bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Feuilleton at War
Authors: Foss Colin
Published: May 2021

The nineteenth-century newspaper was a hybrid text, presenting both fact and fiction, often through reporting and the literary feuilleton respectively. The Siege of Paris upended daily life, making fact appear stranger than fiction, which led to a collapsing of the hybridity of newspapers, coalescing into one chronicle of the Siege. The press increasingly spread gossip dressed up as fact, fictionalized the news, and politicized fiction. Constantly rehashing and reframing the news, the press presented daily life itself as a departure from reality: the news itself became escapist.
The Dubious Battle of Reichshoffen
Authors: Foss Colin
Published: May 2021

Newspapers’ disregard for fact created fertile ground for the growth of national myth. A perhaps fictitious Parisian news report on the Battle of Reichshoffen, which took place just before the siege on the Franco-Prussian border, became one such myth. A few conflicting accounts of this early battle in the war turned into a play, a poem, and a panorama, and perhaps later led to the successful campaign of Patrice de Mac Mahon for President of the French Republic. But it is impossible to verify whether the Battle was a French victory or a defeat. This ambiguity was inherent to newspaper poetics during the siege, and while frustrating for any reader looking for truth, it shows how profitable and how ideologically productive ambiguity could be. Much like the Battle of Waterloo, the Battle of Reischshoffen grew to become a national-historical allegory due to the particularities of literature production in times of war.
Coda
Authors: Foss Colin
Published: May 2021

The memory of the Siege of Paris has always been bound up with the memory of the Commune, the short-lived revolutionary moment that ended in May 1871, four months after the end of the Siege. This coda offers a reading of a short story, “Deux amis,” written and published by Guy de Maupassant in 1883, to suggest that, while those Parisians who lived through the Siege were convinced of its historical exemplarity, memory has relegated the Siege to an auxiliary role in history: prelude to the Commune, precursor to the Great War. Reading the Siege from its own perspective, as The Culture of War proposes to do, shows how literature became a vehicle for expressing the absurdity of war and the threat of state violence against its own citizens.
Introduction: The Hangover after the Handover
Authors: Wu Helena Y.W.
Published: May 2021

The introductory chapter puts forward the notion of “hangover” to scrutinize the so-called colonial-postcolonial transition of Hong Kong after the handover in 1997. With an eye to the cultural, social and political landscape, the chapter explores how Hong Kong undergoes a dual hangover from the last years of British colonial rule, in which the administration made attempts to accelerate localization, democratization and institutionalization, and after the taken-for-granted state following the handover, in which the post-1997 authorities’ rhetorical claims of decolonization are contained within the frames of nationalization and globalization. In view of the cultural, social and political forces in flux, the multiple entry points introduced by this chapter open up a space to critically interrogate the further transition of Hong Kong from the post-handover to the post-hangover during the 2010s and the manifold impacts on the local, national and global levels.
Ecocritics and Ecoskeptics
Authors: Krell Jonathan F.
Published: May 2021

Michel Serres and Luc Ferry represent the two opposing views of ecology in contemporary French philosophy. Serres calls for a “natural contract” that would ensure a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. Ferry rejects Serres’s ecocentric world view, embracing instead modernist humanism that places humans squarely in the center of the world. Part 1 of Ecocritics and Ecoskeptics presents three contemporary novels that depict the world as both a beautiful and fragile place, in danger of being destroyed—as Serres fears—by human technological progress. Part 2 studies two novels that address the animal question. What is the difference between humans and animals? Are humans animals, or have they been torn away from their animality? Can humans justify their inhumane treatment of animals? Part 3 analyzes two novelists, both avowed humanists who—one through humor and the other through humanitarianism—explore potential undesirable effects of environmentalism. The conclusion states that “environmentalism is a humanism.” Traditional humanism must yield to an ecological humanism that gives dignity and respect to both humans and the earth, acknowledging the unbreakable bond between human and humus.
A Fairy in the Age of Prometheus: Chantal Chawaf’s Mélusine des détritus
Authors: Krell Jonathan F.
Published: May 2021

Melusine is a fairy of French folklore, originating in the Poitou region of western France. She was cursed to metamorphose into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday, but in general is a positive figure, associated with fresh water and forests, the construction of castles and churches, fertility and maternity. Mélusine des détritus is a depressing new take on the fairy story. The Melusine of Chawaf’s novel is a young woman who suffers acutely from the contemporary industrial world in which she lives. She has developed severe asthma from breathing polluted air, she lives in the fear of a meltdown destroying the nuclear power plant near her town and has a vague fear that the human race as we know it will not survive much longer. She symbolizes the disenchantment of the modern world recounted by such contemporary French philosophers as Michel Maffesoli and Pierre Rabhi.
Juvenal: Satires Book V
Authors: Godwin John
Published: May 2021

Juvenal’s fifth and last book of Satires consists of three complete poems and one fragment. The poems offer a scandalised exposure of human folly and vice, but the poet also appears to be promoting the value of human life and the need to accept our lives without worshipping the false gods of money, power or superstition—and this is delivered in the hugely entertaining tones of a great master of the Latin language. Satires 13 and 14 both deal with the need to use money without being enslaved by avarice, Satire 15 is an astonishing description of the cannibalism perpetrated in a vicious war in Egypt, while the final unfinished poem in the collection looks from a worm’s-eye view at the advantages enjoyed by men enlisted in the Praetorian guard. The Introduction sets Juvenal in the history of Roman Satire, explores the style of the poems and also asks how far they can be read as in any sense serious, given the ironic pose adopted by the satirist. The text is accompanied by a literal English translation and the commentary (which is keyed to important words in the translation and aims to be accessible to readers with little or no Latin) seeks to explain both the factual background to the poems and also the literary qualities which make this poetry exciting and moving to a modern audience.
Comedy and Crisis
Authors: Goggin Joyce , De Bruyn Frans
Published: May 2021

Comedy and Crisis features the first ever scholarly English translation of two plays by the eighteenth-century Dutch playwright Pieter Langendijk: Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders [Quincampoix of de Windhandelaars], and Harlequin Stock-Jobber [Arlequin Actionist]. Both plays were occasioned by the financial speculation in England, France, and the Netherlands in 1719-20. In the Netherlands the speculative activity was referred to as a windhandel or wind trade. The first play is a full-length satirical comedy, and the second is a short, comic harlequinade; both were performed in Amsterdam in the fall of 1720, as the speculative bubble in the Netherlands was bursting. Comedy and Crisis also contains a translation of the extensive apparatus (introduction and notes) prepared by the scholar C.H.P. Meijer for his 1892 edition of these plays. The current editors have updated the footnotes and added six new critical essays by contemporary literary and historical scholars that contextualize the two plays historically and culturally. The book includes an extensive bibliography and index. The materials assembled in Comedy and Crisis are a rich resource for cultural, historical, and literary students of the history of finance and of eighteenth-century studies.
Capitalism, Work and Suicide
Authors: Waters Sarah
Published: May 2021

Chapter one draws on histories of suicide and historical studies of industrial labour in order to examine whether work suicide constitutes a new phenomenon reflecting the historically specific conditions of neoliberalism. Despite the poor material conditions of labour under industrial capitalism, there are few recorded cases of work-related suicide. In 19th century France, suicide was characterised as a marginal phenomenon that affected the most impoverished social groups: the jobless, the destitute or the infirm. The chapter examines the structural transformations that have precipitated a rise of suicides in the workplace and in particular, the shift to a finance-driven economic order. From a source of productivity and therefore profit under industrial capitalism, labour has become, in the contemporary context, an obstacle to rational and extraneous financial goals that needs to be removed. Suicides are the product of differential neoliberal management regimes. On the one hand, suicides affected workers who were pushed to their very limits by management in a bid to increase their individual productivity, economic worth and therefore maximise profits. On the other, suicides affected workers who were pushed out of the workplace as a form of surplus cost.
Fast Cars and Vital Exhaustion
Authors: Waters Sarah
Published: May 2021

Chapter five examines a series of suicides at car manufacturer Renault, situating them in the transition from an industrial model to a knowledge economy, in which value is expropriated from the resources of the mind. Suicides did not take place in the emblematic spaces of the factory, where cars were once mass produced, but in a state-of-the art research centre, where cognitive workers conceptualised and designed cutting-edge cars of the future. In the knowledge economy, the mind is treated as an endlessly productive resource that reproduces itself continuously and is unencumbered by the physical limitations of the body. I argue that suicides were the end point of a form of vital exhaustion that transcends the corporeal defences of the physical body and depletes the mental and emotional resources of the self. Suicides do not reflect a deterioration in formal or material conditions of work, but rather a transformation in forms of constraint, as the individual worker internalises modes of discipline and becomes his or her own boss. Suicides affected workers who experienced a phase of chronic overwork in which the quest to achieve productivity targets pushed them to work continuously and obsessively.
The Growth of Copperplate Script
Authors: Barker Nicolas
Published: May 2021

The formation and development of the ‘copperplate’ script was one of the distinctive features of the growth of the British mercantile empire in the eighteenth century. Joseph Champion, whose script typified it, popularised in his engraved writing manuals, and reached its apex in The Universal Penman, a large folio of different scripts and forms used in commercial documents. Through it, ‘copperplate’ spread throughout Britain and its dependencies, and from them to other countries in Europe and North America.
Performance and Print Culture
Authors: Jarvis Joanna
Published: May 2021

The middle of the eighteenth century saw a growing interest in the private lives of public figures and a particular style of press reporting began to shine a spotlight on women who displayed a level of autonomy in their lives. This chapter examines how two actresses attempted to counter some of the negative attention that this created. The newspapers began to highlight perceived social transgressions and new publications appeared based almost entirely on gossip. The power of an image was added to this through the popularity of satirical prints and the ability to publish these began to be exploited by some of the new magazines. Each of the two actresses examined attempted to take control of the creation of their public persona, with varying degrees of success.
Script, Print and the Public–Private Divide
Authors: Wilkinson Callie
Published: May 2021

David Ochterlony is a familiar figure to historians of the East India Company, but the focus has been on the man at his peak rather than the shadow hanging over his death, the result of a posthumous information leak. This forgotten incident is re-examined for what it reveals about how information moved across media in colonial India. This chapter pieces together this brief yet explosive affair, using the documentary record produced by the Company’s investigation, in combination with newspapers, pamphlets and letters. The first section lays out the relevant details of Ochterlony’s time in Bharatpur and the controversy he provoked, then it reconstructs the governor-general-in-council’s investigation of the leaked documents. The second section reflects on what the investigation’s findings imply about the circulation of information in colonial India and the dynamics of concealment and revelation at work there. The incident is used as a jumping-off point for reassessing the relationship between manuscript and print, public and private correspondence, and personal and professional commitments in the early nineteenth century.
Tourist Experience and the Manufacturing Town
Authors: Dixon Jenni
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the Magnificent Directory produced by James Bisset in 1800 in relation to industrial tourism in Birmingham. Directories were used throughout the eighteenth century to promote manufacturers, but Bisset’s Directory differed in its inclusion of poetry and expensive copperplate prints outlining Birmingham’s genuine manufactories but also an imagined town. This town was inhabited and viewed through the eyes of Classical gods both in the prints and the poetry. The chapter considers how Bisset’s Directory guided tourist experience by framing the town through a lens of wonder and thus highlighting and heightening the curiosity of visitors. It also assesses in what ways the poetic and visual content, as well as Bisset’s use of fine printing and skilled artisans, were employed to alter perceptions of Birmingham.
The Serif-Less Letters of John Soane
Authors: Melton Jon
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the evidence for the architect John Soane as an early pioneer of serif-less lettering in Britain and the progenitor of the sans serif typefaces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It considers the events that led to Soane’s application of serif-less typography and the reasons he became the principal executor of this radical departure from the roman letter. It also proffers suggestions for why Soane promoted this primitivist letter as desirable for inscriptions on buildings as well as for plans, and elevation and perspective drawings in the neoclassical style. The chapter traces Soane’s early career use of sans serif titling on drawings and importantly documents the earliest known extant sans serif inscriptions still in situ on his architecture.
The ‘Souverainement Orphelin’ of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Early Writings
Authors: Stafford Andy
Published: May 2021

One of Morocco’s most important sociologists, and certainly one of the first following Independence, Abdelkébir Khatibi occupied an unusual place in the new, developing discipline of post-colonial sociology. Both a poet and a novelist, Khatibi was also interested in history, philosophy and cultural theory; and this wide-ranging set of interests served him well when, barely thirty, he became editor of the Bulletin économique et social du Maroc. Here began a literary as well as sociological adventure which, little known in his œuvre, took Khatibi from Marx and Gurvitch to Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann. As well as leading research into sociological topics in Morocco and North Africa such as women’s sexuality, young people’s opinions or radical theories of social explanation, Khatibi began a study of the Moroccan class system in a synthetic analysis stretching back to earliest makhzen periods, using Ibn Khaldun, Marx and Durkheim to account for the açabiyya tradition of male lineage in tribal rulers. It is in this context that Khatibi wrote his Tattooed Memory in 1971, his sociology of the post-colonial self.
Tireless Translation
Authors: Rice Alison
Published: May 2021

In Féerie d’un mutant, Abdelkébir Khatibi creates a dialogue in which one of the interlocutors declares that he is an “étranger professionnel,” a recurring expression in the Moroccan writer’s work that isn’t easily translated from French into English because of the multiple meanings of the first word: “étranger” is most often rendered as either foreigner or stranger, though these terms carry decidedly different connotations for Anglophone readers. This very resistance to translation may be what inspires the individual in the aforementioned textual exchange to specify that this self-description does not refer to a profession, but instead constitutes “a mobile position in the world” that entails “crossing borders: between languages, civilizations, markets.” (Féérie d’un mutant 2005, 38-39). This way of approaching the planet brings the “étranger professionnel” to embrace a stance that stands out in stark contrast to nationalist and xenophobic sentiments: “A foreigner, I must attach myself to all that is foreign on this earth.” (Amour bilingue 1983, 11). The ever-moving, ever-adjusting position that Khatibi extolls has consequences on multiple levels, affecting the body and the relationships of the “étranger professionnel,” but the effects are perhaps most evident on the use of language, which is never taken for granted or considered to be a “given”: “Language belongs to no one […] Hadn’t I grown up, in my mother tongue, as if I were an adopted child? From one adoption to another, I believed I was being born to my own language.” (Amour bilingue 1983, 11). The constant rebirth into language that characterizes Khatibi’s written work involves tireless translation in texts that depict travel as synonymous with self-creation and linguistic innovation that benefit from transnational perspectives that render all things foreign, in complicated but fruitful ways.
Power, Patronage and the Production of Catholic Material Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Authors: McGee Caroline M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Catholic religious authority in the context of the production and consumption of ecclesiastical architecture and art. It moves beyond consideration of this material culture from nation-state or formalist art-historical perspectives to explore the levels of human autonomy and agency that came to bear on building and decorating projects at the turn of the nineteenth century. Using a case study model, it analyses the multiple forms of authority inscribed in Catholic Church buildings whose aesthetic shifted from the modest to the sublime during the period. In so doing, it demonstrates the impact of religious power on architects, transnational commercial art industry businesses, and lay donors, and produces a more nuanced cross-disciplinary picture of the multiple cultural meanings, tangible and intangible, of nineteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture and the people behind its production.
Michael McCarthy’s Campaigns against Clerical Authority
Authors: Maume Patrick
Published: May 2021

The career and writings of the Unionist polemicist and Catholic convert to Protestantism Michael McCarthy (1862-1928) are surveyed in the context of the conflict between declining Irish Protestant elite-professional social networks and their burgeoning Catholic “Whig” and nationalist rivals. McCarthy is seen as combining often-insightful sociological analysis of his native East Cork (his father was a farmer and shopkeeper in Midleton) and of his family’s experience of the 1880s Land War, with paranoid depictions of clerical rapacity drawing on established anti-Catholic tropes and on early twentieth-century fears among British and Irish Protestant populists that a decadent aristocratic ruling class was coquetting with superstition, undermining national efficiency and re-establishing clerical tyranny. McCarthy’s only novel, Gallowglass, is analysed as an exercise in sociology, an analysis of the tensions between Catholic clerics and lay nationalist elites during the 1880s Land War, and a parodic response to the apologetic Catholic stories of the East Cork priest, Canon Patrick Sheehan (1852-1913).
In the Footsteps of Flora Tristan
Authors: Cross Máire Fedelma
Published: May 2021

Through the use of the tropes of intersectionality and transnationalism, this first-ever study of Jules Puech (1879–1957), is a double biography as it makes an intergenerational journey through his life’s work on Flora Tristan (1803–1844), feminist and socialist. Materials from the mid-nineteenth century press found from digitised searches extends knowledge of the advance of Flora Tristan’s political reputation. Its transmission beyond her notoriety as a radical during her lifetime was conveyed by both political activists and scholars. A key feature of the success of Puech is that he considered knowledge of her legacy as a significant ingredient of the nascent labour history of France of which he was part. My work claims that his biography was a major contribution to scholarship. It began when, as a postgraduate student in Paris in the 1900s, he completed his first doctoral thesis on Proudhonian influence on the first internationalist labour movements in France. My book explains the circumstances of how he embarked on the first in-depth biography of Flora Tristan and published it sixteen years later in 1925. By then Puech was unmatched in his knowledge of networks of activists who sustained the memory of early socialists, among them Flora Tristan. An independent scholar with a full-time job he was equally committed elsewhere. He and his suffragist feminist wife Marie-Louise, née Milhau, (1876–1966), also from a Protestant family of the Tarn, worked tirelessly for the pacifist movement, La Paix par le Droit. How his Flora Tristan study was thwarted by the wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 is equally significant. In 1939, he handed both the original Flora Tristan journal and the typed manuscript of his edited Flora Tristan journal Tour de France to the newly established International Institute of Social History in Paris on the understanding that it would publish his work but was powerless to prevent their war-time disappearance. Their eventual recovery in Amsterdam came after his death, too late for him to see the fruition of his cherished project but available for trade-unionist Michel Collinet to publish his annotated edition in 1973, 130 years after Flora Tristan had begun to record her political campaign for a workers’ universal union. The double biography reveals both the multifaceted nature of feminism, socialism and pacifism in activism and the shaping of labour history as an academic subject in France of the first half of the twentieth century.
The Long Wait
Authors: Cross Máire Fedelma
Published: May 2021

Chapter 6 explains how the 1925 biography was well received but that Puech was personally and professionally affected by the impact of further international conflict and the defeat of France in 1940. Through Flora Tristan however, he became embroiled in the further growth of international networks and their endangered existence with the rise of fascism. Puech’s correspondence reveals his opposition to the armistice negotiated by Pétain. Although he was confined to his home in Borieblanque during the Occupation and after the Liberation, the intersectionality of feminism, socialism and pacifism of his life had moved on to a transnational plane.
Marvels of Medicine
Authors: Marín Yarí Pérez
Published: May 2021

Marvels of Medicine makes a compelling case for including sixteenth century medical and surgical writing in the critical frameworks we now use to think about a genealogy of cultural expression in Latin America. Focusing on a small group of practitioners who differed in their levels of training, but who shared the common experience of having left Spain to join colonial societies in the making, this book analyses the paths their texts charted to attitudes and political positions that would come to characterize a criollo mode of enunciation. Unlike the accounts of first explorers, which sought to amaze audiences back in Europe with descriptions of strange and astonishing lands, these texts instead engaged the marvellous in an effort to supersede it, stressing the value of sensorial experience and of verifying information through repetition and demonstration. Vernacular medical writing became an unlikely early platform for a new form of regionally anchored discourse that demanded participation in a global intellectual conversation yet found itself increasingly relegated to the margins. In responding to that challenge, anatomical treatises, natural histories and surgical manuals exceeded the bounds set by earlier templates becoming rich, hybrid narratives that were as concerned with science as with portraying the lives and sensibilities of women and men in early colonial Mexico.
Irreconcilable differences?
Authors: Marín Yarí Pérez
Published: May 2021

Chapter 2 outlines the limits of a normative notion of the body in colonial medical discourse during the last third of the sixteenth century. It centres on a close reading of texts by Alonso López de Hinojosos and Juan de Cárdenas, comparing their ideas with discussions then unfolding in Europe about the purported radical difference between the physiology of Spaniards and those belonging to other ‘nations’ [naciones]. The chapter argues that American medical texts (sometimes unwittingly) became satellite testing grounds for emerging European ideas, not just on social cohesion, but also on racial difference. The juxtaposition of Old World ideas about corporeality with New World medical observations were both metaphorical and literal, given the reliance on Nahua bodies as sources of information to develop modes of care designed primarily to meet the needs of non-Indigenous patients. Despite many shared points of view, the comparison of Hinojosos against Cárdenas reveals a colonial paradox, with anatomy finding accumulating evidence of a repeating body template largely unaffected by a subject’s ethnicity, and physiology advancing instead models that understood racialised bodies as performing differently in arenas like nourishment needs or resistance to disease.
Contested medical knowledge and regional self-fashioning
Authors: Marín Yarí Pérez
Published: May 2021

Chapter 4 analyses Juan de Cárdenas’s Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias in the context of the negative critiques it offered of two contemporaries who had written about New World medicine without leaving Spain: Nicolás Monardes and Oliva Sabuco. Cárdenas found fault with both Monardes's Historia medicinal (1565) and Sabuco's Nveva filosofia de la naturaleza del hombre (1587) identifying flaws in the cause-and-effect reasoning espoused by each source and providing examples that arrived at different results. But Cárdenas’s medical challenge, articulated on scientific principle, belied a growing unease about the marginal status conferred to locally published scholarly efforts in the larger global stage of scientific enquiry; Monardes was keenly interested in New World bezoars especially whereas Sabuco’s ideas on digestion rested on her observations of the quick effects of ingesting coca leaves from Peru. By adopting an oppositional model of refutation that anchored itself on a geographically and culturally determined group identity, Cárdenas’s writing began mounting a challenge to the unequal distribution of epistemological authority in transatlantic colonial hierarchies.
The Alvarez Generation
Authors: Wootten William
Published: May 2021

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.
A Brief History of Ba’Alei Shem
Authors: Oron Michal
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on ba'alei shem, the primary representatives of Jewish magic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It considers the ba'alei shem as the wonder-workers who employed the names of God or his angels through certain techniques, for various theurgic purposes. It also cites rabbinic literature that teaches of the existence and spread of the phenomenon among the sages in the Land of Israel and Babylonia despite biblical opposition to magic or sorcery and their practitioners. The chapter looks at the mystical heikhalot literature, which includes magical texts and descriptions of the qualities and aptitudes of the mystical elect that resemble and later characterize the ba'alei shem. It describes the mystics that possess knowledge of incantations and divine names that enable them to undergo mystical experiences and be in contact with the supernal spheres.
Samuel Falk as Seen by Jacob Emden
Authors: Oron Michal
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the 1760s, wherein Samuel Falk was besmirched, cursed, and persecuted by Jacob Emden while frequently celebrated by various members of Christian society. It reviews extant testimonies that portray Falk as a controversial figure, such as being a fraud, a swindler, and a complete ignoramus, while others thought he was a teacher, guide, and spiritual leader for several prominent Freemasons. It also discusses Jacob Emden's campaign against Jonathan Eybeschuetz and his son Wolf and his crusade against Sabbatianism, which he regarded as a plague that had come to corrupt and destroy Judaism. The chapter highlights Emden's attack on Falk that links him with Moses David of Podhajce and with Jonathan Eybeschuetz. It analyses Emden's book that is full of his hatred of Falk, whom he derisively calls a ba'al shed, which meant possessed by a demon, instead of the term ba'al shem.
The Diary of Zevi Hirsch of Kalisz
Authors: Oron Michal
Published: May 2021

|fo. 1a| London, Tuesday, 23 Elul 5507 [18 August 1747]. *He had intended to practise [his mystical devotions] but instead he went in the coach with *R. Mordecai Franzmann to *the house in Pas, *and he took books from there with him, that is, the best ones, also pictures, and also the staff that was with him, ...
Poetry and Politics in the Caliphate of Cordoba 950–1150
Authors: Gerber Jane S.
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses the distinctive Jewish civilization that emerged in Spain, which was then shaped by the unique coexistence of Jews, Christians, and Muslims on European soil. The Jews of Spain remained a distinctive, subordinate, and vulnerable people under the hegemonies of Christendom and Islam, drawing freely from the cultural vitality of both civilizations while also frequently suffering as the victim of both. It also discusses how the Jews of Spain produced an extraordinary outpouring of Hebrew poetry, engaged in philosophical and scientific enquiry, and crafted a civilization that combined elements of Judaeo-Arabic and Romance cultures on the Iberian peninsula. The chapter highlights the era of the caliphate of Cordoba (929–1031), which is closely associated with the beginnings of revolutionary experimentation in new forms of Jewish self-expression and new fields of intellectual enquiry. It illustrates the daring innovations in the manipulation of the Hebrew language during the brief blossoming of the caliphate of Cordoba and the contraction of Muslim rule.
The Jews of Venice: Between Toleration and Expulsion 1516–1648
Authors: Gerber Jane S.
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the legal arrangements and designations of Jews on the right to live in Venice. It argues that their right of residence would require periodic renewal of specific charters and limited duration. Dwelling in Venice on 'sufferance and not as of right' and in a legal arrangement that required periodic renewal, the Jews in Venice were suspended between acceptance and rejection. The chapter highlights the tension between religiously motivated antagonism and economically motivated toleration which frequently made Jewish life unpredictable. As a result of this unique physical and legal arrangement, Jewish Venice emerged as the site of a highly organized Jewish communal structure that boasted an extremely rich culture. The chapter presents the life of Sephardi migrants, who were recently expelled or forcibly converted on the Iberian peninsula, and how they found refuge and renewal behind its walls. It assesses the roles played by the ghetto of Venice in shaping Sephardi history, despite its inconvenient location and fetid alleyways.
Ravad of Posquières: A Programmatic Essay
Authors: Soloveitchik Haym
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on Ravad of Posquières, 'the greatest of Maimonidean critics'. Ravad's Hassagot were a sparsely disseminated work. Throughout the medieval period, when Ravad's influence was both massive and decisive, his glosses on the Mishneh Torah were little known and of less influence. It was Ravad's commentaries that first broke free from the geonic moorings, and it was these exegetical works that heralded the intellectual independence of Europe. His work was less definitive than Rashi's and far less comprehensive, but more original. It was his almost unparalleled capacity to confront talmudic texts unaided, to wrest their meaning single-handedly, that allowed Ravad to penetrate into those areas where no commentarial tradition was available — halakhic midrashim, tractates Kinnim, and 'Eduyot — and to range far and wide over the Yerushalmi and the Tosefta.
The Dangerous Dead
Authors: Weissman Susan
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses the fear of the dead in Ashkenazi society as depicted in Sefer ḥasidim and other, non-Pietist, sources. In the Talmud, the holy dead appear bodily to the living. In Sefer ḥasidim, by contrast, the holy dead make no appearance at all. The tremendous disparity between the Talmud and Pietist accounts in terms of the emotional response elicited by the returning dead can be understood only in the light of the latter's reflection of a firmly rooted and strongly held belief in pre-Christian notions of the dangerous dead. Sefer ḥasidim and other Pietist sources reveal evidence of German Jewish belief in the violence, vengeance, and summoning power of the dead. These sources prescribe methods of protection against harm from ghosts, exhumation of bodies in order to stop the spread of disease, and various apotropaic funeral practices which parallel other, similar methods and practices extant in the Germano-Christian environment.
Status in the Hereafter
Authors: Weissman Susan
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses R. Judah the Pious's selection of ghost tales that pertain to the individual's status in the afterlife. It contrasts elements of his tales with rabbinic notions of the afterlife and compares them with those found in tales that circulated in the Germano-Christian environment. In both language and content, the Pietist tales of Sefer ḥasidim that describe the state of the individual in the hereafter contain elements that parallel those found in the early medieval visionary literature, as well as in the high medieval exempla collections. Popular motifs, such as vivid descriptions of corporeal torture by demonic agents, figure prominently in both Sefer ḥasidim and contemporary literary sources and artistic representations. Other shared characteristics include the principle of talio and the disproportion between sin and punishment. The problem of corporeality — already apparent in the areas of the dangerous dead and the attire of the dead — surfaces yet again both in Sefer ḥasidim and in the Christian exempla collections.
Bonds Between the Living and the Dead Part I
Authors: Weissman Susan
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on R. Judah the Pious's position regarding prayer and alms for the dead and evaluates it against the geonic stance he inherited, contemporary Jewish sentiment and practice, and various streams of Christian positions. In keeping with medieval thinking, R. Judah tightens the bonds between the living and the dead. The living, he believes, owe a great debt to the dead, who continuously pray on their behalf. In rabbinic thought, although the ordinary dead can be petitioned to pray for the living, it is commonly the holy dead — specifically the patriarchs and matriarchs — who pray on behalf of the nation of Israel, and the living are not obligated, nor do they choose, to reciprocate in prayer on behalf of the dead. In Sefer ḥasidim, however, the average dead assemble annually to pray on behalf of the living, and the living, in turn, are obligated to pray on their behalf.
Bonds Between the Living and the Dead Part II
Authors: Weissman Susan
Published: May 2021

This chapter studies R. Judah the Pious's theories of sin and accountability in Divine judgement relative to contemporary Jewish views, and explores his conception of God as depicted in Sefer ḥasidim. In opposition to the new religious mood, R. Judah sees justice, not mercy, as the dominant Divine attribute in posthumous judgement. With the individual to stand on trial alone and with the odds more against him than in his favour, R. Judah's view of God's judgement departs sharply from midrashic and contemporary liturgical and artistic images. While Ashkenazi commentators on piyut and illuminators of maḥzorim depict a compassionate God who throws away one's sins or tilts the scales of judgement in one's favour, R. Judah paints an austere portrait of humankind overwhelmed by the gravity and inescapability of sin in front of an unforgiving and unswayable deity. His rejection of all models of patronage, both Jewish and Christian, his refusal to allow merit to cancel out sin — a view which he holds in opposition to other Jewish thinkers of his day — and his vision of posthumous judgement as absolute justice untempered by mercy serve to isolate him from members of his own Pietist circle and render his notions of accountability for sin exceptional in Jewish tradition.
Rape Consciousness
Authors: Field Robin E.
Published: May 2021

The new understanding of the victim’s psyche in rape fiction is derived from the literature of the anti-rape movement and autobiographical accounts of sexual assault. The rhetoric of this 1970s social movement, particularly the persuasive language of polemical nonfiction and the first-person narration in testimonies and autobiographies, inspired rape fiction. The use of sociopolitical theories and newly discovered facts about sexual assault informed the themes and plots of the first rape novels, and autobiographies and testimonies provided a bridge between the galvanizing rhetoric of social activism and subsequent fiction. The diverse texts that contributed to the emergence of the rape novel—from the transcripts of the consciousness-raising sessions of radical feminists to the memoirs of Maya Angelou and Billie Holiday—highlight the primacy of social movements to this new genre.
“The Victim Demands Narrative”
Authors: Field Robin E.
Published: May 2021

The central prerogative of rape fiction of the 1980s is to underscore the legitimacy of the traumatic experience by providing in-depth accounts of the assault and its physical and psychological repercussions. The 1980s rape novels contain harrowing rape scenes that use their detail to emphasize the fact that rape engenders deep psychological consequences. Far from glamorizing sexual violence, these novels present an alternative narrative focus that educates the uninformed reader and provides affirmation to those survivors seeking an empathetic community. That these texts bridge ethnic literary traditions testifies to the vital importance of rape fiction as a genre: to create a literary memorial to all victims of sexual assault.
Tracing Trauma in Rape Fiction of the Long 1990s
Authors: Field Robin E.
Published: May 2021

The 1990s rape novels depict contested stories of sexual assault by employing the rhetorical techniques of postmodernism and writing about trauma to eschew the linear narration of realism that imposes certain textual interpretations. The portrayal of rape and incest in these novels echoes the pattern of trauma experienced by their characters in their complicated narration and, often, lack of tidy resolution. This model of rape fiction offers a compelling explanation to readers for the varying portrayals of rape and sexual violence seen in contemporary society, countering those who dismiss charges of sexual abuse as exaggerated or untrue.
Editor’s Introduction
Authors: Marcus Jane
Published: May 2021

This chapter charts the editor’s journey in re-organizing, editing, and seeing through to publication a posthumous unfinished manuscript by her mentor, Jane Marcus. The chapter highlights the book’s significance to feminist scholarship, Modernism, post-colonial and critical race theory, and to historians of race, gender, class, fascism, war, and peace. The book’s response to issues of reputation and representation are considered, here, while making connections to the uses of feminist anger in current debates and strategies in activism against racism and sexual assault.
The Rites of Spring
Authors: Marcus Jane
Published: May 2021

The chapter explores primitivism, African creation myths, and an analysis of Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring and Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster in the context of Cunard’s poetic aesthetic. Marcus also contrasts Edith Sitwell’s anti-war Wheels anthology and Cunard’s engagement with African cultures and artifacts with Eliot’s primitivism. Additionally, the chapter investigates the visual primitivism of World War I and representations of the slaughter by William Roberts and Wyndham Lewis.
The Lady Composer at the End
Authors: Brister Wanda , Rosenblatt Jay
Published: May 2021

The letters sent to American composer and pianist Eugene Hemmer allow Dring to speak in her own voice for the first time since the early diaries, documents that allow a glimpse into her musical as well as her personal life. There is a brief discussion of The Florida International Music Festival, which featured the US premiere of her most popular instrumental composition, the Trio for Flute, Oboe, and Piano, a work which provides a splendid example of her later musical style. Other works that are discussed include The Real Princess, a ballet written for Mari Bicknell’s Cambridge Ballet Workshop, and four song cycles: Dedications, Love and Time, Five Betjeman Songs, and Four Night Songs. Also documented are the first professional recordings of her compositions and the spiritual journey she undertook in her last years, the latter illustrated by talks that she gave at the Centre for Spiritual and Psychological Studies. Finally, her sudden death from a brain aneurysm is related through letters of Roger Lord and other documents, followed by her memorial service and concerts in her honor at the RCM.
Coda The Lady Composer in Print
Authors: Brister Wanda , Rosenblatt Jay
Published: May 2021

“Madeleine has real gifts, and is modest about them.”

—Percy Buck, Teacher’s Annual Report, November 30, 1939

Madeleine Dring left behind many unpublished works. As the pain of her sudden passing lessened, her husband Roger Lord began to sift through these manuscripts to decide on pieces suitable for publication. A superb musician with some training in composition (he, too, studied with Herbert Howells, if only briefly), he knew well the worth of his wife’s music and set about enhancing her posthumous reputation. In this he was aided by Lance Bowling and his company, Cambria Music, which was now issuing printed music as well as recordings (see Table B.1). The first compositions published were ...
Woolf and Criticism in the Time of Post-Critique
Authors: Wallace Jeff
Published: May 2021

Beginning with an apologetically periphrastic account of Virginia Woolf’s 1932 essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, this essay identifies paraphrase as a key tool within a guiding principle of ‘accompaniment’ through which Woolf, in The Common Reader, sought to inculcate a love of the reading of literature. Other recurrent tropes in Woolf’s essays concern the ‘fabric’ of texts, and of the concept of literature in general, and of the principle of construction of building rather than dismantling agreement and consensus, even to the extent of ‘submitting’ to author/text and to their authority. It is argued that the prefix ‘com’ grounds a theory of the democratic and peaceable commonality of reading practice in Woolf, and that this theory anticipates aspects of a post-critical turn in twenty-first century literary criticism, analogous to Latour’s ‘compositionism’ (2010) and located in the work of critics such Felski, Attridge, Love, and Best and Marcus on ‘surface reading’. Nevertheless, by way of Robbins’s (2017) commentary on this critical tendency, it is concluded that Woolf’s insistence upon the necessity of severe critical judgement, and hence of critique and critical distance, is itself not incompatible with a reading practice oriented towards peace and the love of reading.
Breaking the Peace
Authors: McCracken Saskia
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Woolf’s feminist, pacifist, and anti-fascist engagement with Darwin’s work on dictators through the trope of the worm, suggesting how we might we read both Woolf and Darwin through the lens of animal studies. McCracken reads Woolf’s ‘creature Dictator’ and related worm imagery back through Charles Darwin’s writings both on worms and on nineteenth-century Argentinian Dictator General Juan Manuel de Rosas, whom he met during his voyage on the HMS Beagle. According to Darwin, Rosas led a ‘war of extermination’ against indigenous peoples, yet ‘disapproved of peace having been broken’. This chapter argues that Woolf re-appropriates the Social Darwinist rhetoric of the 1930s, and twists animal imagery to feminist advantage.  The chapter also analyses Woolf’s silkworm and related mulberry tree imagery in Three Guineas through Darwin’s interest in breeding silkworms. Placing this imagery in the context of 1930s social Darwinist silk production discourse under the Third Reich, McCracken, argues that, contrary to critics who read her silkworm as symbolic of female creativity, Woolf’s writing intimately connects Darwinian silkworm breeding imagery and fascist politics.
Introduction
Authors: Cuny Noëlle , Kalck Xavier
Published: May 2021

In his prescient 1973 film-essay1 about art forgery, fakery, and the value of authorship, Orson Welles recites the following lines from Rudyard Kipling’s ballad, first published in 1890, so aptly entitled “The Conundrum of the Workshops”:

When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden’s green and gold,...
A list of Sphingidae (Lepidoptera) of Azerbaijan
Authors: Snegovaya Nataly Yu. , Petrov Valeri A.
Published: May 2021

A list of 31 species of hawk moths from the territory of Azerbaijan is given, based on collection materials from the Institute of Zoology of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (Baku) and the Georgian National Museum (Tbilisi). Distribution maps for 27 species are provided.