bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Books Were Not in Their Line”: The Use and Abuse of Reading in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
Authors: Richardson Brian
Published: January 2025

This chapter begins by describing the role of reading, misinterpretation, and sexual connection in Mansfield’s stories “Bliss,” “A Cup of Tea,” and “Marriage à la Mode,” noting her critique of misread texts, signs, and allusions. It then moves on to the works of Woolf, especially To the Lighthouse. The major events of the narrative center on actual or apparent acts of reading. It is Mrs. Ramsay’s reading to James that arouses the jealousy of Mr. Ramsay at the beginning of the novel. It is also the partial subject of the painting Lily Briscoe is creating. The text being read to the boy, the fairy tale “The Fisherman’s Wife,” a patriarchal story warning of the dangers unchecked female desires, has long puzzled Woolf scholars; a new interpretation is offered here, suggesting that it offers a prescient image of the situation of the Ramsay family, though it is one that none of the characters is able to perceive. The site of reading turns into a space of deep engagement and concludes as the reader and Mr. Ramsey both finish the volume they literally hold in their hands.
Reading Ruins: From Modernism to the Illegible Texts of Postmodernism and Beyond
Authors: Richardson Brian
Published: January 2025

This chapter chronicles the radical transformation of the figure of the reader that accompanies the rise of postmodernism. It begins with an analysis of the Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a text that both extends and deforms the modernist practice as it has appeared up to this point. Throughout his fiction, Nabokov is deeply concerned with the act of reading and consequences of misreading. In Lolita, “well-read Humbert” is pitted against Charlotte Haze, who places “blind faith in the wisdom of her church and book club” as well as author Clare Quilty, whose hidden identity Humbert cannot deduce despite all the clues left by him. Reading and the quest for obscured meaning become a major focus of the novel. Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, finds it necessary to embody a dialectic between high modernist and postmodern stances. Depictions of books in postmodern texts by Ishmael Reed, David Toscana, and others are examined. The chapter ends with a glance at the revivals of two other traditions: the enlightenment model, represented Bernhart Schlink’s The Reader and neomodernist fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, as the paradigm outlined by Flaubert continues to flourish in the twenty-first century.
Introduction: At a Crossroads on the Eurasian Steppe Route
Authors: Andreeva Petya
Published: January 2025

This chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book by examining various historiographical approaches to Eurasian nomads. The author shows that for far too long pastoralists have existed at the outskirts of space and discourse, overshadowed by the canon’s penchant for monumentality and sedentism. Drawing from the work of Reinhard Wenskus, the author theorizes that reluctant nomadic alliances were mainly built around shared geopolitical goals and controlled by a negotiable elite nucleus who in turn invented a shared visual rhetoric. The chapter then proceeds to examine the geographical parameters and climate conditions of the Eurasian steppe and how they might have predetermined the nomad’s approach to image-making. Having established that in its early stages, steppe art was entirely zoomorphic, the author explores the ambiguous biography of “animal style”. The chapter re-defines “animal style” in light of the diversity of steppe cultures and provides an outline of the book. The last section on methodology discusses how one deals with homologous and analogous developments in the history of ancient ornament and how much of the scholarship on the subject relies on the frameworks of European art historians like Gombrich and Riegl.
The Tomb Inside Out: Playing (Mortuary) Politics
Authors: Andreeva Petya
Published: January 2025

Animal-style images and tropes were not contained to metalwork and personal adornment. Just like they enacted the body of the deceased noble, they also functioned within the spatial parameters of the tomb itself. The chapter demonstrates the swift transferability of previously examined zoomorphic idioms onto new materials and modes of making, namely felt textiles and woodcarving used as tomb decor. The interior design of the nomadic tomb, with its various felt and wood furnishings, aimed to facilitate a larger decorative program targeting a tangible audience of one’s peers, rivals and successors. One of the main examples of this burial spectacle is the Pazyryk culture whose horse burials and reliance on textiles in curating the tomb’s interior help us uncover new dimensions of nomadic image-making. Finally, the author temporarily leaves the realm of the tomb to trace animal-style idioms above ground. Here, the Bronze-Age deer-stone culture of Mongolia, as well as the Okunev and Ananyino cultures of Siberia, are studied as possible antecedents of the animal-style trend in Iron Age Central Eurasia.
Foreword
Authors: Hogrebe Wolfram
Published: January 2025

A philosophical meditation on beginnings frames the book’s concern with self-generating structures. Schelling’s thought is presented as an inquiry into the “secret of the world” that is the origins of such structures, revealing its contribution to the contemporary problem of autopoietic structure. In consequence, his is said to be an ‘analytic idealism’. The difference between and the rarer synthesis of discourse analytic and discourse creating philosophy is defined and exemplified through The Ages of the World. The present book is differentiated from the previous theological orientation of other scholars’ to The Ages, and the theory that Being is meaningless presented and defined.
Schelling and Dante: An Introduction to Schelling’s Thinking
Authors: Hogrebe Wolfram
Published: January 2025

Explores Dante’s inspiring Schelling’s projected epic philosophical poem through his membership of a Dante reading circle during his Jena tenure, and his analysis of Dante in The Philosophy of Art. This is drawn into connection with the Romantic philosophical program of forming a “new mythology” and Schelling’s theory of a mythology as completing philosophy. Schelling’s epistemological and aesthetic arguments are schematically presented and related to the philosophical problem of “the world” via his philosophy of nature. In conclusion, the chapter argues that Dante provides the model not only for the projected tripartite form of The Ages of the World, but also for its having as its content the thinking of any whole universe that includes thinking.
Predication and Genesis: The Ages of the World
Authors: Hogrebe Wolfram
Published: January 2025

If the universe is auto-epistemic then its modelling must self-generatingly model that self-generation. This is the agenda of Schelling’s The Ages, this chapter argues, as well as that of a philosophy of autopoiesis. The Ages’ participant epistemology is here remediated by contemporary philosophical semantics to allow not only an assessment of Schelling’s contribution to contemporary philosophy, but equally of its resulting transformation. The concept of beginnings (ch.4) is re-examined and Schelling’s solution, “predicative rotation”, introduced and analysed before its application to contemporary concepts and contexts of self-organization is explored. Philosophy’s ‘wholism’ criterion is considered via The Ages’ “world-formula”, summing the metaphysics of contemporary philosophy of language while entailing a theory of unreason or madness.
Postface The Ontology of Predication in Schelling’s
Authors: Gabriel Markus
Published: January 2025

Contrasting Schelling and the Tractatus Wittgenstein on the concept of identity, Gabriel’s essay follows the method pursued in Predication and Genesis to further pursue the ontology of predication, sourcing it additionally in Schelling’s Freedom essay, immediately preceding The Ages. Particularly attentive to developing Hogrebe’s concept of “pronominal being”, that is, of being prior to but promoting predication, the chapter argues that Schelling’s “transcendental ontology” of identity and differentiation consistently resolves problems that, for instance, Frege’s pragmatic approach cannot, specifically by rendering abstract functions such as predication, identification and differentiation into dimensions added to a being otherwise meaningless. It concludes by considering the ethico-political virtues of beginning from being rather than intelligence in order to ground Spirit in an ungrounded world.
Introduction: The Biopolitics of Metabolic Disturbance
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

This chapter offers a biopolitical analysis of the 2019 migrant crisis at U.S. border detention centers to exemplify key concerns of the book, best summarized as how Agamben’s “Bare life” can be defined in terms of the deprivation of supports that allow for metabolic normalcy, or what makes it possible to feel, and be treated as, human. It introduces the primary arguments of the book as well as affiliated research areas including: popular books on the gut by Roach, Enders; sociological study of “fecal habitus” by Inglis, Holmes; history and geopolitics of human waste by George, Marald, Hawkins, Muecke, Simmons; biopolitics of Foucault, Agamben; culture or history of human and other metabolic systems in work of Roy, Harris, Landecker, Hird, Swyngedouw; psychoanalytic, feminist, and affective work on the body or the gut by Ferenczi, Wilson, Massumi; Marxist environmental work on “metabolic rift” by Foster; and Marxist feminism of Shiva, Salleh, Haug
Marx’s Regulation of Metabolism
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the implications of Marx’s premise that “man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” Marx defines “labor” as the regulation of metabolism with nature, arguing that “social metabolism” is prescribed by “the natural laws of life itself”. Man seems both apart from and a force of nature by virtue of his “grown-on tools” (arms, legs, head, hands), but also his “grown-in tools” (stomach, bowels, sphincter). Human bodily metabolism is thus the means by which an apparent human/nature dichotomy is displaced by the image of nature dialectically mediating itself through man’s internal organs. But Arendt argues that in his metabolic work, Marx neglected to distinguish between “labor” (tied in with Nature) and “work” (a form of world-making). Moreover, in the West, “labor” has been relegated to “meta-industrial” populations (women, peasants, etc) who perform most of the metabolic activity (Salleh), and men, the work of world-making. The chapter then examines Marx’s economic circulation of money and commodities as a bodily peristaltic system, with money like fiber that stimulates motility, and fluctuating velocity resulting in smooth functioning or hoarding as constipation of the economic system.
Unkinking, Streamlining and the Household Engineer
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

This chapter draws from Whorton’s Inner Hygiene to chart the early 20c preoccupation with “autointoxication” brought on by constipation. It argues that women were hailed by this cultural preoccupation with bowel regularity as subjects whose identity was rooted in their abdominal health, making them targets of campaigns to promote internal cleansing. It explores London surgeon Arbuthnot Lane’s aggressive colectomy surgeries to straighten the “kinked” bowels of his mostly female patients, whom he deemed to suffer from intestinal stasis. The chapter then draws from design historians Lupton and Miller to link cultural anxiety about intestinal stasis with streamlining, planned obsolescence, and “aesthetic waste” in the architectural rationalization of domestic space, especially in the kitchen and bathroom. A close reading of Christine Frederick’s Household Engineering (1919) shows that housewives were urged to define themselves (on the model of industrial Taylorism) as “domestic engineers,” to manage and regularize both peristaltic movements through their homes (especially the kitchen) and through their own and their family’s bodies, with body and household imagined as one extended metabolic system. Frederick stressed “creative” production and management of waste as key to a family’s success in the realm of social betterment and national advancement.
The Peristaltic Desiring-Machine of Miss Louise
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel’s 1927 case study of Viennese patient “Louise,” whose sexual etiology is clearly implicated in the larger systems of consumption and excretion referenced by the discourses of hygiene and domestic engineering that pervaded the popular consciousness of the era. Louise must be seated at the boarding-house breakfast table next to someone who sexually arouses her in order to have a bowel movement, indicating that she has replaced purgatives and opium to regulate her bowels with a psycho-physiological-erotic self-treatment. Stekel’s diagnosis of repressed lesbianism in need of heteronormative correction is countered by asking how Louise’s desiring-machines (Deleuze and Guattari) situate her athwart the kind of domestic space in which she would take up her role as “household engineer.” It argues that if the peristaltic health of a capitalist economy relies on female consumers whose erotic life has been channeled through the proper sexual organs, Louise will remain somewhere on the periphery of this channeling, with intensifications happening along internal organs, those not conducive to an efficient Oedipalization. Louise evinces a different kind of “metabolic rift,” a deviation in fecal habitus at the level of the individual, facilitated by the unconscious agency of the second brain.
Peristaltic Politics of a Suffragette
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines the memoirs of aristocrat Constance Lytton, who disguised herself as a working-class suffragette to evade special treatment, then minutely recorded her hunger strikes while imprisoned, as well as her peristaltic struggles with a prison doctor wielding the feeding tube. The chapter likens suffrage processions through urban streets to peristaltic contractions and impulsions within the city’s metabolism. Lytton’s accounts are paired with those of fellow vegetarian Mohandas Gandhi, who followed the suffragettes closely and through his articles in Indian Opinion urged Indians in South Africa to adopt the suffrage strategy of passive resistance, or Satyagraha as he called it, in the fight for Indian Swaraj. Both adopt a stance of the “eternal negative” (abandonment of self-will to “what must be”), practice metabolic responses to state-imposed “bare life” (Ziarek, Agamben) and engage in what Leela Gandhi calls “moral imperfectionism.” Lytton immerses the reader, ad nauseum, in the revolting vicissitudes of the body’s peristaltic rebellion under incarceration, all the while insisting on the circuitry that connects and enervates the various registers of metabolic transformations. This technique extends beyond the struggle for women’s suffrage in Britain insofar as Gandhi soon also adopts the hunger strike. By arresting the world’s passage through his own enteric system he seeks, in his common cause with the suffragettes, to “oversweep” the world through an autonomic metabolism of political justice.
Introduction
Authors: Munro Lachlan , Graham W. R. B. Cunninghame
Published: January 2025

A description of Graham’s unusual impressionistic style, and recognition of his works by subject matter and style, particularly his evocations of life in South America. The origins of his writing career and his development as a literary artist, from his early political journalism, particularly his reports on Hispanic labour disputes. The difficulty of transferring his documentary and descriptive skills to Scotland. Graham’s subsequent reliance on his nostalgic, but unsentimental memories of people and places around his home in Menteith in the Forth Valley, which he frequently interspersed with foreign, particularly Spanish memories and interjections. The spiritual quality of his writings which transcended the simple narration of biographical facts, and his gifts for catching the flavour of a landscape.
1896–9
Authors: Munro Lachlan , Graham W. R. B. Cunninghame
Published: January 2025

Graham’s first foray into the ‘sketch’ form for the prestigious Saturday Review. The first three sketches were described as ‘bitter portrayals of the defects of the Scottish character’, but were in fact critiques of the popular ‘Kailyard’ style of Scottish writing. In these, Graham attacked the debasement of the Scots language, the portrayal of very limited ‘cosy’ communities, and the sentimental stereotyping of the Scots themselves, which he believed served the purposes of power.
1911–13
Authors: Munro Lachlan , Graham W. R. B. Cunninghame
Published: January 2025

Graham’s themes continue; the documenting the landscape and people of Menteith, acting as a memorialist, who rescues people, traditions and lifestyles from the march of progress, and oblivion. History then becomes central to his narratives, and we begin to witness the presence of local folklore, particularly the appearance of fairies, as the past continues to impinge on the present.
Introductions
Authors: Munro Lachlan , Graham W. R. B. Cunninghame
Published: January 2025

Graham not only wrote political articles, histories and sketches, he was much sought after as a writer of Introductions and Prefaces to the works of others, particularly for travel books, writing almost 50 during his long career. Joseph Conrad wrote to Graham saying, ‘You are the Great Preface Writer of the Time’. However, he only wrote four Introductions to books on Scottish subjects, two of which were very brief. The other two, however, could stand of fine pieces of literature in their own right. Of particular note was his Introduction to The Secret Commonwealth, by Rev. Robert Kirk (1691), which dealt with local folklore and superstitions.
Introduction: Spinoza in a Contemporary Context
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

The Introduction suggests that the structure of The Ethics unfolds as an enactment of the inter-relations of different aspects of human thinking. Rather than endorsing the dominant supremacy of Reason over Imagination and Emotion, Spinoza shifts the emphasis to understanding the operations of Imagination in human knowledge. That more nuanced treatment of Reason challenges a common interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy as epitomising the theory of knowledge which has come to be known as ‘Rationallism’. The Introduction also addresses contrasts and connections between an ‘interpretation’ and a ‘reading’, clarifying the exercise of reading The Ethics in a new context of climate change discussion.
Embodied Knowing
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

Centred on a close reading of Part II of The Ethics, this Chapter discusses Spinoza’s critique of Descartes’s model of knowledge, truth and error. It highlights Spinoza’s repudiation of of the role Descartes gives to the faculty of will, and their different approaches to Scepticism. It argues that Spinoza’s treatment of Reason’s interconnections with Imagination can illuminate tensions in contemporary ways of thinking of the differences between human and non-human thought. It also explains how his account of human knowing yields the basis for the trajectory of The Ethics as a whole toward understanding deep truths about human well-being.
The Power of the Human Mind
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

This Chapter elaborates Spinoza’s views on the limited power of Reason within Nature – as presented in sections of Part IV and Part V of The Ethics, and in his treatment of the politics of hope and fear in his political writings. It includes discussion of the contrast between Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes on concepts of power and essence. The Chapter argues that the potential which twentieth century Environmental Philosophy saw in Spinoza’s thought takes on new significance in the context of climate change. In conclusion, it applies some specific aspects of his philosophy – his treatment of essence and his version of loving-kindness – to rethinking the understanding of commonalities across difference, within humanity and across species.
Beyond Reason
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

This Chapter explicates Spinoza’s famous treatment of the intellectual love of God, in Part V of The Ethics – presenting it as an understanding, imbued with Affect, of human finitude within the totality of Nature. The chapter accordingly interprets Spinoza’s doctrine of the eternity of the mind as concerned, not with hope of immortality, but rather with an acceptance of finitude. Out of this analysis comes a fuller account of how Spinoza sees the inter-relations of reason and imagination, emphasising that he resorts ultimately to a philosophical form of imagining in articulating his vision of the deepest truths of human presence within Nature.
Rethinking the Present
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

This Chapter argues that Spinoza’s philosophy offers resources for the theorising of interconnection – rather than separation – between human beings and the rest of Nature. It focuses, especially, on the assumption that there is a clear boundary between human thought and a neutral mind-independent reality, construed as open to definitive understanding through Reason. Drawing on Geoffrey Lloyd’s critique of that model of objectivity, in Analogical Investigations: Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human Reasoning (2015), it applies Spinoza’s treatment of imagination to contemporary issues of cross-cultural communication, with special reference to Indigenous knowledge. It also engages with the views of the novelist Amitav Ghosh on cross-cultural communication in the context of climate change.
Conclusion: ‘Descartes’ and ‘Spinoza’
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

The book’s concluding remarks offer some methodological reflections on relating the history of philosophy to contemporary issues. Those remarks address the constructs of ‘Descartes’ and ‘Spinoza’ as they figure in textual interpretation, arguing that those constructs themselves involve an exercise of imagination within changing contexts.
Beyond Realism
Authors: Singer Robert
Published: January 2025

Naturalist cinema is a key aesthetic and critical category in international film studies and remains one of its most under-represented areas of academic research. Too readily linked to or mistaken for realist film, with which it shares select structural precepts, the naturalist film has a unique and significant history. Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice confirms that naturalist cinema is predicated on two foundational, intersecting paradigms that configure as one ideological system in an overarching scientific and social experimental narrative. Either the scientific or social paradigm may be dominant in the film narrative or they may simply co-exist, but a naturalist film reveals both templates and, most significantly, suggests an implicit cinematic anthropology that renders the body as spectacle invoking both Darwinian and Marxist principles. The scientific paradigm invokes the (mal) function of genetics and the effects of heredity, predatory (animal-like) behavior, and the metaphorical trope of the survival of the fittest. The social paradigm largely focuses on issues associated with class (mal) function, the disaffecting experience of work, and the alienated-precariat worker in decline. Both paradigms contextualize a process of experiment, observation, and conclusion. Naturalist film narrative invokes a world of confrontation and demise: the human beast in non-supernatural crisis.
Fleshy Imagery
Authors: Singer Robert
Published: January 2025

Meat is a signifying naturalist trope recurring across multiple narrative configurations and artistic preparations. In international naturalist film, this trope appears in the documentary, melodrama, horror, and comedy genre and may be set in the abattoir-slaughterhouse or in the local butcher's shop with its skilled butcher, and finally, in the morgue. This chapter analyzes the aesthetic, signifying presence of meat-flesh, whether placed on a dinner plate, in human meat pies, or as pulverized dismemberments, and the abattoir, the site of exposed, bloody labor. In naturalist film narrative, in literal and allegorical manifestations, meat is a primary trope indicating the end product of the grinding tradition. Meat is the metaphorical correlative of the human nub.
Darwinian Disconnections
Authors: Singer Robert
Published: January 2025

Naturalist film narrative is frequently a study of abnormal psychology set within the once-familiar structure of a home, suggesting a pathological human presence manifest within familiar industrial genre such as melodrama, comedy, science fiction, and horror. This chapter examines the family, home, and applications of imaginative genetics in a theoretical reading of naturalist film narrative that initially focuses on critical suppositions revealing the past in the present and implied clinical uncertainties in the future. The space and time of the gene is rendered as multiple naturalist films reveal how genetic material and heredity yield a field of narrative play. Another focus of this chapter involves the home setting, which also includes the housing project and "hood"—all territorial sites of imagined interaction—as the dynamic locus of naturalist revelation of personal and social complications.
Moreau Narratives
Authors: Singer Robert
Published: January 2025

H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau may be viewed by the contemporary reader as an intricate work of fiction, but now, more specifically, as a significant hypotextual presence in the naturalist cinematic paradigm. In this chapter, The Island of Doctor Moreau is read in a theoretical capacity as an experimental novel, one that sustains and advances Zola's naturalist discursivity into the speculative range of the political-horror film aesthetic in several adaptations and related narratives. The Island of Doctor Moreau may be viewed as a popularized reading of Darwinian science and theories involving eugenics, evolution, and extreme survivalist strategies, a study of "bad" experimental science involving the spectacle of the isolated human, imperfect bodies, and the beast, and as an ideologically suggestive exploration of power relations involving vivisection, master/slave relations, atavism, labor, language, and extra-legal sites.
Philosophically Queer: Constructing a Concept
Authors: Kedem Nir
Published: January 2025

This chapter employs Deleuzian critique in one of its forms – what Deleuze and Guattari call in What Is Philosophy? ‘constructivism’, that is, doing philosophy. The chapter argues for and reconstructs ‘queer’ as a philosophical concept in Deleuze’s sense as it reexamines one of the oft-cited definitions of queer as an identity without essence from David Halperin’s Saint Foucault. This chapter offers both a detailed, phased demonstration of using Deleuzian critique qua constructivism in a particular discourse and in relation to an actual state of affairs; and a close reading in a foundational work in queer theory. Overall, this chapter reestablishes the relation between the two senses of queer as inseparable yet distinct. The first part of the discussion retraces the problem to which queer as a philosophical concept was created to ‘solve’ in Halperin. It then turns to the three activities of constructivism as described in What Is Philosophy? to construct queer as a philosophical concept: inventing a conceptual persona, creating a concept and laying out a plane of immanence. The chapter concludes with an overview of queer’s function in Halperin’s later works and a revaluing of the powers of the reconstructed concept of queer, as it connects the concept’s genesis (its past) to the present.
Pozitive Bodies of Resistance
Authors: Kedem Nir
Published: January 2025

This chapter draws the inferences from the reconstruction of queer as a philosophical concept as it moves to examine anew queer theory’s relation with the two other domains of its genesis, namely, activism and cinema. It shows that employing Deleuzian critique to account for queer’s genesis and reconstruct it as a philosophical concept allows us to see that queer expressed its revolutionary potential beyond sexuality in making thinkable and imaginable ‘the Poz’ – a body in the Spinozian-Deleuzian sense whose constitutive relations are not determined by sexuality, desire or pleasure. Named after the self-chosen moniker of people with AIDS (PWAs), the Poz (a shortened form of ‘HIV-positive’) rather refers to a viral mode of existence, a possibility of life with AIDS in the face of death – a body that was not yet in existence yet had to be conjured up to make thinkable a new community and new ways of relating to others. Understood thus, it was the Poz which both served as the impetus for queer politics and ethics and articulated the link between the three domains of queer’s genesis, thereby attesting to the concept’s coherence without compromising its internal difference.
Conclusion: The Virality to Come, the Virality that Is
Authors: Kedem Nir
Published: January 2025

The conclusion briefly relates the concept of queer and the Poz mode of existence to contemporary viral ways of being, acting and thinking.
Eighteenth-Century Cultures and the Novel
Authors: Baines Paul
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines Dickens’s relationship with eighteenth-century literature and culture, including its freshest form, the novel. Following analysis of the autobiographical passage in David Copperfield (1849–50) which records deep early affection for his fictional fathers, and other traces of ‘innocent’ boyhood reading, the chapter shows how Dickens detached himself and his characters from this patrimony, and from other material vestiges of eighteenth-century culture. Dickens characterised the eighteenth century in his historical fiction as a time of rupture, the end of a patriarchal regime, and the chapter looks at the various ways in which paternal figures and their legacies are challenged and overcome. Examples of skewed incorporation of eighteenth-century icons, from the prisons of Defoe, Fielding, and Goldsmith, to the coquettes of Pope and the aristocrats of Richardson, are located across the full range of Dickens’s writing, in satiric quotation, careful misprision, playful adaptation, and other tropes of separation.
Fanfiction
Authors: England Maureen
Published: January 2025

This chapter looks at how Dickens’s work is used in digital fanfiction across three popular web-based platforms: Archiveofourown.org, Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad.com. By analysing the function of repetition and interactivity in the practice of fanfiction adaptations of Dickens’s works, we can see how Dickens’s place in cultural memory is dynamic. Dickens remains popular because his works have been used in changing art forms, including fanfiction. Widespread familiarity with some of Dickens’s works and characters enables fanfiction writers to draw on established background knowledge and develop their own literacy skills. Crossovers with other popular fandoms and retellings also serve to build on established Dickensian memory, while helping readers to interpret Dickens’s work through modern focalisation, perpetuating Dickens’s cultural relevance. The shared authorship and communality of fanfiction mirrors the communal readership and piracy of Dickens’s work in the nineteenth century. By considering the increasingly legitimate art form of fanfiction and its adoption of Dickens as a fandom, we can adjust not only our perception of fanfiction but also our perception of Dickens the cultural icon.
Amateur Theatricals
Authors: Isbell Mary
Published: January 2025

Charles Dickens’s involvement with amateur theatricals might seem, at first glance, to be rife with paradox. After considering (but ultimately not pursuing) a professional career on the stage when he was twenty, he carefully preserved his status as an amateur actor for the rest of his life, positioning his famous public readings as distinct from professional acting. Despite his enthusiastic management of theatricals in makeshift and public venues throughout his life, Dickens offers nothing but caricatures of bad amateurs in his fiction, as ‘Mrs Joseph Porter’ (1834) and ‘Private Theatres’ (1836) from Sketches by Boz (1833–6) and Mr Wopsle in Great Expectations (1860–1861) demonstrate. This chapter makes sense of these complications by introducing the concept of the deliberate amateur: a person who believes in the superiority of the amateur to the professional. Nuanced consideration of Dickens’s perspective on class and theatre helps us to understand his relationship to amateur theatricals and his impact on the perception of the practice in the Victorian period.
Nineteenth-Century Stage Adaptations
Authors: Davis Jim
Published: January 2025

This chapter demonstrates how widely the work of Dickens was disseminated in the nineteenth century through theatrical adaptation. The success of many of these adaptations owed much to the dramaturgical skill of playwrights and to the actors who played Dickensian roles. Not only did Dickens’s novels and stories adapt well to the stage, they also provided excellent acting roles for contemporary performers, often enhancing their acting skills. Comic actors extended their range while a number of actresses achieved success in some of Dickens’s younger male characters. Dickens also collaborated in the staging of some adaptations of his works and later created his own adaptations for public reading. Through stage adaptations of his work, Dickens arguably had a major impact on the theatre of the nineteenth century.
Dance
Authors: Morgentaler Goldie
Published: January 2025

Dickens’s literary representations of dance occur within a broader thematic and symbolic framework, so that dancing in his fiction becomes more than a mere colourful interlude designed to embroider his plots, but rather augments the larger concerns of his novels. This essay explores these thematic and symbolic resonances by highlighting two aspects of dance – the social and the professional – as they appear in Dickens’s fiction. By focusing on such examples of dance in Dickens’s writing as the tap-dancing sequence from American Notes (1842) and Mr Fezziwig’s ball from A Christmas Carol (1843), as well as on the depictions of the dancing master from Bleak House (1852–53) and the music hall dancer Fanny Dorrit from Little Dorrit (1855–57), this essay demonstrates how the novelist employs his extraordinary mimetic and stylistic skills to present the social and cultural aspects of dance in his novels.
Rap Music
Authors: Klimaszewski Melisa
Published: January 2025

Closely analysing examples from Jay-Z, Ludacris, and Ab Liva via Clipse, this essay argues that some rappers’ references to Dickens appropriate the white icon and his characters in an interrogatory manner to negotiate a redefinition of black masculinity in relation to wealth. Knowledge of a predominantly white-identified British canon is a significant element of how these artists construct an empowered masculinity and resist histories of cultural appropriation. Klimaszewski suggests that fully appreciating rap as an art form demands synergy among musical, literary, and discursive methodologies. Dickens and his works resonate consistently in the phenomenally popular art form that is rap, an art form rooted in the African American community with worldwide appeal. Studying the work of rap artists who invoke Dickens demonstrates that their cultural critiques sometime interact with the traditional literary canon in ways that ignite reassessment of both.
Twenty-First Century Television
Authors: Geraghty Christine
Published: January 2025

This essay analyses the use of soap opera modes in Dickens television adaptations since the success of Bleak House (BBC/WGBH, d: Justin Chadwick, Susanna White) in 2005. It argues that this move involves more than serialisation and defines three markers which link these adaptations to soap opera: moral legibility as a narrative principle; emotional legibility involving the communication of emotion; and the handling of contemporary social issues. The article illustrates how these markers are used in three BBC co-productions: Oliver Twist (BBC/WGBH, d: Coky Giedroyc, 2007), Little Dorrit (BBC/WGBH, d: Adam Smith, Dearbhla Walsh, Diarmuid Lawrence, 2008), and Great Expectations (BBC/Masterpiece, d: Brian Kirk, 2011). This move towards soap’s melodramatic modes fitted the BBC’s Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) requirement to appeal to popular audiences, as well as to US co-producers, such as Masterpiece, looking for more spectacular classics. The essay concludes with a discussion of the issue of diversity and integrated casting – a distinctive feature of these post-2005 adaptations – and offers an analysis of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (BBC/Masterpiece, d: Diarmuid Lawrence, 2012), an adaptation which eschewed the soap opera influence but which subversively challenged the all-white landscape of the classic adaptation.
Global Cinema
Authors: Gould Marty
Published: January 2025

This essay looks beyond the film industries of Britain and the United States to investigate cinematized Dickens in its larger, global context. Looking closely at specific examples from the early silent screen through the early twenty-first century, the essay considers both how and why novels such as Oliver Twist (1837–39), Great Expectations (1860–61), and Hard Times (1854) have been cinematically translated and transformed. Cinematic adaptation both reflects and shapes different cultural readings of Dickens’s work, and films produced in India, East Asia, Africa, Canada, and Continental Europe demonstrate the availability of Dickens for modern cinematic appropriation as well as the adaptability of Dickensian characters and themes to various global cultures. Informed by current approaches to adaptation studies, the essay sketches a picture of cinematic adaptation as both interpretation and critical intervention, not merely re-presenting but translating and reconfiguring Dickens’s novels to communicate visually and to remain meaningful to diverse and evolving audiences.
Dickens and Shakespeare
Authors: Orford Pete
Published: January 2025

This chapter will consider the often-noted relationship between Dickens and Shakespeare and beg the question: what is it precisely about Dickens’s own fascination with Shakespeare that we find so intriguing? It will balance consideration of Dickens’s use of Shakespeare with a reflective stance on what we aim to learn from such examples. At the heart of this is a sense of idolatry and cultural genealogy – a pleasing illusion of one literary giant inheriting the baton from another. In this model, Dickens becomes raised in our estimation by positioning him as Shakespeare’s Victorian successor. But whether Shakespeare’s influence serves as a marker of high or popular culture is debatable, and it may be more helpful to consider both writers on a more nuanced scale of elitism and popularity.
Dickensiana
Authors: Fong Ryan D.
Published: January 2025

This essay explores the voracious appetite that many readers of Dickens have had not only for his fiction, but for the wide-ranging set of objects that have come to be known as ‘Dickensiana’. From numerous depictions of the author’s likeness to the wide range of objects that depict memorable scenes or characters from his works, these items have been sought after by ardent fans across two centuries. In focusing on three particular objects and analysing their material qualities as ‘things’, this essay identifies the specific fantasies that are activated in the collection of Dickensiana. In so doing, it argues that the production and consumption of Dickensiana function as critical practices that are linked to the bountiful ‘thingfulness’ and vivid richness of Dickens’s fictional worlds.
The 2000s
Authors: Murphy Paula
Published: January 2025

The binary between human and AI is further eroded in this decade, and more positive portrayals of AI emerge In The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions the AI Machines are allies as well as enemies. Machine/ human hybridity and transition is seen in Bicentennial Man, where Andrew transitions from machine to human; in Ghost in the Shell 2, Kim transitions from human to machine, and gynoid robots are created from the brains of human girls; in Screamers: The Hunting, there are human/AI hybrids; in Terminator Salvation, Marcus is a machine/ human hybrid built by AI and in I, Robot, Spooner is part-machine.
Representation of female AIs continues to be highly problematic with male human and AI uniting against the digital AI VIKI in I, Robot and Ghost in the Shell 2 exploring the commodification of female minds and bodies both human and AI. Parent-child relationships are explored in with an AI ‘father’ and an AI child in Terminator 3 and AI. Fully digital reproduction appears in the form of SATI in The Matrix Reloaded. Invisible, internet-based AIs inspire numerous journeys to the ‘source’ in in I, Robot, The Matrix Revolutions and Ghost in the Shell 2.
Introduction: Goethe’s Faust , Giorgio Agamben, and International Law
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Reading Faust into International Criminal Law’s Metaphorical References to the Devil
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

Metaphorical references to the devil in international criminal justice are various, varied and tap into a rich vein of allusion, association and meaning. These range from simple references to evil to more complex referencing to Faustian pacts of one form or the other, to the downright esoteric encompassing the arcane origins of the immunity erstwhile afforded to official acts. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s statement ‘That devil shall be defeated’ as well as Canadian General Romeo Dallaire’s ‘Shake Hands with the Devil’ are two examples respectively resisting and promoting international individual criminal liability. That Carl Schmitt was asked by his interrogator at Nuremberg ‘when did you renounce the devil?’ and that defence counsel at the International Criminal court in the Kenyan Situation analogised the Kenyan government as being accused of entering into ‘a deal with the devil’, to the judge at Rudolf Kastner’s case in Israel related to Nazi-era crimes described him as having ‘sold his soul to the devil’; cut across perpetrators and victims and speak of knowing and willing compacts with evil in order to, allegedly, produce good. Which is to say that are all political theodicies explaining away evil by linking it in some causal way to good.
Carl Schmitt as a Subject and Object of International Criminal Law: Ethical Judgement In Extremis
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

Since the Nuremberg trials in the ‘Justice case’ (United States v. Josef Alstötter, et al.) lawyers utilising the emptied forms of legal process to commit international crimes have been legally punishable. This self-reflexive approach to law by law distinguishes legal and illegal – ‘real’ law and ‘simulated’ law. Why then was the ‘Nazi crown jurist’ Carl Schmitt who appeared to have entered into a Faustian pact with the National Socialists not prosecuted? Aspects of his work expressed avowedly anti-Semitic sentiments while some of his intellectual concepts could be deployed to support National Socialist territorial expansion or Lebensraum. This illustrates the difficulties of judging ethical behaviour in extreme situations where definitions of the legal/illegal are themselves disputed. Schmitt’s life and work (the two are inseparable as his lifework) cross both legal and prescriptive ethics and are consequently more of a metaethical dilemma. The law resolves this meta-ethical dilemma through introducing a split in the legal subject between the office they hold and their person. Agamben traces this doctrine to the theory of the action of the devil within the providential economy
Artificial Islands, Artificial Highways and Pirates: An East African Perspective on the South China Sea Disputes
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

The United States promotes freedom of navigation in the South China Sea while China constructs artificial islands in the same area to bolster up its territorial claims. Both countries utilize their navies similarly but for opposed legal reasons. This reflects a geopolitical contest with the United States championing a sea open to global navigation and commerce while China builds a primarily land based ‘New Silk Road’ linking it to critical markets and natural resources. That struggle between land and sea, similarly as it were with piracy, encompasses both the law of the sea and international criminal law. Reading Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea in light of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust in the context of the various South China Sea disputes provides the opportunity to evaluate whether it may clarify geo-strategic issues at stake that Schmitt himself did not have the opportunity to consider when elaborating his notion of Nomos.
People, Politics and Populism in International Criminal Law
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

Although democracy and democratic practices, in the form of both direct and indirect public participation in governance are axiomatically a cherished value of liberal democratic principles, populism is nevertheless treated with wariness because of its potential to come into conflict with other cherished values of liberal democratic principles such as human rights and the rule of law. The ‘people’ as such have a limited direct role ascribed in public international law. Therefore, populism for this chapter, references a crisis of political representation where a schism between a people and its representatives is detected, or claimed, or exploited. That so-called democratic deficit makes international criminal law practitioners on the one hand particularly vulnerable to demagogic speech challenging their legitimacy and on the other particularly tempted to counter demagoguery by asserting themselves as being more legitimate representatives of a victimised people than their oppressive rulers. This chapter consequently argues that in international criminal law the people is metaphorically explicable as an optical illusion appearing and disappearing at crucial moments in different guises.  In the Kenyan case study selected, these contested guises include victims and popular mandates. The people as such are never present and yet remain politically as well as legally indispensable as a rhetorical claim to ground concrete action oriented towards justice.
Introduction: The Antinomies of Politics
Authors: Nelson Bryan
Published: January 2025

The Introduction serves to acquaint the reader with the general approach of the book, its organising theoretical framework and most important theses. It carefully explains the book’s principal concept of a democracy against in terms of what the author develops as the “antinomies of politics.” It then introduces the three contemporary French political theorists whose work the book predominately draws (Rancière, Lefort, Abensour) and explores the context in which their larger projects may be situated. Finally, it outlines the book’s broader understanding of the work of political philosophy itself as well as its important function in society.