24318 results in Edinburgh University Press
Introduction: Modernist Technology Studies
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 1-20
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In the spring of 2020, almost a century after his final novel was published, E. M. Forster was suddenly current. On social media, on the BBC website and in web publications like The Nautilus, commentators hemmed in by the global Covid-19 pandemic found in Forster an unlikely prophet of their newly isolated and richly mediated existence (Perkowitz 2020; Gompertz 2020). Confined to their homes, wrapped in a machinic embrace, lulled by the hum of electronics and gorging on information whose circulation they were themselves sustaining, readers across the globe might be forgiven for identifying with the protagonists, not of Forster’s Edwardian novels of class and interpersonal relations, but of his 1909 novella ‘The Machine Stops’. One of the earliest descriptions of a total media system as the twentieth century would come to know it, ‘The Machine Stops’ imagines humankind ensconced in honeycomb-like cells underground, with music, books and information available at the touch of a button. Travel, though once common, has become an anxious experience, as residents of an earth altered by unspecified ecological devastation resist the urge to journey by airship merely to see the interior of another human residence. Presiding above it all – until its titular arrest – is the Machine, a substitute God in the form of an all-surrounding technological envelope whose continued smooth functioning has become its own justification. As the character Vashti tells her son, Kuno, ‘You mustn’t say anything against the Machine’ (Forster 1928: 4).
Forster, attentive as he was to the nuances of embodied human connection, saw in his own time the first whispers of a technologised future in which humans risked a terrible corporeal attenuation: ‘Men seldom moved their bodies,’ the narrator tells us; ‘all unrest was concentrated in the soul’ (10). Kuno, who emerges as the doomed hero of the tale, struggles against the perceptual effects of the technological cocoon. Kuno’s attempts to convince his mother of the Machine’s dehumanising effects ground Forster’s tale in the language of its fin-de-siècle media ecosystem: ‘We say “space is annihilated,” but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves’ (17). Better, in Kuno’s mind, to return to an unmediated, direct bodily experience of the world in which ‘Man is the measure’ (18).
Metaphor in Illness Writing
- Fight and Battle Reused
- Anita Wohlmann
-
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022
-
- Book
- Export citation
-
Metaphor in Illness Writing argues that even when a metaphor appears problematic and limiting, it need not be dropped or dismissed. Metaphors are not inherently harmful or beneficial; instead, they can be used in unexpected and creative ways. This book analyses the illness writing of contemporary North American writers who reimagine and reappropriate the supposedly harmful metaphor 'illness is a fight' and shows how Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Anatole Broyard, David Foster Wallace and other writers turn the fight metaphor into a space of agency, resistance, self-knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. It joins a conversation in Medical Humanities about alternatives to the predominance of narrative and responds to the call for more metaphor literacy and metaphor competence.
15 - Interest on Expenses
- Edited by Iain W. Nicol, Thorntons, James S. Flett
-
- Book:
- Expenses
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 100-101
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Another significant change brought about by Act of Sederunt (Rules of the Court of Session, Sheriff Appeal Court Rules and Ordinary Cause Rules Amendment) (Taxation of Judicial Expenses) 2019 was the introduction of rules in the Court of Session and Sheriff Court providing for interest on expenses. Until the introduction of these rules, there was no specific provision to enable the courts to award interest on expenses. Although the courts always had a discretion to deal with expenses as they saw fit, it was not the norm for interest to be awarded on judicial expenses.
The Sheriff Court rule provides:
(1) Paragraph (2) applies where the sheriff grants decree for payment of—
(a) expenses as taxed; and
(b) interest thereon.
(2) Without prejudice to the sheriff’s other powers in relation to interest, the decree pronounced may require the party decerned against to pay interest on the taxed expenses, or any part thereof, from a date no earlier than 28 days after the date on which the account of expenses was lodged.
The Court of Session rule provides:
(1) At any time before extract of a decree for payment of expenses as taxed by the Auditor the court may, on the application of the party to whom expenses are payable, grant decree against the party decerned against for payment of interest on the taxed expenses, or any part thereof, from a date no earlier than 28 days after the date on which the account of expenses was lodged.
(2) Paragraph (1) is without prejudice to the court’s other powers in relation to expenses.
The Sheriff Court rule does not make specific reference to the award of interest following on from an application by the entitled party but it is implicit that is the case. The timing of the award of interest in the sheriff court rule must be at the time the decree for expenses is made by the court. The position in the Court of Session is different as the application for interest can be made by the entitled party at any time prior to the decree for payment of expenses as taxed being extracted.
13 - The Limits of Representational Thought
- Jeffrey A. Bell, Southeastern Louisiana University
-
- Book:
- An Inquiry into Analytic-Continental Metaphysics
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 124-145
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
1. Predicates as Determinates or Determinables?
Let us return to the question that guided (or perhaps haunted) much of the argument of the previous two sections – namely, the question of determining whether or not one is correctly applying a predicate to an object, or, stated differently, whether the property named by the predicate is indeed being correctly named by the predicate. We sometimes get it clearly wrong. When my daughters were young, younger than two, one of their first words was cat, or ‘kittycat’ as they would say it. We also had raccoons that would frequent our back patio, looking for the cat food we would often have outside, and the first time they saw a raccoon on our back patio the girls called it a ‘kittycat’. We can understand the reason they did so. Having never seen a raccoon before, they immediately saw it in light of animals who most closely resemble a raccoon, and for each of my daughters that animal was a cat. We corrected their mistake, telling them this was a raccoon and not a cat, and it didn't take long before they could see the differences between raccoons and cats and correctly apply the predicates ‘… is a cat’, ‘… is a raccoon’ to the animals before them. For D.M. Armstrong and David Lewis, similarly, a key to applying predicates correctly is that they account for a resemblance between entities. A fundamental role that immanent universals play, Lewis argued, is that they can account for the resemblance of entities. To explain why certain entities resemble one another, we can, as Armstrong does, turn to a shared universal, as that which provides the explanation. Lewis, by contrast, accepted resemblance as a primitive, and on this basis argued instead that we do not need to postulate the existence of a universal as some shared entity but can simply refer to classes of individuals that resemble one another. For Lewis, however, some classes are more natural than others, constituting what he called natural properties, and these natural properties entail a resemblance, again taken as a primitive, among entities that carve nature at its joints.
6 - Midterm Elections, the Republican Party, and the Challenge to New Deal Liberalism, 1946–1958
-
- By Robert Mason
- Edited by Patrick Andelic, Mark McLay, University of Glasgow, Robert Mason
-
- Book:
- Midterms and Mandates
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 143-167
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Republicans sought to deploy the midterm campaigns from 1946 to 1958 as a means of achieving a larger revitalisation of their party’s fortunes. The political context that they encountered was one of disadvantage, rooted in the economic crisis that took hold under Herbert Hoover and then in the agenda of government activism that Franklin D. Roosevelt pursued to tackle that crisis. As Iwan Morgan shows in Chapter 4, New Deal liberalism relegated Republicans to minority status in the two-party system, to habitual defeat at the polls, and to a focus on opposition in response to Democratic initiatives – an electoral descent symbolised by the historically unusual decline suffered by their party in the midterms of 1934. Taking place in the shadow of two presidential defeats for their party (those of Thomas E. Dewey in both 1944 and 1948) and then two victories (those of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956), these midterm contests featured efforts by Republicans collectively to mobilise a mandate against New Deal liberalism. Hostility to organised labour was often a key thread of this odyssey. Republicans, seeing unions as powerful in building support at the polls for their Democratic rivals, pursued projects of organisational renewal that were designed to achieve a similar level of capacity in practical politics. A challenge to the labour reforms of the New Deal was, furthermore, an important target of their policy agenda.
Midterm election results twice during this period were suggestive of a watershed in public opinion and in public policy. In 1946, Republicans gained control on Capitol Hill for the first time since the arrival of the Great Depression, adding – to their existing totals – fifty-five seats in the House of Representatives (with a 53.5 per cent share of votes cast) and twelve seats in the Senate. Such a level of change in the parties’ fortunes characterises few midterm contests in American electoral history. But twelve years later, the elections of 1958 also involved upheaval, this time to the Republicans’ detriment. Already in secure control of both Houses, Democrats made net gains of forty-nine House seats (with a 55.5 per cent share of votes cast) and twelve Senate seats, gains that advanced their party to large majorities on Capitol Hill.
17 - Memoir
-
- By Armin Langer
- Edited by Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, Emelia Quinn, Universiteit van Amsterdam
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 250-258
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
According to 2019 Gallup data, people of color in the United States are three times as likely to adopt plant-based diets than white Americans. Nine per cent of Americans of color professed not to eat meat, while only three per cent of white Americans claimed the same. Besides health, environmental awareness was the key motivator for eschewing meat (Hrynowski). Animal agriculture is a leading contributor to the ongoing climate crisis, impacting communities of color more than white ones. Black and Indigenous communities and other communities of color experience greater negative consequences from pollution and environmental degradation, and industrialized animal farms and runoff are often in working-class, non-white neighborhoods (Harper 51). As public opinion surveys prove, Americans of color are more concerned about environmental issues than white Americans (Ballew et al.; Leiserowitz and Akerlof; Mohai; Pearson et al.).
Even though people of color in the US are more likely than white people to choose a meatless diet, veganism is generally associated with whiteness. This association is true not only for the wider public but also for communities of color themselves (Greenebaum; Wallach 155). Jessica Greenebaum suggests that this association is due to the over-representation of white people in vegan marketing and some prominent vegan groups’ seeming prioritization of animal rights over human rights (1). Animal rights and vegan non-profits like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have repeatedly antagonized marginalized communities (Pellow 261; Wrenn 197). PETA campaigns have compared the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust and enslaved Black Americans to that of animals without also acknowledging the lived suffering of humans during these historical instances. Human rights organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) have criticized this comparison, arguing that defaming Jews and Black people as animals has a long history in “Western” societies (Balleck 14; Davis 479). While being called an “animal” is not necessarily offensive in itself, it can be offensive in the context of racism and antisemitism (Haslam, Loughnan, and Sun). White Americans and Europeans have likened members of marginalized outgroups like Black and Indigenous people or Jews to “inferior” animals. Such metaphors have been used to justify violence against them (Jahoda; Livingstone Smith).
Frontmatter
- Janet Afary, University of California, Santa Barbara, Kamran Afary, California State University, Los Angeles
-
- Book:
- Molla Nasreddin
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 06 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp i-iv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Chapter 8 - A Conversation with Punch, Simplicissimus and the World of Art
- Janet Afary, University of California, Santa Barbara, Kamran Afary, California State University, Los Angeles
-
- Book:
- Molla Nasreddin
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 06 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 324-360
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In addition to Francisco Goya and Honoré Daumier, the artists of Mollå Nasreddin drew upon new forms of caricature seen in contemporary periodicals such as the British Punch, or The London Charivari (1841–1992), the German Simplicissimus (1896–1944) and the Russian revolutionary periodicals of the turn of the twentieth century, such as Leshii (Wood Goblin), Adskaia Pochta (Hellish Post), Plamia (Flame), Signaly (Signal) and Zritel (Spectator). Many of these publications were themselves influenced by Goya and Daumier as well as by the Critical Realist style of art, which emerged in the late nineteenth century.
Punch: a mouthpiece for British colonialism
The weekly Punch, or The London Charivari, which was modelled after its French counterpart, coined the term ‘cartoon’, meaning ‘humour or satire on a political subject’, for its full-page woodcut illustrations. The journal, which began under the editorship of Mark Lemon, was a big success, selling 6,000 copies of its first issue in 1841 (Price 1957: 43; Williams 1955). Punch became the most influential periodical of its kind in Britain, eventually reaching a circulation of 150,000, dominating Britain’s political satire for 150 years. The illustrated periodical, which was read in Europe, the United States and elsewhere, owed its existence to an extensive collaboration among its writers, illustrators, poets and printers, as well as its financial managers. In its first forty years alone, there were 150 illustrators contributing to the weekly magazine.
Punch began as a liberal publication and was initially critical of the Church of England and the monarchy. The magazine’s left-of-centre politics meant it upheld the concerns of the impoverished and of the working classes and supported the working-class Chartist movement of 1836–48 and its demands for parliamentary reform and universal male suffrage. However, it did not back republicanism. As the magazine’s circulation increased, so did its appeal to the upper classes of society. Fashion, the arts, social manners of the elite and family quarrels soon occupied many pages of Punch. On political issues, the weekly moved away from the Continent’s tradition of left-wing political satire and gradually came to represent the elite ‘British view on events’. Some even suspected the journal of controlling the ‘laws of England’ (Price 1957: 31–48).
Appendix 2 - Land and Water Use
- Shivan Mahendrarajah, University of St Andrews, Scotland
-
- Book:
- A History of Herat
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 323-327
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Direct and circumstantial evidence exists on the uses of agricultural land; sources of irrigation (above or below ground); cultivation without irrigation (dayma, daymī; rain-fed: hence “dry farming”); and agricultural products of the Herat Quarter in the post-Mongol age. Related socio-economic data (for instance, on mining or wood crafts) can be extracted from the sources. Table A2.1 is a composite of information from Mustawfī and Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū, and includes insightful commentaries by Dorothea Krawulsky (editor of Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū’s Geography). Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrūprovides only select data for the ten bulūks of Herat and does not specify land use. Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū’s data are not evidence of Kartid era land use; just suggestive.
Rashīd al-Dīn provides generic information on mulberries, cotton, and saffron, two of the three cash crops known to have been cultivated in the Herat Quarter in the Kartid period (see table below). Wheat (gandum) and barley (jū), says Rashīd al-Dīn, were farmed wherever possible (that is, subject to soil quality and availability of water). Millet (gāwars) was cultivated, along with zurrat (sorghum durra). Many species of rice were cultivated in sundry regions of Persia; the finest rice came from the Caspian Sea littoral. This information is not specific to the Herat Quarter, but the cultivation of cereals, cotton, and mulberries in the Quarter is confirmed by Mustawfī and/or Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū.
Rashīd al-Dīn gives scientific guidance on the cultivation of an assortment of fruits (e.g., apple, apricot, citrus, fig, grape, melon, peach, pear, pomegranate, quince); legumes (beans, chickpeas); vegetables (e.g., beet, cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, eggplant, lettuce); and herbs (e.g., coriander, garlic, leek, onion). It is not possible to prove that these crops were cultivated in Kartid times; however, a walk through one of Herat’s thriving bazaars will reveal the abundance of these fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Doubtless, many, possibly most, were also cultivated in the Kartid era.
Conclusion
- Alexandra Lawrie, University of Edinburgh
-
- Book:
- Writing the Past in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 06 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 185-187
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
This study began by reflecting on the incidence of protests and demonstrations over the past two decades, with several of the chapters examining movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests alongside historical examples of political activism including the civil rights movement, the New Left and ACT UP. Generally speaking, these protests (past and present) have been in opposition to government policies that have promoted economic and social inequality, failed to protect particular groups of people, or deprived citizens of their rights. But perhaps the most notorious protest in recent times was governed by an altogether different set of objectives. On 6 January 2021 a mob of angry Trump supporters, persuaded by repeated (and unfounded) claims that the 2020 election had been ‘stolen’, marched to the United States Capitol in a bid to stop Congress from formally certifying Biden’s victory. This anti-democratic protest turned violent during clashes with police on the steps of the Capitol and several hundred of the rioters then broke into the building, where they hunted down lawmakers, smashed up offices, occupied the Senate chamber and looted and destroyed artworks, statues and other public property. Their attempt to break into the House of Representatives chamber led to an armed standoff with police while members of Congress were escorted to safety, and in total more than a hundred police officers were injured during the riot, and five people died. Trump was impeached a week later for incitement of insurrection: for months he had refused to accept the election result, alleging widespread electoral fraud and filing dozens of lawsuits to challenge the result, even petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn the results in five states won by Biden. On the day of the riot Trump held a rally outside the White House where he had urged his supporters to ‘stop the steal’, telling them that ‘We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore’.
The chaotic scenes at the Capitol were televised live on all the major networks, with journalists and political commentators responding to the footage in real time.
18 - Race: Fordism, Factories and the Mechanical Reproduction of Racial Identity
-
- By Joshua Lam
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 286-299
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, understandings of the human body underwent a radical revision. With the advent of new medical technologies that could perceive corporeal interiors, such as the ophthalmoscope (1847) and the X-ray (1895), bodies became subject to new regimes of perception. Scientists began to view the body in terms of thermodynamics, and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management sought to economise physical labour, while inventions such as the typewriter (1873), phonograph (1877) and cinema (1891) began to incorporate bodies into new media environments. As the techniques of mass production formalised by Henry Ford spread across the globe, the manufacture of new technologies of mobility like the car and the aeroplane produced a more interconnected world. Each of these phenomena participated in the recasting of racial relations and ideologies: the X-ray, for example, was used for ‘epilation’ (cosmetic hair removal) to clear ‘dark shadow[s]’ from ambiguous skin colour, participating in the technological ‘refashioning of white racial identity’ (Herzig 2005: 162–3). New media pluralised methods of bodily and cultural transmission, from the commercialisation of recorded African American music (‘race records’) in the interwar period to ethnographic sound recordings and cinematic depictions of the body. Taylorism depended upon implicit beliefs about racial and national aptitudes; Fordism utilised neo-colonial theories of ‘race development’.
Despite these confluences, scholars now recognise that, as Bruce Sinclair notes, ‘The history of race in America has been written as if technologies scarcely existed, and the history of technology as if it were utterly innocent of racial significance’ (2004: 1). Although scholars like Rayvon Fouché (2005) and Alondra Nelson (2002), and fields including Afrofuturism, have gone to great lengths to address such gaps, modernist studies has produced little comparable work. Pioneering studies of modernism and technology by Tim Armstrong (1998) and Sara Danius (2002), for example, make few references to race or racial identity, despite their investment in the ‘socially constructed’ meanings and perceptions of the body (Armstrong 1998: 4). This is one symptom of what Michael Bibby calls the ‘racial formation of modernist studies’, which ‘overwhelmingly focuses on white authors’, even as the ‘new modernist studies’ have sought to produce a more inclusive field (2013: 486).
Index
- Janet Afary, University of California, Santa Barbara, Kamran Afary, California State University, Los Angeles
-
- Book:
- Molla Nasreddin
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 06 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 384-402
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
12 - Cinema: Notes on Germaine Dulac’s ‘Integral Cinema’, Form and Spirit
-
- By Felicity Gee
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 192-211
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Writing about cinematography in the 1920s and 1930s involved an extraordinary, celestial vocabulary, which both derived and departed from scientific and philosophical ideas of the previous century. Prior to the invention of cinema, scientists, photographers, astronomers, meteorologists and psychoanalysts of the mid-nineteenth century debated the potential wonders (and dangers) of seeing at a lesser or greater speed than one-tenth of a second, the unit of ‘microtime’ then believed to represent the standard time a human being took to react to external stimuli. Consequently, ‘[n]ew arrangements between keys, bodies, wires, clocks, texts, images, and screens were set in place to understand this moment and solve the problems it posed’ (Canales 2009: 217). The Transit of Venus (which took place in 1874 and 1882), lightning storms, electrical sparks, and solar and lunar events were some of the camera’s early muses. These natural and man-made phenomena occurred at a pace or velocity, a distance or scale, that required the focal range and mobility of early cinematographic technologies.
Until the arrival of the Lumière cinematographic camera in 1895, advances in cinematography were often battles fought in laboratories and observatories, but these advances also presented philosophical conundrums. Frances Guerin argues that ‘Technologies such as electrical light and cinema – with their impetus toward instantaneity, fragmentation and ephemerality – arguably frustrate the totalities and hinder the reconciliation between the world of things and that of the spiritual in technological modernity’ (Guerin 2005: 20). As technologies pushed humans to attempt ever more accurate recordings of the exterior world, the unreliability of the observer, and the discrepancy between individual reactions to events and memories of them, became clearer, as did categorical factors such racial and ethnic discrimination based on an assumed biological determinism. The quest for the technological expansion of human ocular and neurological faculties necessarily invoked a rethinking ‘of basic conceptions of the self […] the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. […The camera] was used to investigate what was distinctly personal and individual about particular observations and about the testimony of these observations’ (Canales 2009: 215).
Contents
- Anita Wohlmann, University of Southern Denmark
-
- Book:
- Metaphor in Illness Writing
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp v-v
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
22 - Ancient Scripture
- Edited by Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, Emelia Quinn, Universiteit van Amsterdam
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 301-316
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
Sacred books are not only the oldest writings known to humanity but also among the most translated and well-read texts in the world – their importance must never be overlooked in the world of literature, particularly where ethics are concerned. This is no less true of anymal ethics, including the ethics of diet. While one can certainly find scriptures that justify the exploitation of anymals, the sacred texts of the five largest world religions – two that emerged in what is now India (Hindu and Buddhist traditions) and three that began in the Middle East (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) – reveal remarkably strong moral teachings against anymal exploitation and slaughter, requiring overt kindness, service, and caretaking of/respect for anymals and the Earth. This chapter provides a survey of the core anymal ethics found in these five traditions in order to demonstrate the ancient literary antecedents pre-dating contemporary vegan philosophies and identities.
Hindu Traditions
For thousands of years, worship in India’s Indus Valley revolved around nature, as recorded in the Vedas, which were “composed and handed down orally over a period of about 10 centuries” (roughly the fifteenth to fifth centuries bce [“Vedic”]). The earliest surviving hymns from these sacred texts of the Hindu religious tradition, contained in the Rig Veda (in their current form sometime before 1000 bce), “express a sense of the vastness and brilliance of nature” (Embree, Sources 7). These writings require that the faithful protect both the “two legged and four legged,” providing water and food for any creatures in need (Subramuniyaswami 204). The later Yajur Veda also speaks on behalf of “God’s creatures, whether they are human [or] animal,” warning that no life is expendable (204). In light of the environmental implications of modern anymal agriculture, those who hold nature sacred and live in a place where they are able to choose vegan must do so given that there is no industry – no force of any kind – as destructive to the natural world (and anymals) as the anymal food industries, including fish, dairy, and eggs (see Kemmerer, Eating 54–2, 51–83).
The Upanishads (700–500 bce), the final and much-revered philosophical texts that close the Vedas, “speculate on the nature of the universe and humanity’s relation to it” (“Vedic”).
Contents
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp v-vii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
11 - X-rays: Technological Revelation and its Cultural Receptions
-
- By Tom Slevin
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 175-191
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The discovery of the ‘X-ray’ had profoundly significant effects upon modern culture: it pushed the boundaries of science and medicine, operated as spectacle for public entertainment, nourished beliefs in the paranormal and provided a subject through which printed media could raise emerging modern social and ethical issues. The fascination with X-rays, as Lisa Cartwright writes, was a ‘mania [that] swept the West at the turn of the century’ (1995: 109). Wilhelm Röntgen submitted the first research paper on X-rays on 28 December 1895 and within days the discovery appeared in newspapers, gracing the front page of the Viennese Die Presse on 5 January 1896. Knowledge of one invisible force was disseminated through another as the news was telegraphed across the world through pulsating electrical signals that circulated information with wired instantaneity. At least forty-nine books and 1,044 scientific essays on X-rays appeared in 1896 alone (see Natale 2011: 347). Whilst X-radiation generated an incredible cultural and scientific fascination, it was also enveloped into other media, from writing and literature to film and painting. Indeed, the very moment of the discovery attests to its position within intermedial modernism: Röntgen submitted his paper on X-rays on the same day as the Lumière brothers’ first public cinematic screening at the Salon Indien du Grand Café. As with the Röntgen rays, so news of the Lumières’ work spread across the world; both made a deep impact upon society, creating visible spectacles through technology’s harnessing of invisible matter. Marconi, again in 1895, achieved his first wireless telegram, creating physical effects from immaterial process through signal transmission and reception. While these new media, including X-rays, transformed and revealed hitherto concealed energies, they also invoked the realm of the dead. Marconi sought to develop an instrument for listening to the dead; photography also contained the fantastic possibility of capturing the spirits of the dead and auras of the living. Upon observing her X-rayed hand, Anne Berthe Röntgen reportedly exclaimed ‘I have seen my death!’ (Tuniz 2012: 3) (Figure 11.1). Modern technologies were folding, collapsing and transforming existing regimes of space, time, distance, speed, interiority and exteriority in different ways. The X-ray embodied technology’s promise of harnessing forces towards the expansion and increase of humanity’s powers, whilst it simultaneously contained a concurrent hauntological spectre at the heart of modernity’s ‘progress’.
12 - Pursuers’ Offers
- Edited by Iain W. Nicol, Thorntons, James S. Flett
-
- Book:
- Expenses
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 85-89
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
On 3 April 2017 the Act of Sederunt (Rules of the Court of Session 1994 and Ordinary Cause Rules 1993 Amendment) (Pursuers’ Offers) 2017 came into force. This saw the reintroduction of pursuers offers into the rules of the Court of Session and Sheriff Court as a means of allowing a pursuer to make an offer to settle a claim in most types of actions that have a conclusion or crave for money, the exception being conclusions or craves that can only be granted after hearing evidence.
Pursuers’ offers had been previously introduced back in 1996 but were quickly revoked after the then formulation of the rules was declared ultra vires in the case of Taylor v Marshall’s Food Group Ltd (No. 2). Notwithstanding the difficulties encountered at that time, the Gill Review in 2009 recommended their reintroduction to provide pursuers with a mechanism of making a settlement offer that has potential financial consequences if not accepted. The aim is to put pursuers on a level playing field with defenders who have the ability to tender.
The 2017 Act of Sederunt creates Act of Sederunt (Rules of the Court of Session 1994) 1994 (RCS) r. 34A and Act of Sederunt (Sheriff Court Ordinary Cause Rules) 1993 (OCR) r. 27A to regulate the procedure in the Court of Session and sheriff court respectively. The rules are virtually identical. RCS r. 34A provides:
Interpretation of this Chapter
In this Chapter—
“appropriate date” means the date by which a pursuer’s offer could reasonably have been accepted;
“fees” means fees of solicitors, and includes any additional fee;
“pursuer’s offer” means an offer by a pursuer to settle a claim against a defender made in accordance with this Chapter;
“relevant period” means the period from the appropriate date to the date of acceptance of the pursuer’s offer or, as the case may be, to the date on which judgment was given, or on which the verdict was applied.
Pursuers’ offers
(1) A pursuer’s offer may be made in any cause where the summons includes a conclusion for an order for payment of a sum or sums of money, other than an order—
(a) which the court may not make without evidence; or
(b) the making of which is dependent on the making of another order which the court may not make without evidence.
2 - From Election to Re-election: The Electoral Politics of Presidency and Party, 1960–2012
- Edited by Patrick Andelic, Mark McLay, University of Glasgow, Robert Mason
-
- Book:
- Midterms and Mandates
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 54-71
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Midterms are part of a political system characterised by frequent elections; in a political system also characterised by a focus on the presidency, these are contests when the White House is not subject to electoral competition but when there are many candidates representing – and opposing – the president’s party. The relationship between president and party is one that has been the subject of scholarly neglect by contrast with other aspects of the presidency – not surprisingly, perhaps, because this is a system further characterised, at least for much of the period investigated in this book by weak parties and, increasingly, by ‘candidate-centred’ politics. Through an investigation of midterms, this book explores the relationship between presidents and parties, analysing the meaning and the impact of these elections when a president is not on the ballot. At the heart of this chapter is the relationship between president and party; it scrutinises the extent to which successful presidential candidates over time have employed party-oriented – as opposed to candidate-centred – rhetoric on the campaign trail, in search of the White House, by comparison with incumbent presidents seeking re-election. It finds that there has been much more discussion of party during these campaigns than prevailing understandings of candidate-centred politics suggest; it also finds that there are significant differences between successful initial campaigns and re-election bids. In turn, this creates a context within which to reflect on midterms and their meanings.
The focus, then, for this exploration of the relationship between president and party involves campaign rhetoric, specifically campaign speeches, between 1960 and 2012. All campaign speeches from presidential election and re-election campaigns have been analysed on a weekly basis, focusing on the use of party within speeches; that is the use of party affiliation to reinforce predispositions of the electorate or encourage the electorate to vote for the candidate in question.
Use of party in campaign speeches
Presidential candidates can try to use their party affiliation, as a Democrat or Republican, to reinforce any predispositions the electorate may have, encouraging the electorate to vote for them. Conversely, some of the electorate may use the party as a way to decide how to vote.
4 - Success Fee Agreements
- Edited by Iain W. Nicol, Thorntons, James S. Flett
-
- Book:
- Expenses
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 33-46
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
There has never been any prohibition on a solicitor entering into an agreement with a client whereby the solicitor will only charge a fee if the piece of work they are instructed to do is successful (or partly successful) and charge no fee if it is not. That applies to all types of business, not simply litigation, and the fee can be a fixed fee (as opposed to an hourly rate), only payable on success.
Since 1992, a solicitor and client may agree, in relation to a litigation undertaken on a speculative basis, that, in the event of the litigation being successful, the solicitor’s fee shall be increased by such a percentage as may be agreed. The maximum percentage increase is prescribed by Act of Sederunt at 100 per cent.
This means that there are now three ways of entering into a speculative (known in England as a ‘conditional’) fee agreement:
(1) The solicitor can accept the judicial expenses that they get from the opponent and at the same time charge their client a success fee that should be no more than 100 per cent of the judicial fees. The success fee calculation is not based on the total of the judicial account, i.e. it ignores those parts relating to copying and the part of the process fee and posts and incidents exigible thereon as well as any additional fee/ charge and outlays. Nothing is charged to the client if the action is unsuccessful.
(2) Alternatively, the solicitor can charge their client on an agent/client basis and can, if they wish, set the charge out rates at a higher level than they normally would to reflect the speculative nature of the work. However, if the client’s fees are based on an agent/client account, no success fee can be charged. The recovered judicial expenses require to be offset against the agent/client account. Nothing would be charged to the client if the action is unsuccessful.
(3) The third option is for the solicitor and client to enter into a written fee-charging agreement setting out the level of fee recoverable if the case is successful. This can be a fixed fee. No additional success fee can be charged.