Books published by EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

Considers how Joseph Conrad's works engage with silence

A genealogy of the concept of the multitude and Spinoza's democratic political philosophy Drawing on new and relatively unknown sources, Sonja Lavaert traces the genealogy of modern democratic thought from Machiavelli to Spinoza and his circle, and into the early eighteenth century. The chapters follow these authors, their writings, and the anonymous works chronologically. The notion of the multitude is central, which Spinoza and his circle investigated in two senses: as a specific political form - the republic of the multitude, or democracy; and as the factual, intrinsic diversity of the multitude - the political constitution and dynamics. Spinoza has long been recognised for the central role he played in the development of modern democratic ideals through his treatises on politics and the freedom to philosophise. Lavaert argues that he drew on Machiavelli for these ideas and in the process dispelled the Machiavellian counterimage created by the Italian scholar's political and Christian opponents. Sonja Lavaert is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. Albert Gootjes is an intellectual historian specializing in early modern theology and philosophy.

Offers the first book-length study of Norwegian horror cinema

Screen Acting, proposes a cognitive model for analysing the creative practices of western film and television actors, from auditions through to their performances on set. Leberg argues that film and television acting is a practice of soliciting a range of simultaneous and complimentary empathetic connections with their characters, their fellow actors, and their anticipated audiences. Interviews with star actors and professional day-players alike are placed in dialogue with modern cognitive and phenomenological research from film, theatre, television, and literary studies to present a critical vision of acting that speaks from the actor outwards towards their audiences. The final performance may be what the audience sees but, for the actor, the performance is simply the endpoint of a long process of training, preparation, imagination, and creative experimentation. Dan Leberg is a Lecturer in Media Studies and Journalism at the University of Groningen, and in Film Studies at Amsterdam University College. Prior to his graduate studies, Leberg worked as a professional classical theatre and film actor for almost 25 years. Alongside his studies, he worked as the Programming Coordinator of the Cinema Politica Network, the world's largest exhibitor of political documentary cinema. His research focuses on cognition in screen media, motion capture performance, and Shakespeare on film and television.

This book tells the history of Herat, from its desolation under Chingiz Khan in 1222, to its capitulation to Tamerlane in 1381. Unlike the other three quarters of Khurasan (Balkh, Marw, Nishapur), which were ravaged by the Mongols, Herat became an important political, cultural and economic centre of the eastern Islamic world. The post-Mongol age in which an autochthonous Tajik dynasty, the Kartids, ruled the region set the foundations for Herat's Timurid-era splendors. Divided into two parts (a political-military history and a social-economic history), the book explains why the Mongol Empire rebuilt Herat: its rationales and approaches; and Chinggisid internecine conflicts that impacted on Herat's people. It analyses the roles of Iranians, Turks and Mongols in regional politics; in devising fortifications; in restoring commercial and cultural edifices; and in resuscitating economic and cultural activities in the Herat Quarter.

In AD 293 the Roman world was plunged into a bold new experiment in government. Four soldiers shared the empire between them: two senior emperors, Diocletian and Maximian, and two junior emperors, Constantius and Galerius. This regime, now known as the Tetrarchy, engaged with dynastic power in thoroughly unconventional ways: Diocletian and Maximian presented themselves as brothers despite being unrelated; Diocletian and Galerius repeatedly thwarted the dynastic ambitions of individual Tetrarchs and their sons; the sons themselves were variously hostages, symbols of imperial unity and possibly targets of assassination; and the importance of women to imperial self-representation was much reduced. This is the first book to focus on the Tetrarchy as an imperial dynasty. Examining the dynasty through the lens of Rome's armies, it presents the Tetrarchic dynasty as a military experiment, created by a network of provincial career soldiers and tailored to the needs of the different regional armies. Mustering a diverse array of evidence, including archaeology, coins, statuary, inscriptions, panegyrics and invective, the author provides bold new interpretations of Tetrarchic dynastic politics, looking at brotherhood, empresses, imperial collegiality, military politics, hereditary succession and the roles of sons within Roman dynasties.

Gideon Baker provides a gripping genealogy of Western philosophy as a history of questioning. From Socrates to Judith Butler, he reveals the ancient in the modern and reflects on newer questions, like: is human being uniquely defined by questioning? And does the negativity of questioning lead to nihilistic despair? Staying faithful to his theme, Baker calls Western philosophy itself into question, asking why questioning should be seen as central to the true life. Is this not the same prejudice that led Socrates, at the beginning of Western philosophy, to ask whether the unexamined life is worth living? Far from being timeless, the questioning that lies at the heart of Western philosophy has a strange and unsettling history that concerns us all.

This book positions the 'California Gothic' as a highly significant regional subgenre which articulates anxieties specific to the historical, cultural and geographical characteristics of the 'Golden State'. California has long been perceived as a utopian space, but it is also haunted by the spectres of European and Anglo-American imperialism, genocide, racial and economic discrimination, natural disaster and aggressive infrastructural and commercial development. Drawing on the work of California historians and cultural commentators, this study explores the ways in which the nightmarish flipside of the 'California Dream' has been depicted within horror and Gothic.

(P)rescription Narratives reveals how the act of narrative creates the subjects of disability, race, and gender during a period of censorship in American history. In a Crip Affect reading of woman-authored medical fiction from the Comstock law era, this book astutely argues that women writers of medical fiction practice storytelling as a form of narrative medicine that prescribes various forms of healing as an antidote to the shame engineered by an American culture of censorship. Woman-authored medical fiction exposes the limitations of social construction and materiality in conversations about the female body since subject formation relies upon multiple force relations that shape and are shaped by one another in ongoing processes that do not stop despite our efforts to interpret cultural artifacts. These multiple failures - to censor, to resist, to interpret - open up a space for negotiating how we engage the world with greater empathy.

This book presents an analysis of English, French and German language fiction about the so-called Arab Spring. Through a transnational comparison of texts by a wide range of authors, both non-diasporic and diasporic, Julia Wurr investigates the commercialisation of Neo-Orientalist and securitised elements in short fiction and novels aimed at the Western literary market, and examines the role which the literary market plays in constructing, aestheticising and marketing mental boundaries between the Islamicate world and the West. By bringing together approaches from the social sciences with literary close readings, this study does not only carve out recurring tropes, frames and figurations which are complicit in diffusing a Neo-Orientalist and anti-Muslim imagery into mainstream society, but it also shows how influential frames of insecurity - precarity, affective masculinity and terror - refract the adverse psychosocial consequences of the neoliberal project into a securitisation of the Other.

A lonely damsel imprisoned within a castle or convent cell. The eavesdropping of a prisoner next door. The framed image of a woman with a sinister past. These familiar tropes from 1790s novels and tales exploded onto the English literary scene in 'low-brow' titles of Gothic romance. Surprisingly, however, they also re-emerged as features of major Victorian poems from the 1830s to 1870s. Such signature tropes -- inquisitional overhearing; female confinement and the damsel in distress; supernatural switches between living and dead bodies -- were transfigured into poetic forms that we recognise and teach today as canonically Victorian. The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry identifies a poetics of Gothic enclosure constitutive of high Victorian poetry that came to define key nineteenth-century poetic forms, from the dramatic monologue, to women's sonnet sequences and metasonnets, to Pre-Raphaelite picture poems.

The early nineteenth century saw the dead take on new life in Scottish literature; sometimes quite literally. This book brings together a range of Scottish Romantic texts, identifying a shared interest an imagined national dead. It argues that the publications of Edinburgh-based publisher William Blackwood were the crucible for this new form of Scottish cultural nationalism. Scottish Romantic authors including James Hogg, John Wilson and John Galt, use the Romantic kirkyard to engage with, and often challenge, contemporary ideas of modernity. The book also explores the extensive ripples that this cultural moment generated across Scottish, British and wider Anglophone literary sphere over the next century.

Few modern materials have been as central to histories of environmental toxicity, medical ignorance, and legal liability as asbestos. A naturally occurring mineral fibre once hailed for its ability to guard against fire, asbestos is now best known for the horrific illnesses it causes. This book offers a new take on the established history of asbestos from a literary critical perspective, showing how literature and film during and after modernism responded first to the material's proliferation through the built environment, and then to its catastrophic effects on human health. Starting from the surprising encounters writers have had with asbestos--Franz Kafka's part ownership of an asbestos factory, Primo Levi's work in an asbestos mine, and James Kelman's early life as an asbestos factory worker--the book looks to literature to rethink received truths in historical, legal and medical scholarship. In doing so, it models an interdisciplinary approach for tracking material intersections between modernism and the environmental and health humanities. Asbestos - The Last Modernist Object offers readers a compelling new method for using cultural objects when thinking about how to live with the legacies of toxic materials.

This book offers various approaches to understanding the short form in television. The collection is structured in three parts, first engaging with the concept of brevity as inherent to television fiction, before going on to examine how the rapidly-changing landscape of "television" outside traditional networks might adapt this trope to new contexts made accessible by streaming platforms. The final part of the study examines how this short form is inextricable from a larger context, either in its relation to seriality (from the crossover to the "bottle episode") and/or a larger structure, for example in the reception of a larger whole through short but evocative clips in order to better weigh their impact (from "Easter Egg" fan videos to "Analyses of"). The collection concludes with an interview with award-winning screenwriter Vincent Poymiro about his French series En thérapie (an adaptation of BeTipul/In Treatment).

This book examines the poetry of Hart Crane and his circle within transnational modernist periodical culture. It reappraises Crane's poetry and reception and introduces several lost works by the poet, including critical prose, reviews and 'Nopal', a poem written in Mexico. Through its exploration of Crane's close engagement with periodical culture, it provides a rich and detailed panorama of twentieth-century literary and artistic communities. In particular, this monograph offers a vivid portrait of forgotten periodicals and their artistic communities, examines the periodical contexts in which modernist poetry fused material and aesthetic experimentation and explores Crane's important and neglected influence on modern and contemporary poetry.

This book tells the story of a manuscript repository found all over the pre-modern Muslim world: the khizanat al-kutub, or treasury of books. The focus is on the undisclosed Arabic manuscript culture of a small but vibrant South Asian Shi'i Muslim community, the Bohras. It looks at how books that were once part of one of the biggest imperial book repositories of the medieval Muslim world, the khizanat of the Fatimids of North Africa and Egypt (909CE-1171CE) ended up having a rich social life among the Bohras across the Western Indian Ocean, starting in Yemen and ending in Gujarat. It shows how, under strict conditions of secrecy, and over several centuries, one khizana was turned into another, its manuscripts gaining new meanings in the new social realities in which they were preserved, read, transmitted, venerated and copied into. What emerged was a new distinctive Bohra Ismaili manuscript culture shaped by its local contexts.

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.

Writing the Past in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction examines contemporary novels profoundly shaped by a sense of historical consciousness. Authors including Ben Lerner, Colson Whitehead, Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru and Garth Greenwell each use flashbacks, historical parallels and non-sequential narrative arrangements to emphasise the re-emergence, in a twenty-first-century context, of historical structures and circumstances. This study explores how these frequent moments of temporal slippage amount to a 'falling out of time', as characters are forced to confront the past crises which continue to exert pressure on their own contemporary moment.