bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
New Journalism
Authors: March Philip
Published: January 2022

‘New Journalism’ commonly designates the developments introduced in the late-nineteenth century by W. T. Stead (1849–1912), the campaigning and investigative newspaper editor. Innovations included typological, technological, organisational, and content changes that brought a more commercial and increasingly populist approach to the newspaper industry. The term is said to have originated with Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), the poet and socio-cultural observer, who, in his article ‘Up to Easter’, published in May 1887, famously characterised Stead’s form of journalism, and, by association, its readers, as ‘feather-brained’. In so doing, he highlighted a connection of influence between culture, politics, and society that had long since exercised his interest. This case study examines and challenges the long-established historiography of the term by considering earlier instances of the expression’s usage. It particularly highlights the editorial rivalries, journalistic discourses, and wider cultural debates that contributed to the emergence of the concept of ‘New Journalism’.
The Byline
Authors: Harrison Steve
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines the shift in practice from almost universal anonymity in newspapers and periodicals at the start of the century to the rise of the celebrity reporter by its end. The introduction of the byline marked a transition in the understanding of “news” from something which was unearthed to something which was created, and went hand-in-hand with professional developments such as the interview and the investigative report. It would be a further 30 years or so into the 20th century before bylines became routine in most newspapers, but the example of the early Daily Mirror shows how bylines were used to position newspapers within the field as well as acting as simple acknowledgements of authorship.
Transnational Exchanges
Authors: Beals M. H.
Published: January 2022

Based upon an interwoven series of international case studies, this chapter addresses how technological, economic, and social changes affected the gathering and distribution of news across the nineteenth-century world. It focuses particularly on commercial and epistolary relationships between Anglophone cultures, and how the exchange of printed materials, and the development of transnational press organisations and communication technologies such as mail steamers and the telegraph shaped interactions between individual newspapers as well as between their far-flung readerships. It explores how texts were transformed as they moved from region to region, despite remaining in the same language. It also covers the role of empire in supporting the growth of professional journalism, and the connection between migration and the evolution of a transoceanic print culture that united home and ex patriot communities. Finally, it offers insights into the role of translation and foreign correspondents in British-Continental networks, including the means and effects of translation on both literary and news content within the newspaper press. Overall, it argues for threads of consistency in style and approach throughout a period of immense social, political, and technological change.
The Irish-Language Press: ‘A Tender Plant at the Best of Times’?
Authors: Chollatáin Regina Uí
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on press and periodical press spaces as significant vehicles for Irish language and culture. Such development took place in spaces that juxtaposed Irish- and English-language usage within confined societal structures. The Gaelic column in English language newspapers from the 1850s onwards developed into a forum for the Irish Ireland movement. Much early nineteenth century Irish-language print material was linked to religious organisations; it is not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that Irish emerges in public discourse forums. A notable feature from the 1880s onwards is the use of journals such as the Irish Ecclesiastical Record and the Gaelic Journal as stepping stones for the foundation of the Gaelic League, the main Irish-language Revival organisation. The first dual-language newspaper of the Revival period An Claidheamh Soluis agus Fáinne an Lae (1899-1932), added new dimensions to the political space while maintaining cultural dominance. Irish-language journalism alone was not the cornerstone for Irish-language Revival, but as a cultural element in an evolving new social and intellectual structure, it embraced new writing and communication styles and formats.
Comics, Cartoons and the Illustrated Press
Authors: Tilley Elizabeth
Published: January 2022

This chapter traces the interrelationship of text and illustration in a selection of periodicals from the 1830s to the 1890s. From the ‘Big Cuts’ in Punch to the ever-developing face of Ally Sloper, the increasing importance of illustration over text defined readerships and ushered in an acceptance of the world as mediated through a visual lens. Iconographic conventions borrowed from gothic and fantastic literature informed the creation of urban scenes in news magazines like the Illustrated London News and Graphic; such codes helped readers make sense of a new sort of interface largely controlled by the artists’ decisions about subject matter. Word and image jostled for space on the page, but were also allied through juxtaposition and the arrangement of white space. Information, illumination and amusement were the triumvirate that helped ensure the appeal of comics and cartoons in the illustrated press across class lines and over time.
The Press and Radical Expression: Structure and Dissemination
Authors: Conboy Martin
Published: January 2022

This chapter argues that, on the evidence of the content and intention of this range of radical periodicals, the key distinguishing element was that of social class. In order to demonstrate this innovative aspect of print culture, it explores explore how these publications created identities of class as well as propagandizing politically on behalf of new readers with a particular focus on the language used. To this extent, the radical press marked both a continuity as well as a rupture with previous traditions of the press: continuity in the claims of the press as a force that eroded the traditional hierarchies of information flow, claims which had accompanied print as a technology since its introduction in to Western Europe; rupture in that the press had hitherto been incapable of generating a lexicon of appeal to anything other than an elite political or mercantile audience. The radical form of advocacy that the radical press launched was not long in the ascendancy. Its disruptive impact was dramatically reduced when many of its claims and much of its rhetoric were subsumed within a mainstream popular press, responding reflexively as it claimed to incorporate the interests of the ‘people’ in its own coverage.
The Nation
Authors: Quinn James
Published: January 2022

The Nation newspaper was founded in 1842 by a group of Irish nationalists (later known as Young Ireland) to assist the campaign for greater political independence. Allying itself with Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union, it strongly advocated the re-establishment of an independent Irish parliament. It also devoted considerable space to cultural matters to recreate an authentic nationality rooted in Ireland’s past. Arguing that pre-conquest Ireland was a land of sophisticated culture and learning, it stressed Ireland’s proud record of resistance to conquest in prose and verse. Accusations that they excessively glorified violence contributed to the secession of the Nation group from O’Connell’s Repeal Association in July 1846. By this time the country was gripped by famine and the Nation began to adopt ever more extreme positions, which led to the paper’s suppression in the summer of 1848. Revived in 1849, it continued until 1891, its influence helping to establish the newspaper as an integral part of all subsequent nationalist movements.
The Children’s Press
Authors: Milton Frederick S.
Published: January 2022

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, just a handful of children’s press titles were circulating, with the didactic and evangelical output of the Sunday Schools and Religious Tract Society dominating. From 1866 to 1914, more than 500 children’s periodicals came into circulation, featuring well over 80 newspaper ‘children’s columns’, as publishers sought to produce reading that increasingly reflected the common pursuits of the widest range of juveniles. This piece undertakes a chronological account of the periodical growth in children’s literature over the course of the century, including the development of the boy’s papers from the 1850s onwards, and moves by publishers to broaden appeal by producing unisex publications such as Cassell’s Little Folks. The second half of the nineteenth century saw development of ‘house’ periodicals of campaigning movements, such as the RSPCA’s Band of Mercy. From the mid-century, newspapers began featuring children’s columns written for children, with purpose of educating young readers, organising charitable work and acting as a forum for carrying epitaphs for child readers. Such themes are examined through the lens of the most successful children’s column, the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle’s Dicky Bird Society, which began in 1876.
William Saunders and the Industrial Supply of News in the Late Nineteenth Century
Authors: Hobbs Andrew
Published: January 2022

Quarry owner William Saunders (1823-95) applied industrial methods to the supply of news as a commodity, experimenting with centralised and networked solutions to the problem of news distribution. He entered the newspaper industry in Plymouth, launching the Western Morning News in 1860, and in 1863 he and his brother-in-law Edward Spender set up one of the first UK news agencies, the Central Press, in London, supplying news and other editorial matter to provincial papers. He founded or purchased other papers around the country, and shared content between them – to some resistance, mainly from journalists. Saunders’s career highlights the dependence of many provincial papers on central sources of news and content, and challenges simple ideas of local, national and provincial. It also shows the contrast between the romantic myths about local journalism peddled by journalists, and the industrial reality of the syndication processes by which those myths were disseminated.
James Joyce, Ulysses and the Politics of Musical Form
Authors: Moss Gemma
Published: January 2022

Chapter 2 has two aims. First, it reconstructs Joyce as a developing artist rather than a born genius by re-assessing Chamber Music, which – despite its name – is Joyce’s least musical work. Second, it re-assesses Joyce’s claim that ‘Sirens’ successfully emulates a fugue. Critics have worked hard to support this claim, but they rely uncritically on discourses of musical transcendence that were coming under pressure in the early twentieth century, and which are critiqued later in Ulysses. Joyce’s writing can be more productively compared with the fragmentation and dissonance of Schoenberg’s modernist music. Reading ‘Cyclops’ with Adorno’s analysis of the social meanings available in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique can enhance our understanding of the political content of ‘Cyclops’ by connecting the fragmentation techniques in Joyce’s novel to the social conditions of the text’s production.
Why Biopolitics?
Authors: Papanikolaou Dimitris
Published: January 2022

Reading the medium-length film Washingtonia (2014, dir. Konstantina Kotzamani) as a metonymic allegory of the whole Weird Wave movement, this chapter then turns to theories of biopolitics. Biopolitics is presented as a valuable concept in order to comprehend the Weird Wave’s sociocultural position, as well as its films’ thematic and formal choices. A short bibliographical review of previous critical approaches to biopolitics and film is then followed by the close reading of Yorgos Zois’s medium-length Third Kind (2018). What “weird” films like those by Zois and Kotzamani present us with, it is argued, is a critical response to the condition of living in an intense biopolitical present.
‘A Cinema About Being Governed’
Authors: Papanikolaou Dimitris
Published: January 2022

The title of this section comes from an interview by Yorgos Lanthimos on French/German TV, and his answer when asked what relates his cinema to that of his peers in Greece. ‘What interested us’ he said, ‘is the way a family or a group is governed and what kind of impact this has on every member of the group’. A political analysis of Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) shows the wider ramifications of this point, especially taking into account Greek cinema’s status within the global dynamics of a “cinema of small nations”. The chapter goes on to review the ways in which Greek filmmakers, as well as a larger group of artists, producers and cinephiles, have worked in the 2010s to produce a milieu in which cinema acted as the common ground for cultural political critique. The collective The Lost Highway of Greek Cinema is used as a case study.
Assemblage, Identity, Citizenship
Authors: Papanikolaou Dimitris
Published: January 2022

This chapter returns to one of the most influential Greek films of the 21st century, Strella (2009, dir. Koutras), a new queer cinema classic whose central trans character became an iconic reference for the ‘trans lives matter’ movement in Greece. Koutras’s film is read alongside the short Mom, I’m back (2017; Katsimiris), but also assessed in the context of the protest mobilization after the killing of transqueer activist Zak Kostopoulos/Zackie Oh (September 2018). It is argued that the new movement for gender and sexual identity politics in Greece, also in its dialogue with visual representations, foregrounds a radical poetics of assemblage which potentially provides an answer to a number of questions asked throughout this book. Intriguingly, this new queer poetics of assemblage incorporates, makes do with, but also directly challenges, biopolitical realism.
Willa Cather in the Realm of the Senses
Authors: Reynolds Guy J.
Published: January 2022

This chapter introduces an account of Willa Cather framed by approaches drawn from Body Studies, and specifically that area of cultural studies focused on the history of the senses. Cather is juxtaposed against such figures as the public intellectual Randolph Bourne and the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy. The chapter also deploys and then inflects the concept of the ‘habitus’ to explore the ways in which Cather’s fiction represents distinctive cultures and ways of bodily being or embodiment.
Cather’s Smellscapes: Perfumes and Flowers, Disgust and Seduction
Authors: Reynolds Guy J.
Published: January 2022

In Chapter Eight the term ‘smellscape’ is used to open up a thesis about the cultural history of aroma, and how Cather inflected the language of flowers. This ‘floriographic’ discourse shaped the early story, ‘Paul’s Case’, and A Lost Lady. The lush, luxurious landscapes and smellscapes of Sapphira and the Slave Girl become the terrain for a reading of violence, racism and sexual predation in that last novel.
Burning Feminism: Virginia Woolf’s Laboratory of Intimacy
Authors: Goldman Jane
Published: January 2022

Like Chapter 2, this chapter explores the simultaneously progressive and conservative agendas informing key modern(ist) representations of intimacy. It presses the notion of textual intimacy between reading and writing as ‘closeness of observation’. Opening with a poem composed of Woolf ’s conspicuously few mentions of ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ in her writings, Goldman traces the injunction to burn the word ‘feminist’ in the anti-fascist Three Guineas (1938) back to a passage, in Chapter 5 of A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together… .’. The chapter shows how this passage, in introducing the fictitious novel Life’s Adventure by Mary Carmichael – a variant spelling of the scientist and birth control pioneer Marie Stopes’s nom de plume for her 1928 novel Love’s Creation, inscribes ‘the double feminist shock that is […] both a newly achieved professional intimacy in the collaboration of women in the previously exclusively patriarchal environs of a university scientific laboratory and a newly acknowledged possibility of sexual intimacy between women’, at the same time as the passage both echoes and undermines the proto-fascist eugenics that motivated Stopes’s work for women’s reproductive freedom.
Introducing … The Mighty Women of Marvel!
Authors: Kent Miriam
Published: January 2022

This introductory chapter sets established the ensuing discussion with a brief account of current popular debates within both superhero comic books and film: the supposed embrace of diversity and inclusion of non-normative subjectivities. Marvel’s teen Muslim superheroine Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) is offered as a short but insightful case study to outline some of the crucial issues presented in the rest of the book. The chapter also highlights the twinned historical trajectories of comics and film and their entanglement with American (gender) politics throughout their existence, while also providing an overview of postfeminist culture and the implications of adaptation in these films. A chapter breakdown is provided, as well as an overview of the book’s key arguments.
With Great Power Comes Great Frustration? Configurations of Hero(ine)ism in Marvel Films
Authors: Kent Miriam
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides an initial discussion of the superheroines represented in Marvel films. While examinations of postfeminist action heroines have proliferated in recent years, this chapter proposes some new approaches to considering these characters, narratives and cinematic elements. It discusses how the gendered phenomenon of power is negotiated within these highly contested characters who in previous analyses—both scholarly and popular—have been characterised as ‘men in drag’ due to the masculine signifiers inherent in their portrayals as heroic. The contradictory nature of postfeminist culture produces a vision of empowered superheroic femininity that is often limited in its potential for action, physicality and heroism. This is frequently facilitated by the very machinations of postfeminist discourse—which ever invokes the notion of power—itself.
Marvel Legacy: Girl Heroism and Intergenerationality in Marvel Films
Authors: Kent Miriam
Published: January 2022

The fascinating but remarkably rarely portrayed teen heroine in Marvel films is examined in this chapter. It provides commentary regarding the placement of these characters within themes of ‘womanhood’ and intergenerational women’s solidarity, using the teen heroine Abby from Elektra (2005) as a unique case study. Drawing from postfeminist ideals of self-actualization and being true to oneself, the film actively participates in discussions around what it means for girls to become women via a female superhero narrative. Subsequently, the chapter builds on this discussion to consider the theme of superhero legacy through the character of Wolverine clone Laura Kinney in Logan (2017).
Sources, Genre, Authorship
Authors: Hagemann Hannah-Lena
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses the sources selected for this study, mainly chronicles and biographical accounts from the 9th-10th century CE, and provides some background information on these works and their authors. This is followed by a brief excursus into questions of literary genre, which is a difficult subject when it comes to the early Islamic tradition both because of anachronistic modern understandings of ‘genre’ dominating the discussion and because of the particularities of early Islamic scholarship and knowledge production. The chapter argues that genre in early Islamic writerly culture is best, if loosely, regarded as a particular mode of framing narrative material that influenced the selection and ordering of otherwise widely shared material, but was in no way sharply delineated from other such frames. Finally, the chapter looks at how best to approach early Islamic authorship, utilising a range of perspectives developed in other disciplines to suggest a model of pre-modern authorship that emphasises collective rather than individual efforts.
Historical Setting
Authors: Hagemann Hannah-Lena
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides an overview of the main actors and events of early Khārijite history from their origins at the Battle of Ṣiffīn in 657 CE until the death of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik in 705 CE. It situates Khārijite history in the broader context of the reign of the last ‘rightly-guided’ caliph, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, and of early Umayyad rule, including the second civil war (fitna). The chapter gives background information on the main Khārijite factions of this period, the Azāriqa and Najdiyya, and looks at well-known Khārijites like Abū Bilāl Mirdās b. Udayya and Shabīb b. Yazīd. The survey is intended to guide readers as they progress through the subsequent chapters.
Portraying Khārijism
Authors: Hagemann Hannah-Lena
Published: January 2022

Chapter Two discusses core themes and topoi emerging from the depiction of Khārijism in early Islamic historiography that recur over the entire period of Khārijite history covered in this book. These themes include the motifs of Khārijite piety, their longing for battle against those they considered unbelievers (jihād) and the resulting excessive violence that was considered a trademark of Khārijism. The continuous presence of these particular themes indicates their importance not only for the characterisation of Khārijism, but also for the development of Islamic doctrine, which largely came to condemn militant piety. This chapter thus outlines one of the main purposes that telling Khārijite history could serve.
Conclusion
Authors: Hagemann Hannah-Lena
Published: January 2022

The Conclusion revisits the book’s main premises and findings. It reiterates the distinctly rhetorical character of the accounts in early Islamic historiography that purport to tell Khārijite history, arguing that a sustained historiographical analysis of Khārijism must precede any study of the historical phenomenon. This is particularly important as the book’s preceding chapters revealed a host of themes that have less to do with the Khārijites themselves than with the specific historiographical concerns of early Islamic authors. This observation further highlights the significance of literary approaches not just to Khārijite history, but to early Islamic history and historical writing more generally. The chapter closes with some remarks on potential future avenues of research that are intended to encourage renewed interest in and engagement with the Khārijites, hoping thereby to narrow at least some of the gaps in the scholarly understanding of Khārijite history and thought.
Introduction
Authors: Harvey Ramon
Published: January 2022

The intellectual activity named ʿilm al-kalām in Arabic is broadly equivalent to the English term philosophical theology.1 This translation is useful because it presupposes that there can be a coherent combination of philosophy – the use of rational argument to clarify, or justify, truth – and theology in the sense of systematic discourse about the divine....
Tradition and Reason
Authors: Harvey Ramon
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores the intersection of tradition and reason that provides the basis for the remainder of the study. First, there is an investigation into the epistemological framework of Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī’s theology. Then, the sources and subsequent development of his kalām tradition are examined. The final section looks at key figures in Western philosophy since Kant, identifying Edmund Husserl and Alasdair MacIntyre as especially important for the book’s theological project.
Divine Nature
Authors: Harvey Ramon
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines fundamental questions about the nature of God and His attributes. In the first section, the question of time is explored and a contemporary articulation of divine timelessness given. The second section looks at necessity, arguing in particular for the relevance of a distinction between logical and metaphysical necessity. The final section assesses an important shift in the conceptualisation of the divine nature between al-Māturīdī and later members of his tradition. This is followed by a contemporary approach to the divine nature that treats God’s attributes as substantive properties.
The South African Soft Power Narrative, Cinema and Participatory Video
Authors: Cooke Paul
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores the gap between the way South Africa is experienced internally by some parts of the nation and the continued power of the story of the nation’s transition to democracy under Mandela internationally, a story which remains a remarkably resilient factor in the nation’s soft power offering. The chapter focuses on the less frequently explored internal dimension of soft power narratives and how they can be used to construct an imagined (national) community. It looks in particular at how community-level filmmaking has been used to contest the national soft-power narrative of the inclusive “rainbow nation”
Towards a Modern Regime of Literary Comfort: Shakespeare and the Failure to Console
Authors: Pieters Jürgen
Published: January 2022

The chapter starts off from Laura Bates’ Shakespeare saved my Life, the story of murder convict Larry Newton’s salutary encounter with the works of Shakespeare. It then moves on to a sustained reading of a number of scenes in four different plays by Shakespeare in which attempts at consolation significantly fail (Hamlet, Richard II, Measure for Measure and Romeo and Juliet). Drawing on writings by German philosopher Hans Blumenberg and Swedish author Stig Dagerman, the experience of failed consolation and inconsolability are identified as typical of the modern regime of comfort.
Fragments of a Consolatory Discourse: Sontag, Riley, Proust, Barthes
Authors: Pieters Jürgen
Published: January 2022

In the book’s final chapter, a discussion of Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, a bibliotherapeutic memoir of the author’s mother’s end-of-life phase leads to a discussion of related writings by David Rieff (on his mother, Susan Sontag), Denise Riley (Time Lived, Without its Flow, an essay on the death of her son Jacob) and Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, written at the occasion of his mother’s death. The analyses of these writings build on the previous chapters’ analysis of the modern regime of consolation.
‘Ritz’: The Roof Garden
Authors: Moore Robbie
Published: January 2022

This chapter considers interwar New York hotels, the rise of hotel brands and chains, and the Ritz in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction. The Ritz was a fiction of global finance: a licensing apparatus for a loose, decentralised and self-propagating franchise. The value of the Ritz was not in bricks and mortar but in its name and its brand. The Ritz aesthetic was an anticipation of corporate minimalism: white walls and white curtains with minimal decorative ornaments, culminating in the evaporated surfaces of its rooftop gardens. Its whiteness and transparency were fitting architectural expressions of the Ritz as a deterritorialised brand. Like the Ritz, F. Scott Fitzgerald (or ‘Fitz’) was a branded entity. For Fitzgerald, the pleasure of the Ritz and its roof garden was in its nothingness: a desirable nowhere into which the moneyed elite could escape. This chapter reads ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ as an allegory for capital’s struggle to escape the physicality of bricks and mortar. It then considers ‘May Day’, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby, where those with means strive toward the mobility and immateriality of ‘Ritz’ and of capital itself.
‘Purity, Piety, and Simplicity’: Heretical Images of the Female, Catholic Reader in Irish Modernism
Authors: Boynton T. J.
Published: January 2022

This chapter investigates the Irish response to modern mass media, in which Catholic and cultural nationalists converged in their efforts to de-anglicise the fledgling nation. For different reasons, both factions noisily condemned such modern vulgarities as tabloid journalism, Hollywood movies, music halls, bodice-rippers, and penny dreadfuls. The iconic figure of the young, female, Catholic reader loomed large in these invectives, with Catholic nationalists campaigning to preserve her purity while cultural nationalists bemoaned her seduction by the international culture industry. Boynton explores the relationship between these religious and gender pieties of the nationalist movement on the one hand and the emergence of Irish modernism on the other, tracing through the works of early, high, and late modernists – from W.B. Yeats to Samuel Beckett – a set of heretical strategies that challenge the representation of this consumer demographic as “pure, pious, and simple.”
Theorising Irish-Language Modernism: Voicing Precarity
Authors: McKibben Sarah E.
Published: January 2022

This chapter challenges the exclusion of literature in Irish from orthodox accounts of Irish modernism. Taking up Robert Flaherty’s fictionalized docudrama Man of Aran, a highly romanticized portrait of the Aran islanders’ manly struggle for survival in a rugged, unforgiving landscape, McKibben shows that these islanders were much less insulated from modernity than the film acknowledges. But the film also suppresses the very hallmark of their supposed archaic authenticity: the Irish language. McKibben compares this ‘devoicing’ to Pádraic Ó Conaire’s 1910 novella in Irish, Deoraíocht (‘Exile’), a ‘gap-ridden’ text recounting the misfortunes of an Irish-speaking immigrant in London. The chapter concludes with a succinct account of the tribulations of the Irish language from the time of the Great Famine, when the language was nearly wiped out as a consequence of mass starvation and emigration, to the late nineteenth century, when Revivalist efforts to forge a new literary tradition out of a language deemed defunct undercut the orthodox identification of ‘progress’ with the English language and the British state.
Introduction: The Fantastic as Sino-Enchantment in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas
Authors: Chan Kenneth , Stuckey Andrew
Published: January 2022

This introductory chapter employs the theoretical concept of Sino-enchantment to explore the cultural, political and ideological complexities, contradictions and complicities of contemporary Chinese fantastic films. The chapter briefly maps out the history of the fantastic in Chinese cinemas and locates the contemporary resurgence of the fantastic in that historical timeline. The theoretical exploration of Sino-enchantment emphasises the playfulness inherent in fantastic cinemas, which serves as a means for audiences to find re-enchantment in a modern, disenchanted world. Finally, the chapter threads the individual key points that the separate chapters articulate into a larger theoretical framework in order for readers to understand the key appeals that contemporary Chinese films make when they deploy the fantastic in newly reconfigured ways.
The Spectacle of Co-Production in The Great Wall
Authors: North Dan
Published: January 2022

This chapter offers a case study of Zhang Yimou’s film The Great Wall (2017) and the way it became emblematic of debates around co-productions between China and other filmmaking nations, especially the USA. Principally, it analyses the way visual effects are used to present fantastic imagery that shapes the visual identity of the film through a blend of Chinese and Hollywood conventions. A burgeoning visual effects industry in Chinese cinema, sustained by a wider interest in fantasy films, consumer electronics and the international marketability of visual spectacle, serves as a site of contest and cooperation, where national and cultural symbols are rendered with a combination of state-of-the-art technology and quasi-ancient designs. The production histories of The Great Wall, and the critical discourses accompanying its reception, illustrate how visual effects give visual form to the material infrastructure of film, inflected by the cultural contexts in which they are made, even as they work to efface and conceal the traces of their own manufacture.
Chick Flick Fantasy and Postfeminism in Chinese Cinema: 20 Once Again as a Transnational Remake
Authors: Chung Elaine
Published: January 2022

This chapter analyses chick flick fantasy as an emerging film genre in mainland Chinese cinema. It borrows the Hollywood-derived framework to read this hybridised genre with the concept of postfeminism. After surveying the rise of the chick flick fantasy in multiple Chinese media platforms, this chapter explores how the socio-cultural meanings of the global genre evolve when it travels across national borders to mainland China. From an inter-Asian perspective, it studies the case of 20 Once Again (2015), the Chinese remake of the South Korean film Miss Granny (2014), which together constitute also one of the best-selling Chinese-Korean films. It examines how the two versions, telling the same story, characterise their female protagonists with fantastical devices and generate distinctive gender discourses.
The Hollywood designers’ reign
Authors: Lundén Elizabeth Castaldo
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides the context for introducing the first Academy Awards banquet, explaining the commercial liaisons between the fashion and film industries that put Hollywood costume designers in the limelight as the foremost exponents of American fashion during the interwar years. In doing so, the book coins the term Hollywood Designers to distinguish those first costume designers who were trained in fashion and worked actively in the industry before and after their positions in the Hollywood studios’ costume departments. The chapter draws a parallel between the conformation of American fashion and film institutions by looking at the politics behind the creation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and The Fashion Group.
Creating an international fashion show for the American market
Authors: Lundén Elizabeth Castaldo
Published: January 2022

In this chapter, fashion comes to the forefront to understand how the event was branded as an ‘international fashion show free for all’ as part of the promotional strategies to sell the first broadcast of an Oscar ceremony (Oscarcast). It explains how the Academy created the fashion consultant position for the ceremony, presided then by Hollywood costume designer Edith Head, and its impact in structuring fashion around the ceremony. It also delves into the first televised fashion pre-show, known as Oscar Night in Hollywood (NBC, 1960), sponsored by Procter & Gamble.
Age of Rogues: Transgressive Politics at the Frontiers of the Ottoman Empire
Authors: Yenen Alp , Öztan Ramazan Hakkı
Published: January 2022

This conceptual chapter frames the turn of the twentieth century at the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire as an ‘age of rogues’, when the shaky foundations upon which the modern Balkans, Middle East and Caucasus were forged. By building on the example of the imperial and revolutionary setting of Ottoman Macedonia and the life history of ‘Young Turk’ leader Enver Paşa, we define the age of rogues as a particular geopolitical and historical context within which imperial rivalries gave birth to a cast of parapolitical and paramilitary agents in frontier regions whose violent autonomy and culture of transgression managed to transform the legitimate norms of politics and the formal institutions of state sovereignty. The term rogue not only signifies capability of transgression, but also denies any pre-configured historical consequence. Rogues can be both heroes and villains, bandits and bureaucrats, rebels and rulers, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. Their brand of what we call transgressive politics, which we locate at the analytical intersection of contentious politics and parapolitics, particularly flourished on the frontiers of empires and modernity, where violence became the effective form of interaction not only between coercive regimes and their subversive opponents but also among rivaling empires and competing rogue groups.
Conspiracy under Trial: Christian Brigands, Rebels and Activists in Bosnia during the Tanzimat
Authors: Vakali Anna
Published: January 2022

The Ottoman nineteenth century witnessed increased levels of mobilization among ordinary Christians throughout the Balkans. Preceded by the Greek and Serbian revolutions and the establishment of autonomous Serbia (1830) and the Greek Kingdom (1832), the onset of the Ottoman centralizing and modernizing reform program known as the Tanzimat (1839-1876) was followed by consecutive tax revolts, local uprisings connected with intense smuggling of weaponry, as well as the formation of networks, (secret) societies, and clubs facilitated by the dissemination of printed material. Instead of viewing these uprisings as a linear chain of events, during which specific demands of the population were manipulated by external and internal agents having a nationalist agenda, this article aims to approach them in their full complexity, without the hindsight of the events which ensued them. By focusing on a series of local uprisings in Ottoman Bosnia during the late 1850s and early 1860s, I argue that the process of ‘nationalization’ was less linear and reductionist than has been accepted; various social groups posing different demands operated simultaneously; agency belonged not (only) to ‘elite mediums’, but was exercised by such diverse local actors as peasants, village priests, brigands and jobless wanderers, motivated and mobilized by different agendas.
Late-Ottoman ‘Rogues’ and their Paths to Power: A Prosopographic Study
Authors: Fortna Benjamin C.
Published: January 2022

This contribution addresses the relationship between individuals and the centers of power in the late Ottoman Empire through a prosopographic study of Unionist komitacıs. Choosing a selection of activist officers who identified themselves as fedais, or self-sacrificing agents, the chapter examines their early career paths to disentangle the ways in which affective affinity, personal allegiance, opportunism, serendipity and structural change in the empire’s military combined to shape their formation. Taking as its focus a core group of middle-ranking officers from different ethnic and geographical backgrounds who came together to serve in key battles from the 1910s to the 1920s, the study analyzes their education, early careers, and patronage links to ascertain patterns and divergences. This select group features men who rose to certain degrees of prominence due to their service for and loyalty to those at the upper echelons of the military establishment, including most prominently Enver Pasha. The paper assesses the tensions between the network of personal and patronage-based connections linking the late-Ottoman komitacıs and the broader but increasingly volatile structural dynamics of the period that brought these men to the fore, with dramatic consequences for the empire, its fragile demographic and social patterns, and the individuals’ post-imperial histories.
A Man of the Frontier: Ramadan Shallash and the Making of the Post‑Ottoman Arab East
Authors: Provence Michael
Published: January 2022

Focusing on the region surrounding Istanbul and the Balkans, important studies of the past couple decades centered on the men who challenged the monarchy in 1908, bent it to their collective will before 1914, and lost the war in 1918. Their post-war insurgency campaign, from which emerged the Turkish Republic, was understood a singular experience in which the “Turkish homeland” loomed large. Their collective ideology and shared habitus was believed to have been formed in the crucible of Great Power proxy wars, nationalist movements, and guerrilla struggles in the Balkans during the tumultuous decades preceding the Great War. But the Ottoman State was far more than its ‘European’ provinces, and similar individuals played equally key roles in the Kurdish and Arab regions as well. In fact, ex-Ottoman soldiers challenged the post-war settlement in distant places like Iraq, Syria, and Palestine into the 1940s. This chapter reconstructs the biography of one such individual, Ramadan Shallash. It traces his scholarly career first in the Imperial Tribal School and then in the Military Academy, followed by a discussion of his professional career as an officer for the Ottoman army and the roles he played in the making of the post-Ottoman Middle East.
7 Digital Surround Sound and the Mimetic Site
Authors: Chattopadhyay Budhaditya
Published: January 2022

Since the early 1990s, a large-scale conversion from analogue recording and production practices to digital technologies has taken place in cinemas.1 Digital technology has been integrated into the production and post-production stages of filmmaking as well as reproduction and projection formats. The ramification of this development has been far-reaching and particularly evident in the way filmmaking has changed through novel digital sound practices (...
13 Street, Public Squares, Urban Neighbourhood
Authors: Chattopadhyay Budhaditya
Published: January 2022

On a hectic morning in a busy street, pedestrians are walking by without looking at one another. They may listen to the footsteps of others, but such listening implies recognition of the social other’s existence and encourages public confrontation through eye contact. Such private contact within public spaces, whether streets, squares, parks or public gardens, counteracts the rhythm that city life demands. Many people are absorbed by the acute socio-political aura that urban sites underscore. Sounds of heavy traffic, electrical machinery and electronic devices, directly human-made sounds such as rustling clothes, a cough, discernible footsteps, a car horn being used, a shout carved out from the background – all of these sounds will eventually dissolve into the city’s monotone, leaving no trace. Little memory of their occurrence will remain. Everyday urban sounds are indifferent; they alienate by absorbing everything into one great cacophony. City inhabitants may endeavour to survive this sonic onslaught by existing on its margins, immersing themselves in their mediated mobile phone world. A personalised city is an augmented environment of soliloquy that outlines selfhood....
19 The God of Small Sounds
Authors: Chattopadhyay Budhaditya
Published: January 2022

Jacob Bronowski argued that humans are always ingrained in natural landscapes and habitual sites, whether knowingly or unknowingly (1973). And yet, as Timothy Morton suggests, humans endeavour to distance themselves from nature as separate entities (2009). Location-driven film and media arts perhaps function as a mirror or lens through which we can see the sites we occupy and ourselves as we occupy them, perceive them, abandon them or personalise them through the agency of humanistic/artistic intervention and mediation. Through technological advancements, the world has entered the Anthropocene – a new geologic era defined by unprecedented human disturbances over earth’s environment and ecosystems. In this era, the ecological integrity of natural sites is being endangered. Land is being intensely developed, especially in the Global South, to facilitate rapid urbanisation and industrial growth. As a result of this speedy development, many natural and rural locations are becoming SEZs (special economic zones), which deeply affect the environment. Consequently, as these areas become homogenised, industrial sites, they are decaying into bucolic landscapes. This transition is complex to grasp, especially when considering their traditionally rich auditory culture and history....
The Blue-veiled: A Semiological Analysis of a Social Love Story
Authors: Bagheri Asal
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores how, through formal filmic grammar, Banietemad has depicted love and relations between men and women in this film. This chapter also demonstrates how Iranian cinema chastely explores love and expresses its own “Iranian form” regarding relationships between man and woman, through constructing space in the way that traditional Iranian architecture does (external spaces for guests and internal spaces for family and private activities), but also through using stylistic devices reminiscent of classical Persian poetry.
Cinematic Western China: The Under-represented Cinematic Cities
Authors: Zou Hongyan
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides an overview of the affinity between cinema and cities, and shows that cinematic cities located in western China have reflected, responded to and reimagined China’s multi-layered realities in the grand progress of urbanisation and modernisation since the 1980s. It presents a comparison between China’s Westerns and Hollywood Westerns in terms of theme, genre, geographical setting and cultural significance, demonstrating that China’s Westerns configured a rural and ethnographical image of the area from the 1980s to the 1990s, which therefore become stereotypes of the region, casting a stark contrast to the dynamic modern images of cinematic Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Delineating China’s eastern coastal-region dominated “urban cinema” that resonates with the uneven urbanisation and modernisation in mainland China in the reform era, this chapter helps situate the discussion on Chinese western urban film within a larger historical and social context. Drawing on space theories of scholars such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja and Michel de Certeau, it shows how national projects and economic policies carried out in western China at different periods shape and reshape the “real and imagined” spaces of four capital cities in the area.
National Project and Disappearing Space
Authors: Zou Hongyan
Published: January 2022

This chapter displays how material and cognitive spaces are shaped and demolished due to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam by examining Zhang Ming’s 1996 Rainclouds over Wushan [Wushan yunyu] and Jia Zhangke’s 2006 Still Life [Sanxia haoren]. The enormous national project represents the macro spatial view of rationalising and modernising the urban space, yet Zhang Ming chooses a micro perspective to examine the inertia and subjective dimension of the city. He creates a Thirdspace by showing the street view of the urban space and everyday life related to emerging commercialism and oppressed desire in a claustrophobic space, which opposes the grand discourse of building the Three Gorges Dam to national resurrection and modernisation. Still Life adopts the style of magical realism to convey the dramatic changes underway in the physical space and the consequent traumatic experiences in the mental space of characters. It works as a space of resistance by focusing on those marginalised people who make ruins, live in ruins, are exiled and even buried by ruins. Ruins, therefore, bear clear and indivisible class marks. The cinematic representations of the city resonate with the immensity and complexity of the trend toward urbanisation and modernisation.