bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Form in The Tree House
Authors: O’Neill Michael
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses the use and workings of form in Kathleen Jamie’s The Tree House. It explores how she balances the claims of modernity and tradition, how she deploys an idiom that combines dialect, the demotic and the literary. It argues that the volume’s use of form is in contact with what in one poem is called ‘the common currency’ of human experience. It maintains that the volume’s handling of form shows Jamie’s awareness that any meanings derived from nature have, at least in part, to be meanings conferred upon it. The chapter also discusses Jamie’s ability to interweave motifs and themes on the volume, and it looks at the intermittent, productive tension between grand assertions at the close of poems and the seeming fragility of poetic form as a vehicle for larger resonances. It concludes by affirming that, in the volume, form is a mode of self-aware and resourceful attention.
‘We Do Language Like Spiders Do Webs’: Kathleen Jamie and Michael Longley in Conversation
Authors: Johnston Maria
Published: September 2017

Michael Longley writes of Jamie: 'She has perfect pitch, a natural sense of cadence and verbal melody that helps to give her work the feel of organic inevitability'. Longley flies close to the heart of his own work, revealing their shared aesthetic practice, central to which is the idea of poetry as dialogue. This chapter tunes in to Longley and Jamie as poets in conversation with each other, across boundaries of nation, time and space, and not merely at the level of shared subject matter, but more profoundly at the level of poetic technique and formal concerns. Both are poets of the singing line and both are shifting, sea-faring poets crossing sound- and sight- lines in their endless probings of words and worlds. Both engage with and extend the limits of the lyric, in particular the sonnet form, and in the work of both the energies of translation lie at the core of the artistic enterprise. Jamie and Longley see into the life of poetry as an act of conversation, an art of conversion.
Badawi: An Academic With a Vision. A Personal Testimony
Authors: Hafez Sabry
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, the author offers a personal testimony about his interaction with Mustafa Badawi as well as the latter's contribution to the study of both Arabic and English literature. The author remembers the day he returned to Oxford University to take part in a colloquium commemorating Badawi's life and work; it was also the fortieth anniversary of his arrival in Oxford for the first time in March 1973, thanks to Badawi's insight and initiative. He also cites two Egyptian critics who studied in the West before Badawi's generation, Muhammad Mandur and Luwis ʻAwad. In addition, he discusses Badawi's cultural formation and university education, particularly in Alexandria University, and talks about how Badawi opened new venues for Arabic literary criticism and modern Arabic literature in Oxford, and later in London. Finally, the author shares some of the many lessons he learnt from Badawi.
From the Shadow Plays of Ibn Daniyal to the Poetry of Philip Larkin: Mustafa Badawi as Editor and Translator
Authors: Hopwood Derek
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on Mustafa Badawi's career as editor and translator. It discusses two works with which Badawi was connected, and both of which demonstrate his deep concern with and interest in language and with making works of literature available to the Arabic reading public: the shadow plays of Ibn Daniyal and the poetry of Philip Larkin. Badawi believed that Ibn Daniyal's plays played an essential role in the formation of Arabic drama. He analysed three of them: Tayf alkhayal, ʻAjib wa-gharib and al-Mutayyam wa'l-yutayyim. As for Larkin, Badawi's interest in him stemmed from his early days in England and in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and others. Badawi published his translation of Larkin, Mukhtarat (Selections), in Cairo in 1998. He translated sixty of the 245 items in The Collected Poems of Larkin.
Jewish Arabs in the Israeli Asylum: A Literary Reflection1
Authors: Cooke Miriam
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the lives and writings of a few Mizrahi Jews who succeeded in Israel despite the challenges they faced there. Focusing on the first wave of immigration and its aftermath through novels, poetry, autobiographies and films, this chapter uses the asylum metaphor to describe Israel. Initially, Israel was an asylum for European Jews (Ashkenazis) until they turned the asylum into their state. From that point on, they created asylums for various constituencies, including Jewish Arabs. The chapter also considers the process of acculturation in the asylum of Israeli transit camps, which has figured prominently in Mizrahi literature; how ‘foreigners’ in Israel achieved nationalisation through religion and not-religion; and the exodus of thousands of Iraqi Jews to Israel; the role of language in Jewish Arabs' self-fashioning in Israel; and the political awakening of Jewish Arab intellectuals.
Strange Incidents from History: Youssef Rakha and his Sultan’s Seal
Authors: Starkey Paul
Published: September 2017

This chapter offers a reading of Youssef Rakha's novel Kitab al-tughra (Book of the Sultan's Seal), set in the spring of 2007 and completed at the start of 2010. It begins with a discussion of Rakha's attempt to produce a contemporary equivalent of the ‘middle Arabic’ used by noted Cairo historians al-Jabarti and Ibn Iyas. It then considers the tension between heritage and modernity in Book of the Sultan's Seal and the novel's main theme: the contemporary Arab/Muslim's (and in particular, the Egyptian/Muslim's) search for a sense of identity. It also examines the contrast between the hedonistic atmosphere of Beirut and the creeping Islamisation of Cairo in the book, as well as the inherent tension between the traditional values of Muslim society and the West.
Trust and Patrimony
Authors: Smith Lionel D
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines whether the common law trust can be understood as a patrimony in the civilian sense. It begins with a discussion of Pierre Lepaulle's claim that the common law trust is a patrimony affected to a destination or purpose. It then considers the situation of creditors and beneficiaries in a common law trust before advancing the argument that, contrary to the position taken by Lepaulle, the common law trust is not a patrimony. It contends that only trustees have direct access to the trust assets; trust creditors, and even beneficiaries, do not. It also asserts that the essence of the common law trust lies not in any division of ownership of the trust property, but in the fact that the trust beneficiaries hold rights in the rights that the trustee holds as trust property. The chapter concludes by relating the trust institution to the idea of legal personality.
Trust without Equity
Authors: Gretton George L
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines an English peculiarity logically detachable from the trust: the distinction between the legal and the equitable estate. According to the Hague Convention on the Recognition of Trusts, ‘the trust, as developed in courts of equity in common law jurisdictions and adopted with some modifications in other jurisdictions, is a unique legal institution’. The unique nature of trust lies in the fact that it is founded on the division between law and equity and the consequent division of property rights into legal and equitable. The chapter first considers whether trust can be explained in terms of the law of obligations before discussing trust as agency and whether trust beneficiaries have rights in rem. It also analyses trust as patrimony, the relation between patrimony and personality, trusteeship as an office, and the Scots law on trust.
Patrimony not Equity: The Trust in Scotland
Authors: Reid Kenneth G C
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the importance of patrimony as an organising principle of trust in the absence of equity. The law of property in Scotland and other mixed jurisdictions is always civilian; like civil law countries, they do not have a separate system of equity, or acknowledge the distinction between legal and beneficial ownership; and yet all mixed systems have the trust. In addition to the common law trust, there is the civil law trust. Of the civil law trusts, a special place may be claimed for the Scottish trust, the oldest such trust by far and one of the most widely used in practice. The chapter first considers trusts in relation to contracts and real rights before discussing the two patrimonies of a trustee: a private patrimony and a trust patrimony. It also assesses the impact of a trustee's death on the integrity of patrimony, along with the rights of trustees and trust beneficiaries.
Translating Part of France’s Legal Heritage: Aubry and Rau on the Patrimoine
Authors: Kasirer Nicholas
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers one of the great texts of nineteenth-century French legal literature: an English translation of Cours de droit civil français, a scholarly description of patrimony in French law written by Charles Aubry and Frédéric-Charles Rau. The discussion is based on three assumptions about legal translation as a means of giving voice to some of the supposed Frenchness of French law. First, the text captures some of the substantive genius of French property law. Second, that part of the formal genius of French law — its style, its aesthetic — is also trapped in texts such as Aubry and Rau on the patrimony. Third, these formal and substantive messages can be drawn out of French and then cast — transposed, translated — into English.
Dual Patrimony Dutch Style: The Magic Spell for Introducing the Trust in the Netherlands?
Authors: Schmieman Emile
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the possibility of conceptualising a Dutch trust using the dual patrimony theory — the concept where a person, natural or legal, holds two patrimonies that are distinct from each other. It begins with a discussion of the main obstacles in Dutch law for the introduction of a trust, including the indivisibility of ownership, statutory prohibition of fiduciary transfers, and paritas creditorum. It then examines how these obstacles have been partly overcome over the years and how the doctrine of separate patrimony could possibly lead to a definitive solution. It also looks at several instruments leading to a separate patrimony and concludes with an overview of some issues that could arise even if the trust were considered to be a separate patrimony, including the potential negative impact on trust creditors, the separation of trust assets from the trustee's personal assets, and the trustee's power to dispose of the trust assets.
Agriculture and Pharmaceutical Innovations: Milestones in Research and Case Studies
Authors: Amar Zohar , Lev Efraim
Published: September 2017

This chapter reconstructs a list as possible of all the ‘new’ medicinal substances that were more widely distributed than in the pre-Islamic period. It studies the contribution and influence of these substances on the theoretical and practical medieval medical legacy as well as how, and to what extent, these substances merge with the development and distribution of ‘new’ technologies and industries that evolved in the Middle Ages such as textiles and paper, and with the new trends, demands, and fashions regarding perfumes, ornaments, and foodstuffs. The chapter also seeks to trace the main routes of trade in these substances in the new ‘Arab space’ and to assess the actual relevance that should be ascribed to the Greek and Indian legacies in the formation of Arab medicine and pharmacology.
‘Arabian’ Substances
Authors: Amar Zohar , Lev Efraim
Published: September 2017

This chapter describes the main medicinal substances that were distributed as a result of the Muslim conquests. It presents about half of nearly a hundred of these substances. Most of the entries in this chapter discuss substances that were clearly identified, along with evidence of practical uses in medical books and prescriptions, as well as commercial documents. Exploration of these is limited only to the typical medicinal substances, some of which had also been used as spices, perfumes, dyes, and gemstones. These drugs were commonly used for long periods, many of them having been utilized until the nineteenth century. In this manner, the long-term contribution of the Arabs in introducing the ‘new’ drugs in the Old World is clearly demonstrated.
Introduction
Authors: Horner Avril , Zlosnik Sue
Published: September 2017

Since the early debates about ‘Female Gothic’ in the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by Second-Wave Feminism, the theorisation of gender has become increasingly sophisticated and has resulted in a long interrogation of the category ‘woman’. There was, however, a political price to pay for this, in so far as feminism gave way to the problematics of post-feminism, now itself being interrogated by a younger generation of women. The contributors in this volume tackle such conundrums in lively chapters that explore Gothic works – from established classics to recent films and novels – from feminist and/or post-feminist perspectives. The result is a book that combines rigorous close readings with elegant use of theory in order to question some ingrained assumptions about women, the Gothic and identity....
Female Vampirism
Authors: Wisker Gina
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines how fictional vampires problematise received notions of women’s passivity, ‘natural’ nurturing skills and social conformity, suggesting that female vampires destabilise such comfortable, culturally inflected investments. Performativity, abjection and carnival lie at the heart of their construction and representation so there is a constant tension between punishment and celebration of their transgressive nature. Ranging across a number of nineteenth-century texts, it is suggested that they can be read as indicating gaps and fissures in social certainties and as nightmares emanating from the zones of patriarchy. In the twentieth century powerful female vampires may be found in the fiction of Angela Carter, who provide templates for later authors. In these later texts and in various lesbian vampire fictions, vampires become liberating, feminist figures: sexually transgressive, they undermine received certainties of identity, family, and hierarchy based on gender, sexuality and ethnicity. But they can also represent the energy of social activism as in Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Greedy Choke Puppy’. The chapter concludes with an analysis of two recent dramatic works by Ana Lily Amirpour and Moira Buffini, in which vampires are shown as becoming angels of mercy and women become self-sufficient, despite poverty and vulnerability.
No Country for Old Women: Gender, Age and the Gothic
Authors: Horner Avril , Zlosnik Sue
Published: September 2017

This chapter uncovers a complex dialogue in and between Gothic texts about the ageing woman – one that both reflects the fear, anxiety and revulsion evoked by the ageing female body in many cultures but that also offers counter narratives that redeem ageing as a time of energy and liberation. It suggests that post-feminism is retrograde in its attitude to age and argues that it has served the purpose of a dominant culture that marginalises the older woman. The fetishisation of the youthful body inevitably produces fears of ageing in the young and is reflected in many popular Gothic texts, such as the Twilight series. The chapter traces a long tradition of writing that represents the older woman as sinister, manipulative and predatory but notes instances of subversion and challenge to the stereotype. In the twentieth century Rebecca’s Mrs Danvers is such a figure, for example, but the older du Maurier portrays the older woman more subtly as strange, wise and emotionally prescient. Post-colonial fiction offers the figure of the soucouyant as another configuration: that of the older woman as insightful, independent and capable of supernatural transformations, while comic Gothic allows the subversion of conventional attitudes to the older woman.
Formations of Player Agency and Gender in Gothic Games
Authors: Krzywinska Tanya
Published: September 2017

This last chapter explores the connections between the design of player agency and formations of gender in Gothic video games. The conditions of player agency drain power from the more radical and subversive gender formations often found in Gothic fiction itself but in some games a more subtle, ambiguous or subversive approach to player agency is taken. Here alternative methods and contextualising representations are deployed by game designers to create models of player agency that do not, through the usual trope of mastery, align with dominant notions of masculinity or a phallic economy. The focus in this chapter is therefore mainly on the role of players in the thick of the Gothic game text and the gendered, contextual economy of the power (or powerlessness) that they are afforded. Such games actively invite the interest of women and girl players. Certain iterations of Gothic can be used very effectively in games to disquieten and demythologise the thoughtless formations of agency and gender that are perpetuated by many games directed at men and boy players, and may be termed ‘Female Gothic’ because of the way they show gender to be constructed or performed.
French and Spanish Queer Film
Authors: Perriam Chris , Waldron Darren
Published: September 2017

This book advances the current state of film audience research and of our knowledge of sexuality in transnational contexts, by analysing how French LGBTQ films are seen in Spain and Spanish ones in France, as well as how these films are seen in the UK. It studies films from various genres and examines their reception across four languages (Spanish, French, Catalan, English) and engages with participants across a range of digital and physical audience locations. A focus on LGBTQ festivals and on issues relating to LGBTQ experience in both countries allows for the consideration of issues such as ageing, sense of community and isolation, affiliation and investment, and the representation of issues affecting trans people. The book examines films that chronicle the local, national and sub-national identities while also addressing foreign audiences. It draws on a large sample of individual responses through post-screening questionnaires and focus groups as well as on the work of professional film critics and on-line commentators.
LGBTQ Film Festivals and their Audiences
Authors: Perriam Chris , Waldron Darren
Published: September 2017

The chapter covers the emergence and development of specific LGBTQ film festivals in France, Spain and the UK. The festivals studied are FIRE !! (Barcelona), LesGaiCineMad (Madrid), FICGLB (Barcelona), Zinegoak (Bilbao), Chéries-Chéris (Paris), Ecrans Mixtes (Lyon), Des Images aux mots (Toulouse), the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival/Flare as well as queer film seasons at Manchester’s Cornerhouse cinema, including POUTfest. Audience responses are used to finesse ideas of how the festivals fit into wider discourses on film festivals in relation to niche designing, space and locality, and responsiveness to community and individual spectators’ needs. The chapter draws on the corpus of written questionnaire responses to programmed films across the festivals.
LGBQ Themes and Responses
Authors: Perriam Chris , Waldron Darren
Published: September 2017

The chapter probes responses to representations relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer identities and desires. Three dominant themes emerge: (1) ageing among lesbians, gay men and bisexuals; (2) gay male, and, to a lesser extent, lesbian and bisexual desires and identities; and (3) a sense of shared experience, as a stake in community history or as a personalised mark of identity. The chapter reveals that investment, care, surprise, empathy, (self-) recognition and identification are recurring modes of engagement, and shows how viewers claim varying degrees of closeness to the subjects, characters and people on screen.
Trans Issues
Authors: Perriam Chris , Waldron Darren
Published: September 2017

The chapter examines trans films and their reception. It draws on philosophical and theoretical texts about trans and intersex identity politics. It reviews trans activism as related to France and Spain and the place of trans films in LGBTQ festivals. In the main analysis some respondents are seen to express a negotiated form of empathy that transmits their solidarity with the issues portrayed while underlining their difference from the films’ trans subjects. Other participants are shown to identify accounts that resonate with their own journeys towards acceptance and emancipation. Particularities of national culture and contexts are little mentioned by respondents and the chapter suggests that this attests to the transnational relevance and salience of the films’ broader discourses on gender identity.
Sex for Sale in Scotland
Authors: Settle Louise
Published: September 2017

Sex for Sale in Scotland examines the various formal and informal methods that were used to police female prostitution in Edinburgh and Glasgow between 1900 and 1939 and explores how these policies influenced women’s lives. The book uses a rich combination of police, probation, magistrates’, poor law and voluntary organisations’ records to demonstrate how these organisations worked together to establish a more ‘penal-welfare’ approach towards regulating prostitution in Scotland. By mapping the geography of prostitution, the book argues that prostitution was not necessarily forced into the outskirts of society, either physically or socially.
The book examines both indoor and outdoor prostitution and the relationships that developed among the wide range of people who profited from commercial sex. Particular emphasis is placed on the experiences of the women involved in prostitution, highlighting the poverty, exploitation and abuse they faced, but also the ways in which they negotiated these dangers. This social history of prostitution maps how the organisation, policing and experiences of prostitution developed in an ever-changing urban landscape during a period of extraordinary developments in technology and entertainment, alongside the wider socio-economic changes brought about by the First World War.
Imagining Surveillance
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: September 2017

Imagining Surveillance provides the first extensive and intensive study of surveillance as depicted and assessed in literature and film. Focusing on the utopian genre (which includes positive eutopias and negative dystopias), this book offers an in-depth account of how creative writers, filmmakers and thinkers have envisioned other worlds in which surveillance operates, for good and ill. It explores how surveillance scholars have utilized these fictional works in understanding the myriad implications of surveillance in the contemporary world. From Thomas More’s Utopia to recent novels and films such as Dave Eggers’ The Circle and Spike Jonze’s Her, Imagining Surveillance traces the long history of surveillance in imaginative texts well before and after George Orwell’s iconic Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book argues that creative texts have long offered subtle, complex and provocative readings of surveillance that investigate the human dimension of this fast-developing, at times invisible, and undoubtedly transformative element of twenty-first century life. Novels and films supply scenarios and narratives that prompt readers and viewers to consider the personal, ethical, social and political questions proliferating surveillance raises. With chapters on the relationships between surveillance and visibility, spaces, identities, technologies, and the shape of things to come, Imagining Surveillance establishes itself at the leading edge of the emerging cultural studies of surveillance.
Visibility
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: September 2017

The next four chapters critically consider key aspects of surveillance represented in literature and film after Nineteen Eighty-Four. Given that surveillance by definition involves seeing things, chapter 4 deals with the question of visibility and the ways in which forms of scrutinising operate and are resisted. An important aspect of this chapter is the possibility of being invisible to surveillance technologies, systems and processes, and about the potential for consciously not seeing, something China Miéville in his speculative novel The City & The City labels making ‘unvisible’. The possibility of not being seen underscores the point Gary T. Marx makes: that all surveillance systems have blindspots or weaknesses that can be exploited. This chapter explores then the various driving forces behind surveillance in different projected works and worlds, foregrounding the ways in which characters manoeuvre successfully or unsuccessfully in these environments. It looks at forms of gendered monitoring (exemplified in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale), surveillance as visual entertainment in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, and visualising future crimes in Steven Spielberg’s film of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report.
Introduction
Authors: Wagner Peter
Published: September 2017

This book examines the temporality of modernity by focusing on the relations between Africa, America and Europe. More specifically, it considers the extent to which the supposed arrival of modernity in Europe affects the ways in which human beings situate themselves in time and history worldwide. It also explores how institutionally entrenched interpretations of modernity based on inequality and oppression are transformed into novel forms that are shaped by the drive to inclusive–egalitarian collective self-determination. In linking the history of Europe to world history, the book shows that what is often referred to as ‘the rise of Europe’ was the creation of an Atlantic world region with increasingly dense but highly asymmetric commercial and communicative ties. This introduction discusses the debate over the relation between the history and the theory of modernity, the connection between the Northern Atlantic West and the origins of modernity, and novel interpretations of modernity in Africa and Latin America.
The Limits of Recognition: History, Otherness and Autonomy
Authors: Peiró Àngela Lorena Fuster , Rosich Gerard
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the modern constitutive ambiguity of the European philosophy of history in relation to the experience and conceptualisation of the other, with particular emphasis on the current theorising of otherness provided by theories of recognition. After discussing the forces present in the modern constitution of the discipline, where it is possible to observe the central tension of modernity itself, in direct relation to the discovery of a new form of the other, the chapter considers a perceived turning point for the imaginary of history, this being a decisive moment allowed by the conceptualisation of the duality ‘master/slave’. It then explores the modern genealogy of the current theories of recognition with the aim of highlighting the bias that continues to frame the understanding of the dynamics between self and other. It also analyses Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's concept of recognition and his views on the process of history.
HIV/AIDS Policies and Modernity in Brazil and South Africa: a Comparative Critical Analysis
Authors: Katito José
Published: September 2017

This chapter compares HIV/AIDS policies in Brazil and South Africa over the thirty-year history of the epidemic, focusing on the period between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s. The discussion lays emphasis on the largely divergent policy responses of the two states to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The chapter begins with an overview of Brazil and South Africa's HIV/AIDS policies, along with critical factors that explain why, despite being two similar societies, they responded so differently to the epidemic. These factors include the nature and the timing of democratic transition and the relatively stronger Brazilian civil society. The chapter argues that Brazil acted far more aggressively than South Africa against the HIV/AIDS epidemic by implementing comprehensive prevention, treatment and care policies. As a result, the Brazilian government has been able to contain the spread of the virus across its population. In contrast, negligence, denial, delay and fragmentation have considerably exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa.
Land and Restitution in Comparative Perspective: Analysing the Evidence of Right to Land for Black Rural Communities in Brazil and South Africa
Authors: Gotlib Joyce
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines and compares the legitimised objects linked to the right to land of black rural communities associated with the reparation policies in Brazil and South Africa. In the Brazilian case, legal recognition of landownership of areas occupied by reminiscences of quilombos (descendants of the slave population) is part of the affirmative action policies adopted by the federal government to combat racial discrimination since the proclamation of the constitution of 1988. In South Africa, the land restitution programme is aimed at the reparation of injustices committed during the apartheid. The chapter shows how the state legitimises ‘orders of grandeur’ of land that differ from its Western conception — which understands it only as an economic good — and converts them into state legibility. It also considers the different ways in which ancestral land rights are justified by the state in these research contexts, in which ancestors, saints and graves have agency as do human beings.
Injustice at Both Ends: Pre- and Post-apartheid Literary Approaches to Injustice, Sentiment and Humanism in the Work of C. Louis Leipoldt, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and the Film Invictus
Authors: Oppelt Riaan
Published: September 2017

This chapter offers an historical reading of injustices in South Africa. Drawing on South African fiction as well as the medium of film, it documents the injustice of the sociohistorical constellation after the South African War on to the one during apartheid. The chapter analyses C. Louis Leipoldt's novel The Mask, a depiction of perceived injustice on the part of early twentieth-century Afrikaners in South Africa, along with the book A Human Being Died That Night by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and the film Invictus for their contributions to the concept of African humanism. The chapter also discusses the legacy of Nelson Mandela's humanism, with its emphasis on the communal effort against mass injustice.
Forming a Social Contract: Hobbes to Anti-Jacobinism
Authors: Beenstock Zoe
Published: September 2017

Despite the attempt of social contract theory and its critics to banish Aristotle’s concept of natural sociability, imagery of dismembered bodies resurfaces in political writings circa 1650-1810. Fractured body imagery is a metaphor for a cadaverous commonality that is inherent to modern political theory. From different perspectives, British empiricism, the Scottish Enlightenment, German Idealism, and Romanticism all express a crisis in theories of community through the imagery of a fragmented body politic. Hobbes and Locke unbind the state from metaphysical legitimizations but are unable to reconcile concepts of individuality, freedom, and sovereignty. Adam Smith’s invisible hand retains a visceral memory of the lost body politic, which finds an outlet in the workings of sympathy. German Idealism recasts the conflict between private individuals and commonality as a productive dynamic. British caricatures of the 1790s reproduce the fragmentation of individuals from the social body in visual terms. Together with anti-Jacobin fictionalizations of the social contract these caricatures break down boundaries between ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ engagements with contract, demonstrating the ubiquity of Aristotle’s ghostly body politic.
Conclusion: The Ends of Romanticism
Authors: Beenstock Zoe , Beenstock Zoe
Published: September 2017

This conclusion proposes understanding Romanticism through a model of internal conflict instead of discrete distinctions of genre and political orientation, which have traditionally served as Romanticism’s defining categories. In replacing Aristotle with Rousseau modern culture moves to a socially contingent model of polity in which a newly-minted individualism contends with its own contingent social grounding. In Sartor Resartus Thomas Carlyle suggests that the Romantic era has come to an end. Sartor Resartus repeats the imagery of Frankenstein, relating monstrosity to empiricism and accusing the Scottish Enlightenment of excessive materialism. Carlyle reclaims Rousseau as an anti-empiricist who recognizes socialization as a fundamentally unhappy development that can barely contain the inherently violent forces of human nature. The post-Romantic modern self as articulated by Carlyle is defined by its exile from social totality, and by an account of human beings as inherently antisocial.
Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’
Authors: Thomas Sue
Published: September 2017

Jean Rhys (1890-1979) and Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) were born within two years of each other in what were then British colonies under the New Imperialism. Rhys’s relative longevity and the fact that her first publication, the story ‘Vienne’ appeared in 1924 have obscured their contemporaneousness. Both wrote about failed love and affairs in England, Rhys in diaries she wrote in the 1910s, which would be reworked as ‘Triple Sec’, an unpublished 1924 novel, and revised as Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Mansfield in the manuscript stories ‘Juliet’ (begun in 1906) and ‘A Little Episode’ (1909), recently unearthed in the King’s College Library. The epigragh to ‘A Little Episode’ is from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; Rhys alludes to the same two sentences in the opening sentence of Voyage in the Dark. This chapter draws out the resonances of their allusions to Wilde, and locates the texts as engagements with literary decadence.
Making a Scene: Rhys and the Aesthete at Mid-Century
Authors: Zimring Rishona
Published: September 2017

This essay reads Rhys’s “Let Them Call It Jazz” (1962) through a consideration of a triad of mid-20th century writers who inherited and transformed a tradition of British aestheticism. The writers considered here are Rhys, the experimental novelist and cultural critic Brigid Brophy, and the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin. All imagined the artist/intellectual as an outsider, cultivated in their writing strong, even aggressive individualists whose work carried on the legacies of British aestheticism as defined by figures such as Pater and Wilde, and all were preoccupied with music. This essay makes a strong case for putting Rhys’s mid-century short fiction, along with other previously marginalized literary works, on the map of 20th-century postwar literary history.
Jean Rhys’s Environmental Language: Oppositions, Dialogues and Silences
Authors: Savory Elaine
Published: September 2017

Postcolonial ecocriticism is a new and rapidly growing field, characterized by a consciousness of the simultaneous depredation of subordinated people and land both during and after formal colonialism (see Huggin and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 2010; eds. Deloughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, 2011). Rhys is somewhat of a complicated case with regard to placement in colonial and postcolonial contexts, coming as she did from the plantocracy in Dominica, but living most of her adult life in economically straitened circumstances in Britain. In Rhys’s fictional world, nature is not a benevolent being or attractive ornament. It often aids and abets amoral power, but also when given the chance to escape the particularly British desire to turn wilderness into dependent, subservient gardens, nature can become a kind of parallel to Rhys’s anarchistic (if often outgunned and outlawed) protagonists. Rhys’s awareness of power disparities extends to her awareness of environment, and reading her work through the lens of ecocriticism allows us to see this clearly.
‘From Black to Red’: Jean Rhys’s Use of Dress in Wide Sargasso Sea
Authors: Joannou Maroula
Published: September 2017

This essay discusses the cultural work performed by dress in Wide Sargasso Sea which is largely to situate the white creole woman within European racial hierarchies. Drawing on both fashion theory (Alison Bancroft’s work on Fashion and Psychoanalysis [2012]) and postcolonial theorists (Mary Lou Emery and others), I show how Rhys retains and develops her earlier interest in clothing as an indicator of women’s subjectivity, visceral longings, day dreams and fantasies, and how dress articulates the protagonist Antoinette’s contradictory desires. Furthermore, dress carries the freight of Rhys’s concern with racial hierarchy, with the relationship between the colonizer and colonized, and is accentuated as a marker of Caribbean identity. The chapter focuses on the importance of Antoinette’s red dress which is used to interrogate and refuse English cultural norms.
‘The feelings are always mine’: Chronic Shame and Humiliated Rage in Jean Rhys’s Fiction
Authors: Moran Patricia
Published: September 2017

In an interview with Mary Cantwell in 1975, Jean Rhys denied that her fiction was thinly veiled autobiography, although, she added, “the feelings are always mine.” This essay argues that many of the feelings that Rhys explores in her fiction constellate around the shame affect, an affect that references not just feelings of embarrassment and humiliation, but more broadly feelings of being out of place, alienated and estranged, found contemptible and unworthy by the very people from whom the protagonists had come to expect intimacy, love, and respect. This chronic and pervasive state of shame engenders profound despair, leading the protagonists to wonder if they have any worth at all, or if others’ rejection, abandonment, and betrayal of them somehow speaks to who or what they truly are. What is more, though, shame feeds into the sadness and anger that function as emotional substitutes for the more totalizing eradication of self that shame involves, thereby concealing the painful recognition of being shamed; sadness and anger in turn develop into the depression and rage that are hallmarks of the Rhysian protagonist.
Selective Learning from the Middle East: The Case of Sino-Muslim Students at al-Azhar University
Authors: Mao Yufeng
Published: September 2017

As a part of a broader Islamic modernist program, Chinese Muslim students went to Egypt—to al-Azhar University in Cairo—in the 1930s to bring home not only true Islamic teachings but also means of empowerment for Muslims in China. Influenced by their personal backgrounds, their interactions with local Muslims, and their aspirations within the Chinese Republican state apparatus, these cultural intermediaries between Chinese Muslims and the Islamic heartlands chose to highlight modernist thought in the Islamic world and to emphasize Chinese nationalism and a cooperative relationship with the Chinese state.
Editor’s Introduction: Four Centuries of Islamic Thought in Chinese
Authors: Lipman Jonathan
Published: September 2017

Muslims have lived in the Chinese culture area since the seventh or eighth century – the mid-Tang dynasty – and have acculturated, as all immigrants do, in order to live comfortably in what began as an alien environment. Over a millennium, through ordinary social processes, including intermarriage with local women, they ceased being utterly foreign and became local but different, Sinophone but not entirely Chinese. Though they spoke the Chinese of their home districts, many of them nonetheless retained female endogamy (males could marry non-Muslim women who converted to Islam), pork avoidance, unfamiliar rituals, mosque-centred community solidarity, and outlandish vocabulary, rendering them unconventional, somewhat distant, sometimes defensively hostile towards their non-Muslim neighbours, who saw them as ‘familiar strangers’....
Cowboy Classics
Authors: Day Kirsten
Published: September 2017

In the American cultural imagination, the Wild West is a mythic-historical place where our nation’s values and ideologies were formed. The heroes of this dangerous world, most familiar to us through film, are men of violence who fight the bad guys as they build the foundations of civilization out of wilderness, forging notions of justice, manhood, and honor in the process. In the Greco-Roman societies that are America’s cultural ancestors, epics provided similar narratives: like Western film, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid focus on the mythic-historical past and its warriors, men who helped shape the ideological frameworks of their respective civilizations. At the same time, the best works from both genres are far from simplistic, but instead, call the assumptions underlying society’s core beliefs and value systems into question even as they promote them. Cowboy Classics examines the connections between these seemingly disparate yet closely related genres by first establishing the broad generic parallels and then providing deeper analysis through case-studies of five critically acclaimed Golden Age Westerns: Howard Hawks’s Red River, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, George Stevens’s Shane, and John Ford’s The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the end, this important comparison allows the American Western to serve as a lens through which to better understand the more remote works of antiquity, while identifying epic patterns in film provides the distance that allows us to see Westerns, in whose ideological undercurrents we are more directly implicated, in a more objective light.
John Ford’s The Searchers1
Authors: Day Kirsten
Published: September 2017

John Ford’s 1956 The Searchers has attracted more scholarly attention than any other Western, including that of receptions scholars who have noted its kinship with Homeric epic. This chapter enlarges on the most important of these arguments – Martin Winkler’s study of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards as an Achilles figure and the author’s own analysis of the film as an Odyssean journey – recognizing the psychological identification between protagonist and enemy-as-alter-ego long noted by Western scholars as an important parallel with the dynamic found in ancient epic and expanding on the importance of women’s sexual fidelity to male honor and identity. This chapter then brings the Aeneid into the conversation, demonstrating that like Virgil’s epic, The Searchers is a self-questioning, multi-layered reflection on heroic achievement, offering a problematic hero and extolling the glories of empire while acknowledging the sacrifices inherent in its establishment. Finally, this chapter considers this film as a commentary on racial and Cold War tensions in 1950s America, reflecting on how this fits in with the larger comparison with ancient epic.
Critical Luxury Studies: Defining a Field
Authors: Armitage John , Roberts Joanne
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces and defines the philosophical concept of luxury and the challenges of studying this seemingly ubiquitous idea. Using the example of the ‘city of pigs’, from Plato's The Republic, this chapter delineates the key themes of luxury studies, including beliefs about necessity and morality. It then studies the extant and contemporary literature on the investigation of luxury, reflecting on luxury in its historical context from the eighteenth century onwards. Finally, this chapter attempts to set out a new perspective on the entirely new field of research labelled ‘critical luxury studies’. The concern here is with luxury as ‘cultural capital’ and with the ever-shifting attitudes towards luxury as both a subject of study and a socio-cultural practice.
The Luxury Duality: From Economic Fact to Cultural Capital
Authors: Lehmann Ulrich
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses luxury as both a quantitative measure of capital (economic) and as a qualitative measure of labour (social). Thus, it argues that luxury has to be regarded simultaneously as an economic fact and as a medium to communicate social relationships. The method of political economy contextualises these relationships into a particular power structure where stratification is expressed in commodity forms, in the concept of the luxury-as-dominance. Furthermore, the duality of capital and labour shows how much forms of production are integral to understanding luxury. Such processes, whatever the ultimate aspiration of the owners of the means of production (and capital), reinstate the makers at the centre of production and advance once more their cultural significance.
The Object and Art of Luxury Consumption
Authors: Featherstone Mike
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at two dynamics of luxury — the ‘democratisation’ of luxury, which occurs when such goods are made more widely available; and the rebranding of luxury goods as art objects, which emphasize their value in how unique and exclusive they are. The expansion of the luxury market and the more general ‘democratisation of luxury’ not only means that luxuries are everywhere, it also creates pressures to develop even more exclusive goods, stimulating ultra-luxury brands and the bespoke luxury market. Moreover, if it is possible for the luxury house to appropriate the aura of the artist and artistic production, then the prestige of their goods will necessarily rise. In exploring these tensions, the chapter looks at the broader issues of access to luxuries, the sustainability of their production, their just distribution, and the possibility of a space beyond.
Libeskind in Las Vegas: Reflections on Architecture as a Luxury Commodity
Authors: Sharr Adam
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers a project from renowned architect Daniel Libeskind: a shopping mall opened in Las Vegas in 2009, deploying what have become the architect's trademark crystalline shapes. Named ‘Crystals at CityCenter’, the mall's branding derives its name and its luxury credentials from Libeskind's signature contribution. The chapter examines Crystals at CityCenter as an example of the millennial phenomenon of the ‘starchitect’-designed iconic luxury building. It explores the origins of Libeskind's architectural brand forms in the architecture of trauma in Berlin and, by contrast, the re-use of those forms in service of high-end retail on the Las Vegas Strip. In addition, the chapter argues that Crystals at CityCenter is also an example of architecture as sign — a sign of architecture referring only to itself, of architecture imagined as a luxury commodity.
Introduction
Authors: Price Fiona
Published: September 2017

The historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott’s fiction, as a reflection on a clear break or change between past and present. Returning to the range of historical fiction written before Scott, Reinventing Liberty explores this often neglected and misunderstood genre by reconstructing how conservatives and radicals fought through the medium of the historical past over the future of Britain. Aware of the events of the Civil War and 1688, witness to the American and French Revolutions, Scott’s precursors realized the dangers of absolutism, on the one hand, and political breakage, on the other. Interrogating the impact of commercial modernity, the works considered here do not adopt the familiar nineteenth-century Whig narrative of history as progress but instead imagine and reimagine the possibilities of transition. As such, they lay the groundwork for the British myth of political gradualism, while problematizing the rise of capital.