bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Reading the Mercure in the Closet
Authors: Wynn Thomas 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter focuses on theatre reviews in the most prominent journal of the early decades of the eighteenth century, the Mercure de France. The critically overlooked reviews help us to think about geographies of reading, coercion, and autonomy. The journal published lengthy extracts from plays performed in Paris, allowing provincial readers to participate vicariously in the capital’s theatrical life. This chapter examines the Mercure’s attempts to guide its readers in matters of taste and judgement, and it analyses how such normative efforts were challenged, undermined, and contradicted within the journal itself. A consideration of the (non-)binaries, decentrings, and blurrings that operate in these reviews and related texts allows us to broaden our understanding of how readers encountered plays in the eighteenth century.
Religious Controversy
Authors: Wynn Thomas 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter explores closet drama’s function as a genre of contestation and provocation. It focuses on six plays that arise from the renewed dispute between Jesuits and Jansenists in the wake of the papal bull Unigenitus in 1713. These satires are situated in the richly detailed context of the scandal of the convulsionaries at Paris’s Saint-Médard cemetery, which occurred following the death of François de Pâris in 1727. Radically opposed religious factions used the particular literary form of closet drama to contribute to the culture of contestation that is fundamental to the developing Enlightenment. The plays deal in vital matters such as the value of evidence, claims to authority, institutional allegiance, and the independence of thought. Far from turning its back on the contemporary world and retreating into polite abstraction, closet drama is a genre of restless and passionate dissent.
Erotic Drama
Authors: Wynn Thomas 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
In the rich field of libertine and erotic writings in eighteenth-century France, sexually explicit plays have yet to be substantially analysed. Such obscene drama appears to exploit the material stage and to push embodied performance to its limit. This chapter explores both the nature and necessity of this materialization, and the imaginary pleasures that these texts offer to the reader. It focuses on Delisle de Sales’s Théâtre d’amour, which was written over several decades at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century. Comprising a range of sexually explicit plays, mostly mythological and historical in subject matter, this highly developed example of closet drama offers the reader a pornotopia in which male aggression is seemingly celebrated. Despite its ostensible violence and misogyny, however, this nostalgic text offers the possibility of a queer model of subjectivity.
Conclusion
Authors: Wynn Thomas 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Drawing together some of the common threads in the study, this conclusion considers Restif de La Bretonne’s Le Drame de la vie (1793) as an extreme, indeed unsurpassed example of closet drama in eighteenth-century France. This extraordinary work is hundreds of pages long, comprises many individual plays, and features dozens of characters. Restif’s claim that the Drame is ‘unique dans son genre’ is justified; he aggravates and accumulates the key elements of closet drama to the point of singularity, thereby revealing where the genre’s fault-lines, breaking points, and limits lie. Such is the force of the author’s single-minded and masculine vision that it precludes the furtive dalliances and improper affiliations that usually flourish in the Enlightenment closet. Despite its capacious scale, Restif’s closet has no room for the reader.
In search of the holy grail
Authors: James William D. 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter places the book’s interpretation of grand strategy within its intellectual context. It first provides a short history of the scholarship on grand strategy from its origins in the early twentieth century to the present day. Despite grand strategy’s current popularity in academic and policy circles, confusion reigns over its meaning and scope. Who does grand strategy—individuals, social movements, corporations, states, or only great powers? When does grand strategy happen—in wartime, peacetime, or both? Which components of national power does grand strategy encompass? Similarly, where is grand strategy observable—in public documents, through behaviour, or elsewhere? What metrics can we use to evaluate grand strategic decisions? Finally, how does grand strategy differ from related concepts such as strategy, tactics, and policy? This chapter tackles each of these questions in turn. In doing so, it makes the case for deep, historical research on specific grand strategic decisions.
Conclusion
Authors: James William D. 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
The concluding chapter provides a summation of the key arguments and historical evidence. It underscores the book’s contributions to debates and ideas on grand strategy, as well as the literature on British foreign and defence policy. Several avenues for future research are also proffered. This book’s interpretation of grand strategy, as well as its method of measurement, could be applied to other second-tier powers or even small states. Future research could also delve deeper into the domestic determinants of British grand strategic decision-making. The chapter concludes with five practical policy recommendations on: the UK’s relationship with the US and the need to reset expectations of the alliance; the value of a stoical mindset for dealing with complexity; the improvements that can be made to the machinery of government; the necessity of creating a culture of constructive challenge; and the vital importance of garnering domestic support for grand strategic decisions.
The Law as Blind Machine
Authors: Fish Stanley 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
The Wrong Man tells the true story of a man arrested because he resembles someone who has been robbing small businesses in a New York neighborhood. The falsely accused musician cooperates with the police and puts his faith in the procedures of the justice system. That system, however, is profoundly uninterested in him; so long as he fits a role in its pre-scripted drama, he will be arraigned, judged, and jailed by a process that never looks at him but just goes on its own self-satisfied way. In the end, he is exonerated, not by evidence and legal arguments, but by an accident bordering on miracle. The law and its victim never really meet.
The Law as the Object of Manipulation
Authors: Fish Stanley 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a lesson in manipulation. The “hero” and a friend, eager to demonstrate the dangers of the death penalty, contrive a situation in which mountains of planted evidence points to one of them as murderer. The scheme goes awry when evidence of the evidence having been manufactured is destroyed. A knick-of-time discovery appears to “right” the situation, until another revelation rearranges everything. In the end, only the director is triumphant, as he pushes every character and every viewer into corners they never knew were there. Witness for the Prosecution is a tour de force of delayed revelation. There are no less than nine surprise twists that leave both characters and viewers continually off balance. In the course of a trial, a flamboyant and self-confident barrister is outwitted by a woman who is in turn duped by the husband she is defending. Everything is deception; the only honest action is a stabbing.
Visible and Spectral Evidence
Authors: Fish Stanley 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
The Crucible is a meditation on two kinds of evidence: the usual kind presented by lawyers in secular courts, and the kind religious believers cite, not despite of, but because of, its invisibility. It is this latter kind of evidence that convicts those accused of being witches: the fact that the effects they are accused of producing are not available to empirical inspection and validation is evidence of their guilt. You were not seen doing it, therefore you are guilty. This logic enmeshes and envelops all the characters, including those who are urging it. Each is tried in this crucible of interpretation, and most are found wanting, with the notable exception of Elizabeth Proctor, wife of the main protagonist, who throughout opposes her faith in goodness and personal integrity to the confected faith of those who would cite scripture for their own very worldly purposes.
Midwifery, Childbirth, and Breastfeeding Advice in Colonial Bengal
Authors: Saha Ranjana 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Despite enormous scholarship on motherhood and childcare in colonial India, the subject of breastfeeding remains underexplored. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring medical advice about breastfeeding by the ‘respectable’ Bengali-Hindu women or bhadramahila, often located amidst the shadows of the ‘dark’ and ‘dirty’ lying-in room, makeshift spaces that signified the impurity and ritual pollution associated with childbirth. It argues that colonial and indigenous medical practitioners of western medicine often drew intimate biocultural connections between midwifery, confinement, childbirth, lactation, and nursing of infants in colonial Calcutta. In particular, the chapter examines why and how European and indigenous medical writings on so-called ‘clean’ or ‘scientific’ midwifery often voiced the urgent need to either replace or medically train the ‘ignorant’ and ‘dirty’ dais. From being feared as ‘a sorceress’ to having a ‘hereditary claim on the family of her patient’, this chapter argues that there were contradictions inherent in the dichotomous representations of ‘clean’ versus ‘dirty’ midwifery in European and Bengali medical print media on midwifery, encompassing maternal and infant care.
Preposterous Propertius
Authors: O’Rourke Donncha 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter examines in Propertius a phenomenon of temporal or conceptual reversal, where the poet’s Latin, if the transmitted text is regarded as reliable, seems to put the ‘cart before the horse’ in one way or another—i.e. is ‘preposterous’ sensu stricto. The analysis takes a maximal approach in assembling more and less palpable instances of Propertius’ preposterous Latin, starting from cases of inverted clausal co-ordination (the hysteron proteron) and scaling up to effects of reversal on the wider level of narrative. The discussion highlights the role to be played by, and the balance to be struck between, both textual and literary criticism: some cases of hysteron proteron and related phenomena may indicate where the text of Propertius calls for emendation; but others may be related to the elegist’s back-to-front or head-over-heels view of the world. For ease of reference, an appendix to the chapter lists sequentially all the examples discussed.
Welfare about More than Money
Authors: Rose Richard 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
While money is the measure of a country’s economy, its health, education, and female employment is measured in different units: years of life, school attendance, and percentage of women in work. Public expenditure is a bad measure of welfare because it is only an input to the welfare mix; it is not an outcome. Gross Domestic Product is a bad indicator for cross-national comparison because the significance of money for welfare varies between high-income countries and low-income countries where non-monetized household resources are of primary importance. Unpaid work in the household includes caring for children and older family members. Money earned in the shadow economy can be used to pay for goods the household cannot produce and avoids tax but does not qualify individuals for some welfare state benefits. Social indicators avoid money problems because they are direct measures of individual health, education, and employment status.
People Going Global
Authors: Rose Richard 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Countries that set welfare standards have a small share of the world’s population. Scandinavian countries account for one-quarter of 1 per cent and highly developed countries for only one-sixth of global population. The welfare of the world’s peoples is shaped by seven countries that together have more than half the world’s eight billion population. Six are developing countries where welfare is not yet at global standards: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, and Nigeria. Yet even if only a minority of their population is at a global standard, this can add 100 million people to global welfare. In developing countries where population is growing fastest, especially in Africa, the welfare of millions more people must progress to keep the percentage at global standards from falling, and additional efforts are required if a country is to catch up with global leaders.
Unfinished Business
Authors: Rose Richard 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
The globalization of welfare is unfinished today, but in principle can be completed by countries catching up with fixed standards. How long it takes to catch up depends on a country’s distance from a standard and its continuing rate of progress. Projecting progress rates for the past three decades indicates that by 2050 infant mortality will have almost completely disappeared and illiteracy will be confined to the old in least developed countries. Four-fifths of the world’s youths will be in secondary school, and two-thirds of the world’s population at global standards for life expectancy and gender equality. In developed countries where standards have been reached, new goals are emerging such as the quality of health and education. Challenges to collective welfare from pandemics and global climate change are wicked problems, because they affect the whole world. but there is no government with the power to take global action.
Introduction
Authors: Amaya Santiago , Shoemaker David , Vargas Manuel 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This introduction to the eighth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility briefly discusses each of the new essays being published, gathered around the theme of “Non-Ideal Agency and Responsibility.” They were drawn from the sixth biennial New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), held in March 2022. The essays cover a wide range of topics relevant to the workshop’s theme.
Temptation and Apathy
Authors: Bermúdez Juan Pablo , Berthelette Samantha , Anaya Alfonso , Fernández-Miranda Gabriela , Téllez Diego Rodríguez 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Self-control is deemed crucial for reasons-responsive agency and a key contributor to long-term well-being. But recent studies suggest that effortfully resisting one’s temptations does not contribute to long-term goal attainment, and can even be harmful. So how does self-control improve our lives? Finding an answer requires revising the role that overcoming temptation plays in self-control. This chapter distinguishes two forms of self-control problems: temptation (the presence of a strong wayward motivation) and apathy (the lack of commitment-advancing motivation). This distinction makes it possible to separate negative self-control (aimed at overcoming temptation) from positive self-control (aimed at overcoming lack of motivation). The chapter argues that temptation should not play a central role in our conception of self-control, since overcoming temptation is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful self-control.
False Consciousness and Fragile Agency
Authors: Mason Elinor 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter explores the blameworthiness of everyday compliance with oppressive norms. Any account of the appropriate response should meet two desiderata: first, it should make sense of the difference in position, and corresponding difference in appropriate response, of those in the oppressed groups and those in the oppressor groups (the asymmetry intuition), and second, it should not ignore or undermine the agency of the oppressed person (it should navigate the “agency dilemma”). The chapter argues that neither traditional stinging response, such as blame or shame, nor traditional therapeutic responses such as those a clinician may take, are apt in the case of wrongdoing that is due to false consciousness. False consciousness does damage agency, but it does not undermine it completely. The chapter proposes a solidarity-based response, which is primarily appropriate between those who are in the same group. This makes sense of the relevance of different social positions without denying that those in the oppressed group are also in the grip of false consciousness. It avoids the problem of being patronizing because it is limited to those who are in the same situation, and so does not have a hierarchical structure.
Contemporary Approaches
Authors: Boyle Matthew 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Much recent work on self-knowledge has been inspired by the striking “transparency” of questions about one’s own mental states to questions about the non-mental world, and by the thought that this transparency holds the key to understanding how privileged self-knowledge is possible. This chapter critically discusses three prominent recent accounts of such transparency: Richard Moran’s account by appeal to the idea of “making up one’s mind”; Alex Byrne’s account in terms of an “inference from world to mind”; and Christopher Peacocke’s account in terms of an inference from consciousness of an act of judgment to the existence of an underlying mental state. The author argues that, although none of these accounts is satisfactory as it stands, each contains an insight that a satisfactory account must respect. Taken together, these insights point toward the need for what the author calls a “reflectivist” account of transparent self-knowledge.
Consciousness-as-Subject
Authors: Boyle Matthew 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
A natural question to ask about Sartre’s idea of “nonpositional” self-awareness is: How can there be a genuine form of self-awareness that is not awareness of one’s own mental states as such? In response to this challenge, the author distinguishes explicit self-consciousness, which deploys a first-person representation and a specific psychological concept, from a more basic, implicit form of self-awareness that he calls consciousness-as-subject. The author shows that this distinction is needed, not just to solve the Problem of Transparency, but also to make satisfactory sense of a variety of topics unconnected with self-knowledge. He goes on to argue that this distinction enables one to give a principled account of the difference between positional and nonpositional self-consciousness, and to explicate the notion of a first-person perspective in a way that clarifies its importance.
Armchair Psychology
Authors: Boyle Matthew 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
To suppose that armchair psychology is possible is to suppose that people can investigate their own cognitive capacities, not by employing experimental methods, but simply by reflecting on their awareness of their own cognitive activity. The idea that philosophers can study the mind from an armchair in this sense has a distinguished history, but today it is an object of widespread skepticism. In the present chapter, the author argues that human knowers do in fact possess a kind of awareness of their own cognitive activity that makes reflective armchair psychology possible. The chapter is thus a defense of armchair psychology against contemporary critics who are skeptical of its possibility.
Self-Understanding
Authors: Boyle Matthew 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
In general, any person’s thoughts and actions have a certain (at least apparent) intelligibility to that person. A mark of this is that people normally stand ready to say why they believe what they believe and why they do what they voluntarily do. This ordinary confidence that people can know their own reasons for belief and action is called into question, however, by various well-known results in social and behavioral psychology. These observations have led a number of philosophers and psychologists to suggest that the everyday assumption of self-understanding is an illusion. In this chapter, the author argues that the grounds for such skepticism are overstated, and that the everyday assumption has a deeper basis than its critics recognize. The author goes on to show that a certain limited self-intelligibility is a consequence of the very ability to think about the non-mental world, an ability that even skeptics about self-understanding do not deny.
Encounters with Modernity
Authors: Whidden James 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter discusses Egypt’s revival as a regional power in the Ottoman and European international systems by investigating its modern forms of governance, representations of state power, and the transformation of relations of state with society. Scholarly debates on the causes and origins of these processes involve the modernizing policies of Muhammad ‘Ali and his heirs. Nationalist narratives regard these as a manifestation of Egyptian nationalism against Ottoman and European imperialism. Revisionists argue that the development of a modern administration, military, and industries occurred in an evolving symbiosis with Europeans and Ottomans. State projects transformed Egyptian society, forcing the population to reorient its primary concerns from family and village, urban quarter, and mosque to the state. The resultant burgeoning of an Egyptian public challenged the century-long domination of a dual-elite, the Ottoman Egyptian dynasty and the European colonies.
Of Machines and Men
Authors: Carminati Lucia 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter examines how laborers were recruited and organized to undertake the excavation of the Suez Canal between 1859 and 1864. After reinstating labor to the eminently technological historiography, this chapter argues that human toil and mechanical exertion, far from being on the extremes of a spectrum of work arrangements, coexisted with one another, albeit in occasional tension. Even if machines have overshadowed migrant workers in the contemporary and later narratives of the Suez Canal undertaking, they always necessitated human drudgery to function. Moreover, the Egyptian government, threatened with an unwelcome mass of foreign workers, actively weighed the pros and cons of committing Egyptian forced labor to the Canal project. In so doing, it clashed with Ottoman directives that opposed the exploitation of forcibly drafted Egyptian workers. In 1864, the stoppage of forced labor, state and imperial politics, budgetary concerns on the part of the Suez Canal Company, and technical exigencies converged to precipitate a shift toward the mechanization of the Canal worksites.