bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
San Fernando, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 11 May 1960, 8:05 p.m.
Authors: Cinquegrani Maurizio
Published: September 2023

Chapter Five is introduced by the actions of three Mossad agents who ambushed and kidnapped SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann on 11 May 1960 in Buenos Aires. The capture of Eichmann, one of the architects of the Final Solution, is used as a starting point for a discussion focusing on the aftermath of the Holocaust in Latin America; the chapter looks at the ways in which amateur films, newsreels, documentaries and fiction films have addressed the relocation of Nazis and Holocaust survivors alike in Brazil, Argentina and other countries. In particular, this investigation considers the connections between fiction films articulating fantasies of Nazi resurgence in Latin America and factual films addressing the complexities of the topographical interrelations between the war in Europe and remote Latin American landscapes. This investigation also dissects the connection between the Nazi escapees and the emergence of totalitarianism in post-war Latin America as it surfaces in film.
Via Mario Fani, Rome, Lazio, Italy, 16 March 1978, 9:02 a.m.
Authors: Cinquegrani Maurizio
Published: September 2023

The attack perpetrated by Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) on 16 March 1978 in Rome, the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and the assassination of his five bodyguards opens Chapter Seven. This investigation looks at the intertwining of factual accounts and fictional representations of Via Fani, the place where Moro was taken, Via Montalcini, the location of the apartment where he was kept prisoner for fifty-four days, and Via Caetani, the street where his body would be found in the boot of a car. This chapter focuses on documentary and fiction films of the incident and uses the live coverage of the events which was broadcast on Italy’s public television from the day of the kidnapping to that of the assassination. Akin to the case of the Munich massacre, the television reports on the Moro case were used in documentaries and in re-enactments of the events, and have also been shown on television as part of the mise-en-scène of a fiction film.
Bornholmer Straße, East Berlin, GDR, 9 November 1989, 11:30 p.m.
Authors: Cinquegrani Maurizio
Published: September 2023

Chapter Eight starts with the raising of the barrier at the Berlin Wall border crossing in Bornholmer Straße on the evening of 9 November 1989. This study looks at the juxtaposition of television news reports on the building of the Wall, and later documentaries and fiction films set in its shadow. In particular, this chapter focuses on the function of the Wall as a location in a number of international spy films. Historical and topographical connections are made to emerge from a study of the urban fabric of the divided city, and the chapter travels back to the building of the Wall and to its impact on three locations profoundly altered by its construction (Bernauer Straße, Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstraße). Topographical accuracy and creative geographies emerge from these three locations and the chapter aims at capturing an image of the Cold War as it surfaces from films of its most emblematic location.
Seminar from January 5, 1983
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

This chapter approaches the broader question of Greek religion. Castoriadis highlights the role of affect in religion and its connection to the broader polyphony and profound unity of the Greek world. Returning to the question of influences and borrowings, Castoriadis argues that the cult of divinities in the dominant current of Greek religion was a decidedly civic cult. Accordingly, he links the later Greek emphasis on the immortality of the soul to a civic crisis in democracy. Turning to the problem of the meaning of the Greek gods, and conversing with the interpretations of Otto and Finley, he then argues that prevalent idea of the gods as anthropomorphic is only partly true. He focuses on the lack of any essential link between each Olympian god and his or her domain, and he argues that the gods have a certain reality as figurations of our sense of groundlessness, i.e., something truly found both outside us and within us. Likewise, he argues that, across different layers of religious significations, Homeric religion does not associate gods with ethical behavior and has no equivalent of sin. He closes by suggesting that Greek religion would eventually condition the emergence of free inquiry and democracy.
Legendary Monsters
Authors: Rawle Steven
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the globalising transnational strategies behind the creation of the latest wave of kaijū films. It considers how Legendary Entertainment have shaped contemporary kaijū films. Legendary’s films have resurrected the shared universe of Tōhō’s creations and shifted their texts to fit the demands of themes around climate change. Furthermore, Legendary’s Chinese ownership has come to reflect the shifting poles of cultural power and how kaijū cinema is now wrapped up with China’s policies around soft power. Strategies such as combining different East Asian genres with the casting of western stars, as in The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016), this chapter argues, are globalising tactics that broaden the appeal of the films within and beyond Asian markets.
The Limiting Imagination ofTransnational Monsters
Authors: Rawle Steven
Published: September 2023

This concluding chapter considers how, despite how connected and mobile cinema has become as it has transnationalised, concepts of nation (and nationalism) still hold sway. Even though the kaijū film evidences the mobility and interconnectedness typical of transnational flows, its name remains inescapably Japanese. Kaijū eiga are essentialised time and again as quintessentially Japanese. Having noted the problematic dimensions of essentialising nation in how films develop or take their eventual generic shape, this chapter highlights, echoing Deborah Shaw, the continuing relevance of the national within transnational cinema, as well as some of the drawbacks of transnational study. Thus, it considers how Shin Gojira (Anno and Higuchi, 2016) might be read as a conservative, protectionist, national cinema’s response to globalised transnational production.
Animating the Digital Action-adventure Spectacle
Authors: Benhamou Eve
Published: September 2023

During the 2008–18 decade, Disney not only notably revised the studio’s formula of fairy-tale romance but also ventured into and re-envisioned action-adventure cinema. This chapter specifically illuminates how the studio reframed the digital action-adventure spectacle, expanding the generic scope of its constructed formula in the process. Relying on Bolt, Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6 and Moana as case studies, this chapter focuses on the three most distinctive layers of this reworking. At the surface level, these films remarkably and humorously reproduce the dazzling visuals of live-action action-adventure through computer animation, as pioneered and influenced by Pixar. At a second level, the chapter explores how these films self-reflexively interact with the techniques of both computer animation and pre-digital animation to re-envision the action spectacle as an illusionistic mise en scène. At a third level, this chapter examines how Disney animated features expand the generic borders of action-adventure by drawing on the studio’s musical roots. In the process, they reimagine and take further the relationship between the two spectacular genres, as epitomised in their explicit merging in Moana.
From newsreel to ‘see now, buy now’: a genealogy of the fashion show live stream
Authors: Halliday Rebecca
Published: September 2023

In this chapter, Rebecca Halliday examines fashion show live streams, produced by mainstream fashion brands, that invite consumers to purchase items online concurrently with the show. Unlike live streams at ready-to-wear fashion weeks that tend to reassert the social status of attendees and distance the online user, this chapter explores fashion show live streams, that exist for more explicit commercial purposes. Analysing Tommy Hilfinger’s collaborations with fashion celebrities Gigi Hadid (TommyxGigi) and Zendaya (TommyxZendaya), Halliday argues that, rather than relying on the more standard and close-cropped toe-to-head shots of individual models used to produce consumer desire, these fashion shows utilize more panoramic and aerial shots to create a more spectacular user viewing experience, drawing attention more to the mediatised event than the collection itself.
Loving but Critical: The Empathetic Gaze of Luck by Chance
Authors: Magazine Aakshi
Published: September 2023

Zoya Akhtar’s debut film, Luck By Chance (2009), has a self-reflexive plot revolving around the Hindi film industry. This chapter interrogates Akhtar’s often subversive take on some key themes in Bollywood film: the Bombay film industry, the popular Hindi film form, romance and success. This is highlighted through its focus on the complexity of the experience of its female characters working within a masculine film industry. In addition, the film is a radical reversal of the representation of romance in Hindi cinema through the changing relationship between its two leads, Sona and Vikram. However, as the chapter will show, the film also works within certain Bollywood conventions like big stars and song-and-dance sequences and therefore retains a connection to this form, suggesting continuities between its style and that of Akhtar’s later films. The film thus provides a glimpse into Akhtar’s later career trajectory as it shows her connection to the industry through which she traces her history.
New Forms, New Stories: Zoya Akhtar’s Short Films
Authors: Shields Amber
Published: September 2023

Zoya Akhtar’s short films provide a departure from her other work and new points of examination. First, they are a compelling example to examine in terms of how this format is growing and, consequently, how its appeal to both new and established directors is pushing the production and form of Indian film. Second, it is a greater glimpse into Akhtar as a filmmaker and how through the greater freedom of the short she pushes herself to experiment with different forms, characters and stories as well as her representation of gender, sexuality and class not realised in her features. In her short films seen in Bombay Talkies, Lust Stories and Ghost Stories, similar to her Amazon Prime series Made in Heaven (Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti 2019), it is possible to see a more direct take by Akhtar on controversial social topics that adds to our understanding of her work beyond what is seen on the big screen.
The Heterotopia of Family Relation-Ship in Dil Dhadakne Do
Authors: Chakravarti Debnita
Published: September 2023

In designating our era to be engaged with space as opposed to the nineteenth century’s obsession with time, Michel Foucault introduced the idea of heterotopia to signify those curious spaces in every culture which “suspend, neutralize, or invert” conventional relationships, of which the ship is the “heterotopia par excellence”(Foucault, 1997). The chapter reads Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do as a study of the Foucauldian heterotopia. It also assesses the film’s representation of familial relationships in the context of the changing portrayal of the Indian family by Hindi cinema, marking the shift from Hum Aapke Hain… Koun! (1994) to the recent Kapoor and Sons (2016). From the feudal family configuration and the joint family dynamics to the urban nuclear unit, the Indian film industry provides a fascinating study of change over the last century. In this film, Akhtar uses the milieu she knows so well in order to delve into the heterotopia of the family structure. Every family is unique, but the shared concerns of safeguarding social appearance and reputation even at the cost of individual unhappiness make the family an intriguing case study using the Foucauldian power apparatus of the heterotopia.
Señoritas at Work: Gendered Work, Aspiration and Leisure in the Films of Zoya Akhtar
Authors: Sharanya
Published: September 2023

This chapter will examine the gendered spatial politics of leisure and work in the films of Zoya Akhtar, analysing the representation of working women and ‘workplaces’ of leisure. The chapter will build on Kathi Weeks’s formulation of the workplace to interrogate two crucial aspects of Akhtar’s representation of spaces of gendered work: first, where such spaces are framed as sites of dreams and aspirations, and second, where work is invisibilised as p/leisure. By interrogating the gendered framing of the work/leisure dialectic with an emphasis on analysing the spaces of aspiration and leisure in Zoya Akhtar’s first three feature films, this chapter asks: how do the films of Akhtar construct a genealogy of women’s leisure?
Deconstructing the Perception of ‘The Elite Class Filmmaker’: A Critical Analysis of Mainstream Film Reviews of Zoya Akhtar’s Cinema
Authors: Jaggi Ruchi Kher , Mishra Mudita
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines how both the appreciation and criticism of Akhtar’s cinematic work is overwhelmingly oversimplified and unidimensional, missing out on engaging with the layered feminist perspective in Akhtar’s work. This chapter presents a critical discourse analysis of the popular criticism of Zoya Akhtar’s directorial ventures through a combination of textual analysis and interviews with India’s leading film reviewers while also questioning the perception of her work from the audience’s perspective by examining the significant corpus of user-generated content on social media using netnography. This chapter will discuss the perceptions of a successful woman filmmaker in the Indian context, especially in comparison to her male counterparts, where the pressure to tell a story in a certain manner may possibly be a function of her gender and class, leading to questions of how concepts of power and bias influence the reading of her work.
The Monotheisation of Khazaria
Authors: Feldman Alex M.
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses conversion to Judaism within the Khazar khağanate regarding dating and ethnogenesis. It evaluates many theories about Khazarian society and previous scholars’ attempts to contextualise the Khazars’ adoption of Judaism. While contemporaneous dynasties adopted and imposed Islam (Islamisation) or Christianity (Christianisation) on their subjects, the Khazarian khağans adopted (but didn’t impose) Judaism (Judaisation). Each of these processes can be deemed "monotheisation." It also analyses sedentarisation alongside monotheisation (here, Judaisation), and the centralisation of dynastic institutions. Khazaria demonstrates how monotheisation fundamentally imposed a social structure by using monotheistic laws to transform a pagan chiefdom into a monotheistic princedom, khağanate or kingdom through (or despite) the contested loyalties of the local aristocracy. In conclusion, Khazaria can be considered a test case for monotheisation comparable to other cases, such Volga Bulgaria, Hungary, the Pečenegs, Rus’ and Cuman-Qıpčaqs.
Case Studies of Monotheisation in Eighth- to Thirteenth-Century Pontic-Caspian Eurasia
Authors: Feldman Alex M.
Published: September 2023

Due to the previous chapters’ foci on ethnogenesis, sedentarisation and monotheisation (Judaisation) in Khazaria, this chapter will in turn examine the same processes within each of the case studies in this order: the Volga Bulgars, Magyars, Pečenegs, Cuman-Qıpčaqs and Rus’. While many scholars have documented the Christianisation of various European polities, they have not necessarily examined them in regard to other possible monotheisations such as Islamisation or Judaisation. For example, Volga Bulgaria’s Islamisation came partially because of Khazaria’s Judaisation, according to the 10th-c. work of ibn Fadlān. The Magyar-Pečeneg migration through the Pontic-Caspian steppe came partially because of Khazarian policy according to the 10th-c. work of Constantine VII Porphyrogennētos. Throughout each case study, the chapter discusses various themes of monotheisation relating to economics, allegiances and law, paying special attention to archaeological discoveries relating to contested loyalties, notably through numismatics, epigraphy, sigillography, ceramics, fortifications and funerary archaeology. One of the primary questions threading through this chapter will be: were there so-called “ethnicities” before monotheism?
Monotheisation in Metal
Authors: Feldman Alex M.
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses comparative coin reforms and ecumenical empires. In 837/838 CE, the Khazar khagan initiated a coin reform meant to affirm his religion on the coinage to be circulated throughout his realm. Though in Arabic script and consciously copying the contemporary Islamic dirham, it read “Moses is messenger of God,” alongside the common Arabic script reading, “Mohammed is the messenger of God,” at the time, Khazaria was a considerable power which the Byzantine emperors and Islamic Caliphs regarded as roughly equals in projecting and protecting a third ecumenical faith: Judaism. While Judaism failed to take enduring root in Khazaria and the coin reform discontinued, the coins themselves survived, namely in the famous Spillings Hoard found in 1999 on the Swedish Island of Gotland. When contextualised along with ‘Abd al-Malik’s Islamic coin reforms (ca. 696-705) and Justinian II’s Christian Roman coin reforms (ca. 705-711), this chapter uses numismatic evidence to demonstrate that nationality and/or sovereignty projected backwards as early as possible (exemplified by the 11-13th-c. Piast and Árpád dynasties which ruled what later became Poland and Hungary respectively) is frequently anachronistic.
Midterm Elections, the Republican Party, and the Challenge to New Deal Liberalism, 1946–1958
Authors: Mason Robert
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that during the post–World War II years Republicans devised strategies for midterm campaigns that sought not only victories in those elections but also a larger revitalisation of their party’s fortunes. Hostility to the political power of organised labour and to policy protections for organised labour was an important motivation in the effort to mobilise voters against New Deal liberalism. Despite the Republicans’ recapture of Congress in 1946, these efforts failed to achieve their larger goal. They were nevertheless consequential by encouraging Democrats to step away from a trend that their party had been pursuing towards a more assertive brand of liberalism, instead moving towards a more moderate agenda.
War on Poverty Stalled, Nixon Recalled: Republican Revival and the 1966 Midterm Elections
Authors: McLay Mark
Published: September 2023

The 1966 midterm elections heralded a more tightly contested partisan era in American politics. Following Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide win up and down the ballot in 1964, the Republicans made significant gains two years later. Scholars have been too enthusiastic in declaring this comeback as being built on the ascendence of a newly aggressive Republican conservatism, which campaigned forcefully against Johnson’s Great Society. In reality, Republicans said little about popular programmes, such as Medicare. Rather they focused their ire specifically on Johnson’s War on Poverty, which was now perceived as solely benefiting racial minorities - a disadvantageous perception in the midst of ‘white backlash’ politics. The Republican strategy was embodied in the campaigning of Richard M. Nixon, who would replicate this approach in his successful 1968 presidential campaign.
The Life and Death of the Author
Authors: Corser Sophie
Published: September 2023

This chapter outlines a history of ‘the author’, of our author-centric attitudes in academia and popular culture. It focuses on a period from the romantics to the present day, hinging on the death of the author: referring to both a general shift away from the author that (may or may not have) occurred in theory and criticism between the late 1960s and early 1990s, and the specific 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes. The chapter is structured around three developments in literary criticism: how the figure of the author gained importance in nineteenth-century romanticism, how that positioning was rejected by the poststructuralism of the 1960s, and how such rejection has been received since. Overall, this chapter endeavours to show how our understanding of the points of connection between author, reader, and text remains unsettled.
‘Critical propaganda’: The Critics and Joyce, 1918–80
Authors: Corser Sophie
Published: September 2023

This chapter investigates the critical response to Ulysses following its publication (serialised and in full) and up to the 1980s. The chapter begins by looking at the reception of Stuart Gilbert’s Joyce-authorised 1930 study James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and its emphasis on the Homeric elements in Ulysses, then details how the character Stephen Dedalus was read by early critics, and suggests how Joyce studies became a self-reflexive field which pre-empted the concerns of poststructuralist theory. Together with Chapter Four, this chapter analyses the ways in which Joyce studies engages and has engaged with questions of the author, reader, and text. By focusing on Joyce’s involvement and the effects of authorially authorised criticism, readings of Stephen Dedalus as Joyce, and the habits of Joycean criticism which resulted from each, this chapter establishes how criticism of Ulysses quickly became as much about how to read the text as it was about the text itself, and – as criticism is in part an act of reading – became self-reflexive. It considers particularly the foundational work of Harry Levin, Richard M. Kain, A. Walton Litz, David Hayman and Hugh Kenner.
Found footage horror and documentary conventions
Authors: McMurdo Shellie
Published: September 2023

This chapter opens the first part of Blood on the Lens: Trauma and Anxiety in American Found Footage Horror Cinema and explores the origins of the subgenre and why it has continually returned to an emulation of documentary conventions. This chapter argues that found footage horror films exploit the historic indexical relationship that the camera lens has enjoyed with ‘the real’, which is traceable to the earliest uses of photography as a tool for scientific enquiry. Found footage horror endeavours to position its narratives within the audience’s reality rather than adjacent to it, and this chapter proposes that one of the ways this is achieved is through the physicality of the camera. In situating the camera in this way, this chapter begins to unravel how the limitations of the camera lens in found footage horror and how the resultant artless aesthetic – an often maligned element of the subgenre – can be read as a form of authenticity that has a precedent in the audience’s reality. Finally, this chapter focuses on three central themes of the subgenre: the inability of the camera to capture evidence, the separation of the camera lens from its operator, and the reoccurring convention of the failed documentary project.
Found footage horror and historical trauma
Authors: McMurdo Shellie
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on The Sacrament (West, 2013) as a case study, and uses this film to examine how the found footage horror subgenre negotiates the limits of traumatic representation. This chapter outlines several limitations of trauma theory in relation to genre cinema, and through use of Adam Lowenstein’s (2005) concept of the ‘allegorical moment’, investigates how allegory is complicated and then departed from within The Sacrament through its creation of a fictional visual accompaniment to a very real horror. Close analysis of selected scenes from The Sacrament and their relationship to the ‘Jonestown Death Tape’ feature in this chapter’s discussion of the film’s movement towards explicit, rather than implicit, representations of historical trauma, and how this eschewal of allegory may have impacted its critical reception. While advancing the idea of the ‘post-allegorical moment’, this chapter then highlights the importance of witnessing in found footage horror cinema, before detailing how The Sacrament recreates the specific video journalism aesthetic of Vice Media, and how this lends a sense of endangerment and immersion. This chapter closes with a discussion of the resonance of The Jonestown Massacre trauma and anxieties around it within contemporary America.
The footage yet to be found
Authors: McMurdo Shellie
Published: September 2023

This concluding chapter addresses how found footage horror is adapting in a post-cinematic world, and outlines its movement into other forms of media, such as podcasts and video gaming. This chapter casts an eye towards the subgenre’s history and evolvement while looking towards its future, while bringing together the central arguments of Blood on the Lens: Trauma and Anxiety in American Found Footage Horror Cinema. This chapter returns to key critiques of the subgenre and argues that far from being over, the future of found footage horror seems bright.
Los Moros De La Hueste : Recovering the Islamicate in the Goths’ Lament
Authors: Hutcheson Gregory S.
Published: September 2023

This chapter applies pressure to those agendas contemporary readers routinely project onto the 'Duelo de los godos' (the Goths' lament), the dramatic account of Muslim invasion inserted into the history of Spain commissioned by Alfonso X in the mid-thirteenth century. Gathering around himself a multicultural collective of scholars, Alfonso tasked them with the compilation, translation and synthesis of a vast array of sources for the purpose of sealing his political and moral authority over the heterogeneous population that fell under his rule. The ‘Duelo’, it is argued here, emerges from and is mediated through this bid for worldliness, even as it parrots the xenophobic formulations of its source text and so punches the alterity of Alfonso’s Muslim subjects. As the ironic mobilisation of Islamophobic tropes within an Islamicate textuality, it cannot help but spin off unintended consequences that confound the too-easy parallels we might be tempted to draw between Islamophobias of the past and Islamophobias of the present.
Introduction: Gertrude Stein, Modernism and Democracy
Authors: Parkinson Isabelle
Published: September 2023

The Introduction sets out the key contexts the book will engage, centred around an exploration of Stein’s text on President Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations ‘A League’, and its appearance in the American publication Life magazine in 1919. Arguing that, in the period 1909-1933, Stein’s work becomes a significant nexus for debate in a scene engaged in the reformation, construction and legitimation of authorship that has complex ties to discourses of democratic rights, the Introduction sets out the key ways Stein’s work, her activity on the cultural scene and the debates around her authorship engage or reflect those discourses. The Introduction also puts the monograph into the context of Stein studies, engaging critically with a scholarly tradition in which Stein’s work is claimed as inherently democratic.
Authorship and Community in Stein’s Pre-war Portraits and Tender Buttons
Authors: Parkinson Isabelle
Published: September 2023

This chapter turns to the early modernist scene of the 1910s and examines the place of Stein’s ‘portraits’ and her 1914 Tender Buttons in a context of new conceptions of the artist and author expressed in modernist magazines and exhibitions, including the 1913 New York Armory Show, that posit collective forms of authorship legitimised through the manifesto and the group. It explores the relationship of these ideas to discourses of liberalism, moving from debates within the emergent modernist literary culture to their reception in the broader public discourse of newspapers and magazines. It shows how, in broader print culture, Stein becomes a signifier of the new artist and author as aberrant and illegitimate, onto which scepticism about and dismissal of the new practices are loaded. The chapter argues that it is here that the figuring of Stein as an inappropriate biological subject for author status is first constructed and begins to circulate.
Introduction: Rainbow and Granite, Women and Biography
Authors: Reus Anne
Published: September 2023

This chapter puts Woolf’s journalistic writing on nineteenth-century women writers in relation to her better-known feminist and biographical works. After a brief overview of Woolf’s career as a reviewer within the contemporary landscape of periodicals, it sets out the underlying assumptions this book challenges, such as Woolf’s Modernist break with the past and the complex question of Woolf feminism. This chapter also explores the different impulses driving Woolf’s engagement with biography over the course of her career, focussing especially on the central tension between biography as the study of character and as feminist historiography at the example of her frequently neglected early fiction (‘Phyllis and Rosamond’, ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, ‘Friendship’s Gallery’ (all 1906), and ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ (1909)).
‘That indefinable something’: Charlotte Brontë and Protest
Authors: Reus Anne
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that Virginia Woolf’s depiction of Charlotte Brontë weaponizes her life against her artistic achievements. Although Woolf’s early reviews convey a palpable fascination with Brontë’s strength of character, Brontë quickly becomes a symbol of the inherently flawed Victorian women writer. Drawing on Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë to justify her portrait of a writer in social and cultural isolation, Woolf perpetuates Victorian tropes of unfeminine passion found in Leslie Stephen’s literary criticism. Woolf’s lasting legacy is the condemnation of the artistic damage of Brontë’s anger in A Room of One’s Own: this chapter therefore demonstrates that Woolf’s feminist aims often operate at the expense of individual writers.
Introduction
Authors: Aquilina Mario , Cowser Bob , Wallack Nicole B.
Published: September 2023

This chapter begins by contextualizing the essay as a ‘contested space’, that is, as a form whose definition, history, and contemporary presence are subject to continuous debate. In the first part, the editors dwell on the notions of ‘genre’, ‘tradition’, and ‘the essay canon’, while staking a claim for an exploration of marginalized voices and perspectives in essay studies. The chapter then provides an outline for the whole volume through a brief synopsis of each individual chapter and a rationale for the three main sections in the book (Part 1: Theories and Definitions; Part 2: Publics, Pedagogies and Histories; Part 3: Form and Genre). The chapter also explains the methods employed in the writing of the eight experimental texts presented under the title of ‘Contemporary Essayists in Focus’.
Affinities and Contestations: The Self and the Other in the Essay
Authors: Aquilina Mario
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the way essays construct and perform the relationship between the self and the other. The ‘I’ of the essay – the speaking voice of the essayist – is central to the widely accepted idea of the essay as self-portrait. Through a discussion of the work of Michel de Montaigne, Claudia Rankine, and Brian Dillon, among others, the chapter argues that while the ‘I’ of the essayist is fundamental to our reading and writing of essays, the self in the essay is inevitably engaged in relations of affinity and contestation with others. In this sense, we can think of the ‘I’ of the essay as collaborative rather than simply expressive, and as engaging in communal spaces rather than being exclusively immersed in individual concerns. This, it is argued, has implications for how we think of the essay, both as a literary form as well as a form that may be significant in cultural and political exchanges.
The Problem of a Name: The Essay and Its Titles
Authors: Karshan Thomas
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the significance of the titles of essays and essay periodicals throughout the history of the genre. It argues that the essay has always played with titles. When Montaigne called his volume Essais, he was following a tradition of giving a volume of miscellaneous writings a modest, and yet richly expressive name which would gesture to the diversity of the writings found within, while implicitly indicating that no name could comprehend that diversity. This chapter follows this tradition from Montaigne through the eighteenth and nineteenth-century periodicals including the Spectator, into modern magazines and websites, showing a remarkable consistency of essayistic games and jokes with names and titles. As Leigh Hunt wrote in an essay entitled ‘Difficulty of Finding a Name for a Work of this Kind’, titling essays is so difficult because the essay is a miscellaneous form, answering so many conflicting interests, combining so many, often paradoxical, discourses and personae. Periodicals and essayists often name themselves after vices in which they discover virtues, or vice versa, indicating the complexity also of moral categories.
‘Lived’ Experience, ‘Sought’ Experience and the Personal Essay
Authors: Hesse Douglas
Published: September 2023

This chapter proposes a theoretical schema upon which we can locate the essay and its differences from other genres. The schema comprises three continuums, which Hesse plots on a two-dimensional figure: that of ‘lived experience’ and ‘sought experience’; ‘self-full’ writing and ‘self-less’ writing; and ‘reflection’ and ‘report’. The essay, for Hesse, tends toward self-full writing inspired by lived experience and aspiring to reflection, but the chapter shows the ways in which this definition of the essay, while serving as a useful model for definitional purposes and in pedagogic contexts, is subject to exceptions and qualifications that are illustrative of the slipperiness of the form.
The Essay and the Advertisement
Authors: Tippin R. Eric
Published: September 2023

Essayists from Samuel Johnson to Virginia Woolf to E. B. White have directed special contempt at the advertisement, for its deceit, its impersonality, and its instrumentality. These essayists and critics who echo them describe the Montaignian essay as a kind of anti-advertisement—authentic, personal, and end in itself. But a survey of essays about the advertisement reveals that the relationship is more complex than a simple antithesis. Not only has the advertisement given the essay a way to understand what it is not—a valuable service—the essay has, in treating the advertisement, redeemed it, removed it from the money economy of the market and placed it within the gift-economy of the essay. In the essay, the advertisement transforms from means-to-end to end-in-itself.
On Reading and the Essay
Authors: Wallack Nicole B.
Published: September 2023

Although essayists read myriad materials to produce their work—from first-hand experiences to written, visual, and aural texts—few have explicitly theorized what reading entails or produces for themselves and their own audiences. This chapter argues that reading animates every essay, regardless of its subject matter. It begins by distinguishing what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “creative reading,” which receives fuller theoretical expression in the precepts of twentieth century reception-theory by Louise Rosenblatt and others, who show how readers, including students, are co-creators of the texts they encounter. Drawing on Theodor Adorno and Graham Good, the essay can be understood not only as a genre that welcomes such readerly agency. Readers of essays may “try to become” the writer, as Virginia Woolf suggests, but essayists including James Baldwin, Rebecca Solnit, and Patricia Williams exemplify the ethical and political jeopardy a reader faces when they cede their responsibility to forge their own ideas about the worlds they have a chance to shape. In the process, essayists and their readers may “call into being” what Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner have termed as a “counter-public” who can counter the injustices they identify. Essayists’ creative readings may or may not stem from political commitments, but they both enact and teach readers the pleasures and power of constructing ideas of their own.
The Essay and the Episteme: A Genealogy for Modern Classroom Use
Authors: Rulo Kevin
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the essay as a mode of writing and its relevance to contemporary classroom practice of the genre in the collegiate setting in the United States. The contribution shows that the essay has functioned as a contested site for larger assumptions and attitudes about language and writing, especially as they relate to emerging paradigms of neoliberalism. A genealogical account is provided that traces the history and growing dominance of transparency discourse and compositional standardization in scholastic prose of the last several centuries. In contrast with this epistemic framework of transparency, the chapter argues that the essay can and should function as an alternative, counteractive space that focuses on heterogeneity, play, dialogue, and expansiveness.
Commonplace Mysteries: Soaring on the Wings of Desire
Authors: Hoy Pat C.
Published: September 2023

Aiming to trace the mind’s journey from evidence to essay,”Commonplace Mysteries” focuses on charged images (pictorial and notional) that arise from the interplay between mind and evidence, seizing a writer and animating a desire to fill a gap between knowing and not knowing. Such evidence calls out and
writers respond. Their responses derive from mysterious, inward acts of mind that concurrently engender sense-making. Resulting conceptual discoveries seem to evolve from an archetypal desire to understand and a concurrent urge to reveal. This chapter, as it traces the journey toward essay, examines not only enabling acts of mind but also a pedagogy that fosters them divulging, as well, the mysterious gifts inherent in the
processes.
On the Interface Between Philosophy and the Essay: Foucault’s Essayistic Ethos
Authors: Borg Kurt
Published: September 2023

This chapter takes as its guiding thread a brief remark by Michel Foucault from The Use of Pleasure, in which he characterized the essay as the living substance of philosophy. The interface between the essay and philosophy is approached in this chapter through their mutual concern with askesis, a practice concerned with the formation and transformation of the self. The chapter turns to a reading of Michel de Montaigne’s essayism as a philosophical practice, whereby Montaigne’s essayistic ethos is interpreted through notions from Foucault’s work, such as confession, self-writing and parrhesia, and their role within his broader genealogy of ethics and philosophy as a way of life. Moreover, the few references that Foucault makes to Montaigne are examined insofar as they shed light on the relation between philosophy and the essay explored in this chapter. This chapter also identifies the essayistic ethos as it manifests itself in Foucault’s own philosophical practice and ethos. Through this engagement with Montaigne and Foucault, the chapter argues that the ethos of self-transformation is key to understanding the intersections between the genealogy of the essayistic and the conception of philosophy as a way of life.
Columnism and Essayism
Authors: Callus Ivan
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that the newspaper column deserves closer critical attention. There are a number of reasons to justify the claim. One of them is the historical co-identifiability, which stretches back to the eighteenth century, between the tradition of the essay and the practice of the column. Another is the fact that the column is a space for regular essayism, of a kind that secures a loyal readership that identifies with the voice and stances of the exponent. Others might involve the extensiveness of a column’s readership and the consequent influence that the space can exert on politics and sociocultural attitudes. In addition, and quite simply, there are the qualities of the writing. At the same time, the differences are noteworthy, not least in terms of critical cachet and of the column’s ephemerality, which derives from the paradox of immediate relevance that is then not necessarily enduring. These aspects are among the issues discussed, and critiqued, in the chapter, the import of which is that the column calls for its own sub-poetics. Essayism and columnism, it is argued, are more similar than would be immediately evident, while the differences are instructive for the understanding and practice of both.
The New Seesaws of the Digital Visual Essay: Genre Provocations, Definitions and Tensions Beyond the Age of Print
Authors: Chamberlain Elizabeth F.
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks at what happens to the essay and essayism when shaped by the internet and other aspects of visual and digital culture. It argues that the digital visual essay has increasingly blurred essay genre lines – between formal and personal essays, essays and games, essays and documentaries. The chapter traces the affinities of the digital visual essay with and differences from the internet personal essay; digital literature such as hypertext fiction and interactive fiction; scrollytelling (a mode of interaction in which pictures, data points, labels and code snippets rise to meet your cursor); and data journalism. The digital visual essay is a contemporary example of the inevitability of genre change, and one possible consequence of this phenomenon is the way the essay form at large might be pollinated by the characteristics of these new strange digital beasts.
Why the (Animal) Essay Matters
Authors: Bugliani Paolo
Published: September 2023

The chapter explores a specific type of essays, labelled ‘animal essays’, which revolve around the essayistic self’s engagement with the nonhuman animal and its world. From a general point of view, the chapter investigates how two of the most recognizable features of the genre are affected by the encounter with the radical alterity of the animal: on the one hand, the essay’s notorious penchant towards the pole of the individual, on the other, its anti-systematic amateur features. More particularly, through a series of examples ranging from Montaigne, Thoreau, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Annie Dillard, the chapter isolates three aesthetic attitudes which characterise contemporary approaches to the animal in personal essays.
Female Missionaries and the Architecture of Women’s Hospitals
Authors: Ebrahimi Sara Honarmand
Published: September 2023

The issue of gaining trust was relevant to activities of both male and female missionaries, but female missionaries were seen as better suited for this task. This chapter highlights female missionaries’ involvement in the design process of the hospitals. A particular concern of the chapter is Dr Minnie Gomery, who was responsible for designing the Islamabad (Anantnag) hospital. Furthermore, the chapter shows that female medical missionaries did not universally and uniformly seek to modernise and enlighten women. This point is nowhere more evident than in the architecture of the medical missions. A specific type of hospital architecture, known as the ‘Purdah hospital’, was developed specifically for women according to what missionaries understood as Muslim and Hindu rules.
Introduction
Authors: Corredera Vanessa I.
Published: September 2023

Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello’s introduction draws together and defines the concepts at the heart of this project: racial representation, Shakespearean reanimation, post-racial America, and race/racism. On the surface, the associations with resistance to authority commonly attributed to reanimating Shakespeare—bringing his plays back to life—combined with post-racial America’s dream of racial equity suggests that post-racial Othellos would be fertile grounds for ethical racial representation. This introduction explains, however, that such a vision does not align with reality. Instead, contemporary reanimations of Othello are not post-racial but either antiblack or antiracist. Distinguishing between these two stances entails identifying how post-racial attitudes and ideologies, especially what scholars have termed “colorblind” racism, are either reinscribed or contested when Othello is reanimated in modern America. Ultimately, then, this introduction explores the use of Shakespeare to shape and challenge America’s “racecraft,” the term Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields employ to articulate the folk ideologies and strategies circulating in America that prop up racial inequality. By drawing on cultural studies, media studies, Critical Race Theory, ethnic studies, and Premodern Critical Race Studies, this introduction ultimately contends that scrutinizing reanimated Othellos provides vital insight into America’s racial habitus.
Introduction
Authors: Lagji Amanda
Published: September 2023

The introduction develops the book’s framework for reading the concept of waiting in relation to postcolonial studies, and begins with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s insight that colonial discourse relegated colonial subjects to what he calls the “waiting room” of history. By developing a framework that builds from interdisciplinary theories from the social sciences, history, and philosophy, Waiting for Now reinvigorates narrative and time analyses; “waiting” is revealed as both an orientation in time, and a structural device in narratives themselves (plots, pacing, tempo). The book’s introduction additionally situates the book between the fields of critical time and postcolonial studies, and indebtedness to the temporal turn in Black Studies and affect studies. Readers not already familiar with the history of postcolonial studies will receive a brief overview of the field, motivated by a desire to reveal its intense focus on time and temporality. The introduction also provides a thorough account of the temporal dimensions of waiting, and its attendant affective dimensions (patience, urgency, despair, and hope among others).
‘Still but an Essayist’: Carlyle’s Early Essays and Late-Romantic Periodical Culture
Authors: Toremans Tom
Published: September 2023

This chapter pursues a critical reassessment of Thomas Carlyle’s 1820s writings and their participation in the periodical culture and literary marketplace of the time. Well before he developed from Late-Romantic transcendentalist to historian of the French Revolution and, ultimately, to Victorian sage and ultraconservative political commentator, Carlyle’s early reputation in Britain was initiated by translations and critical essays in leading periodicals. His early career as cultural mediator started with his Life of Schiller, first published serially in the London Magazine in 1823-4. In the following years, Carlyle published translations and reviews of works by Goethe, Werner, Heine, Novalis, Voltaire and Jean-Paul Richter, among others. The essays ‘The State of German Literature’ and ‘Signs of the Times’, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1827 and 1829, represent the culmination of Carlyle’s early aesthetic and social critique. These early publications have mainly been analysed as preparations for Carlyle’s influential transcendental aesthetic in the 1830s and, by extension, for his later historical and biographical works. This chapter restores these essays to their historical and material contexts of production, focusing how they subtly enact a critique of Late-Romantic periodical culture, thereby repositioning them as precursors for Carlyle’s peculiar literary-philosophical anti-novel Sartor Resartus.