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This book discusses how justice was administrated and applied in medieval Egypt. The model that evolved during the early middle ages involved four judicial institutions: the cadi, the court of complaints (mazalim), the police (shurta), responsible for criminal justice, and the Islamised market law (hisba), administrated by the market supervisor (the muhtasib). Literary and non-literary sources are used to highlight how these institutions worked in real-time situations such as the famine of 1024-1025, which posed tremendous challenges to both the market supervisor and the ruling establishment. The inner workings of the court of complaint during the Fatimid period (10^th-12^th century) are also extensively discussed. The discussion is extended to include the way the courts of non-Muslim communities were perceived and functioned during the Fatimid period. The discussion also provides insights into the scope of non-Muslim self-rule/judicial autonomy in medieval Islam.

A socio-political and cultural history of the Armenians in Cold War Lebanon, this book argues that Armenians around the world – in the face of the Genocide, and despite the absence of an independent nation-state after World War I – developed dynamic socio-political, cultural, ideological and ecclesiastical centres. And it focuses on one such centre, Beirut, in the postcolonial 1940s and 1950s. Tsolin Nalbantian explores Armenians’ discursive re-positioning within the newly independent Lebanese nation-state; the political-cultural impact (in Lebanon as well as Syria) of the 1946–8 repatriation initiative to Soviet Armenia; the 1956 Catholicos election; and the 1957 Lebanese elections and 1958 mini-civil war. What emerges is a post-Genocide Armenian history of – principally – power, renewal and presence, rather than one of loss and absence. Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon Their Own investigates Lebanese Armenians’ changing views of their place in the making of the Lebanese state and its wider Arab environment, and in relation to the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic. It challenges the dominant Armenian historiography, which treats Lebanese Armenians as a subsidiary of an Armenian global diaspora, and contributes to an understanding of the development of class and sectarian cleavages that led to the breakdown of civil society in Lebanon from 1975. In highlighting the role of societal actors in the US–Soviet Cold War in the Middle East, it also questions the tendency to read Middle East history through the lens of dominant (Arab) nationalisms.

This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern Bloc. As an aesthetic based on a productive interaction of media and highlighting cinema's relationship with the other arts, intermediality always implies a state of in-betweenness which is capable of registering tensions and ambivalences that go beyond the realm of media. The comparative analyses of films from Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia demonstrate that intermediality can be employed in this way as a form of introspection dealing with complex issues of art and society. Appearing in a variety of sensuous or intellectual modes, intermediality can become an effective poetic strategy to communicate how the cultures of the region are caught in-between East and West, past and present, emotional turmoil and more detached self-awareness. Through different theoretical approaches and thematic focuses, the book attempts to contribute to the understanding of intermedial phenomena in contemporary cinema as a whole by mapping meaningful areas of in-betweenness including the intermedial and interart relations in-between cinema, music, theatre, photography, painting, sculpture, literature, language and the new, digital technologies of the moving image.

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive and philosophical approaches, this book advances a new methodology for analysing how early modern plays dramatize inward erotic experience. Grounded in cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors—motion, space, and creativity—that shape erotic desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Although Lyly and Shakespeare wrote for different types of theatres and only partially-overlapping audiences, both dramatists created characters who speak erotic language at considerable length and in extraordinary depth. Their metaphors do more than merely narrate or express eros; they constitute characters’ erotic experiences. Each of the book’s three sections explores a fundamental conceptual metaphor, first its philosophical underpinnings and then its capacity for dramatizing erotic experience in Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s plays. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare provides a literary and linguistic analysis of metaphor that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, even of pleasure itself.

The American television commercial exhibits an aesthetic and historical dynamic linking it directly to cinematic and media cultures. Consuming Images: Film Art and the American TelevisionCommercial establishes the complex vitality of the television commercial both as a short film and as an art form. Through close and comparative readings, the book examines the influence of Hollywood film styles on the television commercial, and the resulting influence of the television commercial on Hollywood, exploring an intertwined aesthetic and technical relationship. Analysing key commercials over the decades that feature new technologies and film aesthetics that were subsequently adopted by feature filmmakers, the book establishes the television commercial as film art.

Contested Liberalisms corrects a long-standing critical narrative of the relationship between Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens. That narrative has occluded the importance of Martineau’s contribution to the development of the early Victorian press, obscured the degree to which her and Dickens’s public quarrel in the mid-1850s represented larger fissures within nineteenth-century liberalism, and has prevented us from appreciating how those fissures were embedded within a transatlantic conversation over the role of the press in forming a public sphere essential to the development of a liberal society. This book thus focuses upon the role played in the early Victorian press by two of its essential shaping figures, and this project offers a new reading of the formation of the early Victorian press and of the ways in which that press both contributed to and was shaped by a transatlantic community of letters broadly united in support for the advance of progressive values but crucially divided over core elements of the ideology of liberalism itself.

This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies covering poetry, short fiction, drama and the novel, it examines a range of key writers: Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie and John Galt. Improvement, it shows, was not a unified ideal in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland but rather a contested body of different ideas, some of which were mutually contradictory. The book untangles the complexity of this term that was applied variously to field drainage, elocution lessons, a taste for landscape scenery and the macrohistory of Western civilisation. As it explores, improvement provided a dominant theme for literary texts in this period, just as it saturated the wider culture. It was also of real consequence to questions about what literature is and what it can do: a medium of secular belonging, a vehicle of indefinite exchange, an educational tool or a theoretical guide to history. The book makes a significant contribution to debates around the relationship between Enlightenment and Romanticism, stressing a series of aesthetic innovations across the turn of the nineteenth century in a culture that was saturated by the dialectical workings of improvement.

Disordered Violence argues that neither mainstream nor critical Terrorism Studies scholarship goes far enough in interrogating the structures that determine how terrorism is understood and therefore countered. As an alternative, this book demonstrates that gender, racial, and heteronormative structures that determine hierarchies between states and non-states, forms of violence, and different people are behind how the West approaches terrorism. Drawing upon an intersectional and post-structural feminist critique, Disordered Violence interrogates the persistence of the ‘definition debate’ within Terrorism Studies, arguing that it will never be resolved until a better grasp of gender, race, and heteronormativity are achieved. The empirical chapters look at how these structures work in the profiles of different known ‘terrorists;’ makes a clear connection between the discourse of radicalisation and the racialisation of violence and rationality; and introduces the concept of misogynistic terrorism.

Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa examines for the first time the many different texts imagining the future after the end of apartheid. Focused on well-known and obscure literary texts from the 1880s to the 1970s, as well as the many manifestos and programmes setting out visions of the future, this book charts the dreams of freedom of five major traditions of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid resistance: the African National Congress (ANC), the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). The works of a number of South African literary figures are discussed, including Olive Schreiner, S. E. K. Mqhayi, Alan Paton, Karel Schoeman, Jordan Ngubane, Winnifred Holtby, Ethelreda Lewis, Dora Taylor, Livingstone Mqotsi, Peter Abrahams, Richard Rive, Lauretta Ngcobo and Bessie Head. Political thinkers analysed include Nelson Mandela, R. F. A. Hoernlé, Albert Luthuli, Clements Kadalie, A. W. G. Champion, Edward Roux, James La Guma, Alfred Nzula, I. B. Tabata, Ben Kies, Anton Lembede, A. P. Mda and Robert Sobukwe. The theoretical dimensions of the study are orientated in relation to major Marxist critics of utopianism like Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky and Ernst Bloch, as well as to thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Wallerstein, James C. Scott and Jay Winter. More than an exercise in historical excavation, Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa raises challenging questions for the post-apartheid present.

This book provides the first ever transnational and longue-durée intellectual history of a highly influential but largely understudied modern phrase: esprit de corps. A strong attachment and dedication among the members of a community of practice or a body politic, esprit de corps can be perceived as beneficial (collective élan) or detrimental (groupthink). As a polemical argumentative signifier, esprit de corps has played a significant role in the cultural and political history of the last 300 years: the idea was influential and debated during the European secularisation of education in the eighteenth-century, during the French Revolution, during the United States process of Independence, and the French Empire. It was praised by British colonialists, French sociologists, and during the World Wars. It was instrumental during the rise of administrative nation-states and the triumph of corporate capitalism. ‘Esprit de corps’ is today a keyword in nationalist and managerial discourses. Born in eighteenth-century France in military as well as political discourse, the phrase and its implications were over the centuries an important matter of debate for major thinkers and politicians: d’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, Lord Chesterfield, Bentham, the Founding Fathers, Sieyès, Mirabeau, British MPs, Napoleon, Hegel, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Waldeck-Rousseau, de Gaulle, Orwell, Bourdieu, Deleuze & Guattari, etc. For some of them, esprit de corps is the very engine of History. In the end, this book a cautionary analysis of past and current ideologies of ultra-unified human ensembles, a recurrent historical and theoretical fabulation the author calls ensemblance.

Different understandings of European integration, its background and present problems are represented in this book, but they share an emphasis on historical processes, geopolitical dynamics and regional diversity. The introduction surveys approaches to the question of European continuities and discontinuities, before going on to an overview of chapters. The following three contributions deal with long-term perspectives, including the question of Europe as a civilisational entity, the civilisational crisis of the twentieth century, marked by wars and totalitarian regimes, and a comparison of the European Union with the Habsburg Empire, with particular emphasis on similar crisis symptoms. The next three chapters discuss various aspects and contexts of the present crisis. Reflections on the Brexit controversy throw light on a longer history of intra-Union rivalry, enduring disputes and changing external conditions. An analysis of efforts to strengthen the EU’s legal and constitutional framework, and of resistances to them, highlights the unfinished agenda of integration. A closer look at the much-disputed Islamic presence in Europe suggests that an interdependent radicalization of Islamism and the European extreme right is a major factor in current political developments. Three concluding chapters adopt specific regional perspectives. Central and Eastern European countries, especially Poland, are following a path that leads to conflicts with dominant orientations of the EU, but this also raises questions about Europe’s future. The record of Scandinavian policies in relation to Europe exemplifies more general problems faced by peripheral regions. Finally, growing dissonances and divergences within the EU may strengthen the case for Eurasian perspectives.

Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology argues that Guattari’s ecosophy, which it regards as a ‘schizoanalytic ecology’ or ‘schizoecology’ for short, is the most consistent conceptual spine of Guattari’s oeuvre. Engaging with the whole spectrum and range of Guattari’s, as well as Guattari and Deleuze’s works, it maintains that underneath Guattari’s staccato style, his hectic speeds and his conceptual acrobatics, lie a number of insistent questions and demands. How to make life on this planet better, more liveable, more in tune with and adequate to the planet’s functioning? How to do this without false romanticism or nostalgia? At the conceptual centre of the book lies the first comprehensive and in-depth analysis and explication of the diagrammatic meta-model that Guattari develops in his book Schizoanalytic Cartographies, his magnum opus and conceptual legacy. It is here that Guattari develops, in an extremely formalized manner, the schizoecological complementarity of what he calls ‘the given’ (the world) and of ‘the giving’ (the world’s creatures). After considering the implications of schizoecology for the fields of literature, the visual arts, architecture, and research, this book, which is the companion volume to Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy, culminates in readings of Guattari’s explicitly ecological texts The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis.

Providing a comprehensive reading of Deleuzian philosophy, Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy argues that this philosophy’s most consistent conceptual spine and figure of thought is its inherent luminism. When Deleuze notes in Cinema 1 that ‘the plane of immanence is entirely made up of light’, he ties this philosophical luminism directly to the notion of the complementarity of the photon in its aspects of both particle and wave. Engaging, in chronological order, the whole body and range of Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, the book traces the ‘line of light’ that runs through Deleuze’s work, and it considers the implications of Deleuze’s luminism for the fields of literary studies, historical studies, the visual arts and cinema studies. It contours Deleuze’s luminism both against recent studies that promote a ‘dark Deleuze’ and against the prevalent view that Deleuzian philosophy is a philosophy of difference. Instead, it argues, it is a philosophy of the complementarity of difference and diversity, considered as two reciprocally determining fields that are, in Deleuze’s view, formally distinct but ontologically one. The book, which is the companion volume toFélix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology, argues that the ‘real projective plane’ is the ‘surface of thought’ of Deleuze’s philosophical luminism.

Manuel II Palaiologos was not only a Byzantine emperor but also a remarkably prolific rhetorician and theologian. His oeuvre included letters, treatises, dialogues, short poems and orations. This book deals with several of his texts shaped by a didactic intention to educate the emperor’s son and successor, John VIII Palaiologos. It is argued that the emperor constructed a rhetorical persona which he used in an attempt to compete with other contemporary power-brokers. While Manuel Palaiologos adhered to many rhetorical conventions of his day, he also reasserted the civic role of rhetoric. With a special focus on the first two decades of Manuel II Palaiologos’ rule, 1391–1417, the volume offers a new understanding of the imperial ethos in Byzantium by combining rhetorical analysis with investigation of social and political phenomena. The volume examines the changes in the Byzantine imperial idea by the end of the fourteenth century with a particular focus on the instrumentalization of the intellectual dimension of the imperial rule. It also seeks to integrate late Byzantine imperial visions into the bigger picture of Byzantine imperial ideology and to introduce analytical concepts from rhetorical, literary, and discursive theories.

When a new name is necessary for a concept, word formation and borrowing are possible ways to produce one. As such, they are in competition for the creation of neologisms. However, borrowings can also interact with existing word formation rules. The reanalysis of a borrowing can result in its attribution to an existing word formation rule. The reanalysis of a number of formally similar borrowings can even result in a new word formation rule. Word formation and borrowing both have an inherently diachronic component to them. Historically, Latin was an important source language for borrowing. The effects are found in neoclassical word formation and in many internationalisms. Nowadays, anglicisms have become the most frequent kind of borrowings. Word formation rules may be activated to counter the prevalence of borrowing by creating alternative designations, but they may also be used to integrate borrowings into the lexical and grammatical system of the borrowing language. After an introduction with some theoretical background, twelve case studies present particular situations illustrating different types of interaction of word formation and borrowing in a range of European languages. The concluding chapter describes some general trends that emerge from these case studies.

Since the early 1990s, Israel has greatly expanded a system checkpoints, walls and other barriers in the West Bank and Gaza that restrict Palestinian mobility. As a result, such border spaces have become ubiquitous elements of everyday life, with profound political, socio-cultural, and economic effects.  Israel/Palestine examines how authors and filmmakers in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel have grappled with the spread and impact of these borders in the period since the Oslo Accords of 1994. Focusing on novels by Raba’i al-Madhoun, Ghassan Kanafani, Sami Michael and Sayed Kashua, and films by Elia Suleiman, Simon Bitton, Emad Burnat, and Guy Davidi, Israel/Palestine traces how political engagement in literature and film has shifted away from previously common paradigms of resistance and coexistence. Instead, it has become reorganised around these now ubiquitous physical barriers. Using strategies of narrative fragmentation, multivocality, metafiction, fantasy, and silence to depict the effects of these borders, authors and filmmakers interrogate the notion that such spaces are impenetrable and unbreakable by revealing their deceptive and illusive qualities. In doing so, they also imagine distinct forms of protest, and redefine the relationship between cultural production and political engagement.

Uncovering a history buried by competing nationalist narratives (Jewish, Arab and Palestinian) this book looks at how the late Ottoman era set the stage for the on-going Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has lasted for over a century. It changes how we understand the conflict by exploring the period before World War One: a time when a unique sense of Palestinian identity emerged, and many Zionists imagined a Jewish national home within an Ottoman framework. Further it argues that in the late Ottoman era, Jews and Palestinians were already locked in conflict. The new freedoms introduced by the Young Turk Constitutional Revolution exacerbated divisions, rather than serving as a unifying factor. Offering an integrative approach, this book considers both communities, together and separately, in order to provide a more sophisticated narrative of how the conflict unfolded in its first years. This book is based on documents in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, and French, and moves beyond Palestine to see how the debate over Zionism also played out in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, where both Jews and Palestinians set out to “claim their homeland.

Although we have more literary manuscripts from the Romantic period than for any previous period, these manuscripts have been consulted chiefly for the textual evidence they provide. This book begins the work of unearthing the alternative histories manuscripts tell us about British Romantic literary culture: describing the practices by which they were written, shared, altered and preserved; exploring the functions they served as instruments of expression and sociability; and explicating the migration of texts between the copying technologies of script and print. Deploying a range of methodologies, including quantitative approaches, it considers both literary manuscripts of texts that went unprinted during the lifetimes of their creators as well as those that were printed, presenting a capacious account of how handwritten literary documents were shared, copied, read, and valued. It describes the material processes that brought these manuscripts to audiences small and large, and preserved them for future generations. This book situates manuscript practices within an expanding print marketplace, arguing that the realms of script and print interacted to nurture and transform the period’s literary culture. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the values ascribed to literary manuscripts and the practices involved in their creation and use, this study illuminates the complex entanglements between various media. It concludes with an examination of the ongoing transformations of Romantic literary manuscripts, by textual scholars and digital humanists.

This vibrant collection of essays reveals the intimate politics of how people with a wide range of relationships to war identify with, and against, the military and its gendered and racialised norms. It synthesises three recent turns in the study of international politics: aesthetics, embodiment and the everyday, into a new conceptual framework. With case studies covering 20th- and 21st-century conflicts on four different continents, from the Middle East and post-socialist Europe to the USA, Britain, Australia and Cuba, and diverse methodological examples including autoethnography, visual analysis, fashion history, and digital media research, this volume helps us to understand how militarism permeates society and how far the practices of militarism can be re-appropriated or even turned against military and state power.

Outlawry and espionage would seem to be quite different phenomena, rarely discussed together. This book argues that they have something in common - that both involve exclusion from law. Challenging previous readings that view outlawry as a now-superseded historical phenomenon, and outlaws as figures of popular resistance, this book argues that legal exclusion is a longstanding and enduring means of supporting state power. Through close analysis of the literatures of outlawry and espionage, this book reads legal exclusion as a key theme in writing about outlaws and spies from the Middle Ages to the present day, arguing that literature plays an important role in representing and critiquing exclusion from law. The discussion draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Eric Hobsbawm, and engages with a range of primary legal texts from the Middle Ages to the present day. Literary works discussed range from the medieval Robin Hood ballads, Shakespeare’s history plays, and versions of the Ned Kelly story, to contemporary writing by John le Carré, Don DeLillo, Ciaran Carson and William Gibson.