bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Romance, the Robinsonade, and the Cultivation of Adolescent Female Desire in Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens
Authors: Hicks Amy
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens, a satirical riposte to the Robinsonade genre, draws on the broad tradition of codifying the desert island as a space for romantic interludes and posits the island as a distinctly experimental site for girls to navigate gendered behaviours, in order that they might question conservative social mores concerning female sexuality. It also argues for a critical perspective that reclaims women’s connection to nature by reconsidering the cultural construction of “woman” as one that is potentially transgressive within the narrative, and it schools young readers in finding pleasure in their own bodily, sexual desires.
Introduction
Authors: Morgan Glyn , Palmer-Patel C.
Published: May 2020

The introduction provides a summary of the genre’s literary history from its earliest roots to the contemporary novel, presenting important examples of alternate history literature from nineteenth century French novels to early-twentieth century essays and more recent examples of science fiction short stories, novels, television and films. It provides definitions and distinctions for key terminology such as ‘nexus point’, ‘counterfactualism’, ‘secret history’ and ‘alternate future’, as well as an overview of important existing research, and explores the relationship between alternate history texts and their source historical narratives. After setting out the aims and aspirations of this collection of essays, the introduction concludes with a precis of the essays in the rest of the collection, underlining connections between them.
Napoleon as Dynamite
Authors: Roberts Adam
Published: May 2020

This chapters reads Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy Napoléon Apocryphe (often described as the first ‘alternate history’ novel), contextualizing it in terms of nineteenth-century theories of history and comparing it on those terms to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Where Tolstoy forcefully repudiates the “great man” theory of history; Geoffroy in particular and—I argue—alt-history as a mode in general necessarily style history as fundamentally fragile. In War and Peace even so important a figure as Napoleon is powerful in the face of the inertia of collective historical force, where in Geoffroy’s novel it is history that is weak as the ‘great man’ conquers Russia, defeats America, occupies the whole globe and reshapes a Napoleonic utopia. The chapter explores the extent to which alternate history is Geoffroyan in this sense: agenre that can only think of history as a succession of ‘great’ (that is, significant) individuals, of moments around which everything might hinge. The comparison will lead into discussion of several key althistorical texts, including Murray Leinster’s ‘Sideways in Time’ (1934), Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee (1953), and Felix Gilman's Half-Made World (2010).
Forever Being Yamato
Authors: Rayner Jonathan
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the rewriting of the Pacific War in Japanese films and animation. Films such as Men of the Yamato (2005) and Admiral Yamamoto (2011) evince an uneasy balance between lamentation for the destruction of the Pacific War, evasion of Japanese responsibility for the conflict, and celebration of self-sacrifice in the creation of Japan’s future peace and prosperity. The vexed status of Japan’s history renders the past a contestable and re-interpretable space. Where putatively historical films proffer problematic depictions of the conflict, Japanese science fiction films (like Space Battleship Yamato) and animated series such as Zipang engage in active re-writings of history to posit alternative visions of the Pacific War. In contrast to the equivocation of mainstream cinema, these texts contain controversial re-imaginings of the country’s past, reflecting continuing controversies in the interpretations of Japan’s war.
Time and Affect After 9/11
Authors: McFarlane Anna
Published: May 2020

Lavie Tidhar’s Osama (2011) cannot be categorised unproblematically as an alternate history novel, it does however use alternate history as a discourse to explore the status of history and alternate history in the aftermath of 9/11 and the other terrorist attacks referenced throughout the novel. Osama shows that historiography itself has changed in the aftermath of 9/11 and now demands that the emotional impact of historical events be taken into account by historians, a demand that I argue is recognised by the rise of affect theory in academia. Through the trauma of the main protagonist alternate history and history itself become narrative practices undermined by Tidhar’s refusal to anchor the action of his plots to specific dates and names. The time of trauma is non-linear and affective, and this chapter asks how political action or narrative sense can be made possible in such a milieu.
Weird History / Weird Knowledge
Authors: Buckley Chloé Germaine
Published: May 2020

The 2003 horror short story collection, Shadows over Baker Street partakes of the Weird tradition of revising the history of human civilisation whilst also producing a secret history of the fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. The stories pit Conan Doyle’s master of rational enquiry against Lovecraft’s terrifying monsters. The contest is unsettling. Typically, detective fiction shores up faith in rational enquiry, whilst the Weird disrupts enlightenment narratives, suggesting that everything we know about the world is wrong. Shadows over Baker Street encourages the reader to surrender disbelief entirely in the face of the ‘ineluctability of the Weird.’ This surrender manifests a postmillennial structure of feeling towards epistemological uncertainty. Shadows over Baker Street is an example of how the Weird challenges rational, inductive reasoning and epistemological certainty, ushering in an era of belief - in the unbelievable.
Quest for Love
Authors: Butler Andrew M.
Published: May 2020

The catastrophe science fiction of John Wyndham was once dismissed as being cosy. “Random Quest”, one of several works that David Ketterer labelled “time schism love stories”, is an alternate history. But is this story (and its British film adaption, Quest For Love (1971)) also cosy? Just as his catastrophic narratives invoke the blind forces of evolution that resist anthropocentric visions of the world, so here the blind forces of physics and chance resist the inevitability of true love. A potential intertext, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809), features a heroine Ottiline who shares her name with the heroine of “Random Quest” and offers a pseudoscientific model for predestined love that bears fruit in the film’s assumption of a cosy ending.
Afterword
Authors: Palmer-Patel C. , Morgan Glyn
Published: May 2020

The afterword sums up the conclusions made by the chapters in the collection. All the chapters demonstrate that – although there is a wide variety of alternate history narratives produced – these texts all reflect on and reveal the nature of our current reality. A common theme throughout the collection is ‘Great Man’ model, where a sole figure is held responsible for big historical events. Another thread for discussion is the structure of form of alternate history, as the book explored science fiction and epic narratives alongside the development of alternate history. Issues of time within the structure of narrative were explored, as the collection considered breaks and continuities within alternate history. Many of these discussions emphasized the way that the cultural critique of minority voices are embedded in the narrative structure itself. Issues of power and dogma are often integral to these evaluations. Ultimately the collection concludes that there are a lot of questions that alternate history provokes, and while this collection cannot perhaps provide definite answers, it presents new ways to think about the genre in the hopes of stimulating further conversations.
The Secret Textual History of Pamela, Methodist
Authors: Winckles Andrew O.
Published: May 2020

Chapter Three explores how the manuscript practices of early Methodism, and particularly the writing and circulation of familiar and spiritual letters can be mapped onto the discourse culture that brought about the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and the media storm it engendered. In particular, it focuses on a collection of letters that were sent to Charles Wesley by female converts during the early years of the revival. Analysis of the form, content, and circulation of these types of spiritual letters helps make clear some of the links between the discourse of evangelicalism and the discourse of the early novel, most notably in the shared textual histories and similar protocols of mediation that define early works in each field.
Evangelicalism, Mediation, and Social Change
Authors: Winckles Andrew O.
Published: May 2020

This chapter briefly synthesizes the findings of the volume, considering how evangelical media affected British life and letters more broadly during the long eighteenth century. While evangelicalism itself was, and continues to be, a contested category—reading evangelicalism primarily as part of the history of mediation allows us for a better understanding of the enduring power and influence of the movement. It also troubles narratives of secularization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and better explains the continuing influence of evangelical religion and evangelical media practices today. This chapter reveals that, once a discursive space has been opened up and the outsiders invited in, it can be very difficult to comprehensively close it again.
Universalisms and Francophonies
Authors: Lionnet Françoise
Published: May 2020

Françoise Lionnet’s essay provides a compelling critique of the much-discussed 2007 manifesto Pour une littérature-monde en français. In pointing out the manifesto’s ambiguities and contradictions, Lionnet argues for use of the term ‘francophonies’ in the place of ‘Littérature-monde.’ The latter, Lionnet contends, is far too assimilationist in its vision. In contrast, ‘francophonies’ aims for the ideal of universality and, at the same time, creates space for a broad spectrum of literary expression in French, with many localized specificities in a global context.
Death Drives
Authors: Freud  , Proust
Published: May 2020

Peter Brooks’s essay is on the Great War and its effect on Freud and Proust, in particular on their interpretations of sadism. Brooks argues that after the First World War, both Freud and Proust came to view sadism as independent of pleasure. Brooks contends that sadism is a crucial notion, one that forced writers in the post-World War I era to grapple with the destructive potential of humanity.
Mallarmé Médiéval
Authors: Bloch R. Howard
Published: May 2020

R. Howard Bloch’s text explores Mallarmé’s linguistic links to antiquity and the medieval era. With a close reading of ‘Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard’—Mallarmé’s epic final, and perhaps most famous, poem—Bloch attends to the publication history of the text, its typographic layout, and its medieval philological underpinnings.
Rousseau’s Late Botany Living to the End
Authors: Saint-Amand Pierre
Published: May 2020

Pierre Saint-Amand’s essay is a treatment of Rousseau’s fascination with botany. Saint-Amand argues that Rousseau occupies a distinct and eccentric space in the history of French botany, given the philosopher’s subjective and deliberately unscientific take on the practice. Saint-Amand explores how that minor natural science grew to be an important preoccupation late in life for Rousseau, even though the philosopher’s activity could be best described as ‘lazy botany.’
The Book, Inside and Out
Authors: Motte Warren
Published: May 2020

Warren Motte’s treatment of the work of Edmond Jabès argues that Jabès’s work is animated by a meditation on the idea of the book. Motte contends that despite that sustained reflection, the status of the book in Jabès’s writing remains ambiguous. Indeed, his analysis shows that Jabès always defers a coherent, functional definition of the book. Motte underscores how that process of deferral—paired with the constant iterative process of crafting new interrelated books—has resulted in a powerful œuvre that gives the reader the sense of an ideal book, but one that never quite exists materially.
Internal Senses and the History of the Western Subject
Authors: Vigarello Georges
Published: May 2020

Georges Vigarello’s essay is a history of the senses in the Western subject. Vigarello’s essay traces that history from antiquity, through important milestones in the medieval and early modern periods (with particular emphasis on Diderot), and then finally to its crescendo in the nineteenth century. Vigarello argues that it is through the historiography of the senses that we can gain a better understanding of the rise of modernity.
The Author’s Afterlife
Authors: Noudelmann François
Published: May 2020

François Noudelmann’s essay explores the notion of a ‘posthumous truth.’ This concept refers to how discourses on an author can be shaped by supposed ‘revelations’ after his or her death. Noudelmann interrogates whether these alleged ‘truths’ may be considered as such, and to what degree they remain open to interpretation. This is all the more important given the malleability of archives and, crucially, the decisions made by living authors to have information released after their deaths. Noudelmann contends that these authors are creating a kind of truth effect, given the broad tendency of the public to view information released posthumously as more true to life, more authentic.
Decolonizing the Classroom
Authors: Twohig Erin
Published: May 2020

The second chapter examines novels that cast Arabization as a new colonialism: both by arguing that Standard Arabic was a “foreign” language in Algeria, and by discussing foreign teachers as a colonizing force bent on shaping a multilingual Algerian people into an “Arab” nation. Karima Berger’s l’Enfant des deux mondes (The child of two worlds) argues that studying Arabic after independence made her French-educated protagonist feel like a colonial subject in her own country. Haydar Haydar’s Walimah li-aʻshaab al-bahr (A banquet for seaweed), written by a Syrian who taught in Algeria in the 1970s, tells the story of a young Iraqi teacher who falls in love with an Algerian student, and must fight society’s impression that he is a sexually “colonizing” threat. Despite different approaches, both novels use colonialism as a metaphor to understand Algeria’s assumed “otherness” to the Arab world. This otherness is reflected, and indeed reproduced, in official textbooks, which often present modern Algerian literature as the lesser other of metropolitan French or Middle Eastern canons. This chapter explores the problems and limits of the colonial as metaphor, along with pedagogical theories of “decolonizing the classroom.”
The Rise of a Feminist Consciousness in Saïda Menebhi’s Prison Writings
Authors: Hachad Naïma
Published: May 2020

Chapter 1 reaffirms the historical importance of political prisoner and martyr Saïda Menebhi, who died in prison after her hunger strike in 1977. However, unlike previous studies that emphasize Menebhi’s biography, my analysis also focuses on her writings, particularly the inscription of the people and the revolution in her poetry and unfinished essay on female prostitution. In doing so, the chapter uncovers the nego-feminist strategies Menebhi used to circumvent restrictive sociocultural gender norms of the 1970s and feminize and localize the internationalist and seemingly genderless Marxist-Leninist ideology. The chapter also identifies aspects that make Menebhi a trailblazer who provided Moroccan women with a narrative and a political model for the construction of a feminine testimonial voice and feminist aesthetics.
(Re)writing the Woman Resister
Authors: Hachad Naïma
Published: May 2020

In Chapter 2, I argue that, despite significant differences in their socioeconomic and ideological backgrounds, El Bouih and Oufkir offer two literary representations of gendered political violence that seek to ground their individual experiences within the collective history of violence against women in Morocco. Even though El Bouih’s Hadith Al Atama [Talk of Darkness] (2001) is in the form of a fragmented memoir that constantly shifts from first to third person narration and Oufkir’s La prisonnière [Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail] (1999) is a retrospective and linear narrative, both narrators recast themselves into feminists who speak for silenced women. Focusing on the commonalities in Oufkir and El Bouih’s testimonies not only allows us to uncover the tenets of a female-gendered Moroccan testimonial voice, but also addresses the politics of the narration, memorialization, and criticism of political violence in Morocco’s era of democratic transition.
Visual, Cultural, and Geopolitical Thresholds in Lalla Essaydi’s Depiction of Moroccan Women
Authors: Hachad Naïma
Published: May 2020

Chapter 4 offers analyses of several images from Lalla Essaydi’s photographic series Converging Territories (2004), Les Femmes du Maroc (2006-2008), and Harem (2009), in which she exclusively depicts women from Morocco or the Moroccan diaspora. The chapter focuses on the feminist transnational discourse that emerges from Essaydi’s inscription of her biography—more specifically her experience growing up in a harem and living as an adult woman in Saudi Arabia and the United States—and her training in Western art. The chapter is structured around a set of key questions. Does Essaydi’s juxtaposition of Orientalist tropes and poses from canonical nineteenth-century European Orientalist paintings with the veil, calligraphy, henna tattoos, and Moroccan architecture disrupt or reinforce stereotypes in the depiction of Arab and Muslim women? Can Essaydi’s hybrid language be read as a form of feminist ‘double critique’ that resists Western and Islamic patriarchy? How do Essaydi’s images intervene in relation to the transnational and transcultural discourse and positioning of the ‘Muslimwoman’? What is the economy between the transnational, transglobal and translocal, and the simply local in Essaydi’s images? How do Essaydi’s photographs contribute to the critical (re)thinking of gender in the context of globalization?
Introduction
Authors: Hachad Naïma
Published: May 2020

The introduction discusses the heterogeneity of Moroccan and Moroccan-born women’s self-referential practices and identifies the resources on which they draw, situating the diverse contexts in/from which they emerge. Women’s auto/biographies are products of the historical, sociocultural, and geopolitical contexts they mobilize and negotiate. These contexts dictate not only the content, but also the choice of the medium –writing, photography, body tattoos, embroidery, orality, and digital media. The introduction exposes these dynamics by unveiling the different media, styles, and languages of women’s auto/biographies in context. In doing so, the introductory chapter establishes the transdisciplinarity of my project as well as the critical routes I use to approach the topic including postcolonial and postmodern theories, transnational feminism, autobiography, and testimony.
shoreline
Authors: Wilson Emma
Published: May 2020

At Land (Maya Deren, 1946) opens with shots of the sea. In the surge of liquid a woman’s body is visible. There is the sensual curve of her dark dress, and the line of her neck. Her cool pale skin, the sheen of the cloth, the salt water offer a stretch of sensations. In a cascade of shots, the film cuts to her shoulders, her long neck, a reclining head. The sweep of the camera shows the rush of water over her body, how her image is deformed in the flow, how the form dissolves in the waves. Her body re-emerges. Her head is cast back, the water rinsing through her long hair. Her mouth is open in rapture. The image seems at first one of drowning. Her body recedes and returns in the frame, moved in the water, her flesh unworldly, morbid, and fragile. The sequence effects a metamorphosis, a sleight of hand. She is there, alive, born. The sea recedes before the film cuts to the woman on the shore. Her eyes are open. Her dark pupils are peculiarly animate....
Catherine Breillat
Authors: Wilson Emma
Published: May 2020

Catherine Breillat’s explicit engagement with female sexuality across her corpus is illumined through discussion of her return to images of nudity and reclining in European painting, as witnessed in particular in her work from Romance forwards. Romance and Anatomy of Hell draw on the forms, colours, affects, and sensations of paintings by Georges de la Tour, Ingres, Manet, and others, but the closest point of contact for Breillat with painting is with Courbet’s The Origin of the World. If attention to artistic influence allows apprehension of the formal beauty, luxury, and sensuality of Breillat’s works, her moves through Courbet, and her choreographing of the bodies of her actresses as they adopt recumbent and horizontal poses, speaks further of the animality, savagery, and mortification of being knocked off a vertical axis, and laid out on a bed, as on a butcher’s slab. Beyond Varda, Breillat pushes towards the annihilation of the subject foreshadowed and figured in images of reclining.
Transatlantic Coloniality in 1940s Cuba
Authors: de Alba Francisco Fernández
Published: May 2020

“Transatlantic Coloniality” focuses on the work of Wifredo Lam and Virgilio Piñera to explore the construction of a national Cuban cannon in the 40s. From the perspective of Transatlantic Studies, the development of Cuban arts illustrates the dynamic tensions between those seeking to build Cuban national arts emerging from a whitewashed colonial past and those cosmopolitans, such as Lam and Piñera, emphasizing popular and Afro-Caribbean culture. Colonial discourses were, in both cases, at the center of the struggle to establish and consolidate the Cuban arts. Absorbed and integrated in one case as a historical foundation, it was critically questioned by Lam and Piñera.
Transatlantic Currents: Oceanic Crossings in Novás Calvo’s El negrero
Authors: Surwillo Lisa
Published: May 2020

Novás Calvo's _Pedro Blanco, el negrero _novelizes the life of aninfamous slave trader from Málaga who was responsible for thetransportation of thousands of enslaved Africans to Cuba early in thenineteenth century. His Atlantic is a space of international exchange, aloosely regulated space where the forces of nature and currents createdconditions for massive accumulations of capital. This essay argues thatNovás Calvo writes against the narrative of European superioritythrough a depiction of the Atlantic Ocean as the determining his fate.Finally, the essay makes a methodological claim for readingtransatlantically as a means to appreciate the Atlantic as both a spaceand a place that shaped human culture on land, at seas, and therelations among them.
Linguistic Histories and the Role of Transatlanticity
Authors: Valle José del
Published: May 2020

In this chapter, we discuss how a glottopolitical approach to the role of language academies may trigger a revision of the basic postulates behind the history of the Spanish language (understood as an epistemic paradigm that has dominated the field of linguistic history). Such approach reveals transatlanticity as a condition of our object (the Spanish language), one that itself reveals the permanently contested nature of its history.
The Transatlantic Trajectory
Authors: Ortega Julio
Published: May 2020

This article argues that Transatlantic studies looks to articulate a reading that follows the native cultural method of re-appropriation and serialization of new information. Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso Inca de la Vega are models of processing information to control violence. Arguedas y Jaramove forward open spaces for new critical readings. Thus, Transatlantic readings are open, horizontal, and inclusive.
Children’s Gaze in Contemporary Cinema: A Transatlantic Poetics of Exile and Historical Memory
Authors: Enjuto-Rangel Cecilia
Published: May 2020

This essay examines two contemporary films whose child protagonists end up in exile due to the violent military regimes in their respective native countries: Paisito (Small country, 2008), a Spanish-Uruguayan-Argentine coproduction that attempts to construct a Transatlantic poetics of exile and memory, and yet fails; and a Brazilian film, O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, 2006), which places exiles at the center of a nostalgic, nationalist discourse in which Brazil appears as a multiethnic, multicultural and multiracial ideal space threatened by the military dictatorship. Both Paisitoand The Year represent the 1970s in Uruguay and Brazil, countries torn by a military coup and a military dictatorship. In both films, soccer is presented as a central space, although it is at times questioned as a force for national cohesion; and in both films the child protagonists face exile when their fathers are killed by the military regimes. Both expose how the state uses soccer as a tool of collective appeasement, and yet the nostalgic recuperation of soccer as game seems in some way to infantilize the politics of memory.
The Exile as Disinherited: Pere Calders in Mexico
Authors: Duprey Jennifer
Published: May 2020

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Catalonia saw many of its writers and intellectuals leaving Spain for Latin America. Among them was Pere Calders. In 1937, he enlisted as a volunteer in the army of the Republic, and was appointed to the role of cartographer at the rearguard of Teruel. With the fall of the Republic, he was taken to the concentration camp of Prats de Mollo. At the end of the war, in 1939, Calders went into exile in Mexico, a country where he went on to live for twenty-three years. In exile, he encountered a different reality that often became an important aspect of his literary production, something clearly seen in his short novel Aquí descansa Nevares (1967). In this chapter, I shall argue that in Aquí descansa Nevares, Calders displays not only awareness but also recognition of both the indígenas’ cultural system of beliefs and their socio-political situation.
Transatlantic Trotsky
Authors: Herrmann Gina
Published: May 2020

Few historical figures of the 20th century are as intriguing from a Transatlantic perspective as Leon Trotsky. Trotsky can be thought of as “transatlantic” in at least three ways. First, and perhaps most obviously, we can consider Trotsky’s transnationalism in terms of the internationalist basis and verve of his political theories. Second, we might explore how Trotsky’s exilic fate placed him in contact with intellectuals, followers and enemies in multiple linguistic and cultural communities in Europe, Turkey and the Americas—places in which he could further observe the “unevenness” of capitalism in space and time. Third, we might consider the cultural representations of the Old Man’s exile and assassination at the hands of a Catalan Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader, in Coyoacán Mexico in 1940, whereupon the Revolutionary leader becomes a vessel of Hispanic Atlantic contemplation and circulation.
Notions of Empire: Transatlantic Art at the Height of the Cold War (A Case Study)
Authors: Cifuentes Luis Fernández
Published: May 2020

In 1955, Barcelona’s III Bienal de Arte Hispano-Americano had a double mission. First, it aspired to re-unite the countries of Spain’s old empire under the principles of a common race, a common view of the world, and, especially, a common language and religion. Second, it meant to help introduce Spain–a new ally of the United States–in the Cold War’s international cultural and political scene. The Bienal, however, revealed mostly irreparable fractures and contradictions, and hardly any unity or integrity in the newly conceived Empire. It showed divergent and hostile tendencies and ideologies; hierarchical relations between metropolis and colonies; double standards (one criterion for the national scene and another for the international scene); clashing differences between national and foreign, abstract and figurative (Tàpies’ dissidence versus Guayasamín’s synthesis or fusion), the dictates of the markets and the directives of the regime, and even between divergent modes of analysis. Not an image that could be sold easily abroad.
When the Mediterranean Moved West: Catalan Social Networks and the Construction of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Uruguayan Society and Culture
Authors: Harrington Thomas
Published: May 2020

This essay explores how Catalan traders repurposed the commercial techniques and patterns of human deployment used to create their country’s Mediterranean merchant empire in the late medieval period, to generate important trade networks in the Atlantic basin starting in the 18th century. After explaining the dynamics of this new, but simultaneously old, transatlantic system, it zeroes in on one of the key nodes of the network, Uruguay, and explores how successive generations of Catalans shaped the development of that country’s culture in fundamental ways.
The Good Monarchical Government: Popular Translations of Spanish Political Thought during Mexico’s Independence
Authors: Landavazo Marco Antonio
Published: May 2020

In the Mexican war of independence, patriot’s armies famously repeated, “Long live the king and down with the bad government!”, a political slogan related to the spanish populist doctrines and to what we could call the monarchical tradition of good government. The cry of disdain toward the viceregal government and of acceptance of the king indicates not only obedience to him but it appeals to him: it is a call to an arbitrator who can intervene in the political and social games and force one of their adversaries, in this case the government of New Spain, to act according to the established rules—those of a good government. This paper focuses on the way this rebellious rhetoric shows us how age-old political and ideological traditions stemming from Europe, and the American reproduction of them, saw their expiration date when the leader of the good government Fernando VII, in the eyes of the Mexican patriots, had become a tyrant
Nicolás Guillén and Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa (1953)
Authors: Millar Lanie
Published: May 2020

The 1953 poetry notebook Poesia negra de expressão portuguesa [Black Poetry of Portuguese Expression] was first work that brought together negritude poetry from across the Lusophone African world. Edited by Angolan intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade and Sao Tomean poet Francisco Tenreiro, the short collection declares itself an anti-colonial intervention into the negritude movements underway in the Francophone world since the 1930s. Little has been made, however, of the notebook’s dedication to Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén or the inclusion of Guillén’s poem “Son Número 6” [Son Number 6] in the collection. This article argues that the juxtaposition of Guillén’s “Son No. 6” with the Lusophone poems consolidates an alternative transatlanticism that emphasizes Guillén as a black poet, rather than themes of racial and cultural mixing, and thus shifts the circuits of collaboration away from francophone negritude's colony-metropole axis to the South. Poetic techniques such as call-and-response and the socially-embedded, metonymic construction of blackness shared among Guillén and Lusophone poets Agostinho Neto, Noémia de Sousa, and António Jacinto show how the notebook establishes the origins of both negritude poetry and negritude identity in the trans-Atlantic poetic conversation itself.
It’s Complicated—Ortega y Gasset’s Relationship with Argentina
Authors: Wells Robert
Published: May 2020

At the start of the 20th Century – between the desastre del '98 and the Civil War in Spain, and during a population explosion in Argentina due to a massive influx of immigrants from abroad – elites and conservative elements in both countries felt a political, spiritual, and existential crisis to be at hand in the form of the ascent of the modern masses. Indeed, these masses were seen to personify the threat of anarchic, communistic, and democratic disorder at home and abroad. Within the Hispanic world, the self-styled authority with regards to the "barbaric" masses was the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset – a thinker who, outside of Spain, was most influential in Argentina. This chapter explores Ortega's relationship with his “second homeland,” ultimately positing that the elitist, authoritarian, and xenophobic theses he puts forth in _La rebelión de las masas_ and his various essays on Argentina served as the philosophical justification for the transatlantic co-conspiracy against the masses that would come to emerge.
Concrete Poetry/Konkrete Poesie/Poesia Concreta
Authors: Thomas Greg
Published: May 2020

This chapter provides an overview of the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s, which frames the development of concrete poetry in England and Scotland. Concrete poetry first emerged in West Germany and Brazil in the early-to-mid 1950s, largely through the endeavours of Eugen Gomringer and the Noigandres poetry group. The earliest concrete poetry, defined in this text as ‘classical concrete’, was rooted in the aesthetics of constructivism, concrete art, modernist architecture, and literary modernism, as well as an interest in simplifying and clarifying language systems which was often connected to semiotics, especially information theory. A key impulse was the desire to develop transnational systems of linguistic communication, as the basis for post-war international dialogue. By the close of the 1960s, however, a different definition of concrete poetry, more connected to Dada, Futurism, and intermedia art, had taken hold worldwide. This variant of concrete was associated with the sixties counter-culture, and with a desire to tear down existing social institutions, expressed through non-linguistic or anti-linguistic impulses. To some extent this global narrative mirrors the story of concrete poetry’s development in England and Scotland, and can be traced by assessing the work of Finlay, Morgan, Houédard and Cobbing in turn.
?Concrete Poetry and After
Authors: Thomas Greg
Published: May 2020

Having considered concrete poetry in England and Scotland largely in relation to global trends, in the final chapter this text turns its attention to the binding characteristics of concrete poetry in those two nations. What unique features can be picked out which allow us to speak of ‘concrete poetry in England and Scotland’ as a distinct and coherent phenomenon? The argument is presented that, while concrete poetry in its initial, international guises often represented a response to modernist design aesthetics and semiotic theory, for poets in England and Scotland it was more likely to be placed in creative proximity to Anglo-American modernist poetry. In this sense, concrete poetry in England and Scotland can be considered one aspect of what Eric Mottram called ‘The British Poetry Revival’, that period during the 1950s-70s when a range of British poets began to reincorporate modernist forms and themes into their work. This occurred partly in response to a range of shifting social and economic circumstances, including the emergence of a global imaginative culture through the development of international markets, the space race, and the nuclear arms race of the post-war period, and the emergence of state-funded artistic and literary culture within Britain.
Conclusion: Ireland as a Mainstream Abolitionist Country
Authors: Doyle David M. , O’Callaghan Liam
Published: May 2020

This chapter concludes the book by examining, first, the complete abolition of the death penalty through the Criminal Justice Act 1990 and, second, the constitutional prohibition of the death penalty by referendum in 2001. In so doing Ireland signalled position as a mainstream abolitionist state, one committed, along with fellow European union members, to oppose capital punishment internationally. The chapter concludes by considering why the death penalty was not a source of public or political controversy in Ireland.
The Legacy of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Independent Ireland, 1922-1949
Authors: O'Donoghue Martin
Published: May 2020

This book provides the first detailed analysis of the influence of former Irish Parliamentary Party members and methods in independent Ireland and the place of the party’s leaders in public memory. Previous studies of the party have concluded with its dramatic fall in 1918 and shown little interest in the fate of its members thereafter. This study uses biographical data to provide the first statistical analysis of the Irish Party heritage of each political party in the independent Irish state established in 1922. Utilising a wealth of archival material, contemporary and critical writings, it asks how former Irish Party followers reacted to the changed circumstances of independent Ireland. One chapter undertakes a case study of the Irish National League, arguing that this organisation founded and led by former MPs effectively constituted a ‘legacy party’. Analysis of party politics is complemented by scrutiny of the practice of commemoration to ask how the Irish Party was remembered in a state founded on the sacrifice of the Easter Rising. This study therefore highlights significant features in the evolution of the party’s public memory and sheds new light on how figures such as Charles Stewart Parnell, John Redmond and Michael Davitt were remembered.
The Legacy of the Irish Party in Free State Politics, 1922–5
Authors: O'Donoghue Martin
Published: May 2020

Chapter One provides the first statistical illustration of individuals from home rule backgrounds who entered representative politics in the early years of the Free State with the number of TDs with home rule heritage in each political grouping detailed in a number of tables. Given the historiographical attention drawn to the character of Cumann na nGaedheal, there is detailed attention devoted to comparisons between the government party and the Irish Party in personnel, policy and organisation. While the Farmers’ Party and Labour are also considered for continuities between membership of both parties and the earlier agrarian and labour associations of the home rule era, there is special assessment of former MPs who were elected as independent TDs such as Capt. William Redmond, Alfie Byrne and James Cosgrave and the persistence of the IPP’s methods. This chapter thus highlights the continuities between pre- and post-independence Ireland, helping to explain the party fragmentation experienced in the early 1920s.
A Legacy Party? The Irish National League, 1926–7
Authors: O'Donoghue Martin
Published: May 2020

This chapter provides the first dedicated study of the Irish National League, founded by former MPs Capt. Redmond and Thomas O’Donnell in 1926. Analysing the categorisation of the League as a ‘mobilising’ party, this chapter argues that it was, in fact, a ‘legacy party’, illustrating how the League drew on the old Irish Party personnel, slogans and ephemera. While statistical data highlights the home rule connections of TDs standing for each party, there is also analysis of the League’s controversial actions during the tumultuous summer of 1927, examining two general election campaigns, the aftermath of Kevin O’Higgins’s assassination and the League’s failed attempt to form a coalition government with Labour following the entry of Fianna Fáil into the Dáil. It is argued that despite its short life span, the League was significant in Irish politics as it not only came within a casting vote of government but helped to accelerate the assimilation of former home rule supporters into new parties.
The Blueshirts and the Shadow of the Land League, 1932–4
Authors: O'Donoghue Martin
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the Land Annuities dispute and its political consequences through the lens of former home rulers and the legacy of the Land League. It analyses how Dillon and MacDermot tried to remain distinct from Cumann na nGaedheal, but also sought to broaden the appeal of the ostensibly agrarian National Centre Party to include emphases on Irish unity and the state’s constitutional status. Examining the formation of the United Ireland Party/Fine Gael, this chapter argues that individuals from home rule backgrounds played a significant role in the origins of this new party. However, the tensions between defenders of a constitutional tradition, unrest in the countryside and Blueshirt leader Eoin O’Duffy meant that Dillon and MacDermot ultimately failed to straddle the dual Irish Party/Land League legacies of constitutionalism and direct action. It is argued that while MacDermot and Dillon sought to move Irish politics beyond the Civil War divide, the events of 1932-4 actually helped to solidify and mould the ‘Civil War’ cleavage, making it one with clear undertones of the 1930s as well as the original confrontation over the Treaty.
Home Rulers in a New Ireland, 1935–49
Authors: O'Donoghue Martin
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines how such individuals from Irish Party backgrounds coped with the shift from Free State to republic as independent Ireland faced challenges at home and abroad. It charts the struggle of the AOH to reinvent itself as a Catholic social organisation which retained lingering vitality in the border areas while statistical analysis illuminates the home rule legacy in Fine Gael, disclosing that between 30% and 40% of its deputies up to 1949 had traceable Irish Party roots. This chapter analyses responses of such figures to the Spanish Civil War; the introduction of the new constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann: Irish neutrality during World War II; and the controversial declaration of a republic by Fine Gael Taoiseach John A. Costello — a home ruler in his youth and leader of a government including individuals such as James Dillon, Bridget Redmond, Alfie Byrne, and ex-MP and World War I veteran John Lymbrick Esmonde.
Introduction
Authors: Kelly Matthew
Published: May 2020

This introduction considers the ‘environmental turn’ taken in the humanities, and particularly in historical study, suggesting ways in which these developments might animate the future study of nineteenth-century Ireland. Question of agency and the relationship between human and non-human nature are addressed. Also considered is how current environmental concerns, and climate change in particular, should lead us to think anew about the past, rendering familiar subjects unfamiliar. Particular attention is paid to how Ireland’s past might be located within larger global processes, attracting the interest of scholars from throughout the world. It then introduces the individual contributions in the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate how a change in optic can significantly change how we think about Ireland’s recent past.
The Nature of Improvement in Ireland
Authors: O’Connell Helen
Published: May 2020

Like its English and Scottish equivalents, improvement in nineteenth-century Ireland depicts itself as a civilising force, cultivating nature by means of a range of progressive methods. However, at this point, Irish improvement was shaped by particular events, such as the 1798 Rebellion and the Act of Union. In the writings of Mary Leadbeater, Martin Doyle, and William Blacker, for example, nature is implicitly equated with history, violence, and Catholicism. I argue here that a range of improvement projects – from the dissemination of didactic fictions to the activities of agricultural societies – are directed at the socialising or conventionalising of Irish ‘nature’. Indeed, Ireland is characterised as excessively natural and in need of the middling domestication provided by modern agricultural techniques and tidy cottages. In conveying information and practical advice on soil, pigs, and seeds, improvement sought to be a progressive force, one capable of shifting public debate beyond persistent historical antagonisms towards a supposedly neutral realm of practical inquiry and activity. To that end, improvement found itself relying far more on the participation of women, labourers, and the very small farmers of the countryside than on the relatively few large landowners in residence on their estates
Palmerston’s Conquest of Sligo
Authors: Brown David
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the estates of Lord Palmerston in Sligo during the mid-nineteenth century with a view to examining the ways in which a need or desire to ‘conquer’ nature shaped plans to improve land and, by extension, the condition of tenants on that land, blending economic and political ambitions with environmental and scientific understanding.  This study of estate management, by an absentee landlord, examines Palmerston’s career as an Irish landlord afresh and, borrowing the idea of a ‘conquest of nature’, reflects on the ways in which the Irish landscape was, and could be, understood or regarded by this particular Victorian politician and how this might contribute to debates about nature and its management.
Therapeutic Environments in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Hybrid Spaces and Practices
Authors: Foley Ronan
Published: May 2020

There were strong traditions in nineteenth-century Ireland that associated natural environments with health and healing. As broadly described therapeutic landscapes, there were various locations where particular healing narratives shaped the production of place. Two contrasting examples, the spa town and the sweat-house, are described to show how specifically healthy environments were narrated and understood. The spa town, especially associated with mineral waters, had identifiable scientific characteristics for disease treatments. Key 19th century examples included Lucan and Lisdoonvarna, wherein the commodification of the spas tracked how hydrotherapies were accepted and contested. At the other end of the scale, the rural sweat-house, most commonly found in parts of Leitrim, Roscommon and Sligo, was a much smaller-scale, rural and epigenetic form, built from natural materials and used primarily to cure a range of colds and arthritic conditions. These two forms had variable histories across the century that reflected global/local narratives, yet differed in crucial ways around their recognition and perceived efficacy as healing spaces. Both had strongly embodied components and used different hot/cold forms of hydropathy in very different settings, within which hybrid roles for nature and the environment were experienced and played out in different ways.
Introduction
Authors: Fennell Jack
Published: May 2020

In political rhetoric, academic analysis, social theory and everyday speech, fear is characterised as a limitation or an obstacle to be overcome – see turns of phrase such as ‘culture of fear,’ ‘management by fear’ and so on. This introduction argues for a more useful conception of fear, based on Ernst Bloch’s continuum of ‘negative expectant emotions,’ and combines this with a Sartrean conception of the absurdity of human existence to establish the function of monsters in human culture. In short, monsters reveal the limitations of our ideologically constructed world by breaking it: history cannot continue in their presence; they refute humanity’s ownership of the world, and traditionally, they have occupied spaces where human civilization cannot or will not go. Each monster disrupts history in a way particular to itself, and this chapter lays the groundwork for further analysis along those lines.