it also draws attention to ways that audiences can resist those identities.
Right(s) from the ground up: internal displacement, the urban periphery and belonging to the city
Authors: Berents Helen
Published: September 2018

Often overlooked, internal displacement affects millions around the globe. Colombia’s protracted conflict, which has internally displaced approximately six million people (IDMC 2015a, 2015b), has embedded social exclusion and violence as features of everyday life for many Colombians who find themselves living in informal settlements on the urban periphery. Increasingly, connections between urban exclusion, insecurity and poverty can be read as a ‘violent’ failure of citizenship (Koonings and Kruijt 2007, 12) that negates the lived experience of those on the margins. This chapter contends that despite this negation those who struggle to survive make claims of the right to belong to (and in) the city through placing their bodies in public spaces as well as finding new articulations of place and belonging amongst the complexities of the everyday. Through exploring these acts this chapter asks how the internally displaced challenge established notions of the right to the city and are prompting alternative articulations of belonging.
Positive regard for difference without identity
Authors: Nicholas Lucy
Published: September 2018

The contact hypothesis has been the go-to social psychology concept for promoting better relations between unequal social groups since its inception in the context of ‘racial’ de-segregation in the USA. The idea that contact between groups reduces prejudice has been applied to a range of dominant / subordinate social groups such as ethnic groups, homo/heterosexuals, cis and trans people. This chapter will question whether the aims and premises of contact theory are still useful in the context of increasingly subtle and systemic biases and inequalities, and whether and how it might be usefully extended to relations between more complex identities than simple pre-defined oppositional ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups.  To do so, it considers some examples of intergroup othering using case studies pertaining to backlashes against gender, sexual and ethnic diversity in the contemporary Australian context. This chapter proposes the fruitful combination of queer ethics, post-tolerance political theory and the social psychology concept of ‘allophilia’ (love for the other) to move towards fostering ‘positive regard’ as an alternative way to tackle prejudice. It suggests that queer ethics can lend a convincing strategy here, which I call ‘reading queerly’, that is, being able to approach an other with an openness that neither homogenises nor subordinates difference.
Revisionism and the battle over Clause IV, 1951–63
Authors: Jobson Richard
Published: September 2018

This chapter assesses the political significance of Labour’s nostalgia in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period, leading revisionists within the party, including Hugh Gaitskell and Anthony Crosland, argued that Labour’s attachment to the past was negatively impacting on its electoral fortunes. They stated that Labour’s continued commitment to widespread public ownership (as envisaged in Clause IV of the party’s 1918 constitution) was the product of nostalgia for a bygone era and that it left the party out of touch with modern developments. This chapter shows that these claims contained a great deal of merit. More specifically, it demonstrates how the party’s resistance to Hugh Gaitskell’s attempt to revise Clause IV in 1959-60 was defined by its nostalgic impetus. Gaitskell’s failure in this area was indicative of the continued strength and resilience of the party’s nostalgia.
‘White heat’ and the Labour Party, 1963–70
Authors: Jobson Richard
Published: September 2018

This chapter identifies and analyses the ways in which Harold Wilson’s New Britain programme, frequently identified as the apex of modernity, was held back by the nostalgic opposition marshalled against it within the party. It argues that existing historical interpretations of the Labour Party between 1963 and 1970 as ‘progressive’ and ‘modernising’ require reconsideration and revaluation. From the outset, Labour’s rank- and-file members were generally suspicious of the ‘new’ scientific and technological age that Wilson outlined in his ‘White heat’ speech at Labour’s 1963 annual conference. A nostalgic attachment to the traditional industries of the past informed the party’s hostility to notions of change and modernity. As the 1960s wore on, the party membership’s nostalgic backlash against the 1964-70 Labour Governments’ domestic policies intensified. Nostalgia dictated the parameters within which the Labour leadership could operate. It shaped the options that were available to Wilson and his allies and forced them to make both rhetorical and substantive nostalgic concessions.
Labour’s Alternative Economic Strategy, 1970–83
Authors: Jobson Richard
Published: September 2018

The Labour Party’s Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) has typically been portrayed by both historians and political scientists as a modern and forward-looking strategy. In contrast, this article argues that there was a significant nostalgic dimension to the strategy. The AES, as advocated by important figures within Labour like Tony Benn, was understood by party members as a mechanism by which to preserve and restore the male-dominated traditional industries of the past. In turn, this historically orientated understanding shaped the programmatic commitments that were pursued by the party. Fighting the 1983 General Election on a political platform that was strongly influenced by nostalgia, Labour appeared out of touch with modern developments.
The New Labour era, 1992–2010
Authors: Jobson Richard
Published: September 2018

This chapter assesses the role played by nostalgia during the New Labour era. Building on the analysis presented in this book’s introduction, it outlines how Tony Blair and other leading New Labour figures were overtly hostile to nostalgia and attempted to overturn the party’s attachment to the past. Yet, whilst symbolic modernising changes were made (most notably to Clause IV of the party’s constitution in 1995), this chapter questions the totality of the anti-nostalgic reorientation that took place. It argues that, during this period, nostalgia was suppressed rather than eradicated. An underlying nostalgia continued to inform the party’s identity (particularly at a rank-and-file level where activists were unencumbered by the wider political and electoral considerations of the party’s leadership). Furthermore, when interacting with their party, New Labour élites were often forced to deploy nostalgia instrumentally in order both to increase their political capital and to secure their goals and objectives.
Back to the past? Labour’s return to opposition, 2010 to the present
Authors: Jobson Richard
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines Labour’s return to opposition after the 2010 General Election. It argues that, within the party, the period since 2010 has witnessed a nostalgic resurgence. When compared to the New Labour era, elite discourses have become less hostile to nostalgia. To varying degrees, all of the candidates in the 2010 leadership contest articulated memories associated with the party’s nostalgia-identity. Under Ed Miliband’s leadership, intraparty groups and movements that exhibited a sentimental attachment to the past grew in strength. Following Labour’s 2015 election defeat, Jeremy Corbyn obtained and consolidated his status as party leader by making nostalgic appeals to the past that resonated with party members. Within Labour, Corbyn’s political opponents have largely been forced onto his nostalgic terrain. Therefore, this chapter concludes by suggesting that, far from representing a ‘new kind of politics’, Corbynism represents an acute political manifestation of Labour’s historically orientated identity.
Reconstructing modernity
Authors: Greenhalgh James
Published: September 2018

Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.
Introduction
Authors: Greenhalgh James
Published: September 2018

[T]he only fitting tribute that could be paid to the devotion and courage of a brave people [is] to rebuild our City in a manner worthy of its citizens. … Few of us will see the completion of the plan. But may we point out the road to a destiny that will be not unworthy of the great victory that the heroism and faith of our people helped to secure....
Fantasies of urban futures
Authors: Greenhalgh James
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the origins of the post-war Plans as a means to interrogate a number of historical stereotypes about Britain after the Second World War. In 1945 Hull and Manchester, in common with many other British towns and cities, produced comprehensive, detailed redevelopment plans. These Plans were a spectacular mix of maps, representations of modern architecture and ambitious cityscapes that sit, sometimes uneasily, alongside detailed tables, text and photographs. Initially examining continuities between the inter- and post-war plans, the chapter emphasises the importance of the Plans in local governments’ attempts to express long-held desires to control and shape the city. I argue that the Plans evidence an attempt to mould the future shape and idea of the modern city through imaginative use of urban fantasy. Images of modernism, I argue, were not presented as a realisable architectural aim, but as a way of mediating between the present and an indistinct, but fundamentally better future. I suggest flawed interpretations of the visual materials contained in the Plans are responsible for an over-emphasis on the influence of radical modernism in post-war Britain.
Shinners, Dissos and Dissenters
Authors: Hoey Paddy
Published: September 2018

Newspapers, magazines and pamphlets have always been central, almost sacred, forms of communication within Irish republican political culture. While social media is becoming the primary ideological battleground in many democracies, Irish republicanism steadfastly expresses itself in the traditional forms of activist journalism. Shinners, Dissos and Dissenters is a long-term analysis of the development of Irish republican activist media since 1998 and the tumultuous years following the end of the Troubles. It is the first in-depth analysis of the newspapers, magazines and online spaces in which the differing strands of Irish republicanism developed and were articulated during a period where schism and dissent defined a return to violence. Based on an analysis of Irish republican media outlets as well as interviews with the key activists that produced them, this book provides a compelling long-term snapshot of a political ideology in transition. It reveals how Irish Republicanism was moulded by the twin forces of the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the violent internal ideological schism that threatened a return to the ‘bad old days’ of the Troubles. This book is vital for those studying Irish politics and those interested in activism as it provides new insights into the role that modern activist media forms have played in the ideological development of a 200-year-old political tradition.
A republican digital counterculture? Fourthwrite and the Blanket
Authors: Hoey Paddy
Published: September 2018

In the early 2000s, the Internet, the blogosphere and new online medias were said to have recreated and expanded the countercultural political uprisings of the late 1960s. The radicalism of the underground press, equality, anti-war and anti-colonial movements never quite managed the translate their counter-hegemonic activism into a dynamic restructuring of politics in the West. However, academics and activists saw potential in the Internet to offer a space with which to counter the narratives of political elites, capitalism, globalisation and the domination of western corporations. In Ireland, a group of writers, led by former republican prisoners, developed an activist media space that was critical of Sinn Féin, dissidents and the dominant narratives of the Peace Process. The print magazine Fourthwrite and the online magazine The Blanket, harnessed old and new technology to provide a sustained countercultural critique of their times. That they sustained themselves for much of the 2000s without a specific political vehicle or purpose while producing some of the most compelling and inclusive writing about the times is testament to the opportunities that technology provides for committed modern activists.
Epilogue: Brexit, the border and nationalism’s bounceback
Authors: Hoey Paddy
Published: September 2018

By the end of the 2010s, Sinn Féin was by far the strongest republican voice was rapidly building a stronger base in the Republic of Ireland where it had become the third largest party in the Dáil. But, the structures of the Peace Process and the Stormont Assembly meant that it was no further to significantly challenging of the political status quo in Northern Ireland. The vote for Brexit, based as it was on a binary notion of British sovereignty that had been fudged by the Good Friday Agreement, changed that. The nature of Britain’s exiting of the European Union had massive ramifications of the Irish border. With a majority of people in Northern Ireland voting to remain (with 85% of the nationalist population doing so), the unionist veto over the wishes of the wider population came under deeper scrutiny. For Sinn Féin, which had been a long-term critic of the EU, this provided an opportunity putting the border back on the agenda. For dissidents, they found themselves in the unlikely position of sharing the same political standpoint as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and, allegedly, the Queen.
The challenge of the sublime
Authors: Ibata Hélène
Published: September 2018

The challenge of the sublime argues that the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain could be seen as a response to theories of the sublime, more specifically to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). While it is widely accepted that the Enquiry contributed to shaping the thematics of terror that became fashionable in British art from the 1770s, this book contends that its influence was of even greater consequence, paradoxically because of Burke’s conviction that the visual arts were incapable of conveying the sublime. His argument that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting, because of the mimetic nature of visual representation, directly or indirectly incited visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and even new or undeveloped pictorial and graphic media, such as the panorama, book illustrations and capricci. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and the inadequacy of their endeavours, and thus drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. By revisiting the links between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and visual practices, The challenge of the sublime establishes new interdisciplinary connections which address researchers in the fields of art history, cultural studies and aesthetics.
Presenting the unpresentable: the modernity of Burke’s Enquiry
Authors: Ibata Hélène
Published: September 2018

Chapter 2 furthers the argument that Burke’s Enquiry presented a challenge to visual artists by focusing on its contribution to theories of artistic representation. It places Burke’s views on painting’s representational inadequacy within a broader reflection about the artistic medium, mimesis, and the presentation of the unpresentable. After arguing that the Enquiry outlines a shift from a mimetic conception of art to one which emphasises the artistic medium and, ultimately, the process of production of the artwork, the chapter examines the relevance of the Enquiry to modern aesthetics, by viewing it from the perspective of recent theories of the sublime (Lyotard’s in particular). This approach makes it possible to see in Burke’s conception intimations of what could be called an aesthetics of endeavour, in which the sublime becomes an immanent event of artistic production.
Reynolds, the great style and the Burkean sublime
Authors: Ibata Hélène
Published: September 2018

The chapter examines intellectual interactions between Burke and Reynolds and contrasts their conceptions of the sublime, in order to determine the extent of Burke’s influence on his friend. Reynolds’s own conception of the sublime is shown to be solidly anchored in the neoclassical tradition and its assimilation of the sublime to the ‘great style’ as well as to Michelangelo’s terribilità. Yet, one may discern ways in which the Enquiry’s irrationalism filtered into Reynolds’s own theory of art, which suggests that he played a part in mediating his friend’s aesthetics for the Royal Academy of Arts. Reynolds’s reconciliation of the neoclassical notion of the ‘great style’ with a new emphasis on imagination and intensity of affect is then understood as one of the first stages in the development of ‘Burkean’ academic productions, which flourished from the mid-1770s onwards.
Frames, edges and ‘unlimitation’
Authors: Ibata Hélène
Published: September 2018

This analysis looks at attempts to unlimit visual representation at its edges in the ‘minor’ media of book illustrations and landscape sketches. The unprecedented interest of Romantic artists for these marginal forms of visual expression allowed them to explore the liminal space between representation and its absence, in which were articulated the essential tensions of the sublime: the encounter between images of sense and the supersensible that exceeds them, as well as the transition from the beautiful to the sublime. Postmodern theory, especially through Jacques Derrida’s notion of parergonality and Jean-Luc Nancy’s definition of sublime ‘unlimitation’, makes it possible to see these transitional and unstable spaces as significant places of visual exploration, and to explain in what way they can be seen as a response to the challenge of the sublime. The argument first focuses on the enthusiasm of Romantic artists for book illustrations, which were used as a means to structure the work of art from within rather than from its edges, and further examples of ‘unlimitation’ are then provided by changing compositional practices in landscape painting, in connection with plein air sketching and the use of watercolour.
‘Sublime dreams’: ruin paintings and architectural fantasies
Authors: Ibata Hélène
Published: September 2018

This chapter argues that one of the most efficient strategies of visualisation of the sublime was found in ruin paintings and architectural fantasies, more specifically in the exploration of architectural fragments as a source of formal inventiveness and indeterminacy. The argument suggests that the capriccio genre, especially as it had been developed by Piranesi, provided a combination of irrationality, indeterminacy and boundlessness that made it possible to deny the figurative limitations of the visual arts, and addressed the formal issues that were raised by Burke’s Enquiry. As a result, it could be seen as a major influence on Romantic visual practices, in their quest for the sublime, as may be attested by the works of Joseph Gandy and J.M.W. Turner.
Against and beyond Burke: Blake’s ‘sublime Labours’
Authors: Ibata Hélène
Published: September 2018

Chapter 8 contends that Blake’s theory and practice of art define, against Burke, an original conception of the sublime as a dynamic process located within creative activity itself rather than an empirical experience founded on passive psychological and physiological responses to external sources of terror. It argues that this shift allows Blake to give a new significance to visual representation, which is no longer cut off from the sublime, but becomes a necessary process towards it. Blake’s prophetic cycle is read as a dramatisation of the incommensurability of Vision and sensible form, which articulates the predicament of the artist, caught between the necessity to present forms, and the awareness that material representation is the first step toward a fall from Vision. The necessity of artistic production prevails because, according to Blake, it is the energetic endeavour to produce forms which demonstrates the imaginative power of the artist, which in fact is sublime in itself. This is made manisfest by the artist’s emphasis on line, and the high degree of medium reflexivity in his illuminated books.
Centre-left parties and the European Union
Authors: Hertner Isabelle
Published: September 2018

Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book is about improving our understanding of political parties as democratic organisations in the context of multi-level governance. It analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on power dynamics, focusing on the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The purpose of this book is to investigate who within the three parties determines EU policies and selects EU specialists, such as the candidates for European parliamentary elections and EU spokespersons. The book utilises a principal-agent framework to investigate the delegation of power inside the three parties across multiple levels and faces. It draws on over 65 original interviews with EU experts from the three national parties and the Party of European Socialists (PES) and an e-mail questionnaire. This book reveals that European policy has largely remained in the hands of the party leadership. Its findings suggest that the party grassroots are interested in EU affairs, but that interest rarely translates into influence, as information asymmetry between the grassroots and the party leadership makes it very difficult for local activists to scrutinise elected politicians and to come up with their own policy proposals. As regards the selection of EU specialists, such as candidates for the European parliamentary elections, this book highlights that the parties’ processes are highly political, often informal, and in some cases, undemocratic.
The European policies of the Labour Party, the PS, and the SPD
Authors: Hertner Isabelle
Published: September 2018

Chapter 3 presents a broad overview of the Labour Party, the Parti Socialiste and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands’ positions on the European Union. First, based on Manifesto Project data, it maps the three parties’ overall degree of Europhilia. It argues that a description of the three centre-left parties as ardent Europhiles would be an exaggeration. Second, the chapter provides a short historical overview of the three parties’ relationships with the EU. It explains that in the immediate post-war years, the three parties were rather critical of the European Coal and Steel Community, but that from the 1960s onwards, they took different paths. Labour only started to unconditionally support EC membership in the mid-1980s, almost two decades after the PS and three decades after the SPD’s ‘conversion’ to European integration. Third, the chapter maps out and compares some of the three parties’ recent EU policies as well as their EU strategies. Due to differing and changing domestic circumstances, the three parties focused their attention on different EU policy areas. Overall, it becomes clear that the EU creates challenges for centre-left parties and that in government, social democrats find it difficult to realise their ambitions at the European level.
Centre-left parties and the European Union: what next?
Authors: Hertner Isabelle
Published: September 2018

This concluding chapter first summarises the key findings of this book. It states that European integration - as an external constraint - cannot be made solely responsible for the erosion of intra-party democracy. Rather, it argues that the three centre-left parties have (to varying degrees) missed the opportunity to adapt their organisations to this multi-level reality. Despite recent attempts by the leaderships of the three parties to empower the grassroots, for example through the use of referendums and policy consultations, deep and meaningful debates on the European Union remain rare. As a consequence, the broader party organisations lack EU-savvy and the means to scrutinise the leadership. The chapter then reflects on intra-party democracy, power dynamics and accountability inside the parties of the centre-left. It argues that assembly-based modes of decision-making are slower and more cumbersome, but more suitable than direct democracy, when it comes to EU matters. Last but not least, this chapter highlights the current challenges faced by the centre-left in Europe, such as the lack of a coherent EU narrative and the adoption of right-wing policies.
Nobility and patrimony in modern France
Authors: Macknight Elizabeth C.
Published: September 2018

Châteaux and landed estates, family portraits, names, titles and coats of arms are symbols of aristocratic identity and integral to the collective memory of nobility. In this study of tangible and intangible cultural heritage Elizabeth Macknight explains the significance of nobles’ conservationist traditions for public engagement with the history of France. During the French Revolution nobles’ property was seized, destroyed, or sold off by the nation. State intervention during the nineteenth century meant historic monuments became protected under law in the public interest. The Journées du Patrimoine, created in 1984 by the French Ministry for Culture, became a Europe-wide calendar event in 1991. Each year millions of French and international visitors enter residences and museums to admire France’s aristocratic cultural heritage. Drawing on archival evidence from across the country, Macknight presents a compelling account of power, interest and emotion in family dynamics and nobles’ relations with rural and urban communities.
Introduction
Authors: Macknight Elizabeth C.
Published: September 2018

Neither the frost nor the autumn rain brought damp into the houses that day. Beneath the jutting cliff that peered over the river Tarn the smell of smoke, so familiar to the villagers of La Malène, began to arouse fear. Armed men who had crossed into the department of Lozère from neighbouring Ardèche had drunk all of the wine in the village and slaughtered all of the pigs. Now this ‘band of assassins, known as the revolutionary army’ set out to destroy what remained. ‘They tied up our inconsolable women and subjected them to constant terror and mortal threat in front of the horrible spectacle of flames engulfing their homes.’ La Malène, inhabited by some eighty people, was razed on 4 November 1793. Those who survived the calamity described how ‘nothing was spared, neither our belongings, nor our livelihoods. Everything was reduced to ash.’...
Protecting property during revolution
Authors: Macknight Elizabeth C.
Published: September 2018

This chapter presents a wealth of new archival evidence on nobles’ actions and attitudes during the French Revolution. Various forms of property and evidence of ownership were destroyed or removed from nobles’ possession, which threatened nobles’ capacity to transmit economic, cultural, and symbolic capital to the next generation. Letters, wills, receipts, account books, certificates, passports, and petitions reveal how the effects of multiple decrees played out in personal and familial histories. For the nobility the rapid evolution of legislation meant that the consequences of any one revolutionary law became entangled with the consequences of another. Documentation of noblewomen’s experiences brings fresh insights and understanding to issues often over-looked in historical writing weighted toward aristocratic male military and political involvement.
Adoption for transmission
Authors: Macknight Elizabeth C.
Published: September 2018

In families where there was no male child to whom an aristocratic title could be transmitted nobles could pursue the adoption of another male to become the heir. Prior to the French Revolution the legal mechanism that nobles had relied upon was called substitution, which allowed for titles and other property to pass to collateral members of kin. In nineteenth-century France an act of adoption served in a similar way as a solution for the transfer of aristocratic patrimony. To understand the nobility’s recourse to this strategy the chapter examines revolutionary laws concerning family relationships in the areas of adoption and illegitimacy. It provides archival case studies of the application of the law with particular attention to the emotional ramifications in families where adoption occurred.
Incapacity and debt
Authors: Macknight Elizabeth C.
Published: September 2018

This chapter begins with the efforts to find a solution when an heir proved incapable of exercising responsibility for property affairs owing to a long-term illness or disability. Failure to address incapacity in an heir could jeopardise not only the individual’s patrimony but also the maintenance of the family’s economic, cultural, and social capital. Tutelle and curatelle were legal mechanisms for managing such situations and the chapter documents family decision-making in archival case studies. The second issue explored is the nature of aristocratic behaviour when financial debts strained or exhausted nobles’ control of economic capital. Causes of financial difficulties are analysed as well as the effects on health, moral attitudes surrounding borrowing, and the implications of chronic indebtedness for succession and family dynamics in modern France.
Initiatives for preservation and tourism
Authors: Macknight Elizabeth C.
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the interactions between nobles and various public bodies for the preservation of art, archives, and architectural heritage from the 1950s to the 2000s. It documents nobles’ communication with museum curators and archivists about the lending of items for exhibitions and about the donation or deposition of private archives for the State’s collections. Analysis of this correspondence sheds light on evolutions in twentieth-century attitudes toward patrimony, including the reasons that some items have been kept while others have been deliberately destroyed. The chapter shows how efforts to attract tourists to châteaux received increased stimulus and government support after the Second World War. Nobles in the twenty-first century remain closely involved in initiatives for heritage preservation via family networks and civic associations.
Conclusion
Authors: Macknight Elizabeth C.
Published: September 2018

This history opened with a record of the inhabitants of La Malène who in November 1793 looked around at the smouldering remains of their homes. Perhaps a few of those rural people speculated about the fate of the local noble family, the Brun de Montesquiou, when they saw the château de La Malène ablaze. It was impossible to know then whether noble landowners in Gévaudan or any other province might receive compensation for losses or recover property that had been confiscated owing to revolutionary reforms. War and economic problems rumbled on, but there were signs by 1800 that ‘after ten years of revolution, after its official suppression, the nobility still had another future’. Michel Figeac cautions against imposing chronological limits when viewing the evolution of the Second Estate. Reflecting on the ...
Frontiers of servitude
Authors: Harrigan Michael
Published: September 2018

Based on original research into little-examined printed and archival sources, this book explores the fundamental ideas behind early French thinking about Atlantic slavery by asking three central questions. What, in theoretical and social terms, did the condition of a slave mean? What was unique about using the human body in Caribbean labour, and what were the limits to this use? What can the strategic approaches described in interactions with slaves tell us about early slave society? Arguing that the social and cultural context of the Caribbean colonies from c. 1620-1750 was marked by considerable instability, this book explores the transformations in the theorisation and practice of slavery. Authoritative discourses were confronted with new cultures and environments, and the servitude thought to bring Africans to salvation was accompanied by continuing moral uncertainties. Slavery gave the most fundamental forms of ownership from labour up to time itself, but slaves were a troubling presence. Colonists were wary of what slaves knew and even hid from them, and were aware that the strategies used to control slaves were imperfect, and could even determine the behaviour of their masters. Commentators were conscious of the fragility of colonial society, with its social and ecological frontiers, its renegade slaves, and its population born to free fathers and slave mothers. Slavery, this book argues, was fundamentally, anti-social. With wide use of eye-witness accounts of slavery, this book will be of interest to specialists, and more general readers, interested in the history and literature of the early Atlantic and Caribbean.