bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Things to Come
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: September 2017

This chapter deals with of recent novels and films that project forward into the near future, suggesting where surveillance might be heading. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, surveillance is figured into a future world of interplanetary environmentalism, in protecting planets and helping to monitor the ‘rewilding’ of an environmentally devastated Earth. Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium fashions another Earth under environmental stress, patrolled by stringent surveillance operatives and systems that also screen the put-upon inhabitants from the eponymous eutopian space station literally and metaphorically above them. The film concentrates on the utopian urges of that population in their endeavour to overcome oppressive monitoring and receive medical treatment reserved for those on Elysium. Dave Eggers conjures up an apparently eutopian hi-tech company, The Circle, in his novel of the same name, representing how new technologies manipulate data and images for economic, social and political control. Spike Jonze’s film Her explores the relationship between surveillance and intimacy through the interaction between a human and an operating system. As with Eggers’ The Circle, Her investigates how data confuses definitions of identities as it allows for the fusion of surveillance and intimacy. These novels and films suggest some of the ways in which new forms of surveillance promise or threaten to fashion the worlds of the future. As with all such texts, they suggest options and present narratives and characters that enable readers and viewers to think and act so that the future approximates the eutopian rather than the dystopian.
On Being in Time: Modern African Elites and the Historical Challenge to Claims for Alternative and Multiple Modernities
Authors: Dlamini Jacob
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the ways in which African elites define their relation to the Europe with which they were confronted by the settlers in both appreciative and combative terms. It considers how scholars might use the idea of temporality — identified by both C. A. Bayly and Peter Wagner as being central to a subject's experience of modernity — to engage critically in debates about what Shmuel Eisenstadt has called ‘multiple modernities’ and Dilip Gaonkar has referred to as ‘alternative modernities’. Drawing on a specific historical case, involving a group of Christianised African elites in colonial South Africa from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, the chapter demonstrates the importance of temporality as a dimension of what it meant to be modern.
The Sublime Dignity of the Dictator:1 Republicanism and the Return of Dictatorship in Political Modernity
Authors: Kalyvas Andreas
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the historical and conceptual co-evolution of republicanism and dictatorship in modern political thought. It also analyses the self-professed normative commitments of political modernity, with an eye toward exposing its stato-centric nature and antidemocratic tendency. The chapter first considers how dictatorship became marginal, a minor presence throughout the development of medieval legal and political philosophy, and more specifically how the Roman model of dictatorship was displaced by the medieval theory of emergency. It then explains how the civic humanism of the Renaissance and the ensuing neo-Roman political revival retrieved the republican emergency institution from near oblivion and reintroduced it as a viable model of emergency power for modern republics. It also discusses the relationship between dictatorship and monarchy.
Inconsistencies between Social-democratic Discourses and Neo-liberal Institutional Development in Chile and South Africa: a Comparative Analysis of the Post-authoritarian Periods1
Authors: Olivares Rommy Morales
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines how economic policies in post-authoritarian societies are influenced by policies formulated during previous authoritarian periods, as well as the mechanisms that lead to the continuity of an economic policy framework that allows the perpetuation of social inequality. The discussion centers on the relatively high degree of continuity in economic policy-making in Chile and South Africa, which have been examples of the neo-liberal reforms of the capitalist periphery and offer an additional complexity, and on the discursive level at which the economic and institutional development of both countries has been formulated. After a brief overview of both nations' historical contexts, the chapter offers a socioeconomic analysis of Chile's post-authoritarian period and compares it with South Africa's post-authoritarian period. It highlights five mechanisms of institutional continuity, which may serve as hypotheses to explain the neo-liberal trajectories of both countries.
Indignation and Claims for Economic Sovereignty in Europe and the Americas: Renewing the Project of Control over Production
Authors: Casassas David , Franco Sérgio , Laín Bru , Manjarín Edgar , Olivares Rommy Morales , Sadian Samuel , Pinochet Beatriz Silva
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on contemporary social movements in Europe and Latin America that are taking shape as forms of action that aim not only at defending some achievements of ‘reformed capitalism’ but also at exploring the possibility of forms of social and economic organisation that go beyond purely capitalist logics. More specifically, it examines the efforts of these movements as they try to regain control over production and distribution. The chapter first considers the meaning of the post-World War II ‘social deal’ as well as the actors, historical trajectories and societal self-understandings that contributed to its emergence. It then explains why, both in Europe and North America and in Latin America, the guarantee of degrees of socio-economic security went hand in hand with a decrease of collective economic sovereignty. It also analyses the effects of the neo-liberal turn on the working populations' socio-economic security and on the social deal.
The Politics of Romanticism
Authors: Beenstock Zoe
Published: September 2017

This book examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. It argues that an emerging political vocabulary was translated into a literary vocabulary in social contract theory. British Romanticism absorbed the metaphors and questions of this new discourse of individualism. Elements of social contract theory have subsequently reverberated backwards to shape the reception of Romanticism in contemporary literary studies and culture, leading Romanticism to be perceived as an individualistic literary movement. But Romantic writers were actually astute commentators on a crisis in concepts of community that had developed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory.
By looking at the intersection of social contract theory, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, German Idealism, canonical works of Romanticism, and the political culture of the 1790s, the book provides an alternative to the model of retreat which has dominated accounts of Romanticism over the last century. It offers a fresh understanding of canonical works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Godwin, Mary Shelley and Carlyle who all transposed a pervasive difficulty weaving diverse individuals into a greater social whole, which they found in the works of Hobbes, Smith, and especially Rousseau, into their own highly influential account of a modern experience of alienation.
Coleridge’s Exile from the Social Contract, 1795–1829
Authors: Beenstock Zoe
Published: September 2017

Coleridge wrote frequently about Rousseau throughout his varied career. His early lectures and letters draw on Rousseau’s critique of luxury and frequently allude to the general will, depicting Rousseau as a Christ-like figure. Coleridge’s subsequent disappointment with Pantisocracy led him to reject Rousseau and the social contract. Comparing Rousseau to Luther in The Friend, Coleridge argues that Rousseau’s unhappiness arises from a conflict between an age of individualism and an ongoing need for community. According to Coleridge, poetry tolerates this conflict better than philosophy. In ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ Coleridge suggests that social retreat offers illusory solace from war and social crisis. He critiques the state of nature, sympathy, and even religion for failing to balance the self with its environment. Thematically and formally The Rime of the Ancient Mariner explores this crisis in cohering systems. Through the mariner’s relationship to the albatross, the wedding that frames the poem, and episodes of the supernatural that disrupt the ballad form, Coleridge defines a breaking point between the individual and general wills.
Individual Sovereignty and Community: Wordsworth’s Prelude
Authors: Beenstock Zoe
Published: September 2017

Wordsworth understood poetry as a development of political economy. The 1805 Prelude describes his personal growth as a transition from a state of nature to society. Echoing Rousseau’s Second Discourse and Social Contract, Wordsworth presents nature as a socializing force and initially assumes that the French Revolution realizes the general will. When the revolution degenerates into violence, Wordsworth also blames its failure on Rousseau’s theory for its weak account of community. In the final books of the 1805 Prelude Wordsworth qualifies his withdrawal to the private will and to poetic vocation by comparing himself to Adam Smith, David Hume, and Godwin, all of whom he regards as excessively individualistic. In his revisions to the 1850 Prelude and in The Excursion Wordsworth eclipses individual sovereignty and turns to utopian communitarianism. This resolution of the tension between private and general wills explains the lesser popularity of these poems for modern readers. Nonetheless, the 1805 and 1850 Preludes and The Excursion map out an epic concern with the struggle between individual and community as central to Wordsworth’s poetry.
Empiricism’s Secret History: Fleetwood and Rousseau
Authors: Beenstock Zoe
Published: September 2017

Criticism often organizes Godwin’s career by genre, suggesting that Godwin progressed from political theory to sentimental fiction. Instead this chapter argues that Godwin follows Rousseau in writing literature to ‘judge’ his own philosophy. In Enquiry Concerning Political Justice Godwin posits society as prior to the individual. He regards the general good as mandatory rather than voluntary. Godwin’s novels examine the struggles of individuals in conforming to his model of compulsory sociability. In Fleetwood and Mandeville Godwin explores the shortcomings of Rousseau’s theory of individualist education. He fictionalizes Rousseau, Hume, Wollstonecraft, and the First Earl of Shaftesbury, exploring the shortcomings of their theories. In Fleetwood Godwin uses elements of the genre of the secret history to explore political theory’s failure to validate women within the public sphere. Deloraine extends Godwin’s criticism of the social contract tradition for being inherently patriarchal. In Godwin’s writings Rousseau eclipses Aristotle as the founding theorist of sociability.
Gendering the General Will: Frankenstein’s Breaches of Contract
Authors: Beenstock Zoe
Published: September 2017

As a sociable being that is barred from society, Frankenstein’s monster presents a sustained engagement with social contract theory’s major dilemma of whether individualism can produce sociability. The male creature’s isolation and inner disunity suggest that contract theory displaces men and is unable to concatenate even those members that should be eligible for full citizenship. Shelley focuses on the gender inequality of contract theory through her different creation stories of the creatures’ bodies. In Victor’s decision not to complete the female creature she rejects Wollstonecraft’s revisionist approach to Rousseau, and demonstrates that social contract theory cannot be rewritten to include women. Women are not defined as political subjects but do have independent wills. Therefore, they are potentially resistant to contract and a threat to political control. Contending with Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, and also Coleridge and Godwin, Shelley suggests that intertextual relations produce unpredictable results. The creatures are test cases for the social contract’s respective failures in terms of social cohesion and gender.
Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys
Authors: Johnson Erica L. , Moran Patricia
Published: September 2017

In her unfinished autobiography, Jean Rhys (1890–1979) describes the birth of her writing career as a quasi-memorial for herself as a person: buying some black exercise books and the red, blue, green and yellow quill pens to ‘cheer up’ her table and banish its bareness, Rhys represents her writing out of her unhappy first love affair as a compulsive purgation of the experience, but one that left her bereft in the recognition that something in her had died. ‘I filled three exercise books and half another, then I wrote: “Oh God, I’m only twenty and I’ll have to go on living and living and living.” I knew then that it was finished and that there was no more to say.’...
On the Veranda: Jean Rhys’s Material Modernism
Authors: Emery Mary Lou
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the veranda in Rhys’s writing as an architectural space that opens onto multiple stories, its material history embedded within five centuries of imperial conquest and conflict, the slave trade, the Middle Passage, the plantation, and the plantation’s legacies in city spaces of early 20th-century Europe. As a creolized architectural form, the veranda speaks also to global circuits stretching from its origins in West Africa and India through Europe and the Americas, with the Caribbean as a central point of transit. I analyse the veranda in Rhys’s writing – including several of the short stories and the novels Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight – as framing key characters, conflicts, and events within the transcontinental reach of this deep history. The layering of time and space, as built into the veranda, situates also the experimental prose of Rhys’s Caribbean modernism.
The Empire of Affect: Reading Rhys after Postcolonial Theory
Authors: Su John J.
Published: September 2017

This essay contributes to developing 21st-century readings of Rhys by exploring her work in relation to more recent theories of affect, particularly those associated with Brian Massumi. Massumi's work, including his influential concept of “the autonomy of affect,” is particularly intriguing in this regard because of its potential implications for postcolonial studies. Just as postcolonial studies has in the past decade sought to move beyond the center-periphery model that has dominated the discipline since its inception, readings of Rhys invite scholars to move beyond the focus on the purported (or failed) critique of Empire that has defined postcolonial Rhys scholarship. This chapter reads the two narrators of Wide Sargasso Sea, both of whom focus heavily on how their position within the British Empire is experienced on the level of emotions and affect. Rhys challenges the rigid distinctions between emotion and affect that underlie Massumi's theories, suggesting a more complex interplay between non-cognitive experiences and ideology.
‘Upholstered Ghosts’: Jean Rhys’s Posthuman Imaginary
Authors: Johnson Erica L.
Published: September 2017

Each of Jean Rhys’s novels written during the modernist period presents a world in which her female protagonists are besieged by poverty, exile, loneliness, and abasement at the hands of men and women who consistently treat them with contempt. In the face of such antipathy, Rhys’s heroines demonstrate a pronounced identification with inanimate objects, ghosts, and animals, as though to escape or at least extend their subjectivities beyond the limits of their own imperilled bodies. This outsourcing of identity to machines, mirrors, mannequins, dolls, kittens, zombies, and so forth, may be in part a defence mechanism against the oppressive conditions under which they live, but one effect of Rhys’s portraiture is that she pushes the boundaries of the body and of the subject in directions only recently explored by theories of the posthuman. This chapter examines the enmeshment of Rhys’s protagonists with material and spectral elements in order to understand her distinct representation of the affective flows of modern subjectivity.
Introduction and Sources for the History of the Jalayirids
Authors: Wing Patrick
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides a general introduction to the standard narratives of the post-Ilkhanid period, and the framework of the book, followed by a discussion of the source material available and used in the study. Sources for the history of the Jalayirids include chronicles, biographical dictionaries, poetry, documents, coins, and inscriptions, written in Persian, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish.
Tribes and the Chinggisid Empire
Authors: Wing Patrick
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on tribal organization, as well as the relationship of Mongol tribes to Chinggis Qa’an and his family during the formation of the Mongol Empire. This background frames an analysis of the movement of several Jalayir tribal amirs from Mongolia to the Islamic lands as part of the Chinggisid conquests. The purpose here is to illustrate the relationship of the ancestors of the Jalayirid dynasty to the larger Mongol imperial project in the 13th century.
Dynastic Ideology during the Reign of Shaykh Uvays
Authors: Wing Patrick
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyzes the symbols and rhetoric deployed by Shaykh Uvays and those in his service in order to construct an ideology of dynastic sovereignty for the Jalayirid sultan. Epigraphic, numismatic, artistic and literary sources, including the poetry of Salmān Sāvajī, are examined, and reveal an ideological narrative presenting Shaykh Uvays as legitimate heir to the legacy of the Ilkhanate, the ideal Muslim ruler, and upholder of royal justice.
Conclusions and the Legacy of the Jalayirids
Authors: Wing Patrick
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides an overview of the history of Jalayirid patronage of miniature painting and book illustration. The question of a “Jalayirid school” of painting is most persistent legacy of the Jalayirids in secondary literature, and is taken up here. The chapter ends with a general summary of the book’s main arguments.
Secularisation and Modernisation of Islam in China: Educational Reform, Japanese Occupation and the Disappearance of Persian Learning
Authors: Matsumoto Masumi
Published: September 2017

This chapter describes the rise of modern Islamic schooling in China and the disappearance of the traditional curriculum, partially based on Persian textbooks on the unity of being (wahdat al-wujūd). In the 1920s and 1930s, Islamic reformism became popular among city dwellers in the Chinese coastal regions. They wanted to foster bilingual (Chinese and Arabic) religious and educational leaders who accepted modern schooling, to require Chinese literacy of Muslim students and to promote nation building against foreign pressures. They judged that the traditional learning in both Arabic and Persian was both too time-consuming and ineffective in legitimizing Sino-Muslims’ presence in Chinese society. In Japan’s occupied area during the Anti-Japanese War, however, Persian learning was preserved by some non-political members of Sino-Muslim society. Persian learning is now rapidly disappearing in China, especially since the political turmoil of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution.
Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon
Authors: Day Kirsten
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on what is often considered the paradigmatic Western, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon, beginning with its complicated reception, its varied allegorical readings, its political uses, and its profound influence. The discussion then turns to parallels with Homer’s Iliad: in both, the hero’s initial faith in the justice of the social system gives way to radical isolation when the men who should provide the backbone of this system fail them, and in both, the final showdown functions as a psychological confrontation as much as a physical one. Next, like Homer’s Odyssey, High Noon centers on the threat the hero’s wife poses to his identity through her uncertain fidelity; in the end, however, her loyalty is confirmed, thereby validating masculine goals and values. Finally, like the protagonist of Virgil’s Aeneid, Gary Cooper’s Will Kane is a reluctant hero compelled to defend the community; though both are temporarily distracted by personal desires, they are ultimately moved to resume the heroic mantle by a strong sense of duty anchored to notions of a higher purpose. And like the Aeneid, High Noon is shown to contain a de-mythologizing strain that complicates national identity even as it celebrates it.
George Stevens’s Shane
Authors: Day Kirsten
Published: September 2017

Though a staple of the Western canon, George Stevens’s 1953 Shane has been criticized for its self-conscious mythologizing. Perhaps because of this mythic framing, Shane’s connections to the epic tradition are pervasive. This chapter begins by examining the overlapping concern in both with the guest-host relationship, constructions of male honor, and property rights as they relate to masculine identity. Turning next to the Iliad, this chapter expands on Carl Rubino’s examination of Shane as an Achilles figure by looking at the complicated psychological identification between hero, companion, and enemy present in both works. Next, Shane is connected to Homer’s Odyssey in its focus on a hero torn between lust for action and longing for home, its concern with a boy’s coming-of-age, and its anxiety about women’s sexual integrity. Finally, this chapter examines Shane’s close kinship with Virgil’s Aeneid through their focus on nation-building, with each including a significant acknowledgement of the antagonist’s perspective, in effect calling the justice of the hero’s cause into question, along with related notions of divine impetus and Manifest Destiny.
John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Authors: Day Kirsten
Published: September 2017

Standing at the end of a long line of John Ford Westerns and at the twilight of the genre’s Golden Age, 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a self-reflective work, as much about the Western genre as a product of it. Thus, while this film, like other Westerns examined in this book, demonstrates important connections to Homer’s epics, it finds its most pervasive parallels with the post-Homeric tradition. As in Virgil’s Aeneid, John Wayne’s Tom Doniphan sacrifices his personal desires in the interest of national progress, exhibiting a Western version of Aeneas’ pietas, while Liberty Valance fills the role of Turnus, demonstrating Achillean traits, but in a negative light. Yet the film also has a close kinship with Greek tragedy: in particular, through its preoccupation with generational tensions along with issues of knowledge and identity intertwined with themes of murder, marriage, and reputation, it recalls Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, with James Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard functioning as a decidedly un-epic Oedipus figure forced to confront his own failures. Like both Virgil and Sophocles before him, Ford offers a complex commentary on nation-building, simultaneously sentimental and critical, holding America’s glorious civic identity up for scrutiny and encouraging self-knowledge over blind mythologizing.
Knowing Luxury: From Socio-Cultural Value to Market Price?
Authors: Roberts Joanne , Armitage John
Published: September 2017

This chapter is concerned with the epistemology — or the nature and scope of knowledge — about luxury. The purpose here is not merely to define luxury but, rather, to explore how luxury is known and how this knowing is influenced by the rise to dominance of markets in the neoliberal era. Following an examination of the various meanings of luxury evident in current debates, the nature of knowledge and knowing is considered before knowing luxury goods and services is explored. Two distinct forms of knowing luxury are identified in this chapter: the first based on socio-cultural practice-based understandings and the second on market valuations. The chapter then argues that the privileging of the market under neoliberalism is leading to a shift in the nature of knowing luxury from the first to the second of these two forms.
Sartorial Connoisseurship, the T-shirt and the Interrogation of Luxury
Authors: Faiers Jonathan
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the invasive action of contemporary luxury production and consumption, by using fashion as a means with which to more closely observe its characteristic stages. The basic plain white T-shirt, ubiquitous, instantly familiar and apparently simple, has provided a fertile vestimentary culture in which luxury's recent diversification and adaptation can be detected. A garment as democratic, modest, and undistinguished would seem at first glance an unlikely target for luxury's conquest, and yet the chapter argues that it is precisely because of its humble and unpretentious origins that luxury finds in it its ideal sartorial colony. What was once a utilitarian, basic item of clothing that served specific sanitary, economic and thermal functions has been completely transformed into a prohibitively expensive and, it could be argued, functionless garment, despite the often employed qualification of those same items as ‘basic’.
Extreme Cinema
Authors: Kerner Aaron , Knapp Jonathan
Published: September 2017

Extreme Cinema surveys post-millennial trends in transnational cinema—particularly in its highly stylized treatment of explicit sex and violence. In many cases these cinematic embellishments skirt narrative motivation or even impede narrative progression, favoring instead the possibility to elicit an affective response in the spectator: physical sensation separate from cognition and emotion. As a result, in many instances extreme cinema is not governed according to narrative conventions (narrative arcs driven by character motivation), and instead emphasizes spectacles. If not episodic in structure, then, extreme cinema might host abrupt ruptures in the diegetic narrative—experiments in form and/or composition (editing, extreme close-ups, visual disorientation, sounds that straddle the boundary between non-diegetic and diegetic registers), the exhibition of intense violence and pain, acute intimacy with bodies in the throes of sex. In more episodic films, like the musical, or pornography, extreme cinema frequently showcases set cinematic numbers that flood sensory channels with auditory and/or visual stimulus. Extreme cinema wields the potential to manipulate the viewing body (as demonstrated by “reaction” videos posted on hosting sites such as YouTube). Crucially, the affects and emotions prompted by these films can vary wildly: abjection, disgust, arousal, laughter. Films considered include those of the American torture porn genre, as well as films that other scholars and marketers have classified as “New French Extremity” and “Asia Extreme.” While content is assuredly a concern, what Extreme Cinema explores, above all, is the importance of cinematic form.
Hearing: With a Touch of Sound—The Affective Charge of Audio Design
Authors: Kerner Aaron Michael , Knapp Jonathan L.
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on sound design and its potential to elicit an affective response in the spectator. Films discussed in this chapter include: Berberian Sound Studio, Inside, and 127 Hours. Building off of Michel Chion’s work on cinematic sound, the chapter explores the complicated relationship between image and sound, between seeing and hearing. Chion argues for a model of the human senses that is “transsensorial,” suggesting that sound can be used by films to appeal to other senses, such as vision, smell, taste, and touch. Thus, sound can elicit sensation in the spectator’s body. Extreme films wield sound as a weapon: high-pitched drones communicate the intense pain of characters on screen and, slipping between diegetic and non-diegetic registers, do violence to the image and the narrative itself. Drawing from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Lisa Coulthard, the chapter explores how cinematic noise—screams, scrapes, and subterranean rumbles—are designed to resonate within spectators’ bodies.
Ancient Liberties
Authors: Price Fiona
Published: September 2017

Chapter One explores how the historical novel emerged in the 1760s as a form which at once employed and interrogated the dominant political narrative of ‘ancient liberties’. The notion of ancient constitutionalism allowed proposals for reform or for limits on monarchical power to be seen as attempts to ensure stability or, at most, (as with the theory of the Norman Yoke) to return to political origin. Yet for Horace Walpole ancient constitutionalism seems at times a troubled jest; Clara Reeve senses that the motif desperately needs reinforcement; and even after the more radical uses of the theory of the Norman Yoke by the Constitutional Society in the 1780s and 90s, Ann Radcliffe considers it a frozen political fable. Haunted by the spectre of the divine right of kings, in the historical novel the narrative of tradition ultimately proves an insufficient underpinning for the constitution.
Trying to Ameliorate the System from Within: Delmer Daves’ Westerns from the 1950s
Authors: White John
Published: September 2017

John Anthony White discusses a number of Daves’ 1950s Westerns. From Broken Arrow, 3.10 to Yuma, and Cowboy to films he not only directed but for which he was also wrote the screenplay, Drum Beat, The Last Wagon, and Jubal. White contextualises his analysis in the political turmoil of the House of Un-American Activities Committee, legislative fears over miscegenation, and the growing Civil Rights movement. He considers Daves’ auteur credentials in the face of studio constraints and through his screenwriting collaborations. Despite some of the associated screenwriters holding wildly differing political attitudes, White demonstrates that they all worked with Daves to produce films that espoused a signature commonality of the director’s own liberal sentiments: sympathy for diffident races and compassion for the class struggles of the working poor against industrial capitalism. Furthermore, White’s discussion of Daves and his work with different screenwriters emphasises the complexities of the genre’s so-called ‘classical’ period.
Delmer Daves, Authenticity, and Auteur Elements: Celebrating the Ordinary in Cowboy
Authors: Matheson Sue
Published: September 2017

Sue Matheson engages with the common perception that Delmar Daves is a competent but conventional studio man. She argues that his work with the ‘adult’ Western is actually that of an auteur film-maker. Placing Cowboy within the context of the director’s 1950s Westerns, she interprets it as his scalding critique of the coming-of-age Western. In what she sees as a radical departure from the ‘classical’ Western, Matheson details how Cowboy critically interrogates classical notions of frontier manhood, deconstructs the celebration of individualism, and empties the Western landscape of its usual symbolic significance. In short, she forwards Cowboy as a an example of genre critique, suggesting that it gleans mythic images and styles from films like Howard Hawks’ Red River and John Ford’s Stagecoach only to contrast them with its presentations of a more ‘authentic’ West. Overall, Matheson forwards Daves as a mythoclast who examined the darker, more selfish side and appetites of the national character.
Home and the Range: Spencer’s Mountain as Revisionist Family Melodrama
Authors: Pomp Joseph
Published: September 2017

Joseph Pomp offers an analysis of Spencer’s Mountain, a film Daves’ adapted from the novel by Earl Hamner Jr. He observes that Daves’ lack of recognition by auteur theorists was that he often delved into melodramatic themes in his Westerns, themes out of favour with those who preferred the course masculinity of a John Ford or a Raoul Walsh, and who associated the melodrama with a female audience. Pomp suggests that Spencer’s Mountain provides a key window into Daves’ views on American family values, education, and class, arguing that Daves deconstructed melodrama’s ‘classic realist’ paradigm by considering a nascent feminist agenda that undermines the patriarchal underpinnings of the source novel. This, argues Pomp, creates an unusual mix – rendering Spencer’s Mountain different from most other Westerns of the period but also different from most melodramas. Ultimately, Pomp argues, Spencer’s Mountain suggests that fierce, heroic individualism has no place in Daves’ cinematic universe.
A brief portrait of Cairo under Ottoman rule
Authors: Baldwin James E.
Published: September 2017

Chapter 1 gives an overview of Ottoman Cairo, covering demography, economy, religion, scholarship, culture, politics, and the city’s connections to the wider Ottoman Empire. It concludes with some comments on how law underpinned the life of the city.
A culture of disputing: how did Cairenes use the legal system?
Authors: Baldwin James E.
Published: September 2017

Chapter 6 examines how Cairene litigants navigated the multiplicity of forums and practices with overlapping jurisdictions that constituted Cairo’s legal system. Moving away from the state-centric orientation of much Ottoman historiography, this chapter adopts the perspective of the legal consumer in order to discover how legal institutions were used, rather that the role the state intended them to play. The chapter emphasizes the lack of formal hierarchies or defined relationships between the different legal forums, and argues that this jurisdictional imprecision offered litigants opportunities to manipulate the system’s pluralism to their own advantage.
Screen Presence
Authors: Monteiro Stephen
Published: September 2017

Cinema plays a major role in contemporary art, yet the deeper influence of its diverse historical forms on artistic practice has received little attention. Working from a media and cultural studies perspective, Screen Presence explores the intersections of film, popular media, and art since the 1950s through the examples of four pivotal figures – Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Mona Hatoum and Douglas Gordon. While their film-related works may appear primarily as challenges to conventional cinema, these artists draw on overlooked forms of popular film culture that have been commonplace, and even dominant, in specific social contexts. Through analysis of a range of examples and source materials, Stephen Monteiro demonstrates the dependence of contemporary artists on cinema’s shifting applications and interpretations, offering a fresh understanding of the enduring impact of everyday media on how we make and view art.
The Screen Scene: Andy Warhol, the Factory and Home Movies
Authors: Monteiro Stephen
Published: September 2017

In his prodigious output of hundreds of films throughout the 1960s, Pop artist Andy Warhol cultivated an approach to making and viewing movies that borrowed heavily on the conventions of family home-movie culture. Warhol’s Factory studio in New York and his entourage of so-called “Superstars” functioned much like a family of misfits. This chapter explores film’s role in this context, analysing how Warhol combined improvised scenarios with personality differences to forge or reinforce intimate relations through filmmaking. It argues that his tendency to screen these films in the Factory—often before the people who appear on screen—functioned as a means of identifying, describing, and securing a nucleus of close social relations. Through comparison with the rhetoric of home-movie advertising and guidebooks, it teases out ways Warhol’s films paradoxically became avant-garde distortions of home-movie practices through strict adherence to suggestions and tips given to home-movie practitioners.
Conclusion
Authors: Monteiro Stephen
Published: September 2017

This conclusion briefly summarizes the book’s claims concerning the role of popular media in contemporary art. It reaffirms the need to consider wider visual and material cultural production, as well as alternative forms of media exhibition and participation, when studying moving-image-based artworks.
‘Be Wise in Thy Governing’: Managing Emotion and Controlling Masculinity in Early Modern Scottish Poetry
Authors: Dunnigan Sarah
Published: September 2017

Focussing on lyric poetry of sixteenth-century Scotland found in the Bannatyne and Maitland Manuscripts, this chapter examines the associations between masculinity and emotion. Much of this poetry is concerned with male desire and the uneven distribution of sexual and emotional power between male lover and female beloved. At the same time masculine vulnerability to the controlling forces of passion is highlighted and the importance of regulating disordered emotions is stressed. Other poems are cast in an advice literature form, with a wise father instructing his son in the socially acceptable ways in which to develop a particular form of adult masculinity, including self-governance, order and discipline. Lyric poetry portrays the ideal forms that hegemonic masculinity, or authoritative manhood, could assume, but also the anxieties that arise when inevitably the ideal is not sustained.
Music Hall, ‘Mashers’ and the ‘Unco Guid’: Competing Masculinities in Victorian Glasgow
Authors: Cheadle Tanya
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines an intra-gender competition between three masculine identities in Victorian Glasgow. In 1875, sexually risqué performances at a music hall prompted a group of men from the ‘unco guid’, or rigidly respectable middle class, to launch a morality campaign against the halls. Their efforts were largely unsuccessful due to the formation of a cross-class alliance between young, working-class men, known as ‘mashers’, and bourgeois hedonists, who together defended their male right to sexual pleasure. The analysis of this masculine power play is suggestive in three ways: it demonstrates the existence in Presbyterian Scotland of an unrespectable masculinity; it emphasizes the importance of considering alternative forms of masculine identity in their own right, and not in relation to a hegemonic norm; and it suggests that the preservation of music-hall style into the Edwardian period was the result as much of a gendered as a class-inflected contest of social hierarchies for control.
On Questioning Blindness and What the Blind ‘See’
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: September 2017

Introducing three types of ‘blindness’. Firstly, its conception as a philosophical problem in the Enlightenment. This hinges on the so-called Molyneux Question posed by Molyneux to John Locke. Therefore, the second form of blindness is hypothetical. In its original form, the Molyneux Question explicitly instantiates the Foucauldian mythical experience of the ‘man born blind restored to light’. Thirdly, ‘actual’ blindness, which examines definitions of blindness as opposed to vision impairment.
Objects that ‘touch’d his eyes’: Surgical Experiments in the Recovery of Vision
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: September 2017

Although there were unsubstantiated reports of ‘couching’ cataracts in the Middle East and Medieval Europe, William Cheselden’s cataract surgery and report to the Royal Society in 1728 caused a surge of public interest in the dramatic realization, after bandages are removed, of what the formerly blind now ‘see’. The importance of this for Molyneux’s question is clear: now subjects with prolonged experience of blindness could answer the question directly. The chapter is bookended by a famous 1963 case study in the psychology of perception, Richard Gregory’s patient ‘S.B.’ who, in Gregory’s words, “learned how to see” after an operation to restore his vision, but then retreated into his familiar world of darkness thereafter.
Introduction: Medicine and Blackwoodian Romanticism
Authors: Coyer Megan
Published: September 2017

Ours is not, strictly speaking, a medical Journal, though it contains many recipes for a long life and a merry one … Yet, though Maga is neither a physician nor a surgeon, nor yet an accoucheur – (though frequently she is Fancy’s midwife) – she does not regard with blind eye and deaf ear the medical and surgical world....
Medical Discourse and Ideology in the Edinburgh Review
Authors: Coyer Megan
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines medical discourses and ideologies in the Edinburgh Review to set up a comparative context for examining the relationship of their primary ideological competitor – Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine – to medical culture. It argues that the reforming and professionalising rhetoric of the Edinburgh emerged, in part, from medico-scientific culture and was harnessed by key medical contributors, such as John Thomson (1765–1846), Andrew Duncan, junior (1773–1832), and John Gordon (1786–1818). This rhetoric was carried forward in Archibald Constable’s Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal. The scathing reviews of medical and physiological texts in the Edinburgh Review are read as drawing upon and contributing to the liberal Whig ideology and reforming rhetoric of the journal, while also forwarding the professional agenda of individual contributors.
The Tale of Terror and the ‘Medico-Popular’
Authors: Coyer Megan
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that the ‘tale of terror’ may be read as a form of hybrid ‘medico-popular’ writing to be classed alongside non-fiction medical texts such as Robert Macnish’s The Anatomy of Drunkenness (1827) and The Philosophy of Sleep (1830), as well as one of the most canonical ‘literary’ medical case histories, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822). The first section introduces Macnish’s first medico-literary project in relation to De Quincey’s Confessions, before moving on to an examination of the development of the tale of terror in relation to the type of popular medical material previously published in monthly magazines and the case history tradition. The chapter closes by discussing the engagement with the genre by three medical contributors to Blackwood’s, the surgeons, Robert Macnish (1802–37), John Howison (1797–1859) and William Dunlop (1792–1848).
‘Delta’: The Construction of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Surgeon
Authors: Coyer Megan
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the construction of David Macbeth Moir (1798–1851), a prolific Blackwoodian author and surgeon, as a medical poet, by himself and others, both within Blackwood’s and beyond, as a key component of a redemptive counter-discourse of medical humanism. The idealistic image of the ‘humanistic’ literary medical man is read as developing, in part, as a counter to the negative cultural representations of medicine exacerbated by the anatomy murders as well as the growing divisions between medico-scientific and literary cultures and the perceived negative consequences of the ‘march of intellect’. Moir’s place within a tradition of literary medical men in Scotland and his role in debates surrounding the reform of medical education are discussed, as are key projects, including essays published in Blackwood’s and Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, his Outlines of the Ancient History of Medicine (1831), and his poetry.
Professionalisation and the Case of Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician
Authors: Coyer Megan
Published: September 2017

This chapter reads Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (1830–7) in its vexed original publishing context – the ideologically charged popular periodical press – in terms of its inception and reception, as well as its initiation of a new genre of ‘medico-popular’ writing, and places this reading in relation to debates surrounding the professionalisation of medicine. The political significance of the original intention to publish the series within the New Monthly Magazine is discussed. Within Blackwood’s, the series is read as a new development of the tale of terror, in which the genre re-coalesces with the case history, a continuation of the morally didactic and implicitly conservative mode of John Wilson’s proto-Kailyard writings, and an idealistic and politicised depiction of a literary and gentlemanly medical man. With its avowed mission to reunite intellect and feeling, Blackwood’s provided an apt platform for the construction of a professional medical man of feeling, following in the tradition of medical ethics initiated by John Gregory (1724–73). However, the reception of the controversial series, as tracked both through letters, reviews, parodies, and imitations, reveals that Warren’s series may be read as both contributing to and detracting from the agenda of professionalisation.
The Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson
Authors: Coyer Megan
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the construction of the ‘political medicine’ of William Pulteney Alison (1790–1859) and Robert Gooch (1784–1830) and its development and popular dissemination through Blackwood’s. This humanistic ‘political medicine’ critiqued liberal political economists and utilitarianism and promoted the importance of moral feelings and Christian sentiments in informing public health policy. Alison’s contribution to the debates regarding poor law reform and Gooch’s proposal for a religious order of nurses – a project supported by his friend Robert Southey – are discussed as components within a progressive Tory social medicine. By way of contrast, the chapter closes with an examination of Robert Ferguson (1799–1865), the key medical contributor to the Quarterly Review from 1829 to 1854. Although Ferguson also contributed to what David Roberts terms ‘the social conscience of Tory periodicals’, writing on issues relevant to public health and promoting a paternalistic approach, his writings more clearly reflect the counter-revolutionary agenda of the Quarterly, as opposed to the more explicit humanism of Blackwood’s.
Impossible Puzzle Films
Authors: Kiss Miklós , Willemsen Steven
Published: September 2017

Narrative complexity is a trend in contemporary cinema. Since the late 1990s there has been a palpable increase in complex storytelling in movies. But how and why do complex movies create perplexity and confusion? How do we engage with these challenges? And what makes complex stories so attractive? By blending film studies, narrative theory and cognitive sciences, Kiss and Willemsen look into the relation between complex storytelling and the mind. Analysing the effects that different complex narratives have on viewers, the book addresses how films like Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive or Primer strategically create complexity and confusion, and, by using the specific category of the ‘impossible puzzle film’, it examines movies that use baffling paradoxes, impossible loops, and unresolved ambiguities in their stories and storytelling. By looking at how these films play on our mind’s blind spots, this innovative book explains their viewing effects in terms of the mental state of cognitive dissonance that they evoke.