24318 results in Edinburgh University Press
Index
- Anne Reus
-
- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 211-215
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
List of Figures
- Edited by Aakshi Magazine, Amber Shields
-
- Book:
- ReFocus
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp vii-vii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
13 - Outcomes: Writing for Newspapers
- Beth Daugherty, Otterbein University, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 272-299
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
‘[L]onging to begin work’ as she recovers from a breakdown in September 1904 (L1 144), Virginia Stephen uses her editors’ assignments and guidance over the next eight years to learn the ‘knack’ of writing for papers and move from being a novice to an expert book reviewer and essayist. By the end of 1911, she has moved to 38 Brunswick Square with Adrian, welcomed Leonard Woolf into the household, and written and revised, though not for the last time, her Melymbrosia manuscript, which would become The Voyage Out. That year saw three essays, too, one of them two columns in the three-columned TLS on the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, whom she would revisit as Virginia Woolf. From now on, her non-fiction weaves itself through all her work as a writer, sometimes prominently, sometimes not, but never absent.
By the time she writes ‘The Novels of George Gissing’, her last review essay as Virginia Stephen before her thirtieth birthday in 1912, she has produced a large body of work: between 7 December 1904 and 11 January 1912, Virginia Stephen published 158 book reviews, review essays, and essays, according to Andrew McNeillie, B. J. Kirkpatrick and Stuart N. Clarke (see Appendix 5, a chronological, descriptive table). Some doubtful or untraced periodical contributions also exist. She published the most in 1905 and 1907, thirty-seven pieces each, successfully breaking into newspapers at the same time as she was teaching at Morley. She reveals her enthusiasm for the writing life in a letter to Violet Dickinson on 1 October 1905: ‘Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it,’ and then adds she hopes Mrs Lyttelton will ‘send more work’ (L1 209). She published twenty-five reviews and essays in 1906 and thirty in 1908. Never shunning hard work, she did publish fewer book reviews and essays as she dedicated more time to drafting her novel: seventeen in 1909, five in 1910, three in 1911, and one in 1912 before marrying Leonard.
Fifteen of her 158 published pieces were essays – travel, personal, or responses to music or literature, 9.5 per cent – and 143 were reviews, 90.5 per cent, fifteen of those being review essays. As an apprentice, Stephen reviewed several genres, learning how other authors used and challenged genre and its demands.
Frontmatter
- Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Texas A m University
-
- Book:
- (P)rescription Narratives
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp i-iv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
3 - Bargaining for the Milky Way: The Astrakhan Campaign and the North Caucasus Borderland
- Murat Yasar, State University of New York at Oswego
-
- Book:
- The North Caucasus Borderland
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 86-114
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The Tsardom of Muscovy witnessed the early success of its steppe frontier strategies in the North Caucasus in 1567 when Ivan IV constructed the Sunzha fortress on the Terek River and stationed a thousand soldiers in it upon the request of his loyal client and father-in-law Temriuk of Kabarda. While the Muscovites were creating vassals and strengthening their loyalty to the tsar through marriage, conversion of elites, and construction of a fortress in Kabarda, the Ottomans and Crimean Tatars had to repel the incursions and attacks in the Kuban–Taman region of the Muscovite clients led by Dmytro Vyshnevetskyi. This was a brilliant strategy on the part of Muscovy and kept the Ottomans and Crimean Tatars out of Kabarda at this crucial time. Muscovy could also deny its association with Vyshnevetskyi or his Circassian allies when the Ottomans or Crimean Tatars protested. Once the threat of Vyshnevetskyi was eliminated, and understanding the objectives of Muscovy in the North Caucasus, the Ottoman Porte resolved to take a more active stance in the region. Preparing a campaign to conquer Astrakhan was a harbinger of a series of new strategies that the Ottomans were to employ in the North Caucasus in the following decades.
The Astrakhan Ordeal: Preparation, Campaign and its Aftermath
In line with the Ottoman methods of conquest, snatching Astrakhan from the Muscovites, who were engineering their operations in the North Caucasus from there, was naturally the first order of business for the Porte. After conquering and subduing an area, establishing direct rule and imposing the Ottoman rule of law was the desired outcome of the Ottoman methods of conquest. First, the Ottomans sought to create a degree of suzerainty over the area or state they targeted. If this was successful or following their conquest, they gradually eliminated the native ruling elite in those lands and established direct rule by reorganising land ownership under their infamous timar system. The local rulers and other elites, however, were not entirely deprived of their previous rights; on the contrary, they could be included in the timar system and therefore accommodated within the Ottoman administration, whose aim was the assimilation of such elites and nobility.
2 - The Dark Side of Beauty: Cosmetics, Artifice and Danger
- Michelle Smith, Monash University, Victoria
-
- Book:
- Consuming Female Beauty
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 54-80
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
While beauty is a desirable quality in women, it is also often understood as signalling a threat. The term femme fatale, for example, refers to ‘dangerously attractive’ women (Braun 2). Much of this danger resides in a woman's sexual allure. In her influential study of fashion and eroticism, Valerie Steele argues that the very ‘concept of beauty is sexual in origin, and the changing ideal of beauty apparently reflects shifting attitudes toward sexual expression’ (Fashion and Eroticism 5). Aileen Ribeiro similarly suggests ‘beauty in a woman often cannot be divorced from desire and specifically from sex’ (15) and, relatedly, notes that cosmetics have ‘sexual implications’ (16). This chapter builds upon the foundation of Chapter 1, which distinguished between artifice and acceptable measures for enhancing the appearance and maintaining hygiene in beauty manuals. It examines the ways in which beauty was connected with danger in the Victorian period in three diverse kinds of print: the beauty manual, the periodical press and the novel. Cosmetics, dyes and other commercial products were situated within wider debates ‘about the legitimacy of artifice and appropriateness of styles of dress and adornment that were overtly erotic’ (Steele 126). While magazine advertising increasingly featured beauty products, the harmfulness of dangerous cosmetics to health and the potential damage to natural features from cosmetic usage were routinely emphasised in non-fiction, leaving the woman reader torn between competing ideals. Fictional depictions of cosmeticians extrapolated the dangers associated with cosmetics to harm and crimes that far exceeded deceptive products and treatments, as in L. T. Meade's The Sorceress of the Strand (1902). More frequently, however, Victorian fiction depicted natural beauty itself as a danger for young women, with its sexual implications being sufficient to lead to a tragic downfall and death in numerous novels, including Mrs Henry Wood's East Lynne (1862) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). These novels are representative of the enduring and pervasive association of beauty with sexuality and thereby the potential of a girl or woman's downfall.
Eliza Lynn Linton's ‘The Girl of the Period’, an unsigned article that appeared in The Saturday Review in 1868, hit a raw nerve about the changing behaviour and appearance of young British women in the mid-nineteenth century.
2 - The Ghosts of War: Writing Trauma
- Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield
-
- Book:
- Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 21 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 64-109
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The previous chapter focused on how various tales of World War One attempt to manage and contain anxieties stemming from war-induced trauma. There, the returning soldiers were often restored to their pre-war selves in the home. This chapter explores representations of ghosts who cannot be so easily plotted within structures that attempt to manage trauma. These are ghosts without homes and so without the domestic ties which restore the soldiers to a semblance of their pre-war lives. Trauma is not eradicated in these narratives, all of which indicate a problem with how to articulate war-induced anxieties. Familial structures and conventional narrative forms respectively fail to cure the soldier or to represent their plight coherently. These are ghosts who retain a disorientating Gothic presence as they wrestle with fears and anxieties which cannot be cast off or lived with.
These tales engage with representations of trauma which are clearly influenced by a Gothic sensibility, centred on divided selves and damaged emotional states. The subjects take on Gothic characteristics as they wrestle with fear and anxiety and struggle to find any narrative form which can express their emotional state. We can read the Gothic as a form that is founded within trauma, which often addresses specific historical concerns. The late eighteenth-century Gothic frequently addresses issues about social and political change generated by the French Revolution, just as the fin-de-siècle Gothic reflects concerns about degeneration, invasion and sexuality. That World War One, as a moment of crisis, would also produce a new formation of the Gothic condition is therefore unsurprising. It is a Gothic which inherits much from the earlier Gothic tradition, but which has a particular focus on figures of depersonalisation, such as ghosts and animals. How to represent this new Gothic sensibility is also closely aligned with forms of narrative expression which foreground the problem of representation.
Samuel Hynes has argued that realism is difficult to apply to soldiers’ accounts of war and suggests ‘battlefield gothic’ as a more appropriate term to make sense of ‘when we observe the dead, or, more precisely, when we observe soldiers observing the dead’ (Hynes 1995: 403 italics in original). For Hynes, what we witness is the often callous way in which soldiers observe the dead of their enemies, but we need to understand that their testimony is Gothic in character due to the very uncanny unreality of the war zone itself.
2 - Of Mice, Men and Greek Film Noir: The Little Mouse
- Edited by Anna Poupou, National and Capodistrian University of Athens, Nikitas Fessas, Universiteit Gent, Belgium, Maria Chalkou, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece
-
- Book:
- Greek Film Noir
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 46-61
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Beginning with Prosopa lismonimena/Forgotten Faces (dir. Tzavellas, 1946), the immediate post-war years witnessed several noir productions in Greece. In this chapter I follow a timeline which sets the end of the first post-war noir phase with O anthropos tou trainou/The Man on the Train (dir. Dimopoulos, 1958), a film based on a screenplay by Yannis Maris. My discussion of this first phase focuses on To Pontikaki/The Little Mouse (1953). Written and directed jointly by Giorgos Asimakopoulos and Nikos Tsiforos, and produced by Anzervos, then a major player in Greek cinema, the film has been recently ‘rediscovered’ through Greek television and social media. It attracts curious viewers, mostly because it features, for the first time in an ingénue role, Aliki Vougiouklaki (Lazaridis 1999: 298–301). She would later become the bestknown star of Greek cinema, and certainly remains the best-remembered one. Her character, Krinoula, orphaned during the German Occupation and called by everyone Pontikaki (‘little mouse’), gives the film its name. She has a substantial function in the plot development, saving the young criminal Loukis (Giorgos Lefteriotis). This is, nevertheless, not only a film about young love reaffirming what is best in the condition humaine, even amid a criminal milieu. By following the lives of an older and two young petty criminals in Piraeus, it also addresses in a realist, perhaps even neorealist way, broad social issues of its time: poverty, juvenile delinquency and overseas migration as consequences of the war.
Is Noir Greek Enough?
Questions of verisimilitude and film realism played a crucial role in discourses on post-war film, while current discussions of genre and European noir also inform the classification options when discussing a particular film (on European noir, see Spicer 2007; Broe 2014; Pillard 2014; for Greece: Poupou 2007; Dermentzoglou 2007; Fotiou and Fessas 2017). Critical rhetoric at the time and during the formative years of the New Greek Cinema consistently referred to an assumed escapism of Greek post-war cinema and to its silence vis-àvis the realities of its spectators’ lives. But the early post-war noir films offer enough material to demonstrate that cinema did engage with its surrounding society through relatable stories and characters, albeit in a different stylistic framework from that of mainstream cinema of the 1960s and of auteur cinema.
6 - Sabka Time Aayega: Language and the City in Gully Boy
- Edited by Aakshi Magazine, Amber Shields
-
- Book:
- ReFocus
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 108-125
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
This chapter looks at Zoya Akhtar's Gully Boy (2019) to examine the relationship between Mumbai and its working-class communities and language, particularly poetry. The city plays a central role in the film as that which inspires, intrigues, gives and denies its people in a complicated relationship that demands to be examined. By using gully (street) rap to capture all these sides of Mumbai and reflect on the social and economic realities of its residents, Gully Boy represents the conflict between the city and its citizens.
This reflection is inspired by Murad (Ranveer Singh), the film's subaltern Muslim protagonist, who because of his position has a compelling outsiderinsider relationship to this consuming space. Murad traverses the city from slums to skyrises, encountering and living through the tension that Mumbai, at once a city of dreams and a city of deprivation and exclusion, holds. In Gully Boy, this tension is explored by drawing on two enduring Hindi film character types to fashion Murad as a shayar (poet) who also carries the baggage of the tapori (urban vagabond). In the form of rap lyrics and dialogue, language becomes a way for Murad to chronicle, occupy and claim various parts of the cinematic metropolis that at once claims and rejects him as this vagabond figure, becoming the poetic voice of the city's tensions.
I present this argument in four sections: in the first, I examine how the rise of Mumbai as the ‘global city’ and its relationship with its proletarian citizens play out through Murad's engagement with Mumbai. In the next section, I show how Murad navigates this urbanscape using gully rap, making him a descendant of the shayar figure. The third section draws a contrast between Murad and two previous incarnations of the urban shayar – Pyaasa's (Guru Dutt 1957) Vijay (Guru Dutt) and Namak Haraam's (Hrishikesh Mukherjee 1973) Alam (Raza Murad) – to discuss how Gully Boy departs from the politics of those films by adhering to a neoliberal order. In the final section, I interpret the shayar/tapori characterisation of Murad by examining his language and class location in the context of a need to emphasise the ‘local’, showing how language becomes a mode of subversion.
Introduction: Contexts
- Beth Daugherty, Otterbein University, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 1-12
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
How far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer's life – how far is it safe to let the man interpret the writer?
– ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (E5 576)I start with these biographical facts: Virginia Woolf had an education of sorts; she was a woman writer; and she was an essayist.
Education
The general parameters of Virginia Stephen's education are well known: no formal schooling, full access to her father's extensive library, some classes at King's College, tutoring in Greek. Woolf's biographers do not ignore her education, although some do little more than assume the reader's knowledge of the basic story. Most flesh it out with some detail and provide perceptive insights, such as Jean O. Love's suggestion that although Leslie Stephen did not censor his daughter's reading, he censored his library as he compiled it (42–3), or Panthea Reid's vivid picture of erratic lessons frequently interrupted by Julia Stephen's nursing absences (3–36). But few biographers emphasise it, and if they see a relationship between it and her work, they describe that connection in general terms. So, Quentin Bell points out that when she began to write reviews for the Guardian, she was fluent and at ease because ‘She had been training herself to be a writer for a long time. That is to say she had been reading voraciously and writing assiduously’ (1 93). Phyllis Rose discusses the effect that Virginia Stephen's exclusion from an education had on Virginia Woolf, stressing Woolf's attempts to ‘understand and sympathize’ rather than reject (92); for Rose, Woolf's modest, anti-authoritarian and feminine persona as a critic grew out of her lack of educational advantages (42).
Biographers Lyndall Gordon and John Mepham devote entire chapters of their biographies to Virginia Stephen's education, with Gordon describing Stephen's ‘extraordinary informal education between the ages of thirteen and about twenty-eight’ (68–9) and Mepham taking Stephen's early apprenticeship essays seriously (19–20). Gordon focuses on Leslie Stephen, Janet Case and Clive Bell as mentors, whereas Mepham concentrates on Annie Ritchie, Caroline Emelia Stephen and Bruce Richmond. Louise DeSalvo and Katherine Dalsimer devote full-length studies to the young Virginia Woolf, but DeSalvo focuses on the effects of childhood and adolescent trauma on her and Dalsimer traces Woolf's psychological and artistic development; both assert that writing helped Woolf survive.
1 - The Land and Peoples of the North Caucasus in the Sixteenth Century: An Overview
- Murat Yasar, State University of New York at Oswego
-
- Book:
- The North Caucasus Borderland
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 19-48
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Today the notion of the North Caucasus evokes highlands, untamed tribal societies, bandits, warfare and fierce freedom-loving people, thanks to various infamous Russian literary classics and their representation in Western media. The sixteenth-century North Caucasus, however, was much more complex and diverse than such stereotypical representations portray. It was an idiosyncratic region compared to the lands surrounding it in terms of its geographical features, social and political structures, and the diversity among its peoples. The sixteenth century marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of the North Caucasus, its borderlandisation between the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Muscovy. In this process, the landscape and geography of the North Caucasus played a significant role for both the imperial powers and the peoples of the region.
The Land
Geographically, the North Caucasus is bounded by the Black and Azov seas to the west, the Caspian Sea to the east, the southern slope of the Greater Caucasus Mountains to the south, and the Kuma-Manych Depression and the Kuban River to the north. The northern slopes and westernmost part of the Greater Caucasus Mountains, including its southern slopes at the western end, are also considered a part of the North Caucasus region. The North Caucasus terrain comprises various types of landscapes – coastlines along the Black and Caspian seas, fertile plains, steppes, valleys, high and low mountains, and foothills.
With a width of 50 to 200 kilometres, the Greater Caucasus mountain range not only divides the Caucasus into its northern and southern parts but also constitutes the traditional border between Europe and Asia. Stretching over 1,200 kilometres from southeast to northwest, it has been a formidable barrier throughout history. The Greater Caucasus Mountains are divided into three sections – western, central and eastern. The western section stretches from the Taman Peninsula as far as the source of the Kuban River with an average height of 2,500–3,000 metres. The mountain range in the west, lying parallel with the shore, leaves a very narrow coastal strip with rugged terrain. The central section is the widest and highest of the Greater Caucasus Mountains, going as far as the Daryal Pass, which stands at 2,382 metres. This section includes Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe with a height of 5,629 metres, and Mount Kazbek at 4,877 metres. Daghestan constitutes the eastern section of the main mountain range.
Introduction: A Military Regime in the Third Century ad
- Byron Waldron, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Dynastic Politics in the Age of Diocletian, AD 284-311
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 1-37
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
On 1 May 305, a procession of soldiers, officers and officials departed the city of Nicomedia in Bithynia, led by the emperor Diocletian (C. Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus) and his junior emperor Galerius (C. Galerius Valerius Maximianus). These two men ruled the eastern half of the Roman Empire, whereas one Maximian (M. Aurelius Valerius Maximianus) and his junior emperor Constantius (M. Flavius Valerius Constantius) ruled the west. The procession was headed for a hill three miles distant, atop of which was a statue of Jupiter, the supreme god of the Roman pantheon and Diocletian’s tutelary deity. Upon arriving at the hill, Diocletian convened an assembly of the troops present and the chief soldiers of the empire’s other legions, and he proceeded to do the unprecedented. Diocletian stood upon a podium, and with tears declared that he had become infirm and needed repose from his hardships. He announced that he and Maximian would abdicate and resign the empire into the hands of Constantius and Galerius, and he proclaimed that two new junior emperors would be appointed to serve as their replacements. The soldiers solemnly awaited the nomination of the junior emperors, expecting Constantius’ son Constantine and Maximian’s son Maxentius to occupy the role. Both men were adults and the eldest among the emperors’ sons. To the surprise of the assembled men, Diocletian declared that Severus and Maximinus would be the new junior emperors. The men saw Constantine, later to become the first Christian emperor, standing near the emperors in public view, and they questioned among themselves whether his name had been changed. But Galerius removed the doubt from their minds when, in the sight of all, he drew his hand back, pushed Constantine aside and drew Maximinus forward. Galerius removed the private garb from Maximinus’ shoulders and led him to the most conspicuous place on the tribunal. All the men wondered who he might be, but in their amazement they did not object. Diocletian removed his purple robe and threw it over the hitherto unknown man. He then descended from the tribunal into a coach, which would take the old emperor to his native land to live out the rest of his life in retirement. Such are the events as recorded by the contemporary Christian author Lactantius (De Mortibus Persecutorum [On the Deaths of the Persecutors; henceforth DMP] 19).
8 - Music-video Aesthetics in Pernambucan Cinema
-
- By Samuel Paiva
- Edited by Lúcia Nagib, University of Reading, Luciana Corrêa de Araújo, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil, Tiago de Luca, University of Warwick
-
- Book:
- Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 144-158
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Many films produced in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil, from the 1990s onwards present aesthetic features associated with the Manguebeat musical genre, especially those directed by the filmmakers who took part in the so-called Árido Movie movement. Music video was a key medium in the interaction of film and music in these films. In this chapter, I will examine musical moments in Pernambucan films as the result of a dialogue between film and music videos. Tensions between fiction and documentary, as well as pop references, will be explored by means of an intermedial method that enables reflections on historical developments and meanings, taking into account the film supports available in a moment of transition between analogue and digital technologies.
Manguebeat exploded in the media as a musical phenomenon in the 1990s, paving the way for its cinematic counterpart, Árido Movie. Two decades had elapsed in Pernambuco, a state located in the northeast of Brazil, without a single feature film being produced. Then, the film Baile perfumado (Perfumed Ball, Paulo Caldas and Lírio Ferreira, 1996) was released, becoming a landmark of the so-called Retomada do Cinema Brasileiro (Brazilian Film Revival), after the crisis in the early 1990s, when President Fernando Collor de Mello's government dismantled Embrafilme, the agency supporting film production and distribution in the country. In a bid to overcome the crisis, the interaction of cinema with other media became a way of getting up to speed with the political and social reality of Brazil.
Both phenomena – Manguebeat and Árido Movie – emerged in the city of Recife, Pernambuco's capital. At origin, both can be understood as a response to the city's problems, as can been gleaned from the manifesto ‘Caranguejos com cérebro’ (Crabs with Brains) (Vargas 2007: 66), launched in 1991 as a press release by Manguebeat member Fred Zero Quatro (from the band Mundo Livre S/A) and supported by several other musicians and artists from Recife. ‘Mangue’, meaning ‘mangrove’, is a feature of Recife's natural landscape and defines the three parts of the manifesto. Part I, ‘Mangue, the Concept’, refers to Recife's ecosystem, which is characterised by a web of rivers and the sea, metaphorically suggesting cultural hybridisation.
Index
- Edited by Lúcia Nagib, University of Reading, Luciana Corrêa de Araújo, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil, Tiago de Luca, University of Warwick
-
- Book:
- Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 345-364
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Conclusion: Medical Theater—The Birth of Anti-Lynching Plays and Reproductive Justice
- Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Texas A m University
-
- Book:
- (P)rescription Narratives
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 178-196
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Black Souls is not a work of medical fiction. The play, however, participates in the tradition of medical theater, as women playwrights of anti-lynching plays drew upon the medico-legal discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to rescript the black theatrical body from its racist, sexist, and ableist roots in the theater of lynching, the surgical theater, and anatomical and postmortem exhibitions, among others. Historian Harriet A. Washington traces a tradition of putting Black bodies on public display in the medical theater, beginning with Dr. J. Marion Sims, who infamously performed dozens of surgeries between 1845 and 1849 on no less than seventeen Black slave women, including Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy, in pursuit of a fix for the postpartum condition of vesicovaginal fistula. Initially these surgeries were performed before a live audience of white male doctors, who assisted Sims by holding down the slave women as he made incisions without the use of anesthesia. Although the practice of live surgical theater in Sims’s clinic eventually ended, the black theatrical body emerged in a number of public exhibitions throughout the long nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1780s and continuing well into the antebellum period, Black bodies like that of Emily Brown were regularly “burked,” or stolen, from graveyards to become cadavers for anatomical dissection before an audience of medical school students. Africans suffering from albinism appear in P. T. Barnum’s circus during the 1870s and 1880s, advertised as “white negroes,” “white Ethiopians,” and “leopard boys.” And from the 1890s to the 1930s, journalists advertised specific times and locations for lynchings in advance of the mob violence itself so that crowds could gather to watch. They would even take photographs and sell them as souvenirs.
Ann M. Fox identifies “two powerful theatrical misappropriations of the African American body” that women playwrights of anti-lynching plays not only encountered but also used their plays to counter: “those embodied onstage in minstrel shows and supposedly serious plays by ostensibly sympathetic white playwrights, and those staged in medical theater, including the pseudoscientific knowledge that deemed the African American body to be feeble, inferior, and at the disposal of medical culture.” To this, Koritha Mitchell adds a third theatrical performance against which women playwrights must contend: the theater of lynching.
11 - Kant
- Gideon Baker, Griffith University, Queensland
-
- Book:
- Questioning
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 113-124
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
UP UNTIL LATER LIFE there was little indication that the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804), well-regarded as he was, had any original questions. But then he encountered a problem that placed everything he thought he knew in doubt. This was David Hume’s problem as set out in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Hume had pointed out, not unreasonably, that our knowledge of the world is founded on the relation of cause and effect. If asked how we know about this relation, we point to experience. But what experience do we have, can we have, of causality as such? In noticing that we only ever infer causality rather than being able to experience it directly, Hume posed the wider question of whether our knowledge of the world can ever go beyond our experience of it.
Kant’s response (Prolegomena 4:260–1) to this challenge, which ‘first interrupted my dogmatic slumber’, was decisive in the development of critical philosophy. Indeed, as Kant wasn’t shy to point out, his critique of dogmatic metaphysics led to a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Given that the original Copernican Revolution had turned the European universe inside-out by showing that the earth moves around the sun rather than the reverse, this was no small boast. But what did Kant mean by it?
Before Kant, Western philosophy had assumed that we can have true knowledge of things. While Descartes and Spinoza believed that error was commonplace, they held that reason could sort truth from falsehood and that, in this way, we could gradually attain complete knowledge of the world and God. Even sceptics of rationalism like Hume did not doubt that our senses give us access to the world. Hume believed that we know only through empirical experience, and therefore know much less than we think we know – as we saw, he doubted that we really know causality because this is unavailable to the senses. Causality is only the habit of associating one thing with another, no more. But though we can’t know relations between things, Hume didn’t doubt that we can still know things themselves through our experience of them.
While Kant came to accept Hume’s argument against the rationalists (himself included) that we can only know what is given empirically, that we can’t go beyond experience, it dawned on Kant that even empiricism had misplaced its confidence.
Rx 1 - Crip Medicine: Environmental Health and the Matter of Hysteria
- Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Texas A m University
-
- Book:
- (P)rescription Narratives
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 29-67
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
One month after the passing of the Comstock Law, Rebecca Harding Davis began serializing Berrytown in Lippincott’s monthly magazine. Such an urgency of timing may suggest that the subject matter responds directly to suppression of medical knowledge and social hygiene discourse. In the climactic scene, in which Dr. Maria Haynes Muller decides to confess her feelings to Dr. John McCall, the reader finds Dr. Muller “lecturing,” “chattering for two hours on cervical, dorsal and lumbar vertebrae, without stopping to take a breath,” and “fumbling over [her mankin’s] bones” in the process. Dr. Muller is teaching a social hygiene, or sex education, class at the water cure facility, which Davis well knows violates the conditions of Comstock law. Despite this legalized censorship, two years later, Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, or The Aunt-Hill emerges in St. Nicholas: A Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls promoting a similar social hygiene education scene. Intent on turning his recently orphaned ward Rose Campbell into a healthy, vibrant teenager, Dr. Alec Campbell teaches Rose anatomy and physiology to the embarrassment of her aunts, Alec’s sisters. Like Dr. Muller, readers find Rose playing with her manikin as she “counted vertebrae, and waggled a hip-joint in its socket with an inquiring expression.” Her inquiring expression should signal to the reader Rose’s curiosity toward reproductive health, for the “hip-joint” is structurally located around a contested female sex organ: the uterus.
Scholars have long characterized nineteenth-century medical theory and practice as driven by what historians call “medical materialism” and contemporary theorists call “biological determinism,” defined as the prevailing belief among physicians that one’s sex organs determine social and cultural roles. Historians John S. Haller and Robin M. Haller further emphasize the role of materiality in their assessment of the nineteenth century as the “nervous century,” in which neurasthenia defined the industrialized man and hysteria defined the industrialized woman. Yet literary theorist Kyla Schuller updates this scholarly impression. The recursive deployment of affect and impressibility resulting from a legacy of Lamarckian evolution suggests that the operative notion of the body in nineteenth-century scientific writing was sociobiological indeterminism rather than biological determinism. Nineteenth-century scientists theorize the body as a “biocultural formation,” molded by both material and cultural processes. Such narratives do not simply prefigure contemporary theories of new materialism and social construction.
Consuming Female Beauty
- British Literature and Periodicals, 1840-1914
- Michelle Smith
-
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022
-
Pinpointing how consumer culture transformed female beauty ideals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study documents the movement from traditional views about beauty in relation to nature, God, morality and character to a modern conception of beauty as produced in and through consumer culture. While beauty has often been approached in relation to aestheticism and the visual arts in this period, this monograph offers a new and significant focus on how beauty was reshaped in girls' and women's magazines, beauty manuals and fiction during the rise of consumer culture. These archival sources reveal important historical changes in how femininity was shaped and illuminate how contemporary ideas of female beauty, and the methods by which they are disseminated, originated in seismic shifts in nineteenth-century print culture.
Part II - Reworking Bollywood Themes
- Edited by Aakshi Magazine, Amber Shields
-
- Book:
- ReFocus
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 91-92
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
14 - Heidegger
- Gideon Baker, Griffith University, Queensland
-
- Book:
- Questioning
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 147-156
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
IT IS OFTEN SAID that the key to Martin Heidegger’s epochal book Being and Time (1927) is in the title. Rather than wading through hundreds of pages of difficult philosophy, the reader who knows that being is time can get on with something else. But what does it mean to say that being is time? For one thing, it means that being is always a question. There cannot be an answer to the question of what it is to be because being, for Heidegger (1889–1976), is time and time is nothing abstract but something historical, something that concerns us (Heidegger 1996: 306; 350). Time is only ever my time or our time (Heidegger 2002: 90).
As early as his lectures from 1920–1 on The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger notices this difference between the timeless world of the philosophers and historical time as something that is lived. Heidegger observes that the Apostle Paul’s sense of time is not the cosmic one of, say, Aristotle or Plotinus. Rather, in Paul ‘The present time has already reached its end and a new age has begun since the death of Christ. The present world is opposed to the world of eternity’ (Heidegger 2004: 48, emphasis added). If eternity is the metaphysical sense of time and the world, then Paul’s world is now.
Building on this early insight, one of the central themes of Heidegger’s mature work is that, when we experience time merely as a chronological succession of nows, then we paradoxically lose time itself (Heidegger 2000: 389). Time is ours only as finite beings; time is mortal time. For Heidegger (2000: 390), the time that passes, chronological time, is known to us only from the knowledge that we will die. We question starting from where we are. Indeed, even the Greek idea of time as eternity is conceivable only because we know that we are mortal: ‘finitude completely determines the human being from the ground up’ (Heidegger 1990: 50).
In keeping with this theme of finitude, in Being and Time to be is always to be somewhere (indeed, Heidegger’s preferred term for human being is Da-sein, being-there) – thrown into the world in a particular place and time (Heidegger 1996: 164–8). And to be historical in this way is also to share a history with others.