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Age of Rogues: Rebels, Revolutionaries and Racketeers at the Frontiers of Empires

Ramazan Öztan and Alp Yenen (eds)

The making of the modern world was a result of the fall of empires and the emergence of nation-states. This is particularly true across the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, a region connecting the ... More

The making of the modern world was a result of the fall of empires and the emergence of nation-states. This is particularly true across the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, a region connecting the Balkans to the Black Sea littoral, and the Middle East to the Caucasus. In approaching this poly-ethnic, multi-religious and trans-imperial hub of turmoil, the existing historiographies have either trivialized or idealized the role of rebels, revolutionaries and racketeers. Although revisionist scholarship has critically analysed political violence, imperialism and nation-state building, there is still a need to develop a comparative understanding of political actors that shaped the moments of political transition in these frontiers of empires. We accordingly propose a new genre of comparative and connected histories of rebels, revolutionaries and racketeers during what we call an “Age of Rogues.”Less

The Auditory Setting: Environmental Sounds in Film and Media Arts

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

The Auditory Setting introduces and investigates how narrative and a sense of place are constructed in film and media arts through the reproduction and mediation of site-specific environmental ... More

The Auditory Setting introduces and investigates how narrative and a sense of place are constructed in film and media arts through the reproduction and mediation of site-specific environmental sounds, or ‘ambience’. Although this sonic backdrop acts as the acoustically mediated space where a story or event can take place, there has been little academic study of sound’s undervalued role in cinematic setting and its production. The aim of this book is to question classical assumptions about sound in film and media arts (e.g., image-based relationships) and shift the focus towards the site and its sonic environment, whose presence is often carefully constructed in a film or media artwork’s diegetic world as a vital narrative strategy. The emphasis on site in the book enables an informed investigation of an essentially anthropogenic process of the sonic environment’s mediation and (re)production. Sonic environments are inhabited, experienced, exploited and transformed every day, their corporeality augmented by human agency in mediated forms. The human agency of sonic environments is crucial to unwrap in order to understand cultural expectations from the audiovisual media; greater awareness is required of narration, depiction, communication and artistic production approaches and affordances harnessed through media technologies. Drawing on theories of narrative, diegesis, mimesis and presence, and following a varied number of relevant audio-visual works, this book is a ground-breaking exploration of human agency in mediating environmental sounds and the nature of the sonic experience in the Anthropocene.Less

The Body in Arabic Love Poetry: The 'Udhri Tradition

Jokha Alharthi

This book radically re-interprets the nature of medieval Arabic love poetry in the classical age. It challenges stereotypical ideas about the absence of the body in ʿUdhri love poetry. Investigating ... More

This book radically re-interprets the nature of medieval Arabic love poetry in the classical age. It challenges stereotypical ideas about the absence of the body in ʿUdhri love poetry. Investigating the ʿUdhri tradition through close readings of the classical 10th-century Arabic sources including anthologies such as the Kitab al-Aghani, the book contributes to literary studies on the representations of the body. It also includes close readings of difficult literary texts in classical Arabic including the work of ʿUrwah b. Hizam, Majnun Layla,  Qays b. Dharih, Jamil Buthaynah and Kuthayyir ʿAzzah.  The author re-appraises the relationship between love, poetry and Arab society in the 8th to 11th centuries. She avoids familiar clichés about the purity of love in ‘Udhri poetry. Broadly speaking, this book is an Arabic counterpart to the western medieval concept of unconsummated courtly love. It questions the traditional much-vaunted emphasis on chastity and the assumption that this poetry omits any concept of the body. Less

Cinema and Soft Power: Configuring the National and Transnational in Geo-politics

Stephanie Dennison and Rachel Dwyer (eds)

The apparent shift in power relations between the developed and developing world, along with the increasing emphasis that national and transnational organisations place on the role of soft power in ... More

The apparent shift in power relations between the developed and developing world, along with the increasing emphasis that national and transnational organisations place on the role of soft power in global foreign policy, has profound implications for global film culture. Focusing primarily on the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), this innovative collection examines the diverse and often competing ways the group engages with film as a medium of artistic expression, and as a soft power resource. The contributors explore the wider implications for world cinema of BRICS members’ differing and dynamic positions in the global media landscape, and the book includes a comparative analysis by examining the post-imperial soft power of the UK at the time of Brexit.Less

The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume 1: Underground to Otherground

Kenneth White

Cairns Craig (ed.)

This first volume of Kenneth White’s long-awaited Collected Works brings together three of his early prose-books : Incandescent Limbo, Letters from Gourgounel, Travels in the Drifting Dawn. These are ... More

This first volume of Kenneth White’s long-awaited Collected Works brings together three of his early prose-books : Incandescent Limbo, Letters from Gourgounel, Travels in the Drifting Dawn. These are neither novels nor simple travelogues. Working out his own vocabulary, as he so often does, White calls them either « waybooks », books that cross territories on a multi-dimensional scale, or « staybooks », concerned with the deep habitation of a place. In every case, the aim of this intellectual nomad, inventor of the theory-practice of geopoetics, is to open up new existential and mental space, outwith a pseudo-cultural context that White analyzes in his essays as the tail-end of a tail-end, however productive.Less

The Confederate Jurist: The Legal Life of Judah P. Benjamin

William C. Gilmore

This is the first biography, written from a legal perspective, on the public life of Judah P Benjamin (1811-1884); one of the giants of the common law world in the second half of the 19th century. It ... More

This is the first biography, written from a legal perspective, on the public life of Judah P Benjamin (1811-1884); one of the giants of the common law world in the second half of the 19th century. It charts his meteoric rise as an American lawyer first in the mixed legal system of Louisiana and then nationally. In 1853 he was the first person of Jewish heritage to be offered nomination to the US Supreme Court – an honour he declined. Benjamin was also a member of the US Senate, a slave owner and a supporter of Southern secession. In the Civil War he served continuously in the Confederate Cabinet initially as Attorney General, then as Secretary of War and finally as Secretary of State. Following the victory of the Union he fled America, a fugitive. In political exile in England he requalified as a Barrister. Within a decade he had written a scholarly and long enduring treatise on commercial law and become the undisputed advocate of choice in appeals before the House of Lords and the Privy Council. This work considers the extraordinary career of this distinguished and complex jurist and reflects upon his legacyLess

Dissent After Disruption: Church and State in Scotland, 1843-63

Ryan Mallon

A history of post-Disruption Scottish Presbyterian dissent and its religious, political and social influence. The Disruption of the Church of Scotland was one of the most important events in ... More

A history of post-Disruption Scottish Presbyterian dissent and its religious, political and social influence. The Disruption of the Church of Scotland was one of the most important events in Victorian Britain and had a profound and lasting impact on Scottish religion, politics and society. This book provides the first detailed account of the two major non-established Presbyterian denominations in the two decades after 1843, which together accounted for roughly half of Scotland’s churchgoers: the Free Church, formed by those who left the Established Church at the Disruption, and the United Presbyterian Church, a consolidation of the various secessions of the previous century. Ryan Mallon explores how the relationship between these churches developed from the bitter feuds over the church-state connection prior to the Disruption to co-operation in the major ecclesiastical, political, and social matters of the day, paving the way to negotiations for merger commencing in 1863. The period between 1843 and 1863 redefined conceptions of what it meant to be Presbyterian and Scottish. By examining a key transitional period in Scottish history, this monograph charts how definitions of Presbyterianism, the Kirk, and dissent evolved as Scotland’s national religion slowly moved from the divisions of the previous century towards eventual reunion in 1929.Less

The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism

Maud Ellmann, Sian White, and Vicki Mahaffey (eds)

The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism showcases cutting-edge developments in Irish and modernist studies. Extending the timeline of modernism, the Companion reaches back to the Irish Literary ... More

The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism showcases cutting-edge developments in Irish and modernist studies. Extending the timeline of modernism, the Companion reaches back to the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth century and forward to recent innovations in the arts. The Companion also calls for a more inclusive understanding of Irish modernism, drawing greater attention, for example, to the pioneering work of women and prompting a richer awareness of 'gender trouble' in the long twentieth century. It departs from other handbooks and critical anthologies by highlighting the ‘heresies’ of Irish modernism, its trademark modes of resistance to orthodoxy and tradition. Among those modes, the Companion identifies ‘heresies of time and space’, ‘heresies of nationalism’, ‘aesthetic heresies’, and ‘heresies of gender and sexuality’ as the organising rubrics for each section of the volume, concluding with ‘critical heresies’ that have reshaped the academic field. Under these five rubrics, contributors address a wide range of modernist achievements in drama, poetry, fiction, cinema, journalism, decorative arts, and philately, while the introduction offers pointers for further exploration of Irish music, painting, and architecture, accompanied by photographic reproductions. Granting that heresies often overlap, the chapters are organized to reflect their respective emphases, with the proviso that heresies are defined by their impurity, as well as by the orthodoxies they betray—the word ‘betray’ implying both transgression and revelation.Less

The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900

David Finkelstein (ed.)

Winner of the 2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, this is a thorough account of newspaper and periodical press history in Britain and Ireland from 1800 to 1900. It is a unique ... More

Winner of the 2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, this is a thorough account of newspaper and periodical press history in Britain and Ireland from 1800 to 1900. It is a unique collection of essays examining nineteenth-century British and Irish journalism and communication history during a key period of change and development. It covers an important point of expansion in periodical and press history across the four nations of Great Britain (England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), concentrating on cross-border and transnational comparisons and contrasts in nineteenth-century media history and communication. Designed to provide readers with a clear understanding of the current state of research in the field, in addition to an extensive introduction, it includes fifty newly commissioned chapters and case studies exploring a full range of press activity and press genres during this intense period of change. Along with keystone chapters on the economics of the press and periodicals, production processes, readership and distribution networks, and legal frameworks under which the press operated, the book examines a wide range of areas from religious, literary, political and medical press genres to analyses of overseas and émigré press and emerging developments in children’s and women’s press.Less

Fashion on the Red Carpet: A History of the Oscars®, Fashion and Globalisation

Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén

The Academy Awards’ red-carpet is the most prominent fashion show in media culture. This book investigates the historical liaison between Hollywood and fashion institutions to describe how public ... More

The Academy Awards’ red-carpet is the most prominent fashion show in media culture. This book investigates the historical liaison between Hollywood and fashion institutions to describe how public relations campaigns and the media articulated fashion discourses around the Oscars throughout history. It argues that the fashion industry’s business model of celebrity endorsement and renowned designers as branded labels is based on the triangulation done by Hollywood studios, department stores, and American garment manufacturers during the interwar era. Departing from archival sources, and tracing discourses of fashion, stardom, and celebrity around Hollywood and the Oscars, this study unravels this phenomenon’s cultural, political and economic impact, explaining how the Academy Awards’ red-carpet became a marquee for the global endorsement of high-end fashion brands. The book addresses globalisation as a central topic to frame the red-carpet phenomenon, linking the fashion and media industries throughout the 20th Century. It points at the postwar as a historical turning point that consolidated the position of the United States as a veritable behemoth exporter of popular culture, depicting the American lifestyle as synonymous with wealth and comfort to further the global expansion of consumer culture. The book identifies power shift towards television, the emergence of celebrity culture, the post-war reactivation of transatlantic trade, the growth of fashion journalism, and the increasing circulation of designer names in the media as a series of converging factors that led to the institutionalisation of the red-carpet parade as a fashion event in its own right.Less

The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World

Jeff Malpas and Kenneth White

Originating in a series of conversations between the poet Kenneth White and the philosopher Jeff Malpas that took place over four days at White’s Breton home, The Fundamental Field is made up of two ... More

Originating in a series of conversations between the poet Kenneth White and the philosopher Jeff Malpas that took place over four days at White’s Breton home, The Fundamental Field is made up of two essays: the first is by White on Malpas; the second is by Malpas on White. The volume closes with a set of three new philosophical poems by White. Inspired by poets from John Donne to Hölderlin, and philosophers from Nietzsche to Heidegger, the essays address questions of world, place, narrative, language and politics, from within two constellations of ideas: White’s geopoetics and Malpas’ philosophical topology/topography. Together, and in their separate essays, the poet and philosopher traverse a common field, one in which both poetry and philosophy are founded.Less

Gold Rush Societies and Migrant Networks in the Tasman World

Daniel Davy

This book creatively explores the gold rushes in the Tasman World through an examination of the Otago gold rushes. It adopts a new methodology to reveal how transnational connections and local social ... More

This book creatively explores the gold rushes in the Tasman World through an examination of the Otago gold rushes. It adopts a new methodology to reveal how transnational connections and local social and natural environments shaped colonial identities. The first monograph-length study on the Otago gold rushes and their place in the histories of British and Irish migration, it further increases our understanding of the British World by grounding transnational networks in the local ecologies, geologies and weather patterns which shaped local social structures and profoundly affected migrants' relationships to loved ones in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere. In doing so, Gold Rush Societies evolves as neither a local nor a transnational history but one which blends the two into a single study and offers fresh perspectives on each in the process.Less

Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance: Hellenism as Theatricality

Olga Taxidou

This book explores how encounters between modernist theatre makers and Greek tragedy were constitutive in modernist experiments in performance. It analyses the experiments of Isadora Duncan, Edward ... More

This book explores how encounters between modernist theatre makers and Greek tragedy were constitutive in modernist experiments in performance. It analyses the experiments of Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, H. D. and Bertolt Brecht in creating a modernist aesthetic in performing, dancing, translating and designing Greek tragedies, sometimes for the stage and sometimes for the page. The book proposes a modernist aesthetic of Greek tragedy based on Hellenism as theatricality that radically revises the philosophical discourses of tragedy. Theatricality is read within the broader modernist experiments that reconfigure the relationships between the play-text and the stage, the body of the performer and the written word, while also re-conceptualising the main authors/creators of the performance event. Most such modernist experiments exhibit a strong attachment to notions of Greek tragedy. Sometimes these notions are based on readings of actual play-texts or archeological findings, but more often than not they rely on creative versions and encounters with Greek tragedy that help to revise ideas about classicism, its authenticity and cultural currency, and contribute towards an understanding of Greek tragedy that allows for theatrical experimentation that at once looks backwards, unearthing a radical potential in Greek tragedy itself (after Nietzsche and the Cambridge Ritualists), and forward to reception theory and to the late 20th and 21st century performances of Greek tragedy.Less

Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics

Dimitris Papanikolaou

This book is the first to provide a reading of the recent ‘Weird’ or ‘New Wave’ of Greek cinema, both through the concept of biopolitics and in the context of contemporary World Cinema politics, ... More

This book is the first to provide a reading of the recent ‘Weird’ or ‘New Wave’ of Greek cinema, both through the concept of biopolitics and in the context of contemporary World Cinema politics, aesthetics, as well as production and circulation strategies. Its main aim is to show the ways in which, since the beginning of the 21st century, cinema and other cultural forms in Greece have responded to a sense of Crisis and an ever expansive management of life that we have now come to call biopolitics. Through close cultural and film analysis, the Greek Weird Wave is proposed as a paradigmatic cinema of biopolitical realism, a trend observable more widely in world cinema today. Key films such as Yorgos Lantimos’s Dogtooth, Alps and The Lobster, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, Syllas Tzoumerkas’s Homeland, Alexandros Avranas’s Miss Violence and Panos H. Koutras’s Strella, are read together with less well-known short, medium and feature-length films by directors such as Konstantina Kotzamani, Yorgos Zois, Vassilis Kekatos, Alexandros Voulgaris, Argyris Papadimitropoulos, Babis Makridis. At the same time, the book offers an analysis of the larger cultural context of 21st-century Greece, often explaining the films’ major thematic and formal choices through references to contemporary novels, theatre performances, activist texts and political events.Less

Historicising Ancient Slavery

Kostas Vlassopoulos

This book offers a new approach to the study of ancient slavery. Informed by the global history of slavery, it eschews traditional approaches to slavery as a static institution. It explores instead ... More

This book offers a new approach to the study of ancient slavery. Informed by the global history of slavery, it eschews traditional approaches to slavery as a static institution. It explores instead the diverse strategies and the various contexts in which slavery was employed. It offers a new historicist approach to the study of slave identity and the various networks and communities that slaves created or participated in. Instead of seeing slaves merely as passive objects of exploitation and domination, it focuses on slave agency and the various ways in which slaves played an active role in the history of ancient societies. It examines slavery not only as an economic and social phenomenon, but also in its political, religious and cultural ramifications. Finally, it presents a comparative framework for the study of ancient slaveries, by examining Greek and Roman slaveries alongside other slaving systems in the Near East, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.Less

Hotel Modernity: Corporate Space in Literature and Film

Robbie Moore

Hotel Modernity explores the impact of corporate space on the construction and texture of modern literature and film. It centres the hotel and corporate space as key sites of modern experience and ... More

Hotel Modernity explores the impact of corporate space on the construction and texture of modern literature and film. It centres the hotel and corporate space as key sites of modern experience and culture. Examining architectural and financial records, hotel trade journals, travel journalism, advertisements and cinematic and literary representations, it charts the rise of hotel culture from 1870 to 1939. The book defines corporate space as the new urban, capital-intensive, large-scale spaces brought about by corporations during the nineteenth century, including department stores, railway stations and banking halls. Only in hotels, however, did the individual live within corporate space: sleeping in its beds and lounging in its parlours. The hotel structured intimate encounters with the impersonal and the anonymous, representing a radically new mode of experience. In chapters featuring readings of both canonical and relatively little-studied texts by Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bowen, Arnold Bennett, and Henry Green, alongside films by F. W. Murnau, Segundo de Chomón, and Charlie Chaplin, Hotel Modernity considers the relationship between new kinds of spatial organisation and new forms of subjective and intersubjective life. Hotels provoked these writers and filmmakers to rethink the conventions and functions of fictional characters. This book charts the warping and decentring of the category of ‘character’ within the corporate, architectural, informatic and technological networks which come to define hotel space in this period.Less

Iranian Literature after the Islamic Revolution: Production and Circulation in Iran and the World

Laetitia Nanquette

This book analyses the field of contemporary Iranian literature. It explores how literature has functioned and circulated since the 1979 revolution until the present, both within Iran and in ... More

This book analyses the field of contemporary Iranian literature. It explores how literature has functioned and circulated since the 1979 revolution until the present, both within Iran and in countries of the Iranian diaspora, focusing on North America, Western Europe and Australia. It focuses on prose productions, analysing several genres and media. The book takes Iran as its starting point, revealing the forms, structures and functions of Iranian literature within Iranian society, before turning to the global diaspora to examine the current dynamics of literary production and circulation between Iranian diasporic spaces and the homeland. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary Iranian literary field in its relation to the social, economic and political fields, both within Iran and in the diaspora. It is also a critical intervention in the field of World Literature as it explores Persian literary texts and the Iranian literary field in their worldly dimensions, with an interdisciplinary and global perspective. It is based on 15 years of fieldwork and travels in Iran, with unique interviews, data collection and participant observation.Less

Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History

Monica M. Ringer

This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, if the new intellectual landscape of the 19th ... More

This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, if the new intellectual landscape of the 19th century. The lens of Islamic Modernism is used to uncover the underlying epistemology and methodology of historicism that penetrated the Middle East and South Asia in this period, forcing and enabling a recalibration of the definition, nature, function and place of religion. Muslim Modernists engaged in a sophisticated project of theological reform designed to marry their twin commitments to religion and modernity; they were in conversation with European scholarship and Catholic Modernism, but more importantly, with their own complex Islamic traditions. This book provides a new framework for conceptualizing the relationship between Western and non-Western modernities. It demonstrates that Islamic Modernists adopted intellectual frameworks that first emerged in Europe, then deployed them to argue for the superiority of Islam. For Islamic Modernists, Islam had historically been, and could once again become a motor of modernity and the solution to contemporary ‘backwardness.’ Islamic Modernists considered in this book include Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (Iran), Imam Bayezidof (Russia), Namik Kemal (Ottoman Empire) and Syed Ameer Ali (India).Less

The Kharijites in Early Islamic Historical Tradition: Heroes and Villains

Hannah-Lena Hagemann

The Khārijites are perhaps the most notorious rebels of early Islamic history. The Islamic tradition portrays them as a heretical movement of militant zealots, a notion largely reiterated by modern ... More

The Khārijites are perhaps the most notorious rebels of early Islamic history. The Islamic tradition portrays them as a heretical movement of militant zealots, a notion largely reiterated by modern scholarship on this phenomenon, which is both surprisingly scarce and largely concerned with historical Khārijism ‘as it really was’. In contrast, this book provides the first comprehensive literary analysis of the early years of Khārijite history (c657-705 CE) as depicted in 9th- and 10th-century CE Islamic historiography. It purposefully moves away from positivist reconstructions and instead examines the narrative role and function of Khārijism in early Islamic historical writing. Two main arguments are advanced: first, that there is little narrative substance to the Khārijites as they are described in the selected sources; and second, that Islamic historiography does not approach Khārijism as an end in itself, but as a tool with which to discuss other issues. By exploring the manifold purposes of telling stories about these so-called heretics and rebels, the book thus provides a fresh perspective on early Khārijism and contributes to the study of how historical memory was created in the early Islamic period. Above all, the analysis highlights the need for a serious reassessment of the historical phenomenon of Khārijism as it is currently understood in scholarship.Less

Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction

Hannah Lauren Murray

Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. It brings together fiction and multiple ... More

Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. It brings together fiction and multiple discourses on White racial identity in the early US including natural history, medical science, blackface minstrelsy, abolitionism and anti-abolitionism, mesmerism and spiritualism. Moving beyond an anthropological framework of liminality and its focus on ritualised behaviour in tribal societies, this book examines liminality as both a temporary transformative experience and a permanent condition of exclusion and loss for White men in the early United States. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, the book argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Liminal Whiteness contributes to a growing body of scholarship concerned with the cultural construction of Whiteness and citizenship in the early US, and which resonates with contemporary discussions of White cultural anxiety and fragility. Fears of losing Whiteness in the early US were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today’s White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.Less