bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gangster Films
Authors: Mason Fran
Published: March 2013

The study of gangster films extends back to the 1970s when the development of film studies as an academic discipline generated new perspectives to provide a scholarly framework for the analysis of film. Alongside the study of film theory, national cinemas, and film histories, genre theory and the parallel creation of a taxonomy of genres and the study of specific genres were among these new approaches to film. During the 1970s the iconography, narrative structures, and ideological or cultural parameters of the gangster film were established as part of this critical methodology, very often alongside or in contrast to the western, because of shared concerns with individuality, masculinity, and social concerns. From the earliest articles and books on the gangster film, the genre has predominantly been considered in relation to its historical, ideological, and sociocultural contexts, and such perspectives have continued to inform the study of the genre in recent accounts of masculinity and the gangster and in new studies of the Mafia film. The gangster film has, in particular, been considered in terms of realism, often in contrast to the “mythic” style of the western, but most critics who adopt such a view are more concerned with its symbolic or imaginary representation or refraction of social and political relations than with examining verisimilitude in the mapping of criminal activities. The gangster film has, as a consequence, been considered to be a subversive form of filmmaking, not only in America, but also in European and Asian versions of the genre, even if notable critics such as Richard Maltby and Paul Kerr question such a viewpoint by arguing that institutional and production concerns often contain or deflate the political and ideological messages of specific films. The presumption of the genre’s subversive politics is often based on its critique of American society, and much criticism of the gangster film has focused on Hollywood films at the expense of other traditions. However, in recent years this balance has been redressed with the development of critical strands examining Asian and European cinema, not only because of the awareness of the global reach of criminal organizations and the development of representations of crime in cinematic traditions outside of the United States, but also because of recent critical works that have been produced on Asian, British, and French crime film traditions as well as on the developing crime forms in Latin American and post-Soviet Russian cinemas.
Israeli Cinema
Authors: Yosef Raz , Hagin Boaz
Published: March 2013

Scholarship on Zionist and Israeli cinema is in agreement as to the major periods and movements in this corpus. During the prestate period, and especially after the 1920s, the Zionist movement used cinema to propagate Zionist ideology and to gather financial and political support. Following the 1948 independence of the State of Israel, and during the 1950s and 1960s, Israeli films continued to comply with the Zionist master-narrative. A heroic-nationalist genre related to the emergence of a generation of native-born Israelis—Sabras—now made the new Israeli warriors, and not the pioneering group, its protagonists. In the 1960s and 1970s, two genres that broke away from representing heroic nationalist mythology can be discerned. One is the popular Bourekas genre—mainly comedies but also melodramas and musicals—that focuses on the interethnic tension between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews in Israeli society, which is resolved through the (ideologically suspect according to many scholars) union of a mixed ethnic couple. A different, small group of films from the mid-1960s and 1970s has been labeled by critics and scholars as personal cinema, Israeli modernist cinema, the Israeli New Wave, or the New Sensibility. These are often extremely low-budget, black-and-white, and ostensibly apolitical films that are characterized by experimental cinematic techniques; fragmentary, minimal, and open-ended narratives; alienated protagonists; and existential themes. While the Bourekas films were extremely successful at the box office but loathed by many critics, the personal cinema was warmly received by critics but suffered from dismal ticket sales. From the late 1970s, with the rise of the right-wing Likud Party, through the early 1990s, Israeli cinema was dominated by explicitly political films that tried to challenge the Zionist ideology of the past and gave increased visibility to outsiders and outcasts. This is also the period in which substantial academic scholarship on Israeli cinema began to appear, with works by Judd Ne’eman, Ella Shohat, and scholars such as Nurith Gertz, Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Yosefa Loshitzky, Yael Munk, Raz Yosef, Régine-Mihal Friedman, Orly Lubin, and Anat Zanger. Since the 1990s, and especially in the new millennium, Israeli films have enjoyed critical and popular success both locally and internationally. Scholarship has noted this cinema’s complex explorations of trauma and personal and collective memories and identities.
Jean Cocteau
Authors: Williams James S.
Published: March 2013

Jean Cocteau (b. 1889–d. 1963) was one of French cinema’s greatest and most original directors whose work covered nearly all the major genres, from the early avant-garde to fairy-tale fantasy, historical melodrama, domestic bourgeois drama, detective thriller and mystery, and self-portrait. One of the first French writers to take the cinema seriously, he claimed to have entered the cinema “fraudulently” because he was entirely self-taught, calling himself more an “artisan” and “amateur” (in the French sense of a “lover” of cinema). Yet, the often-applied label of “literary filmmaker” is insufficient to describe Cocteau, who was also an experimenter, collaborator, theorist, and all-round ambassador of film. Profoundly interested in the fundamentals of time, space, motion, speed, and sound, he was a visionary filmmaker intoxicated by the mystery of what he called “the cinematograph,” and he strove to discover what film can reveal of beauty and consciousness. His comparatively slim corpus of extraordinary and utterly unique films (what he called his “poetry of cinema”), along with his other multiple activities in the cinema as a writer of screenplays, dialogues, commentaries, and voice-overs; actor; editor; festival organizer; and judge, established Cocteau in the postwar period as one of the supreme filmmakers in France, above all in the eyes of the New Wave directors who hailed him as an auteur complet. Yet, with the possible exception of La Belle et la bête (1946), Cocteau’s cinema, like much of his work in other forms and media, often has been critically underestimated or neglected, particularly in the English-speaking world, although it has always been cherished by a small chosen few. Prolific and prodigious yet too versatile for his own good, he was perceived by many as a sublime jack-of-all-trades and master of none. In fact, Cocteau lived to see himself become one of the most underrated and outmoded figures in 20th-century French culture. Thus, the number of studies devoted to his cinema is relatively small, and the authors of those that do exist have often been content merely to read Cocteau’s work through his life or else reproduce the simple idea of Cocteau as “film poet” without taking into full account the many complex strands and levels of his film work. A major exhibition of his work in 2003–2004 at the Pompidou Center in Paris titled “Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle,” on the fortieth anniversary of Cocteau’s death, has helped to reverse this trend.
Orson Welles
Authors: Larsson Donald F.
Published: March 2013

The artistry of Orson Welles (b. 1915–d. 1985) can be difficult to disentangle from his own celebrity and notoriety. Citizen Kane (1941) was quickly hailed as a cinematic landmark by perceptive critics when first released, but the pivotal accomplishments of that film were blurred by controversies over the plot’s parallels with the life of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Welles’s earlier controversial theater work in New York and the succès de scandale of his radio version of The War of the Worlds (1938) also affected critics’ views of Citizen Kane. Later films directed by Welles for American movie studios would be released in versions that did not reflect the director’s final intentions, such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and Touch of Evil (1958). Working in self-exile in Europe, Welles created works such as Mr. Arkadin (1955) and The Trial (1962) that also would be altered by producers and distributors. Even when relatively unaltered, some of these films perplexed American viewers and critics, while other projects were never completed. By the 1960s, Welles would become best known to television viewers as an obese, though loquacious and witty, man appearing on talk shows and commercials, dismissed by many as a “has-been.” In the last two decades of his life, however, Welles’s own career was also being rediscovered and reevaluated by a new generation of cineastes and critics. Citizen Kane has remained near the top of critics’ “greatest films” lists for half a century. Welles was also championed as one of the greatest film directors of all time by international critics, led by French critic André Bazin and the auteur critics of the Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s. American film critic Andrew Sarris, who popularized the French “auteur theory” for American filmgoers, placed Welles in his pantheon of the greatest American directors in his 1968 book The American Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton). Such adulation, though, would be tempered by other critics, notably Pauline Kael, who claimed in 1971 that Welles had stolen credit for accomplishments in Citizen Kane from his collaborators, especially his cowriter Herman Mankiewicz. More-measured understandings of Welles, his life, and his work have been made possible by new research and restored versions of some of his films. This bibliography concentrates on major works by or relating to Welles, especially those published after the exhaustive annotated lists in Wood 1990 (see Bibliographies and Other Resources).
Quentin Tarantino
Authors: Coulthard Lisa
Published: March 2013

Bursting on the scene with the controversial Reservoir Dogs (1992), Quentin Tarantino has become known for a particular brand of film violence and postmodern pastiche that has won him both accolades and censure. Studying acting and working as a video store clerk, Tarantino had long been interested in cinema and in writing screenplays. Although Tarantino had written and directed My Best Friend’s Birthday in 1987, it was not released, and Reservoir Dogs marks the start of Tarantino’s career as a writer and director. This violent heist film cleverly reworks the genre to focus on the aftereffects of action rather than on action, and its premiere at Sundance in 1992 made Tarantino’s career. Although offending many and almost entirely snubbed by critics, the film received enough positive attention to make the former video store clerk an overnight sensation in high demand by Hollywood. But it was the sensation of Tarantino’s second film, Pulp Fiction (1994), that truly caught the attention of audiences and critics alike. Winning multiple major awards and setting box-office records, Pulp Fiction solidified Tarantino’s directorial career and won him the designation of auteur; it became nothing short of a film phenomena, as Dana Polan notes (see Polan 2000, cited under Pulp Fiction [1994]). With seven feature films, one omnibus film, two filmed screenplays, and two television series episodes (CSI and ER), as well as guest directorial and acting appearances, Tarantino has lived up to the auteur hype that began brewing after the major success of Pulp Fiction. Although the calls for auteur status prompted by Pulp Fiction might have seemed premature at the time, given this was only his second film, it is clear that Tarantino’s films are marked by stylistic and thematic unities that are pronounced and identifiable. Most books and articles on his films tend to focus on these stylistic signatures, such as numerous cinematic, musical, and pop cultural references; lengthy segments of banter and witty dialogue; extreme violence; self-reflexivity; pastiche; and complicated narrative timelines. And yet there are very few scholarly studies of Tarantino that take his films seriously in terms of film history, style, or theory; rather, the literature is dominated by informal and popular criticism and biography and heavily theorized or highly specific analyses.
Sergei Eisenstein
Authors: Salazkina Masha , Mihailovic Katarina
Published: March 2013

Sergei Eisenstein (Sergei Mikhailovich Eizenshtein, b. Riga, Latvia, 1898–d. Moscow, 1948) remains one of the most celebrated filmmakers and theorists in the history of cinema. He achieved this status internationally during his lifetime, and since his death the overall volume of critical and theoretical writing exploring his work, life, and legacy is surpassed only by that on Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. At least one of his films—Battleship Potemkin (1925)—is inevitably included in every list of “the greatest films ever made,” and both his films and his theoretical writings are a regular part of the standard curriculum of film studies. Eisenstein’s canonical status as a filmmaker from the 1920s through the 1980s can largely be accounted for by the fact that his films have been seen as models for radical political filmmaking, combining antirealist avant-garde cinematic technique with a commitment to the transformation of the political consciousness of the spectator. The availability of archival materials and restorations of unfinished films in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with a renewed interest in historiography within the field of film studies, has led to a reconsideration of Eisenstein’s film legacy. The enduring question that has shaped much of the critical and historical writings on his films has been about the relationship between the ideological mandates of the Soviet state, particularly of the late Stalinist period (1930s–1940s), and the evolution of Eisenstein’s cinematic style.
Military Necessity
Authors: Turns David
Published: March 2013

Military necessity is one of the most fundamental yet most misunderstood and misrepresented principles of the international law of armed conflict. It has been invoked by military operators to justify any violent measures deemed necessary to win a given conflict, and it has also been dismissed by human rights groups, nongovernmental organizations, and other critics of the armed forces as a typical military excuse to explain away shocking collateral damage in modern military operations. At one extreme it has been distorted by the Clausewitzian approach of Kriegsraison geht vor Kriegsmanier (roughly, necessity in war overrides the way of fighting a war) into a doctrine that jettisons all restraints on military action in war; thus, at one end of the spectrum of interpretation, it may be seen as a doctrinal justification for the notion of “total war.” However, the modern law of armed conflict, with its strongly humanitarian emphasis, requires careful distinction between military and civilian targets; it is based on a subtle and often-elusive nonarithmetical equation that seeks to balance the military advantage anticipated from a given operation against the likely civilian casualties or damage to civilian objects. If proportionality is the fulcrum of that equation and humanity is one side of the balance, then military necessity is the other. Fundamentally and in its broadest interpretation, military necessity means that armed forces can do whatever is necessary—provided always that it is not otherwise unlawful under humanitarian law—to achieve their legitimate military objectives in warfare. For example, enemy armed forces that have not surrendered or are not hors de combat are always legitimate military targets in themselves and may therefore lawfully be attacked at any time and in any place, irrespective of where they are located or what they are actually doing. A more restrictive approach to the doctrine, however, interprets it as always placing limitations on military action, in the sense that no such action may be undertaken (regardless of its legality otherwise under the law of armed conflict) unless it is actually necessary in military terms. An example would be an invading force deciding not to attack certain enemy military formations that do not impede its attack or would represent a diversion from its main objectives. It should be emphasized that the legal notion of military necessity is not the same as “military advantage” (which is a factual descriptor of the outcome upon which actions are predicated). In sum, “military necessity” is best defined as the requirement, in any given set of circumstances, for the application of armed force (in accordance with the other rules of the law of armed conflict) to achieve legitimate military objectives.
Nationality and Statelessness
Authors: van Waas Laura , Recalde Vela María José
Published: March 2013

Nationality is the legal bond between a person and a state, denotes membership to said state, and gives rise to reciprocal rights and duties between individual and state. This legal bond is also commonly referred to as “citizenship” and the terms “nationality” and “citizenship” are widely used interchangeably, particularly in the field of international law. However, it is important to note that at the domestic level, citizenship and nationality may constitute distinct legal statuses. In addition, the terms “national” and “nationality” have been used in some international legal contexts to describe membership of a “nation” in the sense of a particular cultural, ethnic, or historic community. Each state’s municipal law dictates who can and who cannot be recognized as a state’s national, with the two principal doctrines for the attribution of nationality (at birth) being jus soli (based on birth in a state’s territory) and jus sanguinis (based on descent). A third common ground for the attribution of nationality is long-term residence, which can open the door to naturalization. It is also possible for persons to renounce, lose, change, or be deprived of their nationality under certain circumstances. While international law recognizes the freedom of states to regulate access to nationality as an exercise of their sovereignty, certain limitations to this freedom exist under international customary and treaty law. A stateless person is someone who is not considered a national by any state under the operation of its law, as defined under Article 1 of the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons. There are at least 15 million stateless persons worldwide, according to estimates from 2020 (World’s Stateless Report 2020). Statelessness has numerous causes, including the conflict of nationality laws, arbitrary deprivation or denial of nationality, discriminatory practices in attribution of nationality, and inadequate regulation of nationality in the context of state succession, to name a few. Statelessness has a detrimental effect on individuals, families, and communities. The lack of nationality can severely obstruct the enjoyment and access to a wide range of rights and services, contributing to poverty and marginalization, and even leading to forced displacement. Although human rights law provides for the right to nationality, and two international treaties were adopted specifically with a view to addressing statelessness, over the years the issues of nationality and statelessness have received inconsistent attention from the international community and from scholars. Therefore, as compared to other areas of international law, there are still gaps in the literature on these subjects. However, interest in statelessness and the problems associated with the regulation of nationality has been growing steadily in recent years, and this has heralded many new and insightful publications.
Terrorism
Authors: Saul Ben
Published: March 2013

International law has struggled to regulate terrorism for over a century, beginning with efforts to cooperate in the extradition and prosecution of suspects, including through unsuccessful League of Nations efforts to define and criminalize terrorism as such. Until 2001 most international attention focused on transnational criminal cooperation against terrorism, through the development of method-specific “prosecute or extradite” treaties (concerning, for instance, violence against aircraft or ships, hostage taking, or attacks on diplomats) but without defining terrorism as a general concept or crime. It may, however, be possible to qualify some terrorist acts as war crimes or crimes against humanity. Since the 1970s, there were ambivalent efforts through the UN General Assembly to develop normative frameworks to confront terrorism per se, which often came unstuck on the controversial issues of “state terrorism” and liberation movement violence. Greater consensus was achieved by 1994 with the General Assembly’s adoption of a declaration against terrorism. There appears to exist an international consensus that terrorism per se is wrongful, even if disagreement remains about identifying precisely what constitutes terrorism. The effort to deal with terrorism as such suggests that the international community views terrorism as more than its underlying physical parts, which are already crimes in most national legal systems and under certain transnational treaties. The special wrongfulness of terrorism is perhaps signified by its intimidation of civilian populations, its coercion of governments or international organizations, and its political, religious, or ideological aspect. Terrorist violence has also sometimes raised certain problems under the law of armed conflict and the law on the use of force, as well as occasionally attracted sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council. Terrorism was generally dealt with, however, through the application of general legal norms rather than through the emergence of terrorism-specific rules. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, sharper international focus was brought to bear on the legal challenges presented by terrorism and counter-terrorism in numerous specialized branches of international law (particularly in the law of state responsibility, the law on the use of force, and international humanitarian law), as well as in the institutional practices of the UN Security Council and the impacts of counter-terrorism measures on international human rights law. By 2011 the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon even declared the existence of an international customary law crime of transnational terrorism, although that decision has proven highly controversial as not supported by state practice. Efforts to negotiate a comprehensive international convention against terrorism have continued since 2000, with disagreement remaining over the scope of exceptions. There is also now increasing debate about whether a field of international anti-terrorism law is emerging.
Self-Determination in International Law
Authors: Summers James
Published: March 2013

The right of peoples to self-determination is their right to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development. It has a central position in international law as a primary principle in the creation and destruction of states. It features in Article 1 of the UN Charter (1945) as one of the purposes of the organization. It is positioned as the first right in the twin Human Rights Covenants (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR] and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights [ICESCR]). Many commentators argue for its peremptory or jus cogens status. Nonetheless, despite a general description in international instruments about what this right might allow peoples to do, the right itself has no exact definition (it is, after all, self-determined) and its subject, the “people,” has famously escaped legal formulation. These ambiguities provide plenty of fuel for academic writing. Engaging with the extensive literature on self-determination can be a monumental task, and this survey is necessarily no more than the tip of the iceberg of the total works available. The omission of particular titles here reflects on space requirements, not on their quality. The academic coverage of self-determination is enormous and growing energetically. Moreover, it is spread across a range of disciplines, not only law but also the study of nationalism and ethnic conflict in the political and social sciences, as well as history and philosophy. This is not to mention the overlapping issues of minority rights and indigenous peoples’ rights, which are covered in separate entries. A well-informed approach to the right of self-determination will require a wider reading than the primarily legal publications listed here, and it is recommended that researchers familiarize themselves with nationalism, liberalism, and the historical context of the right. The right of self-determination, rather like a magician, relies on perceptions and assumptions that a good analysis needs to be able to see through. The right is also linked with fast-changing events, and a good way to keep up with current developments is through websites like ASIL Insights or EJIL: Talk!
Genocide
Authors: Byron Christine
Published: March 2013

Genocide has been called the “crime of crimes” and the gravest violation of human rights it is possible to commit. It was developed as an international crime in reaction to the Nazi Holocaust and intended to provide for the prosecution of those who sought to destroy entire human groups. The word “genocide” was coined by a Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) to provide a legal concept for this unimaginable atrocity. The word is a hybrid of the Greek word genos, meaning race, nation, or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. Although genocide is often spoken of in the same breath as war crimes and crimes against humanity, it is not the same thing. War crimes refer to violations of the law of armed conflict, while crimes against humanity, of which genocide is often seen as a more serious subset, require a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population. Unlike war crimes, the crime of genocide does not have to take place during an armed conflict (although it often does), and unlike crimes against humanity, it may also be perpetrated against soldiers or prisoners of war from the targeted group (if it happens to take place during an armed conflict). Additionally, crimes against humanity do not have to be perpetrated against a specific human group, as is the case with genocide, but simply against a civilian population. While the concept of genocide was developed after World War II, it is unfortunately true that the mass killing of human groups is much older than the legal expression; indeed, the first genocide of the 20th century is widely thought to have been the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) between 1904 and 1907. The Genocide Convention of 1948 (officially the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) declared that “genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they, the contracting parties, undertake to prevent and to punish.” Nevertheless, the real development of systematic international trials and punishment for the crime of genocide waited for the end of the 20th century: the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the inclusion of the crime of genocide in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
International Courts
Authors: Romano Cesare P. R.
Published: March 2013

The multiplication of international courts is one of the most remarkable changes in international law and relations of the post–Cold War era. Admittedly, international courts are not a recent phenomenon. The first international courts date back to the early years of the 20th century. However, since the early 1990s the number of international judicial bodies has multiplied, the scope of their jurisdiction has expanded, and the number of the cases handled and judgments rendered has grown from a few a year to a steady stream that often has considerable impact on international relations and the lives of individuals worldwide. Depending on how international courts are defined, one can count more than two dozen of such bodies currently active, at very different degrees, both at the global and the regional level. If one were to add also those that are inactive or barely active, have been terminated, or never started operating, the tally can easily reach more than three dozen. This phenomenon has been tracked and analyzed by a vast and rapidly growing literature, fed by two main wells of scholarship. Indeed, international courts have been intensively studied by legal scholars––specifically of international law––first, and then by political scientists––in particular, those specializing in international relations. By and large each of the two learned groups has approached the same object of study from different perspectives, often at different levels of resolution, focusing on different aspects and ultimately using different interpretative tools. Yet both have yielded theoretical and functional insight that must be taken into account if a proper understanding of the phenomenon is to be achieved. It should be noted that in the literature, international courts are also called international tribunals. Albeit the terms courts and tribunals do not designate exactly the same kind of institutions, they are often used interchangeably, so much so that the generic expression “international courts and tribunals” (ICTs) is often preferred. Other, more technical and usually employed, designations are “international judicial body” and “international adjudicative body,” although the latter expression usually includes both international courts and tribunals, which are permanent institutions, and arbitral tribunals, which are ad hoc and temporary (see Definitions).
Feminist Approaches to International Law
Authors: Otto Dianne
Published: March 2013

Feminist perspectives have informed the development of international law at least since the early 20th century, when women’s international peace organizations supported the development of international law and international institutions in the hope that they would provide a means to resolve international disputes peacefully. These and other early feminist efforts bore some fruit, notably with provision for greater protections for civilians in the context of armed conflict, the adoption of antitrafficking treaties, and International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions concerned with women’s conditions of employment. However, this engagement with international law was largely uncritical. International law was understood as a hopeful site for feminist engagement; as providing a means for the improvement of women’s lives as well as enabling a permanent peace. By the mid-1980s, more critical feminist approaches were emerging as it was becoming clear that the law was largely impervious to feminist concerns, with women’s issues marginalized by specialist institutions and instruments, and women still being treated protectively rather than as full rights-bearing subjects of the law. It is at this point that the following bibliography commences, with the emergence of feminist structural and postcolonial critiques of international law, which examined its normative and institutional structures, finding them deeply committed to masculinist and imperial power and therefore in need of significant reconstruction. Feminist approaches to international law have always fallen under a very broad umbrella, resulting in dynamic engagements with the law and its fraternity, as well as passionate internal critique and self-reflection. Feminism’s basic commitment can be described as the struggle to realize women’s equality, but the reality is that multiple strands of feminism have been used to inform international legal theories and practices, and women’s “equality” is considered by some to be an inadequate aspiration. Postcolonial and critical race feminisms have a particularly significant role to play in a field of law that grew from European as well as patriarchal origins. And more recently, the challenge to fully denaturalize “gender” and treat it as an entirely social category has highlighted the importance of questioning the received male/female duality and examining the new possibilities that more fluid conceptions of gender and sexuality open for analyzing the law’s enduring exclusionary effects. Feminist engagements with international law have fostered a vast and diverse literature—marked by both hopefulness and despair, by creative advocacy as well as deepening critique—which touches on every branch or subdiscipline of international law.
Human Rights
Authors: Almqvist Jessica
Published: March 2013

The adoption in 1945 of the UN Charter and in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights marks the initial stages in the development of the current international human rights regime. The UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, respectively, both endorsed in 1966, represent a milestone in establishing the international legal foundations for this regime. Together with the Universal Declaration, the two covenants constitute the International Bill of Rights. Since the time of their endorsement, the body of international human rights law has expanded dramatically both at international and regional levels. Much energy has been expended to achieve equality and to fight against discrimination. In this process, different groups have been singled out as especially vulnerable: women, children, and minorities, including indigenous peoples. The notion of human rights has been criticized as a Western construct with little or no relevance elsewhere. However, with time, this challenge has come to be understood not as requiring the abandoning of universality but as calling for cultural sensitivity and dialogue. The human right to development is still controversial, and its proclamation has been seen as requiring the advancement of a rights-based approach to development. At the same time, the idea of three generations of rights is generally rejected and the indivisibility of all human rights reinforced. A lack of respect for international human rights obligations is a serious problem, prompting the establishment of international procedures in the UN context and regional human rights systems, including human rights courts in Africa, America, and Europe. In recent years, more attention is paid to domestic enforcement, including the extraterritorial application of human rights. Also of interest are the human rights obligations of nonstate actors. Serious human rights violations are an important characteristic of contemporary conflicts, urging a focus on the international criminal responsibility of their perpetrators and on applicable law, as well as on remedies and reparations in transitional contexts. Likewise, it has prompted the more polemical question of whether the international community has a responsibility to protect populations whose governments are unable to do so themselves, including through humanitarian interventions and transitional administrations. Despite the relative success of the international human rights regime since the 1950s, its future is uncertain. Its stability and further improvement will depend on its ability to tackle contemporary challenges, such as the “War on Terror,” world poverty, environmental degradation, and climate change.
Charles Reade
Authors: Palmer Beth
Published: March 2013

Charles Reade (b. 1814–d. 1884) entered into the Victorian cultural scene through theatrical adaptations, original dramatic writing, and magazine contributions as well as his best-selling novels. While his historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) was his most widely respected work in his lifetime, his more sensational contemporary fiction such as Hard Cash (1863) or It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) have recently received significant scholarly interest. His first novels were fictional reworkings of stage plays and throughout his career Reade moved back and forth between these forms, each influencing the other. Reade prided himself on his method of fiction writing, which involved extensive research—mostly in the form of cutting out articles that interested him from daily newspapers. This method was important to his “matter-of-fact” romances in which he stressed the significance of factuality in fiction. For much of his life he moved back and forth between Oxford (where he held a fellowship at Magdalen College) and a more bustling and bohemian career in London. An antagonistic figure unafraid to cultivate hostilities with publishers in particular, he nonetheless enjoyed friendships with Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, the actress Ellen Terry, and his dramatic collaborator Tom Taylor. While his Magdalen fellowship precluded the possibility of marriage, he lived for many years with the actress Laura Seymour. Reade found considerable critical esteem in his own lifetime, but he received little scholarly attention during the 20th century. However, the recent interest in popular, middlebrow, and sensational literature has brought Reade greater standing in the field of Victorian studies. His ardent polemics on significant social issues of the day (such as the treatment of prisoners or the medical definition of lunacy) make Reade a significant figure for historians of medicine and law as well as for literary scholars.
The Historical Novel
Authors: Hurst Isobel
Published: March 2013

No student of the Victorian historical novel can fail to observe the divergence between the genre’s critical acclaim and popularity in its own time and its relative obscurity now. Charles Reade, author of the acclaimed 1861 best seller The Cloister and the Hearth, is far from the only historical novelist whose reputation with critics and readers is far below that accorded by his peers. William Harrison Ainsworth, R. D. Blackmore, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, G. A. Henty, and Charles Kingsley are among the small number of writers whose work has attracted some scholarly notice, while best sellers such as G. P. R. James, G. J. Whyte-Melville, Emma Marshall, A. J. Church, and the prolific E. Everett Green remain largely unexamined. Even critically favored historical novels by canonical authors, such as Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852), Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and George Eliot’s Romola (1862–1863), have frequently been considered less compelling than the authors’ other novels. The importance and diversity of the genre in its own time is clearly indicated by the variety of authors who attempted at least one historical novel: Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charlotte M. Yonge, Walter Pater, George Gissing, Wilkie Collins, H. Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle. From Antiquity to the French Revolution, novelists attempted to fictionalize almost every century. Narratives cluster particularly in ancient Rome, at the Norman Conquest, in mediaeval and Renaissance Britain and Europe, and around the Jacobite rebellions and other 18th-century uprisings. Against all of these backgrounds appear characters who encounter historical celebrities or stumble across major events. It is less for the portrayal of the past than for the remedies prescribed for contemporary problems that critics have chosen to explore these fictions. Arguments about freedom and democracy are traced back to the Anglo-Saxons or the Wars of the Roses, helping to reinforce the sense of national identity, or to underline Britain’s imperial destiny. Writers such as Eliza Lynn and George Eliot drew attention to the constraints and judgments Victorian women were subject to, attacking hypocrisies thinly disguised in historical costume. The redoubtable clerics Kingsley, Newman, and Wiseman conducted their public struggle over Protestant and Catholic ideologies through novels set in ancient Egypt and Rome. Such weighty themes, and the extensive research displayed in these narratives, may be responsible for the decline of the realist and didactic historical novel in the 1860s. This was followed by the resurgence of popular historical romance in the 1880s, focusing on adventures and heroic masculinity and providing a conservative counterbalance to fin-de-siècle decadence.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Authors: Bryer Jackson R.
Published: March 2013

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (b. 1896–d. 1940), named after his distant relative, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at private schools there and in the East. He attended Princeton University, dropping out to join the army after the United States entered World War I. While in the service, he began his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which he revised twice before its publication in 1920. It is a highly autobiographical account of its author’s teenage and college years; its frank descriptions of adolescent behavior and its unique literary form brought Fitzgerald literary success and made him and his glamorous young wife, Zelda, celebrities as the prototypical couple of the 1920s and its Jazz Age culture. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), which, again partially autobiographically, follows the lives of a young couple through the tumultuous early years of their marriage, was not nearly as successful with the critics and the public as his first had been, but after a failed attempt at writing a play, The Vegetable (1923), he produced in The Great Gatsby (1925) the intricately patterned, poetic, and concise novel that is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece and one of the greatest American works of fiction. Thereafter, he struggled to complete his fourth novel, continuing to write short stories to offset his constant money problems, which were increased in the early 1930s by his wife’s mental illness. When Tender Is the Night appeared in 1934, its focus on wealthy young Americans on the Riviera was not received well by an America struggling through the Great Depression, but increasingly it has come to be regarded as, if not equal to The Great Gatsby, certainly a major literary work. Similarly, some of Fitzgerald’s short stories, which he tended to dismiss as potboilers written to support his often-extravagant lifestyle, are now thought to be among the best of that genre. Fitzgerald is admired for the skill and accuracy with which he depicted his era, for the beauty and artistry of his style, and for what his first biographer, Arthur Mizener, described in the introduction to Afternoon of an Author (Fitzgerald 1958, cited under Selected Works: Reprinted Material) as “the curious way in which he combined the innocence of complete involvement with an almost scientific coolness of observation” (p. 3).
Gertrude Stein
Authors: Curnutt Kirk
Published: March 2013

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to Daniel Stein and Amelia (“Milly”) Keyser. Orphaned by the age of eighteen, she attended Harvard Annex (renamed Radcliffe College in 1894), studying philosophy with William James, before enrolling in the Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 1903 she left the United States to join her older brother Leo (1872–1947) in Paris. At the soon-to-be-famous address of 27 rue de Fleurus, she immersed herself in the groundbreaking art of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. In 1906 she met her eventual “wife,” Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967), and completed her first major work, Three Lives (1909). Over the next two decades, she produced a steady stream of sui generis experiments, including The Making of Americans (written c. 1906–1911 but not published until 1925), Tender Buttons (1914), and Geography and Plays (1922). While supporters such as Mabel Dodge, Carl Van Vechten, and Sherwood Anderson touted Stein as accomplishing in prose what Picasso had in Cubist painting—fracturing perspective and reimagining dimension—the popular press found her a risible symbol of avant-garde self-indulgence and embarked on a decades-long tradition of mocking her as “the Mother Goose of Montparnasse.” Nevertheless, aspiring writers in Paris sought her audience. The most famous of these “students” was Ernest Hemingway, whose style owes Stein’s an immense debt in its use of rhythm and repetition. Stein would not achieve a readership comparable to her former pupil’s until 1933, when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas became a surprise bestseller. It proved so popular that Stein returned to the United States in 1934–1935 for a lecture tour, a trip recounted in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937). When France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, she and Toklas elected not to flee, a decision that inspired her account of life in occupation, Wars I Have Seen (1945). In 1946 Stein fell ill from cancer and died at age seventy-two. Toklas lived until 1967, during which time she produced her own memoir, What Is Remembered (1963). Although Stein was posthumously remembered as the mater of expatriate Modernism, interest in her work did not really take off until the 1980s, thanks in a large part of the popularity of feminist and poststructuralist criticism. Today, scholarship on the full breadth of her writing thrives, and she is truly recognized as an artist in her own right.
Countee Cullen
Authors: Kuenz Jane
Published: March 2013

Countee Cullen (b. 1903–d. 1946) was born in 1903, probably in Louisville, Kentucky, though the circumstances are unclear in large part because Cullen gave conflicting accounts of his birth and early childhood. He was adopted at age fifteen by the Reverend Dr. Frederick A. Cullen and Carolyn Belle Cullen of Harlem’s Salem Methodist Episcopal Church and changed his name shortly thereafter from Countee L. Porter to Countee P. Cullen and finally simply Countee Cullen. His prize-winning poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Life” brought him to the attention of Black artists and leaders. In 1922 he matriculated with a Regents scholarship at New York University, where he studied with Hyder E. Rollins, a John Keats scholar under whose guidance he wrote a thesis on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Cullen completed an MA at Harvard in 1926, around the same time that his first book, Color, appeared to overwhelming acclaim, making him, at age twenty-two, the most celebrated writer of the Harlem Renaissance. The success of Color helped Cullen secure a regular literary column, “The Dark Tower,” at Opportunity that further confirmed his status as “the New Negro poet laureate.” Three books came out in 1927: The Ballad of the Brown Girl, an updated and racially inflected retelling of an English ballad; Copper Sun, which many readers felt did not live up to the promise of Color; and Caroling Dusk, an edited collection in which Cullen argued that Negro writers should not have to write about race only and had perhaps a greater kinship to the English poetic tradition than to anything inherited from Africa. Cullen would never entirely recover professionally from the critical reaction to this stance. His 1928 marriage in Harlem to Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of Crisis, dissolved less than two years later amid rumors about Cullen’s homosexuality, later confirmed, and his relationship with his longtime friend Harold Jackman. After 1927 Cullen published more poetry, including The Black Christ, and Other Poems (1929) and The Medea, and Some Poems (1935), the first prose translation of a major Greek drama by a Black American writer. His only novel, One Way to Heaven, appeared in 1932. Cullen taught junior high English and French in New York from 1934 until his death in 1946 of high blood pressure and uremic poisoning. During that time, he published two children’s books and prepared a manuscript of his selected poems, which was published posthumously in 1947 as On These I Stand.