bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Prestressed Concrete Pavement Technology Update
Authors: Tayabji Shiraz D. , Barenberg Ernest J. , Gramling Wade , Teng Paul
Published: January 2025

Use of prestressed post-tensioned concrete pavements has been suggested for many years to obtain extended pavement service life in a cost-effective manner. Conventional concrete pavements are designed on the basis of concrete’s relatively low flexural and tensile strengths without effectively utilizing the natural advantages of its high compressive strength. In prestressed pavements, precompression in the concrete due to prestressing allows for increased allowable tensile and flexural stresses, thereby permitting use of thinner and longer concrete slabs. Transverse joints in prestressed pavements may be spaced at about 91.5 to about 183 m. Although several experimental prestressed pavements were constructed in the US, the US experience is based on six large-scale highway projects (Virginia, Pennsylvania (2), Arizona, Mississippi, and Texas), and two airport projects (Chicago O’Hare and Rockford, Illinois), all constructed since 1971. The oldest project, built along an access road to Dulles International Airport near Washington, DC, is almost 30 years old and the youngest project, built along a 7 th International Conference on Concrete Pavements – Orlando, Florida, USA – September 9-13, 2001 taxiway at Greater Rockford Airport in Northern Illinois is about 7 years old. All of these projects, except for the one in Arizona, are still in service. The Arizona highway project was reconstructed recently as part of major intersection realignment at the project site. This paper presents an update on the performance of these eight prestressed pavements. Design, construction, joint hardware and prestressing details are summarized for each project. This is followed by a discussion of their performance to date, including distress development, ride quality, structural testing, and repairs made. Although, there appears to be a need to develop improved joint hardware details, the performance evaluation indicates that prestressed pavements are a viable alternative for pavement rehabilitation or reconstruction.
EVALUATION OF HYDRAULIC CEMENT CONCRETE OVERLAYS PLACED ON THREE PAVEMENTS IN VIRGINIA
Authors: Sprinkel Michael M. , Ozyildirim Celik
Published: January 2025

Three hydraulic cement concrete pavement overlays were placed in the summer of 1995 at three locations in Virginia. Two of the overlays were placed on continuously reinforced concrete pavement to prevent spalling caused by a shy cover over the reinforcement and to enhance the structural integrity. The third overlay was placed to correct a rutted asphalt pavement. The construction was funded with 20 percent Virginia Department of Transportation maintenance funds and 80 percent special ISTEA Section 6005 federal funds specifically allocated to demonstrate overlay technologies. ISTEA funds were also used to evaluate the installation and initial conditions of the overlays and to prepare the report. The variables in the study were concrete mix design, overlay thickness, and base material. Mineral admixtures and steel and plastic fibers were used to improve the mechanical properties and durability of the overlay concrete. Overlay thickness and base material were varied to determine their effect on overlay performance. Overlays that were 51 and 102 mm (2 and 4 in) thick worked well on hydraulic cement concrete pavements. Overlays that were 76 and 102 mm (3 and 4 in) thick worked well on asphalt concrete pavements. These overlays can be used to extend the life of the pavements.
THE "SYSTEMS" APPROACH TO CONCRETE PAVEMENTS
Authors: Forster Stephen W.
Published: January 2025

The performance of concrete pavements is influenced by the series of processes that takes place during a project. This paper reviews the processes that have a major influence on the long-term performance of concrete pavements, and suggests a "systems" approach to help assure due consideration of the interaction among these critical processes. The three major processes are: materials selection and mixture design, pavement design and the construction process. Aspects of each process are considered as they can influence uncontrolled cracking, faulting and concrete durability. Decisions made during the three processes must be mutually compatible, as well as compatible with environmental conditions at the time of paving and over the long term. A "systems" approach to concrete pavements would assure that these areas and their interaction are adequately considered, and therefore that long-lasting, high-performance concrete pavements are the routine result. The framework of the HIPERPAV software developed by the Federal Highway Administration is a practical means to apply this systems approach to concrete pavements.
The Satirical Gothic Vampire in England, 1740–1850
Authors: Hogle Jerrold E.
Published: January 2025

We are all aware of the parodic take-offs on the Gothic vampire-figure from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore (1887) to Hotel Transylvania (2012). But the satiric use of the vampire, often via tongue-in-cheek metaphors, goes back much further and, when the vampire is appropriated by Gothic fiction at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, these comic and metaphoric dimensions turn out to be so built in to this figure’s symbolic foundations that they come right along with it and remain active in Gothic tales and dramas about out-and-out vampires, as well as in satirical poetry and prose outside them.This chapter argues that such a pattern continues in tandem with the horror of the un-dead throughout the growth of Gothic vampires in cultural importance all the way through to the serialized Varney the Vampire (1845-47), grounding the vampire-figure from then on in a kind of double-consciousness for readers and audiences. This multi-dimensional, half-conscious awareness, it can also be argued, points to rarely-noticed levels of ideological irresolution, to Western self-doubts, in the cultural unconscious that simmered from the 1740s to the 1850s – and continue to simmer -- alongside the more terrifying levels projected into and aroused by the Gothic vampire.
General Introduction: Reading, Writing, and Creating Communities in Children’s Periodicals
Authors: Moruzi Kristine , Rodgers Beth , Smith Michelle J.
Published: January 2025

This extensive research-led introduction discusses the dominant concerns informing the development of the periodical genre for children, which is characterised by a tension between didacticism and enjoyment and how it responds to changing ideas about children and childhood. It then turns to the methodological and definitional challenges of examining children’s periodicals over two centuries and across a wide geographical range. It explores how the sheer volume of magazines and their ephemerality pose significant problems for the contemporary researcher while also reflecting on the periodical features of these texts that are significant for young readers. It also discusses how shifts in form and content require scholars to develop an expansive definition of the children’s periodical. Finally, it discusses the scope and structure of the volume and consider how it can contribute to further scholarship in the field.
Charity, Cultural Exchange, and Generational Difference in Scottish Children’s Writings about the First World War
Authors: Burke Lois , Lauder Charlotte
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines two manuscript magazines, The Pierrot (1910–1914) and The Scribble (1915–1916), and their unique insights into childhood experiences of the First World War. The writings and illustrations included in these manuscript magazines show that these children viewed themselves as playing active roles in the war effort; The Pierrot raised money to buy clothing for soldiers on the front, and The Scribble proclaimed it was ‘The Magazine That Sends Cigarettes to Soldiers.’ For the youthful contributors, these magazines were a vehicle for expressing their sentiments about war during a time when young people were perceived to have little agency in public affairs or rhetoric.
Gendering Physical Activity and Sport in the Girl’s Own Paper and Boy’s Own Paper
Authors: Day Dave
Published: January 2025

Socialization into the gendered sporting world of late Victorian Britain occurred most obviously through family and school, although other, much more subtle, mechanisms were often employed to reinforce definitions of masculinity and acceptable femininity. Popular accessible material in the form of periodicals was especially effective in this respect and in their pages the values ascribed to sport and physical activity reproduced contemporary social attitudes. This chapter examines in detail the 1881 volumes of the Boy’s Own Paper and its sister version, the Girl’s Own Paper, to analyse the different ways in which appropriate gender behaviour with respect to physical activity and sport were reinforced. Attention is given to all aspects of content, the structure, the articles, the correspondence, and, most importantly, the illustrations. It was in these visual representations of physical activity that femininity and masculinity were clearly delineated; the passive nature of the young woman knitting or singing at piano juxtaposed with the dynamic nature of masculinity, and the aura of superiority, that was presented to the young male reader. The chapter concludes by linking these differences to social class and discussing to what extent the periodical content may have been deliberately designed to reinforce sporting stereotypes.
Settings and Trends of the Ottoman–Safavid Detente
Authors: Güngörürler Selim
Published: January 2025

Chapter 1 of the book provides an overview of Ottoman-Safavid relations after the Peace of Zuhab in 1639. It emphasizes the hierarchical nature of diplomacy between the two powers, with the Ottomans consistently asserting seniority over the Safavids and the Safavids recognizing this. Key diplomatic concepts such as legal personhood, representation, and delegation shaped diplomatic missions between the two monarchies, highlighting the importance of maintaining a balance of power. The chapter also delves into how borderlands became a space of constant negotiation, reflecting foreign policy challenges on both sides. Finally, it explores the diplomatic language used in these interactions, which was crucial in preventing misunderstandings and sustaining the peace.
The Weather and the Wake: Maternal Embodiment and Peril in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones
Authors: Lénárt-Muszka Zsuzsanna
Published: January 2025

The chapter foregrounds maternal embodiment and identity in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. It argues that while protagonist Esch’s pregnancy is a significant plotline, it is decentered through the novel’s narrative design. Instead, other mother figures are foregrounded, fostering Esch’s understanding of her insipient motherhood while throwing into sharp relief her position as a single, poor, Black teenager. Following Katrina, the literal meaning of the wake intersects with its metaphorical meaning as understood by Christina Sharpe: the acute danger of the hurricane is imposed on the quotidian state of Black life in an already poverty-stricken region. The weather, as used metaphorically by Sharpe, refers to the pervasive climate of anti-Back racism, which Katrina, a literal weather event, exposes and exacerbates. Weathering is also present in the sense used by Arline Geronimus: the gradual bodily harm caused by years of inadequate nutrition, healthcare, and stress. The novel thus juxtaposes literal and metaphorical meanings of (the) weather(ing) and examines the interlocking effects of both short- and long-term, psychic and corporeal, natural and social, catastrophes. Esch copes with the weather—in both its meanings—by fixating on fragmented maternal figures; but she cannot escape the dehumanizing aspects of being in that weather.
‘I need the story to go’: Sing, Unburied, Sing , Afropessimism and Black Narratives of Redemption
Authors: Petrelli Marco
Published: January 2025

Situated at the convergence of narratology and hauntology, this chapter argues that Sing, Unburied, Sing disrupts the paradigmatic conundrums that Afropessimism attributes to Black narratives. Frank B. Wilderson III considers Black emplotment as a ‘catastrophe’ for narrative. Defining Blackness as a non-human paradigmatic condition coterminous with social death, Wilderson concludes that narrative and redemption are inaccessible to Black people because the history of totalizing violence that came to define them lacks both a proper diegesis and an actual denouement. The theoretical issues Wilderson ascribes to Black storytelling are echoed by Richie, the ghost narrator in Ward’s novel. In Richie’s chapters narrative sometimes fails the spectre’s expressive needs, especially when he tries to describe his posthumous perception of time and space. Through Richie, the novel addresses the possibilities of Black narrative and the challenges forced upon it by racialized Western paradigms. Although Sing’s depiction of contemporary Black life is often in line with Afropessimistic speculation, the song that stands as the novel’s denouement seems to possess the redemptive powers Wilderson’s analysis confutes. Social death as embodied by Richie might be ‘aporetic with respect to narrative writ large’, but Ward refuses to separate Black storytelling from the possibility of salvation.
‘Let Loose the Melodies of Holy Hymns’: Voice, Agency and Gender in Aristophanes’ Birds
Authors: Libatique Daniel
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the reception of Sophocles’ Tereus in Aristophanes’ Birds in terms of narratological control over voice, agency and gender. Aristophanes attempts to correct a power hierarchy constructed by Sophocles by shifting opportunities for communication from female characters such as Procne and Philomela to the male Tereus. In so doing, he conspicuously mutes those female characters, reducing them to the object of sexual advances or mere allusions, and he gives control over their voices and bodies to Tereus, Euelpides, Peisetaerus and the chorus of birds. These shifts conform to normative gender expectations that will nevertheless be upended in the practices of Cloudcuckooland, a subversion of a subversion that highlights Aristophanes’ penchant for emulative generic play.
Performing Ritual Sacrifice in Aristophanes’ Peace and Birds
Authors: English Mary C.
Published: January 2025

In Peace (421 BCE) and in Birds (414 BCE), Aristophanes crafts scenes where the comic heroes perform onstage sacrifices: Trygaeus celebrates the restoration of the goddess Peace and Peisetaerus marks the establishment of Cloudcuckooland with a tribute to the new gods. Aristophanes almost seems to mock religious conventions by having Trygaeus and Peisetaerus use the prayers and instruments of sacrifice to further their comic agenda; yet, at the same time, he appears bound to maintain some sense of religious decorum by not having them display completed sacrifices onstage. Perhaps this tension is an inherent element of satire or parody – where the humor derives from a careful balance of truth and comic exaggeration – but Aristophanes seems only to stage this type of extended sacrifice scene at moments of political optimism. Peace coincides with the negotiations for the Peace of Nicias, and Birds is performed just under a year after the launching of the Sicilian expedition.
διδαγμάτων‎ ἥ‎διστον‎: Storytelling and the Origin of Religion in the Sisyphus Fragment (43 Fr. 19 TrGF )
Authors: Ford Andrew
Published: January 2025

This essay explicates a passage in the fragment from Critias’s (?) Sisyphus (43 F 19.25–39 TGrF). Reading the text in the light of contemporary poetic theories suggests that the phrase διδαγμάτων‎ ἥ‎διστον‎ should neither be emended away (as by Diggle et al.) nor read as bitterly ironic (as, for example, by Collard and Cropp) but as a frank expression of a cynical but shrewd theory of how to win credence in the art of storytelling.
Keeping ‘pace with the growing spirit of the times’: The Women’s Magazine in Transition
Authors: Batchelor Jennie
Published: January 2025

In 1820, the Lady’s Magazine marked its fifty-first anniversary by launching a new series. The move was unavoidable. As editor Samuel Hamilton elaborated in the series prospectus, times and tastes had changed irrevocably. Citing “momentous” developments in female education, increased competition, and higher production values, the Lady’s Magazine vowed to jettison once-cherished content (including embroidery patterns, news columns, and the annual supplement) and to “innovate” by increasing the range and quality of its textual and visual contents. The subsequent decade wrought decisive changes for the Lady’s Magazine as it sought to maintain and grow its readership in the face of “formidable competitors” such as the Lady’s Monthly Museum, La Belle Assemblée, and the annuals. It was not alone. Although commonly neglected in Romantic and Victorian periodicals scholarship, the 1820s was a vital transitional decade in which the form(s) and mission of the women’s magazine were energetically renegotiated “to keep pace with the growing spirit of the times.” This chapter documents how rivalries and intimacies between different 1820s periodicals and periodical formats altered the course of the women’s magazine and sheds light on the critical role that women writers played in orchestrating and, in some cases, resisting these developments.
Capitalism and Woolf’s Beyond-Work
Authors: Yan Chan Evelyn Tsz
Published: January 2025

Waged work with long hours, as Kathi Weeks has highlighted in The Problem with Work (2011), “remains today the centerpiece of late capitalist economic systems” (6). This model of work seems to have become so entrenched as a social norm, so embedded in the very fabric of society, that it has become difficult to see that alternatives are possible. As a way out, Weeks advances the idea of a “postwork” society conceived “around the goals of freedom and autonomy,” where “the demands for basic income and shorter hours” would be “not only to inhabit the spaces where we now find a life outside of waged work, but also to create spaces in which to constitute new subjectivities, new work and nonwork ethics, and new practices of care and sociality” (174‒15). Virginia Woolf, this chapter shows, engaged in a similar project in her time, if one that is more centred on envisioning alternatives in an array of representations of work under capitalism in her writing. This chapter samples characters and narrators across Woolf’s oeuvre in order to see how they, with different aspirations and under different economic circumstances, posit themselves in relation to work.
Reimagining Critical Legal Studies
Authors: Stewart James Gilchrist
Published: January 2025

This chapter questions the plausibility of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) as counterculture, reframing it as a legal subculture. This recategorisation offers clarity around the reactions to CLS, both inside and outside the academe. The application of a legal subculture is weighed up against a minor jurisprudence, with both offering new insights into CLS. A successful argument is made for a legal subculture and the associated sociological lens of a moral panic is applied. Through this application an understanding of CLS as moral panic is developed, clarifying the dominant historical and contemporary understanding of CLS.
‘Look upon the hideous god of war’: Reading Shakespeare as a Pacifist
Authors: White Robert
Published: January 2025

Among the many possibilities of different views on war in Shakespeare’s plays, one avenue has rarely been systematically explored, that Shakespeare shows through his plays a deep scepticism about war and a temperamental inclination towards peaceful resolution to conflict. Samuel Johnson described Shakespearean comedy as ‘a mode of thinking congenial to his nature’, and I believe much the same can be said on behalf of peace in his dramatic forays into war and peace. Given the undiminishing cultural authority accorded to Shakespeare on behalf of a range of different causes for over four centuries, it seems important at least to pursue an argument that he was at heart anti-war and proto-pacifist. The pen –or in his case the quill –is mightier than the sword.
‘Mud and dung’: Virginia Woolf’s Environmental Mattering of War
Authors: Hall Molly Volanth
Published: January 2025

The First World War was a conflict that had profound environmental consequences on a planetary scale. In addition to the immediate destruction of the environments of its various fronts, the war altered supply chains, resource extraction methods, and fossil fuel economies, while simultaneously undermining trust in social, political and economic structures. This chapter explores how Woolf’s post-war oeuvre uses mud as a trope to respond to the social and environmental aftermath of the conflict. Beginning by establishing how mud became associated with the war’s popular imaginary, especially through the image of the ‘slimescapes’ of the front, the chapter documents mud’s often disruptive and pivotal appearances in Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Years (1937). Emphasizing mud’s mutable aesthetic register in Woolf’s writing, from the ‘muddy’ hole whose primitive formlessness inspires horror in Peter Walsh to the ‘muddled’ mind of Eleanor Pargiter that produces creative, intuitive insights, this essay shows how mud is not only a central component of Woolf’s response to the legacies of the war but central to her ecological sensibilities.
Deleuze, Digital Media and Thought
Authors: Deane-Freeman Timothy
Published: January 2025

This book traces Deleuze’s remarks about the digital to reveal both their origins and implications. In so doing, we encounter a position which is fundamentally ambiguous. On the one hand, digital techniques are intimately related to what Deleuze calls ‘societies of control’, which deploy them in order to close down potential spaces of creativity and resistance. On the other, digital images take up the mantle of cinema, displacing habitual forms of cognition and forcing us to think in new ways. Deleuze, Digital Media and Thought traces these dual impulses through the images of cinema, television and social media, as well as explicating key Deleuzian concepts, including virtuality, immanence and the outside.
Introduction: The US Government and the Assassination of Foreign Officials
Authors: Trenta Luca
Published: January 2025

Starting with an account of the Trump Administration’s assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, this introductory chapter provides an overview of the place of assassination in US foreign policy. The chapter focuses on three main areas. It showcases the variety of methods deployed by the US government, suggesting that these can be understood along a continuum from more to less direct. It makes the argument that – for a plethora of reasons - the US government relied on assassination primarily against Third World/Global South leaders and officials. Assassination emerged as an option against enemies and (former) allies and van be understood as a lens to explore the evolution of US foreign policy from the Cold War, to the ‘war on drugs,’ to the ‘war on terror.’ The introduction also connects the evolution of US policy surrounding assassination with International Relations literature on norms and norm contestation. Particularly after the mid-1970s, assassination remained an available option through the erosion and contestation of the prohibition of assassination first approved by the Ford Administration. The chapter ends by reflection on the challenges of researching such a secretive and controversial topic.
The dialectscapes of North East England
Authors: Pearce Michael
Published: January 2025

This chapter embeds the work in its sociocultural and geographical contexts by exploring the ‘dialectscapes’ of the region and the important role the North East has played in the sociodialectology of England. It considers the linguistic character of North East Vernacular English (NEVE), showing how it has emerged from a complex of interacting forces. The chapter emphasizes the significance of the region’s ethnonymic field, examining the role played by the most well-known group names – Geordie, Mackem and Smoggie – in practices of (and metadiscourses about) naming, enregisterment, demarcation, difference, commodification and contestation. It also gives an overview of major dialectological resources for the study of the region’s dialect.
Muhacir as Problem
Authors: Fratantuono Ella
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the establishment and significance of the Ottoman Migrant Commission (Muhacirin Komisyonu) during the mass migrations of Crimean Tatars and Circassians in the early- to mid-1860s. It follows the career of Nusret Bey/Pasha, the Director of Migrant Settlement in Rumelia from 1860–4, who played a role within migration administration across several decades. The chapter demonstrates that while migrants remained a resource in colonising Ottoman territory, the muhacir (‘migrant’) also became a problem for officials to solve. Settlement protocols encompassed emergency aid and long-term investment in migrants’ economic productivity. Officials encountered multiple challenges as they attempted to actualise large-scale settlement. As the muhacir became a problem in need of a state-driven solution, officials sought to improve administration by mapping territory and collecting data. Their efforts to turn refugees into colonists attached certain rights and resources to the muhacir category overall and to subcategories based on factors such as class, occupation, gender and age.
Muhacir as Victim
Authors: Fratantuono Ella
Published: January 2025

This chapter analyses the influence of international dynamics on Ottoman migration governance through the lenses of public health migrant welfare. The chapter traces migrant sickness and mortality during two episodes of mass migration. It then demonstrates how during those episodes, public health and the provision of aid to migrants were crucial to Ottoman claims to sovereignty and international legitimacy. First, in the 1860s, the Ottoman government developed techniques to administer migrants in response to concerns raised by members of the Constantinople Superior Health Council, an entity comprised of Ottoman administrators and representatives of the Great Powers. Second, migrant welfare was essential to the empire’s framing of its administrative efficacy and overall legitimacy during the 1875-8 Eastern Crisis. Amidst the 1877-8 Russo-Ottoman War, Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) leveraged migrant suffering in an attempt to overcome anti-Ottoman and anti-Muslim sentiment in Western Europe. Further, philanthropic efforts, such as the Migrant Aid Committee (İane-i Muhacirin Encumeni), established by Ottoman parliamentarians, coupled concern for refugees with attention to international and domestic politics. The chapter thus asserts that during the migration crises of the early 1860s and late 1870s, migrant welfare was crucial in arguments over the Ottoman right to rule.
Muhacir as Failure
Authors: Fratantuono Ella
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores migrant settlement as a territorialising process crucial to Ottoman social engineering. It shows that officials sought to organise space to shape the population and its behaviours. The chapter describes the tools, documents, institutions and projects Ottoman officials deployed to settle migrants, design migrant villages and to render legible the distribution of the population in Anatolia. It also illustrates how failures, critiques and contestations over ‘empty land’ reinforced and challenged documentary regimes and ideologies of land use in the 1880s and 1890s. Officials believed that they could rely on science and careful planning to overcome environmental obstacles and to execute large-scale settlement projects. Diagnosis of failure and ‘the will to improve’ generated grounds for further intervention and contributed to the positioning of the state – and officials as its representatives – as outside of and acting upon society, elevated by regularity, standardisation and the binding qualities of legal codes and documentary evidence.
Jewishness between Performance and Appropriation: Music for The Merchant of Venice (2004)
Authors: Leonard Kendra Preston
Published: January 2025

The performance history of The Merchant of Venice is one entangled with what producers and directors hear as the sounds of Jewishness, be it traditional prayer, like the Shema or Kaddish, or contrived nonsense, like the ‘old Hebraic song of sacrifice’ sung by Anthony Sher in a 1987 stage production. This chapter interrogates composer Jocelyn Pook’s score for Michael Radford’s 2004 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. In discussing both the film and Pook’s score, which engages with specific cultural sounds both within and outside of the typical Western music purview, the author takes up Christy Desmet’s theory of a ‘dialogic concept of appropriation’ to study the use of music, particularly unaccompanied vocal chant, that functions as part of the signification of Jewishness and Catholicism in the film and iterates the religious divide that serves as a fulcrum for the plot. While the appropriation of Catholic chant has become widely accepted and expected in films in which Catholicism plays a part, this essay shows that the use of Jewish-sounding music is far more complex.
Waning and Re-emergence
Authors: Andreeva Petya
Published: January 2025

It is often assumed that animal-style design belongs to “Eurasia BCE”, and that the zoomorphic image systems of early pastoralists died out soon after the dawn of the first millennium. The archaeological record, however, points to several important resurgences of animal-style art. This chapter seeks to uncover the lingering traces of Iron Age nomadic art well into the second millennium. To this end, the author studies archaeological finds from the cultures of the Xianbei, Türks, Permian Komi and Udmurts, among others, and ends with a case study of a felt craft still practiced in Central Asia today.
Towards a Resolution
Authors: Andreeva Petya
Published: January 2025

This concluding chapter summarizes the book’s main premises and touches upon some methodological challenges in the field of nomadic and Central Asian studies. Firstly, the nomadic penchant for zoomorphism and metonymic expression was inextricably linked to a psychology of mobility and a desire to sustain the collective memory of ethnically and culturally diverse, opportunistic alliances. Secondly, rather than being culturally encased by their sedentary neighbours, nomads managed to exert significant influence on the artistic landscape of Central Eurasia for more than a thousand years. The text also poses some hitherto unexplored questions, including how one deals with the various depositional contexts of nomadic objects, and how one tackles issues of provenance as steppe artworks (especially gold) enter the antiquities market and museums. Particularly pertinent here is the collection of the Dutch statesman N. Witsen, a close associate of Peter I. Having considered the nomads’ perpetual in-betweenness in art histories and historiographies, the book ends with a short detour into the work of Owen Jones whose thoughts on the design traditions of non-Western societies emerge as particularly relevant.
Naturalist Comedy
Authors: Singer Robert
Published: January 2025

Throughout modern and contemporary art, there is frequent linkage established between depictions of labor and narratives of naturalist discontent, as the world defines gradations of success and failure by capital, class, and corresponding conflict. Naturalist comedy posits a thriving cinematic space for these depictions as it is associated with malfunctioning labor and personal complications rendered in images of class and social (im)mobility. The naturalist film comedy launches a platform for varieties of labor-related and associated experiences that do not always end "badly" for individuals, but rather, as impossible, embarrassing situations. The individual or group's efforts are observed and exposed either working or not working, and stages of awkward or humiliating moments may be humorous while rarely being fatal. This chapter confirms that naturalist comedy is an essential presence in international cinema.
Melodrama
Authors: Williams Carolyn
Published: January 2025

Starting with Dickens himself, many critics have understood that melodrama is not the opposite of realism. This essay argues for the tight relation between Dickens’s parodies of melodrama and his adaptations or transformations of it. After considering the melodramatic alternation between tragic and comic scenes – theorised in Chapter 17 of Oliver Twist (1837–39) – we see that Dickens practices other melodramatic oscillations as well. The essay then focuses on Dickens’s transformations of melodrama’s pictorial dramaturgy, exemplified in his fiction by his uses of the tableau. In Bleak House (1852–53) we find reworkings of the conventional family picture gallery; in both Bleak House and Little Dorrit (1855–57), we find repeated attention to the spectator’s fixated astonishment in the presence of a tableau; and in Little Dorrit we find fixation itself ‘writ large’ in relation to the novel’s melodramatic rhythm of containment and release.
Global Dickens
Authors: Hollington Michael
Published: January 2025

The first part of this essay presents reasons for Dickens’s global dissemination that transcend print culture, followed by an account of how this happened in white settler colonies in part through the habit of public performance and reading aloud, foregrounding the specific case of Katherine Mansfield. Subsequently, the essay outlines the history of Dickens’s reception in Europe in three major centres – Germany, France, and Russia, in which country a great translator of Dickens ushered in a great literature openly indebted to Dickens. The penultimate part considers ‘Global Dickenses’ – writers including Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul who have been characterised as Dickensian, and who acknowledge their debt to him – before concluding reflection on the thoroughly ‘English’ caricature of Dickens that once prevailed, and how the work of Ada Nisbet exploded this, creating new awareness of Dickens’s global reach as well as of the impossibility for any one scholar of encompassing this.
Commemoration
Authors: Wood Claire
Published: January 2025

Who gets a voice in poetic commemoration of a public figure? While often associated with the elite tradition of canonical elegy, poetic commemoration can encompass a more varied selection of poetry and poets, both ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’. This was certainly true in Dickens’s case, with the author’s death in June 1870 inspiring a wide range of verse, both in the immediate aftermath and the decades that followed. Many of these poems were reprinted as part of the long-running ‘Poetical Tributes to Charles Dickens’ series, published in the Dickensian between January 1905 and December 1918, alongside new verses by members of the Dickens Fellowship. Many-voiced and eclectic in form, origin, and coverage, this corpus demonstrates how poetic commemoration works differently when criteria other than artistry and originality are privileged. Considering both the ways in which individual tributes commemorate Dickens and the cumulative work of the collection, I argue that ‘Poetical Tributes’ affectively stages Dickens’s loss, renewal, and endurance, broadly consolidating a sanctioned version of the author while allowing different facets of his life and work to be celebrated.
The 1980s
Authors: Murphy Paula
Published: January 2025

This chapter concerns robot AIs in the 1980s, some of which are humanoid in appearance. The theme of AI death is raised in Short Circuit and DARYL with exploration of how it is different from human death. DARYL also presents the first child AI in film and explores emotional intelligence. Blade Runner presents the recurrent ‘fear of the many’ in AI film, as AIs combine forces against humans. Some AI characters are presented more positively as worthy of respect and love in this decade: in Blade Runner, Deckard falls in love with AI Rachael; in Short Circuit and DARYL, AI ‘children’ are adopted by human families; in Aliens, the AI Bishop proves himself worthy of the description ‘artificial person’.
The 2010s
Authors: Murphy Paula
Published: January 2025

The AIs considered in this chapter are humanoid robots. The familiar objectification and exploitation of the female humanoid AI is evident with Ava and Kyoko in Ex Machina and Cleo in Automata. The fear of the many is seen with AIs working collaboratively in Automata and Ex Machina. AI death, parent-child relationships and reproduction continue to be strong themes in this decade. In Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, David demonstrates the unfinal death of the AI, struggles with his human ‘father’ and becomes a ‘father’ of sorts himself – a genetic engineer. Eva is a child AI in this decade, and Chitti in Enthiran and Chappie must learn like children.
A female AI scientist creates an AI for the first time in Eva, and Blade Runner 2049 presents the child of an AI mother and a human father. Eva gives a new perspective on AI death, linking affective intelligence and memory to life, and presenting its absence as death. Affective intelligence is also explored in Blade Runner 2049 with the character of Joi, a digital AI. The Singularity emerges strongly as a theme in this decade with Automata and Ex Machina presenting scenarios on the cusp of the singularity.
The 2010s
Authors: Murphy Paula
Published: January 2025

The AIs in this chapter consists of some humanoid robots and some digital AIs. They differ from the AIs in chapter 8 because they are associated with consciousness upload, multi-agent AI and post-material AI. The possibility of uploading a digital consciousness is explored in The Machine, Chappie and Transcendence. In all of these films, AIs enable the uploading of human consciousnesses. In I am Mother, Tau and Her, AIs with a digital consciousness provoke questions about the movement of that consciousness across devices, entities, the internet, and even beyond material existence altogether.
The recurrent themes of death and mortality are linked in this chapter to transhumanism, with films in which humans use AI to achieve transhumanist ambitions and extend human life. Parent-child relationships emerge again in The Machine, in which a human father becomes displaced by an AI ‘mother’. I am Mother presents an AI that raises a human daughter, reversing the usual paradigm. The prospect of the Singularity emerges again at the end of The Machine, is quashed by humans in Transcendence and may occur at the end of Her.
What is Real about Experimental Norms? Thinking with Giorgio Agamben about Medical Trials
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

This chapter locates human experimentation at the intersection of the power–knowledge axis, as articulated in Agamben’s elaboration of Foucault’s insight regarding when and where humans are both examining subjects and examined objects in the production of knowledge. According to Foucault, this produces a context in which ‘science has become institutionalised as a power through a university system and through its own constricting apparatus of laboratories and experiments.’[1] The chapter demonstrates that the justifications for experimentation along the Foucaldian power–knowledge axis are often politically theodicean in justifying the evil effects and intent of power by the promise of the knowledge to be gained. This is done while reading the Faustian pact narrative as already ubiquitous in human experimentation, and by illustrating that both textually and thematically. The chapter argues that experiments on humans describe reality, normalise shared conceptions of reality and create reality by inflecting both ‘humanity’ and ‘norm’ simultaneously as a pattern and as a model, and even a standard to be fulfilled. It concludes that if experiments were solely based within a scientific paradigm without any elements of political power they would not be so legally and politically charged with discriminatory practices.
Democracy and Defiance
Authors: Nelson Bryan
Published: January 2025

This book offers a timely scholarly contribution to the small, but growing literature on “radical” or “postfoundational” theories of democracy. It both documents and evaluates a productive, yet often neglected current in contemporary French political thought that functions to at once challenge the limits of our understanding of democracy and help us to rethink its broader social and political implications. Organising something of a unique triangulation, this study situates the projects of Jacques Rancière, Claude Lefort and Miguel Abensour not only in relation to one other, but in the larger context of the history of political philosophy. What this experimental intersection serves to illuminate with great clarity and nuance is that from ancient times to the present day, democracy can be thought as a profound emancipatory and transformative project offering an unprecedented challenge to modes of domination, strategies of inequality and hierarchies of all kinds. Contrary to prevailing discussions of democracy, the book explores democracy not as a society, institution or procedure primarily, but rather according to what democracy can be said to be against. This is what the author broadly understands and puts forward as the “antinomies of politics.”
Electoral Integrity in Turkey
Authors: Toros Emre
Published: January 2025

This book is an effort to shed light on problems of electoral integrity by combining the lenses of global comparative approaches and the contextual findings of a case study. Accordingly, it explores the causes and consequences of problems related to electoral integrity in Turkey with a novel approach. The primary deficit in the current towering literature on electoral integrity is its preference for checking whether the elections in specific contexts correspond with global liberal democratic procedures and meet global norms and international conventions. Moreover, few investigations have paused to integrate electoral integrity into the theoretical frameworks to examine electoral institutions in non-consolidated democracies. Accordingly, this book offers a theory identifying the causes and consequences of problems related to electoral integrity at individual and institutional levels. Findings indicate the need for further research in the area, particularly in alternative contexts, which will help us solve the democratic problems of our time. This approach contributes to the literature by utilising theoretical approaches and research strategies of existing studies, proposing alternative data sources that will describe the phenomena better, and, most importantly, presenting a theoretical framework that will suit both singular and comparative cases.
Electoral Management Bodies as Establishers of Electoral Integrity
Authors: Toros Emre
Published: January 2025

This chapter elaborates on voters' perceptions of electoral officers and electoral management bodies (EMBs) and links these evaluations to electoral integrity. It presents the evidence by discussing the issue on a global comparative level and relocating the discussion to the Turkish context by providing a historical outlook on the Turkish EMB, the Supreme Election Council (YSK).
Generic Innovation in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
Authors: Gieskes Edward
Published: January 2025

This book offers a new account of generic innovation in the drama of early modern England. Traditional accounts of the development of the early modern stage describe a teleological movement from crudity to sophistication. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Mikhail Bakhtin, this book discards that teleological narrative and strives to understand generic change in terms of particular moments of change rather than in terms of a narrative whose end is already known. Working across multiple genres, the book seeks to understand change and innovation in terms of competition within the dramatic field.
Kafkaesque Cinema
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: January 2025

This research monograph politicizes the widely used and regularly abused concept of Kafkaesque Cinema. Eschewing the conventional understanding of it as a shorthand for obscure films, it argues that Kafkaesque cinema is a critical category that can enable us to consider the interconnection between historical events/contexts, politics and aesthetics in films across the globe.
Introduction
Authors: Armstrong Charles I. , Paterson Adrian , Walker Tom
Published: January 2025

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Illustrating the 1935 and 1937 Cuala Press Broadsides
Authors: Griffith Angela
Published: January 2025

The focus of this chapter is Yeats’s revival of the Cuala Press Broadside series in the 1930s. It outlines the extent to which this project involved the poet in a family collaboration. It places special emphasis on the impact of the resulting publications’ visual and material design. Investigated too is the choice of visual contributors for the series. The chapter considers how their illustrations move beyond the visual vocabulary of the Irish Revival. In the process, it suggests that even when Yeats embraces the ballad tradition, orality enters into a close dialogue with other more visual and material modes of expression.
Yeats, Gender-Bending and the Art of Transvestism
Authors: Balázs Zsuzsanna
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on the fluidity of Yeats’s presentation of the spectacle of the body on stage. It explores how Yeats’s interest in the supernatural, and his collaboration with convention-defying performers such as Florence Farr and Michio Ito, fed into his drama’s ambiguous portrayals of gender and sexuality – moving from early plays such as The Countess Cathleen and The Land of Heart’s Desire to mid-period works such as The Hour Glass and At the Hawk’s Well. This embodied dimension of Yeats’s plays then leads to the explicit and implicit transvestism of several later plays, King Oedipus, The Resurrection and The Words Upon the Window Pane. Yeats’s plays are also shown to stand in contrast to the repressive sexual politics of the fledgling independent Irish state, as is further illustrated through analysis of a series of individual productions of these plays.
The Dramaturgy of Movement: Choreographic Writing in The Dreaming of the Bones
Authors: Szűts Melinda
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers the fluid role of physical movement in the embodied context of Yeats’s drama. Focusing on The Dreaming of the Bones, it uses this particular play to analyse how Yeats’s evolving sense of movement dramaturgy influenced the textual composition and dramatic design of his dance plays. It is argued that Yeats’s practical experience with dance and stage movement in the production of his first dance play, At the Hawk’s Well, led to him becoming a conscious chorographer. A resulting chorographic quality can be discerned in the text of subsequent plays, including The Dreaming of the Bones. These work through the language of the body as well as that of poetry, with significant implications for these plays’ staging and interpretation.
Choreographic Collaborations: Yeats and Ninette de Valois
Authors: Girdwood Megan
Published: January 2025

Dance is perhaps the most important nonverbal component of Yeats’s later work in the theatre. This chapter casts new light on the crucial contribution made by one of his collaborators, the dancer and choreographer Ninette de Valois. It explores her considerable contribution to the artistic life of the Abbey Theatre and the setting up of its associated School of Ballet. Delving into her background, including her development under Diaghilev at the Ballets Russes, illuminates how her choreographic aims intersected with Yeats’s notions of performance in the late 1920s. Her conception of bodily movement is seen to have particularly influenced Fighting the Waves (1929) – a chorographic reworking of Yeats’s earlier drama The Only Jealousy of Emer that he conceived specifically for her. It was also manifest in other aspects of the Abbey’s programming in this period, as well as Yeats’s ongoing dramatic development.