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Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

Six years before the Egyptian revolution of January 2011, many young Egyptians had resorted to blogging as a means of self-expression and literary creativity. Some of these bloggers have not only received big popularity within the online community, but have also attracted the interest of independent and mainstream publishing houses, and have made their way into the Arab cultural field. Previous research on the impact of the Internet in the Middle East has been dominated by a focus on politics and the public sphere, while its influence on cultural domains remains very little explored. Blogging From Egypt aims at filling this gap by exploring young Egyptians’ blogs as forms of digital literature. It studies a corpus of 40 personal blogs written and distributed online between 2005 and 2016, combining literary analysis with interviews with the authors. The study reveals that the experimentation with blogging resulted in the emergence of a new literary genre: the autofictional blog. The book explores the aesthetic features of this genre, as well as its relation to the events of the “Arab Spring”. Finally, it discusses how blogs have evolved in the last years after 2011 and what is left of the blog in Arabic literary production. The book includes original extracts and translation from blogs, made available for the first time to an English-speaking audience.

Bathhouses (hamams) play a prominent role in Turkish culture, because of their architectural value and social function as places of hygiene, relaxation and interaction. As architectural spaces, hamams have been continuously shaped by social and historical change at many scales. The life story of Mimar Sinan’s Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul provides an important example: established in 1583/4, it was modernized in the Turkish Republic (since 1923) and now is a tourist attraction. As a social space shared between tourists and Turks, it is a critical site through which to investigate how global tourism affects local traditions and how places provide a nucleus of cultural belonging in a globalized world. This book constitutes the first in-depth, monographic study of a single hamam, espousing an original and experimental biographical approach.

As Chinese performers have become more visible on global screens, their professional images – once the preserve of studios and agents – have been increasingly relayed and reworked by film fans. Web technology has made searching, poaching, editing, positing, and sharing texts significantly easier. Moreover, by using a variety of seamless and innovative methods, a new mode of personality construction has been developed. With case studies of high-profile stars like Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, and Michelle Yeoh, this ground-breading book examines transnational Chinese stardom as a Web-based phenomenon, and as an outcome of the participatory practices of cyber fans. By grounding the theory and praxis of Chinese stardom in a cyber-context, this book proffers a critical intervention of Chineseness and redress some inadequacies of the current scholarship on the subject by advancing the exploration of the dynamics borne out of technological apparatuses, cultural discourses, and network culture.

Cinema is a prime example of contemporary experience. However, film viewers seem infrequently to express their engagement with this experience in terms of rapt pleasure or plain delight. This book seeks to move beyond the purely rational language of meaning and “interest,” to regard some examples of cinematic work with the sort of pleasured rapture in which people partook in certain eighteenth century experiences of the aesthetic. In-depth analysis of sequences from Vertigo, A Matter of Life and Death, Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, Blow-up, and many other films, urges readers to think and move beyond narrative storytelling; beyond contemporary cultural relevance; beyond moral and political stricture; and into a serious consideration of what it is to be “swept away” by a film. A guiding principle of this text is that new light can be thrown on beloved films by consideration of certain culturally established ways of achieving aesthetic delight that took form in or around the eighteenth century, including but not limited to: viewing Dutch oil paintings; listening to the music of Mozart; strolling through the English Pleasure Garden and public promenade, and reading of the voyages of Captain James Cook. Such socially organized pleasures are cast as historical foundations from which we might draw a better understanding of the pleasure and delight filmic moments can offer.

This is the first edited volume to provide a comprehensive introduction and a critical exploration of the constructivist turn in political representation. Divided into three thematic parts, the 13 newly commissioned essays presented here develop constructivist turn as a central concept advancing the insight that there can be no democratic politics without representation because constituencies, or groups, exist as agents of democratic politics only insofar as they are represented. Complete with an original English translation of ‘Democracy and Representation’ by the French philosopher Claude Lefort, this volume delivers a rich critical intervention in democratic theory.

Contemporary studies of biopolitics tend to assume that the rise of biopolitical governance entails the eclipse of democracy. The abstract egalitarianism of democratic government appears to be incompatible with the concrete, particularist and individualizing operations of biopower. The revival of democracy is then only conceivable as the overcoming of biopolitics. Democratic Biopolitics challenges this interpretation and argues for the possibility of a positive synthesis of biopolitics and democracy, in which both rationalities can positively transform each other. The book identifies the sources of the impasse of the current critique of biopolitics in its broadly Rousseauan orientation that conceives of democratic subject as subtracted from all particular identities, interests or forms of life. In contrast, we argue that democracy is practicable from within particular forms of life as long as their contingency is affirmed and manifested. Drawing on a wide range of authors both belonging to and outside the biopolitics canon, Prozorov develops a vision of democratic biopolitics that consists in the coexistence of diverse and incommensurable forms of life on the basis of their reciprocal recognition as free, equal and in common. He demonstrates the realizability of this vision by addressing its correlates in our lived experience and argues for its sustainability by elucidating the pleasure involved in the freeform, experimental way of living that democracy makes possible.

Children’s metafictions have their roots in literacy pedagogy and entertainment, and remain enormously popular both with authors, readers, and teachers. But they pose a number of unique challenges to screen adaptation. While – arguably – audiences of children’s adaptations prefer that the adaptation adhere to the source as closely as possible, in the case of metafiction its defining ‘meta’ element does not directly transmediate. Yet a more direct filmic equivalence for metafiction – metafilm – reflects filmicity rather than bookishness. This book studies first what children’s metafiction purports to be and to do for the youth reader (infants to young adults). The second chapter examines the distinctive challenges in adapting children’s metafiction to film. The third chapter presents a number of children’s films, adaptations and not, featuring ‘bookish’ themes, characters, settings, and symbols, and develops a ‘film grammar’ for how these are traditionally depicted. The fourth chapter discusses children’s metafilm and draws from a selection of these films. The final, fifth, chapter presents a sub-type of children’s metafilm adaptations which ‘break the fifth wall’ by reflexively focusing not on a single medium (literature or film) but rather on the adaptation processes themselves. These adaptations are meta-adaptations. The book contains over fifty film stills and a glossary of terms. It discusses works like Inkheart, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and the Harry Potter series and the Series of Unfortunate Events. It is grounded in and contributes to contemporary adaptation criticism and theory.

Frederick Douglass (1818–95) was not the only fugitive from American slavery to visit Scotland before the Civil War, but he was the best known and his impact was far-reaching. In 1846 his stunning oratory drew enthusiastic crowds from Ayr to Aberdeen who came to hear him promote his new autobiography and deliver the abolitionist message. Although the main part of the book is framed by accounts of the racist discrimination Douglass faced on both his outward and return sea voyages, it does not offer a chronological narrative of his speaking engagements in Scotland. Rather, each of the three central chapters focus on a different set of encounters with notable Scots in order to demonstrate the vital role they played in the transformation of Douglass from a subordinate envoy of a white-run abolitionist society to an independent antislavery campaigner in his own right. In particular, they prompted far-reaching changes in his styles of speaking and writing, in his choice of heroes and how he identified with them, and in the new fervour with which he attempted to control the way he was represented verbally and pictorially. Situated at the intersection of biography, history and literature, it applies literary techniques of close reading to materials normally treated as historical documents, such as letters and newspaper reports, in order to draw out the subtleties of Douglass's changing attitudes, ideas and affiliations.

This book evaluates the global response to climate change from a cosmopolitan justice perspective. Going above and beyond existing studies, Alix Dietzel neatly illustrates that climate justice theory can be used to normatively assess and compare both state (multilateral) and non-state (transnational) climate change governance – in other words, that theory and practice can be bridged. Investigating the role of states, cities, corporations, and non-governmental organisations in the post-Paris Agreement era, Dietzel provides fresh insight into the ‘big picture’ of climate change (mis)management and the injustices that come along with it. These insights allow her to make recommendations for change that should be of keen interest to climate justice scholars and climate governance practitioners alike.

This book seeks to chart how the Scottish legal system responded to what were deemed ‘illicit and unnatural practices’ after 1900. Using a wide range of prosecution and trial records, along with more recent newspaper coverage of court proceedings, it furnishes a fascinating insight into the relationship between the law, sex, and society in modern Scotland. Case studies of sex-related offences, including abortion, bestiality, brothel-keeping, child sexual assault, and wilful HIV transmission, reveal how far the legal process both reflected and reinforced contemporary moral panics and how far it was shaped by the interplay between law officers and forensic experts, by the prejudices of the local community and civic leaders, and by Scotland’s distinctive legal and moral identity. The law in practice is seen to have sustained important norms of sexual behaviour and masculinity along with an enduring double moral standard with respect to female sexuality. This volume thus affords a remarkable new perspective on the sexual behaviours and ideologies of Scottish society across the twentieth century and into the new millennium.

Intelligence and in the Early Modern Theatre explores intrinsic connections between early modern intelligencers and metadrama in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It offers insight into why the early modern stage abounds with informer and intelligencer figures. Analysing both the nature of intelligence at the time and the metadrama that such characters generate, the book highlights the significance of intrigue and corruption to dramatic narrative and structure. This study of metadrama reveals some of the most fundamental questions being posed about the legitimacy of authority, authorship, and audience interpretation in this seminal era of English drama.

What is a miracle? Who believes in their possibility? What is the historical context within which they emerge?These and related questions have vexed, puzzled and, indeed, enthused scholars and believers, atheists and non-believers alike down the ages.This book examines this perennially fascinating subject of miracles with a comparative focus on two of the world’s great monotheistic religions, Islam and Christianity. Other texts have often approached the subject from a strictly theological, faith or, alternatively, rationalistic, perspective and made it their concern to prove or disprove the possibility of an alleged miraculous event. The approach adopted in this volume is quite different. It is strictly anthropological and phenomenological and the miracles are viewed in a new and dynamic fashion through the lens of narratology. The book examines the stories behind these miracles, the contexts which gave rise to them and allowed them to garner belief and flourish. Perspectives covered include the views of believers and non-believers alike in these phenomena. Similarities and differences in context and approach are explored with a primary focus on the five main anthropological topoi of food, water, blood, wood and stone, and cosmology. A range of intertextual elements in both these Islamic and Christian traditions is discerned.

This collection seeks to position the journey as a persistent presence across cinema, and fundamental to its position within modernity. It addresses the innovative appeal of journey narratives from pre-cinema to new media and through documentary, fiction, and the spaces between. Its examples traverse different regions and cultures, including a sub-section dedicated to Eastern Europe, to illuminate questions of belonging, diaspora, displacement, identity and memory. It considers how the journey is a formal element determining art cinema and popular genres such as sci-fi, romance and horror alike, with a special focus on rethinking the road movie. Through this variety, the collection investigates the journey as a motif for self-discovery and encounter, an emblem of artistic and social transformation, a cause of dynamism or stasis and as evidence of autonomy and progress (or their lack). The essays in it thus document epochal changes from urbanisation, migration and war to tourism and shopping, and all aim to address the diversity of cinematic journeys through developing methodological frameworks appropriate to an understanding of the journey as simultaneously a political question, contextual element and a formal property.

Judging from Experience forms part of Law and Literature and/or, more broadly, Law and Humanities, the interdisciplinary movement in legal theory that focuses on the various bonds of law, language and literature. The book presents a view on law as a humanistic discipline. It demonstrates the importance for academic legal theory and legal practice of a iuris prudentia as insighful knowledge of law that helps develop the practitioner’s practical wisdom. In doing so it builds on insights from philosophical hermeneutics ranging from Aristotle to Ricoeur. The building blocks it proposes for law as praxis are indicative of a methodological reflection on interdisciplinary studies in law and the humanities and of the development of legal narratology.The book engages with literary works such as Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, Musil’s The Man without Qualities, and McEwan’s The Children Act to illuminate its arguments and offer a specific European perspective on the topics discussed. The author combines her understanding of legal theory and judicial practice in a continental-European civil-law system, and, within it, in the field of criminal law, to propose a perspective on law as part of the humanities that can inspire both legal professionals and advanced students of law. Thus the book is also a reflection of the author’s combined passions of judicial practice and Law and Literature.

Katherine Mansfield’s contemporaries knew her primarily as a contributor to magazines and periodicals. In 1922, for instance, Wyndham Lewis described her as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’. This book provides the first in-depth study of Mansfield’s engagement in periodical culture, examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum. Reading these writings against the editorial strategies and professional cultures of each periodical, Chris Mourant situates Mansfield’s work within networks of production and uncovers the many ways in which she engaged with the writings of others and responded to the political, aesthetic and social contexts of early twentieth-century periodical culture. By examining Mansfield’s ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer working both within and against the London literary establishment, in particular, this book provides a new perspective on Mansfield as a ‘colonial-metropolitan modernist’ and proto-postcolonial writer.

Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.

This innovative book examines the development of modernism in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Focusing upon how literary and cultural outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect, mood, and literary geography to offer an original account of the geographical emotions of modernism. It considers three broad features of urban modernism: the built environment of the particular cities, such as cafés or transport systems; the cultural institutions of publishing that underpinned the development of modernism in these locations; and the complex perceptions of writers and artists who were outsiders to the four cities. Particular attention is thus given to the transnational qualities of modernism by examining figures whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles, or strangers. The writers and artists discussed include Mulk Raj Anand, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bryher, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selon, and Stephen Spender.

Modernist Life Histories explores how new biological models of embryonic development in the first half of the twentieth century helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots. Focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and Samuel Beckett, the book links narrative experiments with shuffled chronology, repeated beginnings and sex change to new discoveries in the biological sciences. It reveals new connections between the so-called Two Cultures by highlighting how scientific ideas and narratives enter the literary realm.

This book studies the micro-variation in the syntax of negation of Southern Levantine, Gulf and Standard Arabic. By including new and recently published data that support key issues for the syntax of negation, the book challenges the standard parametric view that negation has a fixed parametrized position in syntactic structure. It particularly argues for a multi-locus analysis with syntactic, semantic, morphosyntactic and diachronic implications for the various structural positions. Thus accounting for numerous word order restrictions, semantic ambiguities and pragmatic interpretations without complicating narrow syntax with special operations, configurations or constraints. The book includes data from Southern Levantine, Gulf and Standard Arabic, which shed light on word order contrasts in negative clauses and their interaction with tense/aspect, mood/modality, semantic scope over adverbs, and negative sensitive items. It also has new data challenging the standard claim in Arabic linguistics literature that negation has a fixed parametrized position in the clause structure. The book brings a new perspective on the role of negation in licensing negative sensitive items, scoping over propositions and interacting with pragmatic notions such as presupposition and speech acts.