bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Stoic Agnosticisms about Death
Authors: Long Alex
Published: January 2022

Chapter ten breaks the chronological borders of Greek literature moving the discussion to the Roman Stoics and in particular Marcus Aurelius. Absent here is much of the mythological focus so characteristic of treatments of death and the afterlife in earlier chapters. However, emphasis of traditional accounts is found in a continuing, if not increased insistence on the soul, although a concern for its post-mortem existence has been redirected from a focus on the Underworld to an understanding of the cosmos it inhabits. While Socrates saw death and the afterlife as ideas about which mortals must remain ignorant, these matters are now thought of as discernible through rational reflection. Long considers the agnosticisms of the Roman Stoics, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, concerning the continuity of the soul after death, and its relationship to the living person.
‘Things’
Authors: Fraiture Pierre-Philippe
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on the 1953 film Les Statues meurent aussi by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. The film was commissioned by Présence Africaine, the publisher and academic journal, which would radically transform France’s post-war intellectual landscape and pave the way for a wholesale reassessment of the relationship between Africa and the West in the arts, literature, the human sciences and philosophy. Les Statues, which is analysed here to ascertain how, in a given present, the temporal dimensions of past and future are related, resonates with the main concerns of this period: it embraces its ethno-philosophical mood, bemoans the commodification of African art in European museums, calls for the establishment of a new humanism but also militates for a more equitable and post-racial world order. The documentary, and the mournful discussion that it conducts on the imminent death of African art, is appraised against a set of viewpoints by Placide Tempels (La Philosophie bantoue) Cheikh Anta Diop (L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire), Georges Balandier (‘Arts perdus’), and VY Mudimbe (‘Reprendre’). The chapter also examines the long-term legacy of Les Statues and considers the response to it by the Irish video artist Duncan Campbell in It for Others.
Conclusion
Authors: Fraiture Pierre-Philippe
Published: January 2022

This conclusion provides a critical commentary of the main findings of this study by focussing on the specific contributions of its principal authors and the political and intellectual context in which they rose to prominence in the 1945-1960 period. More specifically, it also returns to the anti-colonial agenda of Georges Balandier and Cheikh Anta Diop and concludes that, despite the novelty of their claims, they remained dependent on the ‘colonial library’. This conclusion also identifies the main epistemological obstacles faced by post-war anti-colonial scholars and some of their successors up to the twenty-first century (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Duncan Campbell and Felwine Sarr). It is argued here that more than sixty years after the political decolonization of sub-Saharan African the north-south axis that had presided over the colonial management of the world is still a major global force.
A Degrading Division
Authors: Hughes Edward J.
Published: January 2022

As a middle-class intellectual desperate to escape the privilege which that condition represented, Simone Weil went in search of what was for her the otherness of productive necessity, becoming a factory worker in the period between late 1934 and August of the following year. She charts that encounter in her factory journal (Journal d’usine) which conveys the reifying impact of such labour. She would later link her immersion within ‘the anonymous mass’ of factory workers to the practice of branding on the forehead endured by the lowliest of the slaves in Ancient Rome. Weil sees both bourgeois society and the workers’ movement as reinforcing what she refers to as ‘the deranged excess of specialization’. She describes science as a monopoly from whose methods the uninformed or would-be profane are excluded. She is likewise sceptical about a ‘scientific socialism’, arguing that intellectuals have the same privileges in the Communist world as in bourgeois society. A key feature of the present chapter is how Weil’s religious thought as articulated in Attente de Dieu [Awaiting God] (1950) becomes a vehicle, a ‘strange’ vehicle one might argue, for a reconciliation of the manual and the mental.
Playing and Being in Georges Perec
Authors: Kemp Anna
Published: January 2022

This chapter considers a broad selection of Perec's writings with particular focus on 'Les Lieux d'une ruse', Espèces d'espaces, Je me souviens, W, ou le souvenir d'enfance, and La Vie mode d'emploi. It brings Perec's work into dialogue with psychoanalyst D.W Winnicott's understanding of creative play as the foundation of a person's sense of self, to argue that, in Perec's writing, play is intimately linked to survival. In particular, it is through play that Perec manages the tension present in his work between a desire to withdraw from the world, and a desire to find one's place within it and belong. Ultimately, the chapter argues, it is through play that Perec creates a substitute, however inadequate, for the structures of family and community from which he was severed.
Personal Identity in Jacques Roubaud’s La Boucle
Authors: Kemp Anna
Published: January 2022

This chapter considers Jacques Roubaud's La Boucle, the second and most strikingly autobiographical volume of his monumental 'le grand incendie de londres'. It argues that, in this volume, Roubaud's Oulipian approach to mathematics allows him to grapple with the philosophical problem of the persistence of personal identity over time. In particular, it suggests that the rethinking of Bourbakian set theory undertaken in the sonnet collection ∈ provides a rough road map for understanding identity in La Boucle. Roubaud's exploration, in ∈ , of the question 'What makes a sonnet a sonnet?' comes to be reframed, in La Boucle, in terms of the question 'What makes Jacques Roubaud, Jacques Roubaud?'
Islam, politics, and education
Authors: Tomlinson Maria Kathryn
Published: January 2022

Chapter Three examines novels which depict women’s experiences of menstruation, childbirth and the menopause in an Algerian context. This chapter argues that representations of the female body in Algerian women’s writing are primarily inflected by Islamic practices, doctrine and traditions. Algerian women’s writing illustrates that women’s choices can be restricted by a patriarchal culture which justifies its mistreatment of women by perverting Islamic doctrine. Certain novels reveal that the patriarchal oppression of women is reified through it being legally sanctioned by the state. These novels expose a variety of practices which have a harmful impact on female bodily experience. Practises include the belief that menstrual blood is impure, sequestration, and repudiation. Algerian novels also reveal that women’s bodily experiences have been significantly influenced by the changes in education, living conditions, and politics, that occurred since Algeria gained its independence in 1962. In addition, Algerian women’s writing often inscribes the female body in violent and traumatic contexts. The chapter examines the work of Maïssa Bey, Leïla Marouane, Malika Mokeddem, and Nina Bouraoui.
Introduction
Authors: Broderick Céire
Published: January 2022

This chapter introduces the figure of Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, whose recent fictional portrayals are the focus of this book. Her importance as a figure through which to explore questions of ethnic and gender identity in Chile is highlighted, particularly in the texts of Mercedes Valdivieso and Gustavo Frías. It also establishes the theoretical and epistemological approaches taken in the analysis of these texts with a view to situating this study as part of a wider conversation on the colonial legacies of constructing identities in contemporary Chile.
Cinematic Shakespeare
Authors: Owens Rebekah
Published: January 2022

In this chapter is an exploration of those films in which the setting provides a visual analogy with the preoccupations of the story, but not at the expense of Shakespeare's language. In Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth and Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing, the reader will be invited to consider how these directors use visual imagery to complement Shakespeare’s figurative language.
Teenpic Shakespare
Authors: Owens Rebekah
Published: January 2022

This chapter follows on from the last in discussing how some Shakespeare films rely on an assumption that Shakespeare is so well-known as to form a distinctive, easily recognized brand in the cinema marketplace. Thus, his work can be reimagined in completely different genres such as the teenpic. That is, they are translated as stories that deal exclusively with the preoccupations of teenagers and the social milieu of the American high school. In this way, principal themes of the plays can be explored, such as jealousy in Tim Blake Nelson’s O, based on Othello, the treatment of women in Gil Junger’s Ten Things I Hate About You, based on The Taming of the Shrew and gender identity in Andy Fickman’s She’s The Man, based on Twelfth Night. The latter film in particular is also used as an exemplar of how a Shakespeare film can sometimes fail in its objectives and oversimplify the themes of the original play to the point where there is little resemblance between the modern film and the early modern original.
Radiocarbon Dating
Authors: Reimer Paula , Metcalfe Jenefer
Published: January 2022

Isotopes are variants of elements that have the same number of protons and electrons, but a different number of neutrons. This gives isotopes of the same element slightly different atomic masses. Most elements have at least two isotopes and usually one of these is present in a much larger abundance than the other. In most instances, this is the lighter isotope. For example, the ‘normal’ isotope of carbon is carbon-12 (or ...
Analysis of Takabuti’s Mummification Resin and Packing Material
Authors: White Keith , van Dongen Bart , Fraser Sharon
Published: January 2022

Lipid analyses by gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS; Fig. 1A) of the mummification resin obtained from Takabuti’s neck area indicates a dominance of lipids of plant and/or animal origin. This includes contributions from animal fats or from the breakdown of the mummy tissues themselves (...
The Face of Takabuti
Authors: Wilkinson Caroline , Shrimpton Sarah
Published: January 2022

A key aim of the project documented by this book was to see how Takabuti would have looked when she was alive. A focal point of the research and the associated television programme was the production of a facial reconstruction based on Takabuti’s skull. A 3-D laser scan was made of her head in Queen’s University Belfast which was used as the foundation for a scientific facial reconstruction produced at the University of Dundee. For the first time in some 2600 years, Takabuti’s living appearance was once again visible. Although the scope of the current research programme has focused on one mummy, its remit is much wider. It aims to show how the methodology first developed for Egyptian mummies at the University of Manchester in the 1970s – employing multidisciplinary scientific techniques in combination with archaeological, historical and inscriptional evidence – can provide a wealth of information. This not only relates to the historical context, individual ancestry and life events pertaining to the mummy under investigation, but also to wider issues of health, disease, diet, lifestyle, and religious and funerary customs in an ancient society.
Intermitted Song
Authors: Coffey Bysshe Inigo
Published: January 2022

Chapter 4 turns to the intellectual and technical sophistication of his first major production, Alastor, for which the earlier chapters have been a preparation. In Alastor, Shelley first outlines and enacts his conception of what he terms therein ‘intermitted song’ — a type of poetry capable of articulating the idea of thought as substance, and the value of intermediate modes of being. In Alastor such intermediate states are to be celebrated as the most intense form of living; in pauses we are truly said to live.
Kant, Purity, and the Devil
Authors: Coffey Bysshe Inigo
Published: January 2022

It is in the Alastor volume of 1816 that Shelley’s quarrel with Wordsworth as a lost moral leader emerges for the first time. Chapter 5 turns to Peter Bell the Third, Shelley’s satire on Wordsworth, and relates the moral death-in-life of Peter Bell to Shelley’s revulsion against the wish to remain unchangeably as we are, as previously discussed in Chapter 2. This chapter revisits a question that has perplexed certain Shelley critics: did Shelley actually read Kant? The chapter supplies an answer to the question. Under the name of Bell, Wordsworth appears as a Kantian disciple corrupted by an ethical system that elevates, as the fundamental principle of moral action, duty above sympathy or the pursuit of happiness.
Introducing Iberian Translation Studies as a Literary Contact Zone
Authors: Ugalde Esther Gimeno , Pinto Marta Pacheco , Fernandes Ângela
Published: January 2022

By intersecting the fields of Iberian studies and translation studies, this edited collection seeks a better understanding of the complex intracultural transfers that shape the Iberian space. Such an intersection may seem logical and obvious prima facie, in that the Iberian Peninsula has a centuries-old history of multilingualism, along with intra-comprehensibility and internal cross-cultural exchanges (e.g. ...
Theoretical Contact Zones between Translation Studies and Iberian Studies
Authors: Míguez Ana Belén Cao
Published: January 2022

This chapter draws on the notion of the ‘contact zone’ to examine translation as a particular form of triangular intersection between languages, literatures, and cultures, and thus argues for the need for empirical approaches to literary translation. By resorting to previous research based on a corpus of literary translations from Spanish into Portuguese (1780–1850), the chapter illustrates the benefits of incorporating the study of translation history into the comparative study of Iberian literatures in view of its heuristic potential. This kind of approach invites us to rethink interliterary peninsular relations and this case study, in particular, makes us aware of ideas that are taken for granted in regard to the (lack of) communication between peninsular geocultural systems.
A (De)Construction of Modern Literary Iberia: Translating Eugénio de Castro
Authors: Mochila Miguel Filipe
Published: January 2022

The chapter sheds light on the factual relations between peninsular cultures, as well as on their ideological configuration and imaginary substrate, considering how the Iberian idea was constructed by the Castilian translations of Eugénio de Castro’s works. It intends to demonstrate that the Portuguese poet’s Castilian translations can be interpreted as an instrument of the imaginary configuration of a modern Iberian identity that is aesthetically multifaceted and ambiguous. This ambiguity is justified by the semi-peripheral and post-imperial status of Spain in the global context, and it helps us to understand how Castro’s work was appreciated for the tension caused by its own contradictions (nationalistic vs. cosmopolitan or innovative vs. traditionalist). Taking into account the crucial relation of the Iberian space with other cultural spaces, namely the French canonization centre and Latin America, the chapter contends that the Iberian space devised through the translation of Eugénio de Castro’s work is constitutively heterogeneous, semi-peripheral, and post-imperial.
Literary Tourism in a Contact Zone: The Spanish Translation of Lisbon – What the Tourist Should See, by Fernando Pessoa
Authors: de Sousa Sara Rodrigues
Published: January 2022

The chapter analyses the process of translation and the edition of Lisbon – What the Tourist Should See, a tourist guide written in English by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa around 1920, and only recently published in Portuguese (2015) and Spanish (2017) translations. It contends that the Spanish translation brings to the tourist guide a new horizon of reference, adding functions to a text that was, at its inception, already building a Portuguese–English ‘contact zone’. Recalling the cultural specificities of the tourist guide as a discursive genre, the analysis explores how the published Spanish translation of Pessoa’s guide has reconfigured the map of symbolic cultural places displayed in the source text, and how it came to fulfil in a broader sense the author’s goal of spreading knowledge about Portuguese heritage and culture.
The Translations of Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte into Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, and Basque
Authors: Batalla Maria Dasca
Published: January 2022

This chapter centres on the Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, and Basque translations of the novel La familia de Pascual
Duarte (1942) by Camilo José Cela and its circulation within the Iberian geocultural space during the Portuguese and Spanish dictatorships. The analysis highlights the multiple motivations and functions of these literary translations, as well as the constraints acting upon them. It argues that the reception of these translations in the respective literary systems was impacted by the particular socio-political and cultural contexts and the effects of censorship, recalling that the public use of Catalan, Basque, and Galician was forbidden during Franco’s dictatorship. The chapter studies the active role of the translators and cultural mediators involved, not only in the circulation of the translations, but also in the novel’s critical interpretation.
Minotauro and Confluências: Two Portuguese Series Dedicated to Literature from Spain in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Branco Isabel Araújo
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on two contemporary editorial projects promoting cultural relations between Spain and Portugal: Minotauro, published by Edições 70, and Confluências, published by Kalandraka. These are the very first Portuguese book series purposefully dedicated to literature written in Spain. The chapter carries out an analysis of both series, taking into account the criteria for title selection as well as the mission statement of each editorial coordinator. By resorting to the polysystem theoretical framework, it argues that Minotauro and Confluências seek to offer an ‘alternative repertoire’ that ranges from more canonical and traditional literature to contemporary narrative. The investigation also stresses the role of cultural producers and mediators (publishers, editors, and critics) in making ‘new’ literary Iberian repertoires accepted in Portugal.
The Forward March of Reactionary Working-Class Politics?
Authors: Loughlin Christopher
Published: January 2022

The First World War precipitated the Irish Revolution, 1917-21, the strengthening of the labour movement via wartime production in the UK and the rise of ‘modern’ Britain and Ireland. However – alongside these radical developments – there was the development of reactionary and authoritarian working-class politics. For example, this period saw the development of mass reactionary, working-class Unionism in Ulster with the Ulster Unionist Labour Association (1918). There was the development of the National Democratic and Labour Party, 1918-22, (a right-wing and pro-war labour party) in the UK. Further, there were a number of populist, imperialist organisations which attempted to advance a right-wing popular movement: the Unionist Labour Movement, British Empire Union, British Empire League, and the Empire Day Movement. This chapter will attempt a history from below of popular authoritarianism in Britain and Ireland, 1919. It will question the concept of ‘modernity’ in relationship to reactionary working-class politics in Britain and Ireland. It will address how right-wing forces in Britain and Ireland adapted their politics to the era of mass democracy. Mass suffrage had been feared by many intellectuals on the right; yet, the inter-war period demonstrated that there was no simple correlation between economics and working-class political expression. The success of right-wing political parties and movements in mobilising the population was particularly noteworthy in Britain, but lessons, mistakes and fears all contributed to the trans-national re-development of reactionary and authoritarian politics.
The Orchid
Authors: Cherry Brigid
Published: January 2022

Chapter 5 discusses the philosophy of Lost. The chapter looks at the ways the characters felt a strong connection to the island, that there was a reason they had been brought to the island, and that it had given them a purpose or new outlook on life, and how they were deeply affected on a physical, emotional or spiritual level. Questions of fate, destiny and free will were thus revisited again and again, allowing the flashbacks and flashforwards that are integral to the narrative to be read as deterministic. The chapter sets out how Lost engages with questions of free will, of identity and what it is to be conscious, what it means to be human, the nature of space and time, and whether reality is what we think it is, all contributing to the complex web of philosophical and metaphysical allusions within the narrative.
“It’s right behind you!” or Rated R for “Terror”
Authors: Wetmore Kevin J.
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines why The Conjuring was rated R for “terror” and the three most frightening moments in the film as exemplars of how director James Wan manipulates the audience and develops slow scares. It then contextualizes
The Conjuring with Wan’s previous work and considers his collaborators. After a brief production history, the chapter considers the use of humor to offset and thus heighten
the horror. Lastly, the first chapter considers the importance of seeing in the film – film is a visual medium and The Conjuring plays around with the idea of what you can and cannot see and which is scarier.
Child’s Play and Women’s Work
Authors: Wetmore Kevin J.
Published: January 2022

The third chapter examines children and women in
the film. In particular, The Conjuring is a film filled with dangerous and diabolical toys and games: the doll Annabelle, the game Hide-and-Clap, Rory’s music box, the haunted
toys in the Warrens’ Occult Museum. The film also displays children in peril and the parents who must struggle to protect them, even as the danger often comes (directly or
indirectly) from the parents themselves. The five Perron daughters are linked with Judy Warren, Ed and Lorraine’s daughter, as all are threatened by supernatural evil and the
threat of being harmed by the parents. In contrast the film also shows Rory, the dead boy killed by his mother, as a cautionary tale. Similarly, The Conjuring is a female-centric
movie, concerned with wives and mothers, and yet is not particularly feminist. The second half of the chapter offers a feminist reading of the women of The Conjuring, considering how Lorraine, Carolyn and Bathsheba accept or reject roles as mothers and wives, and how they interact with the men in the story.
“Everything you see in here is either haunted, cursed, or has been used in some kind of ritualistic practice.” Or, The Endless Conjuring Universe
Authors: Wetmore Kevin J.
Published: January 2022

The sequels, prequels and other films of the so-called “Conjuring Universe” are analysed in relationship to the original, and considered as to how they shape, expand, and sometimes contradict the ever-growing milieu of the films. Analysed in this chapter are Annabelle, The Conjuring 2, Annabelle: Creation, The Curse of La Llorona, The Nun, and Annabelle Comes Home.
FIRSTS: ‘Ah, there you are, Mr Wilson. Come in. Please’
Authors: Conolly Jez , Westwood Emma
Published: January 2022

General introduction and context, plus the authors’ association with the film that led to their writing collaboration. Introductory highlighting of the contents of the book’s chapters.
SECONDS: ‘Begin again, all new, all different’
Authors: Conolly Jez , Westwood Emma
Published: January 2022

Extended examination of the plot of Seconds with added detail covering character naming conventions and some opening discussion of the film’s visual style.
SEX | DRUGS | ROCK | PAPER | SCISSORS: ‘There’s a kind of gathering…It’s going to be very wild’
Authors: Conolly Jez , Westwood Emma
Published: January 2022

Exploration of the centrality of sexual liberation and intoxicants, as tools of the Company and as experienced by the film’s protagonist, especially through the pivotal grape stomp scene. The themes of sedation and manipulation, as evoked through filmmaking techniques and consequently as part of the effect that Seconds has on the viewer, is also examined.
LASTS: ‘Relax, old friend. Cranial drill’
Authors: Conolly Jez , Westwood Emma
Published: January 2022

A brief final consideration of the effect that Seconds had on the career of its star and how the film can continue to serve as an article of personal reflection and enrichment for today’s audiences.
Synopsis
Authors: Negra Diane
Published: January 2022

Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) opens in a bleak and unsettled landscape; after a brief glimpse of turn-of-the-century waltzing couples the camera pans across present-day scenes of urban poverty including a post-industrial riverside. The nihilist ethos that we will come to associate with the film’s protagonist Charles Oakley is evoked by the rusted car frames junked in front of a “No Dumping” sign beside the Pulaski Skyway bridge in Newark, New Jersey....
Repulsion
Authors: Carr Jeremy
Published: January 2022

Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), starring Catherine Deneuve as a repressed and tormented manicurist, is a gripping, visually inventive descent into paranoia and self-destructive alienation. Emblematic of recurrent Polanski motifs, evinced in his student short films, in his striking debut feature, Knife in the Water (1962), and in subsequent features like Death and the Maiden (1994), Repulsion is a tour de force examination of crippling anxiety and the sinister potency of inanimate objects. Repulsion amplifies the realm of psychological horror by evoking the seething impact of increasing delusion, literal and figurative seclusion, and the consequences of one woman’s foreboding sensitivity to the unsettling world that surrounds her. This Devil’s Advocate considers Repulsion within the context of familiar horror tropes and the prevailing qualities of Polanski’s broader oeuvre. Drawing on the research of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed and others, concerning issues of abjection, the ‘monstrous-feminine’, and the psychology of horror spectatorship, this text focuses on central themes of isolation, sexuality and setting. Bookended by introductory biographical details and concluding with a roundup of the film’s reception, Repulsion is situated within the horror genre at large as well as its various off-shoots, such as the rape/revenge subgenre. There is also an analysis of the film’s technical qualities, from its sound design to its brilliantly low-key special effects, all of which define the film as Polanski’s most audaciously stylish realisation of dread and unease.
Tiptoe Aspirations
Authors: Tontiplaphol Betsy Winakur
Published: January 2022

Chapter 3 considers the influence of the celebrity ballerina on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the 1830s, La Sylphide consolidated the other-worldly aesthetic that came to define the so-called Romantic ballet, and female dancers such as Marie Taglioni and Fanny Cerrito soon eclipsed their male counterparts as the stars of the ballet stage, due, in large part, to their cultivation of pointe technique. The chapter describes the effect of Victorian-era ballet on Barrett Browning’s earliest writing but privileges its manifestation in Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh, both of which explore the intersection of love, femininity, writing, power, and mobility, both literal and metaphorical. Victorian lithographs typically portrayed ballerinas as floating above their male partners during the pas de deux, and that relational dynamic registers in both Sonnets from the Portuguese and, later, Aurora Leigh, the epic voiced by a female poet whose paternal ancestors include a norms-disrupting “French dancing-girl.”
‘I learned to get my own back’: Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986)
Authors: Waterman Rory
Published: January 2022

This chapter considers the contemporary reception of Wendy Cope’s debut collection, and its legacy. It also considers the themes of the collection, including her parodies of other contemporary poets and her invention of the character Jake/Jason Strugnell. The chapter also provides detailed close readings of poems in the collection.
‘He thinks you’re crazy’: Serious Concerns (1992)
Authors: Waterman Rory
Published: January 2022

This chapter considers the contemporary reception of Wendy Cope’s second collection, and its legacy. It also considers the themes of the collection, including her continued parodies of other contemporary poets and the final published poems using her character Jake/Jason Strugnell. It also provides close commentary on her developing themes of love and relationships. The chapter also provides detailed close readings of poems in the collection.
‘They waited patiently’: Uncollected Cope
Authors: Waterman Rory
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides insight into Wendy Cope’s uncollected poems: those not included in her collections, and those that are as yet unpublished. It considers their points of connection or divergence with poems in her collections. The chapter ends with critical comment on work written or published since Anecdotal Evidence (2018), including her long poem St Hilda of Whitby, and where her poetry appears to be heading. As such, it serves a concluding function.
Sailor Talk
Authors: Bercaw Edwards Mary K.
Published: January 2022

Throughout history, most people have encountered the language of sailors in ports. Such language, including nautical terminology, occupational lore, and the coterie speech that bound crews together, was a product of isolated shipborne communities at sea, but it was when sailors entered the liminal space of the port that the general public heard their speech. The language of sailors was often greeted with contempt and fear. The Boston Recorder warned in 1823 that when sailors are ashore, “Children can with difficulty enter the streets at all, without hearing the very dialect of hell.” Despite such condemnation, it was in the spoken world of sailor talk that Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Jack London first became storytellers. They were all seafarers who transcribed their experiences at sea into stories, first told orally and then transformed into the written word. With their storytelling, they crossed the liminal space of the port and emerged as the great artists that they are. This book defines sailor talk, explores its inextricability from the labor of mariners, and investigates the orality of the shipboard world in which sailors worked. It then concentrates on the complex, multitudinous, and intertwining use of sailor talk in the works of Melville, Conrad, and London.
Sailors
Authors: Bercaw Edwards Mary K.
Published: January 2022

To what extent did the demands of shipboard life and work shape the identity of sailors? In what ways did the particular intersection of language and environment—man-made and natural—influence their speech? How did the occupational and technical idiom of sailors influence their cognitive models of language and their use of language in general? This chapter is divided into six sections: sailors historically considered; sailor literacy; nautical terminology; slang, cursing, and swearing; sailors’ work songs; and sailor language in the works of James Fenimore Cooper. The chapter investigates who 19th-century sailors were and what defined them as seamen. It especially considers the central debate amongst historians over the exceptionalism of sailors. Were seafarers ennobled by constant contact with nature at its most sublime? Or were they simply laborers: “working men who got wet,” in David Alexander’s phrase? Were they a people set apart or ordinary people in often extraordinary conditions?
Orality
Authors: Bercaw Edwards Mary K.
Published: January 2022

Melville, Conrad, and London all labored as common sailors before becoming writers. Their sea works reflect the oral world in which they served far more than has been previously acknowledged and are susceptible to the deep analysis provided by theories of orality. This chapter draws on the work of Walter J. Ong, Johan Galtung, Greg Dening, Alessandro Portelli, Cesare Casarino, Hester Blum, and Margaret Cohen to investigate orality and its manifestation on board ship and in sailor language. These theoretical discussions form useful tools in the analysis of sea literature and of the universal questions raised by the oral quality of sea literature. At what point does the shifting quality of an oral story render it untrue? And what does it mean to be true? It considers elements of orality in sea literature, such as the use of repetition, the rendering of multiple voices, and the problem of reproducing silence. The latter is especially important in Conrad, a writer who employs silence, ellipses, and misdirection.
‘Mondism’: Talking to Big Business 1927–28
Authors: Davis Mary , Foster John
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses the attempt to forge a social partnership with the employers. The lesson Bevin and the TUC learned from the General Strike was class warfare was never to be repeated and that capitalism was here to stay. Citrine and Bevin argued that 'trade unionism has reached the end of a defensive stage in its evolution' and that its new aim should be to join with employers in to raise industry to its highest efficiency. Alfred Mond and 21 other employers mainly in the newer industries responded favourably leading to the Mond-Turner talks leading to a set of proposals were agreed which the TUC regarded as the foundation of the industrial relations of the future in contrast to the 'outdated' conflictual model of the militants. Bevin led these discussions. The main employers' organisations representing the older industries overwhelmingly rejected the Mond-Turner proposals.
Keeping the Ancient Way
Authors: Wilcher Robert
Published: January 2022

This book sets Henry Vaughan in the context of his own time and in the context of the development of Vaughan studies since his work was rediscovered during the first half of the nineteenth century. Each chapter contains a relatively free-standing treatment of a single topic, but the ten main chapters are organized into a structure that progressively opens up biographical, intellectual, political, religious, and literary aspects of the man and his work. The topics chosen for consideration are areas of current research and ongoing critical debate. Part One deals with Vaughan’s relation to the world in which he lived: the topography and social context of his native Breconshire; his ideas about God and Nature; his royalist affiliation during the civil wars; his opposition to the Puritan regime imposed upon South Wales; and his encouragement of members of the outlawed Church of England during the Interregnum. Part Two explores literary features of his practice of the art of poetry: the unusual degree of intertextuality with the poetry of George Herbert and other poets; his use of typology and scriptural allusion; nature imagery and description of the natural world; and elements of poetic craftsmanship, such as rhyme, rhythm, and form.
Henry Vaughan and George Herbert
Authors: Wilcher Robert
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses Vaughan’s major debt to George Herbert’s The Temple. It traces the gradual discovery of the extent of Herbert’s influence on Silex Scintillans and distinguishes acts of plagiarism from imitations, inert quotations, echoes, functional allusions and more unconscious manifestations of borrowing. Several examples of wholesale imitation of individual poems by Herbert are analysed and Vaughan’s habit of weaving multiple details from a wide range of poems by Herbert into a single poem of his own is demonstrated. The chapter ends by showing that Vaughan became less dependent on Herbert as a creative source in the second part of Silex Scintillans and invoked him in his later prose volumes as a pattern of holy life and a model of the true Christian poet.
“Mother of us poets”
Authors: Williams Seretha D.
Published: January 2022

This chapter describes Margaret Walker as a literary inspiration for the Black women writers of the Black Arts movement and positions Walker, a member of the Black Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s and 40s, as an active participant in the Black Arts movement. Walker’s support of the Black-owned Broadside Press and founding of the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Center) at Jackson State University are two examples of Walker’s aesthetic praxis for centering Black life and culture. Additionally, Walker’s poem “For My People” served as a model for Black Arts movement poetry that spoke unapologetically to Black audiences.
Against the Grain
Authors: Smith Elizabeth
Published: January 2022

Despite sharing many of the beliefs and values of the Black Arts movement (BAM) African American playwright Alice Childress (1916-1994) is rarely mentioned in the context of the BAM. This essay explores why she was omitted from BAM’s narrative given her consistent questioning of racial identity, and her embrace of a Black Aesthetic. The study asserts that Childress’s foregrounding of Black women differentiated her politics and art from BAM’s and the Black Power movement’s male leadership. She did not use the iconography widely associated with them: the raised fist, militarist clothing and guns for example. Rather she chose iconography and settings that told of the Black community she lived in: the kitchen, the iron, the mop bucket, the backyard, the stage. Childress was often pigeon-holed as a “protest” writer, a label that set her apart from BAM whose theorists argued that “protest” writing addressed a white audience and could not speak to the needs of Black people. This essay analyses three of Childress’s plays to make the case that her absence from the BAM narrative was to the detriment of both, contributing to what is often a monolithic and gendered account of that movement, and impacting on Childress’s unwarranted artistic neglect.
Rage Against the Machine
Authors: Martin Kel
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964) and The Slave (1964) as dialectical theses on black violence as performance in the Black Arts Movement. By combining Foucault’s idea of “reverse discourse” with Adorno’s notion of “truth content,” this chapter considers Baraka’s plays not as celebrations of violence but as playful meditations on the racial tensions of the 1960s. In particular, Baraka seems to suggest that violence as a political strategy can go only so far—that black art must be radical and salubrious, acerbic and sincere. As texts, Baraka’s plays seem to revel in the very same discourses at the center of their critique.  This type of deconstructive reading of these plays enables a more nuanced engagement with Baraka’s multifaceted, often seemingly contradictory, narratives of resistance to racial hegemonies.
BAM Legacies and the “Inner Life” in the Contemporary Poetry of Rickey Laurentiis and Danez Smith
Authors: Kamali Leila
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines modes in which the Black Arts movement emphasised the “inner life” as an important expression of political will and reads that legacy in light of a radical aesthetic being developed by contemporary Queer African American poets. Danez Smith and Ricky Laurentiis are among poets who position an understanding of Queer Black inner life as an individualized source of political power and as influenced by two types of emphasis on the inner life that emerged from the BAM era: a highly masculinized politics and poetics on one hand, and a powerfully feminist counterculture on the other. Smith’s and Laurentiis’s poetry explores these contrasting legacies in the sensual terrain of personal relationships, articulating the intense danger and yet potential freedom of being openly desiring in a racist and homophobic environment. In this way they invoke a sublime inner life which is continuous with both radical thought and political revolution.
Eliseo Subiela’s Dark Sides of the Heart: Poetry and Performance in “Old Argentine Cinema”
Authors: Bollig Ben
Published: January 2022

Chapter Two addresses the role of poetry in Subiela’s films, in particular his two films that most clearly engage with verse and poets, the two parts of El lado oscuro del corazón (1992/2001). It addresses a series of unresolved questions: over parody in Subiela’s work; his politics; and the alleged sexism of these films. The chapter assesses the filmmaker’s inclusion of poetry in a rather vague notion of rebellion, in relation to the liberal politics of “old Argentine cinema.” I offer a critique of this nostalgic and idealistic use of poetry – yet one which at the same time paves the way for later, more radical approaches to genre and disciplinary boundaries, including but not limited to the highly political cinema of Raúl Perrone, whose work appears directly to cite Subiela.
Regarding the Lives of Poets: On Biopics and Poetic Documentaries
Authors: Bollig Ben
Published: January 2022

Chapter Three, on the screening of poets’ lives in films by María Luisa Bemberg, Santiago Loza, and Ernesto Ardito and Virna Molina, asks what happens to the literary work when the writer’s life becomes the subject of the filmmaker’s attentions. Put another way, if one can tell the life of a poet, what happens to the poetry? I assess the poetry-film nexus with reference to the politics of the baroque and neo-baroque; reference Michael Chanan’s work on documentary; and address the “queering” of memory and identity, with reference both to contemporary politics (e.g. memory debates during the Kirchner-Fernández governments) and the Deleuzean philosophy that informed the neobarroco in the Southern Cone. These films demonstrate the long history of intermediality, as far back as the historical baroque, if not earlier, and the particular difficulties raised for intermedial works by poetry.
Poetry-Value-Film in the Cinema of Raúl Perrone
Authors: Bollig Ben
Published: January 2022

Critical approaches to the work of Raúl Perrone have, to date, focussed mostly on its DIY ethos and his reworking of international genres, from Italian Neorealism to the US slacker comedy, in a local Argentine context. However, despite his reputation, and indeed the immediate impression given by many of his early films, as a creator of no-budget Argentine slacker comedies, much of his cinema features or is underpinned by poetic concerns. Chapter Four therefore aims to explore his use of and interaction with poetry – how he screens it, and how it informs the aesthetics and ethics of his cinema. I draw on the work of Theodor Adorno and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, as well as Michel Foucault’s ideas about cynicism and free speech (parrhēsia). Here I develop arguments about how the use of poetry questions contemporary understandings of cultural and financial value – in short, the political implications of intermediality.
Return as Exile inVéronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père
Authors: Wimbush Antonia
Published: January 2022

Chapter Six centres on exile in Côte d’Ivoire and argues that a return to the homeland for an individual, after living in the diaspora, does not always equate to a return home; rather, it can be experienced as a manifestation of exile. This is the case for Nina, the autofictional narrator of Franco-Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père (2010) (and, by extension, for the author herself). Her return to a country which is no longer home is aggravated by gender issues, and by the fact that she constantly views the way of life in Abidjan from a Western colonial perspective, thus revealing the overlaps and disparities between the paradigms of exile and diaspora. The chapter is framed by the psychologist Peter Adler’s five-stage process of culture shock. An analysis of Nina’s culture shock during her return to her country of origin facilitates a discussion about the very nature of home.
Variety in Criticism and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: DeSimone Alison C.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 5 considers how “variety” and “miscellany” became valued in Enlightenment philosophy, eighteenth-century music history, and more specifically, early music criticism between 1700 and 1720, showing that the response to musical miscellany in performance transformed into a lasting cultural appreciation of miscellany in music and the other arts. This final chapter illustrates how the appreciation for variety as an aesthetic facilitated a re-evaluation of cosmopolitanism as Britain transformed under social, economic, and political pressures.
Introduction: Editing the Harlem Renaissance
Authors: Murray Joshua M. , Tangedal Ross K.
Published: January 2022

Near the beginning of The Big Sea (1940), Langston Hughes recalls the moment when he first became conscious of language as a formal expression of identity. Lonely in his grandmother’s house in Oklahoma, he discovers books: “then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”...
Looking Back to Look Ahead
Authors: Cohen Milton A.
Published: January 2022

Just as the novels of Chapter 3 reflect the 1950s theme of conformity and rebellion, two novels of the late Sixties and early Seventies—Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow—view a narrow part of World War
II through the authors’ own times. Vonnegut is explicit that he is writing a late-Sixties anti-war novel and makes his protagonist,
Billy Pilgrim, as unmilitary as possible. The trans-national cartels that enabled the V-2 rocket attacks against the Allies in Pynchon’s novel anticipate the military-industrial complex of his own time. But the novels’ stances are either problematic (Vonnegut) or
complicated (Pynchon). Vonnegut based his facts about the Dresden firebombing on dubious sources (as well as on his personal experience). Pynchon makes clear that war is only an artifact of the cartels’ domination of markets, which he examines extensively. He is more interested in the intertwining of the cartels and technology and in the cartels’ survival into the postwar period. As the first guided missile, the V-2 itself anticipates a Manichean future of technology (space exploration vs. nuclear annihilation).
Conclusion
Authors: Cohen J. Laurence
Published: January 2022

Since the Civil Rights Movement, artists and activists as diverse as Isaac Hayes, Rev. Al Sharpton, Loften Mitchell, Matthew Lopez, Eve L. Ewing, and Beyoncé invoke exodus motifs to express the perils and promise of African American life. While Exodus typology remains a natural way for Black male leaders to frame their life stories, feminist readings of Moses’s story have grown increasingly prominent. As long as police brutality, mass incarceration, the racial wealth gap, healthcare disparities, and environmental racism persist, Black writers will continue to invoke exodus motifs to contend with white supremacy. Yet, the meaning of Moses’s story has changed dramatically over the past two centuries. Feminist and multiracial readings of Exodus have become as prominent as those upholding a single, male leader. The differences—sometimes subtle, sometimes stark—in how Black writers and artists interpret Exodus reveal the supreme variety of Black culture.