bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Commentary on the Second Conversation
Authors: Pattison George 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
The commentary focuses on Dostoevsky’s relation to the Bible and his portrayal of Christ. Emphasis is placed on the challenge of introducing the biblical word into modern realist fiction and the question of authority associated with the biblical text. In some cases (Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov) it is shown how a biblical text that is read aloud provides a key to the religious meaning of the novel in question. The conversation also raises the question as to whether Dostoevsky’s treatment of suffering is, as some critics allege, pathological, arguing against this view that Dostoevsky sees suffering as potentially helping to break down egoism and broaden compassion. The question of Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Christ centres on whether his conception of Christ is too weak in comparison with orthodox Christian teaching and whether Prince Myshkin can be regarded as a Christ figure. A range of theological views is considered.
Commentary on the Fourth Conversation
Authors: Pattison George 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
The commentary considers Dostoevsky’s view of Mary, Mother of God, and returns to the question of Dostoevsky’s ‘weak Christ’, discussing his short story ‘The Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas Tree’. Dostoevsky is shown to have appreciated both Western traditions of representing Mary (the Madonna) in a realist style, as well as the Russian icon tradition. His admiration for Raphael is discussed. His view of the weak Christ is contextualized in relation to nineteenth-century theories of self-deification, often associated with Left Hegelianism. This is also seen as being in continuity with the spreading influence of kenoticism, i.e. the view that Christ emptied himself of his divine attributes in the Incarnation. Following the interpretation of T. A. Kasatkina, the story of ‘The Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas tree’ is seen to illustrate the radicality of Dostoevsky’s transformation of Christology, albeit in keeping with biblical sources.
Commentary on the Seventh Conversation
Authors: Pattison George 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
The commentary explores both literary and theological dimensions of memory in Dostoevsky’s fiction and its implication for views of the afterlife. Nineteenth-century innovations in thinking about the afterlife are considered, placing Dostoevsky’s views in the context of the ideas of his time. It is argued that Dostoevsky’s novels create memories for their readers that bring into focus hope for a life beyond the material world, linking this to the theology of light. With reference to the motto of The Brothers Karamazov (John 12.24), it is argued that Dostoevsky sees literature as being able to raise life to a kind of immortality, thus enabling them to push back against the encroachments of nihilism. Dostoevsky’s view is contrasted with that Hegel and of Proust, who uses the same biblical text to explain his literary work.
Absolute Rights in Assets
Authors: von Bar Christian , Allen Jason Grant 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter elaborates the concept of absolute rights to assets. Through a comparison of the conventional lists of ‘fundamental principles of property law’ in national legal systems, it argues for an approach based on the concept of rights effective against third parties and ‘property law’s’ regulation of third-party interests through the grant of ‘absolute’ rights. The meaning of ‘absoluteness’ also differs between legal systems, especially between civilian and common law systems; however, enforceability against third parties provides a point of reference against which to determine the province of ‘property law’. Property law exists wherever erga omnes rights to assets exist. This leads into a discussion on the numerus clausus principle, its dissemination throughout the legal systems of Europe, and the role it plays in the concept of European property law.
A Tri-Partite Conceptual Framework: Objects of Legal Transaction, Goods, and Things
Authors: von Bar Christian , Allen Jason Grant 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter presents a framework for understanding the objects of property rights. In contrast to national taxonomies, this chapter presents a tri-partite distinction: anything of which a rule-set is willing and able to notice for private law purposes is an ‘object’. Anything, which can be sold or gifted is an object of legal transaction and therefore a ‘good’. Finally, ‘things’ are such objects of legal transaction in which erga omnes rights can be created—namely, property rights. Things, in turn, can be classified as real things, normative things with a physical substrate, and purely normative things. The chapter reviews national approaches to the objects of property law, including the contextual approach taken in the common law systems, and critically reviews the tendency to treat the distinction between ‘moveable’ and ‘immoveable’ things as a summa divisio.
Normative Things with a Physical Substrate: Land Units
Authors: von Bar Christian , Allen Jason Grant 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter describes the category of normative things with a physical substrate—essentially, land units. Many legal systems posit ‘land’ or ‘immoveables’ as the core category of real things. However, on closer examination, the relevant object is a normative one, albeit with a physical substrate. This reveals a concept that has as much (or more) affinity with the common law concept of an ‘estate’ in land as with the German law concept of a ‘land unit’ [Grundstück] on whose terminology it draws. Because of the importance of land to property law, and because of the unique nature of land units, there are a number of intricate rules around the formation and alteration of land units, as well as concerning land units connected with land covered with water.
Things and Rights
Authors: von Bar Christian , Allen Jason Grant 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter concludes the investigation of the ‘foundations of property law’ by elaborating on the recursive relationship between ‘rights’ and ‘things’ (Sachen and Sachenrechte), and explaining the social and economic importance of the legal system’s function of granting persons property rights in things. This relationship is fundamental, and allows us to conclude with a definitional proposition. In the sense we mean it in property law, a thing is everything, but only such a thing which can be the point of reference of some person’s property right. In other words, things are conceptually necessary to imagine rights, and rights are conceptually necessary to describe things.
The Brunian Tradition
Authors: Mori Giuliano 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Chapter 1 focuses on the humanist historiographical current that identified historical truth with verisimilitude, defined as the quality of what is appropriate to and expected of the subjects of one’s narrative in accordance with their condition, social status, and overarching character. The chapter argues that authors such as Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Pier Candido Decembrio used the notion of historical verisimilitude to tailor the classical topoi of history’s impartiality and utility to the needs of different geographical and political environments. Through verisimilitude, humanists could project an overall meaning of the events, whose exposition was considered the task of truthful historians and the standard of history’s utility and impartiality. Verisimilitude also functioned as a criterion to select relevant historical materials—a classical historiographical requirement that could easily be turned into an excuse to pass over unflattering facts. To demonstrate how Brunian historians navigated this gray area, the chapter investigates the boundaries they erected to distinguish between works whose verisimilar character was perceived as a conveyor of historical truth and works that, instead, used verisimilitude as a pretext for carrying out impartial—and hence untruthful—analyses.
Christian Pornography
Authors: Schryer Stephen 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Chapter 4 focuses on a forgotten writer of the conservative movement. D. Keith Mano was the author of nine novels published between 1968 and 1998, including his masterpiece, Take Five (1982), an ambitious postmodern fiction influenced by Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. Today, his books are ignored by critics and general readers. The reasons for this neglect are reflected in the two magazines for which he wrote. He was one of National Review’s most prolific contributors in the 1970s and 1980s, writing a column titled “The Gimlet Eye” in which he satirized liberals. He was also a contributing editor for Playboy; he considered himself a Christian pornographer who led readers to grace through explicit representations of sex. His work, in other words, was too conservative for the left-liberal critics who promoted postmodern literature in the 1970s and 1980s, too transgressive and formally experimental for Christian conservative readers. These two sides of his work reflect the central contradiction of post–World War II conservatism: its attempt to simultaneously promote Christian tradition and the capitalist free market. At the same time, Mano’s novels allegorize his sense of the increasing obsolescence of highbrow literature within the conservative movement.
Collective Political Decision-Making in Aristophanes
Authors: Hardwick Alexandra 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Chapter 3 analyses off-stage group decision-making as portrayed in Aristophanes’ comedies, discussing the assembly scenes in Knights and Assembly-Women. It reveals Aristophanes’ pervasive interest in depicting and exploring group decision-making processes: he frequently echoes stereotypes surrounding group decisions in prose texts. However, Aristophanes also develops a unique range of vocabulary which he applies specifically to group activity. Several off-stage assemblies are followed by the appearance of individual characters who represent the off-stage groups (Dêmos in Knights, Blepyrus in Assembly-Women), allowing us to understand how Aristophanes constructs the differences between group and individual decision-making. This chapter finishes by demonstrating how these conclusions can shed light on other Aristophanes plays, by applying them to the Chorus of Birds.
‘Political’ Armies in Tragedy
Authors: Hardwick Alexandra 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Euripides’ surviving plays often depict an off-stage Achaean army. Such armies exemplify several different types of group identity: they are, in effect, the population of the army camp (or indeed the ruins of Troy); they often participate in assemblies; they contain an inherent potential for collective violence. Euripides’ ‘Trojan’ plays (and, to a lesser extent, Sophocles’ Ajax) encourage us to view the Achaean army in terms of a democratic polis. However, the army is also cast as a menacing off-stage collective which particularly threatens female characters, starkly emphasizing their all-male gender. As such, the army allows darker elements of democratic power to be explored. Furthermore, the army’s political portrayal affects the depiction of Homeric characters (such as Agamemnon, Menelaus, Hecuba, and Clytemnestra), aligning them with stereotyped fifth-century political figures. The army’s shifting identity in Iphigenia at Aulis is a particular focus of this chapter.
‘Operation Netflix’
Authors: James Kathryn 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
The value of global e-commerce business-to-consumer sales in 2022 is estimated at USD 5.4 trillion and predicted to reach USD 6.4 trillion, or one-fifth of sales worldwide, by 2024. Australia is therefore one of many jurisdictions scrambling to find a means to update its value-added tax (VAT), known domestically as the goods and services tax (GST), to effectively tax cross-border transactions within the digital economy, which, due to their intangibility, mobility, and high volume, do not respect the traditional rules and administrative techniques of VAT collection. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has spearheaded the global policy response, and Australia has been a pioneer in adopting reforms aligned with the OECD approach, including reforms to tax imports of digital products and services to Australian consumers, known colloquially as the ‘Netflix tax’. The Australian ‘Netflix tax’ reforms offer an ideal case study of the challenges to the VAT posed by digital disruption, the main policy responses available, and the limitations and risks inherent in these responses.
Lessons from EU VAT Harmonization
Authors: Englisch Joachim 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter analyses the common system of European Union value-added tax (EU VAT) as to the lessons that it holds for the harmonization of VAT/goods and services tax (GST) systems around the globe. The focus of the analysis is on the institutions, procedures, and arrangements that facilitate or complicate the creation as well as subsequent improvement and modernization of the harmonized VAT system. The chapter first explains the institutional framework for the development and implementation of VAT policy in the harmonized system of EU VAT. It then describes its historical trajectory to a dense layer of supranational legislation on VAT and provides four case studies of recent reform attempts. On this basis, several key factors that have contributed to the positive and negative outcomes of harmonization efforts, as well as the processes and institutions that are conducive to a uniform application of the harmonized rules, are discussed in more depth.
Brexit and VAT
Authors: Cordara Roderick 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter examines the Brexit settlement of 2021 between the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU) on value-added tax (VAT) in the United Kingdom after Brexit. It discusses how, in substance and reality, the tax rules have either changed or remained the same, despite legislative relabelling for political reasons. It also examines legislative drafting techniques in the context of a political wish to give the impression of a new start by the UK government, combined with unchanged fiscal policies and money-raising priorities. The chapter reviews the role of European legislation (regulations and directives) in the post-Brexit UK administration of VAT and specifically discusses the accommodation of the general principles of EU VAT law within the post-Brexit UK judicial system without the imperative of building a single EU market since the United Kingdom is already a single market. The chapter makes references to potential further legislation which, if passed, could destabilize the Brexit settlement of 2021 for VAT purposes.
Contractual Interpretation: Meaning, Intention, and Disembodied Spirits
Authors: Kramer Adam 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter focuses on the meaning, intention, and indeed disembodied spirits of contractual interpretation. Beyond the basic objective principle and the (entirely correct) contextual approach to interpretation, there is the need to recognize that speakers intend without foreseeing or contemplating something, and their entry into a contract is an intended delegation, appointment, and out-sourcing. Accordingly, the meaning of contract legitimately includes things parties did not consider or foresee. The core of Lord Leggatt’s analysis of rational choice theory is correct.
Contractual Interpretation: Antinomies and Boundaries
Authors: Sales Philip 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This chapter discusses contractual interpretation in terms of antinomies and boundaries. It highlights that entering into a contract results in legal consequences wherein parties create a shared legal world of legal rights and obligations arising out of compromises between conflicting values. The principle of objective interpretation mitigates the conflict between free consent and rule of law values through the reasonable interpretation of contracts. While consent is the foundational justification for treating a party as bound by it, taking other values into account requires a departure from the principle of pure consent. The chapter then elaborates on the boundaries of contractual interpretation and the management of uncertainties created by the need to accommodate different values in one doctrinal space.
“To Will a Future”
Authors: Crosthwaite Paul 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Chapter 4 focuses on the poet Archibald MacLeish’s verse drama Panic (1935), which depicts an America ravaged by the bank runs and closures that proliferated in the wake of the Great Crash, and ponders the routes via which the nation might emerge from its disastrous slump. Having established MacLeish’s complex position within the cultural politics of the Depression era, the chapter initially explores how the play presents a stylistic critique of what MacLeish saw as Marxist thought’s economic fatalism: the obscurantism and mystification that he associated with Marxism are manifest in the language of dire portents and monstrous terrors assigned to the play’s communist revolutionary characters. While casting Marxist prognostication not as scientific but as paradigmatically speculative, however, the play suggests that radical left projections of capitalism’s imminent and terminal collapse are in effect speculative wagers against the American economy, premised on their capacity to sow the demoralization and resignation that will turn their own future visions into realities. Communists’ predictions thus, for MacLeish, have the potential to harness the power of the “self-fulfilling prophecy” or what economic sociologists have recently theorized in terms of “fictional expectations” or, more commonly, the “performativity” effect. The chapter takes Panic as an opportunity to place a proliferating social-scientific literature on economic performativity in contact with work on the interconnections between performative utterance and theatrical performance by literary critics and performance studies scholars, arguing that the play’s prophetic rhetoric and expressionist staging offer a spectacular dramatic anatomization of performativity in action.
Corporate Governance, ESG, and ‘New Capitalism’
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Corporate governance is a critical—and increasingly crowded—arena for corporate transformation, and for determining the future of Japanese capitalism. Japan’s Stewardship and Corporate Governance Codes have been progressively strengthened. The giant Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) helped to spread ESG in Japan. Shareholders and managers are exhorted to work together for medium to long-term ‘corporate value’, as well as sustainability, but do their interests really align that well? Reflections are offered from the turmoil engulfing Toshiba, setting the scene for a consideration of Keidanren’s ‘sustainable capitalism’ and Kishida’s ‘new (form of) capitalism’. Investor relations have become the core institutional nexus of Japanese capitalism, but this is not necessarily compatible with new capitalism’s emphasis on growth with distribution, investment in human capital, and rebuilding the middle class.
Historical Drama
Authors: Wynn Thomas 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Closet drama offers new possibilities for writing and reading history. Charles-Jean-François Hénault’s François II, roi de France (1747) was thought by contemporaries to be the first example of historical drama in French. Set during the Wars of Religion, the play spurns normal dramatic conventions: there are twenty-three characters; unities of time and place are abandoned; there are substantial historical and bibliographical notes. Hénault took inspiration from Shakespeare’s Henry VI and deployed dramatic form to make his readers visualize the sixteenth-century figures in a kind of resurrection. He presents his characters in such a way as to valorize the reader’s disincarnate gaze, which permits a more complete vision of history in all its terrible truth. To read François II is not just to take an active role in the historiographical process; it is to practise an ideology of tolerance that is absent from the events portrayed in the work.
Athenian Power in the Fifth Century BC
Authors: Lazar Leah 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
This monograph offers a new analysis of fifth-century bc Athenian imperial power, a central topic in ancient Greek history. Challenging orthodox approaches, which have been mostly empirical, monolithic, and centred on Athens, the monograph argues that Athenian power was flexible and a matter of negotiation between the Athenians and their allies. The first three chapters focus on political, fiscal, and religious negotiations between the Athenians and their allies in Athenian contexts. The subsequent three chapters then offer studies of the empire in three different regions—the North Aegean, Rhodes, and the straits between the Aegean and the Black Sea—showing how the empire was formed of overlapping but differentiated regional manifestations. The monograph differs from previous studies in three key respects. Throughout, the monograph provides sophisticated economic analysis. It offers new perspectives on well-known Athenian epigraphic and literary sources, while also utilizing different categories of non-Athenian evidence, including varied forms of material culture. Finally, it makes use of critical historical comparison: with other imperial powers, with later Athenian power, and most of all with the operation of fifth-century Athenian power in different regions.
Negotiation, Flexibility, and Corruption in the Athenian Tribute System
Authors: Lazar Leah 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
Chapter 2 focuses on Athenian imperial revenue production, arguing that the fiscal system, namely the collection of monetary tribute, was inherently flexible and composed of bilateral interactions. The chapter is largely based on close analysis of the inscribed tribute quota lists, in particular unusual patterns of assessment in the 430s and 420s bc. However, this flexibility, and the individual agents which supported it, were increasingly restricted when the financial pressures of the Peloponnesian War began to bite. Indeed, both epigraphic evidence and comic plays from the 420s bc show a significant Athenian preoccupation with imperial revenue and the corrupt behaviour of individuals. Finally, the chapter turns to the abolition of the tribute system in 413 bc, in favour of a much less flexible universal harbour tax. Overall, the chapter tracks a similar development in the Athenian restriction of community-level negotiation and individual agency as in Chapter 1.
Athens, Daskyleion, and Kyzikos
Authors: Lazar Leah 
Published: February 2024

Abstract
The final chapter analyses Athenian fiscal and commercial strategies at the straits between the Aegean and the Black Sea, the Bosporos and Asiatic Propontis, from two perspectives: first through consideration of one allied community, Kyzikos, its unique electrum coinage, and the peripheral position it occupied between Athenian and Achaemenid influences; and second through discussion of Athenian taxation at the straits, the one known location where the Athenians themselves imposed a tax on mobility beyond Attica. The chapter argues that the Athenians were pragmatic in their intervention or lack thereof in their exploitation in the straits. The uniquely fragmented and competitive geography allowed the Athenians to skim surplus from numerous allied communities better integrated into Black Sea networks—a dynamic attested in the material record through the circulation of the Kyzikene electrum staters—and into inland areas not dominated by Greek poleis. Simultaneously, the Athenians asserted their own fiscal claims directly. Their interests overlapped and sometimes aligned with those of allied communities, and also of the Achaemenid satrap. The Athenian approach to coinage and its use, like its approach to fiscal exploitation, was highly pragmatic.