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What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds. Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.

In the rapidly growing study of amateur film, this groundbreaking book addresses the development of British women's amateur visual practice. Drawing upon social and visual anthropology, imperial and postcolonial studies and British, Commonwealth and gender history, the authors explore how women in Britain and overseas, used the evolving technologies of moving imagery to create visual stories about their lives and times. Locating the making, watching and sharing of women's recreational film-making against wider societal, technological and ideological changes, British Women AmateurFilmmakers discloses how women from varied backgrounds negotiated changing lifestyles, attitudes and opportunities as they created first personal visual narratives about themselves and the world around them. Using non-fictional films and animations, the authors invite readers to view films through different interpretative lens and provide detailed contexts for their case-studies and survey of over forty women amateur filmmakers. Whether in remote communities, suburban homes, castles, missionary or diplomatic enclaves, or simply travelling as intrepid sightseers, women filmed their companions, other people and their surroundings, not only as observers but often displaying agency, autonomy and aesthetic judgment during decades when careers, particularly after marriage, were often denied in film and other professions. Research across Britain on films in private hands and specialist archives, interviews and extensive study of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC's) collections enable the authors to reposition an activity once thought of as overwhelmingly male and middle class.

Masons, carpenters and glaziers were all needed to build a house, but in many cities such trades had separate companies. In Edinburgh, however, they banded together in a single incorporation to seek control of the labour market and defend their privileged position. Such issues were often contested by unfree competitors, municipal regulators and powerful customers. Therefore unity was needed to defend their position and privileges, but with ten unequal arts vying for control of the composite corporate body, how was such unity to be secured? The Edinburgh Incorporation of Mary’s Chapel looked to the models of the family and the household.

The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, combining close reading with historicism, to read the stories afresh, sceptically probing Dr Watson’s narratives and Holmes’s often barely credible solutions. Drawing on Victorian and Edwardian history, Conan Doyle’s life and works, and Doyle’s literary sources, the book offers new insights into the Holmes stories and reveals what they say about money, class, family, sex, race, war and secrecy.

The temptation to invoke idealised histories of Islamic cosmopolitanism as the antithesis to the militancy associated with contemporary groups, such as the Islamic State (IS), is quite powerful. Many writers have pointed to the flourishing of al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula and the mobile societies of the premodern Indian Ocean as paradigmatic examples both of the storied past and the potential future of cosmopolitan forms of religious vitality. However, if one pushes beyond nostalgic images of coexistence, pluralism and mobility, it is also possible to discern more complex stories. The chapters in Challenging Cosmopolitanism, specifically direct attention to the historical experiences of Muslims in China and Southeast Asia to explore such complexities. Marked by considerable inflows of Muslim migrants that further complicated the demographics of already heterogeneous populations, the experiences of Muslim communities in these regions provide insights into contests to define legitimate forms of difference. Spanning from the 16th through 21st centuries, this volume presents case studies of itinerant Sufis who overthrew governments in the Indian Ocean and religious shrines patronized by warlords in early Java; of thinkers who promoted ‘Islamic military cosmopolitanism’ in Qing-era China and Americans who supported US-Ottoman cooperation in the pacification of the Philippines; of Muslim rebels in early 20^th-century Malaya who resisted borders and Afghan refugees in China whose experience reflects contemporary dynamics of ‘armoured’ forms of 21^st century cosmopolitanism. Through such explorations, this volume illuminates the fraught relationships between mobility, coercion and border-crossing, thereby contributing to more nuanced frameworks of analysis for Islamic cosmopolitanism.

Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century examines the importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The years between the naval blockade of 1775, which began the American War, and the start of the First World War in 1914 witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast on both sides of the Atlantic. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, coasts were often thought of as unhealthy, dangerous places. Developments in both medicine and aesthetics changed this. Increasingly, the coast could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation – a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. Spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and including interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography, these essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies speak across traditional period and disciplinary boundaries.

The use of hard-core sex and brutal violence in films such as Antichrist, Romance and Irreversible has been branded by many as an unsophisticated attempt to attract audiences. These accusations of gimmickry have been directed towards a range of extreme art films, however they have rarely been explored in detail. This book therefore seeks to investigate the validity of these claims by considering the extent to which these often infamous sequences of extremity inform the commercial identity of the film. Through close textual analysis of various paratexts, the book examines how sleeve designs, blurbs, and special features manage these extreme reputations, and the extent to which they exploit the supposed value of extremity. The book positions the tangible home video product as a bearer of meaning, capable of defining the public persona of the film. The book explores the ways home video artefacts communicate to both highbrow and lowbrow audiences by drawing from contradicting marketing traditions, as well as examining the means through which they breach long-standing taste distinctions. Including case studies from both art cinema and exploitation cinema – such as Cannibal Holocaust, Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom, Weekend and Antichrist – the book explores the complicated dichotomies between these cinematic traditions, offering a fluid history of extreme art cinema while challenging existing accounts of the field. Ultimately, the book argues that extremity – far from being a simple marketing tool – is a complex and multifaceted commercial symbol.

Dickens and Demolition is the first study to trace and measure the material impact of Charles Dickens’s fiction in London’s built environment. The book analyses debates surrounding large-scale metropolitan demolitions, modernisation or reform projects in the mid-nineteenth century and tracks a Dickensian vocabulary in these discussions across multiple media and fora, including written commentaries, parliamentary debates, theatre and the visual arts. It argues that tropes, characters and extracts from his fiction were repeatedly remediated to articulate and negotiate contemporary anxieties about the urban environment and linked social problems. In so doing, it poses the questions: what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives? And can we trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit?

This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.

In Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art Cinema, James Harvey contends that Rancière’s writing allows us to broach art and politics on the very same terms: each involves the visible and the invisible, the heard and unheard, and the distribution of bodies in a perceivable social order. Between making, performing, viewing and sharing films, a space is constructed for tracing and realigning the margins of society, allowing us to consider the potential of cinema to create new political subjects. Drawing on case studies of films including Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates and John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, this books asks to what extent is politics shaping art cinema? And, in turn, could art cinema possibly affect the political structure of the world as we know it?

Journey to Poland: Documentary Landscapes of the Holocaust provides a new topographical methodology for the study of cinema and the Holocaust and addresses crucial issues of memory and history in relation to the Holocaust as it unfolded in the territories of the Second Polish Republic. Aiming to understand the ways past events inform present-day landscapes, and the way in which we engage with memory, witnessing and representation, the book creates a coherent cinematic map of this landscape through the study of previously neglected film and TV documentaries that focus on survivors and bystanders, as well as on members of the post-war generation. Applying a spatial and geographical approach to a debate previously organised around other frameworks of analysis, Journey to Poland uncovers vital new perspectives on the Holocaust. As it focuses on ideas of postmemory, sites of memory and multidirectional memory, Journey to Poland: Documentary Landscapes of the Holocaust thus investigates understudied archival footage and recent Polish and international documentaries made for TV and applies a spatial and geographical approach to a debate previously organised around other frameworks of analysis.

Katherine Mansfield’s ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry, and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their 'curious & thrilling' literary relationship – absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in ‘quicksands’ – and its profound impact on their creative imaginations. Critical essays include Katherine Mansfield Essay Prizewinner Karina Jakubowicz on Woolf’s Kew Gardens, Maud Ellmann on disgust, Maria DiBattista on these artists’ distinctive takes on ‘reality’, Sydney Janet Kaplan on the Conrad Aiken connection, and Christine Froula on Mansfield’s secrets. Creative artists include Vanessa Bell in painterly dialogue with her sister’s classic manifesto A Room of One’s Own, the celebrated novelist Ali Smith -- ‘Scotland’s Nobel-laureate-in-waiting’, says Irish playwright Sebastian Barry – whose ‘Getting Virginia Woolf’s Goat’ leads the creative section, ['and' deleted] Barbara Egel’s dramatic adaptation of Woolf’s story ‘Moments of Being: "Slater’s Pins Have No Points"’ and [deleted:original; add:] new poems by Jackie Jones and Maggie Rainey-Smith.

Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press of the late Victorian era, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and circulate their work. Such periodicals are known as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and their circulation among limited audiences, and during the late Victorian period they were often conceptualized as integrated design project or ‘Total Works of Art’ in order to visually and materially represent the ideals of their producers. Little magazines like the Pre-Raphaelite Germ, the Arts & Crafts Hobby Horse and the Decadent Yellow Book launched the careers of innovative authors and artists and provided a site for debate between minor contributors and visiting grandees from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde. This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen little magazines of the Victorian Fin de Siècle, situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative content items. In doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.

Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution examines responses to the Russian Revolution and the formation of the League of Nations in literature and journalism in the years following 1917. It examines early attempts to assess the Revolution, how the Bolsheviks intervened in the British public sphere, how visitors to Moscow responded to meeting Lenin and Trotsky, and the manner in which the League and Revolution occupied the work of such figures as T.S. Eliot, Leonard Woolf, Maynard Keynes, Clare Sheridan and H.G. Wells. This study reveals the extent and complexity of the debate about revolution and nationalities which was a dominant feature of public discourse. Drawing on the responses of journalists and literary authors, including some figures rarely considered in the context of literary modernism, such as Tomáš Masaryk and Henry Noel Brailsford, it gives new insights into the relationship between modernist literature and the geopolitical shifts which governed the period, and demonstrates how a new age of transnational politics began.

Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most important scientists of the nineteenth century. He transformed understandings of the earth and space by rethinking nature as the interconnection of global forces. His vibrant, lyrical prose captivated British readers. This book offers the first extensive analysis of the translation, publication and critical reception of his works in Britain. It argues that style was key to the success of these translations and shows how Humboldt’s British translators, now largely forgotten figures, were pivotal in moulding his prose and his public persona as they reconfigured his works for readers in Britain and beyond.

This book addresses two historical mysteries. The first is the content and character of the fourth century BCE Greek works on the Persian Achaemenid Empire treatises called the Persica. The second is the method of work of the second century CE biographer Plutarch of Chaeronea (CE 45-120) who used these works to compose his biographies, in particular the Life of the Persian king Artaxerxes. By dealing with both issues simultaneously, Almagor proposes a new way of approaching the two entangled problems, and offers a better understanding of both the portrayal of ancient Persia in the lost Persica works and the manner of their reception and adaptation nearly five hundred years later. Intended for both scholars and students of the Achaemenid Empire and Greek imperial literature, this book bridges the two worlds and two important branches of scholarship. The book builds a picture of the character and structure of the lost Persica works by Ctesias of Cnidus, Deinon of Colophon, Heracleides of Cyme. While focusing on the Artaxerxes (and certain other passages), it shows how Plutarch used the Persica.

This book analyses poor relief in the century or so after the Scottish Reformation of 1560. In doing so it challenges the assumption that Scottish poor relief was weak, informal and haphazard because it was run by the Protestant church rather than the state, as in England (all too often the yardstick against which Scotland is measured). Instead, the book explores the substantial welfare work carried out by Scottish parishes, and examines in detail how the system operated as well as those who benefitted from it. The rich but under-utilised parish records which are the focus of the study reveal not just the relief efforts themselves, but also provide a rare insight into the lives of poor Scots whom pre-modern historians often struggle to glimpse. The book will therefore appeal to a wide range of scholars of early modern Scotland, of poverty and its relief, and of the Reformation.

This book is the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist popular cinema. It analyses a selection of Hollywood films dating from the turn of the millennium, arguing that the character of the ‘melancholic white woman’ operates as a trope through which to explore the excesses of late capitalism and a crisis of faith in the American dream. Melancholia can function as a form of social capital for these characters yet betrays its proximity to a gendered history of emotion and psychopathology. This figure is alternately idealised or scapegoated depending on how well she navigates the perils of postfeminist ideology. Furthermore, the book considers how performances of melancholia and mental distress can confer benefits for Hollywood actresses and female auteurs on the labour market, which in turn has contributed to the maintenance of white hegemony within the mainstream US film industry. Case studies in the book include Black Swan (Darren Aronofksy 2010), Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014) and Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton 2010).

The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is. This book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.

This book seeks to explain how the Corporation of Glasgow, in its large-scale council house-building programme in the inter- and post-war years, came to reproduce a hierarchical Victorian class structure. The three tiers of housing scheme which it constructed – Ordinary, Intermediate, and Slum-Clearance – effectively signified First, Second and Third Class. This came about because the Corporation uncritically reproduced the offensive and patriarchal attitudes of the Victorian bourgeoisie towards the working-class. The book shows how this worked out on the ground in Glasgow, and describes the attitudes of both authoritarian housing officials, and council tenants. This is the first time the voice of Glasgow’s council tenants has been heard. The conclusion is that local council housing policy was driven by unapologetic considerations of social class.