bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Liveable Life
Authors: Zaharijevic Adriana
Published: May 2024

The chapter focuses on livable life, the curious concept engendered by the theory of performativity as the theory of agency. The main thesis of the whole section is that not all lives are livable. Some lives, varying historically and topographically, are unlivable because they are not qualified or counted as alive in the same way. The bodies in which such lives are lodged do not permit for capaciousness. However, the emphasis here shifts from the bodies to the world which fails to respond to the conditions required for a livable life. It also shifts to the second phase of Butler’s work. Although ultimately undefined, the notion of life appears in Butler’s work with many attributes, and this chapter functions as a comprehensive review of them. The section ends with the considerations of war, understood not only as a legitimised mode of manufacturing death, but also a mode of enhancing ungrievability of lives.
Introduction
Authors: Ahmed Zahid Shahab , Akbar Ali
Published: May 2024

This chapter explains the rationale for studying Iran’s soft power in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While doing that, this chapter focuses on the importance of Afghanistan and Pakistan in Iran’s foreign policy and how by employing a variety of soft power tools Iran has been trying to gain influence in both South Asian countries. This follows research questions and a detailed description of primary data collection. Then, the concept of soft power is explained in the light of relevant theories such as those presented by scholars such as Joseph Nye about the importance of soft power. This follows our examination of key Iranian soft power instruments.
Economic Relations and Influence
Authors: Ahmed Zahid Shahab , Akbar Ali
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on Iran’s economic relations and influence to understand whether Tehran has used economic tools, for example, coercive diplomacy and economic sanctions, to achieve its political goals. The chapter also explores how Iran’s economic influence is viewed in both countries. the fall of Taliban regime in 2001 provided Iran with an ideal opportunity to expand its economic relations with Afghanistan and gain economic influence which is significant in western parts of the country. Now that the Taliban are back, Tehran has shown no signs of downscaling its economic relations with Afghanistan. Conversely, Iran’s economic relation with Pakistan had ups and downs. In the early years of the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the economic relation between the two countries significantly grew, but during the 1990s there was a decline because of international sanctions on Iran due to which both countries have not been able to exploit the full potential of their economic cooperation.
Human Infancy and the Language of Beginnings: The Wild Child and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Authors: Escobar Cristóbal
Published: May 2024

Chapter 3 offers a discussion on two New Wave films, The Wild Child and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, to reflect about the cinematic child as a model for intensive thinking. Following Deleuze’s reading of Hume, I explore the proposition that the screen characters Victor of Aveyron and Kaspar Hauser demonstrate a capacity to shatter the perceptual habits of adult subjectivity by enacting a mode of being that is not yet qualified by the ego’s habitual associations. Here, I hypothesise that Victor and Kaspar, although akin to Deleuze’s wanderers of his modern era, are nonetheless trapped in the teleological sequencing of his classical plot, so that the two films assume the form of an antinomy which interweaves the intense forces of the ‘child-seer’ (in the time-image) with the rational organisation of the movement-image schema. However, rather than locating the intensity of the child on the side of neorealism exclusively, I suggest that these constructed experiences of childhood are echoed by another beginning: that of early cinema, for it is in borrowing some conventions from the silent film period that each filmmaker fuses the formal characteristics of the classical with an image of infancy that eludes any simple reduction to signification.
Barbaros Şansal
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Barbaros Sansal
Mine Gencel Bek
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Mine Gencel Bek
Nazan Üstündağ
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Nazan Ustundag
The Right to Opacity in Theory
Authors: Davis Benjamin P.
Published: May 2024

This chapter develops Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” as it is related to decolonial ethics. It reads Glissant in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas. This chapter makes an intervention into debates around what Enrique Dussel called “the philosophy of liberation” and what is increasingly called “decolonial philosophy.” While Dussel in his ethics of liberation drew from Levinas’s vocabulary of “alterity,” this chapter suggests that the most fruitful decolonial ethics would be informed not by alterity, but by what Glissant calls “opacity” and in particular his claim to a “right to opacity.”
Gooey Media
Authors: Jones Nick
Published: May 2024

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface examines this residue and its consequences, revealing how the GUI exerts a powerful influence on contemporary media. Focusing on aesthetics and adopting a media agnostic approach, the book explores cinema, streaming platforms, television, user-generated content, videogames, apps, virtual reality, VFX, design software, and more in order to show how they cross-pollinate with one another and with our desktop interfaces. The result is a new approach for analysing convergent media in the digital era.
Graphic Urban Interface
Authors: Jones Nick
Published: May 2024

The chapter maps the influence of the graphic user interface (GUI) on imaginations of urban form, alighting on the flexibility that urban space is granted by films and videogames like Inception (2010), Doctor Strange (2016) and SimCity (1989–ongoing), among others. The cities in these texts propagate an urban ideal of literal and metaphorical flexibility: characters wave their hands and reorganise city blocks like so many program windows. Disregarding material restrictions and messy complexities, and instead bestowing physical structures with instant flexibility and personalisation, these representations seek to endow built space with the same malleability that we find in the GUI. This imagination of urban space is then also found in navigation technologies like Google Maps and Google Street View, which create individualised and interactive augmentations or replacements of lived urban space. The result is the inculcation of a graphic urban interface – an experience of urban navigation indebted to desktop use. Unfortunately, such graphic urban interfaces are only a dream of digital urban possibility, and this chapter also critiques some of the ways in which such a visuality disregards the realities of unfolding urban histories and the lived experiences of urban inhabitants.
Epilogue
Authors: Herrero Montserrat
Published: May 2024

The Epilogue summarizes the thesis of the book: The idea that we can find divine marks, theological signatures or, as we have characterised them here, figures of the divine embedded in certain instituted political practices. These figures speak of God. In a way, they reveal God by saying something about Him or by representing Him. The five theopolitical figures examined in the book are other names of God found in the political realm. Following the tradition of the apophatic theology, they name God in a negative and symbolic way: in particular, He is the written revelation (scripture); He is the to come (prophecy); He is truthful and faithful (oath); He is mercy and forgiving (charisma); and He is the absolute host (hospitality). These figures refer to symbolic meanings which happen as historical events representing the divine in a negative way.
Sonic Authorship 1: Gregg Araki
Authors: Sexton Jamie
Published: May 2024

This chapter introduces the notion of ‘sonic authorship’, a growing research focus that stresses how personal visions of directors can be expressed via music. The chapter proceeds to analyse the use of music in Gregg Araki's films, considering how they work in tandem with other aspects of his filmmaking, and how his music choices link to broader social factors. It is argued that Araki incorporates forms of indie music – most notably industrial and shoegaze – across his oeuvre in a particularly notable manner. The chapter also explores how the music in his films informs, and sometimes comments on, characters, who tend to be queer and/or social outsiders.
Conatus as a Strategy of Self Love
Authors: Bove Laurent , Filion-Donato Émilie
Published: May 2024

This chapter interprets Spinoza’s conatus as a form of self-love. Bove explains how the essential dynamic of the Spinozist system arises from the imitation of affects constitutive of social life. Because, for Spinoza, each human being imitates the affects of other human beings, they strive to please others in order to feel good about themselves. This dynamic yield, concomitantly, the birth of self-love and love of self: by pleasing others, one imitates their joy with oneself as its cause. The tendency to please others, however, easily transforms into the desire to dominate others, an impulse to press others to love what we love. This is the other dimension of love of self: the desire not only to please others, but also to be seen as a model for them. The key distinction here is between an imaginary love of self and a self-love that affirms reality. The argument concludes that the conatus cannot be distinguished from a strategy of love for the self, yet this love can cultivate both appearance and reality.
Why do People Fight for their Servitude as if it were Salvation?
Authors: Bove Laurent , Filion-Donato Émilie
Published: May 2024

This chapter develops the expressly political dimension of the book. It starts with Spinoza’s famous question, as the title of the chapter indicates. Bove identifies three elements at the root of servitude: desire as the human essence, belief in free will, and the finalist structure of the human search for one’s advantage. He demonstrates how these three elements engender a superstitious imaginary, leading human beings, typically, to lives filled with prejudices. The novel thesis advanced is that there is something paradoxically desirable in servitude: human beings fall into servitude because they falsely believe it will provide them with something else. Servitude is interpreted as a strategic reaction in the face of the complexity of reality. The exit from servitude, on this analysis, must come from an alternative imaginary organization of the world, which replaces the superstitious order. Such a re-organization of the shared imagination, the chapter suggests, becomes the task of politics. Bove portrays Spinoza’s political thought as a theory of the collective imaginary, no longer based on ruse and manipulation, but on the imaginary constitution of a political body and its conative strategy.
Tracking Loach
Authors: Archibald David
Published: May 2024

Tracking Loach presents a ground-breaking and unique contribution to the study of cinema. Archibald was granted unprecedented access to observe one of world cinema's most celebrated and controversial filmmakers, Ken Loach, while he was making the 2012 feature The Angels Share, which received The Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. This book draws on this ethnographic research to offer a first-hand account of the director's celebrated working methods, supplemented with insights gleaned from the British Film Institute's Loach archive, and analysis of his wider output and film-related political activity. Archibald has been 'Tracking Loach' for over three decades, as film viewer, film critic and film academic, and this inside perspective not only offers fresh insights into Loach's films and how they are made, but also highlights the benefits of production studies to the understanding of cinema more broadly.
Words: Between script and screen
Authors: Archibald David
Published: May 2024

Chapter 5 focuses on Ken Loach’s relationship with the writers he has worked with and with the scripts which they have produced. The chapter starts by exploring the centrality that Loach places on the writer before moving to analyse how words come into being on set, in the gap between the screenplay and the finished film. The chapter draws on archive work to examine Loach’s relationship with writers but also detailed analysis of the script of The Angels’ Share, analysing how the word spoken in the final film differed from the early draft scripts and how the actors influenced the process.
A Theatre is Born
Authors: Karoula Rania
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the aesthetic, political and social conditions that gave rise to the Federal Theatre Project. It concentrates on Flanagan’s trip to Europe in 1926. During the trip she studied British, Italian, French, Scandinavian and predominantly Soviet theatre (Meyerhold and the Blue Blouse) that greatly influenced her views on the American version of the Living Newspaper. The chapter also briefly examines the influence that Brecht, the British Workers’ Theatre Movement, MacColl, Littlewood and the American workers’ drama of the 1930s had on the FTP, thus establishing a transatlantic approach in studying and connecting the American and European theatrical traditions.
The Negro Unit: Electrifying Harlem, Electrifying the Nation
Authors: Karoula Rania
Published: May 2024

This chapter introduces and discusses the Negro Unit that was part of the FTP’s objectives to create diverse theatrical units that would express the multiplicity of cultural voices within the USA. It focuses on the well-documented production of Macbeth, as directed by Orson Wells and John Houseman. It also discusses the censored version of Lysistrata that played for only one performance in Seattle. The chapter discusses issues of race, gender, sexuality and experimentation as revealed by the performances themselves and the discussions around them by African-American artists, intellectuals and politicians.
Authoritarianism and Kurdish Alternative Politics
Authors: Tas Latif
Published: May 2024

Can autocrats and democracy co-exist? Why are autocratic regimes not just a local but also a global issue? Can democracy survive against autocrat’s populism? What is the role of media, societal nationalism and intellectuals in autocratic governmentality? Can autocrats go by elections? Why autocrats are so obsessed in courts and judges? Why do we need alternative governmentality? Dr. Latif Tas’s timely and important book, Authoritarianism and Alternative Kurdish Politics, tries to answer these and many other significant and present-day questions. Without studying and understanding societal and political authoritarianism, justice and gender regimes in the Middle East, it would not be possible to understand the main reasons for the multiple and continuous conflicts and often changing borders. This unique book engages critically with ‘radical democracy’ and ‘democratic federalism’ as they are articulated and practised by the Kurdish political movement. The book also gives insight into the lived experiences and daily lives of Kurdish women and men under different authoritarian rules. Dr. Tas’s book is based on several years of ethnographic work in the Middle East and Europe, over 200 interviews with Kurdish female and male activists, politicians, mayors, former and active guerrillas, unofficial court representatives, religious leaders, women’s organisations and representatives from different Turkish and Kurdish political parties.
Monopolistic Nationalism and the Decomposing State
Authors: Tas Latif
Published: May 2024

Chapter 3 discusses monopolistic nationalism and the decomposing state. The chapter provides a historical context of national sentiment to the current situation in the Kurdish regions in Turkey and also Syria, showing how the politics of gender has played a role for group identity and nationalism. It aims to demonstrate how local justice, alternative governance and new gender roles have been shaped by and, in turn have shaped, the evolution of alternative politics and social structures.
Historical Background: The Cold War and Beyond
Authors: Coticchia Fabrizio , Dian Matteo , Niccolò Moro Francesco
Published: May 2024

Chapter 2 describes how the security policies of the three countries were restricted by regulatory and institutional factors during the post-war period. Their common experience of defeat, occupation and political reform led Italy, Germany and Japan to develop both cultures of anti-militarism and a pacifist public opinion and to adopt significant constitutional limits that substantially constrained their security policies. In this sense, Article 9 of the Japanese constitution and Article 11 of the Italian constitution are very similar in that both declare that the country will not use force as a means of resolving international disputes. In Germany, Article 26 of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) also explicitly states that ‘Acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for a war of aggression, shall be unconstitutional.’ This chapter highlights the similarities and differences between these elements, underlining how such factors decisively contributed to shaping security policies in the three countries in question.
Japan: From Defensive Defence to Proactive Contributions to Peace
Authors: Coticchia Fabrizio , Dian Matteo , Niccolò Moro Francesco
Published: May 2024

Chapter 6 focuses on Japan. Japan’s military doctrine has undergone an even more radical redefinition, transcending several of the post-war regulatory and institutional constraints and embracing a role of ‘active contributor to peace’ in the Indo-Pacific region. In terms of timing, Japan more closely resembles Germany than Italy. With the emergence of the threats presented by China and North Korea in the 2000s and 2010s, Japan introduced its most important policy changes, such as the acquisition of ballistic defence systems, the legalisation of ‘collective self-defence’ and the shift to ‘dynamic deterrence’ as the core mission of the JSDF. Overall, the re-emergence of great power rivalry has significantly affected Japan and Germany, reducing the centrality of peacekeeping operations in favour of deterrence and the defence of the integrity of the national territory. The chapter highlights how Japan adapted its force structure to cope with the threat posed by China and another significant military power, North Korea.
The Impossible Ideal: Beauty, Health and Character
Authors: Smith Michelle
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers how the unassailable logic about natural, healthful beauty created unmeetable expectations, fostered a culture of cosmetic secrecy and judged vanity harshly. The rhetoric of harm and danger associated with cosmetics situated them as the antithesis of health and in conflict with true, natural beauty. This generated tension for the authors of beauty manuals who had to remain on the right side of God- as embodied by the natural- and yet somehow satisfy women readers with solutions for improving their appearance. In addition, this chapter examines two novels that demonstrate the harms associated with vanity and the quest to attain beauty: Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady and George Eliot’s Adam Bede.
Embracing the Beauty Regimen in British and American Women’s Magazines
Authors: Smith Michelle
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the embrace of new beauty standards in two British women’s magazines, the Queen (1861–1958) and Woman (1890–1912), and the American women’s magazine the Delineator (1873–1937), from the 1890s to the first decade of the twentieth century, exploring the complicated ways in which commercial beauty products and methods came to occupy more advertising space and how related daily tasks to maintain the face and body were incorporated within editorial content and advice columns. It considers the promotion and adoption of the daily beauty regimen–a phenomenon that signals the acceptance, and necessity of, certain kinds of beauty practices and products–within both British and American women’s magazines. Despite the British focus in this monograph, the consideration of an American magazine is important in order to examine the remarkably similar ideas about beauty and beauty culture evident on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century.
Witnessing
Authors: Kenny Oliver
Published: May 2024

This chapter continues the discussion of rape and sexual assault imagery, but takes a wider and more theoretical perspective, considering how films that present rape in long takes crystallise all the supporting and critiquing arguments around rape imagery more broadly. I suggest that rape imagery is always caught between the progressive potential of communicating widely about a frequently hidden and woefully under-discussed aspect of society, and the regressive potential of visualising and spectacularising a crime that leaves little evidence, rarely leads to prosecution let alone conviction, and problematically combines sexual desire and violence. Transgressive art films depicting rape and sexual assault often appear to interpellate a film witness, positioning the film spectator as the witness to the rape, and thus creating an internally incoherent absent witness in the place of an idealised real or diegetic witness, who in most rape cases is not available to corroborate the victim’s testimony. If these problems relating to evidence, testimony, visualisation and witnessing are inherent to all images of rape, films like The Tribe, Holiday and Irreversible are perfect examples of all the positive and negative potential of such images, on a theoretical, ethical and political level.
Conclusion
Authors: Kenny Oliver
Published: May 2024

This chapter summarises the key takeaways from the book, highlighting the role of academics in preferentially placing the spotlight on certain films over others, and the ethical ramifications of doing so.
Aesthetic Landscapes: Travel and Tourism
Authors: Constantine Mary-Ann
Published: May 2024

The connections between Romantic-period travel, travel-writing and the visual arts have afforded a rich field for research across many disciplines. Art provided a major impetus for British travellers to the Continent: the appreciation of Old Masters and the ability to sketch and interpret Classical ruins formed an important educational strand of the aristocratic Grand Tour; artists who spent time in Rome or Naples brought a classicizing perspective to their treatment of British landscapes. Throughout the period, however, a parallel strand of thought stressed the importance of appreciating the landscapes and antiquities of Britain on their own terms. Classicizing and scientific modes of observation were complemented and enriched by new ways of writing about the experience of travel. These include a greater emphasis on the travelling ‘self’; on bodily and emotional responses to events and scenes, often in the context of pedestrian travel which became increasingly popular from the 1790s. An expanding demographic of tourists dramatically opened up the quantity, range and nature of written tours. This chapter shows how these varied modes of writing about (and visual depictions of) travel developed and influenced each other, and explores the ideological assumptions which underpin them.
Visualising the Indigenous Pacific
Authors: Wills Kacie L.
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the visual representations of encounter produced during the Cook voyages. These visual representations exist within the larger cultural practice of mediating scientific knowledge of people and places through print illustration. For many Europeans, the printed illustrations in popular voyage accounts were their only context for understanding the shifts in science and thinking that resulted from contact in the Pacific, and, indeed, around the globe. With this in mind, I examine popular visual representations of Mai, the famous Portrait of Omai by Joshua Reynolds, and the recently-discovered costuming for the Omai character in the pantomime Omai; or a trip around the world. In doing so, I demonstrate how Europeans used the visual arts to assimilate aspects of Pacific culture and how that same culture can be seen through such representations to resist assimilation. Finally, I turn to the Ra'iatean high priest Tupaia’s illustrations in order to demonstrate the Indigenous perspective on those same instances of encounter and cross-cultural exchange, showing the practice of mediating knowledge through print culture to be a complex process of which we often see only one side.
Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist
Authors: Myrone Martin
Published: May 2024

The flourishing of public exhibitions and gallery displays in London and around Britain from the 1760s to the 1830s has been subject to intensive academic scrutiny. Art exhibitions have been located at the heart of the major cultural transformations of the era, including the emergence of the ‘public sphere’, female spectatorship and cultural engagement, and the ascent of visually-orientated consumerism. This chapter charts the character and chronological framework of exhibitions culture in the Romantic period. It considers the ascendance of the Royal Academy, the brief flourishing of literary galleries of the 1790s, and the new ventures of the British Institution and various dedicated watercolour shows in the early 19th century, challenging the dominance of the Academy. Building on recent work which has focussed on systematic and structural features of exhibitions culture, the chapter addresses more directly than hitherto the question of how exhibitions culture can be situated in relation to the moral values associated with Romanticism. Utilising Colin Campbell’s unjustly neglected work on consumerism and Romanticism, I suggest how the phenomenon of exhibitions culture helped institute a structurally precarious, inherently competitive and individualist artistic field.
Convergence and Dissonance: Romantic Theatre and the Visual Arts
Authors: McPherson Heather
Published: May 2024

This paper examines the complex nexus of affinities and rivalries that characterised the visual and performing arts in the burgeoning visual culture of the Romantic period. As popular modes of cultural consumption and entertainment they appealed to and were shaped by the public’s growing fascination with visual spectacle, exhibition culture and celebrity, but diverged in fundamental ways. A glaring example of this divide is the tension between drama as a literary medium and as stage spectacle that permeated Romantic theatrical criticism. Leading artists, including Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence and George Romney, were fascinated by actors as portrait subjects, but were highly aware of the dangers of applying theatrical principles to painting. In reassessing the affinities and differences that demarcated painting and the theatre, the lynch-pin is the culture of visuality—the heightened emphasis on visual spectacle and scenic effects and performance that was articulated across different modes of visuality and modes of looking. An alternative model for conceptualising the synergies and tensions between painting, especially portraiture, and theatre would be to re-envisage the relationship as a paragone, or comparative debate, grounded in differing modes of visuality and temporality.
Romanticism, ‘Real’ Illusions and the Transformation of Experience in Modernity
Authors: Otto Peter
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines developments that help shape exchanges between the real, the actual, and fiction/illusion that are characteristic of London in the late-18th and early-19th century: the emergence of modern technologies of illusion; the proliferation of viewing/exhibition spaces; and the democratisation and commercialisation of spectacle. During this period the moving panorama and Diorama put the panoramic illusion into motion, while the immersive realities of the static panorama increased in scale and verisimilitude, to the point where they could be experienced as a second ‘reality.’ But the phenomena traced in this chapter are broader than these developments alone can suggest. It therefore places the panorama in relation to popular entertainments, innovations in the art world, and the urban/commercial milieu of London. On this large canvas, it sketches the metamorphoses that fragment experience, producing a sense of disorientation and loss still commonly used to trope Romanticism as an anti-modernity. But, as this chapter concludes, the exchanges between Romanticism and the milieu in which it emerged are more equivocal than this suggests, and these exchanges are a crucial resource if we are to understand the interimplication of ‘real’, actual, and ‘imagined’ worlds in modernity.
Looking Back Through Fashion: Regency Romances and a ‘Jumble of Styles’
Authors: Davidson Hilary
Published: May 2024

In popular imagination, Regency fashion is synonymous with Jane Austen and an ‘Austenland’ where heroines in white muslin dresses are pursued by dashing heroes. These figures are reinforced by Regency romance texts from Georgette Heyer onwards. However, such romanticised visions of the dressed past parallel strong fashion trends during the Regency period itself. As distance in time now gives Regency fashion ‘glamour’ – introduced in its modern sense by Sir Walter Scott – the growth of historicism through the later eighteenth century found its flowering in the Regency dress. In male and female fashion, romantic fantasies bridged time and space to embody concepts of the Gothicised Baroque, Renaissance and Middle Ages; the classical ancient world; Orientalism; and the exotic or picturesque foreign brought closer by the Napoleonic Wars. Although historic-style dress often searches for ‘authenticity’, all aesthetic expressions of the past including clothing are tempered through the present. We judge an adaptation or modern costume’s success by its performativeness of historicity, an inherently Romantic activity, but always conforming to current tastes. In using dress for an individual, romantic yearning for a relationship with a perceived past, modern viewers and readers replicate similar impulses to those expressed through fashion during Austen’s Regency.
Investigating the Origins of Steatite Vessels across the Viking Diaspora
Authors: Forster Amanda K. , Jones Richard E.
Published: May 2024

This chapter outlines scientific analysis, including that of rare earth element (REE) composition, that has been undertaken on steatite (soapstone) quarry samples and artefacts, demonstrating the potential for identifying landnám populations, distribution routes and understanding when and how new arrivals began to discover and utilise local resources as they settled the landscape. Over the last twenty years, two independent paths of study, one concerning the morphology/typology of soapstone artefacts, the other applying analytical techniques to determine provenance have combined into a single project, ‘Homeland to Home’. Several quarries in Shetland and in south-east Norway have been studied, as well as artefacts from Shetland, York, Orkney, Kaupang and the Faroes. Research is ongoing, but already there are tangible results with exciting implications: through determining the origins of soapstone vessels linked to landnám settlement sites, it is possible to map the origins of Norwegian pioneer groups across the region, and to add detail to the understanding of ongoing interactions between the Norwegian homeland and the Viking diaspora.
Norse Shielings in Scotland: An Example of Cultural Contact
Authors: Foster Ryan
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses how Scandinavians would have had to adapt their farming practices to suit the landscapes and soils of Scotland, with cultural contact between Scandinavian and native groups taking place on the farm. Through research into the place-name elements of Gaelic ærgi and Old Norse saetr it suggests that the use of shielings to separate milk cows from other cattle, rather than grazing them all together in an integrated arable/pastoral infield/outfield system, may have been a practice learnt by the Norse from the native Gaelic farming focus on dairying. As Scandinavians settled the Irish Sea Region, they encountered Gaelic speakers and the use of the specialised milking shieling, and once adopted, this system spread through secondary migration to new settlements in the Faroes and Cumbria, and older ones in the Northern Isles.
Thing -sites and the Political Landscape in the North
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: May 2024

Scandinavian thing-sites, preserved today in place-names such as Dingwall in Ross, were places where religious debates and legal rulings, and possibly markets, were held in Scandinavian Scotland. This chapter discusses their importance and investigates their role beyond the administrative, focussing on their position in the regional landscape as widely accessible arenas where negotiation of power relations between elites and their communities could take place. It explores the regionally specific evolution of these sites in the North Atlantic, particularly Scotland, Ireland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. It demonstrates that in Scotland, Scandinavian elites responded to a landscape that included ancient indigenous mound monuments such as barrows or overgrown brochs, like those used in the Scandinavian homelands to legitimise ancient ruling rites that were rooted in the landscape.
The Brough of Birsay, Orkney
Authors: Morris Christopher D.
Published: May 2024

This chapter is prompted by the publication of the third and final volume resulting from the Birsay Bay project, which assesses sixty years of work and archive research at the site. Investigations undertaken from the 19th century, and into the 20th, particularly during the Radford-Cruden campaign of 1954 to 1964, and the later 1973 to 2007 excavations and archival examination, are outlined. Key finds from the site are discusses, which demonstrate that the tidal island of the Brough of Birsay was not only and influential and wealthy Pictish site, but also became the ‘hub of the Viking earldom’.
Afterword: Major Advances and Future Directions
Authors: Batey Colleen E. , Graham-Campbell James
Published: May 2024

This chapter concludes the book by highlighting the growth of new scientific analyses, and the explosion in environmental data collection, that was just beginning at the time of the publication of Vikings in Scotland at the end of the 1990s. These aspects have since become common place in the field of Scandinavian archaeology in Scotland, as has an interdisciplinary approach. Looking to the future, new methodologies such as aDNA are identified, that will allow for the consideration of ethnic identities and their expression in newly settled areas, and existing datasets from both excavations and pagan graves, are thus ‘ripe for reinterpretation and amplification’. Other areas of research identified as going forward are those concerned with landscape, such as those investigating waterways and harbours, and agricultural and pastoral land-use, and those researching international trade to Scandinavian Scotland from the Viking homelands, Europe and beyond.
His Prospect High: The Nunc Stans in Paradise Lost
Authors: Somervell Tess
Published: May 2024

This chapter argues that Paradise Lost is an early experiment in the prospect poem. Paradise Lost establishes that all the events it narrates take place within the view of God beholding all time ‘from his prospect high’; Milton adapts this use of the prospect view to grapple with questions about freedom and time from Boethius’s theory of God’s nunc stans (‘now that stands still’). Through analysis of key passages, this chapter further argues that Milton uses shorter prospect poems to illustrate both the strengths and flaws in different characters’ (Satan, Adam, Eve) understandings of free will and responsibility.
Unforced Method: Reading The Seasons
Authors: Somervell Tess
Published: May 2024

Readers of The Seasons have disagreed over whether the poem is about spatial variety, and therefore its parts may be read in any order, or whether it is a poem about continuous change, and therefore must be read from beginning to end and in the proper order. The Seasons has been excerpted and anthologised extensively, despite the difficulty of defining where a ‘part’ begins or ends. Without advocating for one or the other hermeneutic method, this chapter shows how these different reading approaches and conceptions of the poem’s structure have implications for how the reader receives Thomson’s ethical and epistemological claims.
Conclusion
Authors: Cooper Sophie
Published: May 2024

This chapter returns to each city as an evolving real and imagined space where Irish born and descended people worked, lived, and understood themselves in different ways. It considers the global networks that operated within and from Melbourne and Chicago across gender, class, and religious lines. The chapter ends by returning to the key argument of the book: that men, women, and children all contributed in different, but important, ways to multigenerational community identity formation.
Emily Brontë’s Udolphics: The Gondal and Non-Gondal Poems
Authors: Loksing Moy Olivia
Published: May 2024

For many critics, Emily Brontë’s novels model a new mode of Victorian “New Gothic” (e.g. Villette, Wuthering Heights) that resist or satirize traditional Gothic themes, while her comparatively neglected poems seem unremarkable or juvenile in their overuse of Romantic, “Old Gothic” clichés. This chapter revises that reception, bridging the gap between Emily Brontë’s prose and poetry through a focus on her Gondal and non-Gondal poems. Tracing the strong influence of Gothic romances that permeated the Brontë household through periodicals and print culture, it shows how Emily Brontë’s verses innovatively embody a Radcliffean “Gothics of the everyday” through her superimposition of a violent, foreign Gothic landscape onto the Haworth moors of northern England. This illuminates commonalities between Brontë’s poetry and later Victorian poets. Reading Brontë’s poetry of the 1840s alongside the prison lyrics and confessionals of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and G. M. Hopkins compels us to recognize a significant corpus of Victorian poetry infused and imprinted with Gothic forms.
Industrial Folklore and the Regional Ingénue in Dreiser and Sinclair
Authors: Avery Tamlyn
Published: May 2024

Chapter 1 discusses how naturalist novelists, including Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie) and Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), adapted the bourgeois Bildungsroman to allegorize that region’s rapid industrialization. In doing so, they radically re-engineered the sentimental teleology of development in “local color” realism. Their new poetics of labor showcased the antidevelopment of immature regional types whose dreams of fulfilling labor are churned through the charnel house of Midwestern industrialism. As these novelists contemplated the effects of regional development, they created a new poetics of labor that presented maturation itself as contingent upon the class struggle inherent within national progress; this struggle was registered ironically, in Dreiser’s Bildungsroman, and didactically, in Sinclair’s. In both novels, the regional complex—expressed through the protagonist’s struggle to reconcile their regional idealism (rurality/childhood) with the reality of national destiny (industrialism/ adulthood)—metaphorically exposed the broader challenges of capitalism’s uneven development. Their Midwests represented a marked deviation from the harmonious visions of everyday life in the nation’s regions that local color characters and settings arguably reinforced.
Emplacing Modernism: The Fitzgeralds and the Artist’s Regional Complex
Authors: Avery Tamlyn
Published: May 2024

Section Two shifts focus to the Northeast, which saw the emergence of the development of the regional artist subgenre. Chapter 4 discusses how in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz the young modernist artist’s development is contoured by their ’regional complex’: their sense of regional difference, within the centralizing imperatives of New York’s culture industry. The narrative determinants by which the Künstlerroman is defined—namely, the testing of the artist’s “genius” and “fitness for life” (Bakhtin)—unfold in these novels through the artist’s reflections on the tenuous dynamic between the local and universal impulses of modernism, as they attempt to reconcile their individual artistic instincts and ambitions with the circuits of cultural production and exchange unique to mass production. Stylistically, the Fitzgeralds’ novels drew upon avant-garde technological innovations, forms, and character models from film, theater, variety hall entertainment, modern dance, popular music, and visual art, as they sought to redevelop outdated regionalist tropes. Yet, while these Künstlerromane internalized and legitimized the Northeast region’s cultural centralization, they also self-reflexively insisted that modernism’s developments were remarkably responsive to modernity’s uneven geographies.
Grand-Guignol as Twentieth-Century Gothic Drama
Authors: Hoedt Madelon
Published: May 2024

This chapter argues that the malleability of the Gothic mode has meant that it has always been able to adapt itself to a variety of media. Gothic drama has been a highly successful way of delivering such narratives. First gaining prominence in the late eighteenth- century, alongside the first wave of Gothic novels, these plays had long theatrical runs and attracted huge audiences, as well as being on the cutting edge of developments in stagecraft and special effects. This changed in the early decades of the twentieth century. The never-ending stream of original play texts and adaptations of Gothic fiction dried up and more popular forms of performance such as spookshows and scare attractions emerged. The Grand Guignol, the French Theatre of Horror, includes both horror and comedy performances and yet focusses more on realist plots than on the monsters of the Gothic. It is argued that whilst the Grand Guignol appears as a rupture from the Gothic dramas that preceded it, this is not the full story. The chapter positions the Grand Guignol as a necessary link between the spectacle and melodrama of the Gothic stage, and the psychology and gore of twentieth-century horror cinema.
Russian Twentieth-Century Gothic: The Irrepressible Undead
Authors: Maguire Muireann
Published: May 2024

This chapter argues that that the uncanny, and particularly the undead, are a peculiarly irrepressible trope of Russian literature. This essay offers an overview of the development of Russian Gothic fiction in the twentieth century, contrasting the representation of the undead in the work of early Soviet dissident writers such as Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii with the politically freer, but no less culturally nuanced, portrayal of similar supernatural archetypes in the novels of Luk’ianenko. The growing number of authors who write reflectively about late- and post-Soviet culture is also represented by the inclusion of Anna Starobinets, who, like several of her contemporaries, also draws upon both traditional Gothic and contemporary horror tropes and themes
‘Nightmares of the Normative’: African American Gothic and the Rejection of the American Ideal
Authors: Wester Maisha
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the ways in which African American Gothic fiction began to reject notions of the idyllic heteronormative American existence, showing that it is a simplification requiring allegiance to alienating notions of race, gender, and socioeconomic class. It begins by situating the ‘Red Summer of 1919’ (during which white Americans waged open warfare on Black citizens), as a key turning point in Black Gothic literature. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers such as slave narrative authors wrote literature testifying to the horrors of being denied humanity and citizenship while their descendants wrote texts rooted in rejecting modern ideas of ‘progress’. Drawing it’s title from Roderick Ferguson’s ‘Nightmares of the Heteronormative’, the chapter also points to the ways in which heternormativity has been used as both bait and prison for African Americans, focussing upon Richard Wright’s ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’ (1945), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Amiri Baraka’s 1966 film Dutchman.
The State and its Constitutions: Constitutional Politics from Empire to Republic
Authors: Köker Levent
Published: May 2024

I must stress that the perennial problem of constitutional politics and the unending search for a true constitution in Turkey can be overcome if and only if the peoples in Turkey, with all their diversity and sources of conflict, agree to live together under a new state founded this time, and this will be the first time in their history, by their own will. This is no easy task, for the ‘nationalist paradigm’ has taken root so deeply in the course of history from the Hamidian era to the Kemalist Republic that a revolutionary paradigm shift still awaits its strong and organised supporters in the public political sphere.
Non-Muslims in Turkey as the ‘Founding Other’
Authors: Aktoprak Elçin
Published: May 2024

The principle of reciprocity was also never abandoned despite the national and international legal framework. The main weakness of this point is that it does not put the political struggle of non-Muslim communities in relation to their rights and problems on legal ground, but makes it a condition to establish good relations with the regime. This unofficial condition also resonates with the judge/prisoner dilemma and makes non-Muslims a target in any crisis related to the West. Whenever a government is in a legitimacy crisis, nationalism is there as a remedy for it, and the first ‘other’ of emerging nationalism in new conditions is always the ‘founding other’ of Turkish nationalism: non-Muslims.
The Kurdish Question: A Century Later
Authors: Gurses Mehmet
Published: May 2024

The vast size of the Kurdish geography, coupled with key ideological differences between the two main Kurdish blocs, is likely to contribute to the intra-Kurdish rivalry. This competition may even intensify, drawing in additional regional and global powers, such as the US, Russia and Iran. However, the size and division of the Kurdish lands could also help mitigate this rivalry and allow for multiple Kurdish political entities to emerge, however defined.
Turkey’s Relationship with the Soviet Union and Russia
Authors: Kubicek Paul
Published: May 2024

What remains to be seen is whether Russia and Turkey can continue to compartmentalise their relationship, working together when they can and not allowing disagreements or crises to undermine their more profitable ties. In the early 2020s, one sees much economic, political, diplomatic and security interaction, even as they oppose each other in various regional conflicts. One can understand the benefits of such a transactional, pragmatic, cost–benefit approach, particularly given that both countries have been trying to distance themselves from the West. Whether these ties can be institutionalised into a larger strategic partnership or whether lingering mistrust or diverging interests will overwhelm them remains to be seen.