bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Poetics of Paratextuality
Authors: Bonifacio Ayendy
Published: January 2025

The book’s introduction offers a comprehensive overview of the archives, methodologies, and scholarly discourse surrounding nineteenth-century newspaper poems and their paratexts. It begins by providing a working definition of paratext, derived from Gérard Genette’s theoretical framework. The chapter asserts that, within the context of newspapers, the paratext constitutes a heterogeneous assemblage of aesthetic practices and discourses, producing varying degrees of convergent effects, meanings, and values. Consequently, the paratext facilitates the integration of a poem into the newspaper, presenting it as an inherent component of the publication. The chapter further emphasizes the significance of the Spanish-language press, which is examined in detail in Chapters 2 and 3, in the study of nineteenth-century newspaper poems. It contends that by treating English-and Spanish-language newspaper poems, along with their reprinting culture, as interconnected acts of cultural production, the book facilitates an exploration of linguistic play, integration, and tension reflective of the nineteenth-century press environment. Additionally, the introduction addresses the culturally tarnished reputation of newspaper poems during the nineteenth century, drawing on influential critics and editors from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Margaret Fuller, Horace Greeley, and Edmund Stedman. After defining key terms used throughout the book—such as "speaker," "networks," and "printscape"—the chapter concludes with a summary of the subsequent chapters.
The Reprint Lives of “Panic Poetry”
Authors: Bonifacio Ayendy
Published: January 2025

Chapter 3 centralizes the phenomenon of the reprint poem in circulation, its reprintability, and social value. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, reprint poems were common in the production of antebellum newspapers. In this chapter, the culture of the reprint poem meets the history of the Panic of 1857. The chapter explores unknown correlations between the economy of 1857 and the inflationary social value of three reprint poems: “The Lay of the Directors,” “Lines by Buster” (both anonymously published), and “Hard Times” by Alfred F. Burnett. Through paratextual readings that focus the rhetoric and discourse of the Panic, the chapter argues that these “panic poems” acquired specific forms of value that were not primarily aesthetic or poetic but “social.” The poems’ use of railroad-and bank-slang made them particularly valuable to the media market of the time and to the publics that encountered them. Appealing to merchants, abolitionists, railroad operatives, “young ladies,” other social groups, these poems drew from the socially relevant discourse of the Panic of 1857—the same language that appeared in news, ads, and editorials. Thus, through robust reprinting and circulation, Panic poems became a part of print networks that contributed to the infodemic of the financial Panic.
Smith and Jones: Discourse Analysis of the Raiders of the Lost Ark Story Conference
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

Before writing the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Lawrence Kasdan joined George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for a five-day creative meeting. The transcript of this conference is one of the most unique and important artifacts available to scholars of cinema history and screenwriting, yet is has never received any interrogation within academia. The chapter rectifies this by analyzing the Raiders story conference transcript, allowing the reader to fully understand the creative process behind a multi-million-dollar blockbuster. Employing methodology from the field of applied linguistics, the investigation establishes the relative contributions of the three collaborators – executive producer Lucas, director Spielberg, and writer Kasdan – as they develop the project from its earliest stages. Through discourse analysis, the chapter demonstrates how each participant contributed different aspects to the movie’s creation. The analysis shows that Kasdan’s contributions were successful in injecting the project with verisimilitude, as well as developing the female lead, transforming her role from being what Lucas called a “problem” into a fully defined co-protagonist.
Body Heat : Heightened Style in the Neo-Noir
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

In the early 1980s, the film noir was a dormant genre, superseded by more visceral crime thrillers and action films. Lawrence Kasdan’s decision to make his directorial debut with the erotic neo-noir Body Heat (1981) was a bold one, then, but it became a critical and commercial success. This chapter examines how Kasdan employs a subjective camera to enable the audience to process the narrative from the male lead’s perspective as he becomes entangled in the femme fatale’s scheme. According to Bordwell and Thompson’s neo-formalist paradigms of style, this choice follows the restricted narration of classic Hollywood crime stories. However, Kasdan also occasionally places the audience in the position of voyeur, obscuring the camera behind window frames or foliage, as if we were witnessing the events surreptitiously. Additionally, he uses long takes and languid camera movements to emphasize the oppressive atmosphere and the creeping sense of guilt at the center of the story. Employing historical poetics, the chapter argues that these directorial choices are not only aesthetic, but also help to build dramatic tension, especially when the “objective” truth is finally revealed.
Kasdan’s Collaborations: Creation and Performance
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

Even as Lawrence Kasdan subscribes to the auteur theory, he is a director who surrounds himself with trusted collaborators, both in front of the camera and behind. This chapter discusses some of his most lasting and important creative partnerships, including Carol Littleton, who has edited all but two of his pictures as director, and composer James Newton Howard, whose Americana style is so well suited to Kasdan’s commentaries upon the country. Such relationships, the chapter argues, contribute to the development of a Kasdan “style,” even when working in quite diverse genres and modes. Similarly, Kasdan has employed the same actors repeatedly, building a loose repertory of performers that appears closely aligned to his storytelling needs. Employing deep analysis of primary and secondary interviews, the chapter demonstrates how, through unusually long rehearsal periods and intense on-set discussions with actors, Kasdan develops realistic fictive worlds driven by character and relationship rather than plot or spectacle.
A New Hope in The Force Awakens
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

When Lawrence Kasdan returned to Star Wars to write the first post-Lucas film, The Force Awakens (2015), he and director/co-writer J.J. Abrams sought to streamline the storytelling style, following George Lucas’s divisive prequels. This chapter examines both the screenplay and the finished film, and argues that Kasdan was central to the development of the sequel trilogy, both as a literal connection to the originals and in balancing the needs of the returning characters with those of the new protagonists. Alongside Abrams, Kasdan was able to return the series to its mythic roots, which, as shown in the previous chapter, he perhaps understood even better than George Lucas himself. While a common criticism of The Force Awakens is its derivativeness, the chapter suggests that this was a necessary process in order to connect the series to the original films after the confusing tone of the prequels. Furthermore, it demonstrates that, by chronicling what Kasdan called the “aches and pains” of the older main characters, he was able to reconcile the established themes of the Star Wars saga with his generational concerns and preference for ambiguity.
The Metaphysical War
Authors: Rhee Suk Koo
Published: January 2025

The first chapter opens with the question of what Richard E. Kim’s 1964 novel The Martyred chooses to expose and conceal. It maintains that while it takes the Communists’ religious persecution as its centre of concern, this novel, by means of a process of enfiguring and substituting, displaces the war crimes of the US and ROK armies and the rightist youth corps. Although the book is self-conscious in the manner in which it expresses a central cynicism about the hypocrisy of international politics, this possibly elucidating moment does not develop into a sustained criticism of the Cold War nor is it rewarded with a deserving narrative trajectory. What the novel does instead is to focus on the issues of faith and the absurdity of the human condition. This existentialist turn serves to displace the dual aspect of the Korean War as both civil conflict and international war, enabling the author to rewrite the Korean War as a metaphysical struggle. This chapter recovers the anti-communist persecutions beneath the narrative’s professed agenda of Communist anti-religious persecution by reading a religious mob action in the recaptured Pyongyang as analogous to the Red-hunting perpetrated widely in the North by the rightist youth corps.
a thing impossible I should love thee’: Shakespearean Performance as White Property
Authors: Corredera Vanessa I.
Published: January 2025

This chapter excavates the intimate relationship between property and appropriation in relation to race and Shakespearean performance, asking what the status of Shakespeare as white property means for Shakespearean performance. What inequitable power dynamics plaguing the Shakespearean stage are made identifiable by recognising Shakespeare’s racialised proprietorship and use Shakespeare as a white supremacist tool? How might performances deemed appropriations engage with, contest and respond to the problem of Shakespeare as white performance property? To begin answering these questions, the chapter turns to three distinctly metatheatrical plays: Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile (1986), Carlyle Brown’s The African Company Presents Richard III (1989) and Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet (2012). These plays traverse place and time, yet all three meditate on the role race plays in gatekeeping, inequity and ownership on the historical and contemporary Shakespearean stage. More specifically, all three plays consider how Shakespeare as white property delimits who performs Shakespeare and how staging ‘authentic’ Shakespearean performance becomes defined in opposition to the qualities ascribed to non-white performances. This relentless oppositional stance ultimately extracts an emotional, material and psychological cost by circumscribing not just a person of colour’s performance, but also their subjectivity.
Shakespeare and Gentrification in Regional Theatre
Authors: O’Leary Niamh J.
Published: January 2025

In 2017, the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company (CSC) opened their new theatre on the site of a former Teamsters’ union building and a much-beloved homeless shelter. In doing so, they not only claimed a space in a historic arts corridor, but also took part in the gentrification of this complicated neighbourhood. Responses to the new theatre have been generally, but not exclusively, positive. Considering CSC, this essay will ask a series of questions to uncover useful methods for studying regional Shakespeare in America. What is the iterative potential for a theatre to perform artistic reparations to the local community through performative and adaptive engagements with Shakespeare, a symbol of upper-class, white cultural hegemony? How does a theatre company balance its commitment to Shakespeare with engagement of its (often politically tense) immediate neighbourhood surroundings? The essay considers the economic, marketing, and political realities of what it means to be a regional, ensemble Shakespeare theatre company in Midwestern America and for local actors to take up space in Cincinnati, and to use Shakespeare as the flag they plant to claim that space.
1897 in 1981: Stéphane Mallarmé avec Christopher Brennan
Authors: Carruthers A. J.
Published: January 2025

The story of the modernist Australian poet Christopher Brennan and his uptake of Mallarmé’s experimental poetics is well known, but its implications for avant-garde history remain hitherto unexplored. When Mallarmé composes Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, he sets the conditions for avant-garde movements to come. The 1981 facsimile republication of Brennan’s parody of Un coup de dés (made astonishingly in the same year as Mallarmé’s, that is, in 1897), with the lengthy title Musicopoematographoscope, comes at the midst of a new explosion of visual poetics in 1980s Australia, especially women’s experimental visualism, with a different set of aims to the avant-originals. What does this late echo say about the Antipodal avant-gardes? A lot – and more that will be answered in chapters to come – but at a foundational level, the strange 1897 kinship of Brennan and Mallarmé troubles the narrative of avant-garde progress, anticipation and belatedness. Avant-garde influence could be immediate, or come nearly a century late. Yet the avant-garde tradition comes to serve a variety of purposes that still congeal around a core aim; to issue an uncompromising challenge to the literary and political establishments of the day.
New Order of the Line: W. C. Williams, Ern Malley, Harry Hooton and the 1940s Avant-Gardes
Authors: Carruthers A. J.
Published: January 2025

Three figures now come into view: 1., the canonical US poet William Carlos Williams, who wrote to Australian poets in 1947 urging them to adopt a “new order of the line,” 2., Ern Malley, the hoax poet who needs little introduction given the international recognition he has drawn, and most crucially 3., Harry Hooton; an advocate of “anarcho-technocracy.” Hooton was the most experimental Australian poet writing between the 1940s and 1960s. What do these three figures tell us? Between them all the contradictions of the internal and external constitution of Antipodal avant-gardes and their development in the postwar period are exposed. Malley’s apparent nail in the coffin of all avant-gardes and modernists in 1944 was challenged by the call to innovation from outside by Williams, who knew almost nothing about Australian poetry in 1947. But Hooton pries the nail loose. What Hooton shows is not only that avant-garde poetry was possible in the 1940s, but that it was crucial to the formation of an Australian avant-garde poetics decades later. In the end it was Hooton, not Malley, who would fashion the “new order of the line” that Williams demanded of Antipodal poets.
Introduction: Modernist Hieroglyphics and the Implicated Reader
Authors: Richardson Brian
Published: January 2025

The introduction outlines some of the basic impulses behind and dynamics within modernist narrative texts. It argues that modernist practices typically frustrate many expectations appropriate for Victorian narrative. It demarcates how modernist stories of misreading differ fundamentally from ostensibly similar earlier treatments from Cervantes to Jane Austen, discusses earlier critical accounts of the use and abuse of reading, and examines recent debates over reading and critical interpretation. It includes a brief consideration pre-or quasi-modernist strategies in Wells’ The History of Mr. Polly, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and E. M. Forster’s Howards End. It also points to key intellectual transformations across the disciplines at the time, such as the skeptical hermeneutics of Marx and Nietzsche, which make the search for a hidden, underlying meaning a significant break from the past and a defining feature of modern knowledge.
Metabolic Rift and the Remedy of Faecal Recycling
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores how the concept of “metabolic rift” has become the basis of a Marxist environmentalism, led by sociologist John Bellamy Foster, and taken up by a growing array of scholars thinking through the global repercussions of industrialism. It includes Marx’s central animating story of the farmer whose excrement had once replenished his fields, but who was now forced to shit in the city, thus robbing the soil of important nutrients, and polluting urban waterways. It considers how the model of metabolism has proven useful to analyze urban environments, and explores Marvin and Medd’s metabolic study of “fat as actant” in human bodies and city infrastructure, which serves as a model for how fecal matter similarly moves through human and urban systems. Traces the rise and fall of agricultural fecal recycling in the 19th and early 20th century, and its eventual replacement by water-borne flush systems. Raises the question of how “waste” is defined.
Faecal Habitus
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses how bodily rites of elimination are tied in with class, gender, and race-based systems of distinction. It explores what David Inglis terms our “fecal habitus” (inspired by Bourdieu), that is, unconscious but compulsory practices around defecation that distinguish one class or group of people from another. In England and Europe, for instance, the “clean” Bourgeoisie eventually extended its fecal habitus to the “dirty” Proletariat, leading ultimately to the adoption of a “modern” fecal habitus consisting of the use of flush toilets and state sanitary systems. It argues that the metabolic rift-based environmental research discussed in Chapter 1, and sociological thought on fecal habitus (two fields that do not yet overlap) might be usefully brought into conversation with each other to understand the relationship between environmental and bodily metabolic health. It concludes that Inglis’ emphasis on a “clean/dirty” binary of fecal habitus (bourgeois as clean, proletariat as dirty) should be modified to account for bourgeois desire to be well-regulated, and draws from Foucault’s concept of the biopolitical to propose a metabolic rather than binary model for understanding fecal habitus. It substitutes “regularity” for Foucault’s “sexuality” to highlight the imperative to examine one’s excretory experience in the name of maximizing life.
1915–33
Authors: Munro Lachlan , Graham W. R. B. Cunninghame
Published: January 2025

Graham’s writing career was interrupted by war service, but subsequently, his production of ‘sketches’ reduced as he concentrated on publishing books, mostly on South American history. It may also be that for a writer who relied almost entirely on his own vivid memories of people and places, that these memories are becoming exhausted. Only one sketch deals with World War I on the home-front, one is an obituary of his friend and colleague, Keir Hardie, and three describe lonely, haunted locations, with strong feelings of melancholy.
Biography
Authors: Munro Lachlan , Graham W. R. B. Cunninghame
Published: January 2025

A brief summation of Graham’s long life, his Spanish/Scottish background, education, and business ventures in South America, particularly Argentina. His morganatic marriage, and his time as a rebel MP for a mining community, his dislike of parliament, and his imprisonment for leading a riot. Graham’s expressive journalism for small socialist publications, his role in the founding of the first party of Labour with Keir Hardie, and his continued fight for the rights of the working class. Later, his recruitment for more prestigious publications in which he contributed 250 essays, or ‘sketches’, mostly on South American or Moroccan subjects, but around 50 on Scotland. Graham’s lifelong support for Irish home-rule, then his involvement in the fledgling Scottish home rule movements, and later his senior role in the foundation of the first Scottish independence parties. Graham’s final visit to Argentina, his death there, and burial in his homeland.
Reading Spinoza in the Anthropocene
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

This book offers a reading of Spinoza’s distinctive treatment of human presence in Nature, bringing his philosophy to bear on contemporary climate change debate. Centred on close commentary on The Ethics – with some diversions into Spinoza’s political writings – it highlights the contrasts with Descartes’s treatment of the nature of human knowledge and of mind-body relations, arguing that a Cartesian framework has profoundly influenced current ways of thinking of Reason’s supremacy over Imagination and Emotion, and of the supremacy of human beings within the totality of Nature. Reading the less familiar philosophy of Spinoza now, in the context of climate change, can be a source of insight into the contingency and changeability of those Cartesian ways of thinking.The book thus aims to bring Spinoza’s critique of Descartes into the discussion of conceptual aspects of climate change. A subsidiary, but related, theme is a revaluation of the common belief that Spinoza’s philosophy is a paradigm of rationalism. The book argues that Spinoza offers a more nuanced treatment of Reason – integrated with Imagination and Emotion, rather than dominating them within a hierarchical model. The Chapters are structured around close readings of the five Parts of The Ethics, each of which is brought to bear on themes in current climate change debate. Themes addressed include: the relations between human and non-human; human-centredness and the concept of the Anthropocene; climate change emotions: fear, hope grief, and wonder; Indigenous knowledge and cross-cultural communication about climate change.
‘God’ and ‘Nature’
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

Part I of The Ethics introduces Spinoza’s metaphysics of Substance, which is the basis for his treatment of human thought as embedded in the natural world, rather than separated from it. This Chapter discusses the view of human presence in Nature that emerges from that treatment of God as the one, unique Substance –contrasting it with later treatments of Nature in Romanticism, some of which were influenced by readings of Spinoza. It contrasts Spinoza’s version of Nature with notions of the Sublime in Edmund Burke and Kant. It also contrasts Spinoza’s treatment of human thought with Pascal’s more familiar version of the relations between Reason and Nature. Against that background, the Chapter comments on the appeal of Spinoza in twentieth century ‘Environmental Philosophy’, with special reference to the work of Arne Næss.
Introduction
Authors: Singer Robert
Published: January 2025

This chapter introduces the scope and design of Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice as it discusses critical concepts endemic to naturalist cinema and key historical figures such as Émile Zola, Gustave Courbet, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and contemporary figures such as Gilles Deleuze, Ian Aitken, Mark Seltzer, and Jose Luis Borges and others. Among the film titles referenced are Todd Phillips' Joker (2019), Andre? Antoine's La Terre (1921), and Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925). There is a particular focus on Chloe? Zhao's trilogy of reality-based films, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), The Rider (2017), and Nomadland (2020). This chapter proposes that Naturalism is the essential art of a post-realist, speculative, experimental era, and remains an ongoing aesthetic praxis, a cohesive, cultural product of the contemporary world.
Naturalist Tropes
Authors: Singer Robert
Published: January 2025

Before the celebration of the irrational and the subconscious in Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism and other movements, Naturalism looked within to the internal terrain of genetics and temperament to provide a context for representing the human. This chapter explores the naturalist film aesthetic and its participation-presence in avant-garde cinema's formalist-thematic intertextualities, experimental methodologies, and defamiliarized subjects in states of crisis and decline, in which the spectacle of the human advances the uncertainty of identity and representation. This is accomplished in international naturalist cinema by the presence of recurring visual and thematic tropes. These recurring tropes illustrate Naturalism's crisis of experience in relationship to pervasive material determinism, which is often misread as fatalism. Naturalism's "grinding tradition" reveals the individual as s/he experiences an impersonal yet controlling sense of environmentally or biologically predisposed "fate" that is frequently a product of racial (mis)conception, class prohibition, and gender-based proscription within a given historical milieu.
A Joker’S World
Authors: Singer Robert
Published: January 2025

This final chapter examines Todd Phillips' Joker (2019) in its multiple intermedial capacities. Arthur Fleck/Joker is a concealed creature, a broken, dejected man passing as an oddly sympathetic, violent clown, the result of past brutal interpersonal experiences. He is a real man but with a complex clinical lineage, as he transitions from Arthur, the unexceptional individual, into Joker, Zola's La Be?te humaine, a disturbed, rampaging specimen of the human. Joker documents the stylized evolution of festering human duality in a specific socio-historical milieu, in this case, the New York City of the 1980s. This case study introduces a suffering, surplus, drugged, lonely, and enraged man who emerges, in nefarious strokes of near-mythical violence, as a contrived naturalist specimen, a masked product. Joker is a quintessential naturalist film narrative possessing a profound intertextual range of meaning.
Introduction: We Are No Longer Queer …
Authors: Kedem Nir
Published: January 2025

Taking its cue from Foucault’s claim about our needing to liberate not so much our sexuality but rather ourselves from sexuality, the introduction discusses how and in what sense sexuality has paradoxically become an obstacle for queer theory, dulling its critical edge and undermining its promise to revolutionise our ways of thinking and acting. Underscoring the unprivileged status of sex and sexuality in Deleuze’s oeuvre, this chapter argues that a Deleuzian form of critique provides a practical means to both diagnose this problem and reignite queer theory’s creative, revolutionary potential. To this end, an operational concept of Deleuzian critique as a practice is put forward, defined by its three ‘moments’ or components: the pragmatic, the problematic, and the genetic.
Clowns
Authors: Buckmaster Jonathan
Published: January 2025

Dickens, inspired by Shakespeare and pantomime, firmly believed in the cultural value of clowns. Developing his conviction that clowns operate within life away from the stage, he peoples his work with comic characters who adapt the traits of clowning to momentarily ‘play the fool’. His clowns explore the constructed nature of identity to undermine pretension and authority, but expose their own fragile selfhood. They also disrupt the predictable habits of institutions such as the law, which threatens the integrity of the work they inhabit. Clowns are granted this licence to interrogate society’s rules and taboos, because they remain outside the society; Dickens’s clowns similarly inhabit the margins, but subvert their apparent minor status through their imaginative attractiveness to both author and reader.
Music
Authors: Ingleby Matthew
Published: January 2025

Like many middle-class Victorians, Dickens was musically trained, could play the piano and possessed a fine tenor voice, which he employed in domestic musical performances, such as were common in the nineteenth century. His sister Fanny was a professional singer, who trained at the prestigious Royal Academy of Music. In his fiction, he consistently displays an affiliation with amateur music-making but is satirical about, or even hostile to, elite professional musicianship, especially the opera, which is portrayed as socially exclusive and captured by commodity culture’s fashion system. This chapter explores the way in which, throughout his novels, Dickens qualifies his evident musical appreciation by underlining the value of amateur performances that fail to make the mark in purely musical terms, because of the way they fulfil other important social functions. It then turns to Little Dorrit (1855–57) and looks in detail at its extensive use of music, arguing that it suggests that musical practice, amateur or professional, might be at once resistant to, and complicit with, the reifying social processes of capitalism the novel famously anatomises. Finally, a brief coda looks at the comparative dearth of successful Dickens operas and speculates that this dearth can be partly accounted for if we attend more fully to the cultural politics of music his novels pursue.
The 1970s
Authors: Murphy Paula
Published: January 2025

In the 1970s, technophobic depictions of AI continue to dominate, or AIs are reduced to objects of ridicule such as in the satirical Dark Star. Colossus and Demon Seed present the first explorations of AI in domestic situations in rudimentary ‘smart homes’, where they use surveillance and multi-agent intelligence to control and oppress humans. Westworld and Alien present the first AI visual doubles that can convincingly disguise themselves as humans.
From the 1970s, AIs interact more with ordinary individuals with disastrous consequences, wreaking havoc in homes and holiday resorts. AIs inflict graphic violence on humans in Westworld and in Alien, this violence is sexual. In Westworld, the first POV shots from a humanoid AI are presented, and an AI is killed in a graphic ‘AI reveal’ for the first time. In Demon Seed, the theme of AI reproduction emerges with an AI that procreates with a human woman.
The Faustian Pact in International Law
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

Why the Faustian pact? Why international law? Why now? Inquiring into whether international law is quintessentially Faustian and how to deal with that – as this book seeks to do – does not necessarily explain and justify itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust dangles the tantalising possibility of frustrating Faustian pacts. Two lines from it sparked and have spurred and sustained this project on. First was Mephistopheles’ description of himself as: A part of that force Which, always willing evil, always produces good. where he represented himself – and indeed was presented – as somehow a servant of God or at the very least as doing God’s work for Him. The second, and related to this, was Mephistopheles’ sly and ironic observation to God that Faust ‘serves You in a curious way’, which may well have been simultaneously description and self-description. Whether taken together or separately, these lines say a good deal about the Mephistophelean character and role, which claims to bring good and evil together in some sort of productive and somehow mutually reliant relationship, all the while couched in a consciously bottomless ironic register. Consequently, the Faustian pact or literary (it could never be literal – could it?) deal with the devil rests on the claim that out of evil, good will nevertheless arise. This trope utilises false hope by invoking real desire and relates good and evil with the latter somehow producing the former – that is, it explains away evil by invoking good, and is consequently, much like law, a lay theodicy.
Saving Humanity from Hell: International Criminal Law and Permanent Crisis
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

This chapter compares and contrasts temporary international criminal tribunals to the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) referencing international criminal law’s and UN Security Council’s (UNSC) relationship to ‘crisis’. All the situations where the UNSC has acted in international criminal justice are critical in the sense that they involve crucial decisions where members elect among distinct choices in inherently unstable situations. My argument is that crises enable a negative grounding of legal and political jurisdiction that relies on legitimation that is confirmed by judicial bodies. The analysis outlines the institutionalisation of a once exceptional legal mechanism in the practice of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), its proliferation to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and its normalisation in the International Criminal Court (ICC). The purpose of this analysis is neither to parse what the law is and what it should be—nor what the law does versus what it promises—, but rather to show how and why individual criminal responsibility in the absence of State intervention demonstrates that a crisis is a liminal situation, which by its inherently Faustian ambiguity enables that process of power being refracted to glory.
The President’s Two Bodies: A Study in Applied Political Theology
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

The medieval distinction between the official and the personal bodies of the state sovereign has played out before the International Criminal Court. That scenario involved the President of the Republic of Kenya willingly submitting to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court but only in his personal capacity and not as president. Essentially this argument is based on the medieval doctrine of the ‘King’s two bodies’. The distinction of describing two bodies united in one in its origins sits at the cross roads of legal theory and political theology. As such it draws from a rich heritage of these traditions that are of necessity developed through reconciling practical imperatives to theoretical niceties. Seeing the ancient doctrine of the King’s two bodies manifested in a contemporary context thus provides the opportunity to observe a longstanding (if dormant and obscure) legal theory applied to a novel factual situation. It demonstrates that this legal fiction remains stubbornly useful and effective in navigating between political imperatives and legal strictures. Moreover, that unusual irruption of an arcane legal and political practice into a modern day international courtroom shows that the practice still bears the unmistakeable signature of its mystical foundation.
Introduction: From Traumatic Rupture to Systemic Crisis in the Twenty-First Century Novel of Terrorism
Authors: Keeble Arin
Published: January 2025

This introduction lays out the over-arching argument of the book: that the novel of terrorism in the twenty-first century has steadily moved away from ‘event-based’ narratives. It discusses the exceptionalisation of 9/11 and some of the key historical, cultural and literary contexts for the 22 texts under discussion in the book. It then discusses and defines key terms including ‘terrorism’, ‘trauma’, and ‘systemic’, and outlines each of the five main chapters to come.
Revisiting the Anglophone 9/11 Novel: Domesticity, Metafiction and Exceptionalism
Authors: Keeble Arin
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses six ‘9/11 novels’ published between 2003-2013: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Writing on the Wall by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Falling Man by Don DeLillo, Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, The Submission by Amy Waldman, and Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon – with some passing reference to other notable texts. I consider the alleged ‘domestication’ of 9/11 by these texts, their metafictional impulses, and depictions of trauma. Ultimately, via detailed close readings, I show how, despite certain political critiques and progressive impulses, the first five of these six novels reinforce the exceptionalisation of 9/11’. Only Bleeding Edge, I argue, fully challenges this phenomenon.
Context, Arguments and Structure
Authors: Toros Emre
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses Turkish local elections. In the March 2014 local election in Turkey was the most controversial in the country’s recent political history owing to numerous accusations related to electoral integrity. Allegations included various types of rigging, including lost ballot papers, ballot-box tallies missing legally required stamps and signatures, high numbers of invalid votes in constituencies that were likely to have close races, power blackouts and electoral violence. what I have summarised above, this book explores the causes and consequences of damaged electoral integrity not only through the lenses of explained theoretical explanations but also with a novel and comprehensive approach. The fundamental motivation behind this investigation is the substantial increase in the attention given to the causes and consequences of damage to electoral integrity in various countries in recent years.
Policy Preferences on Postponement of Elections Owing to Covid-19 – Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
Authors: Toros Emre
Published: January 2025

This chapter analyses whether partisanship and affective polarisation shaped the approval of policies related to COVID-19, and if so, how, by using a conjoint experiment fielded in a country-representative face-toface survey. The analysis separates two policy areas – elections and media freedom – referring to newly developed policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings show clear evidence that participants are more likely to approve policy proposals if their political party offers them. Moreover, this impact is more robust for affectively polarised citizens.
“What’s aught but as ’tis valued”: “History,” Truth, and Fiction
Authors: Gieskes Edward
Published: January 2025

Chapter five turns to historical drama of the seventeenth century. It opens by discussing Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida as historical drama before turning to a series of “Tudor history plays” including The True Chronicle History of the whole life and death of Thomas Lord Cromwell (1600), Dekker and Webster’s Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1602), Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me (1604), the two parts of Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1604, 1605), Shakespeare and Fletcher’s All is True. The chapter concludes with Middleton’s “late” historical drama Hengist, King of Kent (1621)and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (printed 1634). Despite the commonplace narrative that the “history play” fades away after 1600, interest in plays on historical subjects remains high and that these later plays also engage in the project of historical representation despite being separated from the 1590s flourishing of the history play by almost three decades. Rather than proceeding from an assumption that these plays represent a genre because they share an interest in history, I ask why and how it made sense for working playwrights across the whole period to write plays drawing on the recalcitrant materials of history.
“When the bad bleed”: Tenants to Tragedy
Authors: Gieskes Edward
Published: January 2025

Chapter 6 turns to developments in early modern dramatic treatments of tragedy after the turn of the seventeenth century while also looking back to plays discussed in the first chapter. In Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy, Vindice calls vengeance a “tenant to tragedy” suggesting that his awareness of revenge tragedy’s status as a subgenre, or, perhaps, a sense that revenge is only one possible element of tragedy. This chapter examines Marston’s Antonio plays, Chapman’s Bussy plays, Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy and Women Beware Women, before concluding with Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. It discusses the various tenants to tragedy in these diverse plays—which include elements drawn from comic drama, history and satire—as another way to characterize both the dramatic field and generic change.
Introduction
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: January 2025

The term Kafkaesque cinema is frequently used but it has rarely been subjected to any thorough conceptualization, leading many scholars to use it interchangeably for an aesthetics of obscurity. The ambition of the introduction is to invite the reader to think about Kafkaesque cinema beyond Kafka. Starting with a critique of the general understanding of the term in film studies, the introduction addresses Kafka’s multimedia modernism by doing a review of the secondary literature. This review will show that scholarship has mainly focused on Kafka’s “cinematic writing”, or the film/tv adaptation of his texts rather than on Kafkaesque cinema. The last section introduces the key thesis of the book that there is a Kafkaesque cinema before and after Kafka, whose aesthetic can be seen as a response to the crisis of liberalism in its longue durée.
Memories from the Rákosi Era
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: January 2025

This is the first Chapter of the section on Stalinism. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s seminal study on Kafka, according to which minor literature reflects collective issues and anxieties, I make a case for rethinking the politics of the New Waves in Central/Eastern Europe during the thaw. These points are further illuminated in the discussion of two Hungarian films: Zoltán Fábri’s Hannibál tanár úr (Professor Hannibal, 1956)and Péter Bacsó’s A tanú (The Witness, 1969).
Behaviourist Surveillance
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: January 2025

This Chapter begins with a brief discussion of cinema as a medium that reflects on the dialectics of the seeing and the seen subject. The analysis of John Hillcoat’s Ghosts… of the Civil Dead (1988) reads the film’s story as a commentary on neoliberal monitoring practices that challenge neat boundaries between observing and observed subjects. I then discuss Jeff Renfroe and Marteinn Thorsson’s Paranoia 1.0 (2004) through the lens of Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism. The term refers to practices of data extraction and digital behaviourism on the part of corporations aiming to predict and shape future consumer and social behaviour. In offering a comparative analysis of the two films, I draw attention to the shift from panoptical forms of behaviourist monitoring to surveillance capitalist ones.
Post-Fascism
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: January 2025

Post-fascism describes a period that perpetuates fascism’s hostility to the Enlightenment, but which, however, permeates even mainstream politics in contemporary liberal societies. Drawing on the work of the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás, the Chapter begins with a definition of post-fascism and then focuses on the discussion of three case studies that anticipate and respond to the historical conditions of post-fascism: Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000), and Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018)
‘Music had driven their wits astray’: Raftery, Nietzsche and the Applied Arts
Authors: Paterson Adrian
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers how a 1902 west of Ireland feis, a traditional arts festival, offers a perhaps unlikely setting for Yeats’s engagement with European Modernism. A simultaneous encounter with Nietzsche’s philosophy helped to remake his views on folk life, music and artistic self-consciousness. Featuring combinations of words, music, song, dance, performance and drama, all that Yeats called ‘the applied arts of literature’, it explores his displaced relationship to the Irish language through collaborations with Douglas Hyde and Augusta Gregory, and his own appropriations of the figure of Anthony Raftery. In Yeats’s hands, Raftery becomes a totemic performer, a bad fiddler and defiantly self-conscious speaker still able to provoke Nietzsche’s Dionysian frenzy in his listeners, featuring recurrently in Yeats’s poems that reanimate a conception of voice and audience.
‘Lose my words in patterns of sound’: Music in the Dance Plays for Ninette de Valois
Authors: Fitzgerald Mark
Published: January 2025

This chapter is primarily devoted to the musical component of the dramatic work that Yeats produced for and in collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Ninette de Valois in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It identifies a difficulty in making sense of the aural dimension of Yeats’s oeuvre, as his pronouncements on music throughout his career can at times seem contradictory. Nevertheless, examining in detail the music composed by George Antheil for Fighting the Waves and by Arthur Duff for The King of the Great Clock Tower illuminates the dramatic role played by music in these plays’ productions. The 1929 Abbey Theatre production of Fighting the Waves emerges as a remarkable modernist fusion of dance, drama and, crucially, music. Yet it was a success that Yeats struggled to replicate thereafter, not least through a lack of suitable musical collaborators.
Yeats’s Common Measure: The Later Ballads
Authors: Campbell Matthew
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers Yeats’s appropriations of orality and its meaning before different audiences and readerships. In particular, it focuses on the political ramifications of Yeats’s oral aesthetics. Yeats’s 1930s ballads seem to offer a deliberate roughening up of his style to enable the unpredictable and the unforeseen. In their original printings they also play uncomfortably with conservative ideologies such as fascism and feudalism. Ultimately, though, the chapter concludes they are too idiosyncratic and wilfully troublesome to be straightforwardly subsumed to traditionalist or right-wing ideologies. Rather, they establish antinomies between the heterogenous and violent energies of the folk from which populist forms have come, and the knowledge required by their informed audience. They operate in a paradoxical, rancorous realm of decidedly impure and synthetic populism and authenticity, one marked by terror and gaiety.
Own experience of using anti-HER2 therapy for cancer of the intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma
Authors: Golubev P. V. , Kuzmina E. S. , Pokataev I. A. , Golubeva S. A. , Kontorovich D. S. , Sydykova R. S. , Parts S. A. , Galkin V. N.
Published: January 2025

Cancer of the biliary tract is rare and one of the most aggressive malignancies. The main method of radical treatment is surgical. However, only 1/3 of patients can use this approach, while the rest of the patients have an unresectable, locally widespread or already metastatic process. The therapeutic tactic of this group of patients is systemic drug antitumor therapy. In this article, we present a description of a clinical case of effective treatment of a patient with advanced intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma using not only standard cytostatics, but also modern targeted drugs.