bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Specters of the Mind: Ghosts, Illusion, and Exposure in Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary
Authors: Natale Simone
Published: September 2021

Natale’s chapter addresses a particular class of ghost movies: the type in which the ghost is ultimately refused and relegated to the realm of human imagination and trickery. It focuses on the case of Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary to show how this film remediates a long tradition of spectacular entertainments based on the rejection of supernaturalism, and how such rejection has important consequences for the film’s narrative framework and the audience’s response. The chapter applies the concept the “spectralisation of the mind,” proposed by literary scholar Terry Castle, to explain the narrative and conceptual role played by ghosts in this film. After establishing Cat’s connections to the cultural history of ghosts, this chapter situates the film within the tradition of spiritualist exposés. This chapter also includes a broader discussion of the ghost film subgenre made popular by Hollywood between the 1930s and 1960s that proposed interpretations that denied the ‘reality’ of the world of ghosts and spectres.
Cinematic Space and Set Design in Paul Leni’s The Last Warning
Authors: Heinsohn Bastian
Published: September 2021

This chapter presents an analysis of cinematic space and set design in The Last Warning, Leni’s fourth and final film for Universal Pictures. Mood and atmosphere are two crucial aspects of Leni’s oeuvre, and he achieved them through light, shadow, and innovative set designs. Using The Last Warning as a case in point, this chapter demonstrates how Leni’s mastery at creating uncanny décor translated within the new spatial context of extravagant Hollywood sets. The film illustrates Leni’s 1924 call to set designers to express mood in their work instead of simply producing faithful replicas of certain locations. In The Last Warning, Leni manipulates space to great effect, drawing the spectator into a haunted labyrinth of hidden corridors, secret passages, and dark staircases. This contribution explores The Last Warning’s set design within several contexts: the film’s limited plot; its unity of space, time, and action; and Leni’s general views on film architecture.
The Idea of the Novel
Authors: Cushman Keith
Published: September 2021

This chapter relates Lawrence's ideas about novel writing to his own novels. Early in his career he wrestled with and rejected the Flaubertian ideal of careful 'construction' and 'form', precisely chosen words, and authorial impersonality. The ideas expressed in the six essays he wrote about the novel, five of them in 1925, inform his own fiction. The distinctive qualities of his best fiction include incomplete, open form - forcefulness, struggle and even danger - energy and quickness. While the chapter focuses mainly on Sons and
Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, it discusses all the novels except The Lost Girl. The chapter also considers the relationship of Lawrence's criticism of other writers, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Whitman, to his own novel writing.
Book Design
Authors: Long Jonathan
Published: September 2021

Much may be learned about Lawrence’s aesthetics from his involvement and preferences in the design of dust jackets, boards, and illustrations in published editions of his own works. Many readers of Lawrence know his work from rather dull uniform editions, some published in England during his lifetime by Martin Secker. However, Lawrence’s main publisher in the USA, Thomas Seltzer, published much of his work in a variety of eye-catching dust jackets. In addition, a good number of Lawrence’s other works were published in expensive limited editions or privately published, some beautifully illustrated. This chapter traces how Lawrence, as an author of increasing standing, came to influence the appearance of his books, while often promoting the talents of artistic friends. It is beautifully illustrated by thirteen monochrome and twenty-one colour images from first and other editions of his books, some not reproduced in colour before
Refuting the Claim that Most of the Hadiths on Apostasy are “Mutawātir in Meaning or in their General Tenor”
Authors: Kadivar Mohsen
Published: September 2021

This chapter is the third section of Kadivar’s ‘Treatise on Refuting the Punishment for Blasphemy and Apostasy’. In this section, these issues are discussed: Analysis of the Hadiths on Apostasy, Two-thirds of the narrations pertaining to the death penalty for apostasy have a deficient chain of transmission, Non-mutawātir Hadiths Do Not Permit or Mandate the Death Penalty for Apostasy, Examination of the Narrations on the Death Penalty for Blasphemy
The narration sentencing a blasphemer to death is an “isolated report” (khabar al-wāḥid) as opposed to a verbatim mutawātir. It being mutawātir in meaning or ijmālī is not actualised. Altogether, the Shi‘i sources relate ten narrations for executing a blasphemer. Of these, four are mursal and four of the remaining six hadiths are ḍa‘īf. Only two hadiths are viewed by some jurists as reliable as regards their chain of transmission. As such, the death penalty for blasphemy rests exclusively on two “isolated reports” (khabar al-wāḥid) that are seriously contested from the perspective of their chain of transmission.
Alteration of the Subject (mawḍū‘) of Apostasy and Objecting to the Perpetual Applicability of the Death Penalty for Blasphemy and Apostasy
Authors: Kadivar Mohsen
Published: September 2021

This chapter is the ninth section of Kadivar’s ‘Treatise on Refuting the Punishment for Blasphemy and Apostasy’.
It analyses four issues: The Method of Retaining the Permanent Nature of a Legal Ruling, A Comparison between the Permanence of Killing an Apostate with the Ruling on Theft and Some Rulings on Jihad, Change of the Subject Matter of Apostasy from the Time of the Imams to Now, and Apostasy and Freedom of Thought.
In the estimation of rational beings, the subject matter of apostasy in the Qur’an, the hadith corpus, and past rulings is not identical to its understanding in our times, because the subject matter in the former is broader than changing one’s religion or leaving Islam. It extends to both aligning oneself with the enemies of and propagandising against Muslims, which would constitute a form of political, military and cultural rebellion against the state’s authority. But today, changing one’s faith is understood to be merely a conversion without any ulterior motives. Contemporary rational beings consider the subject matter of apostasy to be connected with religious and cultural freedom, whereas Islamic jurisprudence considers it to be a political crime: belligerency against the state. These two viewpoints are poles apart.
Conclusion
Authors: Kadivar Mohsen , Kadivar Mohsen , Kadivar Mohsen
Published: September 2021

1. You have stated:

Some who have misgivings about the ruling on apostasy object to the method of ijtihād that is prevalent in the seminaries and argue that a new method of ijtihād should be formulated on the basis of anthropology, cosmology, and new Qur’anic hermeneutics. Whether this claim is true or not requires an independent study and falls outside the scope of this work. What I have penned here is in conformity with the ...
Introduction
Authors: Papadimitriou Lydia , Grgić Ana
Published: September 2021

The introductory chapter offers a re-definition of ‘Balkan cinema’ by revisiting existing conceptual frameworks following the effects of the global financial crisis in 2008, and accounting for the increase in thematic and transnational links across regional cinemas, recent successes on the international film festival circuit and the critical acclaim of several film co-productions. To this end, the collection positions Balkan cinema in relation to the national and the transnational and locates transnational collaborations in the context of different national policies, institutions, and discourses. Finally, it explains the choice of the country-by-country chapter organisation of the edited collection: it encourages novel readings that enable the repositioning, revaluation and reassessment of the richness and diversity of Balkan cinemas in the global edifice.
Bulgaria: Reframing Contemporary Arthouse and Mainstream Cinema
Authors: Doncheva Gergana
Published: September 2021

The chapter on Bulgaria explores how the country’s EU membership impacted on national cinema legislation, leading to a progressive change in production models and a steady increase in co-production activities. The chapter discusses the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers with new artistic styles, the evident tension between arthouse and mainstream films and the reception of national cinema by local audiences. It also examines the increased visibility of Bulgarian cinema at international film festivals and its critical acclaim.
Greece: Transnational Dynamics in Greek Cinema since the Crisis
Authors: Chalkou Maria
Published: September 2021

The chapter on Greece provides a contextualizing overview of the flourishing post-2008 Greek film culture and a brief exploration of its important trends and patterns. It identifies three major strands within Greek cinema: (a) popular heritage narratives that employ shared histories (e.g., Holocaust, WWII) while capitalizing on national specificity; (b) ‘weird wave’ or aesthetically challenging genre-oriented art-house films, widely screened at international festivals; and (c) politically oriented documentaries that address issues of global interest such as neo-Nazism and the financial or refugee crises. The chapter places particular emphasis on how these trends ‘Europeanize’ and ‘transnationalize’ the Greek experience by securing international funding and addressing non-national audiences, while, at the same time, renegotiating national identity.
Class, Criticism and Culture: ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’
Authors: Ó Donghaile Deaglán
Published: September 2021

“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” was not an uncharacteristically radical text, but one informed by Wilde’s consistent engagement with revolutionary politics. This chapter contextualises his essay against the anarchic views expressed a year prior to its first publication in “A Chinese Sage”, his review of Herbert Giles’ translation of the ancient philosophical writings of the Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tsŭ, which appeared in The Spectator. His observations on the dynamics of government, class and empire, and the ideas that he drew from these systems, informed the later essay’s critique of authority, in which Wilde’s defence of revolt as a moral responsibility is underlined by his emphasis on radical self-awareness. This chapter focuses on the essay’s recognition of the structural violence through which, Wilde believed, the authority of the state functioned. This, he argued, was due to the modern subject’s internalization of the values, mechanisms and ideology of authority through means of political and social conditioning.
The Politics of Art and The Picture of Dorian Gray
Authors: Ó Donghaile Deaglán
Published: September 2021

Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, serves as a manifesto in which art, politics and subjectivity are discussed in unusual detail. If all art was, as Wilde argued, simply “surface and symbol”, then what could possibly lie underneath? The answer is provided as this dangerous territory is explored through the text’s complex fusion of literary and political ideas. These subversive notions are presented at an early stage, during self-reflexive discussions of the nature of the relationship between art, politics and subjectivity, all of which are represented as resting just beyond the surface of the novel’s ostensible purpose as a work of gothic romance.
Reading Ideas in Victorian Literature
Authors: Fessenbecker Patrick
Published: September 2021

This book makes a new case for “reading for content,” fleshing out its theoretical claims via readings of Victorian fiction. Questioning the academic assumption that an emphasis on content is aesthetically unsophisticated or theoretically naïve, it argues that the new formalism, like the old, fails to recognize the limits of its own account of the experience of reading and the justifications for literary study. As the philosophical ideas in Victorian narratives demonstrate, writers of literature often use literary form as a means to convey content, and enjoying such books involves precisely engaging, thinking through, and being excited by that content. Moreover, reading for the content in this way does not require denying either a text’s aesthetic nature or historical origins, but is in fact an important way of acknowledging both.
Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
Authors: Fessenbecker Patrick
Published: September 2021

How did “reading for the message,” a mark of shame among literary critics, yet in many ways an ordinary reading practice, become so marginalized? The origins of this methodological commitment ultimately are intertwined with the birth of literary studies itself . The influential aestheticist notion of “art for art’s sake” has several implications crucial for understanding the intellectual history of literary criticism in the twentieth century: most important was the belief that to “extract” an idea from a text was to dismiss its aesthetic structure. This impulse culminated in the New Critical contention that to paraphrase a text was a “heresy.” Yet this dominant tradition has always co-existed with practical interpretation that was much less formalist in emphasis. A return to the world of American literary criticism in 1947, when Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn was published, shows this clearly: many now-forgotten critics were already practicing a form of criticism that emphasized literary content, and often overly rejecting Brooks’s insistence that reading for the content or meaning of a poem betrayed its aesthetic nature.
The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
Authors: Fessenbecker Patrick
Published: September 2021

In a notebook of 1877, George Eliot at one point muses on moral philosophy, asking “Of what stuff is virtue made?” and ending with the dramatic “What is the scourge of the unwilling?” Such questions show Eliot engaging one of the great questions of nineteenth-century moral philosophy: where does the obligatoriness of moral obligations come from? Or, more simply, why should one care about morality? Henry Sidgwick’s magisterial 1874 treatise The Methods of Ethics ultimately conceded defeat on this issue, concluding that there was no way to show the rational egoist that altruistic behavior was more rational than self-interested action. Eliot’s own attempts to answer this question, reflected in the narratives of Esther Lyon, Fred Vincy, and ultimately Gwendolen Harleth, depend on the role of shame in moral psychology, and in particular on the conditions necessary for maintaining the self-approval necessary for internal coherence and autonomy.
Bayana
Authors: Shokoohy Mehrdad , Shokoohy Natalie H.
Published: September 2021

Bayana in Rajasthan and its monuments challenge the perceived but established view of the development of Indo-Muslim architecture and urban form. At the end of the 12th century the Ghurid conquerors took the mighty Hindu fort, building the first Muslim city below on virgin ground. It was the centre of an autonomous region during the 15th and 16th centuries and was even considered by Sikandar Lodī for the capital of his sultanate before he decided on Agra, then a mere village of Bayana.
A peculiarity of historic sites in India is that whole towns with outstanding remains can, through political change or climatic events, be either built over by modern developments or fall into obscurity. The latter is the case with Bayana, abandoned following an earthquake in 1505. Going beyond a simple study of the historic, architectural and archaeological remains ‒ surveyed and illustrated in detail ‒ the book takes on the wider issues of how far the artistic traditions of Bayana, which developed independently from those of Delhi, later influenced North Indian architecture and were the forerunners of the Mughal architectural style, which draw many of its features from innovations developed first in Bayana.
The Chatrī: its Origin, its Basic Forms and its Variants in Bayana
Authors: Shokoohy Mehrdad , Shokoohy Natalie H.
Published: September 2021

The pavilions known as chatrīs are familiar features of North Indian architecture to the extent that Lutyens and Baker adopted them for New Delhi. Their antecedents in temple architecture and the traditional architecture of Iran, as well as their meaning, are intriguing: a canopy representing heavenly protection. The prevalence and variety of the form in Bayana is considered through detailed typological survey beginning with funerary chatrīs: the standard ones with four columns roofed with corbelled or true domes, also octagonal and hexagonal plans, or arranged in series as open rectangular canopied buildings. Indian prototypes and Persian wooden canopies, still standing or depicted in miniatures, are considered. Wooden pavilions in India are known from the sources, and early stone chatrīs for gateways are frequently found, while the Buland Darwāza to the shrine of Ḥamīd al-dīn Chishtī in Nagaur is a famous example with reverberations elsewhere. Bayana preserves experimental forms including a walled chatrī with twelve columns and the Baṛe Kamar: a tomb foreshadowing the arrangement of the tomb of Iʿtimād al-daula in Agra. The symbolic role in the minbars of early mosques is highlighted to explain how the emblematic form is deeply rooted in Indo-Iranian tradition.
Historic Edifices in the Towns and Villages of the Bayana Region
Authors: Shokoohy Mehrdad , Shokoohy Natalie H.
Published: September 2021

The towns once under Bayana preserve significant buildings: in Dholpur, the tomb of Bībī Zarrīna, Sikandar Lodī’s mother, is formed like a jewel box, with the contrasting, plainer, structure of its mosque enhancing the effect. Khanwa has the Karbalā graveyard, with mosques and tombs featuring purposely carved stonework of the Bayana style, some now encroached by sand, and probably associated with a Shi’ite population. Nagar and Sikri were small towns on the plain later adopted by Akbar for his capital and palaces at Fathpur Sikri. Early 14th century mosques, the Aṃbiawālī, the Jāmi‘ and the Purāna Masjid with its curious miḥrāb are still in use. In Sikri the Mīwātiyun kī Masjid, is in the style of the Auḥadī buildings, but perhaps of the Lodī period.
Epilogue
Authors: Shokoohy Mehrdad , Shokoohy Natalie H.
Published: September 2021

The sources for North Indian history from the 12th to 19th century are largely in the language of the culture and administration of the time: Persian. The shift away from this culture to modern administrative and academic priorities leaves this era and its standing remains prone to neglect. Their vulnerability, even when designated as Protected Monuments, is acute. One region is dealt with here, but there is scope for research on neglected sites and urban areas under threat of development throughout the country. The interface between Bayana’s past and Akbar’s first urban endeavour at Fathpur Sikri demonstrates that the whole vocabulary of Bayana’s architectural techniques, combining trabeate and arcuate forms in the same building along with the exploitation of the decorative and structural properties of sandstone, was taken over by the early Mughals and elaborated in their imperial cities. There is still time to pay attention to India’s cultural heritage even while it is being obliterated.
Hubert Crackanthorpe and The Albemarle: A Study of Contexts
Authors: Malcolm David
Published: September 2021

The short life of The Albemarle (January-September 1892), edited by Hubert Crackanthorpe and W.H. Wilkins, makes it possible to see clearly how short fiction engages in a dialogue with the articles, visual materials and advertising that surround it. Although short stories play an important role in the journal (and Crackanthorpe was a prominent short-story writer of the early 1890s), they are immersed within a mass of different material. The socially critical import of several is attenuated by the periodical’s implied readership (well-off, traditionally educated). Indeed, the technical conservatism of most short stories in the journal suggests a readership without innovative literary interests. Although The Albemarle was edited by a short-story writer, short fiction is ultimately peripheral to it.
Horizon Magazine and the Wartime Short Story, 1940–1945
Authors: Einhaus Ann-Marie
Published: September 2021

Cyril Connolly’s wartime periodical venture Horizon is commonly regarded as one of the most significant British literary publications in this period alongside John Lehmann’s New Writing series. Connolly’s specialism was literary criticism and cultural commentary, but the magazine also prided itself in offering readers exciting new (and some older) works of poetry and fiction. Given the stature of the magazine, this chapter investigates whether Horizon had a noticeable impact on the wartime short story in Britain, and if so, what this impact might have been. It outlines an editorial policy that, with few exceptions, regarded short fiction as filler material and chose short stories based on a combination of practical and critical factors, determined by availability and convenience as much as by aesthetic judgement.
Introduction: Theorising Asian Cinema as a Regional Cinema
Authors: Khoo Olivia
Published: September 2021

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s unique regional focus that distinguishes its approach from scholarly works that have regarded Asian cinema predominantly from a national cinema perspective. The chapter outlines the book’s innovative methodology derived from comparative film studies and inter-Asia cultural studies approaches.
From Film Festivals to Online Streaming: Circuits of Distribution and Exhibition
Authors: Khoo Olivia
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how the growth of specialised Asian film festivals (e.g. Busan, Hong Kong, Udine) participates in the development of a regional Asian cinema. It also considers the rise of digital distribution and exhibition of Asian cinema through online streaming models such as Viddsee. The chapter explores how alternative circuits of distribution respond to and in turn precipitate different audience consumption practices as filmmakers continue to seek ways of making films that will cross national markets.
Queer Asian Cinema, Female Authorship and the Short Film Format
Authors: Khoo Olivia
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how the short format film contributes to the formation of queer Asian cinema as a category that incorporates the efforts of women filmmakers. It pays attention to how unique qualities of the short film allow women filmmakers to actively engage with each other’s work within and across the region, and how this transnational connection is redefining how we might come to understand the figure of the individual ‘auteur’ of Asian cinema.
An Introduction to Big Data and Democracy
Authors: Macnish Kevin , Galliott Jai
Published: September 2021

This chapter introduces the book through highlighting recent cases of ethical and democratic concern arising through the use of data analytics (so-called “big data”). The aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum were dogged by claims that the elections had been manipulated through microtargeting by companies such as Cambridge Analytica in favour of the winning parties. The Introduction concludes with an overview of each following chapter in the book.
A Pre-Occupation with Possession: the (Non-) Ownership of Personal Data
Authors: Macnish Kevin , Gauttier Stephanie
Published: September 2021

This chapter considers the question of democratic implications of data by looking at the concept of ownership of personal data. This has been suggested as a way of giving citizens control of “their” data and is assumed in European law. However, Macnish and Gauttier argue that there are at best only weak philosophical grounds on which to base this claim, and that the consequences of viewing our relationship with the data that describe us in terms of ownership may turn out to be highly undesirable. Instead they argue that control should be based around custody of data and the potential for harm.
Twitter and Electoral Bias
Authors: Loh Wulf , Suphan Anne , Zirnig Christopher
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, the authors introduce functional criteria along Habermasian lines for the role of public spheres in a healthy democracy and apply research from the use of Twitter during the last German general election to describe the influence (or lack thereof) of social media on the electoral process. In particular, the authors discuss the workings of various digital divides and highlight their impact on online participation in these elections.
The Big Data Paradox and Its Importance to Strategy and Military Systems Development
Authors: McFarland Tim , Galliott Jai , Cappuccio Massimiliano
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, Mcfarland, Galliott and Cappuccio consider the use of big data in military contexts. They draw on three paradoxes to examine particular challenges facing the military. These are the transparency paradox, the need for the collection and use of data to be as transparent as possible while being collected and used for national security or military purposes which themselves require secrecy; the identity paradox, which recognizes that while big data reflects the identity and behaviour of those whose data is used, so too can it be used to alter those identities and behaviours; and the power paradox, highlighting the increased power gained through big data coupled with the risks of using those data in a largely unregulated environment.
Beyond the Concept of Anonymity: What is Really at Stake?
Authors: Lundgren Björn
Published: September 2021

Lundgren looks at the meaning and role of anonymity, which is often threatened when data sets are agglomerated in big data practices, leading to de-anonymisation. He argues that there are a number of key values threatened by the de-anonymisation, but that the concept of anonymity is not sufficient given what is really at stake. Instead he holds that what is really under threat is our ability to be anonymous, which he characterises as a reasonable control over what we communicate.
Darien, the Golden Dream
Authors: Sandrock Kirsten
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on literary and cultural works dealing with Scotland's attempt to colonize Darien, at the Isthmus of Panama, in the 1690s. It establishes Darien as a central trope in Scottish literature by analyzing works from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including novels, poetry, drama, songs, and political treatises by William Paterson, William Burnaby, Eliot Warburton, Douglas Galbraith, David Nicol, Alistair Beaton, and anonymous female authors. It illustrates how these depictions interact with other political and ideological trajectories in Scotland and the UK, including Jacobitism, Anglo-Scottish relations, and revisionist historical writing. The chapter establishes images of Darien gold and material possession as central structuring devices of Scottish colonial literature, which stand in conflict with depictions of Scotland's alleged kindness towards the indigenous populations of Panama. The chapter argues that narratives of benevolence together with narratives of gold and material possessions turn the colonial utopian tradition into a full-fledged myth of the Scottish Atlantic by the end of the seventeenth century. The mythologization of the colonial sphere together with the mythologization of the Scottish settlers functions as an aesthetic instrument to enter the competition over power in the late-seventeenth-century Atlantic.
Attention, Equivalence and Existential Territories
Authors: Duvernoy Russell J.
Published: September 2021

This chapter draws on Deleuze’s distinction between practices of philosophy and science to articulate a philosophical concept of ecology. Because ecology is constitutively concerned with relations between unity and diversity, it is necessarily entangled with metaphysical questions. The chapter uses Félix Guattari’s framework of the three ecologies (psychic, social, and material) and Deleuze and Guattari’s “existential territories” to connect the metaphysical conception of subjectivity from the book’s first half to the idea of psychic ecology. Drawing on Guattari and Jean-Luc Nancy, the chapter explores how what Marx calls “equivalence” exceeds its initial operation as metric of exchange to also function in the production of predictable patterns of subjectivity. Equivalence as a value tacitly orders and constrains attention in manners that make behaviour predictable, making equivalence-prediction two modes of the same logic perpetuating capitalist subjectivity. This diagnosis opens the possibility of counter habits of attention in the service of contributing to the active creation of different futures.
Longing and Lust, ‘Red Light’ on a ‘Dark Continent’
Authors: Pisters Patricia
Published: September 2021

This chapter presents a variegated depiction of female sexuality seen from their own point of view, beginning with Carollee Schneeman’s Meat Joy (1964). Woolf’s metaphors for the female sex and lesbian desire is brought to the scene in interracial encounters in She Must Be Seeing Things (Sheila McLaughlin 1987), The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye 1997) and Pariah (Dee Rees 2011). The stereotypical figure of the lustful and man-eating witch is reworked in The Love Witch (Anna Biller 2016) and Jennifer’s Body (Karen Kusama 2009). In Raw (Julia Ducournaou 2016) female sexuality is addressed in a ferocious and intense way. After the explicit poetics of horror of the films of the middle section, this chapter looks at three other films that have a more-implied horror embedded within their narration. In I’m Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni 2017) witchcraft is seen from a totally different non-western perspective, whereas in In the Cut (Jane Campion 2003) we see a combination of poetry, sexuality and a different type of final girl. In the equally poetic Longing for the Rain (Lina Yang, 2013), a contemporary Beijing housewife makes love with a ghost that might not be so benign and slowly takes over her life.
Political Gutting, Crushed Life and Poetic Justice
Authors: Pisters Patricia
Published: September 2021

This chapter will return to Woolf’s Three Guineas and political agency and look at Butler’s Kindred and Parable of the Sower. Thechapter has three sections, each addresses different types of political horror. First there is a return to racial and colonial terror in Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season (1989), Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009). Then the chapter takes us to the outcasts and powerful lost souls in man-eat-men environments in The Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2016), Tigers are not Afraid (Issa Lopez, 2017) and Songs My Brothers Taught Me (Chloé Zhao, 2015). In Atlantics (Mati Diop 2019) the sea off the coast of Senegal raises many ghosts from the past and the present. The chapter concludes with a section of eco-horror through the eyes of female directors: Spoor (Agnieska Holland 2017) is an allegory of the feminist backlash in contemporary Poland, wrapped in a hunting tale. Little Joe (Jessica Hausner 2019) and Glass Garden (Shin Sue-won 2017) are contemporary Frankenstein stories with idiosyncratic female scientists.
Introduction Virginia’s Unruly Daughters and Carrie’s Crimson Sisters
Authors: Pisters Patricia
Published: September 2021

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is the entrance point to questions of gender difference and creativity and introduces the theme of the horror genre in the hand of female directors. The book is situated theoretically as an update of Barbara Creed’s monstrous femininity and Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws. It argues that the growing number of women appropriating the language of the horror genre, give expression to deep feelings of related to extreme physical experiences such as (gendered and racial) violence and abuse, bodily transformations and pregnancy, as well as socio-political relations. Rather than “going for the scare” women directors tens to address their inner demons and claim agency to resist different forms of trauma and injustice.
The Revolution of Form: Naguib Mahfouz from the Suez Crisis to the Arab Spring
Authors: Mattar Karim
Published: September 2021

This chapter considers how Naguib Mahfouz has been co-opted in global and in national literary cultures alike. I argue that while the Swedish Academy’s decision to award Mahfouz the Nobel Prize in 1988 was based on universalist principles that obscure what I regard as his more local aesthetic and formal sensibilities, his subsequent recognition by the Egyptian state as a national writer similarly obscures his lifelong critique of that same state for its authoritarianism, corruption, and political violence. Against these co-optations, I aim to restore Mahfouz’s significance for world literature. I do so by considering the novels of his late, indigenous / traditional phase. In Arabian Nights and Days, Mahfouz draws on the frame narrative, folklorish elements, and magical devices of the 1,001 Nights in order to reinvent the novel as a world literary form. In Morning and Evening Talk, he adopts and adapts the classical Arabic genre of the ṭabaqāt in order to reinterpret the 200-year trajectory of modernity in the country from the perspective of its political, social, cultural, and economic margins. Mahfouz’s “revolution of form”, I conclude, enacts a deeply rooted, organic, and historically conscious form of revolution against the abuses of (Egyptian) modernity.
Islam and the Limits of Translation: Orhan Pamuk and the Ottoman Revival
Authors: Mattar Karim
Published: September 2021

This chapter addresses the carefully (self-)cultivated image of Orhan Pamuk as a worldly, cosmopolitan, and secular-liberal writer. This image, I argue, has come to define the aesthetics and politics, the ethos, of his novels in their worldly reception, and has functioned to undermine the nature and extent of his engagement with the local (especially his native city, Istanbul, and its Ottoman, Islamic heritage). I trace this argument through a sustained focus on The Black Book as this novel has been translated and read in Britain and the United States. Drawing on translation theory, I show that both English versions of the novel are unable to capture the logic and significance of Pamuk’s culturally-specific use of language, and have influenced its Anglo-American (mis)reading as a postmodernist work. In my counter-reading, I argue that anything but a postmodernist deconstruction of myths of national and religious identity, The Black Book in fact comprises an evocation of Istanbul’s Ottoman, Islamic heritage in the face of a Turkish secular modernity by which this heritage was historically repressed. I detail this argument through close attention to Pamuk’s treatment of Sufism and Hurufism. The Black Book, I conclude, inscribes what I call “cultural neo-Ottomanism” as form.
Jihadi Audiovisuality and its Entanglements: A Conceptual Framework
Authors: Günther Christoph , Pfeifer Simone
Published: September 2021

The introduction to this edited volume proposes the concept of audiovisuality as a heuristic to explore the links between actors generating meaning and knowledge through audio-visual media, people’s sensations and the mediations they encounter. We argue that audiovisuality not only denotes “representations” of something but includes mediation, sensations, and interpretations. We locate audio-visual media productions and their dissemination by jihadi groups and movements within a field of global media aesthetics and practices with culturally distinct manifestations. This helps to identify the ways in which jihadi actors incorporate various artefacts and techniques of material and immaterial culture, re-codify them, and appropriate them to articulate their cause. We also consider cultural and aesthetic expressions that evolve in response to jihadi media output as entanglements of the wider field of jihadi audiovisuality. Here, we attend to the ways in which various people use aural and visual means to engage with jihadi expressions in multiple acoustic, visual and audio-visual forms to subvert or resist jihadi audiovisuality.
From the Darkness into the Light: Narratives of Conversion in Jihadi Videos
Authors: Günther Christoph
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines a specific format used by Jihadi-Salafi groups to offer an epistemic and ontological framework that helps people setting their individual biography in relation to this social collective. I trace the (re-)creation of two autobiographical narratives of religious conversion as they are presented in two videos authored by al-Muhajirūn and the Islamic State between 2016 and 2017. The epistemological interest of this chapter is to reconstruct the appropriation of key concepts from Islamic intellectual history and the teleological strategies employed in the audiovisual processing of these personal narrations. I will show the ways in which the videos’ authors use audiovisual means to construct and enhance the authenticity and plausibility of these individuals’ personal stories and their spiritual experiences.
Anāshīd at the Crossroad Between the Organisational and the Private
Authors: Berg Carin
Published: September 2021

Islamist organizations often use anashid, a form of poetic chants, as a political tool. Since music is a contested issue in many Muslim contexts, anashid is one of few accepted musical genres. Hence, the usage of anashid is not only limited to the organizational sphere, but traverse the borders between the public domain of the organizations into the private sphere of the supporters. Through the examples of Hamas and Hizbullah, this chapter shows how the usage of anashid interacts in the public and private domains through the theoretical definitions of the purposive (intentional and strategic) and effective (inducing connotations) dimensions of how music can be used for political purposes. Anashid is explored through empirical data gathered within the milieus of Hamas and Hizbullah.
Artistic Re-creation of Grassroots English: Ideologies and Structures in English Vinglish
Authors: Schneider Edgar W.
Published: September 2021

This paper investigates the representation of grassroots English in a recent (2012), successful Bollywood movie, English Vinglish. The plot focusses upon Shashi, a young Indian mother who speaks hardly any English, a fact which is hugely embarrassing to herself and her family. During a stay in New York City she secretly takes beginners' English lessons with other international, instrumentally motivated learners. After a section which outlines some background, the paper's first main part analyzes language attitudes and ideologies held by the characters in this movie, presenting a short Critical Discourse Analysis of scenes from the movie, meant to disclose hidden linguistic value judgements. The second part adopts a linguistically descriptive perspective, presenting an analysis and interpretation of the basic syntactic patterns employed by Shashi and her classmates. These reduced but communicatively sufficient structures are characteristic of early adult learners' usage, and are shown to reflect internal development and to be similar to what has recently been termed "grassroots spread" of English. They are shown to display structural similarities with pidgins, patterns found in early language acquisition, and widespread nonstandard structures found in World Englishes.
Grassroots Diffusion of English in a ‘Blue-collar’ Workplace: The Case of a Multilingual Cleaning Company in New Jersey, USA
Authors: Gonçalves Kellie
Published: September 2021

This chapter adds to the growing literature in sociolinguistics which investigates language practices and multilingual repertoires within blue-collar workplaces. It investigates the ways in which transnational domestic workers within a multilingual cleaning company in New Jersey, USA have learned English from ‘below’ and thus informally and analyses English-language repertoires among both employees and clients. The chapter aims to underscore how effective communication for company external purposes (between employees and clients) often relies on creative, improvised and situation-specific deployment of both linguistic and extra-linguistic resources. Findings from this study deviate from existing literature which promotes English proficiency for reasons of recruitment and social mobility (especially within a US-context). As such, the chapter calls for scholars to look into more context-specific and local practices between individuals who do not share a first/second language in order for effective communication to be achieved.
Animals
Authors: George Theodore
Published: September 2021

Chapter 4 concerns the responsibility to understand that is involved in our relation with animals that are not human. Current research indicates that whereas figures, such as Heidegger, propagate an age-old philosophical prejudice about the radical difference between humans and animals, figures such as Derrida deconstruct the distinction, leaving any final philosophical determination of the relation of human and animal in deferral. In Chapter 4, I maintain that hermeneutical experience of animals suggest the need to enact and cultivate the capacity to displace the prejudice of such a divide, recognizing, instead, both our difference from and continuity with animals. Building on important but understated aspects of Gadamer’s thought, I argue that such displacement demands that we recognize the shared aspects of our lives with animals based on the fact that both humans and animals participate in the hermeneutically significant experiences of play.
Translation
Authors: George Theodore
Published: September 2021

Chapter 8 focuses on contributions that can be made to our pursuit of the formation of solidarities by hermeneutical experience of translation. Thus, again in this chapter, the concern is with a mainstay of hermeneutics—the idea that our experience of translation can displace our prejudices, this time, the very prejudices embedded in the language of one’s speech or a text. In this chapter, I argue that this experience of displacement contributes to the formation of solidarities even with those from different linguistic traditions than our own. Moreover, translation, precisely as an extreme, or, limit-experience of language, underscores the ethical dimensions of Gadamer’s attempt to advance Heidegger’s ontological turn with a further turn to language. For here, as I argue, at the very limits of language we find nothing else than a final emblem of the responsibility to understand as such.
Modernist Disguise
Authors: Popenhagen Ron J.
Published: September 2021

This book chronicles and theorises face and body masking in arts and culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the new millennium. While featuring the modernist era in France, analyses include commentary on performers and visual artists from the margins of the European continent: Ireland and the Baltics; Denmark and the Mediterranean. Representations of silent Pierrots on stage are contrasted with images of fixed-form maskers and masquerades; two-dimensional depictions in paintings and photographs further the study of the form-altered human figure. The relationship of the European avant-garde with indigenous masquerade from Africa and the Americas is discussed and presented in a series of eighteen photographic counterpoints. Modernist explorations of the masked gaze and the nature of looking with the painted face are considered. Meanings suggested by the disguised body in motion and in stasis are investigated via citations of the work of a wide range of masqueraders: Akarova, Bernhardt, Cahun, Höch, Fuller, Mnouchkine, Stein and Wigman, as well as Artaud, Barrault, Cocteau, Copeau, Deburau, Fo, Milhaud and Picasso. Connections between modernist disguising with manifestations of masquerade in daily life, fashion, fine art, media, opera and theatre are proposed while arguing that masking and the carnivalesque are omnipresent in contemporary culture. Modernist Disguise provides greater understanding of the impact of facial masking upon everyday interactions and perceptions experienced, for instance, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The book proposes an interdisciplinary and international lexicon for critical conversation on masking objects, mask play and masquerade as performance.
Reforming and Uniforming the Body
Authors: Popenhagen Ron J.
Published: September 2021

In ‘Marionettes Unmasked’, King Ubu is analysed as a masquerade and architectural construction. Jarry’s oversized body mask is distinguished from the art of the puppet and from Edward Gordon Craig’s Übermarionette. The masquerading actor in movement is situated and theorised, with consideration of Heinrich von Kleist’s commentary, and analyses from Schumacher, States and Taxidou. The chapter also includes thoughts on the performances of Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman and Sadda Yakko. Head and body masks created by Marcel Janco and Rudolf Laban and presented at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich or at the Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland contribute to the discussion on disguise and camouflage in the era of Dada and Cubism. Masquerading and ‘Pirouettes on Eastern Fronts’ extend modernist responses to the Great War to Germany, Romania and Russia while citing the work of sculptors and other visual artists like Ernst Barlach, Constantin Brancuşi, Emmy Hennings and Käthe Kollwitz. Commedia dell’arte treatments in ‘Pierrot and Harlequin Disguised’ feature Picasso images and others created by Heinrick Campendonk, André Derain, Juan Gris and August Macke. Arnold Schönberg’s texts, images and music further complicate the role of Pierrot from Viennese point of view.
Introduction
Authors: Valdez Jessica R.
Published: September 2021

After returning from Australia for the first time in three years, George Talboys joins his friend Robert Audley at a Westminster coffee house. There he picks up a ‘greasy Times newspaper of the day before from a heap of journals on the table’, only to confront the printed evidence of his wife’s death: ‘On the 24th inst., at Ventnor, Isle of Wight, Helen Talboys, aged 22.’ Audley tries to comfort Talboys and assures him that ‘there may be some other Helen Talboys’ or it ‘may be a misprint for Talbot’. Talboys, however, believes that his wife is dead: ‘Yes, there it was in black and white – “Helen Talboys, aged 22.”’...
‘These Acres of Print’: Charles Dickens, the News and the Novel as Pattern
Authors: Valdez Jessica R.
Published: September 2021

While Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers enable readers to imagine national community, Charles Dickens’s writings are attentive to the varying ways that the newspaper press might shape, inhibit, or fragment community through its uncontrolled production of miscellaneous content and matter. This first chapter shows the growing distinction that Dickens drew between fiction and nonfiction, novel and newspaper, in his communal visions
for serial publication. Early Dickens characterised the newspaper press as a meteorological force of destruction, a thunderstorm threatening to engulf the city of London, yet continually produced to meet the endless public appetite for more news. Over the course of his career, Dickens experimented with other metaphors for the working of serial narrative and its influence on a reading public. From an intangible creature telling stories to a weaver at his
loom, Dickens encourages readers to see the instance of a particular serial output linked to its larger structure over time. In doing so, he privileges the power of serial fiction to cultivate new ways of envisioning community.