bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“In These Towns, Mexicans Are Classified as Negroes”
Authors: Donato Rubén , Hanson Jarrod
Published: September 2017

This article examines the emergence of Mexican American school segregation from 1915 to 1935 in Kansas, the state that gave rise to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Even though Mexicans were not referenced in Kansas’s school segregation laws, they were seen and treated as a racially distinct group. White parents and civic organizations pushed school officials to establish separate facilities for Mexican children. We argue that the contradictory and enigmatic responses to school segregation from high-ranking U.S. and Mexican government officials pointed to a degree of uncertainty about whether Mexican children could be segregated. That ambiguity, however, did not prevent local school officials from placing Mexican children in separate facilities. As the American Educational Research Association continues to pursue education research that promotes the public good, the segregation and resegregation of Mexican children in the United States must be framed as a critical issue moving forward into the “next 100 years.”
Contested “Places” and Conflicted Nexuses in Gloria Naylor'sLinden Hillsand Mairuth Sarsfield'sNo Crystal Stair
Authors: Green Kim
Published: September 2017

Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills and Mairuth Sarsfield's No Crystal Stair affirm African Americans' and African Canadians' fortitude at nexuses of resistance and oppression in the United States and Canada through portrayals of characters who refuse to allow their marginalized racial, class, and gender belongings to limit them, and who defiantly enact their ascendant aspirations.
Book Reviews
Authors: Mushaben Joyce Marie , Baranowski Shelley , Allen Trevor J. , von Mering Sabine , Milder Stephen , Prott Volker , Pfeiffer Peter C.
Published: September 2017

Louise K. Davidson-Schmich, Gender Quotas and Democratic Participation:
Recruiting Candidates for Elective Office in Germany (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2016)

Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, ed. German Colonialism in a Global Age
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)

Andrew C. Gould and Anthony M. Messina, ed. Europe’s Contending
Identities: Supranationalism, Ethnoregionalism, Religion, and New Nationalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Kathrin Fahlenbrach Martin Klimke, and Joachim Scharloth, ed., Protest
Cultures: A Companion (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016)

Udi Greenberg, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological
Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014)

Heinrich August Winkler, The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West,
1914-1945, trans. S. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)

Philipp Ther, Europe Since 1989. A History, trans. Charlotte Hughes-
Kreutzmüller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016)
Clinical characteristics and temporal profile of recovery in patients with favorable outcomes at 6 months after severe traumatic brain injury
Authors: Vedantam Aditya , Robertson Claudia S. , Gopinath Shankar P.
Published: September 2017

OBJECTIVE

Early withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment due to expected poor prognosis is responsible for the majority of in-house deaths in severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). With increased focus on the decision and timing of withdrawal of care in patients with severe TBI, data on early neurological recovery in patients with a favorable outcome is needed to guide physicians and families.

METHODS

The authors reviewed prospectively collected data obtained in 1241 patients with head injury who were treated between 1986 and 2012. Patients with severe TBI, motor Glasgow Coma Scale (mGCS) score < 6 on admission, and those who had favorable outcomes (Glasgow Outcome Scale [GOS] score of 4 or 5, indicating moderate disability or good recovery) at 6 months were selected. Baseline demographic, clinical, and imaging data were analyzed. The time from injury to the first record of following commands (mGCS score of 6) after injury was recorded. The temporal profile of GOS scores from discharge to 6 months after the injury was also assessed.

RESULTS

The authors studied 218 patients (183 male and 35 female) with a mean age of 28.9 ± 11.2 years. The majority of patients were able to follow commands (mGCS score of 6) within the 1st week after injury (71.4%), with the highest percentage of patients in this group recovering on Day 1 (28.6%). Recovery to the point of following commands beyond 2 weeks after the injury was seen in 14.8% of patients, who experienced significantly longer durations of intracranial pressure monitoring (p = 0.001) and neuromuscular blockade (p < 0.001). In comparison with patients with moderate disability, patients with good recovery had a higher initial GCS score (p = 0.01), lower incidence of anisocoria at admission (p = 0.048), and a shorter ICU stay (p < 0.001) and total hospital stay (p < 0.001). There was considerable improvement in GOS scores from discharge to follow-up at 6 months.

CONCLUSIONS

Up to 15% of patients with a favorable outcome after severe TBI may begin to follow commands beyond 2 weeks after the injury. These data caution against early withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment in patients with severe TBI.
Water Circulation and Ice Accretion Beneath Ward Hunt Ice Shelf (Northern Ellesmere Island, Canada), Deduced From Salinity and Isotope Analysis of Ice Cores
Authors: Jeffries Martin O. , Sackinger William M. , Krouse H. Roy , Serson Harold V.
Published: September 2017

Ice-core drilling and ice-core analysis (electrical conductivity–salinity, 18O, 3H, density) reveal that the internal structure of the west Ward Hunt Ice Shelf contrasts sharply with that of the east ice shelf. The west ice shelf contains a great thickness (≥22 m) of sea ice (mean salinity, 2.22‰; mean δ18O, -0.8‰), whereas the east ice shelf is entirely of meteoric or fresh-water ice (mean salinity 0.01‰; mean δ18O, -29.7‰). High tritium activities are found only in ice from near the bottom of the east and west ice shelves. The contrasting ice-core data is considered to be a proxy record of variations in water circulation and bottom freezing beneath the ice shelf. The west shelf is underlain by sea water flowing into Disraeli Fiord. Sea ice accretes on to the bottom of the west ice shelf from the sea-water flowing into the fiord. Sea-water flowing out of the fiord is directed below the east ice shelf. However, the east ice shelf is not underlain directly by sea-water but by a layer of fresh water from the surface of Disraeli Fiord. In this region, ice growth resulting from the presence of this stable fresh-water layer has been accompanied by surface ablation over a period of perhaps the last 450 years. As a result, fresh-water ice has completely replaced any sea ice that originally grew in the region of the east ice shelf. Whereas the west and east shelves are underlain almost exclusively by sea-water and fresh water, ice in the south shelf is the result of freezing of fresh, brackish or sea water. This is attributed to mixing of the inflowing and outflowing waters.
Soluble Impurities in Four Antarctic Ice Cores Over the Last 30 000 Years
Authors: Legrand Michel R. , Delmas Robert J.
Published: September 2017

The chemical composition of soluble impurities along the Dome C ice core covering approximately the last 30 000 years is reported and interpreted in terms of atmospheric contributions. Terrestrial and sea-salt inputs are known to have been much higher during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) than during the Holocene period. For this reason, the gas-derived compounds (mainly H2SO4 and HNO3) which dominate the chemistry of present-day snow are minor components in LGM snow. The exact calculation of each of the various contributions has been made possible by the determination of all major ions (H+, Na+, K+, NH4+, Mg2+, Ca2+, NO3−, SO42− and Cl−) in the samples. Three additional deep ice cores from other Antarctic areas have also been analyzed, but in a less comprehensive manner than the Dome C core. The differences observed at the four study sites increase the general understanding of the past atmospheric chemistry of the Southern Hemisphere.
A Detailed Analysis of the Rapid Changes in Ice-Core Parameters During the last Ice Age
Authors: Staffelbach T. , Stauffer B. , Oeschger H.
Published: September 2017

Results from deep Greenland ice cores show rapid changes in several parameters in the deepest part. The most probable explanation for these variations is a fast-changing climate during part of the last glaciation. The question arises, however, of whether the observed changes in the ice cores could also be due to, or at least be influenced by, discontinuities in the stratigraphy. We present new CO2 and δ18O data from the Camp Century and Dye 3 deep ice cores. The data show rapid changes in CO2 and δ18O in both cores. One transition which was investigated in detail seems to be more rapid in the ice core from Dye 3 than in the Camp Century core. The broadening of a sharp δ18O transition due to molecular diffusion is discussed. Since this broadening is larger than the observed width of the transition, we discuss the possibility of a mechanism that can produce stratigraphic disturbances on a small scale. This mechanism is based on a calculation of the compression of horizontal layers which have equal density but different viscosities.
The Anthropogenic Impact on Snow Chemistry at Colle Gnifetti, Swiss Alps
Authors: Wagenbach D. , Münnich K.O. , Schotterer U. , Oeschger H.
Published: September 2017

By chemical analysis of the upper 40 m of a 124 m ice core from a high-altitude Alpine glacier (Colle Gnifetti, Swiss Alps; 4450 m a.s.l.), records of mineral dust, pH, melt-water conductivity, nitrate and sulfate are obtained. The characteristics of the drilling site are discussed, as derived from glacio-meteorological and chemical analysis. As a consequence of high snow-erosion rates (usually during the winter months), annual snow accumulation is dominated by summer precipitation. Clean-air conditions prevail even during summer; however, they are frequently interrupted by polluted air masses or by air masses which are heavily loaded with desert dust.

Absolutely dated reference horizons for Saharan dust, together with the position of the broad nuclear-weapon tritium peak, provide the time-scale for the following statements:

(1) Since at least the turn of the century the background melt-water conductivity has been rising steadily, as has the mean snow acidity. The trend of increasing background conductivity at Colle Gnifetti (1.9μS/cm around the beginning of this century, and at present 3.4 μS/cm) is found to be comparable with the records of mean melt-water conductivity reported from ice cores from the Canadian High Arctic.

(2) Sulfate and nitrate concentrations are higher by a factor of 4–5 than they were at the beginning of the century. This is to be compared with the two- to three-fold rise in the concentrations in south Greenland during about the same time span.
Trace Elements in Simultaneously Sampled Aerosol and Snow from the Antarctic Peninsula (Abstract)
Authors: Dick Alan L.
Published: September 2017

Ultra-clean techniques have been used to collect a series of fresh surface-snow samples on Gipps Ice Rise, Larsen Ice Shelf (68°48′S, 60°54′W) between 21 December 1984 and 12 February 1985. Aerosol samples were collected simultaneously on to pre-cleaned membrane filters to allow the direct comparison of trace-element levels in air and snow. Samples have been analysed by various techniques for cadmium, copper, lead, zinc, aluminium, calcium, potassium and sodium. For all elements, cross-sample concentration profiles have been obtained to support the data for snow samples.

The heavy-metal concentrations found in the surface snow were similar to those measured previously near Gomez Nunatak in the Antarctic Peninsula. The mean aerosol concentrations found at Gipps Ice Rise were Cd: 0.06 pg m−3, Cu: 1.0 pg m−3, Pb; 4.7 pg m−3, Zn: 6.1 pg m−3. These are the lowest concentrations measured so far in Antarctic aerosol.

The ratio of the snow concentration (pg g−1) to air concentration (ng m−3), known as the washout factor, has been calculated for each element and sampling period. The data show that, for the Antarctic Peninsula, the marine aerosol is more efficiently removed to the snow-pack than is the crustal aerosol. Heavy metals are least efficiently removed. This result suggests that the measurement of concentrations in snow and ice alone may lead to misinterpretation of atmospheric source strengths.
Ice-Coring At Mizuho Station, Antarctica, and Core Analyses: A Contribution from the Glaciological Research Program in East Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Authors: Narita H. , Mae S. , Nakawo M. , Fujii Y. , Yoshida M. , Kawada K. , Higashi A.
Published: September 2017

Between May 1983 and July 1984 glaciological parties of the 24th and 25th Japanese Antarctic Research Expeditions (JARE–24 and 25) carried out ice-core drilling using a thermal drill, down to 700.5 m depth at Mizuho Station (70°41'53"S, 44°19'54"E), as a part of the Glaciological Research Program in east Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica.

The thermal drill, 3.9 m long and capable of taking a core 1.5 m long and 130 mm in diameter, is an improved version of a drill used by JARE–15 in 1975. The most important improvement was the monitoring system during drilling, for which a micro-computer was fitted in the drill. By using this system, such accidents as heater burn-out, tank overflow and failure of water suction would immediately be brought to our attention. The drilling speed was about 1.6 m/h, when the optimum output was 3.6 kW. The core recovery rate was above 99%.

The core quality was good down to a depth of 80 m. Between 80 and 120 m, cracks were found at intervals of 0.15–0.5 m, and horizontal cracks were found continuously at intervals of 0.01 m or less.

Immediately after the core was pulled, the stratigraphy was observed and bulk density was measured. A dust band, presumably volcanic particles, was seen at only 500.2 m depth during stratigraphic observation. The following analyses were carried out at Mizuho Station within a month of recovery:

(1)

Density determination by the hydrostatic method.

(2)

Measurement of total gas content.

(3)

Thin-section analyses, including observation of cracking around air bubbles and the crystalline texture, and ice-fabric studies.

The 700.5 m core has been brought to Japan, and the following analyses are now under way:

(1)

Oxygen-isotope ratio.

(2)

Concentration of microparticles.

(3)

Electric conductivity.

(4)

Chemistry of soluble impurities.
Snow-Core Analysis at Mid- and High Altitude in the Snow-Pack (Abstract)
Authors: Page Yves
Published: September 2017

Since 1977, we have been studying the weather and climate of a mountain area, and particularly the winter snow-pack.

The area is situated in the French Alps, at an altitude of 1450-2500 m. Since winter 1982-83, we have been studying the snow-pack each week and every time we collected snow cores. We collected them at different test sites (area 1: 1850 m NW; area 2: 1800 m SE; area 3: 1600 m NW; area 4: 2000 m).

The following parameters were collected at the test sites on a continuous basis throughout the winter: new and total snow depth, wind direction and precipitation (solid and liquid), snow-water equivalent (precipitation and total snow depth), standard snow profiles, and structure of the snow-pack.

After data analysis, many different questions were investigated, in two respects:

(1) Analytical techniques: problems of sampling snow cores (transport, conservation, evolution), and analysis of the micro-structure of the different snow layers in correlation with the macro-structure of the snow-pack.

(2) Results and interpretations: do changes in the structure (macro- and micro-structure) of the snow cores take place during their conservation? Can we consider snow cores as preserving the record of the winter climate (precipitation, chemical pollution)?

(3) Data archive: Constitution of snow-core data archive, in relation to the climatology of the area.
Flow Properties of the Inland Ice at Camp Century, North-East Greenland
Authors: Dahl-Jensen D. , Gundestrup N.S.
Published: September 2017

The determination of the surface velocity at Camp Century makes it possible to determine an improved velocity versus depth profile. This profile is interpreted in terms of the ice-flow properties of Wisconsin and Holocene ice. As the Camp Century hole has been located, further improvements can be obtained from direct measurements in the old deep hole.
Children’s Department: Edwardian Children’s Literature
Authors: Wild Jonathan
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the appearance of much memorable children's literature during what has come to be known as its ‘Golden Age’. Covering the work of three of the main innovators in this field, this chapter shows how new writers reinvented existing popular forms of writing for children to make them attractive and newly relevant for readers in the new century. It first looks at how Beatrix Potter's animal tales illustrate the ways in which new production techniques had comprehensively transformed the appearance of children's books at this time. The chapter then investigates the fiction of E. Nesbit, looking at the ways in which she modernised several forms of writing — in particular the fantastical tale and the family story — that had long proved popular with child readers. Finally, one of the most enduring genres of children's literature, the school story, is discussed through the work of P. G. Wodehouse.
Global London: Highs and Lows, Spaces and Places
Authors: Guha Malini
Published: September 2017

This chapter situates the film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) within a wider historical continuum of “migrant London” cinema, while examining the longevity of social realist modes of storytelling and its “global turn.” It presents a departure from an interpretation of Dirty Pretty Things as a film that allegorizes the conditions of global London in order to chart a history of representation of post-imperial migration to the city. Furthermore, the chapter analyzes the concept of the “dirty/pretty” as a bifurcated understanding of city space, one that scholars argue has its origins in a Victorian imaginary of the city but is subsequently re-imagined in the telling of other urban stories.
Women and Other Animals: Working Metamorphoses1
Authors: Still Judith
Published: September 2017

Heidegger’s distinction between man and animal, in common with other philosopher’s accounts, also has sexual difference at stake. This chapter takes up his opposition between human creativity and mechanical (animal) technology. Other writers present technology as integral to hominization. In either case, the work of women (as well as other inferiors) can end up on the mechanical animal side – and thus women’s weaving (like spiders’ webs), for example, would be neither creative nor a true technological invention. The chapter analyses some myths of weaving and metamorphosis (such as those of Arachne or Philomela); and then turns to contemporary women writing back. Duffy’s poetry mocks those, like Aesop, who lay down the law about animals and humans; Darrieussecq and Ndiaye’s novels rewrite metamorphosis into a pig, wolf, or dogs.
Roger Fry, Chinese Art and The Burlington Magazine
Authors: Parfect Ralph
Published: September 2017

The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs was founded in 1903 by a group of art theorists, scholars and historians that included Roger Fry, later a co-editor of the magazine for almost ten years (1909-1919). On Fry’s death in 1934, the magazine itself described him as ‘the man who in the past did most to establish it and mould its character’. Part of this character was a consistent attention to Chinese art that he shared with fellow Bloomsbury writers, artists and intellectuals. This chapter illuminates Fry’s practice as a theorist and an editor interested in the arts of China by examining how these were represented and discussed in the Burlington Magazine under his auspices. It focuses especially on the kinds of language, discourse and textual strategies of sinophile contributors such as Arthur Waley, Lawrence Binyon, Perceval Yetts and R.L. Hobson. The chapter locates their approaches to Chinese art within a longer-term Western historiography of China and its culture(s), as well as within late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century discourses such as aestheticism, scientism and orientalism. It thus attempts to unpack the ideological implications of the ‘connoisseurship’ professed by the magazine’s title as applied to the subject of Chinese art.
Chinese Artistic Influences on the Vorticists in London
Authors: Huang Michelle Ying-Ling
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines how young poets and artists became interested in Chinese art that in the 1910s was expressed in the tenets of Vorticism. When Ezra Pound came to London in 1908 he got involved in the circle of British poets, artists and critics who held regular social gatherings at the Vienna Café in New Oxford Street. Among them was Laurence Binyon, poet and Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, who shared with the group his scholarship in Oriental painting. When Binyon was developing his friendship with Pound, Percy Wyndham Lewis and other British Modernists, new art movements were rapidly emerging in Europe. At the same traditional Chinese art was becoming available in museums and in London and other Western art markets. Coinciding with a dynamic change in modern European art, Oriental ideas became an alternative source of inspiration for the West. In 1914, Pound collaborated with Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to promote a new artistic movement for which Pound coined the name Vorticism. Gaudier-Brzeska took his inspiration from Chinese animal bronzes of the Zhou dynasty and Lewis from the landscape paintings of the Song dynasty. Their common interest in Chinese art, helped formulate the principles of Vorticism.
The Idea of the Chinese Garden and British Aesthetic Modernism
Authors: Chang Elizabeth
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that a comparative lack of British interest in traditional Chinese gardens during the period 1880-1914, often interpreted as evidence of Japan’s more ready appeal, obscures the complexity of organic exchange going on between Britain and East Asia at this time. Celebrated plant hunters were launching daring expeditions into unexplored Western China; those plants, upon importation, were so successfully and quickly naturalized that they became evidence of the landscape conformity that Japanese designs were held to resist. What’s more, even as these plant hunters were publishing their travel narratives for a broad audience, select British readers were absorbing a very different view of Chinese gardens through the outré works of French and British writers. Spurred by the retranslation of Thomas De Quincey’s works into French, late nineteenth-century French decadents found inspiration in the same provocative elements of Chinese behavior and landscape that British Romantics had found a century before. Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden was read and appreciated by Oscar Wilde, among others, and formed a part of a larger fin-de-siècle European reconsideration of the East. It is the combination of the multiple forms of the Eastern garden that provide a new way of understanding aesthetic internationalism.
Introduction
Authors: Palmer R. Barton , Pomerance Murray
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter provides a background into the life and work of film director George Cukor, contextualizing his career within a time of radical transition as Hollywood turned to sound cinema and many of Broadway's brightest talents likewise turned to filmmaking. It also describes Cukor's working methods, influenced by his stage career, during which time he had demonstrated considerable stylistic flair, managerial competence, and bankability or, perhaps better, a knack for turning a profit from diverse projects. These traits and more would serve him well upon his transition into filmmaking, as would his penchant for being an actor's director, deftly working with both his actors and with the minutiae of filmmaking and production.
George Cukor’s Late Style
Authors: Morrison James
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the tensions in Cukor's late style through three of his later films. Justine (1969) is Cukor's most sustained encounter with modernism and his most vigorous effort to engage with stylistic and narrative “advances” of the New Hollywood. Travels With My Aunt (1972) is something of a retrenchment, unapologetically “old-fashioned” in many ways, yet selectively incorporating new techniques and post-Production Code material in a manner that illustrates Cukor's attitude toward the new dispensation. Rich and Famous (1981) synthesizes these approaches, harking back to Classical Hollywood after the New Hollywood itself had waned, yet it evinces a certain surface chic more effortlessly than any of Cukor's other late films.
The Human Person in Iqbal’s Thought1
Authors: Moosa Ebrahim
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the philosophical anthropology of Muhammad Iqbal's theory of khudi (selfhood or personhood). Asserting that this is Iqbal's greatest contribution to philosophy, it shows how Iqbal rehabilitated the concept and used it as the source of inspiration for the social reconstruction of Muslim society. Stripped of its selfish egotism, and rooted in Iqbal's epistemological metaphysics of intuition, khudi now becomes a positive signifier for a renewed identity for the individual and also the impetus for a creative revolution in the world. Indeed, in Iqbal's understanding, selfhood only triumphs through love of the divine, and when selfhood is realised then it becomes equal to the resurrection of humankind.
Iqbal, Bergson and the Reconstruction of the Divine Nexus in Political Thought
Authors: Hillier H. C.
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at the reconstruction of the divine nexus in political thought in Muhammad Iqbal and Henri Bergson. Articulated in Mark Lilla's book Stillborn God (2007), the divine nexus — that is, the intersection of God, man, and the world — in Western political thought was abandoned in the early modern period and no thinker has effectively re-conceptualised it since. The chapter argues that through their shared metaphysical and epistemological ideas, Iqbal and Bergson form a new philosophical foundation that puts God at the centre of the cosmos. In this, both identify the centrality of prophecy/mysticism in the collective life of society and show the indispensable role that religion plays in challenging those political realities in the world that threaten human dignity, freedom, and well-being.
Pietro Germi, Hybridity and the Roots of the Italo-Western
Authors: Iannone Pasquale
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines Western tropes in Italian cinema's ‘neorealist’ phase. Taking as key case studies In the Name of the Law (In nome della legge, Pietro Germi, 1949) and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo (Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo, Pietro Germi, 1952), it explores the complex ways in which Germi worked references to American genres into his work, thereby debunking approaches presupposing an Italian neorealism separated from ‘popular’ cinema, and demonstrating an oft-overlooked precursor to the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. Identifying in Germi's two films a representational equivalence between the Italian South and the American West, the chapter charts a lineage of tales of banditry that blended the international and the local.
Spectacles of Insurgency: Witnessing the Revolution as Incoherent Text
Authors: Hyman David , Wynne Patrick
Published: September 2017

This chapter presents the authors' response to Austin Fisher's analysis of the popular politics of the Spaghetti Western (Fisher 2011). Taking A Professional Gun (Il mercenario, Sergio Corbucci, 1968) as their key example, they argue that the ‘incoherence’ identified as a political weakness of this filone's ‘insurgency’ variant is rather a manifestation of decontextualised transnational bricolage that, by blurring the boundary between ‘text’ and ‘paratext’, allows us to appreciate the possibilities open to an audience for creative participation within revolutionary discourses. The film is therefore read as a temporal dislocation that exists within images of the Mexican Revolution, and as a conduit through which a plurality of fluid meanings open up for the fomenting of a revolutionary sensibility.
Spaghetti Westerns and the ‘Afterlife’ of a Hollywood Genre
Authors: Falconer Pete
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines how Western movies (and their attendant themes and tropes) have functioned since the genre ceased to be a major part of mainstream American cinema, and how these changed generic conditions have affected the ways in which Westerns are produced and understood. It compares this situation with another historical moment in which the conventions of the Western genre found themselves transformed by a different set of surrounding contexts: the Italian adoption of the Western in the 1960s. It argues that the Italian Western makes the genre ‘strange’, and alienates the viewer from the world of the Wild West. It makes a compelling case for how the seemingly familiar codes of the Western have in fact been rendered alien in differing ways upon contact with various contexts, and thereby offers insights into the representational practices of twenty-first-century Westerns such as Appaloosa (Ed Harris, 2008), 3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold, 2007) and True Grit (Ethan and Joel Cohen, 2010).
Towards a Comparative Approach to Arabic Literature
Authors: Isstaif Abdul-Nabi
Published: September 2017

This chapter calls for a study of Arabic literature from a comparative perspective, arguing that a comparative approach will help to undermine self-centricism and thus allow a more humanist perspective to dominate the field. Although comparative literature is meant to be ‘a discipline of tolerance’, the chapter accuses scholars on both sides of the divide of trying to deny the importance of this interaction in bringing about the changes we witnessed in the histories of Arabic and other world literatures. It cites one example of this intolerance: the West's continued refusal to acknowledge any role played by the Hispano-Arabic strophic poetry Muwashshah and Zajal in the emergence of the twelfth-century Troubadour songs. The chapter also considers one factor that justifies the need for a comparative approach to Arabic literature: the multi-cultural nature of the new Mahjar literatures produced by Arab writers all over the world in Arabic and other living languages.
Mothers and Others
Authors: Carpenter Ginette
Published: September 2017

‘Mothers and Others’ discusses two recent films, exploring the figure of the Gothic m/other as a continuing site of textual absence and/or excessive abjection. Drawing on Kristevan and Irigarayan theory, it argues that both Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), and Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) are examples of a post-feminist Gothic that articulates contemporary anxieties about the increasingly engineered medicalisation and judgemental cultural monitoring of mothering/mothers. Prometheus, prequel to the Alien quadrilogy, repeatedly absents the mother in its postulation of a male creationist myth and the uncanny textual space opened up by its anterior-yet-posterior relationship to its predecessors is overwritten by the predictable effects of penetrative body-horror: the mother as monstrous other is driven beyond the edges of the text. In contrast to this absenting of the mother, We Need to Talk About Kevin is saturated with motherly presence. The tropes of Gothic horror are used to convey a sense of mothering as violent self-erasure and the mother as potential progenitor of an uncontainable monstrous Other. However, the film uses repeated mirrorings of Eva and Kevin that imply a haunting pre-Symbolic bond that persists in troubling a monolithic reading of the developing mother/son dyad.
Female Gothic and the Law
Authors: Chaplin Sue
Published: September 2017

The Gothic emerged in the eighteenth century as a potent literary critique of modern Western forms of law. At the same time as the law itself the Gothic began to take shape and rapidly diversify in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter suggests that Gothic writing by women in particular interrogates the ontological instability and physical vulnerability of the female subject before the law and that it does so through repeated evocations, in various historical and cultural contexts, of the relationship between law, sacrifice, trauma and shame. Points of continuity between older modes of Female Gothic and its more contemporary manifestations are identified through analyses of novels by Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe and Eliza Parsons followed by an examination of female-authored vampire fictions by Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris. Drawing on Juliet MacCannell’s work, the chapter argues that these diverse narratives articulate the trauma and shame of female subjects constructed in and through the law as sacrificial objects of exchange between ‘brothers’. Contemporary female Gothic fictions, it concludes, expose the trauma and shame of the law itself as its ontological coherence begins to disintegrate under the conditions of late-modernity.
The Social Geography of Prostitution1
Authors: Settle Louise
Published: September 2017

This chapter uses court and police records alongside other contemporaries’ writings on prostitution to gain a fuller understanding of how prostitution was organised and to explore the wider social implications attached to this use of space. By chronologically mapping the changing location of prostitution in Edinburgh and Glasgow, it is possible to track how emerging technologies and the development of new entertainment venues influenced the location of prostitution and shaped women’s opportunities for successful solicitation. The first half of the chapter focuses on the geography of prostitution in Edinburgh, beginning with street solicitation and moving on to look at the location of brothels. The second half examines the location of prostitution in Glasgow, following a similar pattern. Whilst the previous chapter stressed the role that the state played in shaping the organisation of prostitution, this chapter will show that the women’s utilisation of new commercial and technological developments was at least equally important in that process, thus demonstrating women’s ability to cross boundaries of gender, class and respectable femininity, highlighting these women’s historical agency.
Surveillance Before Big Brother
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: September 2017

This chapter traces the history of utopian depictions of surveillance before Nineteen Eighty-Four. It argues that we understand Orwell’s novel better when we see it in terms of a long tradition of such works that have from at leas the time of Thomas More in the 16th century have represented and critically analysed social structures and processes, as well as their relationships to individuals and groups. Inherently, utopias are speculative, testing out good and bad possibilities for readers (and, later, for film goers), enabling them to contemplate the worlds they inhabit and to think about optional ways of being, both individually and socially. Concentrating on this genre, the chapter suggests, uncovers a focused, historically- and imaginatively rich body of works that present a valuable array of depictions and analyses.
The Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment: Between Reform and Revolution
Authors: Guimarães Alice Soares
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines transformations of state–society relations in eighteenth-century Portugal in relation to Enlightened political debates of the time. It also explores how these transformations shaped the relations between Portugal and Brazil in the nineteenth century, the debate about the political form of independent Brazil, and the intra-Brazilian struggles over this form before and after independence. More importantly, it challenges the notion that the Enlightenment was absent from the Portuguese Empire as a result of the rejection of modern ideas by conservative world views and projects. It argues that there was a Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment that was plural and eclectic, supporting both critiques and defences of the absolute power of the king, endorsing simultaneously a secularisation process, the promotion of reason and Roman Catholicism, and fostering not only revolutionary projects but also conservative state reforms.
The Student Movement in Chile 2011–12: Rearming the Critique of Capitalism
Authors: Pinochet Beatriz Silva
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the critique invoked by Chile's student movement in 2011–2012 that challenges the premises of the current spirit of capitalism — that is, the mechanisms of accumulation and its specific justifications in terms of the common good. The chapter draws on the work of Luc Boltanski and Peter Wagner about modernity, capitalism, mobilisation, critique, and structural transformations. It first considers how the critique invoked by the student movement articulates itself by understanding how the educational system in Chile was built and identifying the premises that guided the profound transformation of Chilean society led by the dictatorship. It then explores how the discourse of neo-liberal capitalism emerged in Chile, and which structures or reality tests were built based on that discourse. It also discusses the different nuances contained in the social, artistic and political critique voiced by the student movement.
Introduction: Romanticism and the Social Contract
Authors: Beenstock Zoe
Published: September 2017

This introduction argues that not only have Romantic works been shaped by social contract theory’s tensions, but also their reception. The historical-political turn in Romanticism studies has brought attention to politics but often regards Romantic literature as promoting social retreat. Yet Romanticism’s preoccupation with retreat responds to social contract theory and its alienation of individuals from the social body. British Romanticism was affected by a rift in theories of sociability as European culture shifted away from an Aristotelian model of natural sociability to a modern view of sociability as a secondary property of human nature. The introduction considers differences between genres of political theory and Romantic poetry and novels. Social contract theory developed a subversive approach to literature as a medium suited to political critique. Whereas Romantic poetry maintains a critical distance from philosophical discourse based on formal discreteness, narrative fiction had always been an integral part of philosophical argumentation and particularly of empiricism. Therefore, novelists focus their works on dissident individuals excluded from the general will and on a crumbling social body.
Writing the Social Contradiction: Rousseau’s Literary Politics
Authors: Beenstock Zoe
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores Rousseau’s account of the tension between community and individual by examining the Second Discourse and the Social Contract on the one hand, and Julie on the other. In his political theory Rousseau defines the state of nature as a mere fantasy which belongs to an optative imagined past. In leaving the state of nature, people trade basic needs for decadent desires. Rousseau introduces the general will as a practical device for managing the asociability of the private will, which is driven mainly by appetite. To safeguard the general will from its wayward members, individuals must form a social contract which transforms them into sociable beings. In Julie Rousseau explores the sacrifices that individuals make in joining the general will, as Julie is torn between personal desire on the one hand and social conformity on the other. Rousseau’s literature suggests that the two are incompatible and thus ‘judges’ his philosophy, exploring the deathly outcome of contract. Rousseau’s use of literature to critique the social contract constitutes his major legacy to British Romantic writers.
Caribbean Formations in the Rhysian Corpus
Authors: Mardorossian Carine M.
Published: September 2017

In “What is an Author?” Michel Foucault reframes the author as an “author-function” that has historically been produced through its interaction with both the text and its audience. In this essay, I deploy Foucault’s unsettling of the author as origin and use it as a lens through which to make sense of the Rhys protagonist. Specifically, I examine what I call the “landscape function” in Rhys’s texts (to echo Foucault’s “author function”) in order to highlight the multiplicity of meanings through which the category “human” is produced in the Rhysian corpus. This Foucaultian reading thus reveals the extent to which neither character nor the environment pre-exist their narrativisation in the diegetic logic of the text but are actually produced through their mutual imbrication in narrative.
The Discourses of Jean Rhys: Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy
Authors: Murdoch H. Adlai
Published: September 2017

The complex depths of the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture continue to demand further exploration, inflected as they are by the long and pervasive presence of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollaries of hierarchical social separation and ethnocultural difference inflected by perceptions of race. In the work of Jean Rhys, the complex patterns and performances of cultural identity that inform her multi-layered and multi-voiced narratives betray a deep-seated ambivalence towards England, the Caribbean, and their varied issues of identity. In her explorations of the various iterations and possibilities of the creole position in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys compels us to confront the transactional relationship between colonizer and colonized and the uncharted variations of racial, cultural, and national identity.
Shaykh Uvays and the Jalayirid Dynasty
Authors: Wing Patrick
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the transition of Jalayirid rule from that of regional amirs, holding power in the name of Chinggisid puppet khans in Baghdad, to an assertion by Shaykh Uvays of sultanic authority in his own right following military conquest of Azarbayjan. Control of Tabriz meant the incorporation of much of the Ilkhanid administrative apparatus, including administrative elites and economic resources that had formerly been utilized by the Ilkhanate.
Challenges to the Jalayirid Order
Authors: Wing Patrick
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the fragmentation of central authority that took place after Shaykh Uvays’s death in 1374, due to contention among his sons for control of their own shares in the realm, as well as the campaigns of Timur. Although Shaykh Uvays’s son, Sulṭān Aḥmad, took control of the Jalayirid patrimony by the mid-1380s, he spent much of his reign outside of Azarbayjan, either in Baghdad or on the run from Timur’s armies, under the protection of various regional rulers. By the end of his life, the disruptions brought by the Timurids, as well as an uneasy alliance with the Turkman chief Qarā Yūsuf, signaled an end to the Jalayirid order.
Introduction: Western Film and the Epic Tradition
Authors: Day Kirsten
Published: September 2017

Drawing on a wide range of cinematic productions spanning from The Virginian in 1929 to Golden Age and spaghetti westerns to recent popular TV series like Deadwood and Longmire, this chapter establishes the close connection between Western film and ancient epic, showing that like the poems of Homer and Virgil, Western film places invented or fictionalized characters in a foundational period from history, and thus offer enough truth to be relevant, but enough fiction to provide a comfortable distance. Works from both genres also delineate fundamental values and beliefs and provide models both virtuous and cautionary for male and female behavior while helping to justify national self-image. At the same time, the best productions from both genres complicate the ideologies they promote through devices such as depictions of excessive violence, positioning protagonist and enemy as alter egos, and the hero’s ultimate exclusion from the society he has redeemed. And much as epic both reflected and influenced notions of honor, justice, and manhood in antiquity, the imprint of Westerns on our own belief systems is so powerful that it continues to shape and reflect our own values and ideologies today.
Laughter: Belly-aching Laughter
Authors: Kerner Aaron Michael , Knapp Jonathan L.
Published: September 2017

This chapter surveys media that elicits laughter from the spectator. The chapter examines laughter as an involuntary response to a wide range of experiences, and not simply things that could be considered humorous. Laughter (particularly in the communal setting of a theater, or among friends) might follow jump-out-of-your-seat frights in a horror film, giddiness in response to sex, perhaps a nervous response to things that disgust. Whatever it might be, the chapter considers laughter that is spawned by something other than jokes—in the most generic sense. Jokes necessitate narrative contextualization, and this chapter looks beyond that, to examine laughter in response to other phenomena, such as bodies in pain (in the Jackass films, for instance) and the depiction of grotesque bodies (as in the film Taxidermia). The phenomenon of YouTube reaction videos—such as those to the infamous viral video 2 Girls 1 Cup—are discussed. Mikhail Bakhtim’s notion of the carnivalesque is explored at length.
The Labours of History
Authors: Price Fiona
Published: September 2017

Chapter Two examines how the evocation of sympathy in the historical novel generates both radical and reformist historical fictions. The interrogation of chivalric sentiment, which begins with Sophia Lee, accelerates after the French Revolution. Responding to Edmund Burke, radical writers like Charlotte Smith, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft argue for a redistribution of sympathy and for a new, more rational historiography. After the Terror, these notions of history for the ‘mass’ were themselves subject to reformulation, notably in the historical novel of the recent past. Historicising the French Revolution, Charles Dacres (1797), Lioncel; or Adventures of an Emigrant (1803), Edgeworth’s ‘Madame Fleury’ (1809) and Burney’s The Wanderer [1814] explore the possibility of an commercial exchange at once sympathetic and economic. Along with other historical novels including Ann Yearsley’s The Royal Captives [1795] and Montford Castle [1795]), such works implicitly suggest the need for workers to be safely politicised.
Conclusion
Authors: Price Fiona
Published: September 2017

Writing in an uncertain age of revolution, historical novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries struggled with both the meaning of history and the shape of the future. Even following Scott’s creation of a tradition of transformation in the Waverley Novels, the motif of breakage and the apparent triumph of commerce remained disquieting. Although Thomas Carlyle argues that a healthy approach to the past is possible, in ...