bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Constructing Palestinian Identity: The Palace Hotel
Authors: Gitler Inbal Ben-Asher
Published: May 2022

Chapter four examines the construction of the Palace Hotel as a reflection of emerging Muslim-Palestinian identity. Together with his patron, Hajj Amin al Husayni (1895-1974), Turkish architect Mehmet Nihat Nigisberk (1880-1945) forged this identity by singling out the sacred monuments of the Haram al-Sharif (the “Noble Sanctuary” in the Old City of Jerusalem) as Muslim-Palestinian national icons, integrating them into the hotel’s design through an implementation of Ottoman and Turkish architectural theory and practice. This chapter further shows that political tensions, religiosity and relations with the Arab world – all impacted the Palace Hotel’s construction and design. I discuss the arguably unparalleled intercommunal cooperation in the Palace Hotel’s construction, as demonstrated by the intense Jewish-Zionist involvement in the project. This cooperation underscored the inherent contradictions between market and cultural forces of the Mandate period, and the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.
Constructing Zionist Identity: The Zionist Executive Building
Authors: Gitler Inbal Ben-Asher
Published: May 2022

Chapter five investigates the Zionist Executive Buildings (ZEB), designed by Zionist architect Yohanan Ratner (1891-1965). The extent to which Jerusalem was important for the Zionist project in Palestine has been subject to debate, and the analysis presented here offers additional perspectives on this issue, through an examination the political and symbolic role of the architecture of the ZEB. Similar to the Palace Hotel’s significance for the Muslim-Palestinian community, in the ZEB I identify a key formative process of enlisting modernism as the Jewish national style in Palestine. I further demonstrate that intercommunal and intracommunal challenges were incited by this project – challenges which decidedly reflected broader dilemmas and contestations in Palestine.
Conclusion: Buildings, Communities
Authors: Gitler Inbal Ben-Asher
Published: May 2022

The concluding chapter revisits the ways in which the four buildings displayed differing approaches to modernism, historicism and vernacular architecture. I argue that their design processes, building technologies and outcome, provide new perspectives with regard to the spread of modernism and its engagement with global and local traditions and trends. I claim that the contradicting and conflictual ideologies revealed in Jerusalem’s Mandate-era architectural culture foregrounded, instigated, and anticipated ensuing spatial dilemmas. I hence propose that this architecture, which involved communal cooperation, competition, and contestation, significantly contributes to understanding architecture’s key role as a cultural and identity-forming agent not only in Jerusalem, but in mixed cities and contested spaces in general.
Lawrence and Socialism: ‘Art and the Individual’ (1908) and the New Age
Authors: Grice Annalise
Published: May 2022

Chapter 2 considers Lawrence’s early attraction to socialism and provides evidence that he intended to pursue a career in journalism from as early as 1908. It explores how his reading of A. R. Orage’s magazine the New Age shaped writing such as his paper ‘Art and the Individual’ (1908), which was revised and given the subtitle ‘A Paper for Socialists’ before it was sent to his correspondent Blanche Jennings, a socialist and suffragist who represented Lawrence’s ideal reader at this time. The chapter considers Lawrence’s early interest in the careers of writers now often classed as ‘middlebrow’ (partly due to their successful journalistic careers) such as G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw.
Introducing Mr D. H. Lawrence, Author of Sons and Lovers : Transatlantic Connections
Authors: Grice Annalise
Published: May 2022

Chapter 6 examines transatlantic publishing culture to assess Lawrence’s early reputation both in Britain and America. The chapter considers the interest that the New York publisher Mitchell Kennerley took in Lawrence’s work and addresses the significance of Lawrence’s name appearing under the distinctive Kennerley imprint at this time. Kennerley published Lawrence in his magazine Forum and commissioned the Swedish-American literary critic and author Edwin Björkman to write an Introduction to the first American edition of Lawrence’s first published play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914); in London, Arnold Bennett was involved in proposing the play for potential production by the Stage Society. Also in London, W. L. George wrote an article on Lawrence which was published in the February 1914 number of the Bookman. Lawrence supplied biographical notes to his publishers, involving himself in their promotional activities and cooperating (albeit with discomfort) in their construction of his identity as a working-class writer.
Introduction
Authors: Heshmat Dina
Published: May 2022

The introduction of the book gives an overview of the way 1919 is articulated in dominant historiography and sketches an alternative understanding of this key moment of Egypt’s anti-colonial struggle. The chapter also analyses the iconic status of both Saad and Safiyya Zaghlul in the Egyptian imaginary. It then turns to exploring the dynamics of remembering and forgetting 1919, and questions the politics of erasure at work in canonical Egyptian novels and films.
The Poetics of Disillusion
Authors: Heshmat Dina
Published: May 2022

The first chapter deals with the representation of the 1919 revolution in the vaudeville of the mid-twenties, through an analysis of two plays by Amin Sidqi (1890-1944), al-Intikhabat (The Elections, 1923) and Imbratur Zifta (The Emperor of Zifta1924), an unpublished manuscript. The plays preserve to some extent the irreverent spirit of the revolution’s songs and slogans, offering an example of subversive humour and bitter sarcasm as performed in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. The first play exposes the limits of the liberal parliamentary system usually presented as one of the gains of the 1919 revolution, and frames the effendiyya’s electoral ambitions as dictated by self-serving concerns. The second play underlines the ambition for social change, more specifically the declaration of independence of a Delta city during the 1919 turmoil, as a bitter failure. I examine the way these narratives narrate subversive and dramatic episodes of the anti-colonial struggle, and address the apparent paradox between the comic tone and the feelings of bitterness expressed in both plays.
1919 and the Trope of the Modern Nation
Authors: Heshmat Dina
Published: May 2022

This chapter is an analysis of two famous literary representations of the 1919 revolution, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s ‘Awdat al-Ruh (Return of the Spirit, 1933), and Naguib Mahfouz’ Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk, 1956), the first volume in his trilogy. The chapter shows that these two canonical works have been central in polishing a class-biased narrative about 1919 that sublimates the organised middle class’ role and imposes a myth-like image of Saad Zaghlul. In addition to its articulation of the concept of a modern Egyptian Nation, ‘Awdat al-Ruh posits 1919 as a key moment in the birth of that nation and identifies Saad Zaghlul as the embodiment of historical continuity with the country’s Pharaonic past. Likewise, Bayn al-Qasrayn insists on the trope of national unity through a depiction of the emergence of Egypt as a ‘new nation’, and presents the effendiyya as the main actors of the revolution. In addition, the chapter contains a brief analysis of an earlier short story about 1919: Mudhakkirat Hikmat Hanim (The Memoirs of Hikmat Hanim, 1921) by ‘Isa ‘Ubayd (189?-1922), a pioneering short story writer.
Rewriting History in the 1990s
Authors: Heshmat Dina
Published: May 2022

This chapter analyses narratives published, performed or screened between 1968 and 1999 that have attempted a ‘rewriting of history’ in a context of defeat, in the aftermath of the 1967 naksa. Belonging to different genres (a play, two novels, a television series) all these works feature peasants (and urban underprivileged) as key actors of the 1919 revolution and narrate their resistance in a laudatory mode. The chapter starts with an analysis of al-Masamir (The Nails,1968) by Saad al-Din Wahba, and goes on with readings of Qantara al-Ladhi Kafara (Qantara Who Became an Infidel, 1966) by Mustafa Musharrafa and al-Faylaq (The Legion, 1999) by Amin ‘Izz al-Din. Finally, it examines Gumhuriyyat Zifta (The Republic of Zifta, 1999), a television drama written by Yusri al-Gindi and directed by Isma‘il ‘Abd al-Hafiz, in which the peasant community of the Delta village is given a much more important role than is generally admitted in the historiography about the village’s declaration of independence during the 1919 revolution. Special attention is given to the use of the colloquial, including the songs of the Zifta series, based on poems by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Abnudi.
Conclusion
Authors: Heshmat Dina
Published: May 2022

I started this book with a scene of youth frantically cleaning slogans off fences on Tahrir Square in the immediate aftermath of President Husni Mubarak’s resignation; I argued that, as it encapsulated the politics of erasure at work in the memory of the 2011 revolution, the scene could help us imagine how the traces of another revolution were lost and erased, decade after decade. It remained present in my mind while I was reading and watching the literary and cinematic narratives dealing with the 1919 anti-colonial revolution in Egypt that constitute the corpus of this book. I systematically tried to locate ...
The Church of England, Print Networks and the Book of Common Prayer in the North-Eastern Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750– c. 1830
Authors: Hardwick Joseph
Published: May 2022

Despite its ubiquitous presence, the Anglican church in colonial Atlantic Canada has received little attention from scholars. Beginning with the missionary activities of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) which relied on significant revenue from enslaved labour in Barbados, this chapter examines the influence of Anglicanism from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia. It argues that, despite its uniform literature, the Church of England adapted to local circumstances to the extent that it even supplied bi-lingual missionaries to “Foreign Protestants” in the region. This established a diversity of peculiar characteristics and features among Atlantic Canadian congregations that were often maintained after the authority of the episcopal hierarchy was more firmly established during the nineteenth century.
Fenian Ghosts: The Spectre of Irish Republicanism in Ethnic Relations in Newfoundland
Authors: Keough Willeen G.
Published: May 2022

By charting various manifestations of Irish republican sympathy in Newfoundland from the late eighteenth century into the early twentieth century, this chapter highlights the historical memory of grievance among the Newfoundland Irish. The Fenian scare of the late 1860s in Port de Grave, Conception Bay provides the starting point for a wide-ranging survey that extends from elite concern over Ribbonism among early Irish Catholic settlers in the Avalon Peninsula to sympathy for the 1916 rebellion among their descendants. The chapter argues that while most Newfoundland Irish were not explicitly republican, expressions of sympathy with the goals of Irish republican movements reveal that many were not supporters of the British Empire.
Sex and the Nazi Soldier
Authors: Mühlhäuser Regina
Published: May 2022

Sex and the Nazi Soldier is the first monograph that comprehensively examines rape and other forms of sexual violence perpetrated by German Wehrmacht soldiers and SS troops in the occupied Soviet Union but also considers sexual exploitation, from visits to secret prostitutes or officially established military brothels to bartering for sex, as well as consensual liaisons. As a historical study on the German military it “sets a new standard for understanding Nazi occupation policies in the Soviet Union” (Norman Naimark). As an empirical case study on the intertwinedness of gender and sexuality in times of war and genocide, it contributes to developing a more nuanced understanding of soldiers’ sexual behavior and the ways in which military commands assess soldierly sexuality and integrate it into their strategic thinking.
Following the current debates in the US and Western Europe, one can easily get the impression that sexual violence primarily occurs in the warfare of irregular actors, such as terror groups, rebels or private armies. The historical example of World War II, however, suggests that the reality of who perpetrates sexual violence when, where and against whom is more complicated. This book hopes to deepen our understanding of the factors that facilitate and shape but also curtail sexual violence. It also aims to broaden the debate and ask more generally how sex, violence and war intersect, even in non-violent sexual encounters.
Sexual Violence
Authors: Mühlhäuser Regina
Published: May 2022

This chapter focuses on sexual violence by German troops, which was a widespread reality in the Soviet Union and included coerced disrobement, sexual torture, rape, and sexual enslavement committed by individuals or groups. Women and girls but also boys and men suffered bodily and psychological wounds. Many did not survive to tell their stories. The account draws on narratives by perpetrators, victims and bystanders and elucidates the forms that sexual violence took, in what situations specific manifestations occurred, and how the phenomena were dealt with within the military. Throughout this and the following chapters, it is discussed how the military commands of Wehrmacht and SS tacitly accepted sexual activities of their men, including sexual violence, while at the same time trying to implement measures of control and regulation. Ultimately, they regarded male sexuality as something that could and should be productively incited. While commanders seldom seem to have ordered the perpetration of sexual violence (as in cases when subordinates were asked to procure women), they assumed that their men would act in certain ways and exploited this behavior with regard to their own interests.
Sexual Transactions
Authors: Mühlhäuser Regina
Published: May 2022

This chapter takes up various forms of sexual exploitation, beginning with Wehrmacht soldiers offering women and girls food, other goods, or protection in exchange for sex. Further sections retrace the occurrence of professional and clandestine prostitution and the sanctions imposed on women “suspected of prostitution” but also measures taken to discipline Wehrmacht soldiers and SS men for engaging in sexual activities considered undesirable by military leaders. The chapter concludes by recounting how the Wehrmacht proceeded, beginning in early 1942, to establish its own brothels. Focusing on the nexus between soldiers’ behavior and institutional attempts to channel and control it, the chapter demonstrates that regulatory strategies that propagated moderation and certain precautionary measures served to both curb sexual activities and facilitate them. Instruction about venereal disease and medical examination programs for military men and the establishment of brothels in which the women were monitored by physicians in effect created opportunities for soldiers (especially for very young men) who might otherwise have abstained from sexual acts.
Consensual Relations
Authors: Mühlhäuser Regina
Published: May 2022

Consensual liaisons and romantic relationships are the focus of this chapter which explores available evidence that indicate the perceptions and motives of the men and women involved. Also examined are the regulations implemented by Wehrmacht and SS. At times these relationships led, especially in Estonia and Latvia, to applications for marriage permits. How these were dealt with, what criteria of “race” were brought to bear, and what other factors played a part in deciding these applications is the subject of chapter four’s final section.
Although the Wehrmacht and SS leadership followed similar paths in regulating rather than strictly repressing sexual violence and heterosexual contacts, different tendencies surfaced in the two organizations. The Wehrmacht placed more emphasis on upholding “racial consciousness” and moral arguments and at times punished sexual offenders rather severely. The SS, in contrast, adopted a more pragmatic stance by focusing on avoiding the dangers of disease and espionage. But the SS leadership could react harshly if sexual encounters were kept secret.
Concluding Remarks: Gender, Sexuality and Violence in the War and Post-War Period
Authors: Mühlhäuser Regina
Published: May 2022

The chapter briefly summarizes some of the book's findings and links them to the postwar period. After the end of the war, most men chose to keep silent about their sexual experiences. At the same time, the sexuality of German women became the focus of private and public interest. Rapes by Red Army soldiers were a topic of discussion, as was the fact that some women had engaged in relationships with Allied soldiers or prisoners of war. These women were repeatedly accused of having betrayed German men. The chapter looks at different depictions of sexuality and sexual violence in the direct post-war years and argues that that this documentation also marks a boundary between the private and the public. Sexual encounters in wartime and the recounting of such experiences afterwards do not take place in a social vacuum. They have specific meanings for the individuals involved and their respective social environments, and they reveal the entanglement of war, gender concepts and sexuality.
Epilogue: What Can We Learn from the Nazi Case?
Authors: Mühlhäuser Regina
Published: May 2022

This chapter takes current debates-such as 1) whether soldiers commit less rape when there are race pollution taboos; 2) how we can capture the different, often conflicting, interests of military groups with regard to sexual violence perpetrated by their soldiers; 3) what is sexual about sexual violence; or 4) when sexual violence becomes a weapon and strategy of war-and discusses them in terms of historical source material on World War II. Looking to the past offers the opportunity to consider, more independently of the particular interests of the parties to the conflict in current wars, what structural commonalities and historical specifics we can observe when this form of violence is perpetrated.
Surviving a Crisis: Nordisk Films Kompagni as a World Player
Authors: Thorsen Isak
Published: May 2022

Established in 1906 as the first film company in Scandinavia, Nordisk Films Kompagni is known for being the world’s oldest continuously active film company, and still dominates Danish production, distribution and exhibition today. In the Silent Era, Nordisk counted among the major film studios on the world market. This chapter examines the founding and development of Nordisk, describing the emergence of early cinema culture in Denmark. Special attention is paid to the period around 1910, when the company was the first in the world to re-organise its production to prioritise multiple-reel films. Ultimately, Nordisk’s fortunes declined with the end of the First World War, but in the meantime, as a first-mover in multiple-reel films, the company had played a leading role in transforming production, distribution and exhibition practices, as well as the cinema-going experience itself.
Asta Co.: The Politics of Early Danish Film Stardom
Authors: Allen Julie K.
Published: May 2022

Danish cinema’s international prestige in the silent era was attained not only though the business nous of Nordisk Films Kompagni, but also through the efforts of four screen stars in particular: Asta Nielsen, Olaf Fønss, Clara Wieth Pontoppidan, and Valdemar Psilander. Although Asta Nielsen’s name is the most widely recognised today, all four actors were among the most famous and beloved screen personalities of their time, both at home and as far afield as Australia, Brazil and Russia. Tracing the transition from theatre stage to film set of the four stars, this chapter explores the tensions between the cultural kudos of theatre and the monetary rewards and excitement of the new medium of film. It also examines how global stardom functioned in the 1910s, as a high-stakes endeavour requiring ambition, resilience, stamina, courage, and acting talent.
The European Principle: Art and Border-Crossings in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Career
Authors: Tybjerg Casper
Published: May 2022

Carl Th. Dreyer is usually framed as a national auteur, but several of his canonical and less well-known films were produced in France, Germany, Sweden and elsewhere. This chapter takes as its starting point a 1931 interview with Dreyer, in which he distinguishes sharply between an American principle of filmmaking focused on the efficient manufacture of entertainment, and a European one focused on individual artistic expression. Dreyer's career is then discussed in terms of how this idealised principle found expression in practice across the various European film industries where he worked. A guiding concept in the chapter is ‘entangled history’ or histoire croisée, which stresses the interconnectedness of historical actors, events, documents, and other phenomena beyond the national, problematising the concept of national cinema.
The Art of the Popular: The folkekomedie tradition
Authors: Henrik Hartvigson Niels
Published: May 2022

Folkekomedie, or folk comedy, is a film genre whose popularity has endured throughout Danish cinema history. With its roots in the popular theatre, the prototype of the filmic folkekomedie was established in the 1930s, when Danish cinema was forced to adapt to the sound era by appealing to the national, Danish-speaking audience. With a focus on family, friendship, familiar milieux and shared values, a central motif of the folkekomedie is the integration of political, regional, generational and cultural differences, often through the intervention of a character from the provinces or lower classes, or the antagonism of the authorities. The incorporation of popular song into the films facilitated audience participation. While the genre has seldom benefited from state production subsidies, it nonetheless continues to thrive today, both on cinema screens and on television.
Making a Life of Your Own: Films for Children and Young People in the 1970s and 1980s
Authors: Lykke Christensen Christa
Published: May 2022

Films for children and young people flourished in 1970s and 1980s Denmark, setting a new agenda for the portrayal of their intended audience. Drawing on psychological, magical and social realism, and eschewing the comedy and idealism of earlier children’s films, this new generation of productions emphasised young people’s independence and agency. These films emerged from the radical pedagogical and cultural trends of 1970s Denmark, which promoted greater influence for children in the private and public spheres, and more respect for their distinctive perspectives on the world. Films for children and young people were institutionalised as a priority by the appointment of a dedicated consultant in 1976, and in 1982 by ring-fencing of 25 per cent of state film subsidies for children’s film. This chapter discusses a number of key films in the tradition, including works by Danish auteurs Nils Malmros and Bille August, demonstrating the centrality of films for children and young people to the national canon and to film policy.
Into the Dark Forest: The Cinema of Lars von Trier
Authors: Schepelern Peter
Published: May 2022

Born in 1956, Lars von Trier is Denmark’s most influential and internationally admired filmmaker since Carl Th. Dreyer. This chapter offers a detailed account of von Trier’s career, from a distinctive perspective: the director’s former tutor and mentor from his film school days, Peter Schepelern. The discussion reveals that from the very beginning of his career, Trier has built up his auteur persona – at times, a persona non grata – with a deliberateness that has given him a special position in both Danish and world cinema. He also stands out as a controversial innovator who has repeatedly surprised with his artistic provocations, facilitated by his film company, Zentropa. These include intellectual sharpness, a touch of perversity and an unremitting urge to find new expressions in film style and film technology. The chapter provides details of von Trier’s life and work that have garnered limited attention in the extensive scholarly literature on this inimitable filmmaker.
Danish Documentary Production: An All-Female Company
Authors: Jerslev Anne
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines Danish Documentary Production, an all-female production and distribution company founded in 2007, as an unprecedented example of female filmmakers working together to create an internationally successful company and as an example of the generally strong position of female Danish documentary filmmakers. The chapter provides insights into the workings of the company and particularly into its films, beginning by situating the company and the directors within the wider context of women in contemporary Danish documentary filmmaking. It then discusses films by the four directors and investigates the production strategies and documentary visions that characterise Danish Documentary Production. The chapter concludes by arguing that the directors’ otherwise different authorial approaches and themes are united by their enquiring and curious approach to the social world.
Dirty Films: Grimy Materialism and Ecological Aesthetics
Authors: Bigelow Benjamin
Published: May 2022

Against the backdrop of increased ecological awareness and climate activism in the Nordic region and in Denmark particularly, this chapter examines how such perspectives have become crucial aesthetic and critical tools in contemporary film culture. The chapter argues for the continued relevance of materiality in film studies by conducting a material-ecocritical reading of Hlynur Pálmason’s Vinterbrødre (Winter Brothers, 2017), a film that is fixated on the accumulation of particulate matter on the surfaces of things. Building on scholars working in material ecocriticism, the chapter takes grimy materiality as central to the broader aesthetic concerns of the film, which stages a gradual narrative progression from the realm of idealist romantic fantasy to materialist, earth-bound disillusionment via the human experience of unrequited love.
‘Finally, we’re Beginning to Tell Our Own Stories’: Filmmaking in Greenland
Authors: Thorsen Isak , Péronard Emile Hertling
Published: May 2022

One of the earliest films shot in Denmark purports to show Greenland: Peter Elfelt’s Kørsel med grønlandske Hunde (Driving with Greenlandic Dogs, 1897). The first Danish sound film and the first Danish colour feature also took Greenland’s breathtaking geography as their subjects. This chapter outlines the historical and colonial relations between Denmark and Greenland, and provides an overview of the history of Greenland on screen, with reference to the growing field of Critical Arctic Studies. The chapter concludes with an extended interview with producer Emile Hertling Péronard, one of the founders of the Greenlandic film industry association, FILM.GL., and producer of Sumé (dir. Inuk Silis Høegh, 2014), the first film made by Greenlanders about the history of Greenland. As a co-owner, with Høegh, of Ánorâk Film, Péronard provides a snapshot of the state of play in this emerging film industry and the possibilities afforded by international collaborations for indigenous film cultures.
Introduction
Authors: Moslund Marlene Karlsson , Marcussen Martin Karlsson
Published: May 2022

This introduction balances between a general overview of the “material turn” and a concrete focus on the two primary currents of New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology. The first part generally explains the “material turn” in the humanities as a heightened awareness of how nonhuman forces shape and condition human realities and a reopening and expansion of the ways we intellectualise and imagine nature, culture, society, the subject, language, representation and so on. The second part moves on to introduce central post-anthropocentric concerns and key concepts within New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology (such as their ways of understanding reality, objects, nonhumans, agencies, language and representation and human-nonhuman relationships), highlighting their philosophical backdrops and interventions as well as their differences and similarities. Finally, the third part, presents an overview of how literature has been engaged in post-anthropocentric theory so far, by Bennett, Harman, Morton and others, before introducing the central themes and approaches of the new contributions in the current collection. The introduction ends with a brief outline of concerns and perspectives that cut across the various sections and chapters of the book.
Corporeal Creativity and Queer Gaps in Time
Authors: Sellberg Karin
Published: May 2022

This chapter investigates the ‘Shakespearean novels’ Wise Children (1991) by Angela Carter and The Gap of Time (2015) by Jeanette Winterson, where the concepts of time and space are reconstructed as relational rather than linear or four-dimensional concepts, and corporeality and physical reality are matters of continual and creative reformation. Bodies and flesh are made strange in Carter and Winterson’s work. The chapter reads the novels in tandem with new materialist feminist philosophers like Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, and conceptions of queer time developed by Jack Halberstam and Elizabeth Freeman, arguing that Carter and Winterson rearrange the relationships between past, present and future in order to form a continually renewing corporeal order. The chapter teases out the entanglement of time that sustains the novels’ fictional realities and examines the material ontology that makes the authors’ new frameworks of corporeality possible.
Putting the Earth to Use: Reading Resources in the End Times (Through Science Fiction)
Authors: Graulund Rune
Published: May 2022

This chapter examine how the medium of literature can mediate and problematize resource scarcity in the Anthropocene. First the chapter asks how we might start to ‘read resources’ in the academic field in which ‘reading’ is preeminent, namely literary studies. As it has been the case with almost all disciplines, the Anthropocene has severely challenged some of the fundamental ways in which literary studies are conducted. Accordingly, the chapter discusses specific genres of literature (primarily science fiction and postapocalyptic fiction) in order to examine why certain genres of literature are apparently more apt to take up questions of anthropogenic change than others. Finally, the chapter provides an example of how one could potentially ‘read for resources’ in American science fiction writer Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl (2009) and concludes on the question of how (if at all) literature and literary studies can offer insights into the shifting parameters of a rapidly changing world beyond the specifics of literary texts.
The Work of Art in the Age of Capitalist Realism: Materiality/Aura/Apocalypse
Authors: Boscagli Maurizia
Published: May 2022

After the demise of the subject and of human exceptionalism in the contemporary scenarios of capitalist realism, environmental catastrophe and a new understanding of materiality, this chapter shows how Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 attempts to recuperate a distinctive human temporality through the means of literature and art. Lerner confronts apocalyptic futurity by turning to two key concepts of Walter Benjamin’s thought: aura and Jeztzeit. The moments of future-in-the-present, which Lerner recognizes in prosody and in everyday objects, as well as in the art of Donald Judd and Christian Marclay, also herald new forms of collectivity, in which the individual, à la Whitman, can simultaneously find and lose herself.
Introduction
Authors: Jenner Mareike
Published: May 2022

This Introduction seeks to conceptualize binge-watching via several analytical axes. The main thread followed here is the idea of the “rogue audience”, meaning an audience acting against industry expectations or even desires. This lens is combined with a historical view, understanding binge-watching as a consequence of the historical interplay between audience, technology, industry and content. The Introduction further outlines the aims and scope of this collection, introducing the different articles that conceptualize binge-watching in this collection, using a variety of different approaches, including fan studies, audience and reception research, transnational approaches, and textual analysis.
Historical Binge-Watching: Marathon Viewing on Videotape
Authors: Stevens E. Charlotte
Published: May 2022

This chapter presents initial findings arising from archival research on audience activity detailed in letterzines (a form of fanzine) that precedes contemporary models of binge-watching.
Fans writing in letterzines of the late 1970s and early 1980s narrativised their marathon viewing events for fellow fans, both individually and through group watch events. Convention reports dating back to 1979 include celebratory lists of episodes watched, contextual information, and discussion of reactions; individual letters demonstrate a more ambivalent view, with semi-joking references to overdosing on television. These primary documents allow access to fans’ accounts of watching many episodes in a shared space over a limited time frame. These semi-public exhibitions in living rooms and convention spaces appear motivated by scarcity and sharing television with friends, as much as they are about immersion in a storyworld.
Binge-Watching Conditions and Multitasking: The Enjoyable Ephemeral
Authors: Perks Lisa Glebatis
Published: May 2022

Drawing from a study of 120 television viewers who had binge-watched at least two shows in the previous 12 months, this study presents a picture of a viewer who weaves binge-watching into their domestic experience. Many participants were viewing at night through television screens or more mobile screens (such as laptops and tablets) to move the binge-watch out of the living room--most commonly into the bedroom. The two-show comparison suggests that binge-watching behaviors such as co-viewing and multitasking were situational rather than ritualistic. Media multitasking involved several different activities, either related to screens (gaming, texting, perusing social media, working on a computer) or unrelated to screens (eating, knitting, drawing). Although multitasking may diminish the quality of the two coinciding activities, participants reported many multitasking gratifications or benefits, including productivity, alleviating boredom, and relaxation enhancement. These findings gesture toward a view of binge-watching that maximizes an entertainment experience in a way that complements rather than replaces other daily activities and rituals.
Transnationalising Genre: Netflix, Teen Drama and Textual Dimensions in Netflix Transnationalism
Authors: Jenner Mareike
Published: May 2022

This chapter uses textual analysis and genre studies to conceptualize Netflix original productions as transnational television. Using the British series Sex Education and the German How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) as examples, the article analyses the teen series produced for a transnational market. In this, the article especially considers how the series relate to established genre conventions established in the teen series' American iteration. The article uses this analysis to develop the idea of genre as characteristic of a so-called 'grammar of transnationalism'. This is particularly relevant in regards to Netflix and its business model, which addresses its content to a transnational audience and in this context highlights the national while de-emphasising the local.
Transnational Bingeing: Conclusion
Authors: Stolz B. G. , Watts Robert , Jenner Mareike
Published: May 2022

In this section Conclusion, G-Stolz, Watts and Jenner summarise some of their results and bring them together to formulate an approach to transnational bingeing that brings their work together. In this, they particularly focus on ideas of Netflix and its function within transnational television. As more platforms publish content at the same time transnationally, the different approaches to understand Netflix as transnational company become increasingly important.
Bingeing Narratives: Conclusion
Authors: Kozak Lynn , Zeller-Jacques Martin , Hemingway Tom , Can Orcun , Havas Júlia , Horeck Tanya
Published: May 2022

This Conclusion chapter brings together the different views on the various ways binge-watching or ‘bingeability’ is structured into texts. Re-visits some of the arguments made in the section and reflects on the ways the different articles work to create a range of understandings of binge-watching as textual property.
The Albumen B: The Act
Authors: Johnson Ryan J.
Published: May 2022

Give time’s double-sided structure, we then consider implications of this theory on the status of an ethical act. To do this, we consider the “event of death,” specifically the suicides of Seneca and Deleuze. We then take up Deleuze’s seemingly mysterious suggestion that chronos and aion correspond to two methods of interpretation (divination and usage of representations), two moral attitudes (cosmic and singular perspectives) and two ethical tasks (actualization and counter-actualization). All these pairs align. We concretize everything through the figure of the Stoic sage, and Deleuze’s favorite example of the Stoic sage is the wounded surrealist poet Joe Bousquet. Through the “Bousquet proposition,” which concerns the fated nature of the poet’s wartime wound, we find that the act and the event form the same paradoxical object, viewed either from one side (the act), or the other (the event), and counter-actualization is the evental task that corresponds to the act. We end by twisting Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter from A Thousand Plateaus (“How to Make Oneself a Body without Organs”) into a practical program on “how to make oneself a Stoic.” At the heart of this program is the dual affirmation of the Nietzschean/Stoic principle of amor fati.
A Beautiful Mind: Patterns of Thought and the Decoration of Textiles
Authors: Lather Amy
Published: May 2022

This chapter inaugurates the study because it focuses on the manufacture of poikilia in textiles, the material with which this quality is most frequently associated in literary sources, and because it examines how the poikilia of textiles is represented across different media (statuary, painting, texts, and textiles themselves). It thus establishes as fundamental to poikilia a fluid set of exchanges between minds and materials in the construction of elaborate and polychromatic patterns. What these different manifestations of poikilia have in common is an awareness of how the sensory richness afforded by elaborate decoration contributes to the animation and perceptual immediacy of material artifacts.
Brazen Charm: The Vitality of Archaic Armour
Authors: Lather Amy
Published: May 2022

Turning from textiles to metal armament (and in particular their representation in Homeric epic), the passages discussed in this chapter challenge the conception of metal (and bronze in particular) as a fixed, inert substance by disclosing how metal’s sensuous properties–its sights and sounds, specifically–are expressions of a unique form of vitality that encompasses both human and nonhuman attributes. The agency associated with this vitality becomes especially apparent in the multifarious ways in which metal substances interact with human subjects. Possessed of the ability to entrance as well as terrify, metal also bears a special relationship to the humans who wear it by enhancing and even transfiguring their bodies.
Mind Tools: Art, Artifice and Animation
Authors: Lather Amy
Published: May 2022

While the previous chapters have sought primarily to illuminate the porousness of materials in their interactions with human agents, this chapter confronts the opacity of things as much as the propensity for humans to “couple” with objects in their environment. Thus this chapter will examine two facets of human cognition and will probe the conditions under which objects veer towards one or the other of these categories: 1) the intractability or paradoxical quality of the material entity and the wonder (thauma) that this evokes; 2) conversely, the means and mechanisms by which material objects could function as cognitive extensions of the human mind in the form of craftsmanship. These two interpretative lenses will therefore impart a guiding structure to this chapter, which will criss-cross archaic and classical prose and poetry, grouping such objects as Pandora and Hephaestus’ automata alongside things like labyrinths and riddles.
Conclusions
Authors: Lather Amy
Published: May 2022

While Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles was invoked in the Introduction to introduce a number of the themes explored in individual chapters, Plato’s multifarious vision of poikilia (and his critic of the pleasures afforded by poikilia’s sensuality) offers an apt place to conclude. However, his treatment of poikilia in the Republic echoes and even elaborates upon several of the ideas that have recurred throughout this book: the influence of aesthetic experience on cognitive and emotional states, the shifting and variable nature of embodied experience, and the central role that material things play in shaping human conceptions of their own cognitive and perceptual architecture. And in using poikilia to formulate his own vision of the dynamics between body, soul, and environment, Plato––the arch-critic of poikilia––will paradoxically turn out to be one of the most outspoken champions of the vitality of poikilia. For even as Plato excludes poikilia from the ideal state, this quality surfaces again and again in the vivid imagery the philosopher uses to illustrate the vagaries of embodied human experience.
Scots in South African Dutch Pulpits in the Early to Middle Nineteenth Century
Authors: Müller Retief
Published: May 2022

This chapter traces the recruitment and arrival of the earliest Scots recruited to serve in the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in South Africa. Prominent names in this chapter include George Thom, Andrew Murray, and William Robertson, among others. It describes the tensions navigated by Scots ministers who were often appointed to pulpits along the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, in an area where a substantial proportion of the Dutch colonists decided to migrate east and northward in an excursion that would subsequently become known in Boer folklore as the Great Trek. It also describes the early careers of John and Andrew Murray jr., the sons of the abovementioned Andrew.
Scottish Ministers, Evangelical Revival and Church-based ‘Apartheid’?
Authors: Müller Retief
Published: May 2022

This chapter considers the leading roles played by Scots ministers in terms of a number of initiatives involving theological education and the religious life in South Africa. This includes the founding of the Stellenbosch theological seminary, their local adaptation of a transatlantic spirit of revivalism within 19th century Protestantism, and also their opposition to Dutch inspired theological liberalism. It furthermore touches on the role played by Scots and their circle of influence at the 1857 synod of the DRC, which made a controversial decision that would ultimately become the basis of racially segregated churches.
Other(ing) Identity Formations: From Mission Field Ecumenism to Home Church Controversy
Authors: Müller Retief
Published: May 2022

This chapter resumes the thread of the narrative left off in chapter 4 with the focus on events and discussions involving Nyasaland/Malawi. Of central importance here are negotiations leading up to and eventually concluding in the DRC’s Nkhoma mission’s amalgamation with the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, which was the indigenous church being founded by the Free Church of Scotland’s Livingstonia mission and the Blantyre mission of the Church of Scotland. It further discusses the fallout generated in the DRC of South Africa due to this ecumenical venture participated in by their Malawian mission, a project which was controversial due to the supposedly liberal and heterodox views of the Scottish mission partners.
No Power Without an Image
Authors: Saxton Libby
Published: May 2022

No Power Without an Image is the first detailed study of what filmic images can tell us about iconic photographs. Previous scholarship on iconic images, including the proliferation of recent writings on the subject, has typically centred on, or at least paid special attention to, the medium of photography. Yet the publications that helped create some of the most familiar such icons were deeply influenced by cinema, privileging dynamic photographs and layouts and juxtaposing photojournalism with film stills and film frames. Photojournalistic icons, moreover, often coexist as film or video sequences and have played a surprisingly important but unexamined role in film criticism and theory. The book reveals multifaceted connections between seven celebrated photographs that symbolise aspects of wars and political struggles in the mid-twentieth century, when camera images began to acquire iconic distinction, and cinema in all its forms: from the ‘paper cinema’ of magazines and film star portraiture, via newsreels, to documentary, fiction and experimental films. These case studies call into question the conventional opposition between the photograph that sears into memory and the quickly forgotten filmic image. Drawing on original archival research and accounts of religious and secular icons from eclectic fields including philosophy, art history, photography and film studies and star theory, the book explores a new way of thinking about the confluence of still and moving images.
Apocalyptic Stillness: The Self-Immolators
Authors: Saxton Libby
Published: May 2022

In accounts of two widely reproduced photographs of Thich Quang Duc’s protest by self-burning (Malcolm Browne, 1963), film of Vietnamese Buddhist monks, nuns and laypeople who followed his example usually feature at most as a footnote. But these pieces of footage also reached global audiences, initially through cinema newsreels and television. This chapter explores what moving images reveal about the iconicity of those who immolated themselves in objection to South Vietnamese governance and American imperialism. It questions the traditional opposition of the iconic still to the forgotten moving picture by pursuing images of these burnings through the first generation of European and North American films that incorporated them, including newsreels, documentaries and art and experimental cinema. In dialogue with theorisations of photography’s invasion of cinema in the 1960s, the chapter argues that the elevation by Western films of these shockingly still activists into apocalyptic icons risks eliding their anti-imperial and pacifist politics.
The Permanent Way: Movement and Stasis in Beckett’s Railways
Authors: Whelan Feargal
Published: May 2022

Throughout Beckett’s works, railways appear as a dubious intervention by modern technology. Frequently, trains are missed, delayed, or demand that the individual spend a long time waiting to catch them. Beckett challenges the 19th century image of the train as a speedy harbinger of modernism by emphasising its reality of unreliability and enforced immobility. Using this paradox as a starting point, this chapter surveys the appearance of this mode of transport in Watt, Mercier and Camier, All That Fall and That Time, drawing attention to specific contemporary technological developments in Dublin’s suburban railways, and to the effect of the violent period of Irish history from 1916–1923 in altering the technology’s perception. It argues that the central role of rail transport in the establishment and sustenance of Beckett’s suburban home community provided him with a durable metaphor for the portrayal of personal and communal inertia and stasis.