bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Narrative Complexity and Dissonant Cognitions
Authors: Kiss Miklós , Willemsen Steven
Published: September 2017

Chapter 3 describes how impossible puzzle films create paradoxical, incongruent or impossible narrative experiences. To understand the nature of the confusion these films create, this chapter adopts Leon Festinger’s original theory on the psychological state of cognitive dissonance (1957) and argues that the perplexing effects of impossible puzzle films can be understood as cognitive dissonances. These films strategically evoke and maintain dissonant cognitions in their viewers through internal incongruities (contradictions in their narration) and projected impossibilities (narrative structures or elements that disrupt the elementary knowledge, logic and schemas that viewers use to make sense of both real life and fiction). Along with more recent insights from embodied-cognitive sciences and narratology, cognitive dissonance theory offers us a tool to explain the effects that impossible puzzle films have on viewers.
Slums on Screen
Authors: Krstić Igor
Published: September 2017

Despite the rise of the ‘cinematic city’ as an acknowledged paradigm in film and urban studies, ‘cinematic slums’ have remained severely under-researched, even though near to one billion people – almost one third of the global urban population – call slums their home. Accordingly, the author asks how this hard and unyielding way of life was depicted on screen; how have filmmakers engaged historically and across the globe with the social conditions of what is often perceived as the world’s most miserable habitats? Combining approaches from the social sciences and the humanities, the book provides an interdisciplinary perspective while outlining a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, Elendsviertel, gecekondu, barrios populares or chawls of our diverse ‘planet of slums’, exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film and media culture. From Jacob Riis’s How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the volume provides a number of close readings of slum representations of different historical periods and regions to outline how contemporary film and media practices relate to their past predecessors. It focuses thereby particularly on the way filmmakers, both north and south of the equator, have repeatedly grappled with, rejected or continuously modified documentary and realist modes of representation to convey life in our ‘planet of slums’.
Introduction
Authors: Krstić Igor
Published: September 2017

The chapter first outlines the book’s scope and its aim to reconstruct two developments while trying to weave them together: accelerated urbanisation and the rise of an increasingly interconnected global film culture. Considering the enormous amount of slum-dwellers around the globe as well as the ‘global archive’ of still and moving imagery that we have of slums in cities as diverse as Victorian London or modern-day Mumbai, the author argues that in approaching ‘slums on screen’ one needs to take the historical processes of globalisation into account, since they have profoundly shaped both ‘world cinema’ and our ‘planet of slums’. While acknowledging the ethical and political concerns that have continuously been raised by critics – most recently in regard to the enormously popular Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle 2008) – Krstić argues to watch out for hasty accusations of social voyeurism, arguing instead for an approach that is anchored in historical-contextual analyses of representative examples. Taking the notion of ‘global complexity‘ (Urry) as a clue, and departing from Stam and Shohat’s Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994) as well as from recent scholarship on world cinema (Nagib, Andrew et. al.), the author outlines a ‘polycentric approach to world cinema’s planet of slums’.
Documentary Mappings
Authors: Krstić Igor
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the 1920s and 1930s as a constitutive phase of the documentary film, as well as on the genre’s initial relation to cities (and, by extension, their slums). It introduces the notion of ‘cognitive mapping’ and asks why it was especially the city that became documentary film’s first major subject. The chapter first discusses well-known ‘city symphonies’ of the 1920s, but focuses then on a lesser-known example, La Zone (Lacombe 1928), which maps the Parisian slum belt (la zone) as a ‘rag-pickers’ country’. The chapter goes on to show how some of the ideas of the ‘social avant-garde’ flow into John Grierson’s notion of ‘social documentary film’ and its power to disclose a society’s ‘true heroes’, its ordinary people and workers. The chapter provides a close reading of a paradigmatic Griersonian documentary, Housing Problems (Anstey and Elton 1935). The film employs a classical voice-of-authority style and exemplifies some of Grierson’s progressive ideas (giving ordinary people a voice). In conclusion, the chapter shows how the strategies of Housing Problems have become conventions of TV documentaries today, particularly the problematic (sociological and apparently scientific) mapping of urban poverty from both the ideological and visual ‘perspective-of-god’.
Third Docufictions
Authors: Krstić Igor
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses the international film culture of the 1960s and 1970s against the backdrop of the massive urbanisation of what used to be called the ‘Third World’. During these decades not only did world cinema modernise itself in the form of numerous, highly politicised and predominantly leftist, ‘new waves’, but so, too, did many (mega)cities of the global South. The chapter’s first case example, Moi, un noir (Rouch 1958), depicts how rural migrants, full of hopes for and dreams of a better future, flocked to these cities in search of jobs. The intersections between social and film history on a global scale, hence, between the emergence of a politically engaged international film culture and the massive urbanisation of the ‘Third World’, are, as the author argues, not coincidental, and neither is the rise of docufictional forms. Whether theorised as ethnofiction, docudrama, cinéma vérité or Impefect Cinema, these hybrid forms share their historical links with earlier movements (neorealism and the Grierosonian documentary, in particular), as this chapter’s second main example illustrates: De Cierta Manera (Gómez 1974), an essayistic docudrama that investigates the Cuban government’s slum removal policies in a Havana neighbourhood.
Postmodern Bricolages
Authors: Krstić Igor
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the 1970s and 1980s and illustrates how some of the most celebrated world cinema directors became profoundly affected by postmodern thought and cultural practice, among them auteurs like Kurosawa, Brocka or Scola, all of whom have approached the slums of their native countries and cities in their films. The author argues that the cultural and architectural practice of bricolage may serve as a key paradigm that subsumes the otherwise quite disparate styles of these directors. Postmodern concepts and aesthetic strategies such as bricolage – and, by extension, intertextuality, intermediality or hybridisation – put the traditional claims of realist and documentary practices in doubt. Instead, postmodern films, like the chapter’s main example Time of the Gypsies (Kusturica 1989), mix what are apparently contradictory notions, such as magic and realism. However, the chapter also discusses other examples of (predominantly ‘Third-Worldist’) filmmakers who have been trying to preserve and recover the historically inherited, but now vehemently questioned (ethical, social and political) concerns of realist and documentary modes to approach their countries’ social problems, but without turning a blind eye towards the new postmodern realities of increasingly consumer-oriented ‘Third World’ cultures.
Bombay Cinema
Authors: Krstić Igor
Published: September 2017

The first part of this chapter discusses phases of slum representation in the cinema of Bombay/Mumbai, including those of what is better known as Bollywood. Together with scholars of Indian Cinema (Mazumdar, Prasad, Basu), the chapter focuses on a few representative examples, such as Boot Polish (Arora 1954) or Satya (Varma 1998), to outline how popular Indian cinema has gradually abandoned what was once one of its most characteristic settings, the slum, to focus instead on escapist, studio set family melodramas. The second part departs from the harsh criticism (‘poverty porn’) that Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle 2008) has received to then argue that the film is best described as a palimpsestic imitation of Bombay Cinema. The film’s references to genres (gangster films, melodramas), plot structures (the forking life paths of two rival brothers), editing styles (of recent Bollywood gangster films), or character types (orphaned children) are indeed so manifold, that one can describe the film as an ‘archive of Bombay cinema’ (Mazumdar). The chapter concludes that, far from being a realistic depiction of the life of Mumbai’s street children, the film rather aims at immersing its viewers into a cinematic/televisual Mumbai of screens, surfaces and images.
Conclusion
Authors: Krstić Igor
Published: September 2017

The book’s conclusion summarises the key paradigms of contemporary slum representation on screen and relates them to their historical predecessors – a strategy that reverses the chronological approach applied throughout the book. It then looks at Susan Sontag’s assessment of social documentary photography as a form of social voyeurism, or ‘slumming’ through cameras, as well as to the changing notions of documentary and realism by interrogating what role cameras together with still or moving images play in our digital era today. The author concludes with a final argument which is that our ‘planet of slums’ has, for better or worse, become a hypermediated topos, an ‘archaeological’ media site of global dimensions, to which many filmmakers of the digital era respond in a palimpsestic way, re-writing or remediating our cities’ stored stories and images in sometimes highly imaginative, sometimes provocative ways. These filmmakers are not necessarily (re)turning to slums in order to look voyeuristically at the world’s ‘Other Half’ with fascination, pity or disgust, and neither with a reformist or socialist agenda in mind, but rather, the author agues, to challenge our ways of looking at life on our planet of slums.
Conclusion
Authors: Robb Thomas K.
Published: September 2017

When analysing the Anglo-American relationship during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, it is evident that disagreement between the two countries on a number of international topics of mutual interest was a prominent aspect of the relationship. Many of these differences can be explained by virtue of the fact that the United States was a global power and the United Kingdom was simply not. As one author has suggested, ‘Small powers have a whole set of different priorities in their foreign policies than great powers.’...
Paradoxical Legacies: Colonial Missionary Films, Corporate Philanthropy in South Asia and the Griersonian Documentary Tradition
Authors: Motrescu-Mayes Annamaria
Published: September 2017

In her chapter, Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes investigates the paradoxical legacies of British imperial culture based on a comparative study of a missionary film shot in India in the late 1920s-early 1930s by the Fathers of the St. Joseph’s Missionary Society and a 2013 Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corporation television advertisement. Her study illuminates the documentary and anthropological merit of the early missionary film, despite its larger propagandist function. By looking into the heritage of Grierson’s principles of social and cultural engagement, she also more unexpectedly demonstrates that the 1920s film resists the stereotypification of race and colonised people that predominated at the time, whereas the 2013 commercial tends to perpetuate that.
Conversion, Salvation and the ‘Civilising Mission’: Christian Missions and Documentary Film in India (1900–60)
Authors: Sandon Emma
Published: September 2017

Emma Sandon explores documentaries produced by English and Scottish Christian missions in India in order to highlight similarities and differences in the definition of a ‘civilising mission’ adopted by these missions. While, for example, some focused on means of reaching salvation, others believed in the use of education to both bring about social development and instil Christian values. Sandon also discusses specific previously under-researched films in relation to these issues.
Violence and Voyeurism in the Arena
Authors: Gardner Hunter H. , Potter Amanda
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the different forms of violence portrayed in the series—principally the gladiatorial violence in the arena; violence in the streets, including beatings and murders; and sexual violence perpetrated on slaves but also on Roman citizens. It points out that through scenes of graphic bodily dismemberments and eviscerations, the series asks its audience to contemplate the difficult distinction between morally justified bloodshed and the fetishized conventions of gore, conventions popularized in various subgenres of the horror film, in particular the “splatter film” and the “meat flick.” Despite its slippery tendency to celebrate violence both attached and unattached to a moral perspective, the chapter maintains that the series offers a unique window on the embodiment of violence in the ancient world.
Interpreting Arabs: Defining their Name and Constructing their Family
Authors: Webb Peter
Published: September 2017

Chapter 4 investigates the changing faces of Arabness in early Islam. As an identity, Arabness was a fluid intellectual construct, and because Arab communal consciousness developed unevenly in early Islam, Muslims faced manifold challenges when they tried to define the word ‘Arab’ and delineate the boundaries of Arab community. The uneven parameters of Arabness and the debates over the identity’s meaning manifest in this chapter’s findings from the evolving dictionary definitions of ʿarabī, the disputes over membership to the Arab community, and the protracted process by which Muslims constructed Arab genealogy by fusing disparate pre-Islamic groups into one consolidated Arab family tree. By the early tenth century AD, Arabic literature articulates a largely cohesive sense of Arab identity and genealogy traced through a succession of ancient prophets, Judaic and Arabian: this chapter questions how that archetype of Arabness emerged by undertaking comprehensive analysis of the earlier disagreements which accompanied the processes of imagining Arabness in Islam’s first centuries.
Philologists, ‘Bedouinisation’ and the ‘Archetypal Arab’ after the Mid-Third/Ninth Century
Authors: Webb Peter
Published: September 2017

How was Arab identity imagined in a world where most Middle Eastern populations stopped calling themselves Arabs? After the mid-ninth century AD, descriptions of Arabs proliferated in Arabic literature, whilst Arab identity as a social/political asset was in decline. In this period, the key spokesmen for the idea of Arabness were philologists who fundamentally reworked impressions of Arab identity as part of new theories about the Arabic language. Diachronic survey of the development of Arabic philology from the late eighth to eleventh centuries reveals shifting intentions and values which standardised the Arabic language via a unique process that focused on the idealisation of Bedouin as paragons of the ‘original Arabs’. Studying Arabic philology within its socio-historical contexts reveals how the grammarians transcended language study and forged paradigmatic changes to the ways Arab history and culture are interpreted. The novel association of Arab with Bedouin became a popular theme in Arabic literature from the early tenth century, and the weight of the resultant writings comprehensively transformed Arabness from the former expression of urban/Muslim elite identity in early Islam to a desert/Bedouin pre-Islamic identity which has cast a long shadow on the notion of Arab identity to the present.
Blogging Muslim Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Aljunied Khairudin
Published: September 2017

This chapter scrutinises the virtual world as a space where people coming from different backgrounds gather to share, socialise, and partake in discussions about the pertinent issues of their time, thereby attaining clarity about what is at stake for themselves and their societies. The attention here is on Muslim blogs that are aimed at transcending the ideological differences within the Muslim community, the bloggers' strategies in combating Islamophobia, and their promotion of ethical conduct online. The chapter emphasises discussions aimed at bridging ties between people of varying persuasions, in order that they eventually appreciate the universalist and inclusivist proclivities in Islam.
Conclusion: The Vision of Muslim Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Aljunied Khairudin
Published: September 2017

This concluding chapter reiterates the volume's main argument that Muslim cosmopolitanism has provided Southeast Asians with the vision and vocabulary to come together, rather than to become increasingly divided, in the age of the networked society. In spite of the sensationalized reports from the ‘terrorist industry’ encroaching into the religious and cultural lives of Muslims, the chapter presents a more vibrant picture of mutual cooperation and peace between Muslims and non-Muslims, citing the instances analysed in the previous chapters to further expound on this argument. However, the chapter argues that there is still further work to be done in expanding the scope of studies of Muslim cosmopolitanism, and suggests further avenues for research.
Thucydides
Authors: Hau Lisa Irene
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyses the moralising techniques and moral lessons of Thucydides. Using the moralising techniques found and analysed in Polybius and Diodorus as its point of departure, it discovers that Thucydides uses a root version of many of the techniques found in more developed form in the two Hellenistic historiographers, but that, like Herodotus, he also moralises on the macro-plane by means of a structure of subtly repeating patterns. In addition, he uses a discrete technique which is labelled ‘minimalist moralising’ and which has endeared him modern readers. In terms of moral lessons, Thucydides turns out to be the only one of the historiographers studied who does not consider piety a virtue, and much of his work is shown to demonstrate a clash between two different world-views, one ‘traditional’ and the other ‘sophistic’ or ‘realist’.
Xenophon, Hellenica
Authors: Hau Lisa Irene
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyses the moralising techniques and moral lessons of Xenophon’s Hellenika. In terms of techniques, it discovers that Xenophon stands at a midway point between his Classical predecessors and Hellenistic successors, but that he uses scenes with dialogue without explicit narratorial interpretation more than any of the other historiographers studied. With regard to moral lessons, piety looms large in Xenophon, where divine justice also plays a large part in how the world works. In addition, friendship is more important than in any of the other historiographers studied, but otherwise the moral virtues of Xenophon are largely traditional. The chapter ends with a brief comparison of moralising in the Hellenika with Xenophon’s other works, which confirms the distinctions drawn in the Introduction between moralising in historiography compared with other genres.
Fragmentary Classical Historiography
Authors: Hau Lisa Irene
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyses the moralising techniques and moral lessons of the Oxyrhynchus Historian, Ephorus of Cyme, and Theopompus of Chios. Using the techniques and lessons discovered and analysed throughout the book so far as a point of departure, it is tentatively concluded that both the Oxyrhynchus Historian and Ephorus seem to have been close to Thucydides and Xenophon in their moralising, but that Theopompus may have been radically innovative. It is therefore suggested that the ‘first moralising historian’ was not Ephorus, as is often claimed, but Herodotus, and that the innovator who made moralising more explicit and created the form seen in Polybius and Diodorus was likewise not Ephorus, but Theopompus.
American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11
Authors: McSweeney Terence
Published: September 2017

The conflict which came to be known as the ‘War on Terror’, instigated by the administration of President George W. Bush in 2001 and continued by his successor Barack Obama, was the first war of the twenty-first century and an event of profoundly global reach and implication. While the majority of its military operations were undertaken in Afghanistan (2001–14) and Iraq (2002–11), this volume turns its attention to another vitally important front of the war, the films produced by the American film industry in the first decades of the new millennium. Now, more than fifteen years after the events of 11 September 2001, it is clear to see that these films not only function as a uniquely telling and resonant cultural battleground in which conflicting ideologies were projected for all to see, but were also able to shape the cultural imaginary of post-9/11 America in a range of compelling ways. While the ‘War on Terror’ was officially brought to an end by President Obama in 2013, it is one that is still fought in the films about the conflict which continue to be made today....
Refracting Fundamentalism in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012)
Authors: Mendes Ana Cristina , Bennett Karen
Published: September 2017

In Chapter Five Mendes and Bennett argue that while Mira Nair's 2012 adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's 2007 award winning novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist also places the experience of a Muslim, Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), at the centre of the narrative, this is problematicised by the compromises of adapting the complicated and morally ambiguous source on which it is based for the demands of the mainstream market. Mendes and Bennett concede that The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a rare example of an American film which breaks free of the America-centric view of the 'War on Terror' and in doing so destabilises the habitual privileging of American subjectivity and authority, but adhering to many of the tropes of the thriller genre results in a film in which much of the moral relativity of Hamsin's novel becomes lost in translation.
‘Not now that strength’: Embodiment and Globalisation in Post-9/11 James Bond
Authors: Gaine Vincent M.
Published: September 2017

Chapter Six, Vincent M. Gaine's analysis of perhaps the defining action-adventure series of the era (or of any era), the iconic figure of Ian Fleming’s James Bond in ‘"Not now that strength" Embodiment and Globalisation in Post 9/11 James Bond.’ In a dynamic investigation of Daniel Craig's four films as James Bond, from his first appearance in Casino Royale (2006) to his fourth film Spectre (2015), Gaine explores the thematic and stylistic variations undertaken in the Daniel Craig era. Craig's Bond, as Gaine astutely reveals, is as intrinsically connected to the post-9/11 decades as the first incarnation of the character played by Sean Connery was to the Cold War era in which the original books and films were written and set. In this chapter Gaine proposes that the Bond franchise, more than any other, given its longevity, is uniquely placed to observe changing cultural and socio-political trends. The Craig Bond emerges as a much more complicated figure than his predecessors, both emphatically masculine and yet at the same time distinctly fallible, but a resolutely more human figure because of it. Daniel Craig’s interpretation of the character, as Gaine observes, is a Bond who bleeds and one who is traumatised rather than a figure who glides almost effortlessly through his adventures hardly with a scratch, as he once did in the eras of Connery, Moore and Brosnan.
‘Gettin’ Dirty’: Tarantino’s Vengeful Justice, the Marked Viewer and Post-9/11 America
Authors: Schopp Andrew
Published: September 2017

Andrew Schopp argues that the representation of morality and history in Inglorious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015) is a particularly complicated and distinctly post-modern one, inherently connected to the American vision of the world after 9/11. His analysis of Tarantino's texts from the perspective of justice, civilisation and revenge make an invaluable contribution to existing commentaries on Tarantino's work. He also considers their status as allohistorical narratives (commonly referred to as alternative history) which encompasses an awareness of the fact that Tarantino’s films are seemingly divided into a unified diegetic world in which a significant number of his characters reside (see Reservoir Dogs [1992], Pulp Fiction [1994], Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight) and the films that these characters might go to see in this alternate universe (Death Proof [2007], Kill Bill: Volume One [2003], Kill Bill: Volume Two [2004]). On the surface a range of interrelated strands connect his films like the branding of Red Apple cigarettes, characters being related to each other i.e. the Vega brothers in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, Sergeant Donny Donowitz in Inglourious Basterds being the father of filmmaker Lee Donowitz in True Romance (1993), and recently ‘English’ Pete Hickox in The Hateful Eight being an ancestor of Archie Hickox in Inglorious Basterds, but this fluidity is complicated even further both by Tarantino’s liberal appropriation of material from other sources as inspiration and they way the films seem to both reflect, engage and even comment on each others' narratives.
‘Daddy, I’m scared. Can we go home?’ Fear and Allegory in Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007)
Authors: McSweeney Terence
Published: September 2017

Chapter Eleven, ""Daddy, I'm scared. Can we go home?": Fear and Allegory in Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007), Terence McSweeney addresses the potency of the horror genre to function as a cultural barometer by engaging with some of the defining anxieties of the era in a metaphorical fashion. Discussing Frank Darabont's The Mist, an adaptation of the Stephen King novella, McSweeney reads the film's narrative concerning a disparate group of small-towners stranded inside a local supermarket plagued by what might be supernatural beasts outside and, perhaps even more dangerously, religious extremism inside as an articulate treatise on prevailing new millennial fears. The Mist was one of many American genre films which seemed to dramatise Susan Faludi's assertion that, 'The intrusions of September 11 broke the dead bolt on our protective myth, the illusion that we are masters of our own security, that our might makes our homeland impregnable, that our families are safe in the bower of our communities and our women and children are safe in the arms of their men' (2007, 12). The Mist uses familiar genre tropes but localises them to the very specific coordinates of post-9/11 America in a comparable way to how the most resonant horror and science fiction films have done to their own cultures and eras throughout the decades. McSweeney argues that there is a transgressive potency in the horror genre to confront some of the myths which have been at the centre of American popular film since its inception and in particular the 'master narrative' of the 'War on Terror' which emerged after 9/11.
Post-9/11 Power and Responsibility in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Authors: Muller Christine
Published: September 2017

Moving to the science fiction genre, but remaining within the field of allegory, Chapter Thirteen sees Christine Muller scrutinise one of the most economically successful and culturally impactful genre variations to emerge from the American film industry in the last two decades, the renaissance of the superhero film. While it is an emergence which has been criticised by many (see Alan Moore's criticism of it as a "cultural catastrophe" in Flood, 2014), its impact has been so profound that to dismiss it seems imprudent, and, as Richard Gray and Betty Kaklamanidou observed in their The 21st Century Superhero Essays on Gender, Genre and Globalization in Film (2011), in many ways the 2000s were the 'decade of the superhero' (Gray and Kaklamanidou 1). Indeed, one can deal a great deal about a culture by its heroic mythology. Just as the ancient Greeks had tales of Hercules and Achilles, late nineteenth century America turned to mythologised stories of Wyatt Earp and Davy Crockett, in the twentieth century and into twenty-first, western culture found its heroic ideals embodied in comic-book heroes like Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. In Muller's chapter, "Post-9/11 Power and Responsibility in the Marvel Cinematic Universe", she considers the relationship between the superhero film and the tumultuous post-9/11 era, exploring the ideological function of superhero narratives. Muller looks at how the Marvel Cinematic Universe often returned to trauma in a variety of forms in their films which frequently emerge not as bloated blockbusters empty of resonance, but texts which engage with the decade in deeply revealing ways (see DiPaolo and McSweeney). Far removed from the cartoonish fantasyscapes of Salkind era Superman (1977) or the increasingly extravagant excesses of Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher's Batman years, the real world set Marvel Cinematic Universe films, beginning with Iron Man (2008), are deeply immersed in what we might call the ongoing 'War on Terror' narrative. While some writers have dismissed the genre as perpetuating hegemonic ideological systems (see Hassler-Forrest) Muller argues that they are able to, at times, offer more than the conservative world view they are primarily associated with. The defining events of the 'War on Terror' era thus become replayed in the MCU through the melodramatic spectacle of the superhero genre.
Dark Paradise
Authors: Fuller Jennifer
Published: September 2017

The discovery of the Pacific islands amplified the qualities of mystery and exoticism already associated with “foreign” islands. Their “savage” peoples, their isolation, and their sheer beauty fascinated British visitors. This monograph examines British depictions of the smaller islands of the Pacific across the long nineteenth century and argues that while the British originally believed the islands to be commercial paradises or perfect sites for missionary endeavours, as the century progressed their optimistic vision transformed to portray darker realities. The books argues that these islands act as a “breaking point” for British theories of imperialism, colonialism, and identity, and traces in these narratives changing British attitudes towards imperial settlement as the early view of “island as paradise” eventually gives way to a fear of the hostile islanders. This revelation undermined a key tenet of British imperialism in the Pacific – that they were the “superior” or “civilized” islanders.
Sapere Aude?
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: September 2017

Employing Foucault’s 1984 reflection on the ‘critical ethos’ of modernity, the opening return statement interrogates the relationship between the Kantian concept of enlightenment and the contemporary reactions associated with post-secular and post-colonial thought.
Noli mi tangere!
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: September 2017

This statement takes up Jean Luc Nancy’s Corpus (2000) and interrogates the Christian theme of the body in post-phenomenological traditions in France, also drawing upon the early Christian gospels.
Living and Dying Under the Double Horizon of the Death of God
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: September 2017

This statement returns to provide a close reading of Derrida’s seminal lecture “Faith and Reason” in order to situate the different senses of religion that could be said to be returning today.
Introduction: Diodorus’ Work and Our Sources
Authors: Stronk Jan P.
Published: September 2017

The introduction discusses what is known at present of Diodorus’ life and his work, the methods he used to apply structure to his work, and the views that guided him. Furthermore, ample attention is paid to the manuscript tradition on which the several editions that present the current audience with Diodorus’ works were grounded as well as to the main editions of the work from the medieval period onwards.
The Vicissitudes of the Diadoch Kingdoms: The Final Years of Diodorus’ Persian Account
Authors: Stronk Jan P.
Published: September 2017

This chapter falls, in fact, apart in two parts, the first discussing the events, from 310 bc onward, leading up to the Battle of Ipsus (which took place in 301 bc and where Antigonus the One-eyed was killed and Demetrius barely survived) and the battle’s aftermath, the second part discussing the period between c. 280 and c. 64 bc, when the arrival of Pompey formally ended the Seleucid empire, already weakened due to the invasion of the Parthians. In this second part, several Seleucid rulers feature prominently. The end of the Seleucid empire marked the end of Diodorus’ history of Persia. The Ptolemies survived about 30 years longer as rulers before they also formally submitted to Rome: their demise ended the Hellenist kingdoms.
Conclusion
Authors: Stronk Jan P.
Published: September 2017

It is futile to try and determine to which category of authors most ancient authors, emphatically including Diodorus of Sicily, belong. What is possible, is to value the account of ancient authors as regards the amount of information they provide the current audience with, using a distinct form of ‘Quellenkritik’. As such, the value of Diodorus’ Historical Library -a typical example of Hellenistic literature- is tremendous, in spite of its emphasis on aretê, though hugely undervalued.
Deleuze and Baudrillard
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This book theorises shifts in and across critical approaches to capitalism, science, technology, psychoanalysis, literature, and cinema and media studies. Analysing a wide range of novels and films, the book brings renewed Marxian readings to cyberpunk texts previously theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard, and places them at the heart of the emergence of biopunk and its relation to biocapitalism by mapping their generic, technoscientific, libidinal, and economic exchanges. Biocapitalism is the frontline of capitalism today that promises to enrich and prolong our lives and threatens to extend capitalism's capacity to command our hearts and minds. Biopunk is the literature and film of this new space.
Remote-Control Society
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953). This novel imagines a society where minority pressure groups and mass communications technology have evolved into a concordance between masses and the State. Culturally and historically depthless, the fragile texture of a society governed by technology and simulacra is regulated not by an authoritarian State, but by the public themselves — what Baudrillard calls the simulation pact. With that in mind, this chapter argues that Fahrenheit 451's vision of the future has traversed the dystopian model, particularly that of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, to become an inversive utopia, and that its forms of subjectivity can be explained through Deleuze and Guattari's account of fascism.
Durable Consumers
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers anatomo-politics through an examination of Eric Garcia's biopunk novel The Repossession Mambo (2009) and Miguel Sapochnik's film Repo Men (2010). The two texts illuminate different aspects of biocapitalistic consumption and biopolitical existence, describing a complex system of circulating biocapital, and the social life of biocommodities — artiforgs (artificial organs). Together and against each other, they grasp Foucault's anatomo-politics, and understand what Baudrillard means when he suggests that consumption has emerged as a form of control. Just as R.U.R. linked industrial production to overproduction, these texts link consumerism to biocapitalistic overconsumption through a cluster of interconnected, contagious forms that form an assemblage of contradictions: the decaying urban landscape and vigorous property development, pharmaceutical therapies and drug addiction, and cancerous organs and the artiforgs that replace them.
Viral Capitalism
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces the last of the contagious forms under discussion — viruses. It looks at Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral (2012), which engages biotechnology, bodily transformation, and psychosis, all the time maintaining a self-reflexive approach towards the cinematic image. Like the SF films of his father, David Cronenberg, Antiviral attracts either a Deleuzian or a Baudrillardian interpretation. Rather than confining this analysis to either approach, this chapter suggests that Antiviral lays claim to a new, synthetic reading, inspired by Thierry Bardini's Junkware (2011), which is exceptional for its synthesis of Baudrillard and Deleuze into a fourth phase of capitalism. The chapter examines the rationale of this fourth phase and addresses the shortcomings of Bardini's thesis.
Justice in a Complex World: An Introduction1
Authors: Barcelos Paulo
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of global justice. Theorising about global justice starts by questioning the symbolic role classically attributed to national borders as not only physical and administrative circumscriptions but also frontiers demanding the contours of the groups of people that are included and excluded from a scheme of distributive justice, that is, from a system of rules and institutions designed to regulate the distribution of the benefits and burdens originated from social cooperation between the individuals that compose a given community's basic structure. Defenders of global liberal conceptions of justice employ two types of argument to justify the inclusion of all persons worldwide within the web of normative ties between persons that create duties of moral assistance.
Economic Justice and the Minimally Good Human Life Account of Needs
Authors: Hassoun Nicole
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses the minimally good human life account of needs. On the minimally good human life account, people need whatever enables them to live minimally good human lives. Most perfectionists are concerned with what it is for a human life to be good as opposed to minimally good. The chapter suggests that whether or not one lives a minimally good human life is not a completely subjective matter. Rather, a minimally good human life is characteristically choice-worthy and a life in which one can make some significant choices. In making such choices one must be free to shape one's own life. Indeed, because humans are distinctively autonomous creatures, autonomy is characteristic of a minimally good human life.
Restitution and Distributive Justice
Authors: DeMartino George F. , Moyer Jonathan D.
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the extent of consensus and disagreement among alternative contemporary accounts of justice on the matter of the kinds of events that might warrant restitution and, consequently, the computation of the magnitude of restitution. The goal is not to adjudicate the relevant normative controversies, but rather to illustrate the significance of normative theory for the restitution project. For purposes of demonstration, the chapter focuses on three important traditions in the recent scholarship on economic justice: the libertarian tradition of political philosophy, the liberal contractarian approach, and the capabilities approach. This focus shows that normative controversy surrounding the concept of justice bears heavily on considerations pertaining to restitution.
Portrait of the Female Character as a Psychoanalytical Case: The Ambiguous Influence of Freud on May Sinclair’s Novels
Authors: Bont Leslie de
Published: September 2017

When May Sinclair started to write fiction and read psychoanalytical papers in the 1890s, case histories were emerging as a crucial medium that helped Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, as well as the other founding fathers of psychoanalysis to address the new and singular questions raised by their most puzzling patients. Indeed, the case proved to be a valuable tool in the epistemology of psychoanalytical research: writing case histories enabled pioneer psychoanalysts to challenge existing theories, set up new approaches and develop new discourses. But the case study is also a textual object that relies on dialogue, deixis, narrative and analysis, in ways that are quite similar to fictional writing.
Sinclair’s key psychological research papers – “The Way of Sublimation” (1915), “Clinical Lectures” (1916) and “Psychological Types” (1923) – suggest that she favoured a more Jungian-based eclectic approach to psychoanalysis, which she also integrated into her two philosophical books A Defence of Idealism (1917) and The New Idealism (1922), over Freud’s sexual theory. Yet, even if she distanced herself from some (but not all) of Freud’s theses, as we shall see, his influence remained central to her fiction and non-fiction, and more particularly to her textual strategies and character depiction.
May Sinclair and Physical Culture: Fit Greeks and Flabby Victorians
Authors: Bowler Rebecca
Published: September 2017

The Combined Maze, published in 1911, is an allegory about two possible futures for the human race. One possible future is to continue along Victorian lines, with working men and women either ‘weedy, parched, furtively inebriate’ like Ranny’s father, or with the ‘flabbiness’ of his father’s chemist assistant, Mercier.1 The alternative is for young people to throw off their Victorian shackles, to stride forth into the world, to run and jump, and to establish their lives upon the principles of moral and physical fitness. This chapter argues that Sinclair presents physical activity, strength training and joy in movement as the solution to moral, psychological and physical flabbiness. It makes explicit the similarities between Ezra Pound’s vortex and the vortex of Sinclair’s The Combined Maze, and Sinclair’s vision of the active modern woman with the discourses on race, fitness and eugenics (all inflected with classicist ideals) that were circulating in the early twentieth century.
Why British Society Had to ‘Get a Young Virgin Sacrificed’: Sacrificial Destiny in The Tree of Heaven
Authors: Schyllert Sanna Melin
Published: September 2017

In May Sinclair’s fiction, images of sacrifice abound. From the self-abnegating Katherine Haviland in Audrey Craven (1897) to the eponymous antiheroine of The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), Sinclair’s central characters seem to be eternally struggling with the issue of renunciation. The treatment of the theme is heterogeneous in many of Sinclair’s texts, not least in the novel The Tree of Heaven, which both condemns and praises personal sacrifice for a higher or communal purpose. This displays a fundamental insecurity about the nature, function and value of sacrifice. It is this ambivalence, which underlies so much of Sinclair’s fiction, in combination with the individual mixture of philosophies in her work, that will be explored here.
This chapter investigates the concept of sacrifice in the war novel The Tree of Heaven and how it is connected to community and feminism. In order to find an understanding of sacrifice as proposed by Sinclair, and its meaning in the lives of both women and men in the context of early 20th century England, the chapter discusses the crossroads in the text between sacrifice, idealism, feminism, and the nation-wide feeling of community that appears to be required in wartime.
‘Odd How the War Changes Us’: May Sinclair and Women’s War Work
Authors: Liggins Emma
Published: September 2017

Due to her experiences in Hector Munro’s Ambulance Corps in Belgium in 1914, Sinclair was able to comment both in her memoir and her war fiction on the ways in which middle-class women’s involvement in the new working opportunities offered by the war helped to revise ideologies of gender and sexuality, not least in terms of their occupation of the public sphere. However, her public endorsement of women’s work is at odds with contradictory attitudes to the woman worker in her fiction, who is often repositioned in the boredom of home in the final chapters. Developing critical discussions of Sinclair as a writer of spinster fiction (Pease 2012; Liggins 2014), I address the ways in which unmarried heroines negotiate their outsider non-combatant position. Narratives about the hierarchical structures of these new ambulance corps always focus on the activity of driving as a test-case for women’s fitness for war service; I argue that this can be read in terms of negotiations about gender and power. Sexual difference appears inescapable on the Front, even as Sinclair considers ways in which it might be transcended through war work.
Introduction
Authors: Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter briefly examines how, out of the formative encounter between Deleuze and Lucretius, Lucretian atomism provoked Deleuzeanism. Although Deleuze consistently expressed his admiration for Lucretian atomism throughout his life, his relationship to this ancient philosophy has been almost completely ignored. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to briefly explore the idea of atomism as a provocative predecessor to Deleuze's own theory of ideas. To put another way, atomism articulates the problem to which Deleuzeanism is one response, where the problems and concepts that characterised, structured, and defined atomism, especially in its Lucretian form, have generated many of the main problems and concepts operating in Deleuze's writings.
Ethics in the Garden of Epicurus
Authors: Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2017

This chapter develops an Epicurean-Deleuzean ethics as the articulation of the practice of an immanent naturalism that links ancient atomism to Deleuze by means of a ‘great tradition’ in ethics, following ‘a secret link between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche’. Using Deleuze's formulation of the Nietzschean method of symptomatology, the chapter returns to the concept of the atomic idea. Lucretian atomism, for Deleuze, takes nature to be the object shared by both a speculative and a practical philosophy, and so is a fully affirmative naturalism in both thought and act. Deleuzean-atomic ethics is then an immanent theory that links up directly with the problems or ideas that have been seen, in previous chapters, to operate in metaphysics, physics, and epistemology or sensation. In this way, Deleuze's atomism is a thoroughgoing and affirmative naturalism.
Worldly Realism
Authors: Morris Pam
Published: September 2017

A preliminary discussion of Northanger Abbey and Jacob’s Room, foregrounds Austen’s and Woolf’s insistence upon non-heroic, unexceptional protagonists, the challenge their writing poses to existing genres and its disjunction from established, consensual interpretive systems. Jacques Ranciére’s concept of consensual and dissensual regimes of the perceptible, and recent accounts of the constitutive relationship of inanimate objects with self, provide a theoretical framework for discussing these experimental aspects of each writer’s work. The chapter maps an epistemological tradition linking these current perspectives to the Enlightenment empiricism of David Hume, Adam Smith, David Hartley, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Austen’s contemporary. The materialism of eighteenth-century thinkers constitutes the sceptical intellectual inheritance of Austen and Woolf. It underpins their development of worldly realism, an experimental writing practice, utilising innovative focalisation techniques to foreground relations of equality across the worlds of people, things and natural universe. Hence it constitutes a radical undermining of the idealist ideology of individualism.