Books published by EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

Develops an idea that has yet to be properly explained - Muslim democracy Ravza Altuntaş-Çakır proposes a framework of Muslim democracy that reconciles public claims made by Muslims with the normative and practical demands of democratic regimes. This book examines the ideals, institutions and processes that shape the development of a concrete Muslim-based democratic system - a form of democracy that recognises the centrality of religion in Muslim societies. Questioning the customary characterisations of Islam's compatibility with democracy, the book adopts a comparative political theory approach that initiates a dialogue between Muslim and Western political thought. It systematically studies debates concerning Muslim political thought, multiculturalism, secularism, the public sphere and constitutionalism, which enables an exploration of Muslim democracy through a political theory approach, rather than a theological one. Key Features - Constructs a Muslim democracy framework, inspired by Muslim and Western multiculturalist political thought - Provides an inclusive typology of Muslim political thought to discover essential norms for democratic thinking - Provides an inclusive typology of multiculturalism elaborating upon its capacity to reconcile democracy with religion - Synthesises these theoretical concepts and values to provide interpretative tools for a comparative political of Muslim democracy - Offers a scholarly construction of the notion of a political theory of Muslim democracy Ravza Altuntaş-Çakır is a Lecturer in the Political Science and International Relations Department, Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University.

The last three decades in Iraqi history can be summarized in these words: dictatorship, war and occupation. After the fall of Saddam's regime Iraqi novelists are not only writing about the occupation and the current disintegration of Iraq but are also revisiting previous wars that devastated their lives. This book examines how recent Iraqi fiction about war depicts the Iraqi subject in its relation to war, coercion, subjugation and occupation. The theoretical medieval concept of the homo sacer, the killable, as defined by Giorgio Agamben is used to explore the lives and the experiences of different war actors such as the soldier, the war deserter, the camp detainee and the suicide bomber depicted in their "e;bare life"e; as men doomed to death in the necropolitical context. War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction is an exploration of fictional works by a new generation of leading Iraqi authors such as Ali Badr, Shakir Nuri, Najm Wali, Hdiya Hussein and others. It brings to light the overarching continuum in the production of homines sacri in Iraq. Instances of homo sacer under the dictatorship are complemented by new instances found in the camp and under the state of exception of the occupation and the war on terror.

Presents a new multidisciplinary perspective on portraiture in the era of post-digital media As technological practices of the portrait have proliferated across the media ecosystem in recent years, this canonical genre of identity and representation has provoked a new wave of scholarly attention and artistic experimentation. This collection of essays explores the stakes of that seemingly anachronistic comeback. It reframes portraiture as a set of cultural techniques for the dynamic performance of subjects entangled in specific medial configurations. Tracking the portrait across a wide range of media - literature, drawings, paintings, grave stelae, films, gallery installations, contemporary music videos, deep fakes, social media, video games and immersive VR interfaces - the contributors interrogate and transform persistent metaphysical and anthropocentric assumptions inherited from traditional notions of portraiture. Abraham Geil is Senior Lecturer in the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam. Tomás Jirsa is Associate Professor of Literary Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at Palacký University Olomouc.

Provides large-scale analysis of age, gender and status in Macedonian society

Explores how Jihad, political violence and audio-visual media are entangled This collection presents empirically-grounded, interdisciplinary research to foster critical perspectives on the significations of Jihad in the academe as well as in the realm of legislature, executive and the judiciary. It focuses on the contexts in which various notions of Jihad overlap with political violence, not only as a call for armed struggle, but also as a means to characterise Muslims as the 'other' of 'Western' conceptions of social and political order. Contributions shed light on distinct conditions under which Jihad is employed to describe and assess human traits, thoughts, and actions as political violence and how this assessment or its dissemination is informed by various media. From 16 detailed case studies, readers will learn to critically reflect on the practices of knowledge production in different social spheres. Split into four thematic parts, the contributions show how through discursive formations and mediations in the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent "War on Terror", Muslim life and religiosity has been evaluated in terms of a narrow understanding of Jihad. Simone Pfeifer is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Research Training Group anschließen-ausschließen: Cultural Dynamics Beyond Globalized Networks at the University of Cologne Christoph Günther holds the Heisenberg position for Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Erfurt. Robert Dörre is a Postdoctoral Researcher of Media Cultural Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum and an Associated Scholar at the Collaborative Research Centre Virtual Lifeworlds.

Short animated documentaries dealing with the Holocaust began appearing in the late 1990s. Holocaust Representations in Animated Documentaries provides the first comprehensive analysis of movies produced in the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe and Israel. The selected Holocaust animated documentaries analysed in this book epitomise the aesthetic and thematic features of Holocaust animated documentaries in the Western World. Applying theories developed in the fields of animated documentary, Holocaust studies, trauma studies, film studies and memory studies, Steir-Livny analyses how animated Holocaust documentaries create a new layer of Holocaust commemoration. It clarifies the ways in which animated documentaries can broaden and deepen the range of representations by visualising subject matter that previously eluded live-action documentaries, but also points to the dangers inherent to filmmakers' deliberate choices to marginalise the horrors. This extensive analysis of animated Holocaust documentaries constitutes an in-depth outlook on this new layer of contemporary Holocaust memory. Liat Steir-Livny is an Associate Professor at Sapir Academic College and the Open University of Israel.

Provides a new ground-breaking framework for the study of foreign language learning

About the author: Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham. Her most recent book-length publications are After Foucault, as editor (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Selfish Women (Routledge, 2019). She is currently completing a monograph-manifesto, entitled Against Affect, funded in 2021-2 by a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship.

Explores over 30 feature films from the formative years of Egyptian cinema (1919-52) to contest the contradiction between Islam and innovation.

[headline]Examines the connection between historical and speculative fiction to offer a new form of literary-genre fiction that registers the upheavals of the early twenty-first century Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel highlights the emergence of a literary mode, speculative historism, over the past two decades in US literature. Discussing novels by Ken Kalfus, Joyce Carol Oates and Colson Whitehead, among others, it provides detailed critical readings of key writers of the early twenty-first century and integrates questions of critical method, genre, form, and literary theory, all of which have some urgency today. Addressing itself to the question of how to read this mode through a form of utopian hermeneutics, this study explores the formal constitution, narrative choices, and place in the wider literary market of a mode that Lanzendörfer argues is constitutively important for understanding American literature's struggle with the possibility of imagining hopeful futures. [bio]Tim Lanzendörfer is Heisenberg Research Associate Professor for Literary Theory, Literary Studies and Literary Studies Education at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. His previous publications include Books of the Dead (2018) and The Professionalization of the American Magazine (2013), which won the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize in 2015. He is also editor of the Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine (2021) and co-editor of Medial Afterlives of H. P. Lovecraft (with Max Dreysse Passos de Carvalho, 2023) and of The Novel as Network (with Corinna Norrick-Rühl, 2020).

[headline]Develops a literary-philosophical account of 'conversation' that reframes core concerns in contemporary ethics, democratic politics, and literary criticism The ideal of 'conversation' recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice central to ethics, democratic politics and thinking itself. Interweaving readings of fiction and philosophy in a 'conversational' style inspired by Stanley Cavell, Fiction, Philosophy, and the Ideal of Conversation clarifies this lofty yet vague ideal, while developing a revitalizing model for interdisciplinary literary studies. It argues that conversation is key to exemplary responses to sceptical doubt in ordinary language and political philosophy - where scepticism threatens ethics and democratic politics - and in works of British fiction spanning from Jane Austen through Ali Smith. It shows that, for these writers, conversation can shift attention from metaphysical doubts regarding our capacity to know 'reality' and other people, to ethical, democratic and aesthetic action. The book moreover proposes - and models - 'conversational criticism' as a framework linking literary studies to broader political and ethical commitments, while remaining responsive to aesthetic form. [bio]Erin Elizabeth Greer is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA. She teaches and writes about modern and contemporary British and Anglophone literature, ordinary language philosophy, political philosophy, feminist theory, and critical new media studies.

Explores the increasingly intimate relationship between China and wireless technology, taking the wave as a central concept In the twenty-first century city, wireless waves constitute an imperceptible, immersive, all-encompassing environment. Nowhere is this more so than in China, where a hyperdense network of mobile media has restructured daily life. Anna Greenspan re-imagines the relationship between China and wirelessness by synthesizing contemporary media theory with modern Chinese thought. It focuses specifically on the work of three critical figures: Tan Sitong 譚嗣同 (1865-1898), Xiong Shili 熊十力 (1885-1968) and Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909-1995). Anna Greenspan is Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Media at NYU Shanghai.

Provides a systematic theoretical account of food animals under capitalism In the twentieth century, capitalist animal agriculture emerged with a twofold mission: to ruthlessly exploit animals for their labour time and enlarge human food supplies. The results of this process are clear. Animal sourced foods have expanded exponentially. And simultaneously, hundreds of billions of animals confront humans and machines in brutal, antagonistic relations shaped by domination and resistance. Building on Karl Marx's value theory, Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel argues that factory farms and industrial fisheries are not merely an example of unchecked human supremacism. Nor a result of the victory of market forces. But a combination of both. In Animals and Capital Wadiwel untangles this contemporary handshake between hierarchical anthropocentrism and capitalism. Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel is Associate Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and Human Rights at the University of Sydney.

Explores the major political, social, economic, religious and cultural changes impacting what was once the most important region of the Roman world.

The Intensive-Image in Deleuze's Film-Philosophy takes an important category from Deleuze's philosophy--the notion of intensity--and explores its background in the context of philosophical ideas about cinematic intensity, the philosophy of difference, and thermodynamics. Escobar argues that the notion of intensity has the potential to change the way in which we think about Deleuze¿s classification of films as signifying two separate periods, the classical period of the movement-image and the modern period of the time-image, by bringing them together and overcoming the separation that Deleuze's film taxonomy creates. This book also discusses ways in which the intensive-image varies and differentiates itself from other images and the role it plays in contemporary cinema. Cristóbal Escobar is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne, Film Programmer at FIDOCS and Co-Founder of the Screening Ideas program.

[Headline]A new scholarly edition of a bold yet overlooked Victorian text that blends the genres of memoir, travelogue, ethnography and the realist novel This critical edition of George Borrow's Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest (1851) brings a renewed focus to a formally inventive and original text for scholars of the nineteenth-century autobiographical novel and travelogue. This scholarly work reflects and develops research that anchors Borrow's energetically eccentric vision in a range of notable contexts. Radford's introduction gives readers unfamiliar with the formidably prolific Borrow an opportunity to discover more about this author's career at home and abroad, his stylistic innovations and how Lavengro evokes a 'wild England' that became crucial for admirers in the next century such as D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf. [Bio]Andrew Radford is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. His publications include British Experimental Women's Fiction, 1945-1975 (co-edited with Hannah Van Hove, 2021) and The Occult Imagination in Britain 1875-1947 (co-edited with Christine Ferguson, 2018).

Reconsidering the ancient world through the lens of New Materialism From archaeological sites to papyri and manuscripts, we experience the ancient world through its material remains. This materiality may be tangible: from vases to votive offerings and statues to spearheads. It might be the text as object or the object in the text. The New Materialisms have transformed the way we conceive of the material world - but how and to what extent - might they be applied to ancient cultures? Books in this series will showcase the potential applications of New Materialism within Classics, giving us a new way to look at ancient texts, ancient objects and ancient world-views.

[headline]Interprets Hemingway's fiction through the philosophical lens of Giorgio Agamben Marcos Antonio Norris implements Giorgio Agamben's notion of 'secularized theism' to resolve a critical disagreement among Hemingway scholars who have portrayed the writer as either a Roman Catholic or a secular existentialist. He argues that Hemingway is, properly speaking, neither a secularist nor a theist, but a 'secularised theist', whose 'religion' is practiced through sovereign decision making, which, in its most extreme form, includes the act of killing. This book resolves an important debate in Hemingway studies and uncovers fundamental similarities between theism and atheism, building upon the theoretical undertaking first introduced by Agamben and the Existentialists (EUP, 2021). Bringing Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Giorgio Agamben into close conversation, the author reconceptualises existentialism, issues a posthumanist critique of moral authoritarianism and advances an original interpretation of Hemingway as a secularised theist. [bio]Marcos Antonio Norris teaches at the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University. His research examines the intersections among existentialism, the continental philosophy of religion and 20th century literature, cinema, and television. He is the co-editor of Agamben and the Existentialists (2021) and the author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles.

Moves away from offering a single methodology or approach to social justice teaching, providing practical models for academics to follow

This book brings a dynamic approach to Turkish politics by showing how political struggles operate via narratives and how ideas, institutions and narratives interact.

The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea examines the growth of art film exhibition, consumption, and cinephilia during 1985-1997. This moment of heightened interest in art film altered how many Koreans conceptualised cinema and helped pave the way for the critical success of South Korean film. In this historical study, Jackson analyses the cultural, political, social, and economic developments of the post-1985 period that generated an increased interest in European art film. He considers the interactions of art house exhibitors with cinephile audiences, the media and the state-level administrators responsible for governing the industry. The aim of young cinephiles was nothing less than a bottom-up cultural transformation of a society emerging from three decades of dictatorship. Based on the previously unheard voices of audiences who participated in the cinephilia, Jackson's work is a history of Korean cinema and an investigation of the impact of this cultural renewal period on the industry. Andrew David Jackson is an Associate Professor, Convenor of Korean Studies and Director of the Monash University Korean Studies Research Hub at Monash University, Melbourne.

[headline]Provides a comprehensive survey of twentieth-century prison writing from around the world Tracking the evolutionary arc of prison writing across the twentieth century in an international and comparative framework, this study proposes an integrated account of the major shifts and movements in this relatively neglected genre of autobiography. Dwelling on works - memoirs, novellas, poems - by actual detainees, Julian Murphet offers a close stylistic analysis of twelve important texts to show how prison writing moved away from the confessional and self-scrutinising modes of an earlier tradition, to espouse openly political sentiments and solidarities. Looking at works by Oscar Wilde, Rosa Luxemburg, Ezra Pound, Primo Levi, Bobby Sands, Angela Davis, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Behrouz Boochani, among others, the book shows how themes such as the annihilation of experience, dehumanisation, sensory deprivation, brutality and numbing routine are woven into distinctive textual artefacts that give evidence of an abiding human resilience in the face of raw state power. [bio]Julian Murphet is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is the author of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001), Multimedia Modernism (2009), Faulkner's Media Romance (2017), Todd Solondz (2019) and Modern Character: 1888-1905 (2023).

Focusing on the partisan's perspective, the book explores how and why some party organisations reconcile the most contradictory democratic imperatives while others fail to uphold basic principles.

With a career spanning over three decades, French filmmaker Claire Denis has demonstrated not only a remarkable longevity in a notoriously fickle industry, but a continuing fascination with the possibilities of film as form, art, and language. ReFocus: The Films of Claire Denis is a timely look at an artist at the height of her powers with an impressive oeuvre which is reinterpreted in light of new works, including High Life and Both Sides of the Blade. Comprised of 13 original chapters from world leading Denis scholars and early career researchers, this collection includes an accessible introduction for those new to Denis studies, with an overview of thematic interests, and a brief survey of the most salient and influential trends in Denis scholarship. Peter Sloane is Senior Lecturer and Programme Director in English at the University of Buckingham, UK.