bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Jamieson, Jargons, Jangles, and Jokes: Hugh MacDiarmid and Dictionaries
Authors: Whitworth Michael H.
Published: January 2021

Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) used dictionaries in the composition of his ‘synthetic Scots’ and ‘synthetic English’ poetry in volumes such as Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), and Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934). The essay considers his attitudes to artificial languages and to dictionaries in relation to modernity, and his reading of dictionaries and word books against the grain of academicism. It particularly considers John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language. It goes on to consider how, in his poetry, MacDiarmid places words and phrases that have been gleaned from dictionaries: his placing them in similes, and his leaving some of them unglossed and obscure. It concludes by considering the framing effects of alliteration, and the interplay of artifice and authenticity in MacDiarmid’s poetry.
Etymology and Elegy: Paul Muldoon’s ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’
Authors: Gaudern Mia
Published: January 2021

From the subtle and often ominous resonance of names in his earliest poems to the forensic investigations of Maggot (2010), Muldoon never allows etymology to be unequivocally relevant, or indeed irrelevant, to synchronic usage. This ambiguity is especially striking in his elegies, as it chimes with the classic dilemma of representing a loss for poetic gain. Through close readings of ‘Hedge School’, ‘Yarrow’, and ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’, this chapter examines the use of obsoleteness in Muldoon’s elegiac diction; words no longer current, but preserved in dictionaries, provide the poet with roundabout routes to a mitigated poetic grief. Whether evasive, provocative, and digressive, or, as in his elegy for Heaney, profoundly grounding, etymologies are an essential part of these poems’ struggle for closure.
Briefer Mentions and Lyrical Lexicons: Marianne Moore’s Responses to Dictionaries in The Dial and Observations
Authors: Stubbs Tara
Published: January 2021

1925 was an important year for the poet and editor Marianne Moore. First, she began assuming editorial responsibility for the American literary magazine The Dial, taking over from her predecessor Scofield Thayer. Second, she saw her collection Observations published, with the first edition selling out within a month. Moore’s interest in dictionaries at this time displays some intriguing overlaps between her critical and creative lives, still an underexplored area within Moore studies. Therefore, this chapter discusses Moore’s early reviews of a range of reference works, before turning its attention to Moore’s poems ‘Injudicious Gardening’ and ‘Marriage’, to demonstrate how Moore’s preoccupation with questions of definition becomes altogether more subversive, and revealing of her capricious attitude towards the notion of ‘definition’ itself.
Translator’s Introduction
Authors: Glissant Édouard
Published: January 2021

Édouard Glissant was not only a thinker but also a novelist and poet, and the essays in Treatise on the Whole-World reflect this; not only do characters from the novels appear from time to time (and indeed the Treatise itself is presented as written by a fictional character), but much of the writing has a poetic quality that is quite different from the conventional style of the essay (as Glissant says: ‘the poetics that have appeared in the world are gaily reinventing the genres, unrestrainedly mixing them up’, p. 75). The book also contains two actual poems (pp. 138–9, p. 152). He invents new words whose meaning is not always clearly defined, and abstract discussion alternates with lyrical evocations of landscapes, cities or people (‘You ask why I am jumping about like this, going from polished sentences to all kinds of jumbles of words?’, p. 40). Repetition, also, has a positive rather than a negative value, because it is never exact: looking at the same idea from a slightly different angle can shed new light on it....
The Gardens in the Sands
Authors: Glissant Édouard
Published: January 2021

The Gardens: The secret part of the poem, that solitude and grace that the storyteller keeps for himself. The place that he offers to the intuitive attention of She who reads omens, to the dissertations of the friend and the brother, in a fragile sharing....
Waves and Backwashes
Authors: Glissant Édouard
Published: January 2021

Quoting the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite: ‘Unity is submarine’, Glissant describes how relations between Caribbean countries are not only overt but also hidden and subliminal. There is a section on naming: the complexity of names and nicknames in Martinique. He then argues that filiation is giving way to multinational markets. Then, in a good example of the positive value of repetition, he returns to the themes of the system versus the trace, the landscapes of the Americas, the importance of preserving all the world’s languages; and the relation between language and langage.
What Was Us, What Is Us
Authors: Glissant Édouard
Published: January 2021

Here Glissant discusses a number of writers: the ethnographic and poetic work of Michel Leiris; Aimé Césaire; Saint-John Perse; Kateb Yacine; Mallarmé’s dream of writing the ‘Book of the World’, contrasted with Segalen’s embracing of diversity; and a detailed account of Yves Bonnefoy’s Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, and its influence on other poets. There is also a section devoted to Nelson Mandela. Glissant goes on to highlight the similarities between Islam, Christianity and Judaism as monotheistic religions. He then returns to issues he has already raise earlier in the book: the difference between books and the internet; the ‘Chaos-World’ and invariants; different ways of reading, linked to difference between language and langage, and, finally, a definition of the ‘Whole-World’.
The Town, Refuge for the Voices of the World
Authors: Glissant Édouard
Published: January 2021

This chapter is the text of a speech given at the inauguration of the Congrès du Réseau des Villes-refuges and of the International Parliament of Writers, given in Strasbourg in 1997. The Congress planned to set up a network of ‘refuge towns’ for writers who were persecuted in their own countries. Glissant discusses clashes between cultures, and the politicization of culture: culture, he claims, has become one of the most important sites of political struggle. Writers are pioneers is using imagination to create open identities (rhizomes), and this is one of their most important roles: they thus participate in a true ‘Poetics of Relation’.
‘Grass grows, a passer-by is an event and everybody knows everybody else’
Authors: Reader Keith
Published: January 2021

This recounts the story of our quartier between 1789 and the turn of the nineteenth century. Canonical literary and cultural figures such as Balzac – the supreme chronicler of nineteenth-century Paris – Victor Hugo and the film-maker Marcel Carné, whose Les Enfants du paradis is set at the limit of the area, are discussed side by side with less prominent but nonetheless important names such as the influential Romantic Théophile Gautier, Alphonse Daudet and Eugène Sue whose Les Mystères de Paris is a much-undervalued precursor of Naturalism. This period saw the appearance of the first guide-books, references to the Marais in which are cited and analysed, and towards the end the arrival of increasing numbers of Jewish residents, whose presence then and thereafter has been a major factor in the quartier’s identity.
‘The inhabitants are taken into account’ (?)
Authors: Reader Keith
Published: January 2021

The 1964 designation of the Marais as a conservation area by Culture Minister André Malraux was a watershed in its history. Gentrification also had its downside, and the pros and cons of the area’s renovation are here explored through a variety of representations, literary and cinematic. René Fallet’s novel Paris au mois d’août, filmed by Pierre Granier-Deferre with Charles Aznavour, finds a place here cheek-by-jowl with a rather seedy 1968 guide to local commercial sex and Gérard Oury’s film Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob. Contrasting political stances are taken by Isabelle Backouche who criticises the gentrification and effective social cleansing of the area and Yvan Christ who with his collaborators proffers an out-and-proud advocacy of the Marais as ‘the living memorial of bygone France.’
Searching for Japan
Authors: Monserrati Michele
Published: January 2021

This book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant opening of Japan’s relations with the West. Drawing from the fields of Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, analysis of these texts explores one central question: what does it mean to imagine Japanese culture as contributing to Italian culture? Each author shares in common an attempt to disrupt ideas about dichotomies and unbalanced power relationships between East and West. Proposing the notion of ‘relational Orientalism,’ this book suggests that Italian travelogues to Japan, in many cases, pursued the goal of building imaginary transnational communities, predicated on commonalities and integration, by claiming what they perceived as ‘Oriental’ as their own. In contrast with a long history of Western representations of Japan as inferior and irrational, Searching for Japan identifies a positive overarching attitude toward the Far East country in modern Italian culture. Expanding the horizon of Italian transnational networks, normally situated within the Southern European region, this book reinstates the existence of an alternative Euro-Asian axis, operating across Italian history.
Mussolini in Japan: Japanese Representations in the Age of Fascism
Authors: Monserrati Michele
Published: January 2021

In chapter 2, the focus is on travel literature on Japan during the Fascist period, with specific attention to the shift in the mode of representing Japan before and after the Anti-Comintern Pact between Italy, Germany and Japan of November 6, 1937. This historical event is the watershed moment that serves to separate the chapter in two sections. Before the ratification of the anti-communist pact, a nationalistic approach informed by a sense of Italian cultural supremacy defined the attitude of Italians writers who landed in the East Asian country. The chapter’s second half traces Mussolini’s attempts to reshape the image of Japan in Italian public opinion. Beyond the propaganda, the chapter calls for a more nuanced assessment of this literary production. One example is offered by Pietro Silvio Rivetta, who seized the opportunity presented by the military alliance to reinforce his longstanding cultural project of introducing Japanese culture to Italy. Another example, is suggested by the case of Arundel Del Re, whose life spent across countries and continents exposed him to the pitfalls of his cosmopolitan identity, but also generated in him a sense of belonging, from East to West, that transcend the limits posed by national borders.
Singing the Law
Authors: Leman Peter
Published: January 2021

“Singing the Law” is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, I begin with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., they both promote and retreat from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.
Catching History by the Tail: Colonial Non-Fiction, Atavism, and the Crisis of Modernity in Kenya
Authors: Leman Peter
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines colonial responses to African oral jurisprudence as it interacted with laws that recast resistance to colonialism as evidence of an African crisis of modernity. The origins of this crisis discourse become clear in two trials that correspond to significant moments in colonial Kenya and in the evolution of legalistic orature’s challenge to colonial law. In Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa (1937), a “traditional” Kikuyu court convenes to resolve a crisis that has disrupted Dinsen’s pastoral fantasy of Africa as a home for her aristocratic values. She attempts to control the court through a written contract but is frustrated as orature exposes the true crisis of modernity within colonialism. Similarly, Montagu Slater’s The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (1955) emphasizes the tension between African orality and colonial literacy in the famous Emergency-era trial. Slater shows how orature challenged the meaning of written evidence and, like the court on Dinesen’s farm, exposed the crisis discourse as evidence of an ongoing crisis within colonialism itself. These trials enable necessary perspectives on the larger picture of law, orature, and literature in colonial East Africa.
Conclusion: Temp/orality and Law in the End Times
Authors: Leman Peter
Published: January 2021

The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern law. It argues, through a reading of Shaaban Robert’s Kiswahili parable Kusadikika: A Country in the Sky (1951), that the models of oral jurisprudence offered by East Africa’s many writers who touch on, investigate, or otherwise sing about the legacies of colonial law and the crisis of modernity may ultimately offer new ways of thinking about modern law itself. More specifically, these models reveal how “modern law” is not an invention of the West, but a product of a long, complex, and often violent collaboration between the Global North and Global South.
Introduction
Authors: Yoshikawa Saeko
Published: January 2021

After establishing the scope and critical context of the book, the Introduction gives a brief history of the A591 main road linking Kendal and Keswick. This ancient road was and is the central axis of the Lake District in many respects; it was a setting for several poems of Wordsworth, and along it Wordsworth, Coleridge and other Romantic writers took up residence. Attracted by these literary associations and by the spectacular landscape, tourists have journeyed along the road on foot, by coach, by bicycle, and in motor vehicles. The surrounding landscape has also been a centre of campaigns against many projected incursions by railways and road constructions. As a principal site of the book, this chapter gives a cultural and social portrayal of the road, following Hardwick Drummond Rawnsley’s coach journey of 1888 — a glimpse of the last days of pre-modern literary tourism by coach — to highlight how this traditional mode of travel was affected by the age of transport revolutions.
Wordsworthian Tourism in the Interwar Period
Authors: Yoshikawa Saeko
Published: January 2021

Chapter 7 explores how the cultural identity of the Lake District was redefined and preserved after the First World War through two trends: new global tourism, and the advent of outdoor movements. First it focuses on foreign visitors, including American and Japanese tourists, who have made no slight contribution to the re-invention of ‘Wordsworth Country’. Then it explores some of the new walkers’ guides, including those by William Thomas Palmer, Maxwell Fraser and Henry Herbert Symonds, that were particularly attuned to foot-stepping through Wordsworth’s Lake District and encouraged readers to go back to Romantic pedestrianism. The chapter also pays attention to how the hiking and cycling boom among urban working classes changed the tourist landscape in the Lake District, becoming the driving force behind conservation and access campaigns and the new National Parks movement. Taken as a whole, the chapter investigates how Wordsworth’s legacy was preserved and then rehabilitated in the interwar era of mass motoring.
Introduction
Authors: Shears Jonathon
Published: January 2021

The introduction argues that while the hangover has often been the subject of medical and psychological studies, it is a neglected topic in the humanities. In the emerging field of drinking studies, the hangover tends to be overlooked in favour of studies of intoxication, sociability and ritual. Yet, as argued here, a literary study of the hangover contributes significantly to our understanding of many of the issues given prominence in drinking studies such as the relationship between the drinker and their environment, the politics of controlling alcohol consumption and the ways in which alcohol affects perception and cognition. The introduction establishes the historical range of the study from the Renaissance to the present day and argues that the hangover as a socio-cultural phenomenon is best witnessed when we consider the continuities and contrasts in its representation at different times.
‘The Nausea of Sin’: The Early Modern Hangover
Authors: Shears Jonathon
Published: January 2021

The chapter pursues the representation of the hangover in poetry and drama, religious and political writing and in the culture wars of the seventeenth century in England. It begins by exploring why the hangover has been obscured in writing about early modern depictions of drunkenness through a study of Anacreontic verse by Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and Richard Lovelace. Hangovers, it contends, are more prominent in other forms of literature such as Protestant tracts and sermons and in bawdy verse and drama of the Restoration. They also feature regularly in what the chapter terms ‘anti-symposiastic’ verse written by Whigs in the 1690s. The chapter argues throughout that the hangover – whether leading to feelings of guilt and shame or defiance – takes us beyond studies of male fellowship and tavern culture, increasing our understanding of the way that the body becomes a route to discuss moral and spiritual failings in this period. It also gives examples of the way Withdrawal-Relief recovery methods – sometimes known as the hair of the dog – became associated with defiance.
Moral Sensitivity and the Mind: Tired and Emotional Victorians
Authors: Shears Jonathon
Published: January 2021

The Victorian period is often remembered as a morally severe one, associated with rectitude, propriety, temperance and self-help. This chapter argues that hangover literature provides an important means to understand the social and cultural values that drinkers were perceived to have transgressed. Nevertheless, the tendency in Victorian literature was to humanise the figure of the drunkard and hangovers were a part of this. Through analysis of depictions of hangovers in works by Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the chapter argues that Victorian novelists demonstrated many reasons why drinkers felt shame but also – drawing on better medical understanding of the nerves and the mind – their emotional complexity. It shows that they reversed some of the more straightforward condemnation of inebriates commonly found in temperance literature.
The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession
Authors: Hooper Kirsty
Published: January 2021

What did the Edwardians know about Spain, and what was that knowledge worth? The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession draws on a vast store of largely unstudied primary source material to investigate Spain’s place in the turn-of-the-century British popular imagination. Set against a background of unprecedented emotional, economic and industrial investment in Spain, the book traces the extraordinary transformation that took place in British knowledge about the country and its diverse regions, languages and cultures between the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I twenty-six years later. This empirically-grounded cultural and material history reveals how, for almost three decades, Anglo-Spanish connections, their history and culture were more visible, more colourfully represented, and more enthusiastically discussed in Britain’s newspapers, concert halls, council meetings and schoolrooms, than ever before. It shows how the expansion of education, travel, and publishing created unprecedented opportunities for ordinary British people not only to visit the country, but to see the work of Spanish and Spanish-inspired artists and performers in British galleries, theatres and exhibitions. It explores the work of novelists, travel writers, journalists, scholars, artists and performers to argue that the Edwardian knowledge of Spain was more extensive, more complex and more diverse than we have imagined.
Ask the Experts: Spanish Studies and the Struggle for Authority
Authors: Hooper Kirsty
Published: January 2021

Traces the professionalization of Spanish-language education and the emergence of the academic discipline of Spanish Studies, against a background of economic and commercial investment in Spain. Provides a critical analysis of the early years of Spanish Studies and the determination of the first academics to transcend the discipline’s commercial origins. Recovers the works and legacy of scholars excluded from the academy whose contributions to Edwardian knowledge about have been largely forgotten.
Baedeker and Beyond: Tourism and Colonialism
Authors: Hooper Kirsty
Published: January 2021

Explores the emergence of mass tourism to Spain during the late Victorian and Edwardian period, and its intersection with British quasi-colonial infrastructure-building in the country. Considers the transformation in tourist guidebooks in the wake of the first Baedeker guide to Spain in 1898, and the emergence of an discourse of ‘anti-tourism’. Explores the proactive role of Spanish regional tourism associations in expanding British imagined geographies of Spain.
Epilogue: ‘Sunny Spain’ (1914)
Authors: Hooper Kirsty
Published: January 2021

Reaffirms how the transformation in Edwardian knowledge about Spain created a new, dynamic and diverse repertoire of Spanish images, shaped by the interests and experiences of an unprecedentedly diverse and uncompromisingly modern collection of experts. Traces the history of the failed ‘Sunny Spain’ tourism exhibition of 1914, and the insights it provides about the conflict between the Spanish desire to showcase their country as a modern economic partner, and the British view conditioned by a combination of French-mediated Romanticism and characteristically British condescension.
Hidden Texts, Hidden Nation
Authors: Jones Kathryn N , Tully Carol , Williams Heather
Published: January 2021

This book examines the representation of Wales and ‘Welshness’ in texts by French (including Breton) and German-speaking travellers from 1780 to the present day, focusing on key points in the period of Welsh modernisation from the Industrial Revolution to the post-devolution era. Since the emergence of the travel narrative as a popular source of information and entertainment in the mid-18th century, writing about Wales has often been embedded and hidden in accounts of travel to ‘England’. This book seeks to redefine perceptions of Wales by problematizing the notion of ‘invisibility’ often ascribed to the Welsh context and by broadening perspectives outwards to encompass European perceptions. Works uncovered for the first time include travelogues, private correspondences, travel diaries, articles and blogs which have Wales or Welsh culture as their focus. The ‘travellers’ analysed in this volume ‘travellers’ feature those travelling for the purpose of leisure, scholarship or commerce as well as exiles and refugees. By focusing on Wales, a minoritized nation at the geographical periphery of Europe, the authors are able to problematize notions of hegemony and identity within the genre, relating to both the places encountered (the ‘travellee’ culture) and the places of origin (the travellers’ cultures). This book thereby makes an original contribution to studies in travel writing and provides an important case study of a culture often minoritized in the field, but that nevertheless provides a telling illustration of the dynamics of intercultural relations and representation.
A framework: The Homeric and contemporary dead
Authors: Martin Bridget
Published: January 2021

This chapter presents a short summary of the evidence for interaction between the living and the dead in Homer and fifth-century society, concentrating on pertinent topics such as the exposure of the dead, the possibility of post-mortem rewards and punishments (e.g. the Mystery Religions) and interaction between the living and the dead. The tragic dead do not replicate exactly the Homeric or the contemporary fifth-century dead, but they do owe them a large debt, and, from the opposite direction, the depiction of the dead on stage allowed the tragedians and, by extension, the audience to address certain issues in society. As such, this chapter presents the background against which the audience would have understood the dead on stage.
The how and the why of interaction: The manifest evidence
Authors: Martin Bridget
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the means through which the manifest tragic dead (i.e. those who appear on stage or whose appearance is described at length) interact with the living, considering the impetus, methods and outcomes of such interaction and what it can tell us about the abilities and limitations of the dead in relation to the world of the living. The case studies examined concentrate on necromancy (Aeschylus’ Persians, Psychagōgoi and Choephori), dreams (Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Euripides’ Hecuba) and spontaneous appearances (Euripides’ Hecuba). The chapter examines the complex and problematic nature of much of this interaction, which, it emerges, is rarely without ambiguity.
The Critical Dystopia in Climate Fiction
Authors: Milner Andrew , Burgmann J.R.
Published: January 2021

This chapter develops an account of critical cli-fi dystopias that exhibit, by turn, each of five ideal-typical responses to climate change: denial, mitigation, negative adaptation, positive adaptation, and Gaian deep ecological anti-humanism. The texts analysed include Ian McEwan’s Solar, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and Aurora, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jean-Marc Ligny’s AquaTM, David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy and Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm.
The Problem of Fatalism in Dystopian Climate Fiction
Authors: Milner Andrew , Burgmann J.R.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores the logics of fatalism in climate fiction as they variously function in the classical dystopia, the critical dystopia and the time-travel story. For the classical dystopia, the examples are Maggie Gee’s The Flood, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods and Antti Tuomainen’s Parantaja. For the critical dystopia, the examples are Emmi Itäranta’s Teemestarin kirja, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and James Bradley’s Clade. For the time-travel story, the examples are Ben Elton’s Time and Time Again, Wolfgang Jeschke’s Das Cusanus-Spiel and Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia. The chapter concludes by observing that time travel, whether physical or psychic, is perhaps the most improbable novum in the whole of the SF repertoire, and that it might therefore seem strange to worry about its real-world implications. But the fatalist conclusion that there is little we can do to offset anthropogenic warming, and that our efforts might even make matters worse, does have such implications, and these might well be regretted.
Base Reality Texts and Eutopias
Authors: Milner Andrew , Burgmann J.R.
Published: January 2021

The chapter opens with the observation that there seem to be far fewer climate eutopias than climate dystopias, but adds that there is a case to be made that these are likely to become more culturally significant as the climate crisis develops. It then proceeds to a discussion, by turn, of base reality texts and critical eutopias. The texts analysed include Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Earth, Umoya Lister’s Planetquake, Robinson’s New York 2140; Dirk C. Fleck’s MAEVA! trilogy and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam. The chapter proceeds to argue that, by comparison with William Morris’s News from Nowhere, there is no real intratextual plausibility to the mechanisms by which eutopia is achieved within these novels. The chapter concludes with a survey of the study’s findings on cli-fi narratives.
Changing the Climate: Some Provisional Conclusions
Authors: Milner Andrew , Burgmann J.R.
Published: January 2021

The chapter opens with an account of the ‘value relevance’ of the authors’ own loosely ‘Green’ beliefs and of how these led them to search for a cli-fi version of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. They conclude that no such text exists as yet, but note the operation of what they term an ‘Off-Shute effect’, in which the cumulative weight of many different cli-fi texts could have a cumulative effect on real-world behaviour. One of their more striking unanticipated findings, they explain, was that none of their climate fictions, not even those by avowed socialists like Kim Stanley Robinson, depict the organised working class as the social force most likely to prevent anthropogenic global warming. They hypothesise that this is an effect of the persistence into the twenty-first century of ideological residues of postmodernism and stress that the term ‘Green’ as a political signifier derives from the Australian ‘Green bans’, that is from organised labour. The book and the chapter end with an insistence that climate fictions are warnings, rather than predictions or prophecies, and that warnings are there to be heeded and acted upon.
Untimely Graces
Authors: Lee Regina Yung
Published: January 2021

This chapter argues that reading sainthood in Bujold’s novel Paladin of Souls requires forcible recognition of the social constructions of gender, power, and normal life in Chalion, through their eventual disruption by the Bastard, fifth god of the Chalionese pantheon. Reading the novel through Ista dy Chalion’s first and second sainthoods result in comprehensive transfigurations of both the individual and her social contexts, through reconfigurations of gender, family, sexuality, and devotion, which cohere in a rereading of Ordol’s Sermon of the Cups. These lenses together mark sainthood as a form of queer failure, an inability to reproduce or represent normative life narratives or biographies, and centralizes this queering as the primary mode of divine presence throughout the novel.
You Wish to Have the Curse Reversed?
Authors: Herington Caitlin
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines how the heroines, major and minor, of the three novels set in Lois McMaster Bujold’s ‘World of the Five Gods’ challenge and reform traditional narrative depictions of female characters in conformative fantasy fiction. The chapter shows how the novels knowingly play with some of the most frequent and socially approved models of feminine behavior that appear in conformative fantasy: the passive Princess, the Good Nun (and her inverse, the Evil Witch), as well as numerous reworkings of the Mother figure. Examining characters such as Ista dy Chalion, Princess Joen of Jokona and Cattilara dy Lutez (Paladin of Souls), and Learned Hallana (The Hallowed Hunt), the chapter shows how Bujold creates a series of female characters whose political, social, supernatural, and economic agencies move beyond the limitations of traditional depictions to present women whose authority is decoupled from their beauty or reproductive capacity. Moreover, Bujold’s novels are shown not only to present a range of female characters who find self-fulfillment and autonomy without rejection but also to be filled with complex and lively women, the presence and variety of whom is integral to the overarching project of subverting traditional fantasy motifs.
In Quiet Converse
Authors: Woods Katharine
Published: January 2021

This chapter takes as its starting point the dedication at the front of Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel A Civil Campaign: ‘For Jane, Charlotte, Georgette and Dorothy—long may they rule’, arguing that the dedication places the novel in conversation with the authors whom Bujold invokes. This allows the chapter to explore this intertextuality through thematic convergences shared between Jane Austen’s Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Bujold’s Ekaterin Vorsoisson. These themes include: the ambivalent occupation of and transitions between exterior and interior spaces they occupy; on and offstage performances; the significance of gifts of jewelry; the imposition of familial bonds; and the intertwined experience of health and honor. Despite their often ambivalent reception, the chapter argues, Fanny and Ekaterin are integral components of their respective works; central characters in their standalone and series novels.
‘What you need is a liege lord’
Authors: Lindsay Sarah
Published: January 2021

This chapter looks at Lois McMaster Bujold’s use of medievalism, specifically at how Bujold uses feudalism in her Vorkosigan science fiction novel The Warrior’s Apprentice as a bridge between past and future. In constructing Barrayaran politics, Bujold simplifies feudalism by only showing us the basic chain from emperor to Vor nobility to armsman. She also presents an Imperium that, over the course of a century, has broken the power of the Vor nobility (as happened in late medieval and early modern France) and is moving towards a more parliamentary form of government (as happened in late medieval and early modern England). The chapter thus shows how Bujold’s feudalism is simplified from medieval European feudalism and, in terms of its history, is beginning to move beyond the medieval period. Nevertheless, as the chapter concludes, on Barrayar the bonds of mutual obligation created by feudalism remain crucial, as does the centrality of military protection and service.
The Holy Family
Authors: Reid Robin Anne
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on the relationships that two of Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy heroes – Cazaril (The Curse of Chalion) and Ingrey (The Hallowed Hunt) – have with divine and supernatural beings in the world of the Five Gods. The chapter opens by focusing on two specific definitions of queerness which underlie a subsequent stylistics analysis of the visions experienced by both heroes. The chapter explores the impact of these visions on the heroes’ able-bodied heterosexual male bodies, leading to the conclusion that Bujold’s Holy Family, especially the Bastard, deconstructs the gender constructions of the patriarchal nuclear family structure and its attendant ‘family values’ to create queer spaces. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of the potential for even greater subversion found in Bujold’s recent ‘Penric and Desdemona’ novellas.
The Bastard Balances All
Authors: MacDonald Meg
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the role of the Bastard, one of the gods in Lois McMaster Bujold’s ‘Worlds of the Five Gods’ series, and his contribution to her depiction of an inclusive Queer Theology. Drawing on the queer theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid, the chapter considers the distinctive set-up of the five-fold Quintarian pantheon that Bujold establishes, and how it creates and subverts dualistic ideas. The chapter provides close readings of interactions with the Bastard, particularly in Paladin of Souls and the ‘Penric and Desdemona’ series, where the Bastard is the patron god, and analyzes how the idea of the Queer God becomes essential to an inclusive dialogue within religious identity and society. The chapter demonstrates how these novels and novellas afford Bujold the opportunity to reflect upon many of the vital social functions performed by real religions throughout history while challenging those dualistic theological systems that remain prevalent, particularly in Western culture.
Canon Compliance and Creative Analysis in Vorkosigan Saga Fan Fiction
Authors: Busse Kristina
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines different types of fan fiction based on the science fiction Vorkosigan novels by Lois McMaster Bujold. It explores the ways in which the source texts, or ‘canon’, are used as touchstone and tool not only to tell the stories that fan writers want to tell, but also to interpret specific characters and dynamics in the text, to interrogate the political and personal implications of the worlds of the books, and to explore how original characters can offer deeper insight into the characters and societies. The chapter examines canon-consistent stories, original characters, and slash fiction, to argue that the central focus remains the close reading and analysis of Bujold’s universe and characters, albeit in imaginative and exploratory ways.
Electric Cars, Autoduelling, and Bike Shares in the New Wave
Authors: Withers Jeremy
Published: January 2021

Chapter Three focuses on works from the New Wave era (c. 1960-1975) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, and Ernest Callenbach. The primary goal of the chapter will be to highlight how some science fiction writers of the Sixties and Seventies responded to two important events related to transportation: the dramatic spike in annual automobile fatalities that began in the early-1960s and climaxed in the early-1970s, and the growing environmentalism of this era.
Looking in the Mirror
Authors: Whitacre Andrea
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the Mirror Universe as a figure for Star Trek’s negotiation of its own franchise identity. It argues that the Mirror is a tool with which Trek examines its own legacy, tropes, and purpose. It is no coincidence that this dark, funhouse vision is used most extensively in Discovery and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, two shows whose premises are built on re-examination and reinvention of the franchise, and whose themes draw morally murky connections between the Trek future and our real present. These shows repurpose the dystopian Mirror as a necessary means of reflection on what it means to be Star Trek, and how the franchise negotiates its complicated past. This chapter focuses in particular on how Discovery revisits and revises the systems of power inherent to the franchise’s operation, both onscreen and in audience distribution, especially as they pertain to women, power, and normative subjectivity.
From Series to Seriality
Authors: Batzke Ina
Published: January 2021

Until Star Trek: Discovery aired in September 2017 on CBS: All Access, all previous Star Trek series typically conformed to the prevalent narrative formats of their historical periods, i.e. most episodes were self-contained. When the series format was violated, e.g. in the two-part episode “The Menagerie” (Star Trek, 1966), this most often resulted not from a desire for narrative innovation, but from budgetary constraints, or to generate cliff-hangers at the end of a season. With Star Trek moving to CBS, and particularly its All Access platform, this traditional format – in parallel to other adaptations for streaming services – changed significantly: Discovery was created as a post-network serial, instead of a series. This chapter aims to investigate how this move from series to serial influenced not only the narrative structure, but particularly the world-building strategies and possibilities inherent in Discovery. As this becomes especially prominent when comparing the story world of the Mirror Universe, a fictional universe which has haunted the Star Trek characters since the franchise’s earliest instalment, this chapter focuses on episodes set in this dimension.
Discovery and the Form of Victorian Periodicals
Authors: Tattersdill Will
Published: January 2021

In its move to a streaming service and, with it, a less episodic structure, Discovery breaks new narrative ground for the Star Trek franchise – a wholesale move into the serial format. In a marked departure from The Next Generation (somewhat prefigured by the later years of Deep Space Nine), virtually no episode of Discovery functions independently of its fellows; watching the show out of order would not only be confusing, but actively ruinous to an assumed viewing experience built around slow accretions of narrative, long arcs of character development, and carefully placed disruptions of the status quo. The adoption of this format pairs intriguingly with the decision to release episodes weekly, which contrasts with the increasingly fashionable Netflix model of dropping an entire series at once. This decision also brings Star Trek’s storytelling into contact with some far older forms of science fiction, and this chapter seeks to understand Discovery’s serialisation by comparing it to that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.
To Boldly Discuss
Authors: Münderlein Kerstin-Anja
Published: January 2021

In the canon, Star Trek: Discovery seamlessly joins the rank of its predecessors in questioning power and monoglossia. In the “fanon,” contemporary fan writers have done the same and continue the tradition of political fan fictions in Star Trek, as this chapter aims to show. While there certainly are many escapist stories with little, if any, political relevance, a significant part of the stories actively engages in contemporary debates and movements surrounding ethics and science, war trauma, and LGBTQ representation. To prove its claim, the chapter begins with a brief overview over the relevance of socio-political discourses in Star Trek Discovery. These discourses are then compared to political criticism and discussion in Discovery fan fiction. To make this viable, the chapter will analyse a sample of fan fictions published on the two main platforms fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.com. Ultimately, this chapter shows that the importance of socio-political debates is just as relevant in the Discovery “fanon” as in the Discovery canon. Certainly, Star Trek’s degree of political involvement has always been part of the franchise’s allure and Star Trek: Discovery continues this tradition well into the 21st century – and takes its fans with it to boldly discuss what many fans have discussed before.
Interview with Dr. Diana A. Mafe on ‘Normalizing Black Women as Heroes’
Authors: Mittermeier Sabrina , Spychala Mareike
Published: January 2021

In an interview with the editors, Dr. Diana Mafe discusses her book Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV (2018) on the role of black women in science fiction, and what Star Trek: Discovery’s lead character Michael Burnham means for the genre in general, as well as the Star Trek franchise in particular.
The American Hello
Authors: Schillinger Henrik , Sönnichsen Arne
Published: January 2021

This chapter will discuss how Discovery either reproduces, criticizes, or subverts established U.S. representations of diplomacy. The results will provide some leads on whether Discovery lives up to Star Trek’s progressive worldview. Revisiting Iver B. Neumann’s argument, this chapter argues that Discovery’s pilot episode can be viewed as a critical reflection on how the difference between idealist (“We come in peace”) and realist (a “Vulcan Hello”) approaches to diplomacy become blurred from the inverted perspective of the (Klingon) Other. However, over the further course of the season, Discovery loses its reflexive perspective on the ambiguity of diplomacy and settles for demonstrative idealism. The chapter discusses whether Discovery in its adaptation of a demonstrative ‘idealism’ subverts U.S. representations of diplomacy in the light of paradigmatic shifts after 9/11, or whether it reproduces the ambiguity of ‘realist’/’idealist’ representations, ultimately legitimizing the use of force for supposed higher ends.
Not Your Daddy’s Star Trek
Authors: Spychala Mareike
Published: January 2021

This chapter argues that in contrast to older iterations of the franchise, Star Trek: Discovery is not only centred on Michael Burnham, First Officer and later mutineer/science specialist, and thus departs from the usual focus on a starship Captain as lead character, it also introduces a wider variety of female characters – human and Klingon – who are instrumental in resolving the first and second season’s central conflicts. Thus, Discovery, through including of so many different and fully-fledged female characters not only continues in the franchise’s liberal tradition, it also explores new ways in which female characters can be represented in televised (American) science fiction series. This paper will argue that the show’s female characters push against and sometimes transcend generic tropes that have limited characters like TNG’s Deanna Troi and Dr. Beverly Crusher, picking up on and contributing to contemporary debates about gender and gender identity.
‘We Choose Our Own Pain. Mine Helps Me Remember’
Authors: Mittermeier Sabrina , Volkmer Jennifer
Published: January 2021

This Chapter argues that Captain Gabriel Lorca, upon first look, is the archetype of the Starfleet Captain in the vein of Kirk and Picard: a white, middle-aged, (presumably) heterosexual man. However, his reveal as a Terran effectively recasts the character from a capable leader to a white supremacist sociopath, and is thus powerfully subverting the trope of the action hero, and in turn, that of the Starfleet Captain. Discovery thus actively criticizes pervasive ideals of masculinity of the genre (and beyond) through Lorca. It further does so via the character Ash Tyler, who also represents an alternative concept to the traditional action hero. Unlike Lorca, whose sexual prowess is referenced often, Tyler engages in a romantic relationship, an aspect usually neglected in on-screen romances of male heroes. Additionally, he is a rape survivor, again successfully subverting the established gender roles of the genre. This chapter discusses both Lorca and Tyler in order to highlight Discovery’s engagement with, and subversion of genre tropes, and its criticism of traditional ideas of masculinity.
The Destabilizing Materiality of the Autograph for Blake, Coleridge, and Tighe
Authors: Linkin Harriet Kramer
Published: January 2021

This chapter looks at three poets—William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Tighe—who integrate print and manuscript technologies to produce a new materiality in autographic texts that capture their idiolectic voices. They deploy scribal practices in print media to inscribe individuality, autographing the print copies of their works to transform them from uniform products into objects embodying vital processes. Illuminated printing enables Blake to make each copy of his texts a unique graphic object, most expansively in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Coleridge’s habitual revision of his printed texts destabilizes each version to re-engage the immediacy of poetic vision through a vocalized experience, most dramatically in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Tighe initially rejects print publication for the affective palpability of scribal publication but then inscribes privately printed copies of Psyche; or, the Legend of Love to specific members of her coterie, a process her coterie continues after Tighe dies. All three explore the implications of being bound in bookish or human form in their poems even as they use the materiality of their autographic texts to reconfigure a print publication system that might otherwise lock them or their texts into fixed identities or commodities.