bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Synthetic Fiber Content Measurement in Concrete Using Neutron Thermalization
Authors: Amirkhanian Armen N. , Roesler Jeffrey R.
Published: January 2025

The macro-fiber content in concrete cast in the field is critical to achieving the desired toughness properties and performance of the concrete structure. Currently, there exists no standard method to determine the polymer fiber content of hardened concrete. A nuclear density/moisture gauge was used on hardened concrete pavements with and without polymer fibers. Polymeric fibers are composed primarily of carbon and hydrogen. Since these elements are substantial neutron thermalizers, the neutron count detector on the nuclear gauge is sensitive to changes in the fiber content. The effects of hydrogen and carbon present in the unreinforced concrete itself were subtracted out by taking readings on specimens without fibers. Polymer fiber volume had a clear and statistically significant effect on the neutron readings. This effect was found to be linear and the polymer fiber volume of hardened concrete could be quickly and accurately be determined. The proposed non-destructive and in-situ test procedure can provide useful information for engineers conducting forensic failures and provide a method of quality assurance for determining the as-built polymeric fiber content of fiber reinforced concrete structures.
Emissions Reducing Benefits of Multi-Functional Photocatalytic Concrete Inlays
Authors: King Daniel , Roesler Jeffrey R. , Sen Sushobhan
Published: January 2025

Thin, multi-functional concrete inlays constructed with flowable fibrous concrete (FFC) and containing titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles offer enhanced constructability and performance characteristics as well as environmental benefits, including the ability to reduce NOx pollution in near-road urban environments. Photocatalytic FFC mixes incorporating different cement types and fly ash replacement were prepared in the laboratory to characterize NOx removal ability and analyze the impact of factors such as carbonation and reflectance on photocatalytic activity. Highly reflective specimens containing white TiO2 cement greatly enhanced photocatalytic efficiency compared to less reflective specimens made with gray TiO2 cement. Carbonation of the concrete specimens significantly decreased photocatalytic performance, although mixes incorporating fly ash somewhat reduced the impact of carbonation on the photocatalytic efficiency. By quantifying the effects of different variables on photocatalytic performance, the results of this study can be used to optimize a photocatalytic concrete mix design to maximize NOx removal under certain environmental conditions, NOx concentration levels, and carbonation.
Local Calibration of Joint Faulting Model by Using Resampling Techniques
Authors: Haider Syed W. , Brink Wouter C. , Buch Neeraj , Khazanovich Lev
Published: January 2025

The local calibration of the performance models in the Pavement-ME analysis and design procedure is a challenging task mainly because of (a) data needed to characterize the existing pavement sections, (b) nature of the performance models, and (c) inadequate number of pavement sections for a robust calibration. The transverse joint faulting model in the Pavement-ME uses a complex incremental approach. The model has eight (8) different calibration coefficients which can be adjusted to fit the measured faulting. Further, calculating predicted faulting using the published model equations is difficult. The determination of faulting outside the Pavement-ME is essential to calibrate all the model coefficients simultaneously. This paper documents the process of calculating faulting outside of the Pavement-ME by utilizing the inputs specific to the pavement sections. The first step consists of documenting the impact of each calibration coefficient on predicted faulting. This sensitivity assists in determining the most important calibration coefficient in the model. The second step is to calibrate the model by using all the available pavement sections in the calibration dataset. Multiple sampling approaches were utilized to calibrate the faulting model in the State of Michigan. First, the traditional approach uses about 70% of the data for calibration and the remaining 30% for validation. However, most of the States have a limited number of pavement sections for local calibration. Therefore, there is a need to employ statistical methodologies that are more efficient and robust for model calibrations. Second, bootstrapping and jackknifing resampling methods are used to efficiently estimate the model coefficients. The results in the paper show the effect of different sampling approaches on model parameter estimations and compare the role of such parameters in reducing the bias and the standard error of the faulting model.
Impact of Materials and Construction Variability on the Performance of Pavements
Authors: Darter Michael I.
Published: January 2025

Significant variability exists in everything associated with pavements but in particular, materials and construction (M&C) factors. Major sources include (1) variability along the project in layer thickness, initial smoothness, strength, dowel placement, etc., and (2) the difference between what is specified or designed and what is actually constructed in the field. Variation causes localized areas of the pavement to be “weaker” than other areas and these areas fail first either from structural deficiencies or disintegration from durability deficiencies and either results in “early” failures requiring maintenance repairs and “early” rehabilitation of the project. The project then experiences increased life cycle costs and often additional safety risks over time. The importance of variation reduction is recognized in all areas of manufacturing and construction as a critical activity to reduce failure, improve product performance, and lower future maintenance and rehabilitation costs. This paper describes types of concrete pavement variability, its effects, and illustrates how variability reduction leads to longer pavement life.
Dispute in Heavy Duty Concrete Pavement Construction: Significance of Standards
Authors: Poole Toy S.
Published: January 2025

This paper is an essay on the effect of standards and on problems and disputes that commonly develop in construction of heavy duty airfield pavements. It is intended to call attention to the need for improved standards for which research is needed to develop solutions to problems that develop in concrete airfield paving and tend to lead to owner-contractor disputes. Four construction scenarios that appear to suffer from insufficient specifications and consequently result in disputes are presented and discussed. Recommendations for potential improvements are made for each.
Development of LCA-AIR – An Airport Pavement Life Cycle Assessment Tool
Authors: Kulikowski John , Sawalha Mohammed , Sladek Michael , Roesler Jeffrey
Published: January 2025

The demand to provide more sustainable facilities and infrastructure has increased over the past ten years. The ability to measure and quantify the environmental impacts of such projects is in higher demand. Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies/tools are developed for highway infrastructure and pavements but a limited number of studies have been developed for airports and few for their pavement facilities. This paper introduces a pavement LCA tool called LCAAIR 1.0 to fill the necessary gap in quantifying sustainability strategies for airfield pavements. LCA-AIR incorporates the material production, construction/maintenance and rehabilitation, and use phases in the analysis. It uses standard indicators from TRACI to quantify these impacts based on two functional units (square yard and pounds-mile traveled). LCA-AIR showed that each phase contributed to the environmental impact but overall, the use phase produced the greatest LCA impact factors. The material production (MP) phase was heavily influenced by the binding agent (cement or asphalt). Brooming for foreign object debris (FOD) contributed significantly to the construction/maintenance and rehabilitation (CMR) phase. Use (U) phase was dominated by aircraft operations, particularly taking off and cruising. LCA-AIR currently does not consider the pavement end of life phase. An LCA example and corresponding environmental impacts for two different pavement types (Portland cement concrete and asphalt concrete) over the lifespan of a new airfield is provided to demonstrate the capabilities of LCA-AIR.
Optimizing Designs of Structurally Stable Open-graded Aggregate Bases (OGAB) in Concrete Pavements
Authors: Xiao Yuanjie , Tutumluer Erol , Wilde W. James
Published: January 2025

A stable, non-erodible, drainable base layer is crucial to maintain uniform support under concrete pavements and ensure satisfactory performance. This paper presents findings from a recent study aimed at investigating possible improvements in concrete pavement base layers in terms of stability, stiffness, and permeability. Moisture regimes in PCC pavement foundation layers and corresponding predicted pavement performance were first evaluated using different types of base course materials with varying hydraulic and mechanical properties. A previously validated discrete element method (DEM) model was subsequently employed for evaluating the gradation effect on both packing characteristics and load-carrying performance of unbound aggregate materials. The calibrated DEM model has the potential for optimizing the selection of size and shape properties of various types of unbound aggregates to achieve desired shear strength (stability) and drainage characteristics (drainability) for open-graded permeable aggregate base. DEM simulations were performed on different gradations chosen from the current Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) specified gradation band for unbound permeable aggregate base (UPAB). It was found that depending on the specific gradation and material hydraulic properties, different types of unbound permeable aggregate bases resulted in varying performance improvements. The benefits of maintaining adequate permeability and stability of base course proved to be evident. The DEM model simulation results indicated that a gravel to sand (G/S) ratio of 1.6 yielded the highest coordination number due to the achieved densest packing (indicated by the lowest porosity). Therefore, the optimal G/S ratio of 1.6 also determined previously from experimental results agreed well with the results of DEM simulations, which utilized three-dimensional polyhedral particles with realistic size distributions and aggregate shape properties. The use of such optimal size and shape properties is expected to achieve cost-effective open-graded aggregate base designs for long-life concrete pavements.
CONCRETE PAVEMENT DESIGN: IT’S MORE THAN A THICKNESS DESIGN CHART
Authors: Rollings Raymond S.
Published: January 2025

Many aspects must be considered in developing an adequate concrete pavement design besides the selection of the pavement thickness. This paper examines some of these aspects of design and illustrates them with examples drawn from the author’s experience. Among the topics covered are: an understanding of the basis of existing empirical pavement design practices, effect of site conditions, awareness of the basis of design tools and equations, appreciation of the difference between design simplification and actual field complexity, the crucial role of pavement materials, and the impact of construction on pavement performance.
STUDY ON MECHANICAL BEHAVIOR OF DOWEL BAR IN TRANSVERSE JOINT OF CONCRETE PAVEMENT
Authors: Nishizawa Tatsuo , Koyanagawa Masashi , Takeuchi Yasushi , Kimura Makoto
Published: January 2025

The objective of this study is to develop a mechanical design method for doweled joint. In order to investigate the mechanical behavior of dowel bar, a mechanical model for dowel bar in transverse joint of concrete pavement based on three dimensional finite element method PAVE3D was developed. In the model, a dowel bar is divided into two segments embedded in concrete and a segment between them and these segments are modeled by the solution of the beam on elastic foundation and the three dimensional beam element, respectively. The model was verified by comparing the predicted strains in concrete slab and dowel bar with the experimental data which were obtained from loading tests conducted on a model pavement and an actual pavement. The effects of transverse joint structure and subbase stiffness on the stresses in dowel bar and concrete slab were investigated based on numerical simulations with PAVE3D.
AN ANALYSIS OF RIDE QUALITY OF THE ULTRA-THIN WHITETOPPING OVERLAYS AT THE FHWA ACCELERATED LOADING FACILITY
Authors: Rasmussen Robert Otto , Wilde W. James , Ruiz J. Mauricio , Sherwood James , Mack James
Published: January 2025

In 1998, eight test lanes of ultra-thin whitetopping (UTW) were constructed over existing hot- mix asphalt pavements at the Federal Highway Administration’s Accelerated Loading Facility (ALF) located at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center. Various combinations of thickness, joint spacing, fiber reinforcement, and asphalt base type were used. As part of the experimental data collection effort, pavement profiles were obtained periodically during the ALF loading history. From this information, ride statistics were calculated including Ride Number (RN) and the International Roughness Index (IRI). This paper describes a comprehensive analysis of this information from a number of perspectives.
Rational Rickets and Reluctant Canadians: Gothic Colonial Cringe in Robertson Davies’s High Spirits
Authors: Sugars Cynthia
Published: January 2025

Robertson Davies’ sardonic portrayals of small-town Canadian society expose its paralyzing proprieties in comically Gothic terms. Influenced by the humorous ghost stories of his Canadian literary predecessor Stephen Leacock, Davies undertook his own mode of affectionate ghostlyparody. On many occasions, Davies lamented Canada’s “rational rickets”, its failure to accommodate Old-World ghosts. To conjure such ghosts is to affirm the lack of “local”candidates; to not have such ghosts is to be forever condemned to lament their absence. In his ghost stories, Davies, with characteristic self-irony, confronts this paradox head-on. As Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, Davies wrote a ghost story every year for the Massey College annual “Gaudy Night” celebrations from 1963 to 1980, which are collected in his 1982 collection High Spirits. As he argues in the introduction, Canadian culture lacked a suitably fulfilling Gothic pedigree, which translated into a conviction that Canada – and Canadians -- lacked imagination. Davies’ biographer, Judith Skelton Grant, refers to his “reluctant Canadianism” (632), the embarrassment that the Anglophilic Davies felt in response to his colonial origins. This obsession finds expression in Davies’ fictional Gothic manifestations,often as a kind of return of a repressed colonial Gothic cringe.
Laughter through Tears: A Jewish Perspective on the Comic Gothic
Authors: Ringel Faye
Published: January 2025

This chapter surveys texts that supply a comic vision of Jewish supernatural traditions. Jews have not been treated well in the Gothic genre, but when post-Enlightenment writers in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English apply their perspective, the result can be satire or dark comedy. Yiddish writers from Shalom Aleichemto Isaac Bashevis Singer reflect the maxim “laughter through tears” by finding humour in tragic subjects. Among Gothic folkloric themes are the ‘dybbuk’, a possessing spirit, and the Golem, a giant created from clay as a protector; recenttransformations of these Gothic legends play the grotesque and tragic figures for laughs. Jewish writers Ellen Galford, Cynthia Ozick, and others have taken on the patriarchal Jewish Orthodoxy that sees liberated women as Lilith, mother ofdemons.
The Literary Olympic and Riddle Tournament: Competition and Community in Young Folks Paper (1871–1897)
Authors: Atkins Lee
Published: January 2025

Young Folks Paper was a children’s magazine for boys and girls published by James Henderson’s Red Lion House between 1871 and 1897. This chapter explores how the magazine used reader participation via writing and riddle competitions to create a sense of brand loyalty and community. The magazine’s competition pages became a training ground for a generation of young would-be writers, many of whom formed close bonds which extended beyond the page into wider literary networks and social spaces. The chapter offers new perspectives on a periodical best known for its serial fiction and reveals that its readership was more diverse than has traditionally been assumed. Furthermore, this chapter demonstrates how competitions can be seen as a central component of children’s magazines rather than as miscellaneous content that can be ignored.
Women and Anti-Colonial Nationalisms: Gendering Subjectivity in Satyajit Ray’s Home and the World and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat
Authors: Jilani Sarah
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat and Satyajit Ray’s Home and the World – one, a 1967 novel from the major voice of Kenyan literature, the other, a 1984 film from the renowned Bengali filmmaker – with an eye towards how the anti-colonial nationalist movements they narrate struggle to situate women’s subjectivities. The chapter approaches anti-colonial nationalism in two post-independence texts through the lens of gender in order to interrogate the former’s promise of transforming subjectivities. It demonstrates how both Ngugi’s novel and Ray’s film illustrate in different ways how anti-colonial nationalisms can silo embodied experience by gender, and in doing so destabilising the dialectical ‘becoming’ at the heart of their narratives. These texts prove rich case studies in post-independence anxieties around the limitations of anti-colonial nationalism. Whilst remaining politically committed to the project of nationhood, they turn a critical eye on its blind spots around gender, narrativising this tension not so as to deny anti-colonial nationalism’s powers of affect and political change, but to query whether it is the ideological and political framework capable of imagining the social changes for which independence was also fought.
History From Within: Violence and Subjective Experience in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star and Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra
Authors: Jilani Sarah
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores how and why subjectivity is a key consideration for a significant subset of post-independence film and literatures that narrate events of mass-scale violence that followed, and were often related to, the circumstances of that independence. The Partition of India and the Nigerian Civil War are the contexts of this violence in, respectively, the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak’s 1960 film The Cloud-Capped Star and the Nigerian Igbo writer Buchi Emecheta’s 1982 novel Destination Biafra. In bringing the two texts into conversation, this chapter seeks to make visible how Ghatak’s film and Emecheta’s novel position the subjective experiences of survivors of post-independence violence as collectively amounting to the definitive histories of the respective conflicts they narrativise. The everyday (re)creation of sustenance, shelter, sanity and community out of constant and systematised scarcity in both stories develops a sustained and complex relationship between subjectivity and collective resistance in the face of violence perpetuated or enabled by the postcolonial nation-state and neocolonial powers. Thus historically situated, individual psychic suffering evidences a collective kind of nation-memory in these two texts that not only allows that suffering to be read as material oppression, but also affirms how subjective experience carries epistemological and political weight.
Virginity and the Post-mortem State of the Body: Reading Mary and Hippolytus in Dialogue
Authors: Synodinos Chris
Published: January 2025

The primary focus of this study is on revisiting the TransitusMariae and on the changes of Mary’s body in light of the state of her soul upon completion of her earthly life. In this context, Mary’s corporeal changes, reflected in the tradition of her dormition and assumption, pertain to the mystagogy of her body (1 Cor. 15:51‒53). The Transitus narratives tend to oscillate between a mock-resurrectional and a genuine resurrectional assumption pattern. This chapter briefly discusses Mary’s virginity as a token of exemption from postlapsarian retribution in a Scriptural context and therefore as an agent of postmortem incorruption. Contrastingly, in a mythical context, Hippolytus’s abstinentia a Venere is discussed as hubristic behavior producing an adverse effect: the arousal of Nemesis exacting retribution by way of deformity in death. Albeit not actualized, Mary’s sexuality is critical to her attainment of theosis, construed as sanctification. Conversely, seen from the perspective of Mary’s world, Hippolytus’s sexuality is actualized, even if not activized. His sexuality is dormant, yet possessed and not potential. Strictly on the premise of actualized sexuality, Hippolytus is therefore, presumably, on more solid ground in allowing for scrutiny of gender identity from a modern perspective.
Literal Truth, Mythic Truth and Narrative in Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe
Authors: Owens William
Published: January 2025

This essay considers the narrative genres of mythos and logos and their relation to the ideology of Daphnis and Chloe. Longus asserts that his novel will be both pleasurable and useful (Pr.3), rejecting the choice posed by Thucydides between pleasure or utility (1.22.4), mythos or logos. Three inserted mythoi give the protagonists pleasure despite the disturbing violence done to the female protagonists. Chloe, too, is the subject of a mythos created by Eros (2.27); however, bourgeois marriage renders her subordination benign. Chloe’s mythos also idealizes Daphnis’s life as a slave. In the war between Mitylene and Methymna, Longus narrates the seizure of Chloe and agricultural workers (2.20). While Chloe is rescued, those seized with her are taken away as slaves, characters in a Thucydidean logos about war rather than Eros’s idealizing mythos. Through this contrast in genre, Longus reminds the reader of the harsh world outside his mythos about love.
Introduction: British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820–45
Authors: Easley Alexis
Published: January 2025

The early nineteenth century was a period of new media innovation– an era that produced a wide variety of book, periodical and newspaper formats that were available to larger and more diversified reading publics than ever before. The efflorescence of print culture during this era was enabled by the rise of popular literature and education movements as well as the expansion of rail networks, advancements in printing and paper-making technology, and a reduction of the stamp duty. During this period, publishers not only experimented with serial formats– from penny papers to the part-publication of novels– but also explored synergies between text and image, producing, for example, the elegant steel-cut engravings of literary annuals and the innovative wood-cut illustrations incorporated into children’s books and comic magazines. The twelve chapters in this collection are intended to promote greater understanding of the period between 1820 and 1845 as an era of innovation in nineteenth-century print culture. These essays also draw attention to the ways in which our access to this history is enabled by twenty-first-century technologies– digitization, keyword searches and distant reading– that provide access to the periodicals, newspapers and rare books that fuel and shape our research.
Beyond the Literary Annuals: Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Periodical Poetry
Authors: Ehnes Caley
Published: January 2025

This chapter builds on the recent influx of scholarship studying the intersection of new media forms, the development of women’s poetry, and the public figure of the poetess. While scholars of Hemans and Landon have previously considered the role of these poetesses in new media of the early nineteenth century, most have focused on their original contributions to the prominent literary periodicals and annuals of the 1820s. Few have considered how their recirculation in the new media of the 1830s simultaneously anticipates and contributes to the rise of the family literary periodical and its poetics at mid-century. This chapter begins to fill this gap by analysing Hemans’s and, to a lesser extent, Landon’s reprinted poetry in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal between 1832 and 1841. Hemans’s and Landon’s presence in this early Victorian journal encourages a reassessment of the function of the poetess and her poetry in the developing periodical culture of the early nineteenth century. The reproduction and recirculation of the poetry and the public-facing personas of Hemans and Landon in a publication like Chambers’s emphasises how the poetry of the 1820s and ’30s set the stage both aesthetically and commercially for the rise of periodical poetry and the Victorian poetess.
‘Merchant of this city’: Capitalism and the Liturgies of Peace and War in Jacob’s Room
Authors: Andrews Charles
Published: January 2025

This chapter aims to demonstrate the ways that Jacob’s Room exhibits an integrated network of capitalism and civil religion that contributes to the malformation of Jacob Flanders, sending him to war and his death. Jacob is aloof and noncommittal, and yet these ideologies claim him despite his lack of conscious decision-making. Following an evening of revels celebrating Guy Fawkes Day—the fiery commemoration of patriotism mixed with Protestantism—Jacob and his friend Timmy Durrant buy coffee from a stall-keeper who mistakes their conversation about Greek classics for a sign that Jacob is a “military gentleman.” The stall-keeper solicits their goodwill by noting that his son is serving in Gibraltar, and Jacob launches a showy but impotent protest by cursing the British army. Despite his dismissiveness toward soldiering, Jacob is still interpellated by and subject to the everyday conscription produced through a civil religious festival that concludes in a commercial exchange redolent with military pride. Woolf suggests that pacifism is not a simple matter of refusal or separation—the political liturgies of nation and commerce are too absorbing for that. Rather, the novel criticizes the religions of capitalism and nationalism by producing a political theology of peace through small relationships found in the radical ordinary.
Searching for Death
Authors: Stewart James Gilchrist
Published: January 2025

Starting with the premise that Critical Legal Studies (CLS) died, this chapter examines where this death is recorded and remembered in accessible locations. Rather than specific jurisprudential books, this chapter assesses mentions of the CLS death in legal dictionaries and internet search results. This analysis finds no direct discussion of the death but does find a feedback-loop issue with online sources, leading to the further mystification of CLS.
Shakespeare Against War
Authors: White Robert
Published: January 2025

Whilst Shakespearean drama provides eloquent calls to war, more often than not these are undercut or outweighed by compelling appeals to peaceful alternatives conveyed through narrative structure, dramatic context and poetic utterance. Placing Shakespeare’s works in the history of pacifist thought, Robert White argues that Shakespeare’s plays consistently challenge appeals to heroism and revenge and reveal the brutal futility of war. White also examines Shakespeare’s interest in the mental states of military officers when their ingrained training is tested in love relationships. In imagery and themes, war infiltrates love, with problematical consequences, reflected in Shakespeare’s comedies, histories and tragedies alike. Challenging a critical orthodoxy that military engagement in war is an inevitable and necessary condition, White draws analogies with the experience of modern warfare, showing the continuing relevance of Shakespeare’s plays which deal with basic issues of war and peace that are still evident.
‘Food for powder’: Casualties Of War
Authors: White Robert
Published: January 2025

Throughout history, combatants who are incapacitated or die in battle have been praised in literature for fighting and dying as heroes. This is only right and proper for men who exhibit such personal courage, often demonstrated by those whose lowly status in the armed forces requires them to follow rather than issue commands. However, it is more debatable whether the causes for which they have fought are always just and noble, or whether they should have been exposed to such mortal danger by their politician masters and commanding officers. This chapter traces Shakespeare’s many critiques ‘from under’ of ‘honour’ in war, usually ending with dead bodies as ‘food for worms’, and the plight of refugees.
Love in Times of War
Authors: White Robert
Published: January 2025

War in Shakespeare’s works is usually treated by critics in the light of military manuals as a technical subject which is ‘men’s work’, and questions are rarely raised concerning what happens to women and to love relationships in times of war. However, in this chapter we look first at some examples from each genre in Shakespeare’s works, showing how frequently a woman’s position is jeopardised in different ways by war, and young love is blighted in the context of overarching national conflict, leaving war wives and widows, ending with Cressida and Virgilia.
Outside the Anthropocene: The Subject of Virginia Woolf
Authors: Colebrook Claire
Published: January 2025

At first glance there’s an easy way to think about most canonical modernist authors and the Anthropocene: just as geological time appeared to have little to do with lived experience until positing the Anthropocene demonstrated the ways in which complex human history altered the planet as a living system, so modernist authors saw individual consciousness as harbouring a temporal expansiveness and intensity that opened to the cosmos. Woolf’s radical understanding of consciousness and materiality, in which the human is but one part of a vital assemblage that far exceeds one’s own individual being, opens on to a new conception of the self as alive to a rich and affective horizon. There is however an important sense in which modernist writing also demonstrates the potential limitations to reconceptualising life in the face of the Anthropocene’s distortion of the threshold between the human and the planetary. This chapter demonstrates how the impulse towards an expansive, vibrant materialism produces two competing ‘Anthroposcenic’ subjects in Woolf’s writing, one enacting a retreat from the world, safely perceiving its vital materiality from afar and complicit with a violently racialised imperialism, the other willing to risk the radically depersonalised experience of pure difference.
Morphology
Authors: Pearce Michael
Published: January 2025

This chapter describes non-standard morphological aspects of North East Vernacular English, as they are represented on RTG. Topics covered include verb paradigms, verb forms, noun morphology, pronouns, determiners, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions (form).
The American Uncertainty: Genre and Borders in Charles McCarry and Don DeLillo
Authors: Griffin Martin
Published: January 2025

Chapter investigates connections between genre fiction and so-called ‘literary fiction’ via comparative readings of The Miernik Dossier and The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry and The Names by Don DeLillo. All three novels deal with ideas of conspiracy (the assassination of JFK, for example) and the international arena in which the American crisis plays out. Authors may borrow elements of genre fiction but espionage stories can also reach beyond genre in ways that complicate assumptions and stereotypes.
Espionage Fiction and the Lost Adversary: Carlyle and Mathison
Authors: Griffin Martin
Published: January 2025

Chapter explores two female protagonists, Liz Carlyle in Stella Rimington’s At Risk and Carrie Mathison in the series Homeland, and their role in representing the post-Cold War world of intelligence. As women increased their presence in security services, the map of conflict altered from the secular assumptions of the Cold War to one marked by, among other things, fundamentalist religious belief. Counter-terrorism and domestic intelligence gathering pose newer and more complex problems. There is also a challenge facing authors working in a literary genre which grew to maturity within the structure of a struggle between capitalist democracies and Soviet communism.
Narratives of Disability and Illness in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
Authors: Wojtas Paweł
Published: January 2025

This study explores the representations of disability and illness in the novels of J.M. Coetzee, offering a comprehensive analysis of both his early and late works. It examines the evolution of Coetzee's engagement with non-normative embodiment, revealing how his nuanced depictions of disability critique the ableist assumptions underlying political violence and biomedical discourses of postmodernity. By addressing a wide array of concepts—such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, Crip-Goth, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy—the book proposes that Coetzee’s “narrative ethics of disability” provides a sustained meditation on the cultural denigration of disabled experience. Despite extensive scholarly attention to Coetzee, his engagement with disability has been underexplored, a gap this book seeks to fill. Through literary and archival research, including unpublished drafts and materials from the Harry Ransom Center, the book offers a fresh perspective on Coetzee’s work, analysing sensory, physical, and intellectual disabilities in his novels. Using interdisciplinary methods from literary and cultural theory, the study rereads Coetzee’s novels through the lens of Disability Studies. It also responds to contemporary debates on disability metaphors, neoliberal ableism, sensory normativism, and the intersection of disability with ecocriticism and care ethics. By focusing solely on Coetzee’s novels, the book traces the chronological development of his disability representations, situating them within shifting political and cultural contexts. This work provides an in-depth, systematic analysis of Coetzee’s critique of ableism and its broader implications for disability representation in literature.
The Brexit saga: Stancetaking, control and identity in political discourse
Authors: Marín-Arrese Juana I.
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on speaker/conceptualiser stance in striving for epistemic and effective control in discourse. The framework for the analysis of stance posits two macro categories, epistemic and effective stance, which reflect the systematic opposition in discourse between the striving for control of conceptions of reality by providing justificatory support for the speaker's claims, and the striving for control of relations at the level of reality involving the speaker's persuasive and coercive intent regarding the realisation of events. The chapter explores the joint deployment of epistemic and effective stance expressions in the discourse of two key actors in the Brexit process: Theresa May and Boris Johnson. Their specific and recurrent stancetaking patterns are assessed in comparison to the discourse stance of a group of key members in the Conservative Party during the Brexit process. The paper also addresses the variation in the use of stancetaking resources of the two key actors in the Brexit process in relation to the indexing of identity construction.
Towards Legitimisation Studies in contemporary crises
Authors: Butler Robert , Augé Anaïs
Published: January 2025

In the Conclusion, it is argued that discourse production and discourse reception are key objects of analysis in contexts of crisis and conflict. These contexts reveal that legitimisation strategies may be limited in their ability to bridge the gap between the public’s expectations on the one hand, and political delivery on the other hand. The Conclusion appeals to the use of didactic discourse to counter public and media scepticism of the decisions taken to respond to crises. It also highlights the challenges posed by new forms of media to the handling of these strategies, and how the ease of access to online information may lead to over-legitimisation: inaccuracies, fear, an impediment to the effective management of crises and even de-legitimisation. The challenges posed by legitimisation as a discursive strategy in contexts of crisis and conflict warrant further investigation and point towards a broader approach in the shape of Legitimisation Studies.
Introduction: The War That Is Not One
Authors: Rhee Suk Koo
Published: January 2025

Introduction starts with an overview of the controversy over the origins of the Korean War, along with a brief timeline of the war, discussing each of the traditional proxy war, the revisionist, and compound war theories on the Korean War. It also engages with the controversy over the beginning and ending of the Cold War and, above all, the latest challenges raised by Heonik Kwon and Jodi Kim to the traditional definition of the Cold War. Most importantly, it discusses the repercussions on the local politics caused by the division and occupation of the Korean peninsula by the US and the Soviet Union in the wake of national liberation. In this view, the US military rule in southern Korea fashioned the postliberation Korean politics in the Cold War formation. This emphasis on the Cold War as a determining factor in dividing Korea is not intended to suggest that the Korean War should be viewed merely through the lens of the international contest between the two major superpowers for global hegemony. After all, there is a dimension to the Korean War that cannot be entirely subsumed under a proxy war.
‘Ich leb’, was ihr rappt’: Confronting Racism through Consumption in OG Keemo’s Otello
Authors: Mendoza Kirsten N. , Knabe Oliver
Published: January 2025

A rise in activist work and social media, such as the #MeToo movement, has drawn critical attention to the daily microaggressions, hostilities, and systemic inequalities faced by immigrants and their families in Germany today, which include the experiences of second- and third-generation German born citizens. This chapter explores the tensions between appropriation and audience reception conveyed in Otello, a five-song album released in May 2019 by Sudanese-German rapper OG Keemo. In this album, OG Keemo explicitly parallels his image as a black rapper with Othello—the most iconic and damaging portrayal of a black man produced by and for Europeans—to convey his sense of entrapment living in a country that associates blackness with violence while fetishizing black men, sex, and black (self-) destruction. Like Othello, a character derived from the fantasy of white people, OG Keemo recognizes that his hip hop and public identity are shaped by his fans, revealing appropriation to be a shifting and fraught dynamic between OG Keemo and his European rap audiences.
Literary History and Avant-Garde Poetics in the Antipodes
Authors: Carruthers A. J.
Published: January 2025

Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes troubles literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Dés, the same year Mallarmé published it in the journal Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged ‘belatedly’ through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time. The story of how avant-gardism changed Australian literature is also the story of how the Antipodes vitally transforms our understanding of the avant-gardes.
A Wáng Gă: an Epilogue
Authors: Carruthers A. J.
Published: January 2025

What then and where to? Now that a narrative of the poetics of an Antipodal avant-garde has been told, how are we to figure it? Death closes this book – for it is the expiry of the avant-gardes, the end of them, that drives us to reflect upon history. Lethargy and tedium conspire to tire us out and wear us down in the analysis of stubborn poetries, difficult texts. Yet revival beats back against permanent defeat. In our age we are witnessing a “long avant-garde” in bilingual poetry, like that of Ouyang Yu, and the digital poetics of Mez Breeze. But everything depends on reading, and to some significant degree, on how or whether we choose to teach avant-garde texts. It will be, as always, an international movement that decides the fate of the avant-gardes.
Conclusion: The Stories of Modern Fiction, the End(s) of Misreading, and the Other Reader’s Response
Authors: Richardson Brian
Published: January 2025

The results of this study are summarized—thematic, ideological, theoretical, sexual, and intertextual. I reflect on the nature(s) of the modernist reader that so many of these texts have helped construct, noting its parallels to and differences from rival conceptions of audiences and general accounts of interpretation. Drawing on feminist, queer, and African American practice, I develop a theory of the dual implied reader to help explain the effects produced by many modernist works. By tracing the creation, development, and final transformation of the modernist reader(s), we can thereby clarify some basic features of modernism as well as appreciate its repeated alignment with significant minority literary practices, progressive ideological positionings, and dramatic re-evaluations of sexual relations.
Dissident Gut
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

This book explores the biopolitics of modern metabolism, how humans manage and transform the world through their peristaltic systems as they ingest food and produce waste. Part I explores Marx’s theory of how we “mediate, regulate, and control” our metabolic relation to nature, fecal recycling projects to address depleted agricultural fields and polluted cities, the rise of what sociologists call our fecal habitus, the relegation of waste management to female “meta-industrial labor,” and the gut as “second brain”. Part II performs three case studies of early twentieth-century English and European women whose wayward enteric systems intervened in social, affective, and political networks, asserting a peristaltic grammar of desire and resistance. These patient/doctor pairings include a Viennese woman’s reliance on sexual desire to achieve a bowel movement, a working-class Londoner who has “reversed” her peristaltic system, and a suffragette whose prison hunger strike and forcible feeding illuminate the metabolic tactics of the suffrage movement, as well as its influence on Gandhi. Engages with literatures on the gut-brain axis, the dynamicism of biology, biopolitics, metabolic rift, materialist feminism, psychoanalysis and hysteria, bodily habitus, waste management, materialist discussions of the agency of matter, medical anthropology, sanitation. Asks how a metabolic unconscious might speak back to, resist, or even reconfigure regulatory regimes.
The Whole Mind
Authors: Lloyd Genevieve
Published: January 2025

Through a close reading of Part III of The Ethics, this Chapter highlights Spinoza’s integration of Reason, Imagination and Emotion. Reason emerges as a vulnerable power within Nature, rather than a source of domination over it. In discussing his treatment of specific emotions, the chapter gives special consideration to hope and fear, taking into account the part they play in Spinoza’s political writings. It also compares Spinoza’s treatment of hope with Voltaire’s satirical critique of optimism in Candide. The Chapter concludes by offering a Spinozist perspective on emotional response to climate change – including wonder, and grief in relation to the sense of the future.
Operative Spaces
Authors: Singer Robert
Published: January 2025

The factory, laborers, and the related spectacle of human and machine in motion are dominant images present in naturalist film narrative. This chapter examines some of the earliest productions of international naturalist film culture by the Lumie?re brothers and other pioneering filmmakers as they depict indexical non-fictional enactments, actualite?s, along with "cinema of attraction" narratives of spectacular visual experiences involving the factory and workers. These actualite?s are a fundamental and ongoing aesthetic presence, a symbolic-precedent DNA strand in naturalist cinema—the "building block" of Realism—which reformulates footage exhibiting the space and time of the naturalist moment as it enters narrative formation. Later film narratives documenting modern labor's working conditions go inside of the factory with the workers; what begins with footage of an exit from a bicycle factory functions as hypotextual invocation to compelling naturalist film narratives of the assembly line, the meatpacking factory, and other industrial sites.
Architecture
Authors: Moore Ben
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers Dickens’s ambiguous and shifting use of architecture, beginning from Joe’s remark in Great Expectations (1860–61) that the pictures of a blacking warehouse he has visited in London are ‘drawd too architectooralooral’. In spiralling into repetition and meaninglessness, Joe’s term ‘architectooralooral’ acts as a key to a strain of ‘anti-architecture’ in Dickens’s work, which takes various forms. This tendency is explored with particular reference to ornamentality, the domestic and picturesque, Dickens’s satirising of architects in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), and his description of Venice in Pictures from Italy (1846). In the latter case, Dickens’s account is compared with passages from Ruskin’s contemporaneous Stones of Venice (1851–53). The chapter ranges across Dickens’s works, while also touching on significant historical developments of the period, such as the ‘battle of styles’ between Classical and Gothic design, and the growing schism between architects and engineers.
Hollywood and British Cinema
Authors: Langford Barry
Published: January 2025

This essay explores some possible reasons Dickens on film has not left as enduring an impression as the sheer number of Dickens adaptations would suggest. I argue that this asymmetry of output and outcome relates importantly to the centrifugal energy of Dickens’s novels: a characteristically ‘Dickensian’ attribute that crucially qualifies his fiction’s chances of being successfully translated into mainstream narrative cinema, while at the same time, paradoxically, confirming critical arguments for Dickens as a notionally ‘cinematic’ novelist. The most influential and widely disseminated representational practices of mainstream commercial cinema have historically been organised according to formal principles that stand in almost direct contradiction to those that make Dickens’s major work so distinctive and remarkable – and indeed ‘cinematic’. I suggest that more recent experiments and innovations in film narrative, as yet untested in Dickensian cinema but nonetheless familiar to audiences from the different television narrative, could yet offer a fruitful opportunity to shake off the dead hand of the ‘Dickens movie’ as it has until now generally been conceived and carried through.