Browse

Some of the world’s most exquisite medieval paintings, from late fifteenth-century Herat and the early Safavid workshops, illustrate well-known episodes of popular romances––like Leyla & Majnun––that give prominence to depictions of unrelated figures such as a milkmaid or a spinner at the scene of the hero Majnun’s death. This interdisciplinary study aims to uncover the significance of this enigmatic, century-long trend from its genesis at the Timurid court to its continued development into the Safavid era. The analysis of iconography in several luxury manuscript paintings within the context of contemporary cultural trends, especially the ubiquitous mystical and messianic movements in the post-Mongol Turco-Persian world, reveals the meaning of many of these obscure figures and scenes and links this extraordinary innovation in the iconography of Persian painting to one of the most significant events in the history of Islam: the takeover of Iran by the Safavids in 1501. The apparently inscrutable figures, which initially appeared in illustrations of didactic Sufi narrative poetry, allude to metaphors and verbal expressions of Sufi discourse going back to the twelfth century. These “emblematic” figure-types served to emphasize the moral lessons of the narrative subject of the illustrated text by deploying familiar tropes from an intertextual Sufi literary discourse conveyed through verses by poets like Rumi, Attar and Jami, and ended up complementing and expressing Safavid political power at its greatest extent: the conversion of Iran to Shiism.

Casting fresh light on one of the most important movements in film history, Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts is the first comprehensive study of the New Wave's relationship with the older arts. Traversing the fields of literature, theatre, painting, architecture and photography, and drawing on André Bazin alongside recent theories of intermediality, it investigates the 'impure', intermedial aesthetics of New Wave cinema. Filmmakers under discussion include critics-turned-directors François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol, members of the Left Bank Group Alain Resnais, AgnèsVarda and Chris Marker, but also lesser-known directors, notably the 'secret child of the New Wave', Guy Gilles. This wide-ranging book offers an original reading of the complex, often ambivalent ways in which the New Wave engages the other arts in both its discursive construction and filmic practice.

Focusing on a recent wave of international art cinema, Animal Worlds offers the first sustained analysis of the relations between cinematic time and animal life. Through an aesthetic of extended duration, films such as Bestiaire (Denis Côté, 2012), The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011) and A Cow’s Life (Emmanuel Gras, 2011) attend to animal worlds of sentience and perception, while registering the governing of life through biopolitical regimes. Bringing together Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema and his reflections (with Félix Guattari) on animals, while drawing on Jacques Derrida, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Nicole Shukin and others, the book argues that these films question the biopolitical reduction of animal life to forms of capital, opening up realms of virtuality, becoming and alternative political futures.

The nineteenth-century Italian Risorgimento, or ‘resurgence’, re-drew Europe’s map to create a new nation-state: Italy. Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture argues that the Risorgimento radically shaped nineteenth-century British political, literary and cultural landscapes. Crossing borders, political divides and genres, this study examines the intersections of literary works by Mary Shelley, Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), Giovanni Ruffini, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others with journalism, parliamentary records and pamphlets, to establish Britain’s imaginative investment in this seismic geopolitical realignment. This book explores four political focal points of British engagement with Italian unification, moving between two crucial turning points that shaped Europe’s geopolitical map, the 1815 Congress of Vienna and 1861 creation of the Kingdom of Italy, to excavate the unsettling fusion of political optimism and disaffection produced through the collision of British and Italian politics and culture. British and Anglo-Italian responses to the Risorgimento reveal a complicated, decades-long print contest that played out across high literary modes, pamphlets and propaganda, memoirs and travelogues, parliamentary debates, journalism and emerging genres like sensation fiction. This study argues that forging a new state demands both making and unmaking; as the Risorgimento re-mapped Europe’s geopolitical reality, it also reframed how the British saw themselves, their politics and their place within Europe. These chapters demonstrate that the nation-building enterprise of Risorgimento culture was a participatory, international field crossing borders, print forms, political parties and literary genres, which played an invigorating role for British political discourse and print culture.

This book constitutes the first exploration of artistic self-reflection in Islamic art. In the absence of a tradition of self-portraiture, how could artists signal their presence within a painting? Centred on late Timurid manuscript painting (ca. 1470-1500), this book reveals that pictures could function as the painter’s delegate, charged with the task of centring and defining artistic work, even as they did not represent the artist’s likeness. Influenced by the culture of the majlis, an institutional gathering devoted to intricate literary performances and debates, late Timurid painters used a number of strategies to shift manuscript painting from an illustrative device to a self-reflective object, designed to highlight the artist’s imagination and manual dexterity. These strategies include visual abundance, linear precision, the incorporation of inscriptions addressing aspects of the painting and the artist’s signature. Focusing on one of the most iconic manuscripts of the Persianate tradition, the Cairo Bustan made in late Timurid Herat and bearing the signatures of the painter Bihzad, this book explores Persian manuscript painting as a medium for artistic performance and self-representation, a process by which artistic authority was shaped and discussed. In addition, each chapter explores a different theme: how painters challenged the conventions of royal representation (chapter 1); the role of writing in painting, its relation to ekphrasis and the context of the majlis (chapter 2); image, mimesis and potential world (Chapter 3); the line and its calligraphic quality (Chapter 4); signature (Chapter 5); the mobility of manuscripts (epilogue).

Modernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the scales and shapes of time, the consistency of timespace, and the nature of history.

The prime objective of this book is to underpin the Maghrebi encounter with the Occident, which evolved from fascination (Occidentophilia), to Ambivalence, to rejection of the Occident (Occidentophobia) through a process of decolonization. It sheds light on many neglected areas in the study of Maghrebi literature and culture by rehabilitating and reintegrating the pre-1945 novels, hitherto shunned as politically decadent, into the history and the study of Maghrebi literature. It deconstructs this endangered literary corpus with depth, and situates it with other works produced concomitantly in the form of manifestos and letters addressed to the Occident. These works represent the voices of the pre-1945 elite who expressed their fascination of occidental culture with a plea to the Occident to extend its civilization to all factions of the colonized society. The book traces literary depictions of Algerian converts to Christianity; a community obliterated by mainstream discourse of nationalism. The book unearths their voices and gives explanation to their anguishes, and dilemmas as exemplified in the work of the Amrouche family of authors. It also delves into Imperial Feminism and the writings of French feminists on their mission to save native Maghrebi women. To complete the circle the book examines the birth of Algerian feminism and its depiction through literature, of the native women’s encounter with the Occident as advocated in the work of Djamila Débêche. The book concludes by analysing the reasons behind the failure of the East –West encounter as the end of a chimera.

Charting a new course between performance studies and literary criticism, this book discovers a poetics of figuration in English tragic drama. It demonstrates that our recognition of the dramatic person in printed drama of the early modern period is involved in the terms on which those plays were first realized in the theatre. Since many such tragedies challenge and confuse the straightforward discernment of dramatic character, a strong distinction between performance studies and literary criticism breaks down in the course of an attentive reading. In the past this problem of recognition was artificially resolved or ignored so as to launch various sorts of moral interpretation. In fact, the ethical and political difficulty of revenge in plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet and The Duchess of Malfi is inseparable from the difficulty of discerning human shapes in the theatre and on the page. Moreover, the epistemological issues created by these games of personation have been inadequately addressed by historicist criticism purporting to unearth the social, religious, and political impulsions of Shakespearean drama. Intervening in a wide range of current debates within early modern studies, The Origins of English Revenge Tragedyholds that the origins of English tragic drama cannot be understood without considering how the common player appears in the play.

In the 21st century, more than any other time, US agencies have relied on contractors to conduct core intelligence functions. This book charts the swell of intelligence outsourcing in the context of American political culture and considers what this means for the relationship between the state, its national security apparatus and accountability within a liberal democracy. Through analysis of a series of case studies, recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews with national security experts in the public and private sectors, the book provides an in-depth and illuminating appraisal of the evolving accountability regime for intelligence contractors.

Why is intelligence so hard to define? Why is there no systematic or adequate theory of intelligence? This book argues that classic intelligence production has been premised on an ill-founded belief in an automatic inference between history and the future, and that the lack of a working theory has exacerbated this problem. The book uses classic cases of intelligence failure to demonstrate how this problem creates a restricted language in intelligence communities that undermines threat perception. From these cases it concludes that intelligence needs to be re-thought, and argues that good intelligence is the art of threat perception beyond the limits of our habitual thinking and shared experience. This book therefore argues that intelligence can never be truths, only uncertain theories about the future. Qualified intelligence work is, accordingly, ideas that lead to theories about the future. These theories should always seek to explain a comprehension of the wholeness of threats. The hypothesis derived from these theories must thereafter be tested, as tests that make the theories less uncertain. This implies that intelligence never can be anything but uncertain theories about the future that are made less uncertain through scientific, critical tests of hypotheses derived from these theories. High quality intelligence institutions conduct these tests in what is known as the intelligence cycle. This cycle works well if it mirrors good thinking.