Books published by EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

Argues that contemporary slasher films embody a turn towards the metamodern sensibility

Explores how public health concerns and political agendas influenced each other in the US over the past century This book offers an insightful discussion of the complex relationship between public health, US democracy and power during the so-called American century. It sheds light on the intricate history of the US public health system, examining how the development of the federal government has shaped its trajectory. By exploring the intertwined roles of politics, race and socio-economic factors, the contributors uncover the challenges and contradictions of public health in the US from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19. They also investigate the connections between public health and America's aspirations as a global power, as well as its domestic implications for social cohesion and institutional legitimacy. The focus on the American century provides a critical historical timeframe for an in-depth understanding of the connections between public health, people and power, on both the domestic and global stages. Gaetano Di Tommaso is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS), The Netherlands. Dario Fazzi is Assistant Professor of US and Environmental History at Leiden University and Senior Researcher at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS), The Netherlands. Giles Scott-Smith is Professor of Transnational Relations and New Diplomatic History and Dean of Leiden University College at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Explores how affect and emotion create new ways of understanding contemporary cultural politics in China The growing political conflicts unfolding in China provide an opportunity to rethink the cultural politics of emotion. Although the political formations in the region are laden with a multitude of emotions, they tend to be poorly understood. This book explains why affect and emotion matter in politics from the Mao Zedong to the Xi Jinping era. It makes a unique contribution by investigating the dynamics of political passions and the contexts from which emotional subjects engage in hegemonic struggles through the creation of various cultural forms, including Maoist art and popular films. Topics discussed include the mobilisation of revolutionary emotions in political movements, the desire of nationalism, the virtual affective space created by antagonistic identity politics, the subaltern body as a surface of emotion work, and the blurring of public-private divides on social media. Liu and Shi find that cultural feelings and emotional experiences are crucial for understanding political struggle, as well as debates about the cultural dilemma of the Chinese Dream. Shih-Diing Liu is Professor of Communication at the University of Macau, China. Wei Shi is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Macau, China.

Analyses the causes and consequences of regional turbulence in the Middle East following the 2003 Iraq War and the 2011 Arab uprisings The Middle East has experienced unprecedented levels of instability and violence during the first decades of the 21st century, including regime breakdown, heightened rivalry and competition, civil and proxy wars, cross-border military intervention, refugee flows and the emergence of violent non-state actors. Samer Shehata brings together leading Middle East scholars to investigate the drivers of regional turbulence and its impact on the politics of different states and actors in the region. Nine case studies assess the foreign policies and role of the United States and Israel, Iran and Turkey's policies toward the Syrian crisis, and the impact of regional turbulence and intervention on Yemen, Egypt, and relations among Arab Gulf states. The consequences of regional turbulence on violent non-state actors and on the region's newly emergent Salafi parties are also examined. Based on original interviews, examination of primary documents and research that cuts across the traditional boundaries of domestic, regional and international politics, this volume produces new insights about one of the most turbulent periods in Middle East regional politics. Samer S. Shehata is the Colin Mackey and Patricia Molina de Mackey Associate Professor of Middle East Studies, University of Oklahoma.

Explores the critical encounter between anarchism and law

This is the story of Mashya and Mashyana Unearthed, an exploration of when and where ancient myths become metonymic in varied forms of contemporary cultural and aesthetic representations.

Demonstrates how women's writing formed a crucial, if underappreciated, part of the history of sexuality in the Romantic period Women writers in the Romantic period were reckoning with taboo topics such as female pleasure, masturbation, incest, necrophilia and the aftermaths of sexual violence. Building on recent research on the period's sexual culture, this collection develops a new approach to the study of gender and sexuality within Romanticism. The contributors examine how women writers were theorising perversions in their literary work and often leading transgressive sexual lives themselves. In doing so, the collection challenges current understandings of 'transgression' as a sexual category and shows how the Romantic literary tradition and the history of sexuality in Britain look quite different when one foregrounds the experimental sexual thought of the period's literary women. Kathryn Ready is Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, specialising in eighteenth-century and Romantic literary studies, women's literature, and gender and sexuality. She is volume co-editor of Lumen XLI (2023) and co-editor of the collection The Art of Exchange: Models, Forms and Practices of Sociability between Great Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (2015). David Sigler is Professor of English at the University of Calgary, Canada, with research interests in British Romanticism, gender and sexuality studies, and psychoanalytic theory. He is the author of Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism (2021) and Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism (2015).

[headline]Argues that J. M. Coetzee's works constitute a form of late modernism that situates life at the heart of questions concerning the politics and ethics of literature Surveying the full breadth of J. M. Coetzee's career as both academic and novelist, this book argues for the necessity of rethinking his profound indebtedness to literary modernism in terms of a politics of life. Isolating a particular strain of late modernism, epitomised by Kafka and Beckett, Farrant claims that Coetzee's writings consistently demonstrate an agonistic engagement with the concept of life that involves an entanglement of politics and ethics, which supersedes the singular theoretical frameworks often applied to Coetzee, such as postcolonialism, posthumanism and animal studies. Running throughout his engagement with questions of modernity and colonialism, storytelling and life writing, human and non-human life, religion and post-Enlightenment subjectivity, Coetzee's politics of life yield a new literary cosmopolitanism for the twenty-first century; a powerful commentary on our interrelatedness that emphasises finitude and contingency as fundamental to the way we live together. [bio]Marc Farrant is a Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is the co-editor, with Kai Easton and Hermann Wittenberg, of J. M. Coetzee and the Archive: Fiction, Theory, and Autobiography (2021).

Analyses Christian literature as emerging from the common dynamics of ancient Mediterranean religion

The Edinburgh edition of The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay Murray Pittock, General Editor In Enlightenment Edinburgh, Allan Ramsay (c. 1684-1758) was a foundationally important poet, dramatist, song collector, theatre owner, cultural leader in art and music and innovative entrepreneur in many spheres from language to libraries. This series, the result of an international research project, presents Ramsay's complete works in a dependable scholarly edition for the first time, thereby illuminating a body of work crucial in its own right and essential to both the Scottish Enlightenment and the Vernacular Revival associated with Fergusson, Burns and others. [headline]Provides the first reliable textual edition of all extant prose writings by Allan Ramsay Transforming academic and popular understanding of this pivotal but, until now, largely under-researched literary figure, this volume offers the first full and consistent edition of Allan Ramsay's prose. The volume contains all extant prose writings, from both manuscript and print sources. As well as all known letters, the volume includes prefaces, dedications and advertisements for Ramsay's major collections. It also contains Ramsay's anonymously-published Some Few Hints in Defence of Dramatical Entertainments, the full text of his influential collection of Scots Proverbs and significant prose from manuscript sources, including Ramsay's account of Edinburgh's Porteous Riots in April 1736 and notes on contemporary plays. In these works, we see Ramsay's consistent and steadfast commitment to preserving Scottish literary culture, and gain a privileged insight into Ramsay's personality, his priorities, ambitions and core beliefs. [bios]Rhona Brown is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature and the Periodical Press at the University of Glasgow, UK. She specialises in eighteenth-century Scots language poetry and the history of the periodical press in Scotland. She is author of Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press (2012) and co-editor of Before Blackwood's: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment (2015). Brown is also editor of Ramsay's Poems (2023) for The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay. Craig Lamont is Lecturer in Scottish Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. He specialises in print culture, textual editing and memory studies across a range of Scottish subjects and writers. Lamont is author of The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow (2021), co-editor of The Scottish Rebellion: Insurrection 1820 (2022), and co-editor of Allan Ramsay's Future: Studies in Scottish Literature (2020).

Focuses on paramilitary groups and the Turkish state relations during the armed conflict between the state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) in the 1990s.

Examines the Free Church of Scotland Mission in South Africa This book traces the development of the Scottish Presbyterian mission from 1824 until the formation of the Bantu Presbyterian Church of South Africa in 1923 as the first South African outcome of the three-self movement. It considers the development of this autonomous church, supported by the Free Church of Scotland until 1929, and the Church of Scotland thereafter in the light of its ongoing missionary purpose until its union with the Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa in 1999. Drawing from archival sources, Graham A. Duncan documents the history of South African Christianity in the context of racial segregation and apartheid. The book foregrounds the distinguished history of Scottish Presbyterianism in South Africa. It also presents a significant part of the church history of Scotland, beyond its borders, highlighting the important role played by indigenous Christians in the growth of global Christianity. Graham A. Duncan is Research Fellow in the Department of Church History, Christian Spirituality and Missiology at the University of South Africa.

Shows how fiction makes philosophy see reality as a multiplicity of worlds Rok Benčin explores the idea that reality is structured as a multiplicity of divergent, yet coexisting worlds. By engaging with the work of modern and contemporary philosophers and writers, in particular G. W. Leibniz, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière and Marcel Proust, he proposes a new understanding of these worlds as overlapping transcendental frameworks consisting of fictional structures that frame ontological multiplicity. Examining political conflicts and aesthetic interferences that exist between divergent worlds today, he reconsiders the way political and artistic practices reconfigure contemporary experiences of worldliness. Rok Benčin is a Research Associate at the Institute of Philosophy at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Investigates of the structural dynamics of urban inequality from a political economy perspective.

Explores the diversity of women's work in transatlantic and continental publishing across the twentieth-century

Theatricality and the Arts presents a series of investigations of the notion of 'theatricality'. Primarily, theatricality is associated with theatre, but the term has always carried with it the potentially pejorative connotations of exaggeration and fakery, associations which are questioned and contested throughout this collection. Divided into four sections, fifteen chapters provide a comprehensive interrogation of theatricality. Beginning with multimedia, theatricality is examined in relation to mixed modes of media (internet art, painting, performance and digital display). The second section interrogates theatricality through a philosophical lens, followed by an investigation into the historical contexts of art, photography and other media in the third section. The final section features reflections on theatre and cinema, often in conjunction. Considered as a whole, the collection contributes to debates on theatricality in various fields, while also enabling a thorough cross-examination of the topic. Andrew Quick is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Lancaster University Richard Rushton is Professor in Film Studies at Lancaster University

Uncovers a diversity of local encounters with Hagia Sophia in the late Ottoman Empire

In the 1960s, psychiatrists and psychologists intervened in and influenced cinema culture in unprecedented ways, changing how films were conceived, produced, censored, exhibited and received by audiences. Demons of the Mind provides the first interdisciplinary account of these complex contestations and cross-pollinations of the 'psy' sciences and cinema in Britain and America during the defining long 1960s period of the late-1950s to early-1970s. This book incorporates expertise from film studies, history of science and medicine, and science communication, focusing particularly on the situated practices and interplay between ideas, expertise and professionals that constitute the fields of mental health and media. Tim Snelson is an Associate Professor in Media History at the University of East Anglia. William R. Macauley is a Lecturer at the University of Manchester and Senior Research Associate at the Science Museum, London. David A. Kirby is Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Liberal Arts and Professor in Science and Technology Studies at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

Explores literary, visual, material and biological evidence of marginality in the ancient Greek world Studies of the ancient Greek world have typically focused on the life histories of elite males as the group that has made the most distinct mark on ancient Greek literature, art and material culture. As a result, the voices of foreigners, the physically impaired, the impoverished and the generally disenfranchised have been silent, which has substantially complicated the creation of a historical narrative of these marginalised groups. To address this lacuna, previous research has turned to the limited evidence found in literature and material culture to reconstruct societal attitudes toward disenfranchised peoples. This book departs from that approach by primarily considering the skeletal remains and burial contexts of the individuals themselves. Drawing upon literary, artistic, material and biological evidence, it sheds new light on groups of individuals who were typically relegated to the periphery of Greek society in the Late Archaic and Classical periods. Offering the first comprehensive treatment of the biological evidence for marginality in the ancient Greek world, this book argues that intersectionality was the driving factor behind social marginalisation in the Late Archaic and Classical Greek world. Carrie L. Sulosky Weaver is a classical archaeologist associated with the Department of Classics at the University of Pittsburgh.

[headline]Advances our understanding of the literary legacy of contemporary ecological crises to investigate the interfaces of humanity and nature At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, McAuley offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature of empire building. This includes analyses of texts composed by (or about) persons residing at, or just outside, the edges of the British and American Empires, including St Kitts and Nevis, Haiti, Cuba, Hawaii and Samoa, which were built around the global transfer of animals and plants. Offering biotic readings of this literature, McAuley highlights the human place in nature and provides practical literary examples of the ways oceans facilitate the confusion of time and place. [bio]Louis Kirk McAuley has been Associate Professor in the Department of English at Washington State University, USA, since 2014. He has published numerous articles and book chapters and is the author of Print Technology in Scotland and America, 1740-1800 (2013).

A selection of letters by the pacifist and noted art critic Clive Bell, expertly annotated by his biographer Clive Bell was a pivotal member of the Bloomsbury Group. His marriage to Vanessa Bell and his, at times tempestuous, relations with his sister-in-law Virginia Woolf form important strands in the cultural history of modernism. A tireless champion of modernist art, a committed pacifist and conscientious objector, Bell produced a huge body of correspondence with many of the leading artistic and political figures of his time. His lively, witty, highly opinionated letters are a window into the turbulence of the early twentieth century, populated by friends and acquaintances including T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, as well as his Bloomsbury set, Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. Arranged in eight categories - Bloomsbury Circles; Virginia; War; Arts and Letters; To the Editor; Francophile; Travels; Love, Gossip, Home - this selection emphasises Bell's enormously varied life and interests. Bell was born in the reign of Queen Victoria and lived long enough to have been able to hear the Beatles on the radio. His letters demonstrate an appetite for art, for love and for peace that never flagged. [bio]Mark Hussey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Pace University in New York. His most recent book is Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism, A Biography (2021). He is also the General Editor of the Harcourt annotated edition of Virginia Woolf. www.markhusseybooks.com

Despite the enormous cultural impact of Nosferatu (1922) on modern entertainment, the history of vampires in silent film is largely unknown. Vampires in Silent Cinema covers the subject from 1896-1931, reclaiming a large array of forgotten films from countries ranging from the United States and France to Hungary and Russia. Drawing on thousands of primary sources, Rhodes explores vampirism in all of its manifestations, from the supernatural undead to the natural vamp. Gary D. Rhodes is Professor of Media, Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author of Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (2012), The Perils of Moviegoing in America (2012) and The Birth of the American Horror Film (2018). He is a founding editor of Horror Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Rhodes is also the writer-director of the documentary films Lugosi: Hollywood's Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004).

[headline]Contends that the twentieth century novel's approach to character fundamentally shifted in response to contemporaneous theories of psychic connection Criticism of the novel routinely starts with the assumption that characters must think, develop and strive for self-fulfilment as individuals. This book challenges the paradigm that individualism is innate to the novel as a medium. It describes how major writers throughout the twentieth century - many convinced by the supposed findings of parapsychology - rejected the idea of the discrete character. Treating the self as porous, they offered novels structured around the development of communities and ideas rather than individuals. By focusing on D. H. Lawrence, Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley and Doris Lessing, Mark Taylor demonstrates the need to broaden our approach to character when addressing the novel of the twentieth century and beyond. [bio]Mark Taylor is a specialist in twentieth century British literature and most recently worked as Assistant Professor in English Literature at HSE University, Moscow. His work has been published in Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic and Science Fiction Studies.

[headline]Develops a new theory of literary imagination for the Anthropocene by analysing descriptions of the environment from above Readers encounter the environment through literature in ways not available to everyday perception. This is especially clear when a text integrates the grand vistas of what is known as the bird's-eye view. In this welcome contribution to the contemporary theoretical discussion about storied environments and non-human perceptions, David Rodriguez presents an original interpretation of the aesthetics of the view from above. Focusing on fiction by twentieth-century American writers including Willa Cather, Paul Bowles and Don DeLillo, Rodriguez skilfully combines ecocriticism, narrative theory and phenomenological approaches to literature to develop the term 'form of environment'. This theory of literary fiction foregrounds the environment not as setting or historical context, but as an equal agent with the human figures and scales that are normally the focus of literary analysis. [bio]David Rodriguez is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Hofstra University in New York. His previous publications include Narrating Nonhuman Spaces: Form, Story, and Experience Beyond Anthropocentrism (co-edited with Marco Caracciolo and Marlene Marcussen, 2021).

Recent film theory has reframed genre as a discursive gesture, and pressures the idea of a national cinema by bringing to light local, regional, and transnational practices. In French Westerns: On the Frontier of Film Genre and National Cinema, Timothy Scheie explores the volatile arena where the acts of imagination to which 'French' and 'Western' owe their coherence fail repeatedly, productively, and at times spectacularly. Each chapter illuminates this unstable conjunction with a close reading of representative films that position the Western genre alongside French referents: landscapes, regional traditions, post-war modernization, language, stars and the events of May 1968. The films span the history of cinema, and include vehicles for stars like Fernandel, Johnny Hallyday and Brigitte Bardot, as well as the work of directors Christian-Jaque, Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard. Scheie traces how the encounter of the Western genre and French cinema persists into the twenty-first century as both a discordant provocation and a generator of possibilities. Timothy Scheie in an Associate Professor of French at University of Rochester.

Only second to the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide is the most audio-visually recreated genocide with approximately 200 films and documentaries produced in 39 countries between 1994 and 2021. Historical Media Memories of the Rwandan Genocide studies the construction, development, and recreation of the transnational historical media memory of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. This comprehensive work traces the international media image and the creation of historical memories of the Rwandan genocide, starting with the day-to-day television news reporting in 1994, and continues with analyzing how the genocide has been used and reproduced in films and documentaries on a global scale as well in Rwanda, which has created its own images of the genocide in film and television production to support a new national identity. Tommy Gustafsson is Professor of Film Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His books include The Politics of Nordsploitation (with Pietari Kääpä, 2021), Masculinity in the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema (2014), and the anthologies Nordic Genre Films (EUP, 2015) and Transnational Ecocinema (2013), both co-edited with Pietari Kääpä.