Examines widespread contemporary interest in the Cato Street Conspiracy in Europe and North America, with particular emphasis on the production of a visual print by the Parisian engraver Pierre Langlume

At the outset of his response to Ayelet Shachar, Jakob Huber observes that political theorists usually ask two kinds of questions when it comes to issues of refugees and asylum: who should be granted refugee status and how the burdens of refugee protection should be distributed among states. Shachar’s essay, by contrast, presents a third puzzle: does it matter from where refugees seek protection. Noting that Shachar herself is drawn to a negative conclusion, Huber makes the contrary case, building on Kant’s conception of cosmopolitan right (Weltbürgerrecht) in order to defend a right of safe passage. He begins by arguing that our answer to the shifting-border phenomenon is contingent on a deeper question concerning the relation between humanitarian claim-making and territorial presence. He then turns to a related interpretive puzzle. Against the widespread “natural law” reading, he puts forward an interpretation that characterizes cosmopolitan mobility as a form of political agency. This allows him to defend a right of safe passage as part and expressive of a broader shift aimed at acknowledging the choice and the voice of refugees. Huber concludes by suggesting that conceiving of mobility as a form of agency invites us to reframe migration as a whole and see it less as a problem than as a regular part of the human condition.

Chapter 1 is an overview of written lives of poets during the early modern period and the shapes they take (prefatory lives, compilations of lives etc.). It proposes that the dominance of the idea of vita activa (public service) in Renaissance humanism in existing models of lives posed problems for writing lives of poets as poets. The early modern written lives of Chaucer and Sir Thomas More are used to illustrate this problem. Both were recognised as important English poets during the sixteenth century, yet the biographies of both are almost exclusively concerned with their public lives. The chapter also contrasts two lives that illustrate the developments traced by this book: Thomas Speght’s ‘Life of Chaucer’ (1598) and Gerard Langbaine’s ‘Life of Cowley’ (1691). The former is a carefully structured text that unites typical features of the exemplary life and the prefatory life and demonstrates the dominance of the humanist idea of a vita activa within early modern life narratives. The latter considers Cowley primarily through his works, indirectly revealing the impact of Izaak Walton’s Lives (discussed in Chapter 4).

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the fourth part of this book. The book explores how filmic autobiography brings aural and visual elements to the fore in its construction of selfhood on the screen. It explores the way that Lucrecia Martel's La ciénaga represents family and social disintegration in the context of the decadent world of traditional rural Argentine society through the use of a subjective realistic cinematic style. Subjectivity has been a crucial concern for cultural theory in general and, more relevant in the context of this book, feminist theory for the past decades. Although some theorists are exploring how analogy may be integral to subjectivity, it is often thought that the constitution of subjectivity is based on lack and castration and that it is always rooted in sexual difference.

According to Raymond Williams, the most powerful physical image created in the period of major naturalistic drama is the living room as a trap. Yield to the Night was a watershed film for J. Lee Thompson. It marked a moment of revelation which would profoundly influence his career trajectory. The trauma of leaving his family and the excitement of his new relationship did indeed seem to intensify Lee Thompson's desire for independence and experiment in his professional life. The nervous energy released is evident in Woman in a Dressing Gown's restless camerawork, insistent directorial style and, most of all, in the high-octane performance which he encouraged from Dressing Gown's star Yvonne Mitchell. However, Melanie Williams pointed out that, in the way it echoes the claustrophobic perspectives of Yield to the Night, Dressing Gown's mise-en-scène implies the idea of housewife as domestic prisoner.

Jack Clayton's film of Room at the Top has been widely credited with launching the 'new wave' in British film, bringing realism, the working class and sex to the national cinema. Room at the Top was only part of a tide of change in art and society that was pushing so hard against the British Establishment that something eventually had to give. In film terms, it might be said that Clayton's Room at the Top had the same kind of impact at the end of the 1950s as David Lean's Great Expectations in 1946, both debating the promise of class mobility and social change. The X certificate was an issue partly because at the time Room at the Top was made the Rank Organisation had a policy of not screening X-certificate films, associated in some eyes with sleaziness and horror.

This chapter re-examines Marcel Carné's work, and focuses on Carné's postwar work, 'Carné sans Prévert', highlights the centrality of Prévert's absence to understanding the films. It contributes to the debate about whether Carné's work without Prévert was significantly different from his work with him. The chapter emphases on Carné's continuing popularity at the time, which is surprisingly downplayed by most writers. It examines Carné's relationship with the context of postwar France, a period that witnessed huge social and political changes. The chapter explores how masculinity reasserted its power following the nation's 'emasculation' during the war, resulting in an often misogynistic vision of femininity during 1945 and 1955. Examining the popularity of his work is thus central to understanding his significance in postwar French cinema and in particular the hugely popular, but critically despised, tradition of quality.

This chapter examines the dialogue between painting, drawing and cinema in the context of Víctor Erice's El sol del membrillo/The Quince Tree Sun. The films follows the Spanish painter Antonio López as he paints and then draws the quince tree growing in the garden of his Madrid studio during the autumn of 1990. According to López, the film is not a documentary. It was more like a feature film, he suggested, a film that follows an artist as he paints and draws a quince tree and ends with the retelling of a dream. López's invasion of the tree's space and Erice's invasion of López's space reveal a central tension and paradox at the heart of all forms of art that set out to observe and capture reality. The chapter considers the painting and the drawing, and identifies their specific aims and also their relationship with the art of cinema.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is devoted not only to some relevant biographical aspects of Coline Serreau's personal and artistic life, but also to the social, historical and political context of her debut. It deals with the 1970s' flavour of Serreau's work and more especially with the importance of politics. Taking intertextuality in its broadest sense, it assesses the strong literary influence on the tone, genre and content of Serreau's films and dramas. The book is concerned with the cinematographic genres Serreau uses. It provides a description and an analysis of Serreau's comedies, within the wider perspective of French comedies. The book also deals with the element of 'family' or community which is recurrent in Serreau's films and plays.

This chapter discusses the influence of the naturalist tradition on early French cinema, covering the pictorialist naturalist school of the 1920s, the cycles of Zola adaptations that appeared between 1902 and 1938, and the ‘social-realist’ cinema of Renoir. The categorical map of the significant realist French film production of the 1930–8 period is meant to be neither exhaustive nor definitive. The chapter emphasizes that La Bête humaine focuses on a disturbing and morally corrupt social order, which conforms closely to one of the most important features of the critical realist/naturalist tradition in its employment of an indeterminate aesthetic style. It concludes by accounting for Renoir's La Bête humaine in terms of the model of critical realism.

The Introduction discusses the rationale for a book about secular Muslim intellectuals in contemporary France. In particular, the Introduction will demonstrate that most scholarship on Islam in contemporary France has focused on debates around the Islamic headscarf or questions relating to Islamic fundamentalism, with little attention paid to those French Muslims working within the paradigms of islamité and laïcité. The Introduction also presents the interdisciplinary framing of the book, which will draw on current theoretical debates in Francophone postcolonial studies, the sociology and anthropology of Islam and secularisation, and philosophical, critical religious studies and critical theoretical approaches to themes such as alterity, belief, cultural pluralism, recognition and subjectivity. Furthermore, this chapter will discuss the methodology employed in this study, namely close textual and contextual analysis of the intellectuals’ published works and public interventions.

The separation of Godard's early career into two distinct categories of film is an artificial and a necessarily unsatisfactory gesture. The domestic scenes between couples recur in both of the films À bout de souffle and Le Mépris. The films discussed in this chapter are characterised by an interest in political and social issues that would become more marked in Godard's cinema of the late 1960s: the Algerian war and prostitution. Le Petit Soldat, made after À bout de souffle but banned from release until 1963, could be looked upon as an existential drama. There is a general impression of a poor fit between the reality Bruno inhabits and reality as it exists in his head. Vivre sa vie (1962), like Le Petit Soldat, appears, in places, to appropriate a kind of existentialist narrative form, only to move beyond it into something much stranger and more troubling.

Focused on the historical relations between English and the Nordic languages and on the relevance of Nordic literature to British experience, memories produced by language and literature worked towards this same end of fashioning a medieval memory. Lacking the mythology of the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, as well as the sagas’ detailed descriptions of daily life in the Middle Ages, English readers could find in Norse literature reasons to believe there had been comparable material in English literary history and that what Norse literature described equally might have been said about the English experience. Similarities between Old English and Old Norse likewise could be understood to affirm the essential sameness of those who spoke the languages. With the theoretical underpinning of Herder’s and von Humboldt’s reflections on social identity, the putatively shared language and literature identified in this way became much more than a scholarly diversion. Like tropes of travel, ethnicity, and personal identity, replicated references to sagas, Eddas, speakers, poets, verse forms, translation, unintelligibility, dialects, and languages (medieval and modern) fashioned a historical identity worth remembering for what it revealed about the modern world and for how it illustrated contemporary divergences from its historical origins.