bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Evolution of the Revolutionary Guards
Authors: Eshraghi Ali Reza , Mahdavi Amir Hossein
Published: February 2024

The Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guards, Sepah-e Pasdaran or Sepah for short, has become an indispensable player in two major areas, politics, and economy, during the four decades since its inception. The Sepah’s history is inextricably linked to the evolution of the Islamic Republic. It has persisted in spite of several political and economic crises, including the longest conventional war of the twentieth century and a series of regional proxy wars as well as a robust regime of international sanctions. It has also taken an ascending trajectory of growth expanding from a small taskforce to a gigantic organization whose footsteps are visible in every aspect of government. The Sepah has become a highly influential force in national politics and the economy through its interaction with circumstantial factors outside the organization. The institution has greatly grown in size and in the scope of its activities. These developments have led to a myriad of challenges and opportunities that go beyond any deliberate state agenda, and they have generated the space for Sepah’s further involvement in the dynamics of power brokership.
Conclusion
Authors: Pillai Sohini Sarah
Published: February 2024

Along with summarizing the main arguments and insights of the comparative project in this book, the concluding chapter of Krishna’s Mahabharatas also discusses an intriguing display of bhakti to Krishna in a Hindi Mahabharata television show from 2016 and the reactions that this episode has elicited from modern viewers. While this book primarily focuses on devotional retellings in regional languages that were composed in premodern South Asia, new incarnations of the epic that draw attention to Krishna continue to be produced in India today. The conclusion briefly explores some of these new bhakti Mahabharata retellings that elevate Krishna and his deeds.
Abortion, Partisan Entrenchment, and the Republican Party
Authors: Balkin Jack M.
Published: February 2024

The 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization secured a long-sought victory of the Republican Party and the conservative legal movement. The entrenchment in the courts of a majority of movement-identified legal conservatives, and not just Republicans, was the key to overturning Roe v. Wade. Once the conservative legal movement has achieved most of its central goals, however, it may lose cohesion as new issues split the movement. Roe v. Wade made the modern Republican Party possible because it allowed staunchly pro-life voters to form a coalition with people who voted Republican for other reasons and assumed that complete prohibition of abortion was off the table. Dobbs made abortion prohibition possible and highly salient; hence it placed different parts of the Republican coalition in tension with each other. Together, Roe and Dobbs show how Supreme Court decisions can make or break political coalitions.
Dobbs and the Travails of Due Process Traditionalism
Authors: Sunstein Cass R.
Published: February 2024

The Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization embraces a form of due process traditionalism. With Burkean and Thayerian arguments at work, the Court offers an understanding of the Due Process Clause which allows substantive protection of rights only if they are vindicated by tradition and essential to “ordered liberty.” Within the opinion’s logic, the major challenge is to accept due process traditionalism without simultaneously throwing a variety of nontraditional or antitraditionalist substantive due process cases into doubt. There are uneasy relationships between the traditionalist thrust of the Court’s opinion and the Court’s nontraditional or antitraditionalist jurisprudence in other areas of constitutional law. A central reason must be that the Court believes in some forms of moral progress. The central weakness of the Dobbs opinion is its rejection of the idea that moral progress can and should play a role in the understanding of constitutional rights.
From Public Duty to Private Pleasures
Authors: Van der Laan Sarah
Published: February 2024

Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata contains both an Iliad and an Odyssey—integrated not sequentially, as in the Aeneid, but concurrently, into a poem whose unity thereby encompasses and surpasses the achievements of both Homer and Virgil. This chapter re-examines the Odyssey’s role in defining epic and romance in sixteenth-century genre criticism and shows that Tasso’s practice extends readings of the Odyssey as a viable, vibrant epic code model. The Odyssey provides the narrative and ethical spine of Rinaldo’s journey throughout the Liberata, and the ethics that it promotes supersede those of the Virgilian epic settlement. Rinaldo’s reunion with Armida not only resolves the Odyssean strand woven into the Iliadic narrative of the crusade but successfully integrates that strand into the Liberata, not as an isolated episode or digressive romance but as an integral part of the epic. Tasso explores the possibility that the Odyssey can provide a model for the subordination—not the sacrifice—of private desire to public duty and thus enable a successful, though not easy, return to private life after public service. This Odyssean model allows Tasso to integrate homecoming and reconciliation into the epic telos of the Liberata and so to offer an alternative to a Virgilian ethics of conquest and of individual submission to imperial demands. Tasso proposes nothing less than a double overgoing of Virgil, at once ethical and poetic: a new and more complex way of weaving Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic poem.
Milton’s Odyssean Ethics
Authors: Van der Laan Sarah
Published: February 2024

The Odyssey underpins both Milton’s story of cosmic struggle and his story of human ethics throughout Paradise Lost. The divine council of Paradise Lost 3, the framing device that explains both the poem’s action and its larger ethical consequences, is modelled closely on the divine council of Odyssey 1, which performs a similar function. Further Odyssean allusions inform Adam and Eve’s fall and prepare the ground for their journey towards reconciliation with the Father. These allusions participate in contemporary practices of reading the Odyssey as a legitimate interlocutor of major ethical and theological questions. Biblical and Homeric commentaries and Milton’s own prose writings drew on the Odyssey to explore the essential questions of Christian salvation central to the seventeenth-century Protestant doctrinal controversy between orthodox Calvinists and Arminians. As Milton transforms Homer’s pagan epic into the stuff of divine revelation, he draws upon the full range of registers in which his contemporaries allowed the Odyssey to speak. Turning to the Odyssey for its model of the interaction of divine grace with the freely willed faith and moral struggle of humanity, Paradise Lost reinterprets Odysseus’ active fortitude and his struggle to forge an alliance with the gods as heroic virtues for a Christian readership. Homer’s poem becomes the subtext for Milton’s initial and most explicit articulations of his theodicy, his vision of the relationship between the divine presence and fallen humanity, and his model for the struggle to live a heroic life in a postlapsarian world.
Martyrdom
Authors: Grillo Jennie
Published: February 2024

Although none of the heroes dies in the book of Daniel, in their reception their stories are reinterpreted as martyrdoms, and they generate even more martyrs according to Hippolytus. This interpretive process follows a trajectory established within the growth of the book of Daniel itself, beginning with the Additions. This chapter examines six tropes of the later discourse of martyrdom which find roots within the Additions to Daniel (prayer, sacrifice, confession, changing elements, presence, affect), before concluding with the suggestion that martyrological readings may serve to locate the Additions to Daniel within their own early Jewish context of origin. The martyrological motifs of the Additions in many cases match those in 2 Macc. 6–7: the Additions to Daniel thus belong to the distinctively Jewish early adumbrations of martyrdom, and later martyrological construals of the tales work with the grain of the expanding Daniel tradition itself.
Political Economy Puzzles
Authors: Hickey Sam , Sen Kunal
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses two critical puzzles. Why do some countries achieve higher and more consistent rates of economic growth than others? And why do some countries avoid the so-called resource curse? Our work on economic growth focuses on ten countries and reveals that the political drivers of economic take-off are different from the political drivers that underpin sustained economic growth and structural transformation. In developing countries, the ‘deals’ that are made between political and business elites are often more important than any formal rules. A commitment to the ‘ordered deals’ required for take-off is more likely in dominant political settlements, where a strong political leadership allows for the likelihood of deals, once negotiated, to be honoured (ordered deals) and for credible commitment by elites to economic growth. However, sustaining growth requires that deals become open to a wider range of actors, beyond those with political connections, and this is more likely to occur in more competitive settlements. The chapter finds that political settlements also shape how countries choose to govern their natural resources. Our comparison of two new producers in Africa, Ghana and Uganda, shows that the underlying configuration of power, combined with ideological beliefs, guides whether elites invest in developing the bureaucratic capacity required to negotiate good deals with international oil companies.
Intimate Image Abuse
Authors: Citron Danielle Keats
Published: February 2024

A crucial first step in addressing intimate-image abuse is its proper conceptualization. Intimate-image abuse amounts to a violation of intimate privacy. This conceptualization allows us to better understand the significance of intimate privacy for individuals, groups, and society. Everyone deserves intimate privacy to create a life of meaning, respect, and love. Violations of intimate privacy undermine human flourishing, democratic engagement, and equal opportunity. The concept of intimate privacy exposes the breadth of the wrongs, the extent of the harm, and the varied actors involved surveilling and exploiting intimate life.
The Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights on Violence against Women and the Intimate Image Abuse
Authors: Elósegui María
Published: February 2024

This chapter focuses on the recent jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on cyberviolence, specifically the cases of Volodina v Russia and Volodina v Russia (No 2). The latter case relates to the phenomena of the dissemination of non-consensual intimate photographs on social networks by an intimate partner or ex-partner either as revenge for an ended relationship, or in an attempt to maintain the dominance of men over women. The ECtHR has categorized the acts of cyberviolence and cyberharassment as forms of violence against women, also using the terms cyberstalking or cybersurveillance. The Volodina cases encompass the different possible forms of cyberviolence against women and girls. The chapter also analyses some of the provisions of the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (the ‘Istanbul Convention’), as well as General Recommendation No 1 of GREVIO on the digital dimension of violence against women, and the difficulties in legislating against and prosecuting these crimes.
The Criminalization of Non-consensual Pornography in the United States
Authors: Franks Mary Anne
Published: February 2024

The legal, technological, and social landscape of non-consensual pornography in the United States has changed dramatically over the last decade. The number of US states criminalizing the abuse has increased from three to forty-eight; major social media and internet companies have banned non-consensual pornography from their platforms and services; and non-consensual pornography, now also commonly referred to as ‘non-consensual intimate imagery’ or ‘image-based sexual abuse’, is widely recognized as a form of abuse. This transformation is largely attributable to the efforts of courageous victims of this abuse and the civil society advocacy organizations that support them, in particular Dr Holly Jacobs and the organization she founded in 2013, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI). But challenges remain. Because no federal law prohibiting this abuse has been enacted, and the definition and classification of non-consensual pornography varies by jurisdiction, victims are left with an inconsistent and ineffective legal patchwork for this devastating and frequently multi-jurisdictional crime.
Criminalization of Intimate Image Abuse in Japan
Authors: Okada Yoshifumi
Published: February 2024

In Japan, revenge pornography had traditionally been dealt with based on the Penal Code and local governments’ nuisance prevention ordinances. However, there was a growing movement to seek new legislation, claiming that the existing law was insufficient to address the new phenomenon. In 2014 a new Act regulating so-called ‘revenge pornography’ was introduced. However, debate continues on whether voyeurism should be included in the Penal Code. This chapter summarizes the criminal legal response to ‘intimate image abuse’ in Japan. In addition to introducing the contents of the new Act, some of its problems are considered.
Victims of Intimate Image Abuse and Other Crimes
Authors: Vitiello Michael
Published: February 2024

A young woman sends her boyfriend an erotic picture or sexual message. The message gets spread on social media, leading to the woman’s humiliation. An occasional judge suggests that the victim’s conduct is relevant when the boyfriend is subject to criminal prosecution. This often results in accusations that the judge is ‘victim-blaming’, with the clear implication that the judge is benighted. This chapter argues that the criminal law often makes a crime victim’s conduct legally relevant. For example, the law makes a victim’s conduct relevant to a defence of self-defence or of provocation. Further, victim conduct is often relevant to assessing an offender’s mens rea. Beyond describing the law, this chapter argues that the law has it right in those cases as offender culpability is the benchmark for criminal liability.
Image-based Abuse in Intimate Partnerships in Canada
Authors: Aikenhead Moira
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the phenomenon of image-based abuse within intimate partnerships through an examination of three representative Canadian criminal decisions. The chapter highlights the broader social trends and motivations underpinning this emerging and harmful form of intimate partner violence. Through a feminist analysis of applicable Canadian criminal legislation and three selected judicial decisions, strengths and weaknesses in the Canadian criminal justice approach to intimate partner image-based abuse are identified, including emerging evidentiary concerns, legislative gaps, and concerns arising from the ‘double-edged’ nature of harmful images as proof of criminal conduct and a source of significant harm. Paths towards an improved criminal justice response, reflective of survivors’ needs are recommended.
The Material History of Waste Paper
Authors: Reynolds Anna
Published: February 2024

Chapter 1 overviews the material history of waste paper in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and explores why the term ‘waste’ came, at this moment, to be applied to repurposed pages. It examines the multiple etymological valences of wasting and the metaphorical kinship of repurposed pages and wastelands, with both understood as being ripe for repopulation and use. The distinction between this early modern and our own modern-day understanding of waste is considered, before the chapter turns to the material production of waste paper. The origins of these objects in old and unwanted books, printers’ waste, and unsold books, and their use in printing houses, bookbindings, and a variety of shops and households, are outlined. The chapter concludes with a summary of the shift in waste paper use that occurred towards the end of the seventeenth century, when waste disappeared from view in bookbindings and shifted to the margins of book culture. No longer pervasive in every sort of environment, later waste paper was limited to either socio-economic depths (as wrappers and trash) or socio-economic heights (as valuable antiquarian fragments).
Pepper and Mackerel
Authors: Reynolds Anna
Published: February 2024

Chapter 2 traces the emergence of the waste paper trope in classical Roman poetry and its revival and transformation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It analyses the representation of repurposed papyrus texts in the works of Catullus, Horace, Persius, and Statius, and focuses in particular on Martial’s diverse use of the trope in his negotiation of Roman literary culture. It then moves to sixteenth-century England and the decades in which an unprecedented profusion of waste paper and parchment coincided with the circulation of classical poetry—and so the waste paper trope—as a consequence of the work of Humanist scholars. The chapter examines early modern authors’ use of the waste paper trope to negotiate pamphlet controversies, systems of patronage, and rhetorical conventions in the print marketplace. Finally, through an analysis of two poems by John Donne it explores the anti-Horatian sentiment that underpins the majority of waste paper commonplaces, demonstrating how the trope served as a vehicle for articulating what early moderns understood as the eschatological progression of both books and bodies through time.
Pickled Paper
Authors: Reynolds Anna
Published: February 2024

Chapter 4 examines Thomas Nashe’s transformation of typical waste paper commonplaces into an extensive poetics of waste—a morally virtuous and materially prodigal mode of being, based on the kinetics of dispersing and repurposing books that permeates the writer’s works. It situates Nashe’s fixation with waste paper in the literary, religious, and economic contexts of the late sixteenth century, describing how he encountered concerns regarding the wasting of time, skill, and writing materials in the Martin Marprelate controversy and in his quarrel with Gabriel Harvey. In the preface to The Vnfortunate Traueller, Nashe transformed this discourse into a celebration of the unexpected value of waste and its capacity to support prodigal living. This representation of rapidly and productively consumed textual waste is also present in Christs Teares Ouer Ierusalem, with the book portrayed in the preface as medicinal valuable mummy wrapped in waste paper. Finally, the chapter turns to the representation of textual wasting and dispersal in Nashe’s attacks on Gabriel Harvey. In them, we find another version of Nashe’s poetics of waste—of the need for rapid and timely textual consumption, and the parody of fantasies of preservation and endurance through print.
Four Decades of Neoliberalism and Australian Public Universities
Authors: Martin-Sardesai Ann , Parker Lee , Guthrie James
Published: February 2024

This chapter assesses four decades of neoliberalism and NPM and the associated influence of accounting, auditing, and accountability in Australian public universities. Identifying significant changes in post-1980s higher education policies reveals the growing intrusion of accounting-based performance measurement, control, and audit into university operations, and their involvement in the Covid-19-induced Australian higher education financial and social crisis. Public universities are seen to be pursuing predominantly commercial agendas exposed to significant financial and social risks. While being subject to tightening government control, university managements maintain a focus on external market position and ranking and impose an audit and surveillance culture on their staff who work under increasing pressure and deteriorating workplace conditions. The NPM inspired university business model, while demonstrably broken, is revealed as persisting in commercialised Australian universities’ strategic agendas.
From Voluntary Association to Professionalized Voluntary Organization
Authors: Bolleyer Nicole
Published: February 2024

Chapter 6 shows that in all three case studies—National Activity Providers Association (NAPA), a service provider; Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), an interest group; and the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW)—professionalization and bureaucratization were conducive to diversifying member involvement. At the same time, leading managers initiated or actively supported bureaucratization reforms to enhance the effectiveness of CSO decision-making, which reduced member control. Whereas such attempts have been and still are contested by active members in the GPEW (sometimes successfully, sometimes not), in both groups (SAS and NAPA), member control was formally abolished after members had ceased to use their decision-making rights proactively. Similarly, in SAS and NAPA, bureaucratization reforms also created spaces for staff control, while in GPEW—due to its strongly held notions of democratic governance—these spaces emerged informally.
Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama
Authors: Hardwick Alexandra
Published: February 2024

This book discusses off-stage assemblies, populations, armies, and other groups in fifth-century Athenian drama, which often depicts these groups as holding considerable power over events and characters on stage. Off-stage groups can only be depicted through on-stage characters’ viewpoints, and refracted through these characters’ perspectives and allegiances; this allows plays to depict groups from multiple different viewpoints, portraying their activity and decision-making in highly nuanced fashion and confronting the audience with the inherent difficulty of interpreting them. This book sets these off-stage groups in comparison with the groups depicted in fifth- and fourth-century Athenian prose texts: the fictive and mythical worlds imagined in drama explore collective activity in radical, unusual ways. Consequently, plays often undercut and complicate the stereotypes used to portray groups in prose texts.
Introduction
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh
Published: February 2024

Japan is attempting to build a new economy, by 2030—or alternatively the 2030s. A flurry of initiatives—Society 5.0, digital transformation, green transformation, ‘sustainable capitalism’, ‘new form of capitalism’, rebuilding the middle class’—represent this attempt, but how significant are they? Despite strong headwinds such as demographic decline and ageing, Japan’s external energy dependence and geopolitical turbulence, is there any chance of them creating a new ‘model’ to replace the manufacturing-centred postwar model which began to fray in the 1980s and was dismantled in the 1990s and 2000s? The Introduction raises such questions, and introduces a conceptual framework to address them, consisting of (a) state–market and organization–technology dyads in a geopolitical context, all of which are at significant points of inflection; and (b) institutional analysis, especially institutional coherence, both at the macro and micro levels. The structure of the book and individual chapters are then introduced.
Building and Governing the Digital Economy
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh
Published: February 2024

Chapter 2 takes up digital transformation (DX) at a macro-level, focusing on different modes of intervention by the government to effect change. First it considers a METI report visualizing a digital cliff threat, looming large by 2025, and placing the onus on senior managers to take responsibility for DX, with guidelines, indicators, and a Digital Governance Code. It then turns to governmental DX and the creation of the Digital Agency, in what its first director described as Japan’s last chance to reverse ‘digital defeat’. Third, it looks at increasingly urgent and systematic attempts to embed cybersecurity in government, business and society. Industrial and innovation policy has clearly been rehabilitated; the fourth section considers the Strategic Innovation Programme and Connected Industries. Finally, the chapter introduces an attempt to figure out governance in Society 5.0, to ensure that ultimate values like happiness and liberty are enhanced rather than threatened.
Beyond Capitalism
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh
Published: February 2024

It is often said that capitalism needs non-capitalist ethics and institutions for its survival. Japan has a historical reluctance to separate morals and economy, which may account for the limited impact of neoliberalism. Chapter 8 explores this from three perspectives. First it considers Japan’s ‘social and solidarity economy’ (SSE), including the role of cooperatives, as well as labour organizations. Second, it turns to NPOs, taking up two specific cases, as well as networks formed in the wake of Japan’s triple disaster, some of them focused on digital transformation. Finally, returning to capitalism, it looks at corporations as social enterprise, as well as alternative visions of capitalism within Japan. The chapter highlights Japan’s ‘horizontal’ economy or SSE, which is typically overlooked in both top-down developmental state and mainstream economic writing.
Recessions and Retirement
Authors: Coile Courtney , Zhang Haiyi
Published: February 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the US labor market, leading to an unprecedented loss of 22 million jobs in March and April 2020. Evidence from past recessions indicates that economic downturns are typically associated with an increase in retirements. This study revisits the relationship between recessions and retirement during the pandemic, using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) supplemented by other data on economic and COVID conditions. We document that higher unemployment is associated with an increase in the probability of transitioning from employment to being out of the labor force during the pre-pandemic period, consistent with previous studies. Surprisingly, retirement transitions during the pandemic were insensitive to local labor market conditions. Our finding that the probability of retirement increased during the pandemic, but that retirements are largely unrelated to local economic or COVID conditions, points to a potential role for common national factors such as generalized health concerns, government policies, and stock market gains.
Saving and Wealth Accumulation among Student Loan Borrowers
Authors: Dettling Lisa J. , Goodman Sarena F. , Reber Sarah J.
Published: February 2024

Borrowing for education has increased rapidly in the past several decades, such that the majority of non-housing debt on US households’ balance sheets is now student loan debt. This chapter analyzes the implications of student loan borrowing for later-life economic wellbeing, with a focus on retirement preparation. It demonstrates that families holding student loan debt later in life have less savings than their similarly educated peers without such debt. However, these comparisons are misleading if the goal is to characterize the experience of the typical student borrower, as they fail to account for student borrowers who already paid off their debt. Strategies are developed to locate families that ever financed their education with student loans in two large datasets which enables us to draw more meaningful comparisons. The chapter finds that student loan borrowers roughly follow the earnings, saving, and wealth trajectories of other college-educated families into late-career ages and are much better off financially than those that did not attend college.
Retirement Security and Health Costs
Authors: Follette Glenn , Sheiner Louise
Published: February 2024

Health care spending in the US has risen faster than incomes for decades, but the pace slowed materially after the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Using data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, we examine what has happened to out-of-pocket health care spending by different income groups of the elderly over time, and how this has affected resources available for other consumption. We find that the slower pace of health care spending from the ACA was particularly beneficial to the elderly, who devote a greater share of income to health care costs do than the non-elderly. We then examine how out-of-pocket spending on health care by the elderly will change going forward, given current projections for health care spending to accelerate again, and we show that resources available for other spending may fall appreciably for lower income groups.
Domestic Virtues
Authors: Barnden Sally
Published: February 2024

This chapter focuses on the Victorian applications of Shakespeare as a model for female royal identities in the context of the dramatist’s nineteenth-century reinvention as a guardian of family values. I contextualize amateur artwork and tableaux vivants created by the royal family in relation to Victorian educational Shakespeare. Shakespearean images created by the royal family enshrine values that were particularly important to them, especially filial obedience and dynastic marriage. I argue that the Victorians’ domestic engagement with Shakespeare’s plays helped to obscure the tension between companionate and dynastic models of royal family. The chapter also draws attention to the use of Shakespeare to cultivate international relationships among an extended royal family, and proposes that a connection can be perceived between the royal family’s espousal of domestic Shakespeare and their participation in the early stages of Shakespeare’s deployment for cultural imperialism.
Théâtromanie and Reading
Authors: Wynn Thomas
Published: February 2024

This chapter proposes that reading plays was an integral part of the théâtromanie (or craze for theatre) that was characteristic of eighteenth-century France. It draws on publishing data and personal testimonies to show that readers’ experiences of drama cannot be confined to the quiet margins of the broader dramatic culture of Enlightenment France. To read a play is not necessarily to spurn the playhouse; reading, viewing, and listening overlap in important ways. Challenging the critical consensus of readers as isolated and studious individuals, this section foregrounds the social and emotional aspects of encountering plays in print and manuscript, and it proposes a range of protocols of reading drama (including in print, in manuscript, and socially) that obtain in the period.
Reading the Mercure in the Closet
Authors: Wynn Thomas
Published: February 2024

This chapter focuses on theatre reviews in the most prominent journal of the early decades of the eighteenth century, the Mercure de France. The critically overlooked reviews help us to think about geographies of reading, coercion, and autonomy. The journal published lengthy extracts from plays performed in Paris, allowing provincial readers to participate vicariously in the capital’s theatrical life. This chapter examines the Mercure’s attempts to guide its readers in matters of taste and judgement, and it analyses how such normative efforts were challenged, undermined, and contradicted within the journal itself. A consideration of the (non-)binaries, decentrings, and blurrings that operate in these reviews and related texts allows us to broaden our understanding of how readers encountered plays in the eighteenth century.
Religious Controversy
Authors: Wynn Thomas
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores closet drama’s function as a genre of contestation and provocation. It focuses on six plays that arise from the renewed dispute between Jesuits and Jansenists in the wake of the papal bull Unigenitus in 1713. These satires are situated in the richly detailed context of the scandal of the convulsionaries at Paris’s Saint-Médard cemetery, which occurred following the death of François de Pâris in 1727. Radically opposed religious factions used the particular literary form of closet drama to contribute to the culture of contestation that is fundamental to the developing Enlightenment. The plays deal in vital matters such as the value of evidence, claims to authority, institutional allegiance, and the independence of thought. Far from turning its back on the contemporary world and retreating into polite abstraction, closet drama is a genre of restless and passionate dissent.
Erotic Drama
Authors: Wynn Thomas
Published: February 2024

In the rich field of libertine and erotic writings in eighteenth-century France, sexually explicit plays have yet to be substantially analysed. Such obscene drama appears to exploit the material stage and to push embodied performance to its limit. This chapter explores both the nature and necessity of this materialization, and the imaginary pleasures that these texts offer to the reader. It focuses on Delisle de Sales’s Théâtre d’amour, which was written over several decades at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century. Comprising a range of sexually explicit plays, mostly mythological and historical in subject matter, this highly developed example of closet drama offers the reader a pornotopia in which male aggression is seemingly celebrated. Despite its ostensible violence and misogyny, however, this nostalgic text offers the possibility of a queer model of subjectivity.
Conclusion
Authors: Wynn Thomas
Published: February 2024

Drawing together some of the common threads in the study, this conclusion considers Restif de La Bretonne’s Le Drame de la vie (1793) as an extreme, indeed unsurpassed example of closet drama in eighteenth-century France. This extraordinary work is hundreds of pages long, comprises many individual plays, and features dozens of characters. Restif’s claim that the Drame is ‘unique dans son genre’ is justified; he aggravates and accumulates the key elements of closet drama to the point of singularity, thereby revealing where the genre’s fault-lines, breaking points, and limits lie. Such is the force of the author’s single-minded and masculine vision that it precludes the furtive dalliances and improper affiliations that usually flourish in the Enlightenment closet. Despite its capacious scale, Restif’s closet has no room for the reader.
In search of the holy grail
Authors: James William D.
Published: February 2024

This chapter places the book’s interpretation of grand strategy within its intellectual context. It first provides a short history of the scholarship on grand strategy from its origins in the early twentieth century to the present day. Despite grand strategy’s current popularity in academic and policy circles, confusion reigns over its meaning and scope. Who does grand strategy—individuals, social movements, corporations, states, or only great powers? When does grand strategy happen—in wartime, peacetime, or both? Which components of national power does grand strategy encompass? Similarly, where is grand strategy observable—in public documents, through behaviour, or elsewhere? What metrics can we use to evaluate grand strategic decisions? Finally, how does grand strategy differ from related concepts such as strategy, tactics, and policy? This chapter tackles each of these questions in turn. In doing so, it makes the case for deep, historical research on specific grand strategic decisions.
Conclusion
Authors: James William D.
Published: February 2024

The concluding chapter provides a summation of the key arguments and historical evidence. It underscores the book’s contributions to debates and ideas on grand strategy, as well as the literature on British foreign and defence policy. Several avenues for future research are also proffered. This book’s interpretation of grand strategy, as well as its method of measurement, could be applied to other second-tier powers or even small states. Future research could also delve deeper into the domestic determinants of British grand strategic decision-making. The chapter concludes with five practical policy recommendations on: the UK’s relationship with the US and the need to reset expectations of the alliance; the value of a stoical mindset for dealing with complexity; the improvements that can be made to the machinery of government; the necessity of creating a culture of constructive challenge; and the vital importance of garnering domestic support for grand strategic decisions.
The Law as Blind Machine
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

The Wrong Man tells the true story of a man arrested because he resembles someone who has been robbing small businesses in a New York neighborhood. The falsely accused musician cooperates with the police and puts his faith in the procedures of the justice system. That system, however, is profoundly uninterested in him; so long as he fits a role in its pre-scripted drama, he will be arraigned, judged, and jailed by a process that never looks at him but just goes on its own self-satisfied way. In the end, he is exonerated, not by evidence and legal arguments, but by an accident bordering on miracle. The law and its victim never really meet.
The Law as the Object of Manipulation
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a lesson in manipulation. The “hero” and a friend, eager to demonstrate the dangers of the death penalty, contrive a situation in which mountains of planted evidence points to one of them as murderer. The scheme goes awry when evidence of the evidence having been manufactured is destroyed. A knick-of-time discovery appears to “right” the situation, until another revelation rearranges everything. In the end, only the director is triumphant, as he pushes every character and every viewer into corners they never knew were there. Witness for the Prosecution is a tour de force of delayed revelation. There are no less than nine surprise twists that leave both characters and viewers continually off balance. In the course of a trial, a flamboyant and self-confident barrister is outwitted by a woman who is in turn duped by the husband she is defending. Everything is deception; the only honest action is a stabbing.
Visible and Spectral Evidence
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

The Crucible is a meditation on two kinds of evidence: the usual kind presented by lawyers in secular courts, and the kind religious believers cite, not despite of, but because of, its invisibility. It is this latter kind of evidence that convicts those accused of being witches: the fact that the effects they are accused of producing are not available to empirical inspection and validation is evidence of their guilt. You were not seen doing it, therefore you are guilty. This logic enmeshes and envelops all the characters, including those who are urging it. Each is tried in this crucible of interpretation, and most are found wanting, with the notable exception of Elizabeth Proctor, wife of the main protagonist, who throughout opposes her faith in goodness and personal integrity to the confected faith of those who would cite scripture for their own very worldly purposes.
Midwifery, Childbirth, and Breastfeeding Advice in Colonial Bengal
Authors: Saha Ranjana
Published: February 2024

Despite enormous scholarship on motherhood and childcare in colonial India, the subject of breastfeeding remains underexplored. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring medical advice about breastfeeding by the ‘respectable’ Bengali-Hindu women or bhadramahila, often located amidst the shadows of the ‘dark’ and ‘dirty’ lying-in room, makeshift spaces that signified the impurity and ritual pollution associated with childbirth. It argues that colonial and indigenous medical practitioners of western medicine often drew intimate biocultural connections between midwifery, confinement, childbirth, lactation, and nursing of infants in colonial Calcutta. In particular, the chapter examines why and how European and indigenous medical writings on so-called ‘clean’ or ‘scientific’ midwifery often voiced the urgent need to either replace or medically train the ‘ignorant’ and ‘dirty’ dais. From being feared as ‘a sorceress’ to having a ‘hereditary claim on the family of her patient’, this chapter argues that there were contradictions inherent in the dichotomous representations of ‘clean’ versus ‘dirty’ midwifery in European and Bengali medical print media on midwifery, encompassing maternal and infant care.
Preposterous Propertius
Authors: O’Rourke Donncha
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines in Propertius a phenomenon of temporal or conceptual reversal, where the poet’s Latin, if the transmitted text is regarded as reliable, seems to put the ‘cart before the horse’ in one way or another—i.e. is ‘preposterous’ sensu stricto. The analysis takes a maximal approach in assembling more and less palpable instances of Propertius’ preposterous Latin, starting from cases of inverted clausal co-ordination (the hysteron proteron) and scaling up to effects of reversal on the wider level of narrative. The discussion highlights the role to be played by, and the balance to be struck between, both textual and literary criticism: some cases of hysteron proteron and related phenomena may indicate where the text of Propertius calls for emendation; but others may be related to the elegist’s back-to-front or head-over-heels view of the world. For ease of reference, an appendix to the chapter lists sequentially all the examples discussed.
Welfare about More than Money
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: February 2024

While money is the measure of a country’s economy, its health, education, and female employment is measured in different units: years of life, school attendance, and percentage of women in work. Public expenditure is a bad measure of welfare because it is only an input to the welfare mix; it is not an outcome. Gross Domestic Product is a bad indicator for cross-national comparison because the significance of money for welfare varies between high-income countries and low-income countries where non-monetized household resources are of primary importance. Unpaid work in the household includes caring for children and older family members. Money earned in the shadow economy can be used to pay for goods the household cannot produce and avoids tax but does not qualify individuals for some welfare state benefits. Social indicators avoid money problems because they are direct measures of individual health, education, and employment status.
People Going Global
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: February 2024

Countries that set welfare standards have a small share of the world’s population. Scandinavian countries account for one-quarter of 1 per cent and highly developed countries for only one-sixth of global population. The welfare of the world’s peoples is shaped by seven countries that together have more than half the world’s eight billion population. Six are developing countries where welfare is not yet at global standards: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, and Nigeria. Yet even if only a minority of their population is at a global standard, this can add 100 million people to global welfare. In developing countries where population is growing fastest, especially in Africa, the welfare of millions more people must progress to keep the percentage at global standards from falling, and additional efforts are required if a country is to catch up with global leaders.
Unfinished Business
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: February 2024

The globalization of welfare is unfinished today, but in principle can be completed by countries catching up with fixed standards. How long it takes to catch up depends on a country’s distance from a standard and its continuing rate of progress. Projecting progress rates for the past three decades indicates that by 2050 infant mortality will have almost completely disappeared and illiteracy will be confined to the old in least developed countries. Four-fifths of the world’s youths will be in secondary school, and two-thirds of the world’s population at global standards for life expectancy and gender equality. In developed countries where standards have been reached, new goals are emerging such as the quality of health and education. Challenges to collective welfare from pandemics and global climate change are wicked problems, because they affect the whole world. but there is no government with the power to take global action.
Introduction
Authors: Amaya Santiago , Shoemaker David , Vargas Manuel
Published: February 2024

This introduction to the eighth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility briefly discusses each of the new essays being published, gathered around the theme of “Non-Ideal Agency and Responsibility.” They were drawn from the sixth biennial New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), held in March 2022. The essays cover a wide range of topics relevant to the workshop’s theme.
Temptation and Apathy
Authors: Bermúdez Juan Pablo , Berthelette Samantha , Anaya Alfonso , Fernández-Miranda Gabriela , Téllez Diego Rodríguez
Published: February 2024

Self-control is deemed crucial for reasons-responsive agency and a key contributor to long-term well-being. But recent studies suggest that effortfully resisting one’s temptations does not contribute to long-term goal attainment, and can even be harmful. So how does self-control improve our lives? Finding an answer requires revising the role that overcoming temptation plays in self-control. This chapter distinguishes two forms of self-control problems: temptation (the presence of a strong wayward motivation) and apathy (the lack of commitment-advancing motivation). This distinction makes it possible to separate negative self-control (aimed at overcoming temptation) from positive self-control (aimed at overcoming lack of motivation). The chapter argues that temptation should not play a central role in our conception of self-control, since overcoming temptation is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful self-control.
False Consciousness and Fragile Agency
Authors: Mason Elinor
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the blameworthiness of everyday compliance with oppressive norms. Any account of the appropriate response should meet two desiderata: first, it should make sense of the difference in position, and corresponding difference in appropriate response, of those in the oppressed groups and those in the oppressor groups (the asymmetry intuition), and second, it should not ignore or undermine the agency of the oppressed person (it should navigate the “agency dilemma”). The chapter argues that neither traditional stinging response, such as blame or shame, nor traditional therapeutic responses such as those a clinician may take, are apt in the case of wrongdoing that is due to false consciousness. False consciousness does damage agency, but it does not undermine it completely. The chapter proposes a solidarity-based response, which is primarily appropriate between those who are in the same group. This makes sense of the relevance of different social positions without denying that those in the oppressed group are also in the grip of false consciousness. It avoids the problem of being patronizing because it is limited to those who are in the same situation, and so does not have a hierarchical structure.