bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Social System
Authors: Malatras Christos
Published: May 2024

This chapter is occupied with the ideological infrastructure of social stratification, the basic norms and ideas that governed social relations and facilitated social reproduction in Byzantium. Hierarchy and order are seen as essential tools for the preservation of the social system. The hierarchy and the outward conformation to it were expressed through dressing, verbal expressions, gestures and positioning signifying deference etc.In a second place, the contention between the outwardly expressions of deference by the social inferior and the philanthropy or benevolence expected by the social superior, as part of redistribution of part of their excess social and economic capital, is identified as the system that helped the maintenance of social peace. There were cases, often by lower-born intellectuals, who managed to use this system to their advantage. However, cases of disobedience are very rarely attested in our sources. The reasons for the lack of rural social revolts in Byzantium are explored at the end of the chapter.
Reluctant Remilitarisation
Authors: Coticchia Fabrizio , Dian Matteo , Moro Francesco
Published: May 2024

While armed forces in several countries underwent deep transformations after the end of the Cold War, few if any, however, experiences more radical changes than Germany and Italy, and Japan. Reluctant Remilitarisation analyses how and why the three losers of the Second World War reconsidered their pacifism, embraced a more active military role and transformed their armed forces after the Cold War. In order to do so it analysis of the process of military transformation in Italy, Germany and Japan; it addresses the impact of historical legacies on the pacing and direction of transformation; it looks at the transformation of military doctrine and force structure over three decades
The book explores how the three countries modified posture and structure of their militaries over the past three decades. While the three countries all had to overcome a pacifist constitution, a widespread view – in both elites and public opinion – that that war was a taboo, and armed forces designed to defend and deter against large-scale threats, they all became more active security providers over the last decades. Each country followed a distinct path, though. The book reconstructs these paths, trying to show how a mix of external and domestic factors affected the pace and the extent of transformations.
The book also identifies critical junctures in such process: any push to change – it is argued – is mediated by the need to come to terms with the cumbersome weight of the past.
Consuming Female Beauty
Authors: Smith Michelle
Published: May 2024

Consuming Female Beauty connects the emergence of consumer culture in the second half of the nineteenth century with the development of new models of beauty to demonstrate how beauty ideals for girls and women were substantially reshaped in Britishprint culture from 1840 to 1914. It analyses how physical beauty appeared in fiction, periodicals and their advertising, and beauty manuals to produce the first comprehensive history of how female beauty ideals were radically transformed in and through mass print culture. Underlying this discussion is an attempt to chart how female beauty shifts from an innate or ‘natural’ attribute to become a quality produced through the consumption of images and goods in order to transform the self. This examination demonstrates how the commercialisation of beauty practices became integral to the socialisation of young women. It aims to develop knowledge of how beauty ideals were constructed and circulated to readers during a period in which consumer culture began to thrive, revealing both the origins of contemporary standards of beauty and how the association between female beauty and appropriate consumption was formulated.
Beauty and Girlhood
Authors: Smith Michelle
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers how the highest-selling girls’ magazine of the late nineteenth century, the Girl’s Own Paper, linked together beauty, health and character. In turning attention to girls’ fiction, it argues that the unhealthy girl cannot be productive or useful to others and thereby inspires feelings of distaste and pity in others that issue from perceptions of flaws in both her character and appearance. In contrast, the healthy girl who can aid others is understood to be beautiful inside and out. Two novels published more than three decades apart, Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Six to Sixteen (1875) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) signal the enduring views about the interconnection between health, beauty and a pleasing character in girls across the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.
Limits
Authors: Kenny Oliver
Published: May 2024

This chapter returns to a more theoretical consideration of transgression, most notably Bataille’s ideas of transgression. Building on the discussion of transgressive acts from Chapter 1, it argues that Bataille’s work is of great importance for thinking about transgressive imagery, but that his ideas about transgressive acts are often unhelpfully and misleadingly extrapolated onto transgressive images and artistic transgression. Focusing on transgressive acts in Raw and In My Skin, and these films’ exploration of the violence of patriarchy’s imposition of gender norms, it demonstrates that Bataille’s ideas are useful for understanding these films’ presentation of societal structures and their relation to violence, but that they are insufficient for comprehending how these films are artistically transgressive. This chapter is an attempt to push Bataille’s ideas to their limits in terms of their pertinence for understanding the transgressive art film.
Cinema Art World
Authors: Kenny Oliver
Published: May 2024

This chapter takes the widest perspective, considering the role that transgressive art films play in the cinema ecosystem as a whole. Moving away from close textual analysis and taking a more sociological approach, this chapter examines the different stages from production, film festivals, distribution, exhibition, reception and intellectualisation, in order to show how the transgressive art film is created by many stakeholders within the cinema art world. It argues that granting a film the status of transgressive art film is about being recognised as having transgressed the right boundaries in the right way. In effect, transgressive art films are those that include imagery and structures that were not previously considered to be part of art cinema, but that are incorporated into the domain of art cinema: they are in that moment both inside and outside art cinema before subsequently becoming part of the canon, and effectively enlarging the limits of film art. This chapter brings together all the ideas about form, reception and theory discussed throughout the book and points to our ethical and political responsibilities as scholars when choosing films on which to focus our attention and research time.
Commemoration, Domestic Display and the Decorative Arts: Romantic Nelsonia
Authors: Boyce Charlotte
Published: May 2024

As well as giving rise to grand paintings and elaborately sculpted memorials, the death of Lord Nelson also gave impetus to the field of the decorative or applied arts, inspiring a range of commemorative ceramics, textiles and glass-pictures intended for domestic display. Designed to capitalise on the outpouring of national grief that greeted the news of Nelson’s demise, the production of these items of memorabilia was driven, at least in part, by economic motives. And yet, despite their commercial origins and ‘low art’ status, commemorative wares often shared an iconographic vocabulary with their fine-art counterparts, deploying similar visual symbols and aesthetic motifs to signify Nelson’s heroism and immortal fame. Manufacturers reproduced well-known portraits of Nelson by eminent artists on their jugs, tankards and tableware, thus orientating themselves towards a culturally and artistically literate marketplace. This essay argues, then, that the commemorative wares that emerged in the wake of Nelson’s death played an important part in enabling aspirational middle-class consumers to participate in the art-culture of the Romantic period and, through acts of domestic display, to contribute actively to the construction of wider, national narratives of mourning and heroic apotheosis.
Mired in Print: Romantic Writers and Caricature
Authors: Haywood Ian
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents a radically new perspective on the Romantic-era visual portrayal of writers and writing. Instead of focusing on the familiar genre of the individual literary portrait and its static iconography of authorship (the carefully placed pen or book, the inspired expression, the classical or pastoral setting), the chapter turns to the rumbustious imagery of caricature to locate a more dynamic and collective picture of literary print culture in action. The chapter shows that caricature undermined the Romantic cult of genius and celebrity by focussing on the material difficulties of writing and the networks of print and patronage which determined an author’s reputation and success. Caricatures are therefore illuminating historical documents which cast new light on the Romantic idea of solitary and transcendent genius, and on the highly conflicted political, social and cultural contexts within which this new and enduring ideology of authorship emerged. The careers of Romantic authors including Robert Southey, Lord Byron and Walter Scott are re-examined and re-framed through a series of close readings of caricatures by James Gillray, George and Robert Cruikshank, and Charles Williams.
‘A Point to Aim at in a Morning’s Walk’: Encounters at the Print Shop
Authors: McCue Maureen
Published: May 2024

In a moment where Britain’s art and literary worlds were in flux, when texts and images were becoming more readily available to an increasingly diverse audience, the print shop – both real and imagined – became a key focal point, a place where the public’s desire for visual culture was simultaneously peaked and sated. Wares could range from rare engravings of Old Master art or high-end prints of contemporary history paintings (as in the case of Molteno’s or Colnaghi’s), to satires of the most salacious gossip and political intrigue found in the popular periodicals of the day (as one might find at Hannah Humphrey’s or William Holland’s). Dually coded, therefore, as the pinnacle of refinement and the disgrace of art, prints became powerful markers of one’s taste and social standing. This essay examines the ways in which contemporary periodical essays, poetry, novels and prints constructed the print shop as a site in which reader-viewers might navigate the often-confusing slippages between high and low art in order to fashion themselves into true lovers of art.
Angelica Kauffman and the Sister Arts
Authors: Brylowe Thora
Published: May 2024

This essay addresses the history of the sister arts in order to frame a discussion of their political implications for Romantic-era cultural practitioners in general and for the painter Angelica Kauffman in particular, as well as for her print mediators. The analysis of Kauffman’s related self-portraits, one in which she styled herself the embodiment of Design and one where she “hesitates” between the sister arts, reveals that she used these personified allegories to promote and cement her professional reputation. At the same time, the classically garbed personifications of art and music reinforced Kauffman’s femininity and scrupulous moral judgement.
Cultural Manifestations of Romanticism on the Contemporary Screen
Authors: Shachar Hila
Published: May 2024

In much the same way as the Romantics reworked, appropriated, and extended the contemporary material and visual culture of their own era by borrowing from the wider arts in their conceptualisations of the sublime and creativity, their own ideologies, works, and biographical personas have been extended and appropriated from the Victorian period, onwards. This chapter focuses on how this extension and appropriation can be theorised in relation to films made specifically within the last few decades.
There are several ways in which Romantic ideologies manifest on the contemporary screen: as direct representations of biographical films about Romantic authors; adaptations of later nineteenth-century novels; and new narratives, set in the contemporary era. This chapter explores all three manifestations of Romanticism, arguing that Romantic definitions of individuality and creativity pervade a diverse array of films that are primarily centred on narratives of feminine subjectivity in our own modern era.
Echoes of Native–Norse Relationships in the Archaeology at St Ninian’s Isle, Shetland
Authors: Barrowman Rachel
Published: May 2024

Excavations at the chapel and burial ground on St Ninians’s, Shetland have led to new analysis and re-examination of previous excavations at the site in the 1950s. Original interpretations of violent Viking incursions into the site around 800 have been re-evaluated, and instead there is a strong argument for continuity as seen in the excavated evidence. St Ninian’s Isle sits in an area that is rich in Pictish culture and early Christian sculpture, the early church building on the site itself being the location for the deposition of a hoard of Pictish silverware. Throughout seismic changes in belief and culture, the site continued to be considered a site of sacred importance. The interment of long cist burials marked by cross-incised sculpture into a significant pagan burial site below the chapel, suggests the site was already considered sacred prior to the arrival of Christianity, and subsequent interments of tenth-century, demonstrably Norse, Christian burials accentuate a continued loyalty to the site.
The Use of Space in Norse Houses: Some Observations from the Hebrides
Authors: Sharples Niall
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the excavation of three high-status Norse houses spanning the late 9th to the early 14th centuries from a large settlement mound at Bornais in South Uist in the Western Isles. The exceptional quality of preservation seen at the site has allowed a tight chronology determined by the acquisition of large assemblages of radiocarbon dates and material culture. House 1 is shown to have been built in the late 9th/early 10th century, and used until the middle of the 11th century, House 2 built in the second half of the 11th century and abounded early in the 12th century, and House 3 built in the middle of the 13th century and abandoned as late as the early 14th century. A study of the social position of female slaves in houses from Iceland and the Hebrides is also made possible through analysis of artefact distributions and the location of cooking areas, and spatial relationship of the hearth and entrance in the houses. Overall, it is demonstrated that whilst there are similarities between the longhouses in the Scandinavian territories of the North Atlantic, there are significant differences in their social management and organisation.
The Lewis Hoard of Gaming Pieces – Evoking and Reassembling a Viking Past?
Authors: Hall Mark A. , Caldwell David H.
Published: May 2024

This chapter summarises the work on the Lewis Hoard of gaming pieces, commonly called the ‘Lewis Chessmen’, that has taken place since the publication of Vikings in Scotland. Reassessment of the find spot, artistic parallels and the cultural context of the hoard has led to new conclusions. The gaming pieces are shown to post-date the Viking Age by at least a century, and it is suggested that they were collected together across the 12th and 13th centuries in order to recall a Viking past at politically fraught time in Gaelic-Norse society in the Western Isles.
The ‘Pagan Norse Graves of Scotland’ Research Project
Authors: Graham-Campbell James , Paterson Caroline , Harrison Stephen
Published: May 2024

This chapter outlines the findings of the Pagan Norse Graves of Scotland research project, which has, since the publication of Vikings in Scotland, sought to reassess known Viking graves and artefacts by tracing the original written records documenting them. In the course of this research, mistakes in interpretation were rectified, and as a result, a dramatic increase in the number of known Viking graves was observed. In addition, the reinterpretation of artefacts and burials has gained new insights into the origins and practices of the Norse buried in Scandinavian Scotland.
Hung O’er the Deep: Wordsworth’s Allusions and Revisions
Authors: Somervell Tess
Published: May 2024

This chapter approaches both Wordsworth’s allusions and his revisions as depictions and dramatisations of the poet’s engagement with the literary past. Wordsworth’s allusions to Milton and Thomson, I argue, reveal the mediation of the time that has flowed in between in the form of the long literary history of the eighteenth century. His extensive revisions to The Prelude similarly hint that versions of the poem represent moments in time that are part of a continuous, additive process, because the revisions often retain traces of and subtly allude to, rather than fully displace, their origins in past versions of the poem.
Forging Identities in the Irish World
Authors: Cooper Sophie
Published: May 2024

Set within colonial Melbourne and Chicago, this book explores the shifting influences of religious demography, educational provision and club culture to shed new light on what makes a diasporic ethnic community connect and survive over multiple generations. Forging Identities is the first book to compare these two settler cities and the Irish communities that lived in them.
Sophie Cooper focuses on these Irish populations as they grew alongside their cities establishing the cultural and political institutions of Melbourne and Chicago. These comparisons allow scholars to explore what happens when an ethnic group – so often considered ‘other’ – have a foundational role in a city instead of entering a society with established hierarchies. The crucial roles of women in shaping these cities and identities are placed alongside their male counterparts to explore the varied influences on migrant identity and community life.
Introduction
Authors: Cooper Sophie
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter briefly explores the historiography of the Irish diaspora and the emigrant Irish Catholic Church, particularly relating to the United States and Australia. It identifies the gaps in the existing literature and justifies the methodologies used in this book, particularly comparative and transnational history frameworks. The comparative approach of this book problematises what we think we know about differences between imperial diasporic Irishness and American, highlighting the similarities as well as the differences in community organisation, politicisation, and images of ‘home’. The transnational framework, though secondary to the comparison, locates the Irish experience within an ever-changing network of influence and influencers, connecting Irish communities in Melbourne and Chicago with Ireland and with international political and social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Church and Club: Religious Parish Life
Authors: Cooper Sophie
Published: May 2024

While both cities had a thriving secular parish life, the role of religion is a vital consideration in studying the Irish diaspora. The organisation of the Catholic parish system in Melbourne and Chicago transformed the way that Irish identity was understood and presented in each city. Melbourne’s Catholic Church was almost completely Irish in make-up; to be Catholic was to be Irish during the nineteenth century, though to be Irish was not necessarily to be Catholic. In Chicago, however, the Catholic Church was diverse and parishes were organised based on ethnicity with Irish priests and nuns catering to Irish congregations. This chapter explores the ways that these differences manifested in parish life and the role of sodalities, charity, community fundraising, and religious newspapers in connecting children and their parents to each other based on location. It considers the role of institution building in claiming physical space for Irish Catholics in each city, and how religious organisations contributed to shaping understandings of ‘Irishness’ at different times in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Different Fighting Styles: Political Nationalism
Authors: Cooper Sophie
Published: May 2024

While Irish nationalism in American cities has frequently been characterised as militant and virulent, Australian nationalism has been dismissed as non-existent. Both of these summations are exaggerations and comparison presents an opportunity to explore the nuances in nationalist expression as well as the transnational connections that existed between the two cities. Instead of focusing primarily on the decades from 1880 when Irish diasporic populations funded boycotts and dynamite campaigns, the multigenerational nature of this book allows for the exploration of each city’s foundation and the influences that had on shifting responses to Irish nationalist ideas. This highlights the strong financial support of the Melbourne Irish community for home rule and the importance of self-government in Victoria as an example for Ireland, in addition to the little acknowledged support for constitutional efforts to gain self-government that existed in Chicago. The community networks of Irish associational culture, explored in chapters 3 and 4, are expanded across nationalist societies, emphasising the shifting influences on Irish public life in its many guises.
St Patrick’s Day and the Public Performance of Identity
Authors: Cooper Sophie
Published: May 2024

This book focuses on the changing public understandings of what it was ‘to be Irish’. The conclusions reached in previous chapters are brought together in this study of St Patrick’s Day celebrations where Irish leaders representing the Catholic Church tussled with secular organisations to present a particular image of Irishness. Parades and grand balls were opportunities to demand public space and acknowledgement, therefore this chapter explores the ways that religion, ethnicity, and class were balanced in the public sphere, and the ways that power was distributed and fought over in the battle to present diasporic Irishness in a particular way. This book argues that understandings of Irish identity shifted based on time and context, work and leisure. Only a fraction of the Irish communities of Melbourne and Chicago paid subscriptions to join ethnic clubs, more sent their children to Irish or Catholic schools, however, St Patrick’s Day was, and remains, a time where an imagined Irish identity is celebrated by large swathes of people regardless of their ethnicity or engagement with ethnic identity on a day-to-day basis. This chapter therefore unites themes that have been explored throughout the book in considering how public Irish identity was claimed and compromised over in the streets and ballrooms of Melbourne and Chicago.
Gothic Overhearing: Inquisition, Confession, and Accusation in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues
Authors: Loksing Moy Olivia
Published: May 2024

This chapter identifies the overhearing of the “prisoner next-door” as a Gothic trope essential to Robert Browning’s early dramatic monologues. His early poems often feature dramatic speakers who are mad monks and murderous dukes confessing criminal acts. By entitling his first pair of dramatic monologues “Madhouse Cells,” Browning calls attention to a Gothic genealogy – one inherited from 1790s novels, where the characters of overheard prisoners were ubiquitous. In their novels, Radcliffe and Lewis frequently staged scenes of romantic and criminal confession that served as a testing ground for lyric expression, literalizing and experimenting with the model of triangulation across prison walls. Those semi-satirized figures pour forth their feelings through song and are overhead across castle thresholds, monastic cloisters, and jails of the inquisition, serving as precursors to some of Victorian poetry’s most memorable speakers.
Gothic Shock and Swap: Suspended Bodies and Fluctuating Frames in D. G. Rossetti’s Double Works
Authors: Loksing Moy Olivia
Published: May 2024

This chapter draws a connection between Radcliffe’s “realist supernatural” and the “realist symbolism” of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite “double works.” Turning to the experience of the Gothic reader, it considers disorienting, “eleventh-hour” swaps at the endings of 1790s Gothic novels: a dead body turns out to be a waxen image; or a supernatural spirit turns out to be a sleepwalking servant. Both the “terrorist school” of Gothic sensation novels and Rossetti’s “Fleshly School of Poetry” were criticized for arousing corporeal reactions and causing readers’ hairs to stand on end: Rossetti’s Victorian-era female studio models, cast as figures like Venus or the Virgin Mary, appear on canvas and the written page as real, fleshly women, warm to the touch. But the same is true of the infamous waxen corpse in The Mysteries of Udolpho and the seductive image of Matilda in The Monk. 1790s Gothic novels and Rossetti’s 1860s-1870s “picture poems” both depicted women’s bodies as alternately ethereal and physical in confounding, unrelenting succession — contributing to the readerly sensation of discomfiting, shocking swaps and switches that define the Gothic experience.
The U.S. Bildungsroman’s Regional Complex
Authors: Avery Tamlyn
Published: May 2024

This introduction provides an historical and generic framework for understanding that effects of a pervasive sense of regional difference in U.S. political and cultural life upon the development of the Bildungsroman’s generic themes, forms, and characters in the twentieth century. Namely, regional difference informed the U.S. novel of uneven development, in which the young protagonist’s development within the national-historical time of Americanization is unsettled by their preoccupation with regional difference: an immobilizing entanglement Avery calls the U.S. Bildungsroman’s regional complex. The unfixed youth’s heightened awareness of regional difference ultimately leaves the unfixed youth, and the Bildungsroman genre with it, irreconcilably caught and loose within the homogenizing processes of Americanization. Indeed, the nation’s uneven development gave rise to several regional variations, as authors repurposed the genre’s universal features to contend with the asymmetrical effects of national development—culturally, politically, and economically. This introduction focuses on the different types of novels of uneven development that developed across the Midwest, the Northeast, the South, and the Southwest.
Situating the Bildungsroman’s Transnational Afterlives
Authors: Avery Tamlyn
Published: May 2024

This afterword briefly reflects on what happened to the Bildungsroman after the turn toward the current post-nationalist stage in U.S. culture and politics. It considers the limits, real and imagined, of the historical and geographical stakes of the Bildungsroman national framework, while pointing to the paradoxical endurance of regional difference as a thematic and aesthetic preoccupation in contemporary iterations of the genre.
Weird Fiction in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Corstorphine Kevin
Published: May 2024

‘Weird Fiction in the Twentieth-Century Gothic’ provides a historical overview of the term ‘weird’ as it relates to twentieth-century fiction and outlines some definitions in terms of the characteristic features of the genre, as well as the ideas underpinning its manifestations. This involves an unpacking of H.P. Lovecraft’s use of the term in his essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (1927), which argues for the existence of a ‘truly weird atmosphere’ expressed in certain forms of fiction that go beyond the horror and terror of the Gothic mode to convey what he calls ‘an awed and convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres or entities.’ It is also argued that Weird fiction provides the eerie thrills of the Gothic but also an engagement with rapid developments in science, creating the perfect set of circumstances for it to proliferate in pulp magazine form in the mid-twentieth century.
Gothic Horror Films at the ‘Fin-de-Millennium’: From Nightmare Videos to Filtered Realities (1980–2000)
Authors: Ní Fhlainn Sorcha
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores new forms of technological circulation that informed the proliferation and aesthetics of Gothic Horror films in the closing decades of the century. Marked out in distinct thematic flows, the chapter charts the rise of slashers on video and contemporary anxieties of the crumbling morality of the 1980s, through to the recuperation of horror via genre hybridisation in glossy Hollywood Gothic blockbusters. By the end of the century, the fin-de-millennium gloom had pervaded postmodern horror in ‘self-aware’ considerations of 1980s slashers (in Scream), the terror of nuclear extermination and millennium-eve Satanic returns reflecting Y2K panic, and complicated notions of subjectivity and truth with the rise of found footage films. This chapter identifies the main themes and cinematic developments at the turbulent end of the twentieth century, where we identify with (and occasionally cheer for) monsters, champion outliers and unmask doubled others, and find that our understanding of truth (and what it means to ‘bear witness’) is radically challenged.
Twentieth-Century War Gothic
Authors: Monnet Agnieszka Soltysik
Published: May 2024

This chapter notes that the twentieth century was marked by two of the bloodiest global wars in history, as well as numerous colonial and resource-driven military conflicts spanning from the Philippines in 1899 to the Persian Gulf in the 1990s. The First World War and its mechanised slaughter represented both the demise of the illusion of modernity as a force of progress and enlightenment and the full maturation of the Gothic mode as a literary paradigm capable of expressing that failure. Although the War Gothic has existed since the eighteenth-century, it came into its full range and power only with the nightmarish conditions of the trenches and chemical weapons in World War One. This chapter focusses on several key texts which represent the most important cultural work of the War Gothic, from the war poetry of the trenches to the horror fiction and cinema of the Vietnam War, ending with a brief discussion of new developments in the Gothic representation of war at the end of the twentieth century.
The Gothic 1950s
Authors: Hantke Steffen
Published: May 2024

While the Gothic has often responded to turbulent and violent periods in European history, periods of great calm and prosperity have fostered a Gothic acutely attuned to the cost of such calm. America in the 1950s was just such a period. Here it is argued that amidst the popular culture of the period, Hollywood articulated these Gothic undertones. The author suggests that classic films such as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956) helped transform the most prominent war of the decade, the Korean War, into ‘the forgotten war’. The work of canonical directors like Nicholas Ray showed how the racial polarisation driving the nation’s suburbanisation operated below the threshold of visibility until the urban riots of the following decade. In its ability to enact (and thus entrench) and reveal (and thus subvert) these mechanisms of repression, the Gothic provided a sustained note of anxiety and scepticism to reverberate along the self-assured, triumphalist tenor of 1950s American pop culture.
Troubling Legacies: African American Women’s Gothic from Zora Neale Hurston to Tananarive Due
Authors: Downey Dara
Published: May 2024

Here it is argued that Octavia Butler’s 1979 neo-slavery novel Kindred is emblematic of a distinct ambivalence towards Gothic tropes and conventions found in twentieth-century fiction by African American women. From Zora Neale Hurston’s engagement with Southern and Caribbean hoodoo, voudou, and conjure in the 1920s, to Tananarive Due’s visions of successful young black women haunted by the very real presence of racialised violence in the American 1990s, African American women’s Gothic fiction walks a perilous line. These texts reject both the ultimate optimism of traditional Female Gothic plots and the demonisation of black characters as avatars of Gothic darkness. At the same time, it is argued, they also acknowledge and dramatise the continuing usefulness of Gothic imagery and narrative tropes in excavating, and moving beyond, the horrific history of race relations in the Americas throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
The Past: A Brief History of Migration in Scotland
Authors: Westfall Aubrey L.
Published: May 2024

“The Past” reviews Scotland’s historical experience of migration and describes the Scottish government’s efforts to build a multicultural and immigrant-receiving nation in the new millennium. It describes how emigration was a central feature of Scottish life until the 1990s, even as the country experienced large immigration flows, especially from Ireland. The chapter then reviews trends in modern immigration flows that have racially and culturally diversified Scotland. It describes the demographic profiles of immigrant populations in England and Scotland, which explains why immigration is less visible in Scotland. The second half of the chapter outlines the Scottish approach to immigration, with which the Scottish government pursues its interest in increased migration through specific policies that incrementally push devolution further by enhancing Scotland’s competencies within the UK-wide system of immigration.
The Promise: The Benefits of Immigration for Scotland
Authors: Westfall Aubrey L.
Published: May 2024

“The Promise” reviews how and why political elites promise that immigration will be a solution to demographic and economic difficulties that compromise Scotland’s status as a nation. Three key areas in which Scottish and UK interests differ and where immigration is presented as a benefit to Scottish interests are population growth, economic growth, and support for social services, like health care, housing, and education. The chapter reveals little evidence that the migrant presence detracts from native-born citizens’ wages, employment opportunities, or social services. Instead, migrants rejuvenate local communities and attract services. Much of the Scottish campaign to justify and endorse immigration focuses on dispelling myths about the effect of migration on the labour market and demonstrating that immigration is beneficial to the Scottish economy and Scottish workers. Migration is presented to the Scottish people as a win-win solution.
The Press: Newspaper Reporting on Immigration in the Uk Versus Scotland
Authors: Westfall Aubrey L.
Published: May 2024

“The Press” examines the representation of immigration in the UK’s print media. The chapter compares coverage of immigration in major UK-wide and Scottish broadsheet newspapers, and evaluates the tone and framing in each article with “immigration” in the title. The chapter begins with a review of the newspaper market in the UK, followed by a discussion of how immigration is framed by the media, before describing the methodology employed in the analysis of 706 UK-wide and Scottish newspaper articles. The analysis explains the nuances in how immigration is framed in the UK-wide and Scottish newspapers to reveal some regional differences. However, the biggest differences in framing and tone are attributable to the ideological perspective, rather than the national audience of the newspapers. The chapter considers the implications of the analysis by reviewing how media framing influences the formation of public opinion, and compares the opinions of Scottish survey respondents by their preferred newspaper.
The Projections: Alternative Futures for the Politics of Immigration in Scotland
Authors: Westfall Aubrey L.
Published: May 2024

“The Projections” demonstrates how immigration has become a symbol for Scotland’s future relationships with the UK, the EU, and the international community. The England-facing politics of immigration contrast national approaches to immigration and multiculturalism and use the contrast to advocate for independence, which would profoundly impact English–Scottish relations. The Scottish leadership also uses migration to position itself within the institutions and ideology of the EU. The EU has legitimised Scotland’s political personality and Scotland has exploited opportunities within the organisation to advance its interests. The EU also incentivises free movement and pro-immigration policies among its regions and prospective states. Finally, immigration and emigration play a critical role in developing Scotland’s international reputation and Scotland’s public diplomacy promotes positive contributions of immigrants and internationalism. The chapter concludes by considering how a sustained focus on immigration functions as a mechanism for defining Scotland’s future, regardless of whether Scotland achieves independence.
Post-war Reconstruction and Reforms of the 1920s and 1930s
Authors: Grigoriadis Ioannis N.
Published: May 2024

Through his radical top-down reform Atatürk attempted to place Turkey within the West and introduced Western values, as he considered them to be universal. Whether Turkey remains a member of the Western bloc or not depends on a number of factors.
On the centennial of the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, the West remains by far Turkey’s most important economic and political partner, yet the voices of those who see the West as being in irreversible decline and advise have gained pace in Turkey as well in other countries of the Western periphery.
Civil–Military Relations in Turkey: Back to Square One Yet Again?
Authors: Özcan Gencer
Published: May 2024

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, while many militaries around the world had to give up their prerogatives, Turkey’s military could maintain its pivotal position within the state and act as subordinate vis-à-vis the civilian authorities. However, the pivotal position has never been above politics. Contrary to all claims, the military appeared to act as the bulwark against the social and political forces challenging the existing order for change. However, legal reforms and political contingencies brought the military’s political agency in Turkey’s politics to an end in 2011.
Greece–Turkey Relations
Authors: Aydın Mustafa
Published: May 2024

It is generally accepted that the existing problems between the two countries cannot be solved easily any time soon. Although the improvement of Greek–Turkish relations depends on mutually sustained efforts to this end, at any one time, one side or the other seems reluctant to rise to the challenge, either because it considers the existing status quo in its favour or because it is constrained by domestic or international pressures. While the groundwork has already been laid down since 1999, especially with the proximity talks between high-level officials since March 2002, and the gap between Greek and Turkish positions has somewhat narrowed, they have not yet reached the final political deal.
The Eastern Mediterranean in Turkish Foreign Policy: From the Defensive to the Assertive
Authors: Tziarras Zenonas
Published: May 2024

Without neglecting the need for national defence and security, Ankara’s policy in the eastern Mediterranean under the AKP has moved towards assertiveness, revisionism and power projection far away from the bounds of its immediate neighbourhood and the eastern Mediterranean itself. This is a result of both a stronger naval and military force (national power) and the emergence of a political elite with much more willingness to take risks and follow an adventurous foreign policy in the context of an ambitious grand strategy. The third decade of the twenty-first century will find Turkey wrestling with the results of and reactions to its openings, presence and influence abroad as it faces social, political and economic challenges domestically as well.
Turkish Foreign Policy and the Arab Spring: Opportunities and Challenges
Authors: Köprülü Nur
Published: May 2024

Turkey’s growing regional role as well as its ideological centrality, then, were also undermined by the coup in Egypt and Assad’s refusal to democratise Syria, which culminated in Ankara severing ties with Sisi’s rule and the Syrian Ba’ath regime. As a matter of fact, the transition which has been underway in Tunisia since 2011 has been considered the most successful case in scholarly debates, displaying an increased democratic endeavour. Freedom House reports that Tunisia, which was characterised as a ‘not free’ country during the Arab Spring, rapidly shifted to a ‘free’ country. Having said that, despite the existing demands of the people for both economic change and democratisation in the region, the majority of the countries are still governed by authoritarian regimes, which has precluded the opening of a democratically inspired form of governance in the MENA region and Turkey’s achievement of its goal to act as a ‘model’ for the entire region.
Turkey’s Seven Decades of Ebb and Flow within NATO
Authors: Açıkmeşe Sinem Akgül , Ovalı Ali Şevket
Published: May 2024

This chapter departs from the argument that Turkey’s relations with NATO should be evaluated through the conflict–cooperation nexus and only this approach can provide substantial evidence about the roots of conflict and motives for cooperation. Moreover, this approach would also display the limits of Turkey’s position within NATO, with a focus on potential areas and/or issues that are likely to produce conflict, as well as future opportunities for collaboration in the conflict-prone regions. Against this background, this chapter merely focuses on the cases that have had direct implications for the alliance rather than the external bilateral disputes between Turkey and the fellow members of NATO. Within the context of conflict dynamics, the divergent interests of Turkey and its NATO allies in the Syrian civil war, Turkey’s decision to purchase S-400 missile systems and Ankara’s veto bargain over NATO’s defence plan for Poland and the Baltics as well as Turkey’s concerns over NATO’s expansion to Finland and Sweden will be examined. The motives for cooperation will be scrutinised through Turkey’s several contributions to NATO, including its participation in selected missions and field operations.
Environmental Protection versus Economic Development in Turkey
Authors: Atvur Senem
Published: May 2024

Instead of following unsustainable and controversial economic projects, Turkey must focus on improving its environmental agenda to guarantee not only the preservation of nature, the sustainability of the environment and the rights of the next generations, but also the future of the democratic, liberal and egalitarian Republic. The environmental struggle in Turkey has become a movement for democratic, existential and political rights; therefore, for the sake of the Republic’s future, the state should listen to the voice of the citizens and change the political direction to rebalance ecological sustainability and social welfare with economic policies. The EU’s Green Deal could be a guideline for Turkey to renew its environmental regulations as well as an economic model. The European Commission defines the Green Deal as an action plan to boost the efficient use of resources and restore biodiversity; thus, the EU aims with this model to transform into a zero-carbon economy and climate-neutral continent (European Commission 2021). As a candidate state, Turkey’s integration into the Green Deal seems to be not only an indispensable option but also an obligation. Turkey should redefine its political position in the transforming global system, and the environment could be the key to this process.
Kinetic Medicine: Superposition of Black Female Subjectivity Before the Law
Authors: Peebles Tavera Stephanie
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the ways in which Frances Ellen Watkins Harper prescribes empathetic nursing as a path toward healing from the ongoing trauma of slavery in her medical novel Iola Leroy (1892). In deploying Cary Wolfe’s concept of before the law, this chapter reveals the racism inherent in Anthony Comstock’s censorship methods, which employ selective censorship practices to perpetuate the false narrative of black animality and black bestiality that underpin the law of hypodescent and anti-amalgamation law. In Iola Leroy, Harper not only counters such false cultural narratives that seek to delegitimize women of color as rights-bearing citizens and to legitimize the rape of black women during and after slavery, but also imagines empathetic nursing among communities of color as a way to heal from the physical and psychological trauma. This chapter further theorizes race, gender, and disability as superposition ala Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism. Understanding race and gender as superposition reframes our interpretation of the medico-legal discourses at work in Harper’s Iola Leroy, and at work in our own society as we hold on to the cultural narrative of black bestiality and hypersexuality in the twenty-first century.
Queer Gothic: Romantic Origins and Victorian Innovations
Authors: Zigarovich Jolene
Published: May 2024

Continuing in the Queer Romantic Gothic vein, this chapter delves into female homoerotic readings of Charlotte Dacre’s Zafloya, or, The Moor (1806) and then Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) within a trans theoretical framework that includes an exploration of Susan Stryker’s iconic late twentieth century essay, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.’ From the Romantic Age, the chapter moves into the Victorian Era in which a more strict binary culture informed by legal precedents and the growing study of sexology was taking root. This portion of the chapter analyses Bertha as a queer figure in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847); and, the author also focuses on Jane’s problematic privileged and colonial gaze as she is both terrified of and titillated by Rochester’s first wife. From Brontë, the chapter focuses on Wilkie Collins’s famous queer and gender fluid Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White (1859) as well as Collins’s less scrutinised Miserrimus Dexter the non-binary disabled character at the heart of The Law and the Lady (1875). The chapter concludes with an exploration of Queer Gothic bonds between Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865).
Gothic Cinema and Sexology in the Weimar Republic: Towards a Queer Gothic Aesthetic on Screen
Authors: Wegner Dennis
Published: May 2024

As a specific focus for early twentieth-century Queer Gothic, the author has honed in on the Weimar Republic in order to explore Gothic cinema and the fruition of sexology – specifically sexology that had positive queer messages through Magnus Hirschfeld’s work. This chapter analyses seminal German Gothic horror films like the 1913 The Student of Prague with the theme of the doppelgänger and the classic vampiric horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) for underlying queer readings. Beyond the queer readings of these essential early films, the essay moves to an analysis of a 1919 queer education film featuring Magnus Hirschfeld: Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others). This silent film combines melodrama and tragedy with documentary footage of Hirschfeld lecturing on and advocating for homosexuality as a normal sexual variant. Wegner brings a fresh Gothic perspective to this rare queer film by analysing the machinations of the sinister blackmailer figure who so terrifies one of the gay male characters that he commits suicide. The film, itself, is a miracle that barely escaped Hitler’s raid on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin.