bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How to do Queer Genealogy with J. S. Mill
Authors: Popa Bogdan
Published: September 2018

In this chapter I show that queer genealogy helps us rethink nineteenth-century feminist activism. By drawing on Judith Butler and Jacques Rancière’s ideas, I develop a conception of queer genealogy that mobilizes the performativity of shame to identify practices that challenge the police. The method of queer genealogy illuminates Mill’s unconventional relationship with Harriet Taylor as a creative intervention that disrupted Victorian sexual norms. In developing a genealogical method, I draw on Mill’s concept of experiments in living, which points to the sexual and affective value of relationships that take place outside marriage. Also, I investigate Mill’s use of silence as a politician and his deployment of humiliating language to resignify the shame associated with his sexual and political transgressions.
Performative Slurs: Political Rhetoric in Feminist Activism
Authors: Popa Bogdan
Published: September 2018

In this chapter I discuss performative slurs as a tactic deployed by feminist activists in England in the 19th century. During debates about the Contagious Diseases Acts in England, feminists’ radical and humiliating rhetoric resignified exclusionary political conventions such as prostitution laws and prohibitions against voting. While Josephine Butler chastised upper-class men who were part of the political elite for being hypocrites and sadistic villains, Mill used shaming and humiliation strategically in his articles and public interventions. Humiliating language can be a radical democratic act when it represents a risky intervention that imagines new possibilities of living for sex and gender marginals.
Does Queer Political Theory Have a Future?
Authors: Popa Bogdan
Published: September 2018

In this final chapter I reflect upon the possibilities unleashed by recent scholarship in queer political theory. First, I discuss the future of queer political thinking by insisting that the act of interpretation has to draw on how one becomes both irritated by and surprised by scholarly arguments. As an affective practice, irritation offers the incentive to challenge what is already known while the surprise opens up a new territory for investigation. Second, to enact my interpretative method, I critically engage with the work of Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lauren Berlant to argue that queer practices can articulate an equality-oriented vision of politics.
Introduction
Authors: Caughie John , Griffiths Trevor , Vélez-Serna María A.
Published: September 2018

Cinema history has tended to be defined by metropolitan cultures and dominant nations. This introduction and the chapters that follow challenges that view. At a theoretical level, it engages with questions raised by what is now known as ‘new cinema history’ with its focus on issues of the social experience of cinema and its formative institutions. At the same time, it argues that a history of national representations is part of the social history of the experience of cinema At a methodological level, it addresses the challenges of historical digital humanities, of data gathering and of mapping early cinema. The introduction offers an overview of the particularities of early Scottish cinema, and suggests the importance for international cinema history of a more sophisticated understanding of cinema in small towns and small countries.
Depicting Scotland: Scotland in Early Films
Authors: Caughie John
Published: September 2018

This chapter by John Caughie addresses both fiction and non-fiction films, dealing with scenics made by international companies, and with the ways in which Scotland was represented in international feature cinema. Particular attention is given to the mapping of scenics and their relation to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel literature. With regard to the feature film, it follows the traditions of Scott and romanticism, the movement in the 1920s towards Barrie and domestic melodrama, and the perennial return to the comic characters of Scottish music hall. The chapter addresses the question of how it came to be that a country without its own film industry nevertheless secured a place in the international cinematic imaginary.
The Talkies Triumphant: Scottish Cinema and the Coming of Sound
Authors: Griffiths Trevor
Published: September 2018

A concluding chapter by Trevor Griffiths considers the end of the ‘early period’ and the effects on cinema production and cinema-going of the arrival of sound. The emergence of sound cinema raised fundamental questions about how film was presented to audiences, exposing to view many practices in the silent era, which more often than not pass without comment. The factors, both supply- and demand-driven, promoting the adoption of sound by Scottish exhibitors are considered through analysis of the trade press and associated business records and the chapter examines the pace and extent of the diffusion of sound exhibition from the end of the 1920s, tracing its spread across both metropolitan and small-town Scotland, consolidating the emphasis of preceding chapters.
Filmography of Scottish-themed Fiction Films
Authors: Caughie John
Published: September 2018

A comprehensive filmography of Scottish produced and internationally produced films with significant Scottish themes or characters from 1896 to 1927. The filmography, compiled by John Caughie, is based on reviews and synopses in the main British and American trade journals, and is annotated with trade commentary to indicate how the trade perceived the ‘Scottishness’ of the films.
The US and Brokering Republican Moderation
Authors: Whiting Matthew
Published: September 2018

This chapter argues that in order for moderation through institutional inclusion to take full hold, it was necessary for the US to act as a powerful external broker throughout the negotiations of the Belfast Agreement and during the consolidation of republican moderation. This brokering was short and targeted, not of relevance in the early stages of republican moderation and only mattered during the formal peace process phase and its implementation. The US provided a series of credible guarantees to republicans that their interests would be protected and given fair representation when entering a bargain with the more powerful British state. It also provided a series of incentives (funding, investment, access to powerful allies) and disincentives (the threat of removing the incentives, political marginalisation) that encouraged republicans to increase their engagement. This was important not only in persuading republicans to sign the Belfast Agreement in 1998 but also in persuading the IRA to eventually decommission its weapons some seven years later.
Mary and George Watts
Authors: Rose Lucy Ella
Published: September 2018

Chapters 1 and 2 explore the Wattses’ and the De Morgans’ progressive socio-political positions as suffragist artists who actively supported and promoted the women’s suffrage movement that gained momentum over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows how they achieved this through their anti-patriarchal conjugal creative partnerships; their professional creative practices; their involvement in suffrage societies and women’s culture; and their works privileging female struggle, power and freedom. Chapter 1 focuses on Mary and George Watts. It explores the feminist dynamics of the couple’s conjugal creative partnership, their professional creative practices, and the ways in which they supported the women’s suffrage movement and women’s liberation more generally. Most notably, Mary Watts convened suffrage meetings at the Wattses’ Surrey studio-home, while George Watts was close friends with – and his art was a source of inspiration for – early feminists.
Self/Portraits
Authors: Rose Lucy Ella
Published: September 2018

Chapter 3 presents alternative visions of these neglected Victorian figures – the Wattses and the De Morgans – through an analysis of their self/portraits. It explores the Wattses’ and the De Morgans’ self-portraits and portraits of each other as well as of their famous contemporaries in order to examine the construction of artistic identities, the gender-role inversion within creative partnerships, and the self-fashioning of suffragists. It explores public and private self/portraits (that is, self-portraits and/or portraits) in the form of neglected paintings, sketches and photographs in which images and perceptions of these figures as individuals and as couples are built. It also compares the Wattses’ and the De Morgans’ self/portraits with those of their contemporaries, placing them in a wider context to reveal their standpoints and focuses. It explores the gender politics of portraiture and shows how their self/portraits fit into the tradition of Victorian portraiture.
Women Artists’ Diaries
Authors: Rose Lucy Ella
Published: September 2018

Chapter 4 considers the diaries of Mary Watts and Evelyn De Morgan in conjunction and in relation to their emerging political positions. It includes an analysis of the author’s transcriptions of Mary’s diaries and of Evelyn’s diary, bringing to light previously unseen archival material in order to assist the recovery and revival of women’s marginalised life writing. A reading of Mary’s multiple, detailed diaries informs a reading of Evelyn’s relatively short, single diary, and the significance of the latter is highlighted through comparison with the former. The author aims to show how these women artists’ narratives, views and voices relate to each other and to other women’s diaries and life writing of the period, challenging traditional assumptions about these women as well as ideological assumptions about Victorian women writers.
The Metamorphic Mermaid in Fairy Tales and Feminism
Authors: Rose Lucy Ella
Published: September 2018

Chapter 7 explores Evelyn’s series of Symbolist paintings based on Hans Christian Andersen’s popular fairytale ‘The Little Mermaid’ in relation to early and more recent feminism, and shows how she employed the metamorphic mermaid as a model for socio-political transformation from captivity to liberty. Her paintings are compared with contemporary literary and visual texts in order to show how her work, often positioned in relation to male Pre-Raphaelite artists, dialogised with early feminist iconography. Chapters 6 and 7 reveal George Watts’s and Evelyn De Morgan’s statuses as suffragist poet-painters and/or narrative painters who re-presented women to promote socio-political reform.
Metaphorical Recurrence and Language Symbolism in Arabic Metalanguage Discourse
Authors: Lian Chaoqun
Published: September 2018

This article, written by Chaoqun Lian, begins by pointing out that in Arabic metalanguage discourse one often encounters metaphors associating the form and situation of Arabic to non-linguistic entities and activities. Many of these metaphors, according to Lian, belong to ‘organic metaphors’, as they depict Arabic and its varieties as living organisms. In his article, Lian investigates the recurrence of ‘organic metaphors’ in language policy discussions within the Arabic language academies in Damascus and Cairo. By carefully analysing selected cases of metaphor-making, Lian unearths the normally covert link between language perception and socio-political circumstances in the Arabic-speaking world. According to Lian, when these socio-political circumstances are taken into consideration, academic research will be able to produce a more nuanced, dialectic understanding of the ‘organic’ perception of languages.
‘Arabic is Under Threat’: Language Anxiety as a Discourse on Identity and Conflict
Authors: Abdelhay Ashraf , Makoni Sinfree
Published: September 2018

This article, jointly written by Ashraf Abdelhay and Sinfree Makoni, lays out a series of critical reflections on the discourses of language anxiety that characterise Arabic as a ‘threatened language’. Examining Arabic as a site of social contestation in the Sudan, Abdelhay and Makoni analyse three statements that express a specific set of ideas and social attitudes about language, identity and society. The first statement was made at a rally by President Bashir a few weeks before the southern referendum held in 2011. The second statement comes from an article written by the Sudanese journalist Hussein Khojali. Finally, the third statement is a metalinguistic commentary made by the late South Sudanese leader John Garang de Mabior. Despite the different contexts surrounding their statements and the differences between them, Abdelhay and Makoni demonstrate that all three statements are metalinguistic commentaries which bring language to the fore as a proxy for articulating wider social and political concerns. All statements are ideological; they all link language with the extra-linguistic world of identity politics and power. The authors thus conclude that in contexts of conflict, individuals display awareness of the indexical values of language, ‘and they exploit the symbolism of language to articulate social and political issues’.
The Literary Norm
Authors: Lunde Ingunn
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses the new and changing conditions for linguistic norms in literary fiction of the post-Soviet era. In particular, it looks at how the interrelationship between the language of literature (iazyk literatury) and the standard language (literaturnyi iazyk) has been challenged by several processes of sociolinguistic change, including initiatives in language policy.
Language, Time and Linguistic Dystopia
Authors: Lunde Ingunn
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores how Russian prose writers create fictional representations of a past, or a future, where language emerges as an essential theme. It offers close readings of two works, one portraying a fictional future for Russian – Tat’iana Tolstaia’s 2000 novel Kys’ (The Slynx), and one diving into the language’s past – Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Lavr (Laurus, 2012). The analysis shows how both authors challenge the standard language by stretching its potential and including a wealth of elements taken from non-standard varieties and older forms. Whereas Tolstaia’s novel depicts a brutal, destructive world of linguistic dystopia with, or so it would seem, no real past and no future, Vodolazkin’s text presents a smoothly created linguistic amalgam characterised by flexibility and multifunctionality. The chapter discusses the linguistic attitudes implied in the two approaches and their relevance to the post-Soviet language debates.
Language Ideologies and Society
Authors: Lunde Ingunn
Published: September 2018

This chapter offers readings of two recent Russian novels, Valerii Votrin’s Logoped (The Speech Therapist, 2012) and Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Zakhvat Moskovii: natsional-lingvisticheskii roman (The Occupation of Muscovy: a national-linguistic novel, 2012). Votrin represents a linguistic dystopia governed by strict orthoepic norms. The story is told through the portrayal of two persons, a speech therapist representing the authorities, and a journalist, expelled for his oppositional views. Gigolashvili’s novel tells about a young German student of Russian and his encounter with the grammar nazi movement, a group of self-appointed language mavens who monitor, expose and ridicule linguistic liberties and orthographic errors in highly aggressive ways. Both novels can be read as responses to language legislation and language cultivation, highly topical issues in present-day Russian language culture.
Towards a Theory of Performative Metalanguage
Authors: Lunde Ingunn
Published: September 2018

The book’s conclusion discusses the findings of Parts three and four and their implications for a general theory of what this book proposes to call performative metalanguage. Arguing that literary works may contain a metalinguistic dimension and intention, we maintain that a theory of performative metalanguage helps us understand this particular form of linguistic commentary, mapping out ways in which we can identify and assess such reflection.
Shortness of Breath: Beckett’s Breath in Context
Authors: Goudouna Sozita
Published: September 2018

The chapter examines the ways artists and directors have staged Breath. The “stagings” or “displays” of the playlet are examined in an attempt to show how artists and directors have responded to Breath's intermedial structure. The presence of the human body in certain of these works, is in contrast to Beckett's central decision to eradicate the body/subject from the stage. Consequently, these art works disregard (fail to see) the existential and ontological importance of Beckett's decision to eradicate the figure of the performer by presenting the “absence” of the human subject.
Emptied of Theatre: Breath and the Phenomenology of Disembodiment
Authors: Goudouna Sozita
Published: September 2018

The fourth chapter examines the variety of means that Beckett applies so as to generate that lack of the subject. The evasion of figuration, the withdrawal from representation and the abeyance of the mimetic are related facets of Beckett’s method of representational reduction. The chapter examines the de-centred field of subjectivity and its polysemous modes of absence and presence and argues that Breath is intrinsically intermedial given that is operates in-between presence and absence/emptiness, in-between embodiment and ambiguity of corporeal experience. Intermediality is traced in the context of the quasi-generic and inter-generic features of Beckett’s late style in the theatre, the de-centred field of subjectivity and its polysemous modes of absence and presence.
British Multiculturalism and the Politics of Representation
Authors: Thomassen Lasse
Published: September 2018

What is the connection between inclusion, exclusion and identity? This book argues that the politics of inclusion and identity should be studied as struggles over the representations of the identities involved. The book engages with a range of debates and themes including Britishness, race, the nature and role of Islam in British society, homelessness and social justice, and it adopts a post-structuralist approach to the theoretical and practical issues surrounding inclusion, exclusion and identity. The argument is developed through careful analyses of cases from the last four decades of British multiculturalism. Each chapter deals with a concept and practice of inclusion: equality, recognition, tolerance and hospitality. Each chapter also deals with one or more cases: Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s different versions of Britishness, the legal case Mandla; the debate between Bhikhu Parekh and Brian Barry; newspaper coverage and debates about Begum, X v Y, Playfoot and Watkins-Singh, which all concerned school uniforms and religious symbols and clothing; and Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good. The book makes a contribution to empirical debates about the nature of British multiculturalism as well as theoretical debates about inclusion, identity and representation. It is informed by post-structuralist political theory, particularly Ernesto Laclau’s theory of discourse and hegemony and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction.
Conclusion: Multiculturalism, Britishness and Muscular Liberalism
Authors: Thomassen Lasse
Published: September 2018

The Conclusion looks at David Cameron and his speeches on terrorism, immigration, liberalism and Britishness to illustrate the points made throughout the book. Together the analyses and discussions of the book serve to show that there is no inclusion without exclusion, that inclusion and exclusion are intrinsically linked to identity, and that, since identities are constituted at the level of representation, we need to analyse identity and inclusion in terms of the politics of representation. What we must examine when examining identity and inclusion is, then, which and whose representations come to dominate, and how identity and lines of inclusion and exclusion are articulated.
Introduction
Authors: Paganelli Maria Pia , Rasmussen Dennis C. , Smith Craig
Published: September 2018

The introduction includes details of the biographical, historical, and intellectual context of the relationship between Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It places the chapters that follow in the proper intellectual context allowing the reader to immerse themselves in the detailed arguments of each chapter with a ready sense of the broad parameters of the relationship and ideas in question. The introduction also provides a brief account of the existing literature on the relationship between Smith and Rousseau, and ends with an introduction to the chapters, their main themes, and the relationship between them.
The Role of Interpersonal Comparisons in Moral Learning and the Sources of Recognition Respect: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s amour-propre and Adam Smith’s Sympathy
Authors: Fricke Christel
Published: September 2018

I inquire into Rousseau’s and Smith’s views on moral psychology and on the role of interaction for people’s moral development. The question is whether Smith’s account of sympathy and the origin of people’s respect for others as their equals (recognition respect) was inspired by Rousseau’s pitié and amour-propre. I answer this question in the negative and argue that Smith proposed a more optimistic account of the possible effects of human interaction than Rousseau did. According to Rousseau, interpersonal comparisons feed our amour-propre, the wish to be admired by others; for our moral development, amour-propre has a destructive effect. And this effect is enforced in the framework of a society that imposes serious socio-economic differences on its members. While Smith was not blind to the moral challenges arising from socio-economic inequalities and the misery of the poor, he argued that sympathy-guided human interaction was crucial for a person’s moral development. Without entering into sympathetic processes with others, people cannot learn to judge moral matters from the point of view of impartial spectators.
Actors and Spectators: Rousseau’s Contribution to the Eighteenth-century Debate on Self-interest
Authors: Hill Mark J.
Published: September 2018

A debate between virtuous self-interest and social morality emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The historical narrative of these ideas has been touched on by others – such as Albert O. Hirschman, Pierre Force, and Eric MacGilvray – with nuance and detail, but broadly one can recognize two camps: those who saw public utility in self-interest through the positive externalities of commerce, and those who had serious concerns over the political outcomes of the entanglement of commerce and virtue. This chapter follows these studies and attempts to locate Rousseau (primarily) and Smith (secondarily) within this debate. By looking at how their particular moral philosophies interact with their political thought it is argued that Rousseau is distinct from Smith in an important, but often confused, way: while some have argued that Rousseau is a moralist and Smith a philosopher of the political and social value of self-interest, it will be argued here that the opposite may be true. That is, despite Rousseau's “general will” and Smith's “impartial spectator” having been identified as similar moral tools used to overcome the negative aspects of self-interest through externalized self-reflection, it is argued that Rousseau is a moral rationalist who is skeptical of reason as a moral motivator, and thus dismisses the general will as a tool which can encourage personal moral action, while Smith is a moral realist, but a particularly soft one in regard to the motivational force of morality, and instead turns to rationality – through the impartial spectator – as a source of moral action. The upshot of this distinction being, Rousseau does not deny the power of commerce and self-interest as motivational forces, simply their social utility; social institutions like English coffeehouses – centres of politeness and doux commerce – should exist, and self-interest should motivate, but both need to be cleansed of the vice of commerce. That is, this chapter argues that Smith is moral realist who relies on reason – specifically that one must be a spectator who can impartially and rationally reflect on situations in order to will moral ends – and Rousseau is a moral rationalist who relies on sentiment – one must have an interest in situations if they are to be a moral actor.
Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Vices of the Marketplace
Authors: Schleeter Michael
Published: September 2018

In this chapter, I want to accomplish two main tasks. First, I want to outline Smith's views on the marketplace and its potential to contribute to the erosion of both natural sympathy and social virtue as well as his suggestions for how these negative effects can and should be mitigated. Second, I want to supplement Smith's suggestions for the latter by contrasting his views on sympathy and virtue with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's views on compassion and virtue as they are developed in his Emile or On Education. In particular, I want to supplement Smith’s suggestions by contrasting his view that self-interest must be tempered by sympathy and virtue with Rousseau's view that self-interest or, more precisely, amour-propre must be sublimated into compassion and virtue through a process of careful habituation, and then by indicating how Rousseau’s view on the latter might impact Smith's vision of proper education.
‘Savage Patriotism’, Justice and Cosmopolitics in Smith and Rousseau
Authors: Saccamano Neil
Published: September 2018

The chapter investigates the problematical status of international relations in both Rousseau and Smith. In Rousseau, I highlight moments when he offers a critique of the pre-reflective character of pity and affirms the possibility of a cosmopolitics. For Rousseau, despite his repeated dismissal of deracinated cosmopolitans, the supposedly impossible politics of humanity becomes conceivable if one accepts that "law comes before justice" and that, despite the premise of the patriot as the enemy of humankind, the "State gives us an idea" of a "general Society" (Geneva Manuscript).
Like Rousseau, Smith asserts that there is no natural affection for "a great society of mankind," but only love of our own country based on the contingencies of place, custom, habit; yet this love of country is also partiality, prejudice, and hence injustice. In contrast to Rousseau, Smith remains with the unjust nation-state as the condition of moral practice and dismisses international relations as a sacrifice of one's self-interest and identity--which is "the business of God, not man."
Introduction
Authors: Radner Hilary
Published: September 2018

This brief introduction offers an outline of the purpose and scope of the volume, which provides a synthetic overview of the work of a scholar characterized by a subtle and complex engagement with, and analysis of, cinema and moving-image installation art that takes place over a fifty-year span, addressing a massive list of films and artworks. It establishes that the goal of the book is not simply to summarize this oeuvre, but to offer “un passage,” a point of entry into the perspectives of this scholar, showing how they shifted and developed over many years.
Film Analysis: Image and Movement
Authors: Radner Hilary , Fox Alistair
Published: September 2018

This chapter assesses Raymond Bellour’s contribution to the area of research known as “film analysis,” arguing that it is best understood as an “art” rather than a scientific practice. Grounded in the French tradition of “explication du texte” as a means of approaching literature, Bellour was among the first film scholars to bring a French literary sensibility to the analysis of Classical Hollywood film, which enabled him to recognize the rhetorical refinements of the cinematic medium and its potential for poetic expression. The chapter explores the significant concepts that define Bellour’s approach: segmentation; “the unattainable text” (also referred to as “the undiscoverable text” or “le texte introuvable”); le blocage symbolique (also referred to as “the symbolic blockage”);“the textual volume”; Hitchcock and psychoanalysis; and enunciation.
The Digital Challenge: From the Theater to the Gallery
Authors: Radner Hilary , Fox Alistair
Published: September 2018

This chapter demonstrates how Bellour’s work on video art (or what was later termed moving-image installation art), while a product of his own preoccupations, is situated firmly within more general speculations about spectatorship. Confronting this new medium, or media, as it turned out, Bellour introduced the notion of “le spectateur pensif,” the pensive spectator, or the spectator engaged in thought – who is not an entirely rational spectator, nor one who is completely sutured into the narrative as some scholars felt was the case with the spectator of classical cinema. He also sees the emergence of new relations between images which he calls “l’entre-images,” the between-images, complicating his initial ideas about the “défilement,” a concept, at least initially, referred to the movement of the celluloid print through the projector’s mechanism and the filing past of the cinema images in front of the spectator. In this same period, Bellour, along with film critics such as Serge Daney and filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, began to speculate about the death of cinema due to the changing situations (or dispositifs) in which the spectator encounters the moving image. An important influence on his thinking as this time was the film theorist turned video artist Thierry Kuntzel.
Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality
Authors: Radner Hilary , Fox Alistair
Published: September 2018

In this section of the interview, Raymond Bellour explains why he thinks hypnosis is superior as a model for explaining the effects of cinema, on the grounds that it involves a somatic displacement that comes from outside the spectator. At the same time, he explains his objections to cognitivist film theory. Finally, Bellour recounts how his interest in animals, which began in the 1970s, derived from his perception of the way in which animal figures were being used in American cinema in films like Howard Hawks’s Bringing up Baby and Monkey Business and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, which in turn led him to consider the issue of animality itself.
Raymond Bellour (1939– ): A Biographical Sketch
Authors: Radner Hilary , Fox Alistair
Published: September 2018

This section includes a biographical sketch of Raymond Bellour, which lists his major publications, and an annotated bibliography of his major works. The biographical sketch is designed to give an outline of the intellectual and cultural factors that shaped Bellour’s preoccupations, the range of his interests, and the course of his career. Apart from the articles reprinted in The Analysis of Film and Between-the-Images, the vast majority of Bellour’s books and articles have been published in French only, and hence are unavailable to readers who are unable to read them in that language. The annotated bibliography provides a brief abstract of each work so as to provide the reader with a sense of the evolution and topography of Bellour’s thought on particular issues. Bellour’s articles that have been subsequently reprinted grouped in his books are arranged according to the book in which they appear, and are presented in chronological order. The listings can thus serve as a guide to specific topics and works discussed in the books, even for readers who are not able to read French. The bibliography also includes a list of articles in English not otherwise republished in Bellour’s books, of miscellaneous articles, and of supplementary interviews.
Introduction: Jonson and Comedy
Authors: Hui Isaac
Published: September 2018

The introductory chapter gives a preliminary reading of Act 1 scene 2 of Volpone, suggesting how it was often neglected by many early modern scholars. The phenomenon reflects the traditional tendency of reading the dramatist from a moral perspective. It discusses the concept of bastardy through plays such as The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing. This chapter suggests that modern literary and cultural theories can help us understand Jonson in a different light.
Jonson’s Comedy of Bastardy
Authors: Hui Isaac
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses how the comedy of bastardy can be seen in The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, examining how Jonson plays on the tension between possession and dispossession, and the ambiguity between folly and madness. While Jonson makes fun of the city ‘professionals’, and to be possessed is to be melancholic; to be a fool, for him, is a liberation. The city helps to create and construct different identities. In his article ‘Jonson’s Metempsychosis’, Harry Levin suggests that ‘Possibly Mosca’s interlude was written before the rest of the play, like the puppet-show in Bartholomew Fair.’ The second part of this chapter develops from this suggestion, examining the similarities and differences between the two scenes and their importance in the two plays. It argues how the puppet embodies the characteristics of Volpone’s bastards.
Conclusion: ‘Fools, they are the only nation’: Rereading the Interlude and Beyond
Authors: Hui Isaac
Published: September 2018

This concluding chapter re-examines Jonson’s thinking of metempsychosis based on the previous discussion of Volpone’s bastards. While metempsychosis is usually referred to as the transmigration of souls, the idea in Volpone can be carnivalesque and is full of slippage and deferral. Using Sontag’s concept of Camp, it argues how the interlude represents a celebration of an epicene style. Finally, this chapter discusses the idea of Jonson’s comedies as lack with other early modern city comedies and modern film comedies, with a particular focus on Middleton (for plays such as A Mad World, My Masters and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, with the comparison of cuckold and wittol for instance), and attempts to think about bastardy as a multivalent trope to discuss the city, capitalism and comedy (including modern film comedy) and jokes themselves as improper, bastard forms of utterance.
The American Short Story Cycle
Authors: Smith Jennifer J.
Published: September 2018

The American Short Story Cycle spans two centuries to tell the history of a genre that includes major and marginal authors, from Washington Irving through William Faulkner to Jhumpa Lahiri. The short story cycle rose and proliferated because its form compellingly renders the uncertainties that emerge from the twin pillars of modern America culture: individualism and pluralism. Short story cycles reflect how individuals adapt to change, whether it is the railroad coming to the small town in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) or social media revolutionizing language in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Each chapter examines how cycles use temporal and spatial settings and characterization to link the stories within. Doing so reveals that authors turn to the cycle when exploring identities—be they gendered or ethnic—in flux and when experimenting with the conventions of narrative unity, from regionalist through modernist to contemporary writers. This book constructs a history of community, family, and time in American culture through one of the nation’s most popular, yet unrecognized genres. Combining new formalism in literary criticism with scholarship in American Studies, this book gives a name and theory to the genre that has fostered the aesthetics of fragmentation, as well as recurrence, that characterize fiction today.
Forming Provisional Identities
Authors: Smith Jennifer J.
Published: September 2018

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.
Locating the Short Story Cycle
Authors: Smith Jennifer J.
Published: September 2018

This chapter corrects the long-held assumption that the form began with modernist blockbusters and instead suggests that modernist writers revised a vibrant regionalist tradition to their own uses. It trace the development of the cycle from a regionalist tradition often marked by an attention to the experiences of women and those living on the fringes of America. Nineteenth-century village sketch narratives, such as Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who'll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839), served to incorporate towns, distanced from cultural centers, into the national imaginary. These cycles depend upon the construction of a restricted geographic terrain to contain and ground the narratives; in other words, they stake out “limited locality” to encompass the stories. Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) continue to question the extent to which geographic proximity produces communal affiliation, which is often imagined as an antidote to the poisons of industrialization.
Tracing New Genealogies
Authors: Smith Jennifer J.
Published: September 2018

Chapter four turns to a more intimate form of affiliation than either nation or community: family. The period from the 1970s onward has produced the greatest concentration of cycles since modernism, because writers embraced the cycle to express the contingency of being ethnic and American. Family, rather than community or time, is the dominant linking structure for many of these cycles, reflecting how immigration laws placed family and education above country of origin. This chapter focuses on the role of family in the production and reception of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), Julie Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (2008). These cycles argue that subjectivity—and by extension gender and ethnic attachments—derives not only from biological relationships but also from “formative kinship,” which originates in shared experiences that the characters choose to value.
Short Films from a Small Nation
Authors: Thomson C. Claire
Published: September 2018

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.
Introduction
Authors: Thomson C. Claire
Published: September 2018

This chapter introduces the phenomenon of informational filmmaking in Denmark, giving an overview of the purpose, scope and reach of the body of films in question. It outlines the approach to the case studies, explaining that the book is not a history of the state-sponsored film in Denmark, but a series of case studies examining the commissioning, production, distribution, exhibition and reception of a representative sample of the films made under the auspices of Dansk Kulturfilm. A chapter-by-chapter outline of the book is also provided.
Enlightenment and Utility: Informational Film as Useful Cinema
Authors: Thomson C. Claire
Published: September 2018

This chapter outlines recent scholarly work on film made for purposes other than entertainment: to persuade, instruct and inform. Throughout the history of the moving image, governments, businesses and other interest groups have used film to educate their workers and the public, establishing networks and mechanisms to produce, screen and distribute predominantly short and narrow-gauge films, often on an international scale, and outside the theatrical cinema circuit. Such filmmaking has been termed ‘useful cinema’; this chapter explains how and why scholarly interest in the phenomenon has increased since the late 2000s, discusses the taxonomy of its various sub-genres, and outlines emerging research methodologies. The chapter also situates Danish informational film within this critical and historical framework. A brief outline is provided of the Danish institutions involved in producing and distributing informational cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s, including Dansk Kuturfilm and Ministeriernes Filmudvalg, covering extant scholarship in the field, and the relationship of the commissioned film and the state.
Mapping Messiness: The Informational Film Archive and Actor-Network Theory
Authors: Thomson C. Claire
Published: September 2018

This chapter offers Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a toolkit for analysing the often messy and complex networks and relationships involved in the production and distribution of useful cinema. Stressing that ANT is employed in the book as a way of thinking rather than as an explicit framework, the chapter briefly outlines the key principles of ANT and relates them to documentary and informational filmmaking. In particular, the chapter discusses the potential of ANT for rendering visible or audible the many non-human actors in any instance of filmmaking, and for revealing how facts are constructed in documentary and related genres. The institutions, individuals, networks, technologies and other actors involved in mid-twentieth-century Danish informational filmmaking are then mapped. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of the archive and the researcher in the network of any given film, explaining how contemporary archival practices, especially digital technologies, are creating new dispositifs for historical informational film.
Introduction
Authors: Bettinson Gary , Martin Daniel
Published: September 2018

This introduction to Hong Kong Horror Cinema introduces Hong Kong horror from a variety of perspectives, charting the history and development of the genre and citing key films and filmmakers; it puts Hong Kong horror in the context of East Asian horror more broadly, discussing some of the cultural specificities of Hong Kong horror that differentiate it from the popular and historical horror cycles from Japan, South Korea, Thailand and China; it provides a brief overview of horror studies within the field of academic theory, and suggests ways in which Hong Kong horror films can contribute new perspectives to these well-rehearsed arguments. A brief survey of literature covers the major related works from the fields of Hong Kong cinema and horror film history, and in doing so, makes a case for the importance, timeliness and originality of this anthology. The introduction also includes a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Hong Kong Horror Cinema, explaining the division of chapters into sections and drawing pertinent connections between the varied studies that follow.
From Killer Snakes to Taxi Hunters: Hong Kong Horror in an Exploitation Context
Authors: Willis Andy
Published: September 2018

From the Shaw Brothers production line to the clones of Bruce Lee, Hong Kong cinema has long been seen as driven by raw commercial concerns. Like many other commercial film industries, most notably Hollywood, production in the Hong Kong film industry has also been focused on popular cycles of production. These have included phases when family melodramas, historical swordplay and kung-fu films, screwball comedies and triad based crime films have all proved successful at the domestic and regional box-office. As with other commercially focused film industries there has also been a low budget sector within Hong Kong industry. Here producers and directors have fashioned energetic, populist films that were designed to appeal to audiences’ desire for films that contained sex and violence. The horror genre seemed the perfect vehicle to satiate these needs. This chapter explores the work of filmmakers who worked at this rougher end of Hong Kong horror in the 80s and 90s. As well as placing them into this exploitation context of production, this chapter discusses their excessive content and the visual style employed by directors such as Kuei Chih-hung (Killer Snakes, Hex) and Herman Yau (The Untold Story, Ebola Syndrome) to deliver their exploitative content.
Hands, Fingers and Fists: ‘Grasping’ Hong Kong Horror Films
Authors: Diffrient David Scott
Published: September 2018

The cultural imaginary of kung-fu cinema has been codified as a physically balletic and graceful, if also violently bloody and brutal, genre defined in part by the persistent presence of deadly, thrusting hands. Of course, hands are also central to another type of cultural production, one that has often incorporated kung-fu action and iconography. This chapter assesses a broad range of motion pictures that showcase hands in thematically complex and symptomatically relevant ways, be they the severed anatomical remnants of long- departed souls sprung back to life in Witch from Nepal (1986) or the skeletal appendages that comically grab the protagonist’s crotch in Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980). This chapter strives to pin down the powerful forces that lay dormant within the genre, including its tendency to dredge up and display moments of excessive, otherwordly violence for which there is seemingly no “rational” explanation.
Cross-border Implications: Transnational Haunting, Gender and the Persistent Look of The Eye
Authors: Ibarra Enrique Ajuria
Published: September 2018

The Eye (Gin Gwai, 2002) and its two sequels (2004, 2005) deal with pan-Asian film production, gender, and identity. The films seem to embrace a transnational outlook that that fits a shared Southeast Asian cinematic and cultural agenda. Instead, they disclose tensions about Hong Kong’s identity, its relationship with other countries in the region, and its mixture of Western and Eastern traditions (Knee, 2009). As horror films, The Eye series feature transpositional hauntings framed by a visual preference for understanding reality and the supernatural that is complicated by the ghostly perceptions of their female protagonists. Thus, the issues explored in this film series rely on a haunting that presents textual manifestations of transposition, imposition, and alienation that further evidence its complicated pan-Asian look. This chapter examines the films’ privilege of vision as catalyst of a transnational, Asian Gothic horror aesthetic that addresses concepts of identity, gender, and subjectivity.
A Parliament of Monsters: Romantic Nonhumans and Victorian Erasure
Authors: Geier Ted
Published: September 2018

Shows the robust nonhuman concern in Romantic works through new readings of Mary Shelley, Burns, Wordsworth, Clare, and Coleridge. The chapter traces these themes and forms of threatened, abject life as an expansive multispecies community of suffering. These works interrogate the weakness of expressive forms, performing the very captivity they lament. Wordsworth’s poem on the Bartholomew Fair is a fulcrum to the London studies in the book. These forms of expression are then examined in Dickens’s narratology and the narrator-object Esther in Bleak House.