Böcker utgivna av EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

Instead of making readers into better people, what if fiction could help us to become better animals? On Fiction and Being a Good Animal argues that we should abandon the persistent humanist idea that fiction can produce better people. Instead, we should read and value fiction according to its ability to help us to envision being better animals. Inspired by Theodor W. Adorno, David Rando defines a good animal as one who does not live a life of domination. He argues that when readers approach fiction's wishful images with non-anthropocentric expectations, we are rewarded by anthropocosmic visions of the world - ones in which humans are in and with the world but no longer at the centre of it. In compelling readings of Agustina Bazterrica, T. C. Boyle, Leonora Carrington, Marian Engel, Karen Joy Fowler, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, Clarice Lispector, Kenzaburo Oe, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jesmyn Ward, the book explores wishful images that pertain to the nonhuman and more-than-human worlds. Readers will discover in this fiction wishful images relating to irreconcilable minds and experiences, human-nonhuman family relationships, love and risk across race and species, and shared vulnerability, communion and pleasure.

Bringing together world-leading scholars from the Global North and Global South, this book interrogates ideas of multiculturalism and their resilience in politics, policy and culture. To do so, each chapter critically engages with one of the foremost thinkers and proponents in the field, Tariq Modood. As a whole, the book contributes to debates on citizenship and diversity, identity and belonging, and nationalism and migration.

By bringing together eminent scholars, this book highlights the current scholarship in the field of migration, which tries to present a counter-narrative to the popular anti-immigrant rhetoric and the populist domestic politics of the US. There has been a growing global trend of alternative histories and anthropologies that brings forth the voices from the margins and the developing world. This volume, in that sense, without undermining the US's eminence, tries to deprovincialise (Burke, 2020) or deparochialise it from within or through the histories of the immigrants. In other words, it attempts to re-read the US's emergence as an important power with immigration as the site of analysis. It provides a comprehensive and in-depth theoretical and empirical discussion that will appeal to scholars and practitioners alike.

In June 2022, former miners secured through the Scottish Parliament a collective pardon for convictions acquired during the 1984-85 miners' strike. The Miners' Strike (Pardons) (Scotland) Act recognised the distinct injustices facing Scottish strikers: twice as likely to be arrested as those in England and Wales and three times as likely to be sacked. This book analyses the injustices of the strike, and shows how the pardons were won, using thirty oral history testimonies from former strikers and family members. They remembered the injustices of arrest, conviction and employment dismissal. They emphasised how the National Coal Board, police and courts operated as confederates of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, silencing union voice and closing pits deemed unprofitable, to maximise returns from intended privatisation. These testimonies were used in the successful campaign which pushed the Scottish government to provide the broad-based collective and posthumous pardon that was won in Parliament in 2022.

Deleuze, Mathematics, Metaphysics provides new solutions to the central problems of the philosophy of mathematics by reconstructing Deleuze's metaphysics. It does so through direct engagement with analytic and continental philosophy, along with the formal and natural sciences. These new Deleuzian solutions reject equally other-worldly accounts of mathematics, such as Platonism, and accounts which treat mathematics as a useful fiction or an empty formalist game. Instead, Deleuze, Mathematics, Metaphysics argues that mathematical truth is grounded in the necessity of difference itself. Since difference is entirely this-worldly, the truth of mathematics does not require us to posit the reality of transcendent entities or possible worlds. Doing so not only provides a new metaphysics of mathematics; it also explains the usefulness of mathematics for science and why mathematical truth appear to have such otherworldly properties in the first place.

What in terms of Alice Munro's creative artistry and creative power allowed her to become the first and only short story writer, the first and only Canadian, and just the thirteenth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Literature? And exactly when during Munro's career did her artistry and power advance to ensure that she would earn such world-wide renown? The answers lie in studying the boldly innovative yet greatly under-examined group of her four mid-career breakthrough books. Our volume therefore provides a carefully orchestrated analysis of Munro's subtle yet potent handling of form, technique and style both within individual stories and across these special collections. Reading Alice Munro's Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices not only addresses a significant vacancy in Munro criticism - and, by extension, in all short story criticism - but, equally importantly, offers an exciting new model for how criticism can be collectively written.

Alfred Hitchcock was a major figure in the development and flourishing of film noir. His noir films became an inspirational foundation of the neo-noir movement beginning in the 1970s, from Brian de Palma's mash-up homages to Hitchcock originals such as Obsession (1976) and Body Double (1984) to the dark political thrillers of the era that explore the underside of American life, all of which owe a substantial debt to Hitchcock. However, the central role of Hitchcock in the long history of film noir has seldom been acknowledged in work devoted to his career and noir criticism more generally. Instead, there has been a tendency to consider Hitchcock's many dark thrillers and crime melodramas as sui generis, that is, as "Hitchcock films" that are somehow separate and distinct from industry trends. But this is to take a narrow view of the director's accomplishments that underestimates his substantial contributions to film history. Alfred Hitchcock and Film Noir will be the first book-length treatment of the impressive corpus of Hitchcock noir films considered as such, as well as of his connection more generally to the emergence and flourishing of this important cinematic trend.

In Shakespeare's Britain rivers were not only a crucial form of travel and important natural resources which sustained communities and provided employment but were also sites to which myths and memories accrued and which could be used to figure religious ideas of cleansing and the waters of life. Pageants were performed on them, legends grew up about their names and led to plays and poems being written about personified river gods and goddesses, and stories were told of historic battles which had been fought on their banks. These essays explore the cultural and literary geography of rivers in the early modern period and the ways in which they shaped the lives and identities of those who lived near them. By charting changes (both manmade and natural) to the way in which rivers ebb and flow the book also reminds us of the urgency of the climate crisis.

Explores the biopolitics of modern metabolism, of how humans manage the world through their peristaltic systems, as they ingest food and produce waste. Set against a backdrop of Marx's theory of how we "mediate, regulate, and control" our metabolic relation to nature, of the rise of a bourgeois faecal habitus, of the relegation of domestic waste management to female "meta-industrial" workers, of depleted agricultural fields and polluted urban centres, Dissident Gut performs three in-depth case studies of early twentieth-century English and European women whose wayward intestinal systems intervene in larger social, affective, and political networks, and who assert a peristaltic grammar of desire and resistance. Intervenes in theoretical discussions around the gut-brain axis, biopolitics and biopower, materialist feminism, psychoanalysis and hysteria, bodily habitus, and waste management.

Finnegans Wake - Human and Nonhuman Histories opens new ground by exploring the productive tension between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric readings of James Joyce's final modernist masterpiece. Drawing on the most up-to-date theories and methodologies (the Anthropocene, new materialism, petroculture studies, the blue humanities, animal studies, ecofeminism, ecomedia), twelve leading Joyce scholars offer valuable new insights into the interwoven historical and planetary dimensions of Finnegans Wake. The volume's focus allows the contributors to read the Wake's nonhuman imaginary in original, often surprising comparative contexts (colonialism, the Irish Revival, the Free State's energy policies, the invention of television) and to spotlight enlightening nonhuman themes in Joyce's circular history (bogs, storms, rivers, bodily fluids, skin, wolves, mourning, DNA, atoms, labour, music). As these chapters show, a century later, Finnegans Wake remains a vibrant and vital text in which to interrogate the limits, exploitations and common plight of human and nonhuman life in the 21st-century.

The decades between the French Revolution and the mid-nineteenth century were a period of radical transformation in Scottish society and culture on many levels. The Scottish Enlightenment had seen a striking blossoming of the natural sciences, with the development of a distinctive and influential national scientific culture. The natural philosopher David Brewster was educated in Edinburgh amidst the intellectual ferment of the late Enlightenment but lived to end his days as a grand old man of Victorian science. This book uses the long and eventful career of Brewster as a lens through which to explore themes of rupture and continuity in Scottish scientific culture in a period of dramatic social and political change.

With an interdisciplinary agenda, Film Phenomenologies investigates the emerging field of film phenomenology, linking the fundamental significance of early thinkers and related methods of phenomenological investigation to newer emphases and diverse voices, such as Gaston Bachelard, Karen Barad, Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Iris Murdoch and Hermann Schmitz. Established scholars consider various themes, including colonial duration and the politics of refusal, feeling feminist time, the exchange of play, scalar theory and scattered bodies, spectatorship and the entanglement of montage, disability, dance and speculative embodiment, AI phenomenology and breath gestures, cinematic atmospheres, the precarious intimacy of the film screen, stardom and biopics, and Black lived experience. Divided into three parts, Film Phenomenologies offers a collective combination of phenomenological approaches, braiding classic and critical methods to explore aesthetic, embodied, ethical, and political perspectives. It is the first collection to provide a substantial engagement with diverse and inclusive directions in the field of film and media studies.

The Midcentury Minor Novel brings to light a distinctive mode of the American novel emergent in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It explains how a group of neglected writers reimagined the novel as a minor form, defined by its constraints rather than its possibilities. Reflecting a broadly held view among critics that midcentury fiction was in crisis or decline, these 'minor writers' sought to make a virtue of what were taken to be the novel's bleak prospects, crafting fictions of modest proportions and seemingly attenuated ambition that reflexively explored their own aesthetic limitations. Ironically, the book argues, midcentury anxieties about the 'death of the novel' breathed new life into it. Blending literary criticism and intellectual history, the book offers close readings of five writers who shared this curious project for the novel, an account of which adds texture to our understanding of the aesthetic diversity of midcentury American literature.

Lyn Hejinian is considered one of the most important avant-garde poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with five poems written from 1963 to 1965, The Proposition collects Hejinian's previously uncollected works from 1963-1983 in one unique volume. The individual early works curated in this volume broaden the existing published collections of Hejinian's works, showing Hejinian's play with form, visual language, and linguistic experiment before the poet's move to project orientated writing practices. With a new Preface by Lyn Hejinian, and five essays by prominent critics in the field, the volume offers both a new collection of Hejinian's poetry and an important scholarly resource for students, scholars, and readers of contemporary avant-garde writing more widely.

Few polities were more instrumental to the rise of the East India Company and the advent of British colonial rule in South Asia than the Mughal successor state of Awadh (c. 1722-1856). And few individuals influenced the making of the Awadh regime and its pivotal relationship with the Company more than the chief consorts (begams) of its ruling dynasty. Drawing on previously unexamined Persian sources, this book centres the begams of Awadh within a revised history of state-formation and conceptual change in pre- and early colonial India. In so doing, it posits the begams as essential, if contested, builders of both the Awadh regime and the Company state, and as ambivalent partners in forging evolving political economies and emerging conceptual languages of statehood and sovereignty in early colonial India.

This book unravels the complexities of traditional storytelling and uses creative analytical techniques to uncover the meanings of the stories we tell. The reader is first acquainted with conceptualisations of how stories make meaning in our lives, then guided through a selection of stories from the rich traditions of Scotland's Traveller and Nawken/Nacken communities. Beginning with a nuanced historical overview of the communities, Traveller Storytelling in Scotland: Folklore, Ideology and Cultural Identity then draws on archives, texts and interviews to introduce readers to the unique and vibrant folklore of Scotland's Travellers and Nawken/Nacken. It connects ethnology and literary criticism to contextualise folklore and reveal how its ideological priorities underpin cultural identity. Utilising diverse analytical techniques, this book is a timely examination of a folkloric idiom that has, until now, been sorely in need of further scrutiny. It showcases the sophistication and enduring relevance of folkloric expressions to contemporary Scottish culture.

The Korean War Novel examines the ways that novels written by Korean and Asian American writers have represented the Korean War. By studying the ideological contours of works by Richard E. Kim, Ahn Junghyo, Susan Choi, Ha Jin, Choi In-hun and Hwang Sok-yong, it documents the range of historical narratives that have alternatively framed the Korean War as an international war, a civil war, a reverse postcolonial war or 'proxy war', a war between the genders, and an attempt to de-escalate the Cold War itself. The dual role of North East Asians as both victims and willing agents of the Cold War comes into focus in revisiting the conflict from the post-Cold War perspective of decolonisation. Suk Koo Rhee writes back against the authoritative version of Cold War historiography to explain the contemporary nature of the unfinished conflict on the Korean peninsula today.

Gardens were both a setting and showcase for nearly every aspect of social and daily life at the royal court during the early Islamic period in Western Asia. Safa Mahmoudian uses a wide range of primary source materials including contemporary Arabic manuscripts, together with archaeological reports, aerial photographs, and archaeologists' letters and diaries. Through close readings of this evidence, Mahmoudian creates a picture of these gardens in their historical, architectural and environmental contexts and examines various factors that influenced their design and placement. In doing so, Mahmoudian adds to our understanding of these gardens and palaces and, ultimately, early Islamic-period court culture as a whole.

Tackling digital effects such as colourisation, time-ramping, compositing and photo-realistic rendering, this monograph explores how the growing use of these post-photographic procedures shapes our relationship with the image and the world that the image represents. At stake is the ability to critically engage with the digital techniques that mediate perceptions of reality. Through a series of case-studies the book connects the dominant techniques of hybridisation with emergent ways of being in our increasingly hybrid physical-digital world. Pointing at the relationship between mainstream visual culture and the manifold imperatives of digital technology and digital culture, Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital Visual Effects highlights how a handful of digital visual effects are coming to shape the way we live.

Human Spoken Interaction as a Complex Adaptive System explains how human spoken communication functions, combining two separate complex adaptive systems: the universal 'interaction engine' and language(s), which now number around 7,000. Siegel and Seedhouse offer a comprehensive overview of how the components and processes of the interaction engine work together to enable us to understand each other, whatever the language. Through combining Complexity Science and Conversation Analysis, this book explains how to simultaneously analyse spoken interaction on micro and macro scales. Detailed analyses of L2 learners reveal them to be simultaneously expert in using the interaction engine and inexpert in using the specific language. The study shows that the basic characteristics of the interaction engine are the same as for other life-related complex systems and that it is possible to access the perspectives of participants inside this complex adaptive system as it is evolving.

Drawing on a wealth of material from children's periodicals from the Victorian era to the early twentieth century, Kristine Moruzi examines how the concept of the charitable child has been defined through the press. Charitable ideals became increasingly prevalent at a time of burgeoning social inequities and cultural change, shaping expectations that children were capable of and responsible for charitable giving. While the child as the object of charity has received considerable attention, less focus has been paid to how and why children have been encouraged to help others. Yet the ways in which children were positioned to see themselves as people who could and should help - in whatever forms that assistance might take - are crucial to understanding how children and childhood were conceptualised in the past. This book uses children's print culture to examine the relationship between children and charitable institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to foreground children's active roles.

This monograph addresses a subject in star studies that is still developing outside of (and even within) Hollywood and cinemas of the West - the film couple. Known as the 'love team' in the Philippines, they are a transmedia phenomenon whose sheer ubiquity and variety make them an ideal case study to work towards an understanding of the film couple and how they contribute to the pleasure of watching films. Film couples move beyond understanding the star as an individual, particularly where a popular love team is a prerequisite early training ground for successful stardom in the studio system. I explore three different identities that construct film couples and offer a vocabulary to distinguish between these identities and consider how they are inflected by each other. I then trace how the couple is constructed at various stages by stars, studios, film and other cross-media appearances, their fandom and wider societal context.

Rousseau's Politics of Taste challenges the popular but partial pictures we have of Rousseau as an inconsistent 'ancient' utopian or a 'modern' abstract philosopher with a systematising spirit. Combining intellectual history and political theory, it reinterprets his understandings of pleasure and happiness, judgment and amour-propre, inequality, the general will and, above all, taste. Rousseau's readers have long recognised the complex tensions in his thought. By reconstructing his theory of taste as a kind of modern Epicureanism, this book provides a way of articulating neglected patterns in those tensions and, a new understanding of what he was attempting to achieve with his political thought.

The twentieth century was the century of the deconstruction of all absolutes: of liberation understood as a critique of every meaningful structure. In this sense, conflict was understood as an instrument of the rupture of every form, institution and community. Niccolò Machiavelli is the first in our tradition to think about the productivity of political conflict - its capacity, on the model of ancient Rome, to construct new orders, institutions and forms of life. Francesco Marchesi offers an original reading of Machiavellian thought as well as a critique of some of the most influential contemporary theories of conflict including Foucault, Schmitt, Arendt, Lacan and Althusser. In doing so, he proposes an innovative, conflictual political ontology that, with Machiavelli, is capable of conceiving the affirmative, and not only deconstructive, power of conflict.

Drawing on thousands of naturalistic online interactions from Ready to Go, a popular football message board centred on North East England, North East Vernacular English Online describes dialect at the levels of morphology, syntax, lexis and - through a study of orthographic innovation - phonology, charting historical continuities as well as more recent developments. Pearce also examines metalinguistic commentary and debate on the website, revealing folk-attitudes and perceptions of linguistic variation. Informed by the latest research, but also building on the foundational scholarship of the English Dialect Society and the Survey of English Dialects, this volume will appeal to academics in the fields of sociolinguistics and dialectology, as well as undergraduates, post-graduates and general readers interested in the language and culture of England's most distinctive region.

Drawing on a wide variety of Chinese-language publications and in-depth interviews with high-school students, Mobilising China's One-Child Generation provides systematic evidence of the spread of martial logic and techniques into Chinese schools. The book explores how China has implemented Patriotic Education (PE) and National Defence Education (NDE) programmes to foster love for the nation and the Party-state, mobilise the population to fight modern wars in the information age, and encourage youth to join the army. It studies how these programmes present the tropes of war and the military to youth, and how they are related to shifting constructions of gender and the national collectivity. It also documents students' varied perceptions-and notably contestations-of this militarised ethos, complicating our understanding of popular nationalism and militarisation processes in this authoritarian global power.

Many critics classify Vladimir Nabokov as a highbrow humourist, a refined wordsmith overly fond of playful puzzles and private in-jokes whose art appeals primarily to an intellectually-sophisticated readership. This study presents a more balanced portrait, placing equal emphasis on the broader, earthier humour that is such a marked feature of Nabokov's writing, which draws on the human body and all things physical for its laughs: sex and scatology, farce and slapstick. Moving between the metaphysical and the physical, the cosmic and the comic, mind and matter, it presents Nabokov as a writer at home in both high and low forms of humour, a comedian who is capable of producing as many belly laughs as brainteasers, and of appealing to a much wider readership than is commonly supposed.

For seventy years, William Gillies has been seen as a placid painter of landscape and decorative still life. Andrew McPherson explodes this view to reveal a modernist whose response to the instabilities and violence of modernity touched universals of human experience. Gillies' idiom was shaped by institutions for artistic production unique to Scotland. But it was the politics of Scotland's connections to the rest of the British Isles that produced his mythic and misleading reputation. New paintings and new meanings are uncovered placing the micro-effects of modernity on mental health, family and community in the wider contexts of war, nationalism and public patronage. McPherson also shows how this changing world led Gillies towards new applications of modernist expression. Lavishly illustrated, and referencing almost one thousand works, this major reappraisal is an indispensable source on the cultural politics of a four-nation state and the reception of modernism in Britain.

This book examines the practice of risk allocation in the offshore energy industry through the public policy lens and offers a novel perspective on the concept of gross negligence in risk allocation. This perspective is founded on the proportionality element of distributive justice in burden distribution. The assessment of how mutual indemnity clauses apply as an absolute shield against liability arising from gross negligence reveals that moral hazard can result from the practice. In the analysis, this book considers the risk allocation practice in PSC and Concession regimes and how parties' liability is determined in drilling contracts. This book considers gross negligence a sui generis risk and provides a definitional pathway for determining when gross negligence occurs and how it should apply to offshore drilling contracts. Thus, it advances an environmental sustainability approach to offshore petroleum drilling operations. This book will be useful to operators and contractors, resource-rich countries, insurance companies, practitioners, scholars, and academics interested in risk allocation in the petroleum industry.

As evidenced by the famed Book of Kells and monumental high crosses, Scotland and Ireland have long shared a distinctive artistic tradition. The story of how this tradition developed and flourished for another millennium through survival, adaptation and revival is less well known. Some works were preserved and repaired as relics, objects of devotion believed to hold magical powers. Respect for the past saw the creation of new artefacts through the assemblage of older parts, or the creation of fakes and facsimiles. Meanings and values attached to these objects, and to places with strong early Christian associations, changed over time but their 'Celtic' and/or 'Gaelic' character has remained to the forefront of Scottish and Irish national expression. Exploring themes of authenticity, imitation, heritage, conservation and nationalism, these interdisciplinary essays draw attention to a variety of understudied artworks and illustrate the enduring link that exists between Scottish and Irish cultures.