bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: Seeing Things ‘Perspectively’
Authors: Monte Steven
Published: January 2023

This chapter outlines the book’s arguments and situates them among scholarly debates. More specifically, it argues that the genre of “the sonnet sequence” is crucial for reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, entailing as it does ideas about artistic craft, and competitive relations among poets. What is more, the art of perspective figures in the poet’s views of his beloved in the sonnets. The chapter also offers explanations for why reading with organizational expectations has been neglected, reviewing the reception of the sonnets and the critical landscape since Romanticism.
Romantic Pasts
Authors: Fermanis Porscha
Published: January 2023

Working against the longstanding belief that British romantic-era history is primarily ‘feeling’ or sentimental, Romantic Pasts argues that historians from Mary Wollstonecraft to Thomas Carlyle developed a new kind of cognitive or psychological historicism that was as much concerned with motive as with affect. Recognising that feelings could be a viable object of historical study as well as a sentimental or affective mode, these historians increasingly reconfigured psycho-physiological and behavioural processes as situated and historically variable phenomena that could reflect changes in social and historical contexts. Weaving together literary criticism, the history of emotion, theories of the novel and philosophies of history, this book rethinks the paradigm of resurrection or revivification that has come to stand for romantic history, as well as that history’s place within the development of modern historiography.
Introduction: Romantic Histories of Feeling
Authors: Fermanis Porscha
Published: January 2023

This introductory chapter traces the complex relationship between feeling and the making of the modern historical method in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Focusing on ‘official’ history rather than on quasi- or para-historical genres, it makes the case that debates about the role and status of feeling played a central role in determining both the moving boundaries between history and fiction, and how historical methods developed as the nineteenth century progressed. In suggesting that sentimentalism was not an uncontested way of representing even the most radical disassociations in the development of historical consciousness (such as the English and French Revolutions), it argues for an emerging distinction in the period’s written history between a sentimental historicism (or ‘feeling history’) concerned with the representation of affective states and a psychological historicism (or ‘history of feeling’) concerned with the analysis of motives and mental states.
Democratic Transition Studies: Lessons from Another Region
Authors: Bishara Azmi
Published: January 2023

The problem with transition theory is not its bias towards democracy or lack of objectivity, but its Eurocentric tendency to universalize the western experience and over-generalize from it. Generalisations dilute initial findings into platitudes, leaving little beyond the commitment to the integrity of the state, and the importance of the elite choices. The challenge is thus to transcend and enriching it with new findings from other regions. This is precisely what this work tries to do, by bringing in Arab experiences (mainly in Egypt and Tunisia). Important lessons include: the difficulty of dislodging entrenched despotisms with an intact security apparatus, except with foreign support; the importance of acceptance and loyalty to the nation state; avoiding premature elections in the absence of elite consensus, for it could trigger conflict in fragile states. The priority should thus be building consensus around effective state institutions.
Elite Women and Democratisation in Morocco, 1998–2016
Authors: Essaoudi Tourya
Published: January 2023

This chapter highlights the neglected, but significant, contribution of elite Moroccan women to advancing democratization, well beyond the vanguard struggle for rights. Occupying influential political leadership positions during the 1980s and 1990s, this elite (in both intellectual and class sense) also made significant intellectual contributions to the formulation of democratic concepts. Emphasizing the centrality of equality to democracy, they advanced transition to democracy by generalising this core feminist demand. The chapter argues that elite Moroccan women mobilization succeeded in pressing their demands and asserting a presence at the heart of the political system. Strategies including media campaigns, national and international networking, and enlisting power centres, such as the monarchy. While only a small portion of emerging female elite engaged in political activism, the overall impact was significant. Undeterred by the rise of (an admittedly moderate) Islamist government, feminists in fact succeeded in enlisting support from an important section of “Islamist feminists” behind key demands for women-friendly legislation. While there is still a long way go to achieve full equality, the feminist elite have contributed significantly to the practice and language of democratization. They also pose some paradoxical challenges to existing theories of democratization and elite roles.
Democratic Transition in Rivalry Contexts
Authors: Kabalan Marwan
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on the role of external actors and the global environment in facilitating or complicating the transition to democracy following the 2011 Arab revolutions. It argues that domestic conditions, no matter how conducive, cannot alone guarantee successful democratic transitions. The right domestic environment is a necessary, but not a sufficient, factor for realizing democracy, especially in rivalry contexts. In fact, the likelihood of a successful democratic transition diminishes in regional and international rivalry contexts, with external factors becoming the decisive independent variable determining success or failure of the transition. Here, revolutions and domestic instability invite external powers to intervene in favour of rival forces (pro- or anti-change), rendering the domestically originated protest movements into a geo-political conflict. In Syria, Libya and Yemen, foreign interference transformed the 2011 protests into protracted civil wars, subduing any hopes for a peaceful democratic transition. In Bahrain, a Saudi-led military intervention (ostensibly to curb Iranian influence) quickly put down popular protests. In contrast, integration contexts provide incentives and channels of support for democratic transition.
A Stranger Everywhere: The écho-monde of Tony Gatlif’s Exiles
Authors: Talijan Emilija
Published: January 2023

This chapter takes forward the resonant body to questions of national borders and bodies constituted in or by the national and social spheres. It brings in the thinking of post-colonial theorist Édouard Glissant and his concept of the écho-monde, a sound-space associated with ‘wombs’ of the ships of the Middle Passage, bringing slaves to Europe. For Glissant, the écho-monde becomes a productive way of imagining a poetics of relation, the various feedbacks that take place across geographic borders, rarefied cultural spheres and fixed identity positions.
The chapter argues that Tony Gatlif’s placement of sound and appeal to noise as a migratory event in Exiles (2004) opens cinematic écho-mondes that can express the contaminations, feedbacks and relations that take place between categories and identities. Gatlif loosens the security of the relationship between image and sound to create a world of capacious relations between a sound’s origin and its identity. The audio track neither belongs to Exiles images, nor is it wholly other and so becomes a vessel for the body’s expropriations and the experience of being a ‘stranger everywhere’. This approach expands our sense of the spaces cinema makes palpable and the possibilities the medium offers for the articulation of an exilic identity.
Vagaries Of Bilingualism. A Curious Case Of Beckett’S Translations Of His Own Poems
Authors: Studniarz Sławomir
Published: January 2023

Beckett’s translations of his own poems from French into English puzzle both his admirers and his devoted scholars. Marjorie Perloff was the first to draw attention to the disparity between the French originals and their subsequent rendering in English, on the example of “je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse” and “my way is in the sand flowing.” As is the case of many works by Beckett first written in French and then translated by himself, the French original and the English version are never exact counterparts or analogues of each other. Beckett’s translating practice goes to prove the thesis advanced in translation studies that self-translators usually take advantage of poetic license and rewrite “their” originals. In fact, Beckett’s bilingual creations invite rather a study of semantic interplay between the two linguistic versions.    This chapter deals with the three poems first published in Transition 48.2, June 1946: “je voudrais que mon amour meure,” “je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse,” and “que ferais-je sans ce monde sans visage sans questions”, and their English counterparts. Finally, some attention is given to “Comment dire” and “what is the word.” The last two mentioned texts merit special attention as they are Beckett’s final works, “what is the word” appearing in print shortly after his death.
Literal Translation Vs. Self-Translation: The Beckett–Pinget Collaboration On The Radio Play CENDRES ( Embers )
Authors: Verhulst Pim
Published: January 2023

Although Beckett is generally known as a self-translator, he did not systematically render his own work into French and English before the 1970s. Until that time, he enlisted the help of various third parties, either translating his texts together with them on the spot or revising their work afterwards. Many of these collaborations left behind material traces which offer unique insight into the little-studied practice of co-translation. This chapter focuses on the French version of Beckett’s radio play Embers. Using unpublished information from the Pinget papers at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris and Beckett’s letters to Barbara Bray at TCD, this chapter compares some of the choices made by Beckett and Pinget throughout the remaining drafts of Cendres. Its purpose is to study genetically the differences between a ‘transliteration’ and a ‘(self)-translation’, showing how the former seeks to imitate or stand in for the original, while the latter continues its – in this case bilingual – genesis with more creative leeway.
Translation’s Challenge to Lyric’s Immediacy: Beckett’s Rimbaud
Authors: Dennis Amanda
Published: January 2023

In part, translation forces acknowledgment of the extent to which a textual encounter is mediated by mnemonic, cultural, temporal, generic and linguistic networks. Beckett’s spirited translation of Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre expresses his skepticism about the immediacy and spontaneity associated with the lyric, foregrounding instead the associative networks that contribute to the poem’s composition. In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin asserts that “no translation would be possible if it strove for likeness to the original,” and Beckett practices this theory in the extreme.  He does this by finding English equivalents for inter-textual allusions to Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage,” and “Le Cygne” and to Victor Hugo’s “Oceano’s nox.” By replacing these with echoes of Ezra Pound and Christian catechism, Beckett’s translation reveals the irony of the fact that the poem’s sense of being “free” derives in part from its allusions to a literary tradition of French lyricism. In this chapter, Amanda Dennis asks how Beckett’s early expression of translation as mediation inspires his later work of self-translation — especially his deviations from the “original” French that draw on Hiberno-English cultural associations, place names and puns, focusing on Molloy to make this point.
Tuning Absent Pianos: WATT and the poetics of translation
Authors: Andrade Fábio de Souza
Published: January 2023

In Beckett’s works, misencounters are often the expression of an unbridgeable abyss between the world and the words, the body and the mind, presence and representation, as different examples such as the asynchronous timetable in Mercier et Camier or the always postponed meeting with Godot attest. They point out how “empêchement” should replace positive “correspondence” in Beckettian poetics as a whole, translation included. This paper concentrates on a reading of Watt, interested in looking for allegorical expressions of this permanent gap so significant in translation’s tasks and objectives. It explores particularly the Galls’ piano tuning episode – and the semantic crisis it causes – as a critical metaphor of the limits and possibilities of translation from a Beckettian perspective. De Souza Andrade interprets this episode as an example of the rupture between subject and object and believes that translation in Beckett should be considered as an opportunity for inventiveness.
Late Modernism and the Poetics of Place
Authors: Alexander Neal
Published: January 2023

This monograph offers a decisive reappraisal of both the literary history and the literary geography of Anglophone modernism by focusing attention on poetry from both sides of the Atlantic. Where recent studies of late modernism tend to regard it as an inter-war or mid-century phenomenon, this book contends that the period 1945-1975 marks a major phase of experiment and achievement in late modernist poetry. The author argues that what distinguishes the work of many late modernist poets during this period is its multi-layered poetics of place. In part, this is due to the engagement of individual writers with contemporary developments in human and physical geography. It is also manifest in the tendency of late modernist poets to foreground the cultural significance of regional and non-metropolitan places in their texts. The book employs an interdisciplinary methodology, combining literary criticism and cultural geography, but also drawing upon philosophy, art history, and urban sociology. It also develops innovative critical readings of key texts by a group of important but neglected modernist poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Basil Bunting, W. S. Graham, David Jones, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Olson.
Conclusion: After Late Modernism
Authors: Alexander Neal
Published: January 2023

The Conclusion considers the significance and legacy of late modernist poetry, particularly the role that key late modernist poets play as mediating figures, enabling influences for younger generations of poets from Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean who continue to write in modernist and experimental modes. It argues that these poets, many of whom began their publishing careers in the 1960s, are best understood as neo-modernists, for their work – unlike that of their late modernist forebears – does not straddle the decisive historical break of the Second World War but comes into being in the altered conditions of the Cold War. Nonetheless, it is clear that late modernist poets played a crucial role in stimulating neo-modernist poets’ wide-ranging interests in place, space, and landscape.
Superhero Blockbusters
Authors: Brinker Felix
Published: January 2023

Superhero Blockbusters: Seriality and Politicsexamines the enduring popularity of blockbuster films based on DC or Marvel superhero comics. It argues that the success of superhero movies is rooted in a multi-dimensional seriality that endows films of the genre with an unmatched potential to engage audiences over longer periods of time, to solicit a range of cultural activities, and to actively intervene in the discourses of online fandom and professional film criticism. To make this case, the book develops a critical theory of digital-era popular seriality and examines the evolution of superhero movies from Superman (1978) to Avengers: Endgame (2019) and beyond. It also discusses textual and extra-textual practices of fan mobilization and considers the genre’s shared political imagery and its purchase on contemporary political debates.
The Hyper-Referential Style of Storytelling
Authors: Brinker Felix
Published: January 2023

This chapter considers the key elements, mobilizing power, and evolution of the hyper-referential storytelling style that is at work in films of the genre. Combining a high density of references to other superhero narratives with attempts to approximate the aesthetics of comic books, this style is already on display in Richard Donner’s Superman(1978) and serves to locate feature films within larger networks of closely related narratives and media. Suggesting that this style evolves in response to larger cultural, medial, and industrial transformations, the chapter argues that more recent superhero blockbuster films have successively increased the frequency of their references to other narratives and media. To make this case, the chapter traces the evolution of the hyper-referential style across four waves of releases that began with Donner’s Supermanand came to an end in 2020, after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Superhero Blockbuster as Fan Management
Authors: Brinker Felix
Published: January 2023

This chapter considers the fan management practices that position superhero blockbusters within the discourses of online fandom. Building on the arguments of the preceding chapters and recent work by Mel Stanfill, Matt Hills and others, the chapter examines the 2016 films Deadpooland Suicide Squad, as well as accompanying marketing efforts, to show how corporate actors actively intervene in the discourses and practices of online fandom.
Martel Variations
Authors: Amante Adriana , Brizuela Natalia
Published: January 2023

Focusing on some early and short productions by Lucrecia Martel, the article will analyze the essayistic dimension of his cinema: cinema as an act of thinking, which is, in her case, to think of cinema as writing. The documentary as a writing (or perhaps a score, but always –above all– a notation) that articulates image and sound as a fully verbivocovisual composition. The essayistic dimension, as a slow mode of scrutiny of an idea, materializes in certain critical objects, as happens in research essays: fish, water, dogs, children, Silvina Ocampo, a pond, a pool, Encarnación Ezcurra or some texts (Zama, Argirópolis). The documentary is thought not as a record of the real, but as a notation of a process of elaboration of the real. There is, endeed, a syntax in her cinema which involves or realises (i.e., crystallises) her prosody. That syntax defines the (dis)order in which the moods of the situations, rather than the facts, become chained. Martel’s cinema, therefore, as a writing, as a musical notation of variations.
Temporal Deconstructions: Narrating The Ruins Of Time
Authors: Norquay Glenda
Published: January 2023

Glenda Norquay looks at fiction by Kate Atkinson, A.L. Kennedy, Ali Smith and Louise Welsh, and at their preoccupation with what Smith calls the ‘annoying’ fact of temporality. For Norquay, the four writers challenge temporality politically, in order to contest conventional narratives around romance and ultimately to address the gendering of history. By looking at the past and its relationship to the future, the novels examined by Norquay challenge heteronormative futurity to destabilise familiarity, either with the present, or with the dominant discourse associated with it. Norquay also re-examines the notion of queer temporality and its connection with a particular historical moment, showing that similarly to the way that theoretical thinking around queer temporality developed in the 1980s around the AIDS crisis, the current focusing on WWII performs the function of looking at the present as crisis, which in turn shapes a different future.
Mapping Escape: Geography and Genre
Authors: Baker Timothy C.
Published: January 2023

Timothy Baker’s chapter approaches women’s fiction through their depiction of and connection with landscape, making use of Westphal’s theory on geocriticism, as well as Braidotti’s re-reading of Deleuze on maps, and his notion of nomadism. Focusing mainly on recent fiction by Laura Marney, Jeni Fagan, Linda Cracknell, Sarah Moss, but also crime novels by Karen Campbell, Denise Mina and Shona MacLean, Baker tackles the question of spatial identity, showing how the various authors create Gothic landscapes that defamiliarize the familiar, or use the generic codes of crime to reach a similar goal. The real and the imaginary therefore interact, with the map seen as a tool of interaction, a way to chart not a real, fixed place, but a network of possibilities.
On Aristotle, Actuality And Potentiality
Authors: Dickinson Colby
Published: January 2023

Agamben’s critique of the Aristotelian categories that have dominated western metaphysics and theology have led him to interrogate the use of dualisms in western thought on the whole insofar as they are used to legitimate traditional political and ethical relations. The dualism of potentiality/actuality is referred to repeatedly in the Homo Sacer series, including as the metaphysical basis for the foundations of power—constituted and constituting, governance and sovereignty. One’s power, one’s true sovereignty, comes not from acting, or performing the appearance of having to act, but from refraining from action, from the weakness or impotency ‘that turns back on itself’ and becomes a ‘pure act’ in another sense altogether from that which defines traditional forms of sovereign and divine power. As a form of resistance, this alternative power is captured in the figures of Bartleby the Scrivener and of Christ—figures Agamben pursues in-depth. This is precisely where we can locate the other form of sovereignty accessed through contemplation as the ‘use-of-oneself’ that is also a ‘zone of non-consciousness’, allowing for contemplation to be defined as a habit that occupies the form-of-life.
Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States
Authors: Weiner Scott
Published: January 2023

Tribe-state relations are a foundational element of authoritarian bargains in the Middle East, and in particular in the Gulf States. However, the structures of governance built upon that foundation exhibit wide differences. What explains this variation in the salience of kinship authority? Through a case comparison of Kuwait, Qatar and Oman, the book shows that variation in tribal access to limited resources before state building can account for these differences. Its conclusions are based on seven months of archival research and interviews in Arabic and English, and reveal new details about state formation on the Arabian Peninsula.
State Building in Kuwait
Authors: Weiner Scott J
Published: January 2023

Considers the case of Kuwait between 1899 and 1990 as an example of competitive access to vital limited resources before state building. In the periphery, British and Kuwaiti historic records illustrate in great detail the conflicts between kinship groups and the limited extent of water resources. In the center, Kuwait’s Emir and the predominantly Shi’a merchant families of Kuwait City enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship in which the Emir provided security for merchants, and merchants provided financial resources through taxation for the Emir. The chapter also provides new details of how water was distributed in pre-oil Kuwait based largely on trust and personal relationships. It then shows how Kuwait created infrastructure, moved non-urban tribal populations based predominantly in the Nejd desert onto that infrastructure, imposed bureaucratic authority, and created buy-in for this authority through a nationalist idiom. Throughout state building, Kuwait engaged with kinship groups themselves, reifying the importance of kinship authority in the process. The result is that kinship in Kuwait has governing salience.
The Alternative Modernity of the Bicycle in British and French Literature, 1880-1920
Authors: Brogan Una
Published: January 2023

Contributing to an established area of research that interrogates the cultural impact of technology, this book engages with the long-overlooked bicycle as a crucial literary and cultural object. In a selection of turn-of-the-century fiction, travel writing and non-fiction, cycling is revealed to be a favoured literary device, allowing writers to structure their narratives in new ways or depict a fresh sensory and aesthetic experience. Moreover, this study reveals that from its earliest days, the bicycle played a compelling counter-cultural role, proposing an alternative modernity that directly challenged bourgeois, patriarchal, capitalist society. From blurring gender and class divisions, to offering a more empowering interaction with the machine and allowing an embodied and social experience of space, the bicycle pointed a human-powered route to progress amidst increasingly mechanised visions of the future.
Liberation on Two Wheels: Class, Gender and the Bicycle in Literature
Authors: Brogan Una
Published: January 2023

Chapter 2 focuses on the bicycle’s revolutionary role in class and
gender relations. Close readings of three of Wells’s social novels
allow us to appreciate the evolving symbolism and narrative function of a vehicle that seemed capable of eroding strict Victorian class and moral structures. Secondly, I examine the bicycle’s relationship to the changing status of women in society, asking whether the bicycle really was a ‘freedom machine’. By exploring texts from a range of British, Irish and French authors such as Grant Allen (1848–99), Mary E. Kennard (1850–1936), Matthias Mc Donnell Bodkin (1850–1933) and Émile Zola (1840–1902), I seek to complicate the picture of the bicycle’s role in women’s emancipation by shedding light on the machine’s ambivalent role in a society that remained decidedly patriarchal. A study of the role of bicycles in A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust (1871–1922) closes this chapter, where I highlight the object’s crucial role as a feminist and queer symbol in literature. The bicycle emerges from these texts as a subversive technology that allows its users to transgress and blur gender and social boundaries.
The Body and the Machine: The Sensory Discoveries of the Cyclist
Authors: Brogan Una
Published: January 2023

The third chapter examines the new aesthetic and sensory experiences of the cyclist. Returning to some authors already examined and integrating others such as J. W. Allen (1865–1944), J. H. Rosny (1856–1940), Alfred Jarry and Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957), I analyse the ways in which the bicycle offered direct contact with speed and mechanism alongside a rich sensory experience. Cyclists enjoyed a hybrid of mechanical and corporeal sensations which provided rich ground for literary experimentation. The close relationship between rider and machine allowed a questioning of the man/machine dichotomy, moving away from the alienation of the industrial era in order to achieve a more empowering and meaningful interaction with technology.
Bergson's Philosophy of Biology
Authors: Posteraro Tano
Published: January 2023

While we now seem to be in the midst of what some have called a full-blown “Bergson renaissance,” a number of obstacles to Bergson’s uptake as a serious philosopher of biology remain. Among them are his association with the legacy of vitalism, his commitment to a scientifically untenable metaphysics, and the progress made by the life sciences since. This book paints a different portrait. It argues that the typical criticisms are mistaken, and that Bergson should be understood as a philosopher of biology with contemporary relevance. Its main interpretive move is to uncover a concept of virtual tendency in Bergson’s thought and to use it to present a renewed understanding of Bergson’s philosophy of biology.
Individuality and Organisation
Authors: Posteraro Tano S.
Published: January 2023

This chapter uses the idea of tendency to show how space and time are not categories, but tendencies. The human intellect seizes on these tendencies and abstracts them to their limits to arrive at the idea of a static spatial grid on the one hand, set against time as a purely interior psychological state on the other. The author argues that all material systems are constituted by some combination of spatial and temporal tendencies. This means that the life/matter dualism that seems to structure much of the popular reception of Bergson’s philosophy has been misunderstood, as inert matter is a category like space. It is an abstraction. Organised material systems, or organisms, are in a particular sort of dynamic equilibrium between the two tendencies. This means that organisation is not a property, as the vitalists have claimed, but a manifestation of the tendency towards time achieving predominance in a material system. This chapter clarifies a number of interpretive difficulties in the reception of Bergson’s philosophy of life. Philosophers of science interested in the recent turn towards process in the philosophy of biology, as well as those interested in the philosophical dimensions of Developmental Systems Theory, should find these discussions particularly engaging.
Conclusion. Conduits for the Humane: Walsh’s Optic Verve
Authors: Lloyd David
Published: January 2023

Catherine Walsh’s Optic Verve deploys a variety of poetic forms, from “lyric” fragments to prose commentary and narrative verse, in a complex meditation on the long and destructive history of Irish modernity. Against the vexed conditions that sustain and impede the work of writing and the colonization of daily language by commodification and bureaucratic euphemism, Walsh forges a mode of writing that allows her to draw together the destructive impacts of contemporary neoliberalism with the survival of practices of mutual aid and life in common that persisted through the destructiveness an earlier colonial mode of modernization. They come together in constellations of instants and languages that recall Walter Benjamin’s dialectical images, where past and present converge. Walsh’s work proves exemplary of the ways in which Irish modernist and experimental poetry has continually shown itself capable of inventing forms and languages adequate to Irish conditions a century after the nation’s partial decolonization.
Introduction The Philosopher Armed
Authors: Brennan Shane
Published: January 2023

The introduction places the late publication of Anabasis – written some thirty years after the event – at the heart of the study and introduces the central argument about its Socratic character. Xenophon’s method in Anabasis, it is suggested, is not fundamentally different to that used in the more conventional Socratic works. He implicitly defends Socrates against the charges which resulted in his death in 399, while his own character in the story is in ways a stand-in for Socrates; for instance, he perpetuates the philosopher’s values through his words and actions and takes a conspicuously analytical approach to problem-solving. The second part of the introduction outlines the structure of the monograph and previews its main contents.
Xenophon the Athenian
Authors: Brennan Shane
Published: January 2023

This chapter provides a brief biography of Xenophon of Athens. Focussing on his early years, three factors are identified as major influences on his life and traced to the strong apologetic Tendenz in his writings. Firstly is the figure of Socrates, whom Xenophon became a follower of as a young man and in later life defended in his Socratic writings. Secondly, violent conflict in the form of the Peloponnesian War and the Civil War at Athens which followed it. In the case of the latter, Xenophon may have sought to distance himself from the Thirty Tyrants, who ruled until the restoration of the democracy. Thirdly, his exile from Athens, the date and cause of which are now matters of dispute. He refers to this event only in Anabasis and only in passing, but it is argued in a later chapter that the text on some level answers the charge(s) made against him.
Socrates in Anabasis
Authors: Brennan Shane
Published: January 2023

From Xenophon’s writings it is clear that Socrates was a major influence in his life. Four of his works feature the philosopher prominently, and the thesis of this book is that Anabasis too incorporates a strong Socratic presence. This is signalled by the philosopher’s appearance in the key passage of the work (3.1.5–7) where Xenophon himself is formally introduced into the story. Although Socrates does not thereafter feature again, in his actions and moral bearing throughout the retreat, Xenophon’s character exemplifies Socratic principles. The purpose of this final chapter is to substantiate this argument by showing how ‘Xenophon’ on the retreat represents a model Socratic pupil, the author’s aim being to demonstrate in real world terms the benefit of the Socratic education. In this way he both stakes a claim for the primacy of his Socrates amongst other versions in circulation and offers a defence of his teacher against the historic charges of impiety and corrupting Athenian youth.
Conclusions The Philosopher Unarmed
Authors: Brennan Shane
Published: January 2023

The conclusions summarise the contents of the preceding chapters and draw together the different strands of argument running through the book. The limitations of the interpretation offered are highlighted and onward directions for further research signposted. The exceptional character of Book 7 (Thrace) is considered and an argument made that this final act in the story is intended to cool the aura surrounding the exemplary character of Xenophon. Its message, and perhaps that of Anabasis as a whole, seems to be that virtue is hard earned and can only ever be maintained by constant attention.
‘Spreading Vx Gas Over Kaaba’: Islamic Semiotics In Turkish Black Metal
Authors: Mattsson Douglas
Published: January 2023

Black metal, one of the most extreme subgenres of metal music, is famous for its brutal, multimodal expression in lyrics, imagery and music. The genre’s metanarrative is centred around a disdainful and provocative stance towards religion, one infused with an anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian rhetoric. Blasphemy commonly lies at the heart of this metanarrative. This chapter investigates the use of Islamic semiotics in Turkish black metal. The author argues that the use of anti-Islamic references is closely related to a dialectical relationship with international as well as national expectations of subcultural concepts such as authenticity and identity. Blasphemy in black metal must be further recognised as a subcultural response and resistance to the dominance of pious conservatism in Turkey.
Laughter As Politics
Authors: Giamario Patrick
Published: January 2023

Laughter As Politics offers a novel account of laughter’s role in contemporary political life. A world awash in hilarity has rendered the traditional philosophical question of whether laughter should play a role in politics obsolete. Faced with the laughter generated by late-night comedians, Twitter trolls, and reality TV presidents, we must instead trace how laughter operates politically. Only an account of gelopolitics – that is, of the concrete practices of and regulations around laughter (gelōs [γέλως‎]) that shape and reshape a political community – can reveal the possibilities and dangers of the current moment. Through investigations of the accounts of laughter offered by Thomas Hobbes, Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison, and feminist and queer thinkers like Hélène Cixous and Judith Butler, this book develops a critical theory of laughter that illuminates laughter as a privileged site wherein the contemporary social order constructs, preserves, and transforms itself politically.
Chapter 1
Authors: Giamario Patrick T.
Published: January 2023

This chapter unpacks the political logic of laughter by investigating the relation between Thomas Hobbes’s account of laughter as “sudden vainglory” and his broader political philosophy. The notion of a “laughing body politic” highlights how laughter is an experience/event through which sovereign authority establishes, exerts, and entrenches itself and how sovereignty is in turn haunted by the threat of counter-sovereign disruption. By way of analyses of the 1980 Lenin Shipyard strike and the 2010 Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, the chapter concludes that the political logic of laughter is neither simply sovereign nor simply counter-sovereign, but rather counter/sovereign. Laughter challenges sovereignty only by re-inscribing it anew, and it bolsters sovereignty only by dramatizing its own vulnerability to challenge. Hobbes, in sum, illuminates laughter as an unauthorized, fragile feeling of power through which sovereignty is made, undone, and remade again.
The Best Medicine? Repoliticising Laughter for Contemporary Feminist and Queer Politics
Authors: Giamario Patrick T.
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the enormously influential feminist and queer discourse on laughter inaugurated by Hélène Cixous’s 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” and continued in different forms by Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, and others. This discourse challenges men’s historical monopoly on laughter by conceiving of laughter as an experience that is uniquely capable of undermining patriarchy and heteronormativity. For all this discourse’s merits, its view of laughter as naturally emancipatory obscures how laughter participates in sex and gender politics beyond and oftentimes in tension with its subversive power. Butler’s Herculine Barbin, Sigmund Freud’s The Joke, and Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 Netflix special Nanetteprovide the basis for a re-politicised feminist/queer account of laughter that attends to how laughter produces and sustains conventional conceptions of masculinity and femininity. The chapter concludes that laughter is neither the nemesis nor savior of feminist and queer politics, but a privileged site of political contestation over sex and gender itself.
Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being
Authors: Morin Marie-Eve
Published: January 2023

Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being proposes a reinterpretation of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy from the perspective of realist and object-oriented tendencies in contemporary philosophy. The realist critique of subject-centred anthropocentric thinking indicates the danger, inherent in the phenomenological approach, of reducing being to sense. The author demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty and Nancy avoid this pitfall through the development of ontologies that respect the materiality and exteriority of what exists without reaffirming the Cartesian divide between mind and world. The analysis is oriented around three key ideas where Merleau-Ponty’s and Nancy’s thinking intersect: body, thing and being. Each time, the author tracks the role of difference or spacing within sensing and sense-making and concludes that their respective conceptions – as encroachment and promiscuity or as unpassable limit – may provide counterweights to each other.
Chapter 3 Divergences: Unity versus Dislocation
Authors: Morin Marie-Eve
Published: January 2023

This chapter stages the first encounter between Merleau-Ponty and Nancy. While both situate the locus of sense-making in the body, for Merleau-Ponty there is a priority of unity over dislocation in sensing and self-sensing, which is also a priority of interiority over exteriority and of the moment of reappropriation and integration over the moment of alienation and separation. In order to clarify how this priority plays out, the chapter goes through two main areas of comparison. It compares, first, the kind of unity attributed to the body schema with Nancy’s description of the body as corpus and, second, the kind of synthesis experienced in sensing to Nancy’s pluralisation of bodies of senses, focusing more specifically on the experience of self-touching. The suggestion is that Merleau-Ponty’s lived body is experienced as a kind of unity while Nancy’s corpus is constituted by a fragmentation that is never mended, and that this difference spreads to the body’s relation to the world.
Chapter 4 Things in the Phenomenology of Perception : The Paradox of an In-Itself-for-Us
Authors: Morin Marie-Eve
Published: January 2023

Chapter 4 engages with the question of the status of objects or things in the Phenomenology of Perception. In perceptual experience, things have the paradoxical status of an in-itself-for-us. Perception is always situated and perspectival but perception is also always perception of the thing, and not of a perspective as a sign of the thing. Objective thought is unable to account for this paradox because it operates with the opposition between being and appearance and forgets the order of the phenomena. While Merleau-Ponty’s notion of an in-itself-for-us invites the accusation of correlationism, it also provides resources to respond to it. This response relies on the appeal to a natural world, the status of which remains problematic, finding its place both within experience as correlate of perceptual life and outside of it as ground for all experiences.
Introduction: Rethinking Nostalgia
Authors: Johanson Kristine
Published: January 2023

The Introduction provides an initial framework for understanding the idea of nostalgia that dominates the succeeding chapters. It argues that nostalgia, as a structure of longing, is an unfixed orientation of desire in time that is capable of idealizing both past and future. Discussing a wide range of nostalgia criticism, the Introduction demonstrates the limits of contemporary theoretical approaches to nostalgia, and the need for their expansion, by considering how nostalgia fits into a broader early modern English mindset that perceived those practices and ideas which lie at the heart of nostalgia-temporal comparison, imitatio, innovatio-as ambivalent, as both valued and suspect. The chapter offers readings of Shakespeare's Henry V to show that while nostalgic narratives often attempt to create an unequivocal construction of the past, Shakespeare's own use of the idealized past exposes it to equivocation. Finally, the Introduction outlines defining characteristics of Shakespeare's use of nostalgia on the early modern stage and shows nostalgia's significance to Shakespeare's dramaturgical practices.
In the Mean Season: Richard II ’s Absent Hospitality
Authors: Johanson Kristine
Published: January 2023

This chapter demonstrates how Richard II’s political action depends on constructions of the idealized past and its potential to be reclaimed for the future. The chapter analyses the contemporary, anonymous play Thomas of Woodstock to highlight how Shakespeare writes hospitality’s absence in Richard II, in which the language of lost hospitality invigorates and commands the sense of nostalgia. In the sixteenth century, time and space were central to hospitality discourse, which constituted the dichotomies of past-present and country-city and resulted in the idea of the hospitable countryside of the past and an inhospitable urban present. This chapter attends to how writers like Shakespeare, John Stow, and others use, discuss, and consider the ruins of monasteries which could symbolize the idea of lost hospitality. In the play, absent hospitality becomes a source of grief and a consequence of tyranny, and motivates collective political action. Richard II reveals an overwhelming sense of a lost golden age, as justice and equity have abandoned England. The drama’s staging of both a tyrannical present and the threat of a dystopic future as a consequence of a nostalgia-fuelled rebellion demonstrate once more how Shakespeare’s dramaturgy renders nostalgia a suspect rhetoric.
Conclusion: Resisting Nostalgia
Authors: Johanson Kristine
Published: January 2023

The Conclusion reiterates that in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan histories, the idealized past possesses rhetorical force because it turns the nostalgic toward the future. It then considers how, if at all, Shakespeare carries his Elizabethan model of nostalgic rhetoric—where the idealized past informs and gives hope to the future—into his Jacobean histories. Throughout Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare displaces any confident image of the past, rather crafting it as a source of anxiety and instability. Henry VIII (All is True) notably depicts a past that could possess nostalgic significance for its audience; however, the play’s focus on the future and absence of nostalgic rhetoric intimate that, taking a cue from Jonson, such rhetoric cannot have a central place in a play that speaks so determinedly to its Jacobean present. Indeed, Katherine and the Cardinal recall Jonson’s Germanicans, as they suggest that there is no idealized past that can inspire or alter the course of the future. The play insists on language’s inability to create the future, much as Shakespeare’s Elizabethan drama insisted on its failure to reclaim the past and its political inheritance.
How to take Tiger Mountain? The Tsui Hark Model
Authors: Yiu-Wai Chu
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses Tsui Hark, once hailed as the ‘Hong Kong Spielberg’. Marking the beginning of a new era of Chinese main melody commercial blockbusters, his epic action main melody film The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D, based on one of the most well-known model works during the Cultural Revolution, enjoyed both box-office success and critical acclaim in the mainland. Drawing on Tsui Hark’s film career from Hong Kong to Hollywood and then to the mainland, it examines how the main melody film was inspired by his signature style of filmmaking. It is argued that this film is an excellent example to explore the chemistry between mainland melody and a creative model of filmmaking in cross-border collaborative projects.
John Calvin’s Political Naturalism
Authors: Kennedy Simon P.
Published: January 2023

In 1532, a young humanist attempted to force his way into the illustrious upper echelons of classics scholarship by publishing a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia(On Clemency). However, the commentary was received with no fanfare. The ambitious Frenchman’s pride was wounded. This impressive work of classical scholarship would, in the end, recede into the background of the later theological works of that young Frenchman, John Calvin. As it turned out, more fame was to be had in his vocation as a Protestant Divine. Another thing related to the commentary that receded into the background, although remains present in Calvin’s later works, is the Senecan emphasis on the social nature of humanity. In De clementia, Seneca states that ‘hominem sociale animal communi bono genitum’; that ‘man’ is a ‘social animal begotten for the common good’. Calvin agreed with this sentiment in 1532, and he reaffirmed it throughout his later theological and biblical writings.
John Locke on Conventional Politics
Authors: Kennedy Simon P.
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on the connection between natural law ideas and the origins of political life in the thought of John Locke. Like Hobbes, Locke abandoned the transcendent grounds for political life, further entrenching this pattern of political thought. This chapter essentially demonstrates that the desacralisation of political thought set in quite early in the Reformed tradition, and that this was linked to a change in theories of natural law. It will show that Locke entrenched the new pattern of desacralised conventionalism grounded on a new concept of natural law. Locke’s natural law theory centred on the desire for self-preservation. The chapter will then examine Locke’s political anthropology, which will then be linked to his account of the origins of political life. Locke continued the trajectory away from a transcendent foundation for the social order, instead embracing a conventionalist account of political life.