bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Value of Grassroots English for Bangladeshi Migrants to the Middle East
Authors: Chowdhury Qumrul Hasan , Erling Elizabeth J.
Published: September 2021

This chapter, based on a research in rural Bangladesh, investigates the value of grassroots English for the Bangladeshi migrant workers in the Middle East, and sheds light on some of the methodological and ethical issues relevant to the findings. The chapter draws insights from the narratives of three participants and argues that it is difficult to establish a straightforward relationship between grassroots English/language skills and successful economic migration because of issues like global inequality, and the social and psychological costs of economic migration should also be considered. The chapter provides useful sociolinguistic insight into the value of English in a grassroots area of growing importance, economic migration, which is relatively under-explored. It also describes the methodological and ethical complexities of working with vulnerable communities, such as low/semi-skilled economic migrants, while also throwing into relief the value of gaining insight into their experiences, language practices and reflections.
Language Use among Syrian Refugees in Germany
Authors: Wilson Guyanne
Published: September 2021

Following the outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians sought asylum in Europe, particularly in Germany. This chapter looks at language use among Syrian refugees living in the German state of North Rhine Westphalia. It reports the results of a series of qualitative interviews conducted with refugees and other stakeholders in the refugee integration. Refugees’ linguistic repertoire consists minimally of Syrian Arabic, English, and German, though proficiency in the latter two languages varies from person to person. Though both scholarly literature and societal legend consistently report the centrality of English as a lingua franca, the refugees’ experiences show that this is not necessarily the case; the assumption that proficiency in English will ease communication in official contexts and help gain access to employment and other social benefits is often unmet, in stark comparison to the experiences of immigrants and refugees in neighbouring Holland and Belgium. Thus, the study has implications for the understanding of the role of English as a lingua franca, particularly in Germany.
Uprooted Speakers’ Grassroots English: Metalinguistic Perspectives of Asylum Seekers in Germany
Authors: Bohmann Axel
Published: September 2021

This chapter discusses metalinguistic discourse produced by asylum seekers from English-speaking West Africa in Germany, with a focus on the role of English in participants’ communicative environment and the values and affordances ascribed to different varieties of English. The chapter argues that, in this specific context, a) English loses much of its communicative range but retains important identity-related functions, and b) the values associated with different varieties of English reflect global relationships in the World system of Englishes. African varieties are linked to in-group functions and receive differential evaluation, with Nigerian English being constructed as more standard-distant than Ghanaian English, whereas the English of German interlocutors is associated with the prestige varieties American and British English. Particularly surprising is the frequent equation of Gambian English with Jamaican ways of speech, a pattern accounted for not in terms of linguistic similarity but of the global circulation of reggae and dancehall culture. The chapter thus contributes to the sociolinguistics of globalization and the study of language, mobility, and migration.
Facing Change and Changing Masks
Authors: Popenhagen Ron J.
Published: September 2021

The primary focus of this chapter is the fixed-form mask in its many manifestations, beginning with ‘Death Masks Re-membered’. The difference between performance masks and death masks is theorised, including a discussion of photographs of the death masks of notable figures. The fascination of modernist painters with African masks in British, French and German museums is discussed with reference to the Picasso Primitif exhibition (2017) and to the history of anthropological exhibitions of the ‘savage’ during the early years of Modernism. Indigenous masquerade is further explored by commentary on photographic portraits of the ‘other’, with consideration of the rapport between subject and photographer. Painted images of the mask object and disguised individuals by Paul Cézanne, James Ensor, Émil Nolde and Pablo Picasso are contrasted with Edward Sheriff Curtis’s photos of Native American masking. Modernist innovations in masquerade, like the dance scenography of Loïe Fuller, highlight alternative methods of changing the body image, as well as transforming the human figure into a part-object form (an aspect exhibited also in a painting by Margaret Macdonald Mackinstosh). Modernist Pierrots in Berlin, Copenhagen and St Petersburg, for example, suggest that playful disguise was an almost-universal impulse in Modernism across Europe and the United Kingdom.
Feigned and Distorted Bodyscapes
Authors: Popenhagen Ron J.
Published: September 2021

Creative interdisciplinarity in performance and scenography permeate the masking and disguising of the avant-garde. Chapter Four highlights the artistic collaboration of choreographers, composers, visual artists and writers in Paris and beyond, beginning with the production of Parade in Paris (1917) and concluding with work of Vsevolod Meyerhold in Moscow in the 1920s. Popular performance disguising by Liesl Karlstadt and Karl Valentin in Munich, as well as Alexander Vertinsky’s Ukrainian Pierrot, contrast with much of the abstraction proposed in other urban bodyscapes. The bold distortions of Aleksei Granovsky’s mises en scène with the State Yiddish Chamber Theatre complement the masquerading described in Paris with the Swedish Ballet and the Ballets Russes. This chapter parades a line-up Charlie Chaplin, Clowns and Pulcinella interpreters alongside the omnipresent Pierrots who offer an escape from the troublesome years of war. In this era, disguising also proliferated in domestic and military circumstances as malingerers and ‘Aspirants and Pretenders’ displayed Chaplinesque masquerading skills throughout the belligerent communities and battlefields of Europe.
Introduction Turkey and the Balkans in the New Millennium: Religion, Identity and Power
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi
Published: September 2021

‘ Turkey is back!’ Since the beginning of the 2000s, a considerable number of semi-academic and academic productions, echoing popular opinion, have been building around this theme with regard to the role of the Turkish Republic in the Balkan Peninsula and its social, cultural, economic and religious ramifications. Some claim that the policies of the successive AKP (Justice and Development Party – Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) governments and the political strategies of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan concerning the Balkans have long been energised by Turkey’s desire to re-establish political, economic, religious and cultural hegemony in the region through various neo-imperialist and neo-colonial projects, and to foresee the revitalisation of the multifaceted Ottoman legacy....
Multi-Sided Roles of Religion, Identity and Power in Politics
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi
Published: September 2021

This chapter is the theoretical skeleton of the book, explaining how religion can be a part of the state identity and how religion-oriented state identity affect the power resources and notions of the state in foreign policy. This chapter studies religion as one element of state identity among other elements, and various outcomes of religious state identity as an element of power in international relations. Furthermore, it employs a constructivist reading of religion within politics and international relations, and explains the theoretical contribution of the book: the ambivalence of religion-oriented soft power.
Turkey as a Nascent Power in the Balkans: From the Özal Years to the Akp
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi
Published: September 2021

Without considering the common history of Turkey and the Balkans, and the Özal period in Turkey, it would be difficult to understand the AKP’s religion-oriented domestic and foreign policy preferences and Turkey’s religious-oriented ambivalent soft power structure for the Balkans. Therefore, this chapter also explains the historical social–political developments via using interviews and relevant fieldwork notes.
Exportation of Domestic Conflicts
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi
Published: September 2021

The power and influence of the Gülen Movement is another factor in the reactions of the case countries, but the main determinant is the response capacities of the countries in question. In this regard, the Bulgarian state seems to have the greatest capacity to respond directly to the problems exported from Turkey. It is a member state of the EU, which could intervene to block some of Turkey’s demands. On the other hand, the Bulgarian authorities are aware that without the Diyanet’s financial support there may be serious issues among the country’s Muslim population. Therefore, it has been trying to frame the issues in a delicate balance.
Slavery, Subjection and Culture in Adams’s Democracy and Esther
Authors: Coit Emily
Published: September 2021

Chapter 1 shows how Henry Adams's novels interrogate John Stuart Mill's arguments for egalitarian reciprocity in marriage and in pedagogical practice. Reading Democracy and Esther alongside Mill's Subjection of Women, with reference to his 'Inaugural Address', the chapter argues that these novels are early expressions of an apostasy from liberalism that finds fuller expression in Adams's later work. Questioning liberalism's account of the human as well as its zeal for development, Democracy and Esther play with Darwinian ideas in order to suggest that men and women are base and bestial, especially in their relations with each other. Relishing such primitive animality along with a sensuous absence of intellect, Adams locates these qualities in womanhood and Blackness; these categories of sex and race help him to articulate a rejection of liberal arguments for education and progress.
The Education of the People in James’s The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima
Authors: Coit Emily
Published: September 2021

Chapter 2 reads Henry James's The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima in the context of their serialization in magazines later called 'genteel', showing how these novels question the practice of cultivation that those magazines facilitate and prize. Identifying that practice as a core ideal in the liberalism expressed by Bostonians like Charles Eliot Norton, the chapter shows how James questions the capacity of the broader public for such cultivation. Especially in his evocation of Reconstruction-era efforts to educate freedmen, James points to the hypocrisy and the accidental tyrannizing of liberal educators like Norton; but his novels distinguish between that accidental tyranny and the deliberate tyranny of those who would simply master and rule rather than educate. Associating such projects of mastery with Thomas Carlyle's pessimism, which he juxtaposes against an Emersonian optimism about democracy, James ambivalently endorses Carlyle's sense that 'the people' have meagre capacities, but also links the denial of education to violence. Drawing from Walter Pater, James portrays cultivations that feed on the pleasures of food and art in New York and the Continent, and suggests that this kind of cultivation fosters development much more successfully than the ascetic moralizing of democratic revolutionaries and Bostonians.
The Professor and the Mob in Wharton’s The Valley of Decision
Authors: Coit Emily
Published: September 2021

Chapter 3 reads Edith Wharton's Valley of Decision, 'The Vice of Reading' and 'The Descent of Man'. Considering these texts alongside Charles Eliot Norton's writing about reading and education, the chapter argues that Wharton articulates her political thought in conversation with the elderly professor. In these early texts, as in her later commentary on modernism, Wharton expresses a realist conservatism that opposes a liberal idealism committed to democracy. In its reliance on abstraction and theory, Wharton contends, such idealism fails to see clearly the people whom expansions of democracy would enfranchise. Norton imagines a democracy enhanced by broader access to culture and a richly literate electorate; Wharton derides the capacities of the actual reading public, locates the the diffusion of culture in the marketplace rather than the school, and points to the degradation of literature amongst vapid consumers. Her texts satirize and exterminate professorial types, portraying a public that misunderstands or murders the scholars who would teach them. The scholar who gives voice to Norton's liberal idealism in Valley of Decision is a woman who herself embodies an ideal; Wharton's portrayal of her sad fate uses incisive feminist analysis to bolster a conservative case against idealisms of all sorts.
Universal White: Discrimination and Selection in James’s American Scene
Authors: Coit Emily
Published: September 2021

Chapter 4 reads James’s 1898 essays on American Letters, The American Scene, ‘The Question of Our Speech’, and ‘Charles Eliot Norton’, alongside writing by Charles Eliot Norton and Charles William Eliot, among others. During the early years of the twentieth century, Harvard thinkers address questions about the political responsibilities and powers of the 'college-bred'; this chapter argues that James responds to this discussion about the cultivated elite (or what Matthew Arnold calls 'the remnant') by directing attention to that elite's private pleasures rather than its public responsibilities. Tracing across multiple texts James's articulation of an aesthetic that prizes difference, discrimination, delimitation, and exclusion, the chapter shows that he, like Edith Wharton, associates these desirable qualities with the social hierarchies of the Old World. Although his celebration of intricately shaded heterogeneity has been hailed as anti-nativist or progressive, his critical portrayal of white homogeneity can function to criticise not racism or nativism but rather the egalitarian democracy with which such whiteness was closely associated. In contrasting his own practice of culture against that of Norton's 'Puritan' type, James distances himself from that type's commitments to asceticism and moralizing, and also its lingering associations with radicalism, antislavery sentiment, and democracy.
The Reign of the Genteel
Authors: Coit Emily
Published: September 2021

This conclusion examines some episodes in the formation of the narrative about 'the genteel tradition'. Having shown that Henry Adams, Henry James, Edith Wharton and their friend Barrett Wendell all contribute to a realist critique of a liberal idealism, American Snobs notes here that when George Santayana makes his own influential commentary on the 'genteel', he is responding to the same liberal Harvard milieu that provokes that realist critique. Wendell's Harvard students Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Louis Parrington adapt this critique as they develop the narrative about the genteel for their own ends. Brooks, the conclusion shows, contributes to the distortions of that narrative by conflating Charles Eliot Norton's perspective with that of the much more reactionary Wendell. The book closes by considering the unsexy femininity that frequently figures the genteel, linking it to Reconstruction-era evocations of the schoolmarm and later references to sterile Anglo-Saxon womanhood that hastens racial decline. In later iterations of the narrative about the genteel, negative representations of this unsexy white femininity tend to serve progressive ends; in earlier iterations like those surveyed in American Snobs, however, such representations tend to serve a conservatism that is sceptical about democracy and understands itself as realist.
Blood and Convulsive Affect: Vectors of the Pulse as Sovereign Operations
Authors: Mee Sharon Jane
Published: September 2021

This chapter conceptualises the vectors of the pulse as the quantities of magnitude and direction that communicate. The vector discloses the difficulty in isolating the place of the pulse, which in turn suggests the ‘putting at stake’ of self as a sovereign operation experienced in Georges Bataille’s general economy. This chapter analyses the vector in relation to the form of spectatorship that Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film Possession gives rise to. The film is remarkable for the way it relates the magnitude and directional flow of blood to a frenzy of the body in a kind of convulsive affect. Blood points to the sacrificial expenditure, or dispossession, of the self, which nevertheless produces an intimate communication or communion between characters, film, and spectator.
“Slow,” “Smart,” “Indie,” “Prestige,” “Elevated”: Discursive Struggle for Cultural Distinction
Authors: Church David
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the successive critical attempts to name the emergent post-horror cycle as something other than the literal conjunction of art cinema and horror, including modifiers like “slow,” “smart,” “indie,” “prestige,” “elevated,” and finally “post.” The shortcomings in each of these naming attempts were driven as much by critics’ difficulties to put the films’ affective impact into words as by the increased speed and fragmentated authority of film criticism during the social-media era. Nevertheless, by looking at the individual meanings of these critical labels, the chapter traces an intersecting series of historical lineages (e.g. slow cinema, smart films, indie cinema) that have productively led into the stylistic and discursive construction of the post-horror corpus.
Horror by Gaslight: Epistemic Violence and Ambivalent Belonging
Authors: Church David
Published: September 2021

“Gaslighting” is a common theme in post-horror films where emotional abuse cannot be immediately ascribed to intergenerational family dynamics. This chapter focuses on post-horror’s generation of dread within depictions of intimate-partner relationships where gender, race, or class provide the impetus for others to monstrously undercut a protagonist’s worldview. Whereas the couple is presented as part of an endangered out-group in both Midsommar and The Invitation, the racialized possession of Black bodies in Get Out demonstrates how gaslighting within romantic bonds can function as a form of epistemic violence that reinforces larger social inequalities. The affective discomfort created by films about the horrors of gaslighting is further heightened by post-horror’s tendency toward epistemic hesitation, as well as viewers’ potential hesitation over their own sense of belonging in the audience of films that may be feel far less entertaining than expected.
Existential Dread and the Trouble with Transcendence
Authors: Church David
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how post-horror films engage with metaphysical and existential issues, with stories about protagonists’ attempts to gain some sort of transcendence thus serving as a way of imagining post-horror’s own mixed success at (for better or worse) transcending the genre itself. Films like A Ghost Story and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House transform the ghost from a vengeful, fear-inducing trope into a much more existentially wandering figure of unresolved grief and the impermanence of human memory. Meanwhile, A Dark Song uses occultism to echo A Ghost Story’s concern with individual grief’s relationship to cosmic realms of (non)existence, much as mother! and I Am the Pretty Thing ask whether artistic creation itself can play any role in personal or spiritual redemption.
Introduction
Authors: Easley Alexis
Published: September 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the 1832-60 time period in Great Britain, focusing on developments in the publishing trade that offered new openings for women writers to pursue literary careers. It also provides a chapter outline, as well as a discussion of methodology and current scholarship on women writers and the history of mass media.
Eliza Cook, New Media Innovator
Authors: Easley Alexis
Published: September 2021

This chapter provides an in-depth examination of the career Eliza Cook. After publishing her first book, Lays of a Wild Harp, Cook submitted verse to the Weekly Dispatch and soon thereafter became its house poet. By 1847, Cook was serving as editor of the paper’s ‘facts and scraps’ column, a position that enabled her to hone her editorial skills and publish the work of fellow women writers. Cook’s masculine appearance violated the poetess norm of the period, as did her romantic partnership with American actress Charlotte Cushman, but this seemed only to enhance her image as an eccentric yet accessible poet of the people. In 1849, she parlayed this fame into the founding of her own Eliza Cook’s Journal, which initially surpassed Dickens’s Household Words in popularity. Yet as the 1840s gave way to the more conservative 1850s, Cook was frequently the target of gender-trolling attacks in the popular press, which defined her as a sexual deviant on the one hand and a second-rate poet on the other. This notoriety may have been one factor that forced her to retreat from the public eye in 1852—a move that initiated her gradual disappearance from literary history.
George Eliot, the Brontës and the Market for Poetry
Authors: Easley Alexis
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, I explore the early poetic careers of George Eliot and the Brontë sisters, situating their work within the market for popular poetry in the periodical and newspaper press. I begin by analyzing George Eliot’s school notebook from 1834, which includes twenty-four poems she copied from periodicals, newspapers, and books. I trace the probable source publications of some of these poems in order to illuminate Eliot’s teenage reading practices. I then explore how her early experiences as a reader and writer carried over into one of her first prose publications, ‘Poetry and Prose from the Notebook of an Eccentric.’ In the second part of this chapter, I focus on the parallel history of the Brontë sisters’ entry into the world of print, 1846–50. I first analyze Charlotte’s understanding of the periodical field and then examine her advertising strategies for Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, highlighting her keen awareness of the literary marketplace. Today, this volume is seen as something of a failure—a prelude to the Brontës’ more successful careers as novelists. Yet due to the practice of reprinting among popular periodicals and newspapers, the Brontës’ poetry reached broader audiences than has hitherto been understood.
Women Writers and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
Authors: Easley Alexis
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, I investigate the networks of women writers associated with Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal through an analysis of its ledgers and correspondence files. I detail their contributions, writing locations, rates of remuneration and working relationships with the editorial staff in order to shed light on the role Chambers’s played in the emergence of the popular woman writer in the early decades of the Victorian era. I link the work of individual writers to the editorial policies and generic conventions of the journal, which constructed ‘modern’ women as key players in the popular literature movement, both as readers and writers. Chambers’s provided a venue for prominent women writers such as Anna Maria Hall to reach broader audiences than ever before and for up-and-coming authors, such as Dinah Mulock and Julia Kavanagh, to establish themselves in a burgeoning literary marketplace. Chambers’s also provided opportunities for many other amateur and unknown authors to pursue their craft anonymously without name or fame. Written in part by and for women, Chambers’s Journal, by the 1850s, became an important vehicle for debates on the ‘Woman Question’, bringing issues of female education and employment to a broad audience of artisan and middle-class readers.
Scrapbooks and Women’s Reading Practices
Authors: Easley Alexis
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, my focus shifts from women’s roles as writers to their roles as readers and consumers of the cheap weekly press, 1820–60. I first examine scrapbooks held by John Rylands Library and the Harry Page Collection at Manchester Metropolitan University, which have much to tell us about how middle-class women read: their processes of selecting, copying, arranging, and editing printed scraps in creative ways. I first explore some of the challenges that arise when reading women’s scrapbooks and then demonstrate methodologies that help us begin to unpack their meanings, especially their relationship to the cheap popular press, which served both as a creative inspiration and a source of content. In the next section, I examine a type of content that was particularly ubiquitous in scrapbooks: poetry. The frequent appearance of verse in women’s albums corresponded with the proliferation of poetry in miscellaneous columns and other popular publication formats during the early and mid-Victorian periods. Finally, I examine a remarkable scrapbook from the 1850s that provides an enticing view of the broad range of periodicals and books middle-class women read—and how they used these disparate materials to imbue their leisure time with meaning.
Coda
Authors: Easley Alexis
Published: September 2021

In the conclusion, I reflect on the resonances of early and mid-Victorian popular media practices in our own time—the questions they raise as we consider the ways our experience of Victorian women’s writing is mediated, remediated, and cross-marketed in digital formats. My case studies for this investigation are Eliza Meteyard and Rose Ellen Hendriks. Writers like Meteyard and Hendriks were able to take advantage of changing media technologies—e.g., the expansion of cheap newspapers and transnational press networks—to promote the recirculation of their work in ways that made it seem continually fresh and relevant. For some, subsequent changes in media practices led to de-canonization, yet an exploration of their afterlife in new media of our own time demonstrates the temporary, contingent nature of any writer’s or textual object’s disappearance from the historical record or from public view. The recirculation and serendipitous recovery of Victorian women writers’ texts, portraits, book covers, and ephemera in social media de-contextualize and repurpose these materials for a variety of social, commercial, and artistic ends. An investigation of the afterlife of early and mid-Victorian women’s writing reminds us of the mobile, shifting relationship between popular writing and new media, both past and present.
The Desegregation of Spark
Authors: Bailey James
Published: September 2021

This introductory chapter provides a comprehensive account of Spark’s critical reception, spanning the 1960s to the present day. Established critical views, it argues, have collectively developed a ‘myth’ of Spark as an author who delights in playing the role of malevolent master-puppeteer, flaunting her powers of omniscience before the reader. This tendency to liken Spark’s authorial power to that wielded punitively by the Old Testament God does a disservice to the complexity and diversity of her writing, and blunts its political anger and subversive edge. Instead, this rigid, prescriptive theologically-informed reading of Spark has postponed or even precluded more rigorous analysis of the significance of the social and historical contexts and concerns of her fiction, explorations of the relevance of her writing to diverse strands of literary and psychoanalytic theory, as well as considerations of how her literary innovations have facilitated instances of gendered social critique. Spark’s narrative perspectives – which are multifarious rather than uniform, altering drastically from one text to the next – are instead concerned intensely with reflecting and subverting the dynamics of power, knowledge and control operating within the worlds in which they are set, rather than conveying godlike omniscience.
Introduction
Authors: Dobson Eleanor
Published: September 2021

In 1856, George Eliot (1819–80) lamented the proliferation of ‘the least readable [variety] of silly women’s novels, […] the modern-antique species’, specifically criticising authors’ lack of ‘accurate and minute knowledge’.1 She favoured instead the writer of the rare, well-researched novel, a work that rested upon a foundation of scholarly archaeological information and whose ‘genius […] familiarized itself with all the relics of an ancient period’; this type of novel, she claimed, ‘can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic divination, restore the missing notes in the “music of humanity,” and reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us’....
‘Fairy tales’ and ‘bunkum’: Marie Corelli, Artefacts and Fabrications
Authors: Dobson Eleanor
Published: September 2021

This chapter centres on the spectral stories and rumours which orbited ancient Egyptian artefacts in the possession of literary authors, along with the Egyptological connections such authors made. It focuses on Marie Corelli, her one-time friend Oscar Wilde, reading Wilde’s scarab ring that recalled the rare and expensive objects in his own writings as finding a literary counterpart in Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895). Corelli’s devil is Wilde’s double, Wilde’s scarab ring represented as a live beetle within which resides the soul of a mummified princess. Such a depiction, this chapter claims, reflects Corelli’s condemnation of Wilde, and decadence more broadly. Also considered is a necklace that Corelli was given by Sir John Aird, partially comprised of ancient Egyptian beads. This object’s renderings in a heretofore neglected archival source along with Corelli’s lifelong companion’s memoirs, illuminate her belief that ancient Egyptian jewellery allowed spiritual connections between the ancient and modern worlds. Ultimately, this chapter unearths how Corelli, proposing that she was a reincarnated Egyptian princess, fashioned herself as an alternative Egyptological authority at odds with masculine, scholarly Egyptology represented by figures such as E. A. Wallis Budge of the British Museum.
‘The master-key that opens every door’: Hieroglyphs, Translations and Palimpsests
Authors: Dobson Eleanor
Published: September 2021

This chapter considers the translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs along with advancements in printing technologies across the nineteenth century, which led to an increased hieroglyphic presence in modern media. It focuses, in particular, in the use of hieroglyphs by authors of fiction, including H. Rider Haggard and E. Nesbit. In some cases, Egyptologists lent their expertise; alternatively, authors and designers consulted these experts’ grammars and dictionaries to construct their own (sometimes erroneous) meanings. Analysing the use of hieroglyphs in a variety of fiction and other cultural forms not only reveals networks of consultation between those with a professional and an amateur interest in ancient Egypt, but the wealth of connotations that the hieroglyphs suggested: from a magical language (often in children’s or supernatural fiction) to a romantic script suitable for love letters and secret correspondence (suited to romance, mystery, and detective genres). Meanwhile, increased tourism in Egypt resulted in the proliferation of palimpsestic chiselling of names onto temples and pyramids, while ankhs obelisks were incorporated into European and American grave designs. Ultimately, these uses of hieroglyphs reveal a bid for immortality, whether that of the individual or even the literary works that contemporary authors were inscribing with ancient Egyptian script.
Coda
Authors: Dobson Eleanor
Published: September 2021

The symptoms of ‘Egyptomania’ subsided with the Great Depression and the tailing off of art deco style. A world war had stalled Egyptological excavations, and in the 1930s another global conflict approached. As I suggested in the introduction, it was the deaths of the giants of Egyptology, not new discoveries and breakthroughs, that dominated Egyptological reports in the newspapers across this decade. Flinders Petrie, who survived the 1930s, was to die on film in 1940, demonstrating the extent to which Egyptology was enmeshed in sensationalist fictions, even beyond the zenith of collaborative activity which has been the focus of this book. A museum archaeologist with Petrie’s name is the first victim of the reanimated mummy in the 1940 film ...
Introduction: Masaniello’s Moment
Authors: Taylor Dan
Published: September 2021

Spinoza, fond of drawing, once depicted himself as Masaniello, the fisherman and doomed revolutionary leader of the people of Naples. While perhaps intended to amuse friends familiar with his iconoclastic reputation, it is a fitting symbol of Spinoza’s many subsequent reincarnations as an atheist, pantheist, proto-ecologist, anomalous thinker of the multitude, radical democrat, liberal individualist, or precursor to Nietzsche, Marx, or modernity more broadly. For while Spinoza shared Masaniello’s desire to empower the people, he was also aware of the contingent and disharmonious nature of politics, where desire, ambition or restrictive imaginings of community could easily upturn any nascent democratic movement into superstition, violence and the tyranny of fear. The Introduction sets out the problem of Masaniello, revolution and collective power to then introduce the book’s core approach and where it sits in wider debates and positions in Spinoza scholarship.
Desire
Authors: Taylor Dan
Published: September 2021

Chapter 4 applies this theory of Spinozan power to human freedom, whose features it then explores. It seeks out a practical account of freedom, one that avoids empty tautologies like ‘power makes things more powerful’, or which places freedom beyond the reach of most human beings. It argues for a more inclusive model of empowerment, one that sets up the value of the imagination and the passive affects, things which are not in themselves empowering, but which can be used to greater power and self-knowledge. It distinguishes desire from the conatus, and explore the features of this peculiar ‘consciousness’. What matters most is not what a given desire is, but what it does for the agent. Neither desire nor the affect of joy intrinsically correlate with actual self-preservation, but are best realised through it, providing a new way to think freedom through desire and what is called an education of the imagination.
Becoming Collective
Authors: Taylor Dan
Published: September 2021

Part 3 then turns to aspects of collectivity over three different articulations in Spinoza: the Ethics, TTP, and TP. What does it mean to be one with another person of a common nature, to become ‘one body’ and ‘one mind’, and why does Spinoza repeatedly emphasise this at points across his works? Chapter 5 identifies a tendency towards unanimity that develops across Spinoza’s works unevenly. It is premised in his accounts of sociality and individuation in the Ethics, in which individuals are conatively compelled to associate with one another, and find in reason the most effective common ground in doing so. It argues that there is an emerging view of the good of unanimity, or collective right, which appears in the Ethics and TTP, with fuller exposition in the TP. While some scholarship has focused on the political implications of group subjectivity (e.g. multitudes), there is a wider and more systematic thought of collective power that goes beyond momentary democratic eruptions. This notion of collective right precedes the political as an intrinsic model of association, and one that is more flexible and universal than its specifically political manifestation.
The State
Authors: Taylor Dan
Published: September 2021

Chapter 7 turns to the state, and Spinoza’s ideas in the TP about the role of the state in establishing the conditions for peace, piety and mutual assistance. Does Spinoza champion a proto-liberal sovereignty of reduced scale, founded in deliberation, toleration and free speech, or should the state actively intervene in the lives of its subjects? If he seems to emphasise both, why, and are the two compatible? What late and new role does the multitude play in the establishment and maintenance of social cohesion? The TP itself has been under-appreciated in providing a deeper exposition of the pre-eminence of the affects to political life. Here the multitude appear on stage, and their common feelings and desires take a primary role in the freedom and security of the state. The chapter identifies Spinoza’s aim in this late, unfinished work as one to describe a reasonable republic, that is, an optimum state whose foundation and laws are strictly, scientifically reasonable. I then critically assess Spinoza’s attempt to load the burden of becoming freer onto the state itself, resulting in some potentially unresolvable paradoxes for individual freedom
Cadenza: Prudentissimo Viro
Authors: Taylor Dan
Published: September 2021

A Cadenza is typically a more expressive, ornamental passage towards the end of a musical work, usually by a soloist – here it serves to contrast Spinoza and Gramsci’s readings of Machiavelli’s The Prince in terms of the symbolic and collective nature of power. In both thinkers one can discern a politics of common sense, being a shared sense of being of a community or common, and of the importance of transforming shared ideas, beliefs and feelings to broader political freedom. This section contrasts Spinoza and Gramsci on collective identity, power, and the individual’s relationship to the collective in a more speculative pitch.
Her Husband Jalal
Authors: Dabashi Hamid
Published: September 2021

Before I go any further and in this chapter explore the relationship of Jalal Al-Ahmad and his wife Simin Daneshvar, a seminal aspect of both their lives and characters, let me briefly recap the major points I have been driving home so far as I write this book on the person I have suggested we consider ‘the last Muslim intellectual’.
Gharbzadegi: The Condition of Coloniality
Authors: Dabashi Hamid
Published: September 2021

The study of Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s arguably most seminal text Gharbzadegi (Westoxication) has historically suffered from a mode of bizarre nativism that has in turn projected the nativism of the Iranian or Iranist scholar onto the presumed nativism of the subject of their studies, Al-e Ahmad himself. Al-e Ahmad, contrary to their common assumption, was not a nativist. Quite to the contrary: he had a wide global perspective in his prose and politics. They are nativist – these scholars who have historically, systematically and consistently abused, misread and sought to discredit him as ‘a nativist’. This chapter revist Al-e Ahmad’s classic text --
Literary Interludes
Authors: Dabashi Hamid
Published: September 2021

I concluded the last chapter by suggesting that Al-e Ahmad’s turn to a renewed reading of Islam in Gharbzadegi and On the Services and Treasons of Intellectuals might be interpreted as his preliminary steps towards a kind of liberation theology, the full contours of which he could not see for he was unaware of similar events in Latin America led by theologian like Gustavo Gutiérrez and others. These ground-breaking events were happening almost simultaneously with the publication of Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi. But his own mind being overly fixated on Europe, and his main interlocutors at Tehran University too Eurocentric even to be aware of such monumental developments, he never unpacked this crucial potential in his critical thinking. That aspect of Al-e Ahmad’s project thus remained dormant until the Islamist takeover of his legacy would take it in a direction that would legitimise their tyranny and discredit Al-e Ahmad. A major task of this book is to retrieve that moment in Al-e Ahmad’s thinking and push it in a direction he could not see or even anticipate. In this chapter I turn to his literary work.
From a Short Life to a Lasting Legacy: Towards a Post-Islamist Liberation Theology
Authors: Dabashi Hamid
Published: September 2021

Why should one bother to go back and re-examine the short life and enduring significance of a public intellectual if not to push his crucial but limited achievements forward and place them on a global stage? It is now time for me to bring all my previous chapters together in this final push to deliver on my main objective of suggesting Al-e Ahmad as a harbinger of a post-Islamist liberation theology
Introduction
Authors: Kadıoğlu İ. Aytaç
Published: September 2021

This introduction argues that ethno-nationalist groups’ ethnic identity, desire for self-determination and territorial concerns are related to a specific context, which reveals a dilemma related to the choice of whether a state pursues armed struggle or a non-military solution. It explains the data collection methods of the book which relies on a broad range of sources including interviews, archival materials, official documents and reports. It then evaluates the nature of ethno-nationalist groups and describes the rationale behind the selection of the ethno-nationalist conflicts in Northern Ireland and Turkey, and how non-violent, political resolution efforts played a role in ending violence in these two comprehensive and long-standing conflicts. It reviews the evolution of ‘conflict resolution’ theory and how this book intends to modify the existing theory. The chapter ends with an explanation of the structure of the book and the specific topics and case studies examined in each chapter of the book.
Understanding and Rethinking ‘Conflict Resolution’: A Conceptual and Theoretical Framework
Authors: Kadıoğlu İ. Aytaç
Published: September 2021

This chapter details the conceptual and theoretical approaches of conflict resolution and develops a framework to understanding non-violent attempts to resolve ethno-nationalist conflicts. The chapter focuses on two interrelated arguments. Firstly, that conflict resolution efforts of states, sub-state groups and third parties provide a framework for ending ethno-nationalist violence. Secondly, that conflict resolution as a process develops an understanding of non-violent resolution efforts during the pre-negotiation and negotiation stages. The chapter divides conflict resolution approaches into three levels; the elite, middle-range and grassroots level approaches. As the book addresses peacemaking efforts between states, opposition groups and third parties, the relevance of the elite level approaches as well as other groups and the initiatives of other actors towards peace are clarified by conceptualising three major parts that play a role in peacemaking efforts: backchannel communications, P/CROs and official negotiations.
Official Negotiations: The Long, Narrow Road to Peace
Authors: Kadıoğlu İ. Aytaç
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores official negotiations as the key factor in conflict resolution processes in both the Northern Irish and Turkey’s Kurdish conflicts. The cross-case comparison allows for the generation of comprehensive insights into the conflict environment—which is a decisive factor for the nature of political resolution attempts—by providing an analysis of the root causes of the conflicts in both cases. The main events included the Good Friday Agreement and the role played by Sinn Fein and Gerry Adams on the one hand, Dolmabahçe Declaration and the role played by Abdullah Öcalan on the other. The analysis at this chapter broadens the process from ‘negative’ to ‘positive peace’ that includes transformation of the underlying reasons for conflicts and restoration of relationships. It provides clear evidence from both track-one experiences and their comparison which will help establish an extensive analysis in making peace. The chapter reaches a detailed analysis by including other actors and factors, namely ‘spoilers’ who aim to distract a peace process, and mediators in facilitating or hindering progress.
Biography of a Book
Authors: White Robert
Published: September 2021

This chapter traces the progress towards publication of Keats’s collection which eventually appeared in 1820, its title page reading, ‘LAMIA, ISABELLA, THE EVE OF ST AGNES, AND OTHER POEMS. | BY JOHN KEATS, AUTHOR OF ENDYMION || LONDON: PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY, 1820’. Stung by the savage reviews and commercial failure of his previous efforts, Poems (1817) published on 10 March, 1817, and Endymion: A Poetic Romance published in early May, 1818, Keats was understandably disheartened when contemplating further publications. However, by September 1819 he was, according to Woodhouse, writing to the publisher John Taylor, willing ‘to publish the Eve of St Agnes & Lamia immediately: but Hessey told him it could not answer to do so now’. On 10 October he had spoken of writing ‘Two or three’ poems in which he wishes ‘to diffuse the colouring of St Agnes eve throughout a Poem in which Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery’. He hopes that writing such poems ‘in the course of the next six 3 years, would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum—...’. Writing on 17 November, 1819, he asserted ‘I have come to a determination not to publish Anything I have now ready written’, a corpus which in fact included all the poems which were to be included in 1820. The definite decision to put together the ‘Lamia’ collection was made between the date of the letter to Taylor (17 November, 1819) and a relatively buoyant letter to his sister Fanny written on 20 December, 1819. The collection was published in late June, 1820. The result was one of the greatest poetry collections of all time, though it has rarely been considered in this integrated light since editors and critics invariably consider each poem in the chronology of its composition rather than their contribution to a unity which is greater than the sum of the parts.
Development
Authors: Coulson Victoria
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores Bowen’s understanding of psychological maturation in the matrix of the family. The first section, focusing on The Hotel (1927) and The House in Paris (1935), articulates Bowen’s view of the different roles to be undertaken by a baby’s parents. The second section, focusing on ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ (1945), highlights factors that Bowen identifies as threatening the developmental process. The third section, focusing on The Heat of the Day (1948), raises the question of how Bowen explores the psychodrama of individual development in relation to contemporary world-historical events.
Kelsen’s Style of Political Thinking
Authors: Schuett Robert
Published: September 2021

What is political realism other than a form of political analysis and speaking truth to power? What is the national interest other than an ideological fiction of political idealism? The concluding chapter ties two intellectual halves together: there is Kelsen the gentle liberal and champion of open society ideals, and there is Kelsen the no-nonsense realist of political and international life. The synthesised progressive realist doesn’t believe in magic bullets or easy formulas: when it comes to the question of progress, there is the real You and the real Me, and in between, in some intimate place, is the twilight zone where the real political battle rages. What real realists do is take this struggle for power and peace to the international arena and work unceasingly towards global reform.
Introduction: Conversion, Cities and Theatre in the Early Modern World
Authors: Jouve Martín José R. , Wittek Stephen
Published: September 2021

On the morning of 3 February 1631, the people of Lima awoke to discover that their main square had been transformed overnight into an elaborate allegory of the city of Troy. In addition to offering an unprecedented dramatic spectacle, this remarkable feat of civic theatricality provided a fitting metaphor for the multiple transformations experienced by the city in the century that followed its founding by Francisco Pizarro in 1535....