Books published by EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

Philosophising in Mombasa provides an approach to the anthropological study of philosophical discourses in the Swahili context of Mombasa, Kenya. In this historically established Muslim environment, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, philosophy is investigated as social discourse and intellectual practice, situated in everyday life. This is done from the perspective of an 'anthropology of philosophy', a project which is spelled out in the opening chapter. Entry-points and guidelines for the ethnography are provided by discussions of Swahili literary genres, life histories, and social debates. From here, local discourses of knowledge are described and analysed. The social environment and discursive dynamics of the Old Town are portrayed, firstly, by means of following and contextualising informal discussions among neighbours and friends at daily meeting points in the streets; and secondly, by presenting and discussing in-depth case studies of local intellectuals and their contributions to moral and intellectual debates within the community. Taking recurrent internal discussions on social affairs, politics, and appropriate Islamic conduct as a focus, this study sheds light on local practices of critique and reflection. In particular, three local intellectuals (two poets, one Islamic scholar) are portrayed against the background of regional intellectual history, Islamic scholarship, as well as common public debates and private discussions. The three contextual portrayals discuss exemplary issues for the wider field of research on philosophical discourse in Mombasa and the Swahili context on the whole, with reference to the lives and projects of distinct individual thinkers. Ultimately, the study directs attention beyond the regional and the African contexts, towards the anthropological study of knowledge and intellectual practice around the world.

Deleuze and Memorial Culture is a detailed study of contemporary forms of public remembrance. Adrian Parr considers the different character traumatic memory takes throughout the sphere of cultural production and argues that contemporary memorial culture has the power to put traumatic memory to work in a positive way. Drawing on the conceptual apparatus of Gilles Deleuze, she outlines the relevance of his thought to cultural studies and the wider phenomenon of traumatic theory and public remembrance. This book offers a revision of trauma theory that presents trauma not simply as a definitive experience and implicitly negative, but an experience that can foster a sense of hope and optimism for the future.

This book considers the politics of patronage appointments at the universities in Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews, exploring the ways in which 388 men secured posts in three Scottish universities between 1690 and 1806. Most professors were political appointees vetted and supported by political factions and their leaders. This comprehensive study explores the improving agenda of political patrons and of those they served and relates this to the Scottish Enlightenment. Emerson argues that what was happening in Scotland was also occurring in other parts of Europe where, in relatively autonomous localities, elite patrons also shaped things as they wished them to be. The role of patronage in the Enlightenment is essential to any understanding of its origins and course.

This is the first modern book about the artist David Wilkie (1785-1841), the first British painter to become an international celebrity. Based on extensive original research, the book explores the ways in which Wilkie's images, so beloved by his contemporaries, engaged with a range of cultural predicaments close to their hearts. In a series of thematic chapters, whose concerns range far beyond the details of Wilkie's own career, Tromans shows how, through Wilkie's thrillingly original work, British society was able to reimagine its own everyday life, its history, and its multinational (Anglo-Scottish) nature. Other themes covered include Wilkie's roles in defining the border between painting and anatomy in the representation of the human body, and in transforming the pleasures of connoisseurship from an elite to a popular audience. For the first time, all of Wilkie's major subject pictures are brought together, reproduced and discussed. With a great range of new archival material and original interp

This book examines the important issue of British propaganda to France during the Second World War and aims to show the value of the propaganda campaign to the British war effort. British Propaganda to France is a unique contribution to the field, not only in its examination of one of the least well-studied areas of British activity during the Second World War but also in the breadth of its approach. It surveys the organisation, operation and nature of the British propaganda effort towards the French people, including both white propaganda (BBC broadcasts and leaflets dropped by the RAF) and black propaganda (secret broadcasting stations, documents purporting to come from the Germans in France or distributed in France using clandestine methods, and rumours). Finally it examines the contemporary British understanding of the French and German reception of and reaction to this propaganda material, to show whether the campaign was an effective and well-directed use of resources. Almost all examinations of British foreign propaganda during the Second World War have focused on propaganda directed towards Germany. British propaganda to France, which in terms of quantity of output was actually the most important area of British propaganda, has never been examined in depth until now. This book adds a further chapter to our knowledge of propaganda in the Second World War, especially in the conduct of psychological warfare. It also touches on better-known areas such as RAF Bomber Command and its Operational Training Units, which handled aerial dissemination of British white propaganda leaflets over France, and the Special Operations Executive in France, which worked closely with the Political Warfare Executive in delivering much black propaganda.

The pervasiveness of Protestant natural law in the early modern period and its significance in the Scottish Enlightenment have long been recognised. This book reveals that Thomas Reid (1710-1796) - the great contemporary of David Hume and Adam Smith - also worked in this tradition. When Reid succeeded Adam Smith as professor of moral philosophy in Glasgow in 1764, he taught a course covering pneumatology, practical ethics, and politics. This section on practical ethics took its starting point from the system of natural law and rights published by Francis Hutcheson. Knud Haakonssen has reconstructed it here for the first time from Reid's manuscript lectures and papers, and it provides a considerable addition to our understanding not only of Reid but of the thought of the Scottish Enlightenment and of the education system of the time. The present work is a revised version of a work first published by Princeton University Press in 1990 which has long been out of print.

This fascinating history explores the ceremony of the oath of allegiance to the caliph from the time of the Prophet Muhammad until the fragmentation of the caliphate in the late ninth and tenth centuries.The study of royal rituals of accession and succession in Christian Rome, Byzantium and the early Medieval West has generated an extensive literature. This has however remained unexplored in scholarship on the Islamic world. This book redresses that by examining the ceremonial of accession to the caliphate in early Islam, covering the following aspects of the subject:* The place of ritual in political practice* Changes and continuities in that practice* The problem of how best to understand accounts of ritual. It also offers a contribution to major, current debates in Islamic history: the development of Arab-Muslim identity and the formation of the 'Islamic state'. It presents an accessible discussion of 'royal' ritual in early Islam which situates developments in the Islamic world in a late antique and early medieval context, adding an important comparative context to the book.

During the 19th century the U.S. and Britain came to share an economic profile unparalleled in their respective histories. This book suggests that this early high capitalism came to serve as the ground for a new kind of cosmopolitanism in the age of literary realism, and argues for the necessity of a transnational analysis based upon economic relationships of which people on both sides of the Atlantic were increasingly conscious. The nexus of this exploration of economics, aesthetics and moral philosophy is philanthropy. Pushing beyond reductive debates over the benevolent or mercenary qualities of industrial era philanthropy, the following questions are addressed: what form and function does philanthropy assume in British and American fiction respectively? What are the rhetorical components of a discourse of philanthropy and in which cultural domains did it operate? How was philanthropy practiced and represented in a period marked by self-interest and rational calculation? The author explores the relationship between philanthropy and literary realism in novels by Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, and William Dean Howells, and examines how each used the figure of philanthropy both to redefine the sentiments that informed social identity and to refashion their own aesthetic practices. The heart of this study consists of two comparative sections: the first contains chapters on contemporaries Hawthorne and Dickens; the second contains chapters on second-generation realists Eliot and Howells in order to examine the altruistic imagination at a culminating point in the history of literary realism.

'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?' That question was to be repeated endlessly during the anti-Communist investigations carried out by the House Committee on un-American Activities (HUAC) in the early 1950s. The refusal of ten members of the film industry to answer the question in 1947 led to the decision by studio bosses to fire them and never to hire known Communists in the future. The Hearings led to scores of actors, writers and directors being named as Communists or sympathisers. All were blacklisted and fired. Hollywood's Blacklists is a history of the political and cultural factors relevant to understanding the why and the how of the various investigations of the alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood. What was HUAC? What propaganda role did films play during World War II and the Cold War? What values were at stake in the confrontation between Left and Right that saw the former so resoundingly defeated and expelled from Hollywood? Answers to these and other questions are offered via analyses of the motives of the various players and of the tactics deployed by HUAC to reward collaboration and punish dissent.

Transatlantic Women's Literature is a valuable contribution to the evolving debate surrounding Transatlantic Studies and transatlantic literature. Its originality and importance lie in its focus on 20th century women's narratives of travel and adventure, and its deliberate expansion of the Transatlantic concept beyond the familiar US-UK axis to include Canada, South America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. The crisscrossing of the Atlantic is contested and problematised throughout. The book explores culturally resonant literature that imagines "e;views from both sides"e; and examines the imaginary, "e;in-between"e; space of the Atlantic. It offers a considered exploration of the way in which the space of the Atlantic-and women's space-work together in the construction of meaning in transatlantic texts.Focusing on contemporary literature, this book engages with a range of genres, from novellas and novels to essays, memoirs, and travel literature. Nella Larsen's Quicksand is read alongside Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine in relation to constructions of the exotic; Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation is explored in relation to memoirs of travel such as Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train; and Anne Tyler's transatlantic novel The Accidental Tourist is read alongside her latest transpacific novel, Digging to America as well as Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune. Readers will gain an appreciation of the complexity of the transatlantic narrative and the ways in which these narratives are defined by and infused with gender considerations.

This study explores maternity in the 'disciplines' of early modern England. Placing the reproductive female body centre-stage in Shakespeare's theatre, Laoutaris ranges beyond the domestic sphere in order to recuperate the wider intellectual, epistemological, and archaeological significance of maternity to the Renaissance imagination. Focusing on 'anatomy' in Hamlet, 'natural history' in The Tempest, 'demonology' in Macbeth, and 'heraldry' in Antony and Cleopatra, this book reveals the ways in which the maternal body was figured in, and in turn contributed towards the re-conceptualisation of, bodies of knowledge. Laoutaris argues that Shakespeare resists a monolithic concept of motherhood, presenting instead a range of contested 'maternities' which challenge the distinctive 'ways of knowing' these early disciplines worked to impose on the order of created nature.

What does it mean to 'think differently'? The ability to create thoughts is what lies at the base of philosophy and political theory and practice. One cannot hope to change the world, or even adequately critique it, without the possibility of the new in mental life. The Political Mind explores the possibility of thinking differently through connecting neuropsychological material on consciousness, nonconsciousness and affect to political theory. It spans diverse disciplines: from hard-edged neuropsychology to sociology, economics, political theory and Eastern and Western philosophy. Its originality lies in its ability to draw meaningful connections between such disparate literatures, weaving a coherent whole. It then applies the concepts created to the currently popular topics of consumerism and the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements.

By examining at length for the first time those places in Scotland that inspired MacDiarmid to produce his best poetry, Scott Lyall shows how the poet's politics evolved from his interaction with the nation, exploring how MacDiarmid discovered a hidden tradition of radical Scottish Republicanism through which he sought to imagine a new Scottish future. Adapting postcolonial theory, this book allows readers a fuller understanding not only of MacDiarmid's poetry and politics, but also of international modernism, and the social history of Scottish modernism.

This book is the first major study of a French silent cinema star. It focuses on Pierre Batcheff, a prominent popular cinema star in the 1920s, the French Valentino, best-known to modern audiences for his role as the protagonist of the avant-garde film classic Un chien andalou. Unlike other stars, he was linked to intellectual circles, especially the Surrealists. The book places Batcheff in the context of 1920s popular cinema, with specific reference to male stars of the period. It analyses the tensions he exemplifies between the 'popular' and the 'intellectual' during the 1920s, as cinema - the subject of intense intellectual interest across Europe - was racked between commercialism and 'art'. A number of the major films are studied in detail: Le Double amour (Epstein, 1925), Feu Mathias Pascal (L'Herbier, 1925), Education de prince (Diamant-Berger, 1927), Le Joueur d'echecs (Bernard, 1927), La Sirene des tropiques (Etievant and Nalpas, 1927), Les Deux timides (Clair, 1928), Un chien andalou (Bunuel, 1929), Monte-Cristo (Fescourt, 1929), and Baroud (Ingram, 1932).Key features:*The first major study of a French silent cinema star.*Provides an in-depth analysis of star performance.*Includes extensive appendices of documents from popular cinema magazines of the period.

The first major study of the historical writings of religious dissenters in England between the 1690s and the 1790s, this book redefines the way we understand religious and political identities in the eighteenth century.Dissenting Histories provides a synoptic overview of the development of religious dissent in England between the Restoration and the early nineteenth century, using Dissenters' writings to open up new and different perspectives on how the past was perceived in this period. These writings are located within the wider political culture and the author explores how the long shadow of 'the Great Rebellion' of the 1640s stretched across the division between Church and Dissent.The author is not simply concerned with history as a representation of the past, but history also as part of the bitterly divided collective memory of the present. Focusing on the relationship between the history that historians wrote, and the history that men and women experienced, John Seed provides the reader with new perspectives on eighteenth-century England.

Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies is an innovative exploration of the ethical and political significance of Cultural Studies and Post-Marxist discourse theory. It argues that although Cultural Studies and post-Marxism tend to present themselves as distinct entities, they actually share a project - that of taking on the political. Post-Marxism presents itself as having a developed theory of political strategy, while Cultural Studies has claimed to be both practical and political. Bowman examines these intertwined, overlapping, controversial and contested claims and orientations by way of a deconstructive reading that is led by the question of intervention: what is the intervention of post-Marxism, of Cultural Studies, of each into the other, and into other institutional and political contexts and scenes?Through considerations of key aspects of Cultural Studies and cultural theory, Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies argues that the very thing that is fundamental to both of these 'politicised' app

John Stuart Blackie was one of the most impressive and influential figures of nineteenth-century Scotland, as well as one of the most striking and flamboyant. As an intellectual he translated Goethe's Faust and brought first-hand knowledge of German philosophy to Scotland as a means of keeping the Enlightenment tradition alive. As first Professor of Humanity at Aberdeen from 1839 to 1852 and then as Professor of Greek at Edinburgh until 1882, he played a, perhaps the, central role in modernising the Scottish university curriculum, removing the dead hand of theological orthodoxy, raising standards (and the entry age), introducing tutorial teaching and establishing new chairs (including the Edinburgh chair of Celtic). His role in the reform of secondary school teaching was equally central. But Blackie was also a great 'public man', corresponding with great and famous throughout Great Britain and Europe, from Goethe and Carlyle to Ruskin and Gladstone, and filling the pages of newspapers and journals with writings on the major issues of the day. For the last thirty years of his life he became closely involved in issues of Scottish nationalism and home rule, and as champion of the crofters is largely responsible for their contemporary survival and unique status. Despite the existence of a rich archive of his papers and letters, there has been only one book devoted to his life: The Life of Professor John Stuart Blackie, the most distinguished Scotsman of the day, edited by J. G. Duncan and published in 1895.

This book presents a new and controversial theory about dialect contact and the formation of new colonial dialects. It examines the genesis of Latin American Spanish, Canadian French and North American English, but concentrates on Australian and South African English, with a particular emphasis on the development of the newest major variety of the language, New Zealand English. Peter Trudgill argues that the linguistic growth of these new varieties of English was essentially deterministic, in the sense that their phonologies are the predictable outcome of the mixture of dialects taken from the British Isles to the Southern Hemisphere in the 19th century. These varieties are similar to one another, not because of historical connections between them, but because they were formed out of similar mixtures according to the same principles. A key argument is that social factors such as social status, prestige and stigma played no role in the early years of colonial dialect development, and that the 'work' of colonial new-dialect formation was carried out by children over a period of two generations. The book also uses insights derived from the study of early forms of these colonial dialects to shed light back on the nature of 19th-century English in the British Isles.

Develops a metaphysics of problems to address longstanding issues in metaphysics Jeffrey Bell offers a novel approach to thinking about a number of longstanding problems in metaphysics, issues that have persisted throughout the history of philosophy. By developing a metaphysics of problems, he shows how the history of both the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy can be seen to be an ongoing response to the problem of regresses. By highlighting this shared history, Bell brings these two traditions back together to address problems that have been essential to their projects all along and central to much of the history of philosophy. Jeffrey A. Bell is Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Combines Deleuze's thought with Marxism, sociology, ethology and existentialism Jeffrey Bell argues that a motivating problematic for existentialist writers is the attempt to think through the implications of the problematic nature of life. He applies a Deleuzian theory of problems to an analysis of some key concepts in contemporary social and political theory. Building on the metaphysics of problems set out in his book, An Inquiry into Analytic-Continental Metaphysics, he provides a new way of integrating the concerns of existentialist writers into contemporary political and social debates. Jeffrey A. Bell is Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University

In 1977 Grant Simpson published a seminal article in the Scottish Historical Review: which asked if 'anything conceivably new can be said about a document so well known in Scotland as the Declaration of Arbroath?' The contributors to this volume demonstrate that there can. The text of the Declaration, written in 1320, followed closely an Irish prototype and was structured in the fashion that was expected at the papal court, where the letter was sent. It drew heavily on political ideologies and legal concepts with which English and continental intellectuals were familiar. And it was brought to papal attention through diplomatic means and practices which were commonly understood across Europe. Although the Declaration disappeared from political discourse in the centuries which immediately followed its dispatch, its rediscovery from the later seventeenth century is traced in hitherto unprecedented depth. Its relevance was not just to Scotland. The question of whether it influenced the American Declaration of Independence has oft been mooted but is here closely investigated. Today the Declaration remains a controversial document, inspirational to many, misappropriated by others, and even feared by some. Sharper focus on context; new textual analysis; unsurpassed investigation of the afterlife of the declaration in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Terry Brotherstone is Emeritus Research Fellow in History at the University of Aberdeen. David Ditchburn is Associate Professor in Medieval History at Trinity College Dublin and co-editor of the Scottish Historical Review.