bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The LGBTQ Press in Twentieth-Century Britain and Ireland
Authors: Oram Alison , Bengry Justin
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the development of the ‘gay’ press in Britain and Ireland from the late nineteenth century. Early periodicals that directly addressed gender fluidity and same-sex love were privately circulated; caution and secrecy lasted well into the 1960s. Yet at the same time considerable queer content appeared in some mainstream publications, such as fashion, film and physique magazines in the pre-decriminalisation period. More recognisably lesbian and gay publications from the 1960s sought to achieve political and cultural change and to foster social contacts for lesbians and gay men. The Gay Liberation Movement marked a wealth of short- and longer-lived magazines, newspapers and periodicals, while feminism invigorated lesbian activism and publications. Differentiation in content characterises the gay press in the late twentieth century, from glossy arts magazines to political campaign news to specialist pornography. From the 1980s there was a discernible shift towards lifestyle magazines. Regional gay and lesbian magazines also appear in this period, often overlapping with the local alternative press, although censorship and persecution continued alongside the success of the LGBT press. The chapter further identifies the specific development of LGBTQ publications in Scotland and Ireland.
The Sunday Press
Authors: Conboy Martin
Published: September 2021

The Sunday newspaper is an often-neglected success story of the twentieth century news media landscape. The popularity and profitability of Sunday papers grew throughout the century to establish themselves as flagships of cultural and commercial trends and an essential complement to most national daily productions. On account of their production cycle, Sunday newspapers were always able to do things that the daily press with its punishing routines and pressure of deadlines were never able to achieve. Mapped onto the characteristic social class and politically stratified perspectives of British and Irish newspaper reading publics, the Sunday newspaper became a prominent vehicle for the experiments in layout and content after the full computerization of newspapers in the mid-1980s; lifestyle, commentary, colour photography all were pioneered in this format. The range of geographical variants of the Sunday newspaper are also considered from the regional Sunday Sun published in Newcastle from 1919 to the Irish Sunday Independent and Scottish Sunday Post to the migration of English titles across Britain into Ireland with increasing national specialization in their content and appeal. The chapter also considers the varying reasons for the failure of high-profile Sunday papers such as the Sunday Correspondent and the News of the World.
Satirical Journalism
Authors: Larkin Felix M. , Whitworth James
Published: September 2021

This chapter discusses satire, in both literary and visual form, as an element in British and Irish journalism in the twentieth century. It reviews specifically anti-establishment journals such as Dublin Opinion and Private Eye, but also considers the work of notable individual satirical journalists in the mainstream press such as D.B. Wyndham Lewis and J.B. Morton (‘Beachcomber’) in the Daily Express and Brian O’Nolan (‘Myles na gCopaleen’) and Donal Foley in the Irish Times. There is particular emphasis on political cartoons, perhaps the most popular and influential form of satirical journalism in the twentieth century. There is a rich history of cartooning in Britain and Ireland, starting with the innovative work of W.K. Haselden in the Daily Mirror and Percy Fearon (‘Poy’) in the Daily Mail, and with many outstanding later practitioners of the art – for example, David Low, Osbert Lancester, Charles E. Kelly, Gerald Scarfe, Mel Calman, Peter Brookes, Steve Bell, Nicola Jennings and Martyn Turner.
Extra-Parliamentary Reporting: The Under-Reported Life of the Working Class
Authors: Calcutt Andrew , Beachill Mark
Published: September 2021

This chapter will explore the range of periodical publications that have engaged with politics on a regional or national level without an overemphasis on the workings of the Westminster parliament. These might be serving geographically distinct communities or they may be circulating among politically disaffected with radical aims. Some periodicals have taken advocacy journalism to petition for causes and movements outside the normal mechanics of the Westminster cycle such as the publications fighting for women’s rights from Votes for Women in 1907 to Spare Rib from 1972. Specific campaigns and causes have been facilitated through such as the pacifist Peace News in 1936 and the New Internationalist which started to encourage greater awareness of overseas development issues in 1973. Other peridocials have addressed a particular political community, for example the Socialist Labour Press out of the Red Clydeside era, the left-wing Irish Republican, An Phoblacht from 1906 and other constituencies have more recently drawn upon publications such as Living Marxism, Schnews, Class War.
Science and the Press
Authors: Bud Robert
Published: September 2021

Repeated press discussion of the upturning of traditional civilisation through science underlies the chapter’s treatment of science and the press explored through three sections. The first summarises an historical scholarship which has gone beyond old categories of popularisation to show how the press constructed science in the public sphere, principally before the Second World War. Secondly, the chapter explores the coverage of ‘applied science’ by the press during that period. It deals with the contributions of such journalists covering ‘modern life’ as Vera Brittan and Storm Jameson as well as celebration of local industrial research laboratories on the one hand and warnings of the danger of new weapons on the other. Finally, there is a treatment of science in the press and its ‘medicalisation’ during the post Second-World-war period. Increasingly, contrasting enthusiasms and terrors have been mapped and analysed by the literature that has grown out of the new scholarship in public engagement with science, and by the broader study of science, technology and society.
Introduction: Refocus on Tarkovsky
Authors: Toymentsev Sergey
Published: September 2021

This introduction outlines the main tendencies in Tarkovsky studies, the most salient of which are English-language auteur studies, methodologically based in film history and formalist analysis, and Russian-language hagiographic and quasi-theological monographs fostering the religious cult of the director. This chapter argues that most Tarkovsky scholars trained in Slavic studies are somewhat reluctant to enter into interdisciplinary dialogue with other film theories and philosophical approaches by relying more on the traditional (empirically oriented) methods of film analysis developed by film history and film hermeneutics. This anthology, the chapter argues, attempts to overcome the methodological narrowness of Anglophone auteur studies on Tarkovsky on the one hand and Russophone hagiographic zeal on the other by opening up the field to different theoretical approaches.
Tarkovsky’s Childhood: Between Trauma and Myth
Authors: Tsymbal Evgeniy
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on the traumatic events in the director’s childhood that continued to haunt him throughout his life. Tarkovsky scholars often point out the autobiographical nature of his cinema and, more specifically, how the divorce of his parents influenced his cinematic representation of marital relationships. According to Helena Goscilo, for example, Tarkovsky’s personal trauma of paternal abandonment provides a clue to the narrative structure of his films. For Tsymbal, however, it is the director’s strained relationship with his mother, viewed in the context of André Green’s theory of the dead mother complex, that defines much of his artistic impulse. This chapter also discusses what hardships Tarkovsky experienced during the wartime and how his father’s influence inadvertently helped him choose his future profession.
The Child’s Eye View of War in Ivan’s Childhood
Authors: Weld Sara Pankenier
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores how Ivan’s Childhood (1962) critically transcends the genre of the Soviet war movie by employing the child’s perspective on the war. Through his poetically and autobiographically enriched cinematic version of Vladimir Bogomolov’s original story “Ivan” (1957) that foregrounds the patriotic celebration of a child hero, Tarkovsky juxtaposes wartime violence with childhood as such and the protagonist’s private subjectivity, by letting the viewer enter his memories and dreams. The chapters argues that in Ivan’s Childhood the child’s eye view becomes the artistic dominant for the unique design of the film. By assuming a child’s perspective through disconcerting and unusual camera angles that replicate the point of view of a younger person, the film also disempowers the viewer and forces the audience into a subservient and vulnerable position.
The Flesh of Time: Solaris and the Chiasmic Image
Authors: Efird Robert
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores Solaris’s chiasmatic interpenetration of the real and the phantasmatic in the context of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh defined as the non-physical substrate of the visible world and the virtual. Thanks to its genre of science fiction, Efird argues, Solaris accomplishes more convincingly the physical realization of the characters’ dream imagery, which vividly exemplifies Tarkovsky’s cinematic materialism. Besides numerous scenes with mirrors, the dynamic chiasm of the flesh, which is both physical and spiritual, fully manifests itself in the ambiguous figure of Hari who is simultaneously the object of Kelvin’s memory as well as the self-conscious subject on her own.
Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza
Authors: Matheron Alexandre
Published: September 2021

Alexandre Matheron (1926–2020) worked and wrote substantially on the 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza beginning with the publication of his influential 1969 masterpiece Individu et communauté chez Spinoza. Widely considered one of the most important and original interpreters of Spinoza’s philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but whose work was rarely translated into English, the 20 essays gathered here span the entirety of Matheron’s prolific career and present to the Anglophone the first collection of its kind outside of France. From texts on Spinoza’s epistemology and metaphysics to his signature interpretation of Spinoza’s political philosophy, Matheron’s work touches on every imaginable theme in the Spinozist corpus from Spinoza’s views on sexuality to his relationship to his predecessors, contemporaries, and inheritors such as Aquinas, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Rousseau to Spinoza’s latent communism and importance for the development of Spinozist Marxism in France. Complete with a substantial interview conducted by two of Matheron’s best known students, Laurent Bove and Pierre-François Moreau, and a comprehensive bibliography of Matheron’s publications, this is a crucial collection for anyone seeking to understand 20th-century continental Spinozism. Whether it be the established scholar looking for translations of difficult to find essays or the advanced undergraduate or graduate student in search of reliable secondary literature on Spinoza, this volume is the perfect introduction to Matheron’s rigorous, masterful, and original interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy.
Muslim-Christian Polemics in Safavid Iran
Authors: Tiburcio Alberto
Published: September 2021

This book is a study on the history of polemical exchanges between Catholic missionaries and Muslim ʿulama in Safavid Iran. The book is centred around the figure of ʿAli Quli Jadid al-Islam, a Portuguese missionary who embraced Islam and worked as a court translator for Shah Sultan Husayn. The book explores the context in which he worked, focusing on broader conditions of Muslim-Christian relations in Iran, and examining his interreligious polemical writings. The latter, conceived in response to cycles of polemics linking Iran to Rome and Mughal India, adapted the historical conventions of polemical writing to serve the specificities of a Shiʿi Iranian context. The book contributes to debates on intellectual history of Shiʿism, confessionalisation in the early modern Middle East, Conversion, biblical translation projects and commentaries, and Muslim-Christian relations in the early modern period.
The Specificity of the Aesthetic (Lukács 1963)
Authors: Aitken Ian
Published: September 2021

This chapter is a close analysis of the chapter entitled ‘Film’ in Lukács’s 1963 book, The Specificity of the Aesthetic. In this chapter, Lukács forwards a naturalist-impressionistic account of film that is at variance to much of his writing on literature. Lukács also relates film to the modern condition and discusses the nature of time in film. The chapter discusses some of Lukacs’s ley concepts, such as Geradesosein, Besonderheit, the photographic ‘deanthropomorphising’ basis of film, and the ‘field of objectivity’.
Introduction to Kracauer: Abstraction, Redemption and Modernity1
Authors: Aitken Ian
Published: September 2021

This chapter provides an analysis of the key ideas of Siegfried Kracauer, covering his key concepts of abstraction, redemption and distraction, and his account of the modern condition, the role of conceptual reason within modernity, the subordination of intuition within modernity, and the way that film may contribute to the ‘redemption of physical reality.
‘Photography’ (Kracauer 1927)
Authors: Aitken Ian
Published: September 2021

This chapter is a close analysis of Kracauer’s 1927 essay ‘Photography’. In this essay, Kracauer regards photography as contributing towards the pervasive alienation within modernity, and he contrasts the photographic image with the ‘memory image, which contains substantial value. Nevertheless, the alienating photographic image can also reveal the nature of alienation, so has a positive potential. Kracauer also argues that the film image is less alienating than the photographic image because it can preserve more of the memory image
‘Introduction: Photography’ and ‘Basic Concepts’, from Theory of Film (Kracauer 1960)
Authors: Aitken Ian
Published: September 2021

This chapter is a close analysis of the two chapters from Kracauer’s 1960 book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. The chapter covers Kracauer’s increasing influence by phenomenology and outlines his key notion of the ‘basic aesthetic principle’ of film and photography, the ‘cinematic approach’, and the ‘realist’ and ‘formative’ stages of the aesthetic process in both film and photography. Kracauer’s contention that film is ‘uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality’ is discussed.
Dissensus in the Community: Disrupting Neoliberal Affects in La Comunidad
Authors: López Lerma Mónica
Published: September 2021

Chapter three rethinks the notions of political community and democracy through Alex de la Iglesia’s La Comunidad (2000), and places them in the context of the anxieties attending Spain’s integration in the European Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. Taking as starting points Jean Baudrillard’s vision of the “consumer society” and Jacques Rancière’s account of the “politics of consensus,” this chapter suggests that La Comunidad launches a powerful critique of the ideological presuppositions and “regimes of visibility” of Western liberal democracies. However, departing from previous analyses, it is argued that the real strength of the film lies not in its ability to render visible this order of domination, but rather in its ability to create an aesthetics of dissensus within the sensory world of the viewer. In this way, the film demonstrates not just the aesthetic dimension of politics, but the political character of aesthetics.
Surveilling Terror: Post-Western Topographies in No Rest for the Wicked
Authors: López Lerma Mónica
Published: September 2021

Chapter five explores the “aesthetic frames” that constitute the sensory configuration of security and justice in the post-9/11 “age of terror,” through Enrique Urbizu’s film No habrá paz para los malvados (2011). The film exposes what Michael J. Shapiro (2009) has called the “violent cartography” of national security in the context of the Madrid terrorist attack on March 11, 2004. The chapter shows how, while at the narrative level the film seemingly reinforces the ideological discourses of security and justice constituted by the state and the media, at the level of aesthetics the film disturbs and reconfigures the frames within which the former discourses are to be understood. The film uses a post-Western aesthetics that recycles themes, tropes, and styles of classical Western cinema to actively interrupt and modify its assumptions, ideology, and values. Against the state’s rhetoric of safety, protection, and prevention, the film makes visible both the failure of the law to respond to violence and the inability of the police to intervene in it effectively. By leaving the viewer with a disquieting feeling of uncertainty and danger, the film asks the question, is there a place for justice between violence and the law?
Introduction: Sensing Justice
Authors: López Lerma Mónica
Published: September 2021

The meaning of justice and the meaning of the aesthetic may both be sensed, but they can never be codified or entirely understood. They lack an essence, or a definition; they exist in specific performances rather than as general propositions. The aesthetic and the just alike deny the application of a priori models or abstract understandings and instead focus on the tangible and unrepeatable experience of singular events. The artwork and the moment of judgment come each time differently. Reproduction is forgery....
The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow
Authors: Lamont Craig
Published: September 2021

This book provides a long overdue reading of Scotland’s largest city as it was during the long eighteenth century. These formative years of Enlightenment, caught between the tumultuous ages of the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, cast Glasgow in a new and vibrant light. Far from being a dusty metropolis lying in wait for the famous age of shipbuilding, Glasgow was already an imperial hub: as implicated in mass migration and slavery as it was in civic growth and social progression. Craig Lamont incorporates case studies such as the Scottish Enlightenment, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Eighteenth Century Print Culture to investigate how the city was shaped by the emergence of new trades and new ventures in philosophy, fine art, science, and religion. The book merges historical, literary and memory studies to provide an original blueprint for new research into other cities or civic spaces.
‘That barbarous traffic’
Authors: Lamont Craig
Published: September 2021

This chapter looks at the extent of Glasgow’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and the key figures in Glasgow who sought to change, support, or comment on it. Adam Smith, rooted in the Glasgow Enlightenment, is shown to be anti-slavery, but Smith’s own complicated cultural memory is also brought into view. Key objects such as the Description of a Slave Ship and the Glassford Family Portrait help frame the discussion.
Regional Defence
Authors: Singh Bhubhindar
Published: September 2021

The chapter shows how the Japanese security policymaking elite utilised the North Korean Nuclear Crisis in 1993–4, the Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1996 and the Taepodong Crisis in 1999 to authorise the SDF to adopt a regional defence role within the US–Japan alliance.
Collective Self-Defence
Authors: Singh Bhubhindar
Published: September 2021

This chapter illustrates how the Japanese security policymaking elite utilised the China threat emanating from the series of China-related maritime incidents during 2010–15 to successfully achieve the addition of collective self-defence missions into the SDF’s mandate.
Introduction
Authors: Purse Lisa , Wölfel Ute
Published: September 2021

This chapter introduces the anthology’s focus on figures of transgression in war representation by locating the concept of transgression itself within the context of the political polarisations and social destabilisations of the 21st century. As ‘architectures of enmity’ increasingly dictate political rhetoric, acts of transgression enfold their potential to radically challenge accepted allegiances, disturb dominant hierarchies, and contest received wisdom.
This chapter argues that cinema, and cultural representation more generally, are privileged sites at which war and its effects are reflected upon; they can shore up established ‘war scripts’, or create space for counter-narratives and a more reflective approach to war’s effects on people. Figures of transgression – those who transgress the borders between enemy and friend, perpetrator and victim – are import to centre for critical analysis because they are crucial to the ways in which cultural productions seek to understand war and its aftermath, reflect on dominant narratives about who wages war and why, and reflect on its consequences for people, communities and nations.
‘Just another Kraut’? The Wehrmacht Traitor as ‘Good German’ in Hollywood’s Decision before Dawn (1951)
Authors: Major Patrick
Published: September 2021

Decision before Dawn (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1951) was based on the true story of a Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war, code-name ‘Happy’, who volunteered for the American Office of Strategic Services in 1945 to spy behind German lines for the Allies, exploring the issue of Landesverrat (national treason) amid the changing loyalties of the Cold War during West Germany’s post-war rearmament. Screenwriter Peter Viertel had himself been ‘Happy’s’ case-officer. The chapter uses archives from Twentieth Century-Fox studios and the US State Department to chart fruitless attempts to suppress a West German release for fear of inflaming nationalist and local Bavarian sentiment. Entscheidung vor Morgengrauen (1952) received mixed reviews, which are discussed alongside subtle changes made to the dubbed German version. The Hollywood release marked the international breakthrough for Austro-German actors Oskar Werner and Hildegard Knef.
Religious Pacifism and the Hollywood War Film: From Sergeant York (1941) to Hacksaw Ridge (2017)
Authors: Westwell Guy
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how the Hollywood war film accommodates and contains religious pacifism. Through comparison of Sergeant York (1941) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016), both of which tell the stories of religious pacifists who find themselves on the battlefield, this chapter describes how each film shows the transgressive nature of religious pacifism and puts in place containment strategies that seek to recuperate this radical anti-war belief system. I argue that in spite of this ideological recuperation the films still retain a strong sympathetic view of this form of pacifism, and that this testifies to the possibility that the audience is suspicious of the dominant pro-war narrative and may even desire an alternative, more pacific view of the world.
Military Masculinity and the Deserting Soldier in Stop-Loss (2008)
Authors: Bjerre Thomas Ærvold
Published: September 2021

The chapter outlines the deserter narrative in American war culture, with a focus on the inherent tensions between normative ideals of masculinity and transgressive notions of cowardice. The chapter then analyzes Kimberly Peirce’s 2008 Iraq War film Stop-Loss in this context. The U.S. war film genre is regulated by certain conventions regarding masculinity, heroism and national identity, but by presenting the transgressive act of desertion as one of moral courage, Peirce challenges established notions of military masculinity and national identity. This challenge remains temporary, though: the main character retains the culturally powerful trope of the ideal male soldier. Ultimately, he is unable to turn his back on his men and his country, and the film is unable to fully undermine the potent trope that links nation, military and masculinity.
Marie Colvin – The War Hero and the ‘Nasty Woman’
Authors: Piotrowska Agnieszka
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on the iconic war correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed in a bombardment during the siege of Homs. Bringing together autoethnographic and scholarly modes of analysis, and drawing on the concept of the ‘nasty woman’ (Piotrowska 2019) and a Lacanian reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, the essay challenges normative accounts of Colvin’s life, and interrogates the narratives of transgression that circulate around women war correspondents.
Carving Cameras: Antonioni’s Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo
Authors: Jacobs Steven
Published: September 2021

Dealing with Michelangelo’s famous 1513 statue of Moses, Antonioni’s 2004 short film Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo (literally The Gaze of Michelangelo) is an impressive meditation on the encounter between film and sculpture. By means of the dynamic, immaterial, two-dimensional, and volatile images of the film medium, Lo Sguardo evokes the static, material, three-dimensional, and durable forms of sculpture. Antonioni not only confronts the heroic and muscular statue of the Old Testament prophet with his own old and weakened body, he also juxtaposes visual and tactile perception: the gaze (the director’s eyes and glasses are explicitly framed) is paired with tactility as Antonioni’s hands are touching the marble surfaces.
Rearticulating some of the discussions and concepts central to sculptural theory since the eighteenth century, Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo also demonstrates that the medium of film not only represents, reproduces, or duplicates artworks but that it also reconfigures, re-imagines, and remediates them.
What Does a Dance Filmmaker See?
Authors: Roberts Adam
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, filmmaker Adam Roberts discusses three of his films, Hands (1995), blue yellow (1995) and Pieces of the Quiet Dance (2006). Meditating on the intimate relationship between the filmmaker and dancers in movement, he touches upon recurrent influences or concerns in his work, including carved funerary objects (‘stelae’), still life versus portraiture, and the forest glade as a cleared space (a space made and filled with light). In his films, he explains, the body of the filmed dancer is apprehended as a storehouse of infinite potential, a gesture into the past and the future. To film the human figure, he asserts, is to unveil a body in all its virtuality, in a celebration of the moment of discovery.
A Dialogue with Claude Cahun: Between Writing, Photography and Film in Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror
Authors: Pucill Sarah
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, the artist filmmaker Sarah Pucill elucidates her artistic dialogue with the Surrealist lesbian artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954), whose photographs and manuscripts are constitutive of her films Magic Mirror (2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (2016). Pursuing Pucill’s earlier interest in the intersubjectivity between women, the films re-enact Cahun’s photographs in the form of tableaux vivants, creating new connections between the French artist’s visual and written work and Pucill’s own creative practice. Drawing on Ágnes Pethő’s theoretical writing on the intermediality of the tableau vivant in film, the artist analyses how her re-enactment of Cahun’s photographs as tableaux vivants creates a sense of indecipherability caused by the overlaying of the original ‘ghost’ photograph with its re-staging in colour and with sound. The reworkings of Cahun's texts and photographs in the films conjoin different art forms and authors, interrogating questions of queer female subjectivity across time and space.
Introduction: Planetary Woolf
Authors: Pająk Paulina , Dubino Jeanne , Hollis Catherine W.
Published: September 2021

WE WRITE THIS INTRODUCTION IN A time of global crisis, as the Covid-19 pandemic has closed regional and national borders. Almost simultaneously, the Black Lives Matter movement has ignited global protests against racist police brutality. Although the pandemic has separated people physically from one another, while placing the health of first responders and essential workers at risk, the demand for social justice has drawn many people into the streets. From anti-government protests in Hong Kong to the thousands of global demonstrations in support of BLM, the demand for social justice crosses borders and creates activist communities even in the midst of unprecedented global crises. New technologies allow us to create digital communities and new forms of sociability, even in the wake of the many cancelled or postponed in-person events. In difficult times we, as scholars and common readers of Virginia Woolf, turn to her writing to help us make sense of the complexities of the present moment, particularly as we negotiate the relationships between politics and art and between sociability and solitude in our daily lives....
From Julia Kristeva to Paulo Mendes Campos: Impossible Conversations with Virginia Woolf
Authors: Pinho Davi
Published: September 2021

This chapter discusses the concept of the name ‘Virginia Woolf’ as a ‘signature’. While Julia Kristeva uses Woolf's name in About Chinese Women as a signature for the summation of depression and suicide, Brazilian cronista Paulo Mendes Campos's lyrical review of Virginia Woolf's Orlando presents the name as a signature that gestures towards interminable movements of life and makes fiction an element of permanent novelty. In this sense, Campos finds contemporaneity with Woolf, thus momentarily escaping the limiting reality of his own place in time. Campos’s essay ends with the word ‘life’. Even when death is at the heart of a sentence (‘I can’t go on’), life is its final word. The task of this chapter is to bring Kristeva and Campos into coexistence with Woolf’s final philosophy, as presented in Woolf’s autobiographical essay ‘A sketch of the past’, and also to make Kristeva and Campos our contemporaries in an undulant conversation about writing and life, not death – for it is interesting that conversation implies coexistence in its etymological roots: -con (with) -versari (to turn), which together form the Latin verb conversare, to turn round and round and round, and its deponent conversari, to live with, dwell together.
Three Guineas and the Cassandra Project – Christa Wolf’s Reading of Virginia Woolf during the Cold War
Authors: Krause Henrike
Published: September 2021

Against the background of the Cold War and a period of elevated tension between the East and West Bloc states at the end of the 1970s, this chapter explores the fascination of the East German writer Christa Wolf for Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. By introducing findings from Christa Wolf’s private library, the chapter offers evidence that Wolf turned her attention to Woolf’s book-length essay while she started to write her novel Cassandra and pre-pared her Lectures on Poetics, also known as the Cassandra Project. I argue that Woolf and Wolf were strongly influenced by their reflections on politics under the threat of war. In order to promote new ideas both writers searched for innovative literary forms that involved their audiences and readers with their arguments. The essay and autobiographical forms become crucial parts of their writing. Both writers drew their attention to female protagonists from ancient mythology like Cassandra and Antigone and brought these stories into communication with their own questions during intense political contexts. I show how both writers put feminist community-building at the centre of anti-militarism and were both convinced that writers have a social responsibility, and how literature can bring about a change in thinking.
Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Writing in Estonian Translation Culture
Authors: Marling Raili
Published: September 2021

Virginia Woolf’s texts pose a serious challenge to translators, not only because of the subtleties of her style but also because her political stances, most notably, on cosmopolitanism and feminism, continue to create friction in many receiving cultures. Previous scholarship has shown radical transformations of Woolf’s texts by androcentric translators. This chapter analyses the transfer(ability) of Woolf’s cosmopolitan feminism into the postsocialist Estonian culture and focuses on the example of the translation of A Room of One’s Own (1994/1997). This text was chosen because research from other Eastern European countries has shown that its translation can help open doors to other feminist texts. This analysis shows that the Estonian translation prioritises stylistic excellence over politics but not to an extent that would mute the feminist intentions of the text. The translation indeed can be seen as a means of smuggling in feminist ideas and inspiring feminist activism.
English and Mexican Dogs: Spectres of Traumatic Pasts in Virginia Woolf’s Flush and MarÍa Luisa Puga’s Las Razones Del Lago
Authors: Parra-Lazcano Lourdes
Published: September 2021

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the English Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) and the Mexican María Luisa Puga’s Las razones del lago [The Reasons of the Lake] (1991). It aligns the spectre of the traumatic past experienced by the dog Flush with those of the dogs Novela [Novel] and Relato [Story], based on their differing social and cultural contexts. The first section introduces the notion of spectres of traumatic past in nonhuman animal studies. The second establishes a comparison between Flush as a pet and Novela and Relato as semi-stray dogs to show how in each story a traumatic past of confinement has impacted the dogs’ lives. The third section discusses how the dogs’ spectres are associated with their violent past experiences, and the chapter concludes by addressing the human-animal empathy between these dogs and the voices of the writers.
Human Rights and Reformist Islam
Authors: Kadivar Mohsen , Künkler Mirjam
Published: September 2021

Human Rights and Reformist Islam critiques traditional Islamic approaches to the question of compatibility between human rights and Islam and argues instead for their reconciliation from the perspective of a reformist Islam. The book focuses on six controversial case studies: religious discrimination; gender discrimination; slavery; freedom of religion; punishment of apostasy; and arbitrary or harsh punishments.
Explaining the strengths of structural ijtihad, Mohsen Kadivar’s approach is based on the rational classification of Islamic teachings as temporal or permanent on the one hand, and four criteria of being Islamic on the other: reasonableness, justice, morality and efficiency. In the book, all of the verses of the Qur’an and the Hadith that are problematic in relation to human rights are abrogated rationally according to these criteria. The result is a powerful, solutions-based argument based on reformist Islam – providing a scholarly bridge between modernity and Islamic tradition in relation to human rights.
The book’s fourteen chapters are organized in five sections, including freedoms of belief, religion and politics, women’s rights, and slavery in contemporary Islam. Adding an extensive new introduction and annotations throughout the text from Kadivar bring the work up-to-date and place it in its academic and public contexts. In the introduction, the author critically compares his approach to Islam and human rights with those of five leading contemporary scholars: Mahmoud M. Taha, Abdullahi A. an-Na’im, Ann E. Mayer, Mohammad M. Shabestari and Abdulaziz A. Sachedina.
The Principles of Compatibility between Islam and Modernity
Authors: Kadivar Mohsen
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the relationship of Islam and modernity as a collection of issues which includes human rights.
Muslim reformists have brought together modernity and intellectualism on the one hand, with Islam on the other. In this intellectual and faith movement, human rights and divine obligation, individual freedom and social justice, collective wisdom and religious ethics, human rationality and the divine prophecy, peacefully coexist. The thinkers of reformist Islam have accepted the Islamic message together with the jewel of modernity.
The characteristics of reformist Islam or the principles of the compatibility of Islam and modernity are as follows. First principle: re-reading the texts of religion on the basis of its higher ends; Second principle: the high place of reason in the understanding of religion; Third principle: the permanent right to choose how to live; Fourth principle: the possibility of legislation and public policy on the basis of religious values.
An Introduction to the Public and Private Debate in Islamic Culture
Authors: Kadivar Mohsen
Published: September 2021

This chapter first presents a brief explanation about the private and the public before establishing the fundamental principle of the matter. Using two of the criteria taken by private definition as the basis of discussion, the chapter will then consider the following two axes: the prohibition against prying and the right to freedom in action. Thereafter, the chapter will consider important issues pertaining to the private sphere, such as al-amr bi al-ma‘ruf wa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar (enjoining the proper and forbidding the improper), the office of accountability (da’irat al-hisbah) and the limits of the authority of an Islamic government. Finally, the chapter will conclude with a recommendation for raising religious conscience.
‘Enjoining the proper and forbidding the improper’ is essentially the duty of people versus the state and not vice versa. ‘The office of accountability’ was a medieval institution based on a restricted and incomplete understanding of this duty. Hisbah was part of an Islamic state or theocracy, on the one hand, and a legal understanding of shari‘a, on the other – both of which are problematic. The time of hisbah is over.
Human Rights and Reformist Islam
Authors: Kadivar Mohsen
Published: September 2021

This chapter takes the form of a transcribed interview and consists of a reflection on the relationship between traditional Islam and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related covenants, and provides a solution for making traditional Islam compatible with the idea of human rights.
It critiques traditional Islamic approaches to the question of compatibility between human rights and Islam and argues instead for their reconciliation from the perspective of a reformist Islam. The chapter focuses on six controversial case studies: religious discrimination; gender discrimination; slavery; freedom of religion; punishment of apostasy; and arbitrary or harsh punishments.
Explaining the strengths of structural ijtihad, the author’s approach is based on the rational classification of Islamic teachings as temporal or permanent on the one hand, and four criteria of being Islamic on the other: reasonableness, justice, morality and efficiency. In the chapter, all of the verses of the Qur’an and the Hadith that are problematic in relation to the notion of human rights are abrogated rationally according to these criteria. The result is a powerful, solutions-based argument based on reformist Islam – providing a scholarly bridge between modernity and Islamic tradition in relation to human rights.
The Issue of Slavery in Contemporary Islam
Authors: Kadivar Mohsen
Published: September 2021

Although the rules on slavery are part of Islamic jurisprudence, there are a few verses about slaves in the Qur’an. In addition, there are a lot of hadith about them. However, this was a “temporal rule” and the time of slavery is now over. As such, slavery is now an “abrogated rule” of Islam. It is a forbidden and illegal act. This chapter describes the process of this paradigm shift.
With the elimination of the conventions of reasonability, which was the main basis for the ratified ruling (hukm imda’i) on slavery and ownership of humans in Islam, it is natural that this ruling too be recognised as a temporary and seasonal ruling of shari‘a, a ruling whose limit and duration of credibility has come to an end and which in these times is lacking credibility and legitimacy. That is to say, slavery, servitude and the owning of humans in such a context is illegitimate and forbidden (haram). There is no evidence for permanent and continuous ratification (imda’) of the slavery ruling. All ratified rulings (al-ahkam al-imda’i) are conditional on continuity of justice and reasonability.
The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre
Authors: Ward Ian
Published: September 2021

The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre investigates the place and purpose of law in a range of modern dramatic settings and writings. Each chapter, which focusses on a particular area of law and the work of a particular playwright, illustrates the important role of theatre in articulating legal and political issues to a modern audience. The encompassing aspiration of The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre introduces the reader to a variety of genres in modern dramatic writing. From the ‘state of the nation’ plays of the 1980s and 1990s, to ‘verbatim’ and modern historical drama, to the calculated violence of ‘in-yer-face’, and associated expressions of radical and feminist theatre. Amongst those playwrights whose work is considered are David Hare, Richard Norton-Taylor, Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, Mike Bartlett, Sarah Kane, Bryony Lavery and Evan Placey. Along the way the reader is introduced to an equally wide range of areas of political and legal debate; from constitutional reform, to the present state of international law, to a variety of familiar controversies in associated areas of law, society, and gender.
Murmurings
Authors: Ward Ian
Published: September 2021

This chapter focusses on David Hare’s Murmuring Judges; part of his critically acclaimed ‘State of the Nation’ trilogy, produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In each of these plays, Hare focussed his attention on the seeming dysfunctionality of particular public institutions. The other two plays in the set examined the Church of England and the Labour Party. Murmuring Judges, as the title suggests, focusses its attention on the legal profession; more closely still the Bar and the police. Hare’s critique of legal practice, and education, chimed with contemporary movements in ‘critical legal studies’ or CLS, as it became known. The CLS movement sought to uncover the ‘politics of the law’, and its consequence, arguing that its roots could be located in the modern law school. This chapter brings this claim and Hare’s play into alignment.
Conclusion
Authors: Ward Ian
Published: September 2021

The conclusion is summative, its purpose being to bring together insights drawn from the preceding chapters. It interrogates, more closely, the aspiration described in the Introduction; to explore the dynamic relation of law, literature and history in the closer context of modern British drama. It confirms that the theatre, and theatrical writing, is especially suited to realising one of the abiding ambitions of ‘law and literature’ scholarship, which is to humanise the legal text. An insight familiar to students of Shakespeare or Chekhov and various other dramatists whose work is already established in the literary jurisprudence ‘canon’, but which is just as persuasive in the context of modern and contemporary drama.
War in Space
Authors: Bowen Bleddyn E.
Published: September 2021

War in Space presents a theory of spacepower and considers the implications of space technology on strategy and international relations. The spectre of space warfare stalks the major powers as outer space increasingly defines geopolitical and military competition. As satellites have become essential for modern warfare, strategists are asking whether the next major war will begin or be decided in outer space. Only strategic theory can explore the decisiveness and effects of war in space on grand strategy and international relations.
Bleddyn E. Bowen applies the wisdom of military strategy to outer space and presents a compelling new vision of Earth's orbit as a coastline, rather than an open ocean or an extension of airspace as many have assumed. Rooted in the classical military works of Clausewitz, Mahan and Castex, to name a few, Bowen puts forward new principles for strategic thought about space that explain the pervasive and inescapable influence of spacepower on strategy and the changing military balance of the 21st century.
Introduction
Authors: Bowen Bleddyn E.
Published: September 2021

In 1996 Colin Gray asked ‘where is the theory of space power? Where is the Mahan for the final frontier?’1 This book answers that question by presenting propositions of spacepower and a strategic analogy of Earth orbit as a cosmic coastline. This book’s spacepower theory shows how to think more constructively and critically about the use of space systems in warfare – satellites, their infrastructure, methods of attacking them, and their influence on modern warfare and strategy. Spacepower theory helps to answer questions like ‘will a war begin or be decided in space?’, ‘how do satellites change the way war is conducted on Earth?’ and ‘what difference can space warfare make on Earth?’ Engaging with these questions has never been so important, as the use and deployment of satellites and space infrastructure – or spacepower – have become essential for modern military and economic power. It underpins and shapes a global web of connectivity and information-based economies. It provides new methods of political–economic development and control for continent-sized states. Space warfare is a realistic prospect because space technologies are at the heart of military weapon systems, intelligence, logistics and economics, and the tools for harassing or disabling satellites are spreading. In short, spacepower and the spectre of space warfare cannot be ignored in international relations (IR) and modern strategy. Spacepower represents a logical extension of the concept of power – however defined – in IR and it ‘consists of capabilities designed to control, deny, exploit, and regulate the use of space’....
Produced by Irving Thalberg
Authors: Salzberg Ana
Published: September 2021

Irving Thalberg was not just a critically important producer during Hollywood’s Golden age, but also an innovative theorist of studio-era filmmaking. Drawing on archival sources, this is the first book to explore Thalberg’s insights into casting, editing, story composition and the importance of the mass audience from a theoretical perspective. The book argues that Thalberg’s views represent a unified conceptual understanding of production – one that is still significant in the modern day. It examines Thalberg’s impact on film-historical turning points, including the transition from silent to sound cinema and the development of the Production Code, and features in-depth analyses of his productions at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1924 to 1936. Indeed, each chapter offers a reading of Thalberg’s films through his own theoretical lens, thus highlighting his insights into production and introducing new ways of considering his classic pictures, including The Big Parade (1925), The Broadway Melody (1929) and Romeo and Juliet (1936). The work concludes by assessing his resonance in popular culture, tracing the mythology of Thalberg as it evolved after his death in 1936.