24318 results in Edinburgh University Press
Coda. ‘Out-Laws of the World’: Cosmopolitanism in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria
- Laura Kirkley, Newcastle University
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- Mary Wollstonecraft
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 10 August 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 200-214
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Summary
When her ship docked in Dover, Wollstonecraft knew she had returned to an island nation literally at war with her political ideals and hostile to her feminism. Shortly afterwards, she discovered Imlay's continued infidelity and made a second, more determined suicide attempt. Rescued from drowning in the Thames, she resolved to live for her daughter, but her long expatriation had entrenched her sense – apparent from her earliest extant letters – of being ‘an exile’, ‘a sojourner in a strange land’ and a ‘Solitary Walker’, and her final semi-autobiographical persona, Maria Venables, explicitly rejects national allegiances. Her transnational perspective had also given her insight into the ways different political and social systems and gender norms can strengthen or snuff out human benevolence. In Wrongs of Woman, she depicts British society as a corrupt and iniquitous patriarchy that turns women and the poor into second-class citizens liable to turn on their compatriots. Railing against the laws that have ‘bastilled’ her in marriage (I, 146), Maria complains that ‘the laws of her country – if women have a country – afford her no protection or redress from the oppressor’ (149). Women are ‘the out-laws of the world’, grappling even in their homelands with the legal invisibility and personal vulnerability that typically afflict outsiders (146). It should be clear by now, however, that Wollstonecraft's cosmopolitanism cannot be defined simply in negative terms as a rejection of her mother country, although her disgust with Pitt's government and the biases written into English law inoculated her against the rising nationalism of her war-torn era. As we saw in the quotation from Woolf's Three Guineas in the opening pages of this book, emancipation from national loyalties can enable a different sense of belonging to an imagined global community.
When Wollstonecraft died in September 1797 from complications following childbirth, she had been struggling to draft her final novel, constantly rewriting it as her physical discomfort increased. The notes and fragments that Godwin assembled offer only an imperfect insight into the ethical framework she was seeking to construct, but many critics see in the text a total disillusionment with politics in the wake of the Terror and consequent reorientation towards the private sphere.
II - Hollywood Gothic
- Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College Dublin
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- Book:
- The California Gothic in Fiction and Film
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 14 July 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 113-114
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2 - ‘The dwelling-place of a mighty people’: Travellers beyond Copenhagen
- Cian Duffy, Lunds Universitet, Sweden
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- British Romanticism and Denmark
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 07 June 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 61-91
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Summary
Murray’s Hand-Book for Travellers in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Russia (1839) reminds the reader early on that the attractions of Denmark are not limited to the capital but extend across the entire country, ‘whose fertile lowlands have ever been the dwelling-place of a mighty people’. However, if Copenhagen received comparatively few British tourists during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then the rest of Denmark – that ‘flat country’ which Sommer’s Description of Denmark portrays, rather less encouragingly than Murray’s Hand-Book, as ‘abounding in bogs and morasses’ – received even fewer. But by no means none at all. Prior to the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–97) Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), for example, at least eight other English-language accounts of travel in Denmark had appeared. These include the brief but informative descriptions of key places on the land route from Hamburg to Copenhagen given in the Grand Tour (1749) of Thomas Nugent (1700–72), and the much more substantial discussion offered by William Coxe (1748–1828) in his Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1784), which Wollstonecraft used, and which had gone to three editions by the time of her visit. And, of course, many other accounts would follow Wollstonecraft’s, written by everyone from wealthy tourists through prisoners of war to the author of the controversial Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
Like Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence, however, most British observations of places outside Copenhagen focus on the surrounding environs of Zealand and were made en passant, as it were, to and from the capital, at the beginning or the end of a larger Nordic tour. And the majority of these describe the east coast of Zealand between Copenhagen and Helsingør (Elsinore), the latter famous in Britain, of course, as the setting for Hamlet, as the prison of Caroline Matilda (1751–75), and as the main crossing point between Denmark and Sweden, ‘the grand turn-pike gate to the Baltic’, as Andrew Swinton (dates unknown) describes it in his Travels (1792). But increasing numbers of British travellers did in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries describe the rest of the Denmark, often as far west as the moors along the Jutland coast, including the likes of William Coxe and Edward Daniel Clarke (1769–1822), both of whom who made the journey from Germany to Copenhagen overland rather than by sea.
IV - The Institutional Matrix of Health Care
- Edited by Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester, Sophie A. Jones, University of Strathclyde
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- The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 12 August 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 265-268
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Summary
American public hospitals and health centers are often criticized for their inadequate facilities or for not being patient-centred enough. Financial constraints faced by public institutions are often cited for these impediments, but government regulation also shapes the availability of good health care, with either too much or too little regulation typically impacting disproportionately upon patients whose options are limited by where they live or by the affordability of treatment. Despite the (often undervalued) endeavours of primary health care workers, many activists conclude that the system serves its own ends rather than patients’ needs – or, more polemically, that the ‘medical establishment’ poses a ‘threat to health’, as Ivan Illich famously stated in Limits to Medicine (1976). Conversely, though, health institutions are vital for preserving life and for advancing medical research, spanning a matrix of interpersonal and bureaucratic relationships which, in many ways, reflect broader changes in American society and culture. By addressing these divergent perspectives, the five authors of this section explore the politics undergirding the administration of public health institutions in terms of capacity, finances and regulation, while also reflecting historically on public–private institutional relationships, uneven efforts by authorities to tackle racial segregation in hospitals during the postwar years, and the challenges faced by the Veterans Administration in recognizing and caring for the needs of veterans facing adverse mental health experiences arising from their active service.
In assessing the role and scope of health institutions it is tempting to focus on the pace of change and technological innovations since World War II. Developments in tomography in the late 1970s and the emergence of mobile health services (or mHealth) in the 2010s, to take two examples, have offered new horizons for preserving lives. But whether we see such technological developments as complementing or straining the interpersonal bond between doctors and patients, we should remember that ‘old forms and practices coexist alongside the new’, as the 2000 volume Institutional Change and Healthcare Organizations reminds us. Sometimes owners and governing bodies are resistant to change or their organizations lack the bureaucratic agility to ensure that when change happens it is in the patients’ interest.
7 - ‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’: Authenticity and Diversity in Wollstonecraft's Narrative of Progress
- Laura Kirkley, Newcastle University
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- Book:
- Mary Wollstonecraft
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 10 August 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 178-199
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In the Advertisement to Short Residence, Wollstonecraft acknowledges the effects of her shifting emotions and acute sensual responsiveness on her view of the Nordic societies she encounters. This subjectivity is offset, however, by the measured reflections of the paratextual ‘Wollstonecraft’. In the Advertisement, she comments retrospectively on the emotions excited by her voyage, while her Appendix offers a sanguine prospect of human progress entirely at odds with the final letters. There are also times when the letter-writer echoes her paratextual counterpart, as in Letter XIX where she explains that her philosophical goals are to ‘trace the progress of the world's improvement’ and to ‘take such a dispassionate view of men as will lead [her] to form a just idea of the nature of man’ (VI, 326). From this totalising perspective, her observations on Scandinavia bring new dimensions to an ever-evolving but fundamentally universalist portrait of humankind which, in many passages, underpins a teleology of progress to universal rights. Yet Wollstonecraft's travels also make her question how these rights should manifest in specific national and cultural contexts. Moreover, her affective responses emphasise that every ‘universal’ is articulated from a particular and contingent subject position. Neither the emotive ‘Mary’ nor the paratextual philosopher can be reconciled entirely with the authorial signature on the title page, but their juxtaposition presents the reader with a dual perspective on Wollstonecraft's epistemological project and its relationship to her cosmopolitan ethic.
Short Residence is shaped by two discrete – and distinctively cosmopolitan – models of progress. One is a universalist model in which general ‘truths’ transcend national and cultural boundaries. Claiming that all human subjects have developmental potential, Wollstonecraft regards ‘national character’ as a political and social construction, a product of external factors susceptible to change. From this constructivist perspective, there is no such thing as an inferior people, only underdeveloped socio-political institutions. And yet whole races, she complains, ‘have been characterized as stupid by nature’, and others ‘brought forward as brutes, having no aptitude for the arts and sciences, only because the progress of improvement had not reached the stage which produces them’ (266). With this argument, which recalls the (often prejudiced) abolitionist rhetoric circulating in the period, Wollstonecraft defends the right of all races, nations and cultures to be counted as part of the same global community.
6 - Legendary Monsters
- Steven Rawle, York St John University
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- Transnational Kaiju
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 12 August 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 196-231
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Summary
The kaijū eiga saw a strong global renaissance during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Films like Love and Monsters (Michael Matthews, 2020), Tremors: Shrieker Island (Don Michael Paul, 2020), Monster Hunter (Paul W. S. Anderson, 2021), and Notzilla (Mitch Teemley, 2019) have all made the most of trends for giant monster films. This chapter, however, will focus on a cycle of transnational productions, including Pacific Rim, its sequel and The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016), that have helped to build global interest in giant monster spectacle. These films, along with the MonsterVerse series, encompassing Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong, all have a shared production company: Legendary Entertainment. This chapter examines their attempt to create a Marvel-style shared universe for their monster films that resembles aspects of 1960s Tōhō films such as King Kong vs. Godzilla, King Kong Escapes, and the wider universe implied by the plethora of monsters resident on Monster Island. The manufacturing of a transnational genre in this regard is cyclical, from the sharing of monsters across national borders to the collaboration between Asian and American producers. However, the kaijū genre's breakthrough as a mainstream cinematic genre in the west is now more in keeping with modern blockbuster production tactics of transnational co-production, franchising and reliance on CGI spectacle. This chapter explores the networking of the narratives in the MonsterVerse, including its transmedia elements.
Furthermore, this chapter examines the globalising transnational strategies behind the creation of this wave of kaijū films. Legendary’s deals with Universal and Warner Bros. strongly focused on the development of transmedia properties, alongside Legendary's access to transnational networks, particularly in Asia. The chapter takes a close look at Legendary, who were bought out by Dalian Wanda in 2016. Wanda are a major Chinese conglomerate with interests in property and tourism, and the owners of the world's largest chain of cinemas. The acquisition of Legendary is a major part of their convergent strategy. The Great Wall is an important text here, as a film reminiscent of previous transnational blockbusters, such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000), with its wuxia pian (martial hero) setting crossed with the monster genre.
Filmography
- Martin O'Shaughnessy, Nottingham Trent University
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- Book:
- Looking beyond Neoliberalism
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 06 June 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 201-203
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List of Figures
- Edited by Ned Curthoys, University of Western Australia, Perth, Isabelle Hesse, University of Sydney
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- Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict after the Second Intifada
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 07 June 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp v-v
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6 - Music for Amy and her Friend: Webb's Score for the Curse of the Cat People
- Michael Lee, University of Oklahoma
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- Music in the Horror Films of Val Lewton
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 14 July 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 105-118
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Summary
The Curse of the Cat People ranks among the strangest films made in Hollywood during the 1940s. Upon its release in early March of 1944, reviewers struggled with its weird hybridity. Bosley Crowther concluded his unusually positive review with, “The whole conception and construction of this picture indicates an imaginative approach. Its chief fault is that it is cursed with the flavor and some of the claptrap from that ‘Cat People’ film.”
Ostensibly a sequel to the lucrative Cat People, The Curse of the Cat People delivers neither a curse nor a cat person, rendering it the rare sequel that rehashes nothing from its predecessor. Instead, the film offers the story of a sensitive child seeking a friend. Yet, three characters return from the earlier film … or do they? Jane Randolph and Kent Smith reprise their roles of Alice and Oliver, who are now married with a young daughter named Amy (Ann Carter). Simone Simon's Irena, dead at the end of Cat People, enters as Amy’s friend. But Irena's nature is uncertain. Some scholars, like David Bordwell, see Simone Simon playing the ghost of Irena returned to aid Oliver's lonely child. Others, most notably Joel Siegel, see her as purely an imaginary friend whose face Amy selected from a photograph. The film's music weighs in importantly.
In addition to its role in clarifying the film's central mystery, the music in the film situates its audience in the position of a young girl, a demographic Hollywood films rarely privileged during the studio era. By reinforcing only Amy's interiority, the film's soundtrack situates the audience in rapport with Amy.
The film's music reinforces the film's presentation of childish fantasy with great realism while presenting adult reality as thoroughly infiltrated by the fantastic. Claudia Gorbman explains that music in horror and other fantasy genres normally serves to break down an audience's defenses against irrational forces. Here music aids in revealing the irrational deeply ingrained in the adult world of “logic, everyday reality, and control,” while also painting the fantastical inner world of childhood.
“Universalizing” Horror at RKO
Before turning to music for some guidance in understanding this unusual film, we visit how it came to be. RKO formed the Lewton unit to compete with Universal Pictures’ horror cycle.
List of Figures
- Humphrey Welfare, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
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- Book:
- General William Roy, 1726-1790
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 03 June 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp vii-viii
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1 - ‘What Happened a Hundred Years Ago is Happening Again’: The Ghosts of the California Past
- Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College Dublin
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- The California Gothic in Fiction and Film
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 14 July 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 19-68
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Summary
Messiah of Evil (1973) is set in a Northern Californian community named Point Dune. The main character is a young woman named Arletty (Marianna Hill), who has travelled there in search of her father, artist Joseph Lang (Royal Dano). Arletty relates her story in flashback from the confines of an asylum:
Not far from here there is a small town on the coast. They used to call it New Bethlehem but they changed the name to Point Dune after the moon turned blood red. Point Dune doesn't look any different than a thousand other neon stucco towns. But what happened there – what they did to me – what they’re doing now … They’re coming here – they’re waiting at the edge of the city. […] and no one will hear you scream. No one will hear you scream!
Point Dune's profound wrongness becomes obvious to Arletty when she makes her first stop in town. She pulls up at an empty, neon-lit gas station, only to find the attendant firing a gun into the darkness to scare off ‘stray dogs’. Within moments of her departure, the clerk is murdered. It soon becomes clear that many of the town's residents are flesh-eating zombies (of a sort) in thrall to a powerful supernatural figure known as the ‘Dark Stranger’.
Jamie Russell situates Messiah alongside other minor-but-worthy post- Night of the Living Dead efforts, such as Jeff Lieberman's LSD flashback nightmare, Blue Sunshine (1977), David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975) and John D. Hancock's Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971), suggesting that these movies insist upon overthrowing the ideals of the ‘Flower Power’ generation: ‘Forming a backlash against the utopian hippie dream, these films all toy with fears about the dangers of mind-alerting drugs and rampant sexuality, while also displaying a stark mistrust of the strangeness of other people.’ Kim Newman, who ranks the film highly amongst the narrow but significant pantheon of ‘post-hippie horror films of note’, observes that it clearly draws from H. P. Lovecraft and George A. Romero.
However, whilst Romero generally structured his zombie films as siege narratives, Messiah of Evil's creative team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (they co-wrote the screenplay, which Huyck directed and Katz produced) keep their coastal Californian dead folks out and about on the streets and in the supermarkets and movie theatres of this otherwise deserted beachside locale.
12 - Gothic Ecologies of Mind
- Edited by Richard C. Sha, American University, Washington DC, Joel Faflak, University of Western Ontario
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- Book:
- Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 14 July 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 268-284
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This chapter proposes that the gothic ballad revival, and the formal experimentation it engendered, also became an opportunity for Romantic-era writers to experiment with different models of mind. From the poems Matthew Lewis included in his novel The Monk to the ‘new principle’ of meter Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed to have invented for ‘Christabel,’ metrical inventiveness was one way that poets gave shape to a gothic interest in alterity and idiosyncrasy. In his reading of gothic metrical experiments, Daniel Robinson has described this neogothic love of nonce meters – poetic forms that invent their own idiosyncratic lines and stanzas – as ‘weird form,’ aligned with a broader interest in historical difference and gothic excess (155). On my argument, that interest in ‘weird form’ also had implications for longer-standing conversations about the history of cognition. In particular, this chapter reads gothic imitations as a response to an earlier moment in the eighteenth-century ballad revival, which had framed ballads as the products of an early phase in cultural development – and which, consequently, read them as artifacts shaped by common, pre-cultural features of the human mind. Joseph Addison's emphasis on ballads’ formal simplicity and universalizable sentiment, for example, implied a uniformitarian account of mental development, where simplicity of form and feeling pointed back to a common origin point. Another way to put this is that eighteenth-century writings on the ballad revival often double as claims about the history of cognition. Those claims frequently emphasize continuity over time: literary artifacts were made to uncover and naturalize aspects of mental functioning that came to appear universal, timeless, and embodied. Neogothic experiments, in contrast, show that ballad studies also afforded a different approach to the history of cognition.
The idea that poetic meter reflected the rhythmic, embodied movements of thought itself had a long history in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Recently, that attention to rhythmic thinking has helped recover Romantic writers’ commitment to the mind's embodiment: to the idea that thinking happens in and through the body's rhythms. Yet even as gothic nonce meters and irregularities suggest that kind of embodied movement – in Robinson's words, marking ‘the pulses and beats of English meters and, at the same time, in the human psyche’ – they can still seem strangely decorporealizing, especially when the ‘weird’ seems to pull in the direction of ‘other-worldly or subconscious sources’ or an ‘evocation of the uncanny’ (164).
Chapter 3 - The desperate search for the exit
- Martin O'Shaughnessy, Nottingham Trent University
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- Book:
- Looking beyond Neoliberalism
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 06 June 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 70-97
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Our first chapter gave us a positive account of the entrepreneurial neoliberal subject as enacted in the cinema of Audiard. The second showed cinematic subjects enchained by debt and no longer able to shape themselves or their future. Radicalising this sense of a coming-into-crisis of neoliberal subjectivity but also seeking to look beyond it, the current chapter focuses on an important cluster of films that have successful or abortive worker suicides at their core. The chapter has two main thrusts. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s tripartite typology of violences (Žižek 2008: 1–2), it gauges how productively the films connect the subjective violences (the suicides) to the systemic and symbolic violences that are built into the ‘normal’ functioning of the status quo. Supplementing Žižek, addressing workers’ on-screen suicides more specifically, teasing out differences between them, it also draws on another tripartite typology, this time the suicide-related one deployed by Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming in their Dead Man Working (2012). If that book’s title points towards the nightmare situation within which workers kill everything within themselves superfluous to the requirements of the neoliberal workplace, effectively becoming zombies, it also summons up the possibility that one might kill the worker in the self and open up an exit from capitalist labour. It is the films’ capacity to develop the latter, more politically promising scenario that I probe as I move towards the latter stages of the chapter. To help me here, I draw on Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia as a scandalous truth-telling that points the way towards another life within this life (Foucault 2011). I work through these questions in relation to some key worker-suicide films. I begin with the proletarian deaths of Stéphane Brizé’s films La Loi du marché (The Measure of a Man, 2015) and En guerre (At War, 2018) and move on to Christophe Barratier’s L’Outsider (Team Spirit, 2016) and Nicolas Silhol’s Corporate (2017), two films engaging with suicide in relation to the corporate and financial sectors where we might expect to find ideal neoliberal subjects. I will argue that, despite their differences, all these films bring us up against another impasse. They successfully force the violences of neoliberal employment and failure of neoliberal subjectivity into view but are trapped in a sterile left moralism or an individualist humanism that renders them incapable of looking beyond what they show. Their exits are blocked.
30 - Mass Incarceration and Health Inequity in the United States
- Edited by Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester, Sophie A. Jones, University of Strathclyde
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2022, pp 511-530
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Summary
The United States accounts for less than 5 per cent of the world's population, but holds over 20 per cent of the world's prisoners. This astronomical rate of incarceration – commonly referred to as ‘mass incarceration’ – is a relatively recent development in American history. US incarceration rates began to increase in the 1970s and accelerated with the federal ‘War on Drugs’ and the passage of harsh sentencing laws in the 1980s and 1990s. By the mid-2000s the incarceration rate in the United States had quintupled, and over two million people were being held inside American prisons and jails. Due to racial inequalities in arrest and sentencing practices, Black people are incarcerated at five times the rate of whites, and have thus borne the brunt of a mass incarceration system that legal scholar Michelle Alexander famously called ‘the new Jim Crow’.
The focus of this chapter is on the relationship between mass incarceration and health in the US. Unlike most Americans, people in prison have a constitutionally guaranteed right to health care. This means that some individuals may actually receive better access to care while incarcerated than they did while free. At the same time, jail and prison health care in the US is often of poor quality, requests for care are frequently denied, and the conditions of incarceration itself may erode physical and mental health. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that mass incarceration negatively impacts the broader public health, as families and communities – particularly Black communities – suffer adverse health and other consequences as a result of having disproportionate numbers of family and community members cycle through correctional facilities. Thus the impact of incarceration upon health is multifactorial, sometimes paradoxical, and must be understood within the broader context of the US health care system and its shortcomings.
The chapter starts by providing a broad overview of incarceration and health care in the United States, including the rise of racialized mass incarceration, the legal basis for health care in American jails and prisons, delivery and quality of care for incarcerated persons, and a synopsis of the most prevalent health problems in prisons and jails. I then use historical and ethnographic data to examine three key manifestations of the politics of health and incarceration: first, the prison as laboratory; second, the jail as ‘safety net’; and, third, incarceration as a chronic health condition.
Bibliography
- Demet Asli Çaltekin
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- Book:
- Conscientious Objection in Turkey
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 14 July 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 145-157
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Contents
- Agnieszka Rasmus, Uniwersytet Łódzki, Poland
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- Book:
- Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films
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- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 10 August 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp v-v
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2 - The Dark Side of ‘the Good Life’: California and the Birth of Modern Horror
- Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College Dublin
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- Book:
- The California Gothic in Fiction and Film
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- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
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- 31 August 2022, pp 69-112
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Summary
Chinatown (1974) is one of the bleakest films about California ever made. Like other 1970s neo-noir films, as Erik Dussere notes, it ‘interrogated and undermined the noir detective genre, self-consciously incorporating references to classic hardboiled films while constructing stories in which detectives are unable to solve the case or become unwitting pawns in a larger plot’. In Chinatown, the ‘larger plot’ in which fast-thinking private investigator J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) finds himself embroiled pertains to the future of Los Angeles.
Chinatown screenwriter, Robert Towne, was inspired by a historical episode detailed in Carey McWilliams's Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946). The ‘Owens Valley Tragedy’ began when the city of Los Angeles deliberately created a drought to encourage citizens to vote for the construction of an aqueduct. But as Sam Wasson outlines:
rather than supply the City of Los Angeles with the water it had paid twentyfive million dollars for, the masterminds brought the aqueduct only as far as the north end of the San Fernando Valley, a hundred thousand acres of which they had clandestinely bought up a year earlier. The newly irrigated land, which they had purchased for a song, netted them an estimated profit of one hundred million dollars. They got rich, but the citizens of Los Angeles were robbed, Owens Valley land workers lost their livelihoods, hundreds of acres were decimated, and ‘the rape of Owens Valley’, as McWilliams put it, persisted unvanquished. The bad guys won.
Chinatown's chief villain is land developer Noah Cross (John Huston), who lives outside the city in a pretty ranchero-style property. Gittes, who has uncovered Cross's murderous scheme, asks the old man why he is going to all this trouble: ‘Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can't already afford?’ Cross defiantly responds: ‘The future, Mr Gittes! The future!’
Cross is not only an immensely corrupt and powerful figure whose crimes will shape the material infrastructure of Southern California for generations to come. He is also the unrepentant rapist of his tormented daughter, Evelyn (Faye Dunaway), and the father of her child. Money, political clout and the inherent corruption of the young city mean that Cross is not only free to do whatever he likes in a business capacity: he can also engage in consequence-free acts of murder and incest.
4 - Shelley and the Real of Faith
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- By Joel Faflak
- Edited by Richard C. Sha, American University, Washington DC, Joel Faflak, University of Western Ontario
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- Book:
- Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2022, pp 73-93
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Summary
Romantic Consciousness and Psychoanalysis
Published in 1970, Harold Bloom's Romanticism and Consciousness signals the apotheosis of a surge in Romantic studies that reflected the previous decade's mood swings between optimism and disillusionment. In the struggle between revolution and reaction, if not reform, the volume found its not so uncanny double in the Romantics. The tutelary spirit of this version of Jerome McGann's Romantic ideology, as noted in this volume's Introduction, and despite the diverse critical backgrounds of Bloom's contributors, was psychoanalysis. This orientation made sense, given Bloom's debt to Freud. But it also made sense, given that, especially post-World War Two, American psychoanalysis was dominated by ego psychology, which sought to make the darkness of the unconscious visible and thus champion the subject's ability to conquer inner demons. Yet, at the same time, the Romanticism of Bloom's volume reflects a world at once very and yet never quite sure of itself. This ambivalence heralds a version of psychoanalysis focused more on indeterminacy than resolve, one that took its cue from Continental theory and philosophy, particularly through Jacques Lacan's return to Freud, in which the cogito and its consciousness do not add up to the same subject. Lacan was, of course, a key influence on a deconstructive and poststructuralist thought whose impact can already be felt in Bloom's volume in essays by Geoffrey Hartman and especially Paul de Man. So, while Romanticism and Consciousness reflects a desire to bring the unconscious to consciousness, particularly by healing the Romantic subject's alienation from the world, it also heralds another psychoanalysis in which this desire for a cure is only one of the plague of fantasies by which we live.
Reassessing Freud's legacy closer to our own time, Adam Phillips argues that ‘Freud … charts the development of the unknowing and largely unknowable modern individual in a culture obsessed by knowl-edge; of the distracted and disrupted individual whose continuities and traditions are breaking down around him’ (10–11). This assessment speaks directly to Romanticism as a process of ‘restless self-examination’ (Rajan 25) and entails one of the period's central preoccupations with what Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, calls a ‘willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith’ (2:6). Phillips adds that ‘Freud moves from wondering who to believe in, to wondering about the origins and the function of the individual's predisposition to believe’ (Phillips 111).
32 - Environmental Health beyond the State: Thinking through the 1970s
- Edited by Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester, Sophie A. Jones, University of Strathclyde
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2022, pp 553-568
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Summary
In October 1976, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Russell Train, asserted that the recently passed Toxic Substances Control Act was ‘one of the most important pieces of “preventive medicine” legislation’ ever passed by Congress, as its ‘basic aim is to give public health far more of the weight that it deserves in the decisions by which chemicals are commercially made and marketed, by which they enter and spread throughout the human environment’. Train framed health as a measure of the extent to which humans could exist within a particular environment free of disease. In his formulation, the environment deserved protection not in its own right, but because without it humans would die. Train reflects a relatively familiar perspective on environmental health protection, in which health is a property of human bodies, clinical biomedicine is its proper discipline of study, and the government exercises responsibility for it through legislation and regulation.
Train's conceptualization of the environment as the backdrop for the central drama of human existence is but one way in which health has been used to think about the relationship between humans and the non-human world. A far different understanding of environmental health is visible in an anatomical description of the earth made in 1978 by Northern Californian bioregional activist Peter Berg:
There are countries that can't be found in a World Atlas … They are the natural countries founded on specific soils and land forms, exposed to particular climate and weather, and populated by native plants and animals which have endured since the last Ice Age. Each is a separate living part of the unified planetary biosphere; tissues and organs in the current manifestation of Earth's anatomy. They exist as a live geography more distinct than the nations and states whose borders shift arbitrarily to include or divide them.
Berg saw the constraints of framing environmental health as a metric of human well-being and survival. He believed that health was a dynamic state to be protected through the restoration of holistic interactions between living creatures. His perspective was grounded in an ecological anarchism that valued deep historical knowledge of specific places.
These contemporaneous invocations of environmental health diverge in their interpretations of human behaviour, ecological interconnectedness and political legitimacy. Federal scientific and regulatory action reinforced the first, anthropocentric, perspective on environmental health.
4 - Reason, Method, System
- Edited by Philip Ziegler, University of Aberdeen
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Critical History of Twentieth-Century Christian Theology
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2022, pp 64-82
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Summary
Introduction and Approach
How theology is defined as an academic discipline is a function of history. Medieval theologians, like Thomas Aquinas, understood theology to be a scientia, or a demonstrative mode of reasoning based on propositions revealed by God. Theologians in the modern period, specifically those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the West, continued this tradition. They organised theological knowledge as a system of revealed propositions, primarily drawing upon the articles from the Apostles’ Creed, from which they derived other theological and ethical claims. When academic scholarship in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century turned to consider history as significant for knowledge claims, theologians took up the philological and historical study of language and texts into their discipline. From medieval scientia to modern historia, theology is a field of study that appropriates, uses and transforms ways of knowing respective to the wider academic culture to which it is related.
The question of ‘reason, system and method’ in the theology of the twentieth century must therefore be addressed, as is the aim of this essay, in view of broader cultural, historical and political movements. The question of how theology produces knowledge about the Christian religion is one that must be answered in relation to academic and ecclesial considerations concerning how theologians and Church leaders engaged, integrated or repudiated ideas and claims pertaining to ways of knowing deployed by their colleagues. I begin with some presuppositions before embarking on a survey of distinctive theological rationalities in the twentieth century.
That theology's own way of knowing is rightly understood to be coterminous with the respective intellectual and religious cultures in which it is practised is itself a historical claim. The claim that theology is a function of culture was advanced by early twentieth-century theologians, particularly in Germany, who sought to connect their discipline to new developments in the humanities and social sciences. In a talk delivered in 1906, Protestantism and Progress – as its English title runs – German systematic theologian Ernst Troeltsch developed a theory that understood modern culture to be characterised by a distinctive religious spirit that developed alongside and in complex relations to other aspects of human experience, such as politics, society, economics and the arts. Troeltsch thought that modern religion, which he identified with Protestantism, expressed cultural values common to yet distinct from other fields of human experience. Religion was not immune to influences from other experiential domains.