bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’: Authenticity and Diversity in Wollstonecraft’s Narrative of Progress
Authors: Kirkley Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter argues that Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark evinces Wollstonecraft’s troubled integration of universalist abstractions with nascent receptivity to foreignness, challenging the taxonomies of natural philosophy and conjectural history, and redefining her cosmopolitan ethic to incorporate appreciation of diversity. In common with Rousseau, she connects cultural and personal authenticity with moral integrity, suggesting that both are essential for the moral health of a nation. The chapter contends that this emphasis on distinctive national character indicates a growing recognition of the value of culturally specific modes of living. As Wollstonecraft attempts to mediate between her philosophical universalism and the cultural diversity of a pluralist Europe, she begins to adapt her narrative of progress to incorporate her incipient relativism, indicating her willingness to accommodate diversity as well as her growing resistance to economic and cultural imperialism. Refining her cosmopolitan worldview, she envisages the core principles of the Revolution crossing the boundaries of language and culture, at once absorbed by and adapted to the ‘particular soil’ of individual nations.
A Borders Region at Last!
Authors: Hope Douglas G.
Published: May 2024

The reorganisation of local government in Scotland in 1975 replaced the existing county and burgh councils with a two-tier structure of regional and district councils with the Borders Regional Council responsible for all planning functions in the Scottish Borders. Chapter five describes how the four existing county councils prepared for local government reorganisation and established the Regional Planning Unit to produce a report, The Borders Region 1975, on the state of the region as an aid to producing a future regional strategy. This chapter also details how the new regional council set about the task of administering town and country planning in the new region with the production of a Regional Report, an ‘Action Plan for Development’ and the establishment of a new development control system.
Epilogue
Authors: Hope Douglas G.
Published: May 2024

The epilogue draws together the changes and continuities in the practice of town and country planning in the Scottish Borders during the period 1946-1996. It summarises how county planning was administered prior to 1975 and regional planning in action between 1975 and 1996. It identifies a number of themes: the increasing complexity of the planning process, the increasing involvement of the public, the increasing proactivity of planning and the increasing need for partnerships with a range of agencies and the private sector, the increasing attention to rural issues, and the growing awareness of the impact of development on the environment. The epilogue also looks forward to the challenges to come after 1996 with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and major changes to town and country planning legislation, which would see a greater role for central government.
Introduction: Estimative Intelligence and Anticipatory Foreign Policy
Authors: Guttmann Aviva , Ikani Nikki , Meyer Christoph O. , Michaels Eva
Published: May 2024

The introduction situates the approach of the book against the background of a series of major surprises that Western professional analysts and decision-makers experienced since the early 2010s. In the aftermath, intelligence communities and policymakers were accused of failing to anticipate, warn, listen or prepare for these eventualities. However, there have been few in-depth studies focused on European estimative intelligence and foreign policy and the few existing inquiries differ substantially in their depth, scope, level of independence, their criteria for judging success and failure, how they handle problems such as hindsight bias, and crucially, which lessons they advocate for intelligence and foreign policy. The introduction outlines the postmortem approach to the performance of estimative intelligence in European foreign policy. It summarises the contribution of the overall volume to the study of strategic surprise and learning in foreign policymaking in a European context. It introduces the method and research design of the empirical chapters by explaining how the authors have used interviews, workshops and open source analysis to reconstruct what was known and knowable in each case. Finally, it outlines the structure of the book and briefly summarised the content of each of the chapters.
Expectations from Estimative Intelligence and Anticipatory Foreign Policy: A Realistic Appraisal 1
Authors: Ikani Nikki , Meyer Christoph O. , Michaels Eva , Guttmann Aviva
Published: May 2024

The chapter sets out a common conceptual and theoretical framework for the postmortems analysis and identification of lessons to be learned in the overall volume: What can we realistically expect from estimative intelligence and anticipatory foreign policy? To what extent and when is being surprised to be expected and excused? When do performance shortcomings point to underlying shortcomings that might be avoided or addressed through learning the right lessons? It draws not only on the literature in strategic surprise and postmortems in intelligence studies but considers also insights from other literatures in in foresight, risk and emergency management, and public administration about the role of experts, expertise and learning. It develops a normative model of evidence-sensitive anticipatory foreign policy. A second section looks at the specific challenges for estimative intelligence when seeking to minimise surprise in foreign affairs. It provides a taxonomy of different degrees and types of surprise and discusses when being surprised might be condonable or expected. Thirdly, it investigates how to identify the most important causes of any performance problems in intelligence-policy nexus. Finally, it looks at the specific challenge of identifying and learning the right lessons and how to prioritise among recommendations for change.
Lessons Learned and Still to be Learned: The Case of the European Union
Authors: Conrad Gerhard
Published: May 2024

Chapter 7 focuses on learning lessons for estimative intelligence production and use within the EU from all three cases. It explores political, structural and procedural deficiencies in producing and disseminating estimative intelligence within the EEAS and beyond starting with the setting-up of the EEAS in 2010-2011 until 2019. Among fundamental shortcomings and problems identified were a lack of infrastructure for handling classified information (EUCI) within the EEAS and beyond, a lack of proper procedure in producing all-sources authoritative warning intelligence, and limitations as to how the EU’s Intelligence Assessment and Situation Centre (INTCEN) – together with the Intelligence Directorate of the EUMS – was plugged into EU CFSP/CSDP-decision-making processes. In addition, the cooperation between civilian and defence intelligence, the intelligence support provided by member states, and the politicisation problems arising from the mixing of operational/policy and situational/intelligence perspectives are discussed. The EU has been seeking to address shortcomings since 2014, for instance through the EU Early Warning System (EWS) and the creation of a fusion cell for hybrid threats (HFC) in 2016. However, further steps are necessary for emancipating and professionalising the build-up and promotion of intelligence supported all-sources comprehensive situational awareness and strategic foresight.
Introduction: Scottish Liberalism and Scottish Society
Authors: Torrance David
Published: May 2024

This short introductory chapter captures the long-standing hegemony of the Scottish Liberal Party during the 19th century and identifies a gap in the literature relating to studies of Scottish Liberalism. It also reviews existing studies and acknowledges those who have aided the present volume.
Mulk Raj Anand in the Mud
Authors: Van Dijck Cedric
Published: May 2024

This chapter takes embodied engagements with the soil as a point of entry into the subaltern war experience. In The Village, Mulk Raj Anand’s novel about a farming family in the Punjab, the protagonist’s visceral knowledge of the landscape symbolises his right to this place. Such moments of touch in the novel articulate an explicit critique of colonial dispossession. A form of protest underwrites similar encounters with the mud of the trenches in Across the Black Waters: a literal erasure of the self, as the sepoy’s body becomes stained with mud, figures as a tangible (and racialised) symbol of a more pervasive threat to agency in wartime. In a final section, this chapter studies the sepoy’s engagement with the soil in a more abstract sense – as paperwork. Anand’s fiction is littered with land debt collection letters and military files. Left unread, these functional documents tangibly emblematise how power worked inconspicuously through the written/printed word, without a fault to the detriment of the farmer-sepoy.
Catherine Malabou: Plasticity of Reason
Authors: Žukauskaite Audrone
Published: May 2024

Chapter 4 examines the notion of plasticity which, derived from Hegel’s vocabulary, becomes the main characteristic of life from stem cells to the brain and artificial intelligence. If Ruyer distinguishes between preformationism and morphogenetic improvisation, Malabou contrasts the traditional notion of form with her notion of ‘plasticity’, which refers to qualitative change that takes place both at the level of cells (cell plasticity) and the brain (neuroplasticity), and which can be either creative or destructive. It is destructive plasticity that is the most interesting for neurological and philosophical investigations because it reveals the rupture between the cerebral and the mental, or between cerebral auto-affection and mental auto-affection. In these cases, we discover something that Malabou names as the ‘cerebral unconscious’ – cerebral activity without consciousness. These discoveries open a gap between the brain and the mind, or between the biological and the logical origin of thinking. Malabou argues that instead of being seen as the proprietor of the brain, the subject is defined by his or her neuronal connectivity, which relates the inside to the outside, the brain to the outside world.
Hybrid Organism
Authors: Žukauskaite Audrone
Published: May 2024

Chapter 7 discusses symbiosis as a specific kind of biological assemblage. Donna J. Haraway points out the obvious but ignored fact that every living being is dependent on other living beings, such as viruses, bacteria, archaea, etc. Haraway suggests the term ‘sympoiesis’ to refer to collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. These systems are evolutionary and have the potential for change. Thus, the theory of sympoiesis questions the notion of the bounded individual and examines living beings as mutually interconnected and interdependent. Similarly, Scott F. Gilbert argues that there is no such thing as biological individuality; both human and non-human animals are holobionts – organisms coexisting with persistent communities of symbionts. Taking this into account, Haraway suggests sympoiesis as a continuous process of ‘becoming-with’ which creates new networks of collaboration and gives an increased potency to its collaborators. The chapter also discusses the notion of immunity and asks how to define the limit at which coexistence is collaborative and productive, and beyond which it becomes damaging and lethal.
Eye Witness: Memorialising Humanity in Steve McQueen’s Hunger
Authors: McNamee Eugene
Published: May 2024

Approaches McQueen’s film Hunger as a ‘humanist’ intervention in retrospective discussions of the conflict in Northern Ireland that successfully avoids political partisanship. Explores the aesthetics and politics of the film, which centres on the 1981 hunger strike and death in the Maze Prison/Long Kesh of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands.
Shame and the City: Subverting Neoliberal, New York Singleton Culture in Shame
Authors: Richardson Niall
Published: May 2024

Posits Shame as a nightmarish reworking of Manhattan as a sexual utopia, the glamorous setting for countless rom-coms and musicals. Argues that, via a combination of McQueen’s distinct visual aesthetics and a dystopian revision of genre conventions, the film refuses to represent sex “addiction” as a pathology, or the result of trauma, but instead codes it as the consequence of a neoliberal, pornographied society.
If it is to be done, how?: Considering a Robeson Biopic
Authors: Redmond Shana L.
Published: May 2024

This chapter both responds to and looks beyond McQueen’s 2012 gallery installation End Credits, which staged redacted FBI surveillance reports on the singer-actor-activist Paul Robeson, and speculates about a McQueen biopic of Robeson. Could McQueen capture the impossibility of such an idea, by delivering a Robeson biopic that would inevitably challenge the genre’s simplistic investments in the singularity of an individual, much as Robeson himself did though his manifold achievements?
Small Axe and/as Cinematic Television
Authors: Andrews Hannah
Published: May 2024

This chapter asks what it means for Small Axe to be conceptualised as “cinematic television”. It pursues an answer via four vectors of inquiry: aesthetics, affect, address and access. It concludes that while the imagery, composition, and construction of affect in the Small Axe films may be “cinematic”, their political significance is profoundly televisual.
Representation without a Demos? A Very European Democratic Dilemma
Authors: Lord Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses democratic representation in the European Union. The chapter questions common assumptions in existing discussion and in particular the notion that supranational democratic arrangements require a common demos. The chapter argues that there are good reasons, to develop the Union’s own system of representation even without such a demos. It does so by taking an original perspective on democratic legitimacy to argue how representation in the EU needs to be rethought, and how its implementation gives rise to dilemmas that have not been sufficiently explored in existing debates. The chapter provides a new perspective on how to evaluate supranational representative arrangements, even for those that see democratic legitimacy as firmly tied to the level of member states. It thus demonstrates the continued salience of the dilemma between national and supranational arrangements in the EU while highlighting ways in which it needs to be reconceptualized.
Formal Innovation and Affect in the Contemporary Irish Novel: Kevin Barry, Mike McCormack, and Eimear McBride
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: May 2024

The demands made upon the reader by the language of modernist fiction are often claimed to inhibit affective responses. This chapter challenges this claim through the examination, by means of selected passages, of three recent Irish novels all of which are avowedly indebted to Joyce’s work: Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone, Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Barry’s pararealism is shown to be moving; McCormack’s syntactically continuous but visually discontinuous prose works powerfully on the readers emotions; and McBride’s linguistic distortions are capable of creating an almost unbearable affective response.
Form, Politics, and Postcolonial Fiction: Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: May 2024

This chapter addresses the question of the relation between form and politics in the novel, with particular attention to the role of postcolonial studies. For the most part, postcolonial critics pay scant attention to form; political effectiveness is seen to stem from the content of literary works. Arguments that formal disruption equate with political subversion are unconvincing; more convincing is the ethic force of modernist procedures in staging encounters with otherness. The Joycean heritage is evident in postcolonial works that challenge realist conventions, most radically when form, as in Ulysses, influences content. One example of this is Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire, in which the governing framework is Sophocles’ Antigone. The writer’s craft evident in using a prior work to regulate the plot, and in relating the narrative through different five perspectives, contributes to the reader’s enjoyment and thus increases its potential political significance.
Our Place
Authors: Zaharijevic Adriana
Published: May 2024

The conclusion, with the poetic title ‘Our Place’, is about our reclaiming the world – the only one we have, the one in which we craft ourselves in medias res. Our place is one in which we live as bodies, plural, occupying space together with unchosen others, vulnerable to relation or the lack thereof, responsible for the relation we build by our own acting, and interdependent by merely being there. Nonviolence thus appears as a performative perseverance in cohabitation, as ‘an experiment to living otherwise’ to the current configuration of continuous violation of social bonds. Far from being a mere absence of violence, a politics of nonviolence impels us to do something with the world, the only place we have, here and now.
Iran's Soft Power in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Authors: Ahmed Zahid , Akbar Ali
Published: May 2024

This book examines resources and instruments Iran has used to project its soft power in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 1979 to 2021 and explores how Iran’s attempts to increase its reach has been received by elites and opinion makers in both countries. This interdisciplinary study applies soft power theory to examine and compare case studies of Iran’s influence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By doing so, this research focuses on Iran’s historical resources and instruments, the reasons and why Iran seeks to exercise soft power in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the outcomes that Iran has been able to achieve. It argues that Iran’s national interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, driven by geostrategic concerns, have prompted Iran to enhance its influence over its eastern borders. This study also argues that Iran has benefited from its imperial legacy, or that of the Persian Empire, as well as its strong historical ties with both Afghanistan and Pakistan, to promote its goodwill currently in the two countries. In this context, the instruments used by Iran to enhance its soft power in both countries include the promotion of Persian language and some of its key cultural norms, such as the celebration of the Persian New Year (nowruz). The strategies Iran uses to promote its language and cultural norms include investment in educational sectors, cultural centres, and media outlets in both countries. Further, as this study argues, Shi’a ideology and certain ideological norms, such as anti-American discourse, are promoted by Iran in both neighbouring countries.
Geostrategic Interests
Authors: Ahmed Zahid Shahab , Akbar Ali
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines how Afghanistan and Pakistan are significant for Iran’s geostrategic goals in South and Central Asia. This chapter relies on primary data collected in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This chapter explains that besides its interests in exporting natural gas to energy-deficient Pakistan and India via a pipeline through Pakistan, Iran was troubled by the US troops presence in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Similarly, in Afghanistan, Iran was deeply concerned with presence of the US and other international troops during 2001-2021. When it comes to Pakistan, while Tehran views Chabahar and Gwadar projects as “sister ports”, Pakistan views the Chabahar Port as a threat to its national security because its arch-rival India has been mainly involved in this project. Analysis in this chapter also focuses on how Tehran has re-adjusted its policy towards Afghanistan since the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021.
The Intensive-Image in Deleuze's Film-Philosophy
Authors: Escobar Cristóbal
Published: May 2024

This book argues that the intensive-image constitutes an important cinematic category that prompts a rethinking of Deleuze’s taxonomy of images in his Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. I explore the proposition that the notion of intensity has the potential to change the way in which we think about Deleuze’s classification of films as signifying two separate periods, the classical period of the movement-image and the modern period of the time-image, thereby bringing them together and overcoming the separation that Deleuze’s film taxonomy creates. My book also explores the ways in which the intensive-image varies and differentiates itself from other images and the role it plays in contemporary cinema.
Animals and Capital
Authors: Wadiwel Dinesh Joseph
Published: May 2024

The last two centuries have seen an explosion in the use of animal products for food, and with this, the global industrialisation and intensification of animal agriculture. Animal studies and posthumananities have drawn attention to the ethical issues associated with these developments, highlighting concerns around the welfare and rights of animals, and describing the way in which anthropocentric viewpoints have contributed to the mass exploitation of animals. At the same time, contemporary left and Marxist thought has challenged the rise of capitalist agriculture, highlighting the connections to anthropogenic climate change, and also the structural inequalities that have accompanied these transformations. Animals and Capital is the first volume of its kind to bring together this scholarship in order to develop a systematic theoretical account of the place of food animals under capitalism. Building on Marx’s value theory, in addition to contemporary animal studies and posthumanities, feminist and green Marxist scholarship, this book situates food animals as a distinct economic class, following through their transformation from an input” or raw material for production, to labourers which produce value, to their eventual metamorphosis into consumption commodities under capitalism.
Deniz (Pseudonym)
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Deniz
Engin Sustam
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Engin Sustam
Eser Karakaş
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Eser Karakas
Faysal Sarıyıldız
Authors: Öztürk Ahmet Erdi , Baser Bahar
Published: May 2024

Interview with Faysal Sariyildiz
On the Treatment of English Word Stress within the Generative Tradition: History, Concepts and Debates
Authors: Durand Jacques , Yamada Eiji
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides a historical overview of the treatment of word stress in English within the generative tradition, giving prominence to Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English (1968, SPE). As SPE emerged from a rich history of research on word stress, we first examine a number of early twentieth-century antecedents of a pedagogical, descriptive and theoretical nature, from both the United Kingdom and the United States. We then focus on SPE as the first and most significant comprehensive study of English stress in the generative tradition. Thereafter, we provide a detailed survey of the main frameworks that attempted to extend and improve the linear derivational approach of SPE. Among these, Metrical Phonology, Lexical Phonology and Optimality Theory are highlighted. The chapter concludes with reflections on the status of phonology with regard to Plato’s problem within Chomsky’s generative enterprise.
English Word Stress and the Guierrian School
Authors: Dabouis Quentin , Fournier Jean-Michel , Fournier Pierre , Martin Marjolaine
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents an overview of the approach to English stress initially developed by Lionel Guierre (1979). This approach is defined by its use of large corpora, the integration of orthographic information in the phonology, the inclusion of semantically impoverished constituents among possible determiners of stress, the assumption that syllable structure affects stress less than what is traditionally assumed in standard generative accounts and, finally, the assumption that the English lexicon is split into a number of different subsystems with different phonological grammars. The chapter presents some of those characteristics and details how the stress system of English is analysed in that framework.
English Phonology and the Literate Speaker: Some Implications for Lexical Stress
Authors: Dabouis Quentin
Published: May 2024

This chapter questions the absence of inclusion of orthographic information in phonological theories and, more specifically, in analyses of English phonology. After an overview of the psycholinguistic evidence underlining the importance of orthography in phonology, the chapter details the processes found in English which are difficult or impossible to account for in a phonological model which does not integrate orthographic information. This includes widely discussed processes such as the Vowel Shift Rule (and vowel alternations more generally), Velar Softening, the simplification of stem-final clusters involving a nasal, vowel reduction or r-sandhi. The chapter also includes a discussion of the impact that integrating orthographic information has on how the stress system may be analysed and how that information may be represented in the phonology.
Input Optimization and Lexical Stress in English
Authors: Hammond Michael
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines English main stress from the perspective of Input Optimization (Hammond, 2013; 2014; 2016; 2017). The claim of that framework is that phonological configurations exhibit a frequency distribution that reflects their markedness, as measured by Optimality Theory violations. This applies to words in isolation as well as to words in combination. Crudely, the more violations a word or combination of words has, the less frequent it will be. Using a variety of corpus data, we demonstrate that this does indeed apply to English main stress.
A Solution to Theoretical Shortcomings in the Stress Assignment of Words in English
Authors: Yamada Eiji
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the two types of prior theories dealing with stress placement in English words, highlighting the problems in their exceptional treatments. It then outlines a third and new method, Positional Function Theory (PFT), that can successfully resolve these issues and others in a more regular framework. Using 16 Positional Functions, the author accounts for subsidiary stress assignment in exceptional word types, such as ìnformátion and còndênsátion, in a principled way within a single system, without recourse to exceptional or lexical treatment. The chapter further shows how main stress assignment, too, can be explained within the same framework. PFT allows us to clarify most of the main and subsidiary stress assignments of words in American English without issue. In the light of this theory, what appeared to be lexical exceptions turn out not to be so. It is successfully controllable. In other words, exceptional words have regularities that can be elucidated, and they can be dealt with within this new approach.
Solidarity beyond Participation
Authors: Davis Benjamin P.
Published: May 2024

This chapter advances a sense of solidarity beyond participating in protests. In other words, this chapter portrays solidarity as part of what Pierre Hadot called philosophy as a way of life. To make this offering, the chapter engages Glissant, Dussel, and Simone Weil. It also follows the analytic philosopher James Griffin in arguing that if participating in coalitional protest is part of what Griffin calls a “primary duty” associated with the right to opacity, then standing in solidarity with the dispossessed is a “secondary duty” that follows from listening to what Glissant called “the right to opacity.” Thus, this chapter situates human rights as part of philosophy as a way of life.
Screen Mirroring
Authors: Jones Nick
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the graphic user interface’s (GUI) centrality to contemporary media culture, and the way its aesthetics have been directly adopted by entertainment media of various kinds. It begins by exploring the GUI’s lineage (including the Memex and the Mother of All Demos) and how its development was influenced by other screen media like cinema, television, and videogames. It then identifies the way the GUI cross-pollinates with these other media today. Such overlaps can be subtle, as in the case of TV guide interfaces and the split-screen compositions of digital cinema, or overt, as in the case of texts which openly remediate the look, sound, and affordances of the GUI. These latter – which include the film Unfriended (2014) and mobile videogame Sara is Missing (2016), both of which the chapter studies along with similar texts – may seem marginal, but they reveal the extent to which the desktop and various forms of narrative entertainment screen media are, as it were, all compatible files.
Prophecy or the Deconstruction of Historical Expectation
Authors: Herrero Montserrat
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses and contradicts the enlightened versions of historical time, which usually understand past, present and future as a progressive line. By recovering the theological locus, the chapter shows how the narrative of Scriptures speaks of very different ways of qualifying time that are not only linear, but also cyclical and of other mixed kinds expressed as occasion, age, season, etc. One of them is that of “prophetic time,” which translocate future, present and past in the logic of the “already and not yet.” The chapter ends with an historical example, that of the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, which confronts the enlightened argumentative justification of physical evil with that of the prophetic discourses of the time.
Conclusion
Authors: Potter Kevin
Published: May 2024

The two parts of Poetics of the Migrant – differing in focus and analytical structure – solidify more thoroughly the complexities of kinopoetics, thereby leading to this concluding chapter. This conclusion summarizes the main points touched upon throughout this book. Readers will encounter some final words about the interconnection between literature and cultural politics, particularly through the realm of market systems and commodification. The first section invokes the laws of motion and value analyzed within the Marxist tradition, to suggest that a migrant text is subject to patterns of valorization, intensive and extensive movement, acting as an agential, kinetic cultural object. The life of the text, as it is disseminated throughout different contexts of material life, enables it to change, shape, and re-orient our cultural knowledge and the varying regimes of inclusion and exclusion that exist within political life. This conclusion argues that kinopoetics offers the epistemic and affective capacity to achieve solidarity.
Freak Scenes
Authors: Sexton Jamie
Published: May 2024

Freak Scenes explores the increased licensing of indie music and representation of indie music cultures within American independent cinema since the 1980s. Indie music has, since the 2000s, become highlighted in some indie films as an attraction, but this book probes how the appeal of indie music stretches back to the late 1970s, when punk music made its impact on filmmaking. Sexton looks at a range of issues where indie music and indie film intersect, including commercial concerns, the growth of niche marketing, the increased employment of popular music in cinema and questions of authenticity, as well as the fraught tensions between commercial and artistic concerns. Case studies include: sonic authorship and indie music, representations of punk and indie scenes on screen, and an exploration of how racial and gender issues inform the representation and reception of indie cultures on film.
Introduction: What Was the Federal Theatre Project?
Authors: Karoula Rania
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides a historical context for the Federal Theatre Project by situating it within the economic and historical events that led to its creation, those being the Great Depression and the New Deal. It introduces Flanagan’s vision for the project, her ideas on the creation of a federation of theatres that would respond to America’s contemporary realities and the difficulties she faced. The project’s status as a relief project relying on federal funding and its immediate repudiation by Congress are highlighted and discussed. Lastly, the introduction offers a summary of the chapters that follow.
Epilogue: Was it All Worth it? The Legacy of the FTP in Contemporary Performance
Authors: Karoula Rania
Published: May 2024

The epilogue attempts to situate the FTP and its productions within the spectrum of theatrical modernism. Written before the pandemic, it reflects on the challenges of performing a contemporary Living Newspaper on stage. It reiterates what artists, playwrights and audiences can learn from these past performances and how they can act as guidance in reimagining the LN. Sharing Flanagan and Tamiris’s vision of the artist and actor as a socially conscious being, the chapter ends on the hopeful note that the project is still relevant and important and that it can inform contemporary performances and creative works.
Exoteric Modernisms
Authors: Collins Michael J.
Published: May 2024

This book is an account of how American realism in the Progressive Era contributed to debates about modernity. It uses the anthropological theories of Franz Boas, and Jacques Ranciere's work on aesthetics and politics, to develop a mode of reading class and culture that challenges conventional interpretations that pit the two modes of representation in opposition and shows how realism functioned in the period to present a world full of possibility and diversity. It paints a picture of the late-nineteenth century, prior to modernism, as an aesthetically exciting, original, and politically radical stage in American life to reinvigorate the study of realism as a radical aesthetic practice, with implications for understandings of American literature both in the past and into the future.
Introduction: Modern Times; Or, Re-Reading the Progressive Era
Authors: Collins Michael J.
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by demonstrating a conceptual link between William Dean Howells’ definition of realism in his critical writings as a literature that does not “lie about life” and Jacques Ranciere’s reconsideration of the birth of modernism as a mode of understanding the aesthetic politics of everyday life. From this starting point, I move on to rethink the historical relationship between realism and Boasian anthropology to show how the frame of the “everyday” is used in both fields in the nineteenth century used to argue for a new literary modernity.
Coda: James Huneker, A Decadent Among Modernists
Authors: Collins Michael J.
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers how genealogies of the development of American modernism have failed to account for the presence of James Huneker, a major figure and cultural critic of the pre-War era who resisted some of the grander manifesto claims of an emergent international modernism and sought to retain the legacies of American realism from the nineteenth century as an important social and political bulwark against fascism and racialised ontology.
Authoritarian and Alternative Governmentalities
Authors: Tas Latif
Published: May 2024

Chapter one focuses on authoritarian governmentality and the global increase in autocrats’ capturing of states, much like hunting octopuses. This chapter argues how the legal system has been an important instrument at the hand of autocrats, and how laws and policies have been created as a corporate set of conditions. The chapter sets up the puzzle of why Foucault’s concept of governmentality has its limits, and how authoritarian governmentality is born, functions and fails in the end. The role of media, intellectuals and society in authoritarian governmentality and how authoritarianism cannot be limited to a simple individual power is analysed from the cases and examples. This chapter then moves to introduce a new theory, alternative governmentality, against autocratic rules.
Mardin and Diyarbakir: An Ethnographic Account of Conflict
Authors: Tas Latif
Published: May 2024

Chapter two starts with the author direct observations of the atmosphere in Turkey just before and during the 2015 in clashes in urban cities. It re-examines the author’s ethnographical account in Mardin just before the conflict in May 2015, and then recounts his experiences of being caught in a curfew during heavy clashes between the Turkish military and police forces and Kurdish youth activists and guerrillas in the Sur district of Diyarbakır in September 2015, when female Kurdish MPs and women’s rights activists came to his rescue. The ethnographic account will show how people live a ‘normal’ day under continuous conflict and authoritarian rules.
Social Status
Authors: Malatras Christos
Published: May 2024

This chapter assesses the importance of some markers of social status (wealth, ancestry, political distinctions, occupation, etc.) for the Byzantine society and the system of social stratification. Eventually, the most important criteria are identified as wealth (not necessarily from defined sources, such as land) which enabled a distinguished lifestyle, and honours which were translated to the assumption of state offices and titles. Ancestry and origins were also important, however, other criteria, such as merit and occupation were more subjective and minor determinants of social status. Finally, the chapter discusses cases of social mobility and strives to determine on which of the criteria this was based. However, social ascent was accompanied quickly by social assimilation. These people identified with their new social position and lost their connection to their earlier social milieu.
Social Associations
Authors: Malatras Christos
Published: May 2024

Here are related the various social groups which united people from different social backgrounds, and the degree of their influence and relevance to the social structure of Late Byzantium. First are discussed traditional social communities: the family, the clan, the civic or the rural community, confraternities. However, with the exception of the nuclear family, these had little influence on the social structure. Instead, there were different and numerous social networks created with different purposes: political factions created around important political personalities, either serving a particular purpose, or durable political associations, supporting a certain policy or orientation of the state or even the aspirations of an important person. The most significant associations were those formed around an elite household either through marriage associations and friendship, or through patronage in the form of retinues. They were the basis for most of the political factions and were themselves a hub of controlled social mobility for people of a lower background. However, these networks, with their different aims, structure, and composition contributed much to the lack of orientation of the Byzantine state and society and, together with social assimilation, to the low solidarity of social classes.
Beauty and Ageing
Authors: Smith Michelle
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the differing beauty strategies for older women described in beauty manuals, women’s magazines and advertisements by the final decades of the nineteenth century, which both offered hope for lifelong beauty and, at the same time, blamed women’s character, thoughts and mental health, in addition to their hygiene and grooming methods, for any degradation in their appearance as they aged. Finally, I consider two novels published at mid-century, Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), focusing on the revulsion associated with women’s ageing and loss of beauty in order to exemplify the minimal scope afforded for women to age well until much later in the century.
Introduction
Authors: Kenny Oliver
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides the historical and cultural context for the book, notably discussions about extreme cinema, and presents the three key pillars of the book’s analysis: form, reception and theory. It provides a review of the academic literature on (new) extreme cinema and explains the structure of the book. Ultimately it summarises the book as a wide-ranging attempt to sketch out a coherent and rigorous framework for understanding some of the most controversial films of the past twenty-five years.
Illustrated Magazines and Periodicals: Visual Genres and Gendered Aspirations
Authors: Batchelor Jennie
Published: May 2024

The small body of scholarship on women’s Romantic magazines registers the perceived tension between images of fashionable consumption and text-based educational content as emblematic of the impossibly contradictory messages with which magazine readers have been bombarded from the form’s inception. This essay contests these claims by detailing some of the multiple ways that image and text remediate one another in the long-running and influential Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832). It argues that while the periodical sometimes did perpetuate mixed messages, it also rigorously questioned these clashing imperatives with the avowed intention of seeking to equip readers to navigate them. The intellectual dexterity the reader was encouraged to exercise as she followed up on the and deciphered pictorial codes and attempted to mediate between the magazine’s different types of visual and verbal content, provoked a range of pressing cultural and political questions about women’s lives that were central to the periodical and the contemplation of which aligned with the publication’s intellectual aspirations for subscribers.
Album Culture: Begging for Scraps
Authors: Matthews Samantha
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the valences of the ‘scrap’ in later Romantic print and manuscript culture through the gendered construction and reception of albums and scrapbooks during 1820s and 1830s ‘albo-mania’. It considers tensions between amateur and professional artistic practices, between handmaking and reproduction, and between gift-exchange and the marketplace through the curious contemporary trope of the scrap-beggar. This figure, common to visual and verbal discourses, applies the stock attributes of the mendicant, with ragged clothing, staff and begging wallet, and the exoticised female ‘gypsy’, to the middle-class album-owner ‘begging’ for contributions to her album. Where Maurice Rickards views the scrap-begging motif as ‘gently satirical’, this chapter argues that it represents the print industry’s drive to redirect the iconography, practices and dynamics of album culture and gift-exchange for profit. By aligning albums and their makers with a socially conservative view of mendicancy as exploitative professional beggary, print professionals aimed to discipline and discredit amateur women makers’ increasing agency in arts and culture while exploiting cultural feminisation commercially. This chapter argues that the ‘scrap’ aesthetic and album arts affirm an alternative women-centred sphere of artistic, social and affective practice based on the gift and motivated by the spirit of charity and inclusivity.
Romantic Caricatures and Comics
Authors: Whittaker Jason
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by examining the role played by caricaturists such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, and drawing upon the work of art historians such as Richard Godfrey, Mark Hallett and Todd Porterfield to contextualise such productions as part of the mass media of print culture in the 1790s and early nineteenth century. Particular attention is given to those caricatures of contemporary Romantic figures, such as Cruikshank’s cartoon “Fare Thee Well”, depicting Lord Byron leaving Britain. The second part of this chapter focuses on post-war reception of the Romantics in longer comic books. An important focus is William Blake, not simply because his graphic works have lent themselves more easily to adaptations in comic books, but also because this allows for a brief theoretical discussion of the distinctions between the kind of composite art that Blake was practising to the sequential art of modern-day comics and graphic novels. Artists considered include figures such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman for depictions of Blake, but also Hunt Emerson and Moore’s Watchmen for their adaptations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Landnám and Landscape in Viking Orkney
Authors: Griffiths David
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the developing reassessment of the evidence for the ‘colonial invasion’ concept of the Viking arrival in Orkney and Shetland. The view that violent Viking raids or invasions occurred around 800 and were then followed by land-taking (landnám) and settlement, dominated archaeological thought at the time of the publication of Vikings in Scotland, although this was starting to change. The Scandinavian arrivals could be identified in the archaeological record, particularly in Orkney and Shetland, with pagan graves furnished with weapons, grave goods and sometimes boats or horses, bowed longhouses, and an increased use of steatite vessels and the expansion of fishing. However, there was still a lot to be learnt about the nature of the initial contact between the native populations in Scotland of Picts, Gaels, Angles and Britons, and about the processes by which this transitioned to landtaking, naming and settlement. The author identifies that the later 10th century seems to have been a significant time of transition in the Scandinavianisation of Orkney and Shetland, as identified by landscape survey, research and excavation by the author around the Bay of Skaill in Orkney.
The Tarbat Peninsula in Northern Pictland: Portmahomack as a Case Study in Native–Norse Interaction during the 9th to 11th Centuries
Authors: Spall Cecily
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes the evidence for razing by fire of the 8th-century Pictish monastic settlement of Portmahomack in the Tarbat peninsula between 780 and 810. This extensive archaeological site surrounding St Colman’s church was subject to thirteen seasons of open-area excavation and field survey, and a lengthy post-excavation phase and is the first Pictish monastic settlement to be excavated. The intense fire at the site at the turn of the 9th century, hundreds of small chunks of smashed Pictish sculpture found in the fire-destruction horizon, and suggestions of interpersonal violence found amongst the human remains assemblage from the cemetery are seen by the excavators as evidence for an otherwise undocumented Viking raid. Post-raid activity on the site ended around the time of the deposition of a hoard of Viking silver there between 990 and 1000, following a gradual fragmentation of the settlement and associated landholdings along the inner Moray Firth.
Hamar and Underhoull, Unst: Settlement in Northernmost Scotland
Authors: Bond Julie M. , Dockrill Stephen J.
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses excavations at Hamar and Underhoull in Unst, Shetland, an island where a uniquely high number of longhouses of apparently Viking or Norse date have been found through survey, in a density and state of preservation unparalleled elsewhere in Britain. The excavations have revealed that a longer, and far more complex, settlement history of development and decline is present than previously thought at these two sites. Below one of the two single longhouses at Hamar, an earlier sunken-floored building was uncovered, predating the longhouse above it and like pit houses found in Norway from the 9th century onwards. Excavations at a previously unexplored longhouse at the upper area of Underhoull, revealed that it had several phases of use, with three zones, an upper, central, and lower room, two annexes flanking a flagged entrance passage, and a gulley at the back of the house to collect runoff form the hill above. Several finds were recovered, including a small steatite figurine, similar to an example from Iceland dating to the 11th century.