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In Keiser's words, "each work depicts, in a knowingly ridiculous manner, a natural philosopher digging into brain matter in the hope of exposing the mechanisms that make the mind tick" (pp. 143-144). Keiser's focus is not on how the nerves and various brain structures appear during a dissection, which is straightforward and verifiable. Locke did not partake in the kinds of fictions Willis, Cavendish, and others were promoting about the nerve spirits. [Extracted from the article]

Chapter 3 focuses on Euhemerus of Messene, following recent scholarly interest in the topic (including Marek Winiarczyk's 2002 monograph, republished in 2013, when Whitmarsh's book first appeared). The book contains four previously unpublished studies: Chapter 2, "The Romance of Genre", Chapter 3, "Belief in Fiction: Euhemerus of Messene and the I Sacred Inscription i ", Chapter 11, "Lucianic Paratragedy", and Chapter 14, "Adventures of the Solymoi", preceded by a brief Introduction. Tim Whitmarsh's collection of essays has seen the light of day at a time when the academic world is again reconsidering "classicism" and modernity's relationship to the "classical.". [Extracted from the article]

This article reads Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005) in dialogue with Édouard Glissant's concept of "opacity", an ethical and esthetic stance that values impeding comprehension. This novel's opacity arises from various limiting mechanisms – linguistic, translational, and formal – which both invite and inhibit interpretation, and in so doing open up a space in which readers can think with the text. Bringing The People of Paper and Glissant's thought together shows how Plascencia's text thickens and complicates readerly engagement, and so increases the esthetic purchase of the novel. The People of Paper both invites and deflects the idea that esthetic experience might offer a route to understanding the social or that it provides the foundation of a more ethical relation with others. In parallel, Plascencia's innovative use of the page and his invocation of an intertextual history of such innovation expands the scope of Glissant's theory, by incorporating the physical medium of the book and the workings of genre history as components of an opaque poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary narratives constitute memory-archives that challenge state silencing of anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984. The paper draws upon Rigney's [2021. “Remaking Memory and the Agency of the Aesthetic.” Memory Studies 14 (1): 10–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/175069802097] idea of ‘agency of the aesthetic’ in generating memorability to show how cultural representations participate in unforgetting of traumatic pasts. The paper argues that in creating memorability of a difficult history, the texts bring state-narrative to a limit and open an alternative space where confrontation with traumatic-memories does not preclude possibility of hope. The texts feed into ‘memory-as-relevance’ as the mediation of memories of trauma, resilience, and hope carries possibility of effectuating subtle changes in the dominant narrative of anti-Sikh pogrom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caring is the theme Ali Smith pursues consistently throughout her fiction. She seems particularly concerned with all kinds of nonstandard caring situations, care that apparently cannot make any difference included. In Like Kate offers her orange kangaroo to the dead girl living in the drain, in Hotel World Clare tries to intensely experience life for the sake of her dead sister, in How to Be Both George resolves to watch each day a porn movie for the sake of the actress presumably abused in its production. The paper suggests that such nonsensical − predictably ineffective − caring can be read as a typically metamodernist whole-hearted commitment to a cause that is doomed to failure (cf. Vermeulen and van den Akker's "Notes on Metamodernism," 2010). However, the caring in question also can be interpreted as a hopeful cooperation with intimated spiritual forces on the assumption of postsecularism (cf. McClure's Partial Faiths, 2007). The paper argues that such postsecular interpretation of Smith is justifiable focusing in the analysis on How to Be Both. In all, the paper aims to contribute to research on ethical considerations in Smith's fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ronald Bogue, Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia, has compiled many of his previously published journal articles and chapters on Gilles Deleuze in this book. Thinking with Deleuze: by Ronald Bogue, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, xvii + 450 pp., $33.95/£25.99 (paper) The comprehensive nature of Bogue's analysis and application of Deleuze's ideas make the volume valuable to anyone who wants to learn more about Deleuze. [Extracted from the article]

When parents pursue transnational labour migration, challenges arise around ensuring the social belonging of children, especially ‘gift children’ who are conceived or born abroad as a result of out-of-wedlock relationships or sexual assault. Families we interviewed in Lombok, Indonesia, displayed complex social ingenuity to ensure the gift child’s social belonging. Caregivers described how they address discrimination by manipulating and falsifying family histories in identity documents, including census forms and birth registration. These family strategies drive home the local role of identity documents as a tool to enhance belonging rather than as proof of legal identity. We spotlight the time lag between birth and obtaining an official birth record as a crucial space in creating ‘citizenship from below’ in communities with high out-migration and low birth registration rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although traumatic memories of the subcontinental Partition left indelible scars on South Asian diasporas dispersed worldwide, Partition has been examined from a nation-centric lens. Lately, Partition scholars have emphasised the need to investigate its traumatising effects beyond the nation states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Arguing that when it comes to geographically and temporally displaced diasporic subjects, memory becomes the primary tool for reconstructing a history for oneself and one's community in the host-land, this paper shows how the diasporic filmmaker re-creates the past through 'fictions of memory' (Neumann 2008, "The Literary Representation of Memory." In Media and Cultural Memory, edited by A. Erll and A. Nünning, 333–343. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.) by mixing fragments of facts with fiction. The South Asian diaspora films on Partition selected for this study are Deepa Mehta's 1947 Earth (1999), Meera Nair's Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Gurinder Chadha's The Viceroy's House (2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Made-for-television movies, originating as popular television forms in the 1960s, have historically received scant scholarly attention and faced persistent devaluation within the film industry. However, the contemporary landscape witnesses a resurgence in interest, catalyzed by the focus of VOD services on long-form fiction tailored for streaming, commonly referred to as “originals.” This paper conducts a retrospective examination of the past decade, scrutinizing the presence of made-for-television movies within general television and accentuating their intrinsic value by investigating intra-European circulation flows. Through comprehensive content analysis of general-interest channel schedules in five prominent European countries, this study explores the nuances of production, circulation dynamics, and the influence of public corporations in this scenario. The findings reveal distinctive circulation patterns characterized by continual European exchanges, setting made-for-TV movies apart from TV series, particularly on public channels. Notably, a select cluster of large European countries emerges as pivotal players dominating these intra-European flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper critically discusses the biopoliticalisation of mobility biographies in the time of climate change with reference to Gi Chang Kim’s cli-fi trilogy. The dystopian work demonstrates how fiction can help us better imagine the lived experience of biopolitics (as theorised by Giorgio Agamben) at this critical juncture, as well as the possibility of an alternative future which resembles Timothy Morton’s notion of the ‘symbiotic real’. By focusing on the mobility biographies of selected characters within the text - those who live within the ‘dome’ and those who are forced to survive outside its walls - this article demonstrates how climate biopolitics aimed at sustainable survival will inevitably be at the expense of large sectors of the world’s population, while showing how everyone’s mobility will be impacted by a politics of adaptation, hence speaking to urgent debates on the topic of mobility justice as advanced by Mimi Sheller and others. Given the ultimately catastrophic consequences of such climate biopolitics, the trilogy’s alternative future prioritising ‘planetary biographies’ is equally crucial. In this way, the fictional biographies in Kim’s texts vividly demonstrate what is at stake in the real-world decisions currently being fought over by policymakers across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, literary fiction’s interventions into debates about the crisis in literary studies, and contestations over critical methods, have received scant scholarly attention. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind treats the idea of crisis with irony, utilising overstatement in the novel’s narrative discourse to draw attention to crisis discourse’s inefficacy in delivering meaningful change. The novel represents literary critique, especially as extended to non-literary objects, as a compulsion; and, as failing to result in action. Instead, in The Life of the Mind, crisis and critique are discursive conventions which culminate in the protagonist remaining in a suspended emotional and economic state. This paper draws its theoretical approach from the novel’s intertexts, including Lauren Berlant’s conceptions of crisis ordinariness and impasse, and contextualises The Life of the Mind in relation to its intervention into discussions about critique and reading methodologies. Literary criticism and literary fiction are portrayed as being in a state of impasse in Smallwood’s novel. Despite Berlant’s (and Ann Cvetkovich’s) guarded sense of impasse as a state of potential, in The Life of the Mind impasse is regarded ironically; progress in the protagonist’s situation, in the discipline of literary studies, and in the practice of critique, are questionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To trouble internalist narratives of Europe, it is necessary to consider the “external” vectors that went into its making. This paper reads Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020) as representing a telling instance of such decentering, which warrants particular attention due to the mass mainstream visibility guaranteed by the author’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021. It takes the novel’s tracing of German colonialism as particularly instructive, because German colonial ventures have long remained in the peripheral vision of examinations of European colonialism more broadly, in anglophone postcolonial studies and literary representation. This prompts the article’s intervention in making this other European colonialism its focus. Via an examination of two facets of the novel’s engagement of knowledge-making – naming and recording – I argue that it enacts subversive interruptions of colonial epistemologies. The narrative’s delineating of the journeys of two characters from the colonial “periphery” of East Africa to the colonial “centre” of Germany sees these external Others becoming internal Others on European soil, and requires readers to think German colonialism with what came after. I propose, finally, that in (re)naming and (re)reading archives against the grain, the novel configures ambivalent alternatives to eurocentric knowledge-making, delineating the contours of what colonial archives excise, and gesturing toward what literary fiction can do to sketch flickering presences into some of those absences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to David Zeitlyn's introduction, the paper considers implications of different conceptions or gamuts of time. Flows and connections between pasts and futures are considered in the light of Huw Price's work on the philosophy of time and by thinking seriously about how science fiction writers have considered the paradoxes of time travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the possibilities of fiction in understanding intelligence, taking two female 20th century writers as case studies, Barbara Pym, and Muriel Spark. It considers how they did or did not draw on their wartime experience in their fiction. It asks why fiction still matters in an era of ever-more accessible archives and public records. It concludes that authorial choice, self-censorship, redacting and editing by others suppressed Barbara Pym's official wartime experience as an Examiner or censor. It suggests that the role was undervalued both at the time and subsequently as a source of intelligence. The paper concludes that Muriel Spark exploited to the full a short exposure to black propaganda, highlighting how three of her works of fiction offer readers insights into ethical questions of deception, manipulation, and surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herstoriography is a feminist tool that explores the voicing of women who were silenced by literary historiographic discourses. As a herstoriographic metafiction, Stevie Davies' Impassioned Clay (1999) has diverse narratives about the same historical events. The herstoriographic metafictional moments in the novel doubt and question the concept of the indisputable universal truth endorsed by patriarchy. The paper draws mainly on the "Arachne" paradigm in the light of feminist and postmodern theories of Nancy Miller, Judith Butler, Patricia Waugh, Linda Hutcheon, Elaine Showalter, Teresa De Lauretis and others to offer a herstoriographic reading in opposition to patriarchal historiography that fixes women as menial or monstrous beings, or as objects of sexual gaze. Three moments of subversion or blurring can be elicited in this metafictional novel that constitute herstoriography: political and religious, gender, and literary and historical. The paper seeks to focus on those moments that establish a dialogue between fiction and history/ herstory, present and past, and voice and silence. Thus, the female voicing that has been silenced by the androcentric historiographic discourse is rescued and reframed in herstoriography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the entanglements of art and terrorist violence in Paul Theroux'sThe Family Arsenaland Doris Lessing'sThe Good Terrorist, each of which responds to anxieties about the political power of the novelist in contradistinction with the terrorist-anxieties that Joseph Conrad raises but never fully settles inThe Secret Agent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machery et al.’s 2004 x-phi project has been widely criticised for ambiguities contained in the expression ‘talk about’. Interestingly, although ‘about’ plays a prominent part in the debate, aboutness has not been a topic. This paper discusses this aspect. Alas, it must thereby add a further ambiguity to the list, the ambiguity between aboutness and reference, and thus also between subject matter and referent. It explains the distinction between intra-categorical aboutness which makes no ontological demands, and cross-categorical reference which requires the referent to exist. It then analyses the 4-fold embedding contained in Machery et al.’s study and shows how the aboutness-reference distinction bears on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Made-for-television movies, originating as popular television forms in the 1960s, have historically received scant scholarly attention and faced persistent devaluation within the film industry. However, the contemporary landscape witnesses a resurgence in interest, catalyzed by the focus of VOD services on long-form fiction tailored for streaming, commonly referred to as "originals." This paper conducts a retrospective examination of the past decade, scrutinizing the presence of made-for-television movies within general television and accentuating their intrinsic value by investigating intra-European circulation flows. Through comprehensive content analysis of general-interest channel schedules in five prominent European countries, this study explores the nuances of production, circulation dynamics, and the influence of public corporations in this scenario. The findings reveal distinctive circulation patterns characterized by continual European exchanges, setting made-for-TV movies apart from TV series, particularly on public channels. Notably, a select cluster of large European countries emerges as pivotal players dominating these intra-European flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rhetoric of Emily and Anne Brontës' Diary Papers is closely examined in order to assert that these texts notably fashioned Emily as a speaker, a woman and a writer, creating a blurred ethôs of secrecy, defiance and fiction that prevented any intrusive reader from authorizing her. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional narratives of sport posit winning as the defining goal in ways that can feel and be exclusionary to young people and result in a lack of enjoyment and subsequent decision to avoid or discontinue involvement in sport. This is particularly true for girls and young women who participate in sport at lower rates and quit at higher rates than boys and young men. Shifting the focus of sport away from winning can open space for a wider range of girls and young women to see themselves as athletes. Scholars have highlighted how story in the form of counter-narratives can play a role in changing readers’ perspectives. However, no attention has been paid to fictional representations of athletes engaging in non-competitive sport and how these depictions might invite girls and young women to imagine themselves differently in sporting spaces. This paper employs thematic inductive analysis to examine three, girl-centric young adult sports novels that work as counter-narratives to examine what happens when winning is not the central goal of participation in sport. Specifically, it explores what fictional young women athletes gain through their participation in non-competitive sport and what young adult readers might gain in their engagement with these titles. Findings reveal how participation in non-competitive sport gives the fictional athletes a sense of full personhood, confidence and pride in what their bodies can do, and connection with something larger than themselves. These titles can show readers that their engagement in sport is desirable, that non-competitive sport is beneficial to them, and that their engagement in sport is possible, that non-competitive sport is for them. The paper suggests that stories of non-competitive sport have the potential to open equitable access by inviting more young people, particularly those who have not seen themselves in stories of sport, to engage as athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many want to know what bitcoin is and how it works. But bitcoin is as complex as it is controversial, and relatively few have the technical background to understand it. In this paper, I offer an accessible on-ramp for understanding bitcoin in the form of a model. My model reveals both what bitcoin is and how it works. More specifically, it reveals that bitcoin is a fictional substance in a massively coauthored story on a network that automates and distributes jobs normally entrusted to centralized publishing institutions. My model therefore falsifies a popular view according to which each bitcoin is a chunk of code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the correct way to appreciate art and specifically the art of the pop song? This is the question at the heart of Magnus Mills's 2017 novella The Forensic Records Society which reads like an absurd comic parable of how men (specifically), repeatedly fail to appreciate art and reduce even the most inoffensive acts of creativity to dysfunctional bureaucracies. This paper briefly discusses how the book tackles aesthetics, community, gender and commodity fetishism and outlines its uncanny parallels with Adorno's Sociology of Music (1976). Most significantly, the argument put forward here is that this deceptively brief and simple novella is truly an artfully-constructed postmodern performative text – a work of histiographic metafiction which manipulates time, evades period setting, and questions historical certainty; a concrete-poetry inspired novella that deploys mimetic cover art, musical allusions, numerology, nominal characterization, melodic repetition and affirmative character arcs to replicate, and pay homage to, the subject of the book – the iconic 7-inch three-minute pop single. The conclusion asserts that The Forensic Records Society is an intermedial text that ironically benefits from the perpetual online distractions of the internet and pop music, thus providing a novel 21st century reading experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a large body of research about emotional labour in workplace settings, such as the health professions and the service industry, less is known about the empirical processes through which emotional labour is taught in higher education and professional education. Using medical education as an example, a discursive psychological (DP) approach is used in this paper to detail how the feeling rules of the physician's profession are constructed by students and tutors in fiction, film, and poetry seminars. From a data set of 36 video- and audio-recorded fiction seminars from two medical schools, 29 sequences of discussions about emotional challenges for physicians were found. These examples have been transcribed in detail and analysed using DP. Analysis shows that students and tutors construct feeling rules as fluid, negotiable and changeable. Feeling rules are defined as the calibration of emotion to suit different situations as well as different physicians with different levels of emotionality. Students deploy constructions of feeling rules to manage student identities, and students and tutors construct emotion as a separation between subjective experience and observable behaviours, where the subject-side experience should be managed or controlled in the way it manifests externally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Videogames often confront players with frustratingly difficult challenges, fearsome enemies, and tragic stories. As such, they can evoke feelings of failure, sadness, anger, and fear. Although these feelings are usually regarded as undesirable, many players seem to enjoy videogames which cause them. In this paper, I argue that player misery often originates from a fictional or lusory attitude which brackets game events from real-life, making the player's emotions solely relevant within the game context. As they are part of the game themselves, these negative emotions can be enjoyed and easily relativized, since players can acknowledge that their cause is 'only a game'. However, there are feelings of misery associated with the playing of videogames which are not caused by either the game's fiction or challenge. In the last part of this paper, I describe a qualitatively different kind of player misery: one that is caused by elements that are not perceived as part of the game by the player, and is not bracketed from real life by a lusory or fictional attitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on papers delivered at the 2023 convening of Austria's annual museum education conference, the issue focuses on complex concepts of "truth" in museum education. In 2016 the renowned art historian Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann noted that while the histories we write are ineluctably linked to their proponents, these narratives "may [nonetheless] be evaluated and found to be substantial." Still, as it becomes increasingly difficult to find sources of trustworthy information, educators are faced with the precarious task of engaging the public in critical discussions about museum narratives while supporting the museum's important role as a reliable source of academically supported and researched truth. [Extracted from the article]

The ability of graphic narratives to ensure reader-participation creates a visual dialogue between the narrative and the readers and makes them hospitable to the story at hand. The readers become active participants, which brings in the question of ethics, as the passive gaze is converted into empathy and identification. Such a reading encourages a reassessment of the perceived differences between the 'I' and the 'other' and aims to reduce such a gap. This paper, therefore, discusses the idea of empathy and ethics vis-à-vis the strategies and techniques employed in the graphic narratives to encourage reader-participation and make them sensitive to the sufferings of the 'others'. The texts under analysis include Clément Baloup's Vietnamese Memories: Leaving Saigon and Vietnamese Memories: Little Saigon, representing the migrant stories. Such experiences require a hospitable audience and the graphic practices of the texts play a crucial role in making the readers empathic to the life narratives of the 'others'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an important debate in the philosophy of mind that has roots in the phenomenological tradition, namely: what are the primitive forms of consciousness, that is, what are the fundamental ingredients or aspects of consciousness. This paper wants to contribute to partially answering this general question by providing an answer to a required sub-question within this question: is emotional phenomenology fundamental? I will answer in the affirmative and will offer an argument focused on contemplative emotions elicited by fiction. Another type of contemplative emotions, namely, esthetic emotions, have been invoked in the literature but I will argue that the phenomenology of emotions elicited by fiction, given their continuity and sameness in kind with the phenomenology of garden variety emotions, are more dialectically efficient vis-à-vis the debate on the irreducibility of emotional phenomenology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexis Wright's novel The Swan Book (2013) has been read as contesting imperialist histories in its use of ironic magical realism: asengaging with debates in Australian indigenous communities about sovereignty; and, as world-making in its portrayal of conflicting and overlapping material forces and temporalities. Previous readings have examined the text's dramatisation of biopolitical interventions into the lives of Aboriginal people, and the novel's near-simultaneous evocation of different time periods. To date, scholarship on The Swan Book has not fully conceptualised its assault on western narrative forms. The following paper focuses on the novel's contestation of crisis and catastrophe as metonyms for colonial and western ways of being and knowledge, and its narratival focus on what could be termed 'survivance', a term used (after Derrida) by Native American fiction writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor, to whose novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990), Wright's book makes intertextual references. The following paper contends that Wright's novel offers radical structures of feeling that counter western notions of narrative,history, time and the individual. These are manifest in the text's inclusion of nested narratives, its critique of western notions of history, its de-hierarchisation of time, and in its disputation of the centrality of the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literacy practices enacted in secondary school English classrooms can be influenced by the pressures acting upon teachers and students. Attention can be diverted away from the process of meaning-making when more emphasis is placed upon performance outcomes than on reading processes. This paper argues that digital forms of Interactive Fiction (IF) hold the potential to help teachers and students attend more closely to the process of meaning-making. It also argues that IF's component parts – passages, choices and links – render it a useful resource for the scaffolding of classroom dialogue. By considering the different ways that IF could influence the choices that individuals make in the classroom, this paper suggests that works of IF could enable teachers and students to engage with texts differently, improving the literacy practices of the students involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Set against the soaring skyscrapers of much canonical urban science fiction (sf), the single storey structures of Abbenay in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed might be easily overlooked. But, as this paper argues, the sparse description of this city 'as plain as spilt salt' offers a rich and complex vision of architectural possibility. This paper dwells within this moment of description, drawing on personal association alongside architectural and literary theory to consider how this image of a city might cast strange new light on embedded aspects of architectural practice. It explores how the sustained consideration of the built spaces of feminist sf can provide designers with an empathetic appreciation of how the built environment reflects and informs social relations. Salt is modest, Salt is domestic, Salt is refined, Salt is anything but plain, To spill salt is to act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is it that we can rationally assert that sport outcomes do not really matter, while also seeming to care about them to an absurd degree? This is the so-called puzzle of sport. The broadly Waltonian solution to the puzzle has it that we make-believe the outcomes matter. Recently, Stear has critiqued this Waltonian solution, raising a series of five objections. He has also leveraged these objections to motive his own contextualist solution to the puzzle. The aim of this paper is to defend the Waltonian solution. The general upshot is that, contra Stear, a make-believe based solution to the puzzle is viable after all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Love, sex and marriage are recurrent themes in Kurahashi Yumiko's literature, especially in her early works. In the novel Divine maiden (1965) she approached those topics from a different perspective, through the form of shōjo shōsetsu (girl's fiction): she even went so far as to define Divine maiden as 'the last shōjo shōsetsu'. The protagonist of this novel is a young girl, Miki: the story revolves around Miki's incestuous relationship with her father, as it is depicted in her three diaries, read by a male narrator. Even though incest is a recurrent theme in Kurahashi's work, it has been pointed out that the incestuous relationship between father and daughter could be considered shōjo shōsetsu's grand finale. However, not much attention has been paid to the relationship between Divine maiden and shōjo shōsetsu as a literary genre; moreover, the meaning of love, sex and marriage in the novel has been left unexplored. This paper aims to analyse the girl's sexuality depicted in Divine maiden in the context of post-war Japan's junketsu kyōiku ('purity education'); through an analysis of Miki's diaries, I will explore the way Kurahashi has parodied the concept of 'democracy' in relation to the ideal of 'pure love'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hypertext has been described as embodying Roland Barthes' ideal text. This paper considers that association, and the relationship of each to literary theory's historical privileging of authorial intention over reader interpretation. Firstly it outlines the rise and fall of authorial intention in literary theory, culminating in Roland Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author. Secondly, it challenges the relationship between anti-intentionalism and hypertext in three ways: by exploring hypertext as a dialectical situation, which places the reader in dialogue with the author; by challenging Barthes' galaxy of signifiers as an embodiment of links; and finally, by establishing a disciplinary emphasis on hermeneutics as intrinsically readerly in nature. The paper concludes by considering whether an intentionalist approach might in fact be the best fit for hypertext fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With Horse and Morse in Mesopotamia: The Story of Anzacs in Asia (Burke 1927) memorializes the service of various units in that theatre during World War I. It is uncharacteristic of the standard unit history genre in that it adopts the format of so-called soldiers' books. These, key examples of which are The Anzac Book (Bean 1916) and Australia in Palestine (Gullett and Barrett 1919), consist chiefly of contributions from service personnel themselves, and thus are informed to varying degrees by the pre-war populist imperialism espoused in boys' weekly papers and adventure novels by Henty and others. In its self-proclaimed role as 'memory book' of the Mesopotamian veterans' 'great adventure', With Horse and Morse is characterized by the same mix of residual imperial and emergent nationalist discourses to which its predecessor works had subscribed. However, that emergent nationalism in turn has its roots in an earlier discourse of comradeship long upheld in popular boys' papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With this paper, we intend to contribute to the debate concerning Hobbes' conception of the person of the State. To be more precise, we shall argue that the philosopher's notion of the State draws influence from what classic rhetoricians called prosopopoeia. Although this similarity has been identified by some contemporary interpreters, its chief characteristics remain underexplored. This viewpoint will allow us, on the one hand, to delve into the creative role of Hobbesian representatives in the process of actively conforming the person of the State; on the other, it will enable a novel understanding of the enemies of the State as personifications or allegories conjured up by rebellious agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the role of fiction in Hobbes's system of philosophy has come under growing pressure. This is most clearly reflected in various attempts to dismiss the characterization of Hobbes's state as a person by fiction or even as a person at all. This paper argues against this trend by demonstrating that Hobbes employs fiction in a more consistent and more fundamental way than has been previously recognized. In particular, the paper argues that Hobbes uses fiction to refer to both a peculiar set of mental operations and the 'things' they originate, and that he attributes fiction, as process and as product of that process, key cognitive and world-making functions. Chief amongst the latter, the article argues, is the enactment of the people as a representational fiction. This requires the creation of an intersubjectively shared imaginary encouraging individuals to think themselves and act from their position as citizens, identifying with a collective whose unified will the state – and it only – expresses and enacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early years science curriculum in England requires teachers to incorporate scientific enquiry in their classrooms. However, teachers perceive science teaching to be challenging because of their lack of subject knowledge. This paper aims to develop an understanding of science as an enquiry rich subject rather than a plethora of scientific knowledge. In this paper, I will present a model of Enquiry Based Learning (EBL) that can be introduced in early years teaching and learning practices. This presentation of the EBL model will then lead to a discussion on the benefits of using children's stories to scaffold the process of scientific enquiry. Finally, I will present three example scenarios from the stories of Curious George, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Wizard of Oz, to support early year practitioners to include scientific enquiry practices as an integral part of their day-to-day planning and delivery of lessons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tells a story of one student teacher's experiences as she considers the choice of fiction texts studied by young secondary learners of English, and how those texts are taught. Based on a series of interviews carried out in the South-West of England and Wales, the narrative provides a perspective on the limitations of current curricula offered by schools that feel bound by a restrictive assessment and inspection regime. It concludes that such curricula can stifle effective teaching and learning, and so teacher educators have a duty to provide new entrants to the profession with a range of perspectives, opportunities and experiences. Through so doing, we promote the fictionalisation of data as a valid, robust approach to educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how representations of the Holocaust – what is labeled Holocaust institutionalization – have been critiqued and even condemned in literary texts. Rather than exploring the Holocaust, and the corollaries of memory, identity, Second Generation inherited trauma, and other concerns, this body of literature considers the integrity, decency and purpose of Holocaust projects. Mainly it looks at the way aspects of Holocaust institutionalization are morally suspect, exploitive and counter to meaningful engagement with Holocaust history in the writings of Mordecai Richler. Then, as a counterpoint it examines Hope by Shalom Auslander and Nathan Englander's 2012 short story, 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,' which traffic in moral inquiries into assumptions about Holocaust institutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My research aims at investigating the function of ghostly entities in the field of Italian popular literature between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, by considering the fiction of Carolina Invernizio (1851–1916) and Matilde Serao (1856–1927), two leading authors of the Italian feuilleton, which was directed at petty-bourgeois and proletarian readers. Invernizio wrote some successful novels focused on the "buried alive" woman, whose apparitions are dreadful and uncanny but, at the same time, lead the "living" people to right the wrong, to punish acts of violence, to resolve the faulty lines in society which were provoked by the patriarchal system's excesses or by human evil. This paper examines Invernizio's La sepolta viva ("The Woman buried Alive", 1896), which shows an innovative portrayal of a woman aspiring to a greater role by escaping from gender subjugation. This novel, a bestseller of a prolific writer who published more than 120 novels in forty years, was strongly appreciated in Italy and was repeatedly reprinted and translated into English and Spanish. Matilde Serao, a long-established investigative journalist, was the first woman to edit an Italian journal and to author important works within the Verista movement, including Il ventre di Napoli (The Belly of Naples, 1884) and Il paese di cuccagna (The Land of Cockayne,1891). Serao highlighted the hermeneutical role of the fantastic, which reveals a hidden and obscure reality, allowing people to grasp the deep, unconscious reasons for their actions. In "Barchetta fantasma", (Little ghostly Boat") and "Leggenda di Capodimonte" ("The Legend of Capodimonte"), in the collection Leggende Napoletane (Neapolitan Legends, 1881), ghosts sanction deviant forms of passion. In ""O Munaciello" ("The Little Monk"), also in Leggende napoletane, Serao shows the human side of her literary fantastic by depicting a deformed child, the scapegoat for the community, who returns to the world after death, and embodies both a sad, irrepressible need for love and a willingness to avenge injustice. In "La donna dall'abito nero e dal ramo di corallo rosso" ("The Woman with the Black Dress and the Red Coral Brooch") (1883), the ghost personifies the "Jungian shadow", the rejected side of the self. Ghosts in Invernizio and Serao's works represent a means of defending reasons based on instincts and passions while proposing a more active role for women, giving literary and human dignity to the "difference". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue centralizes powerful leisure stories that may otherwise be understood as myths—sometimes recognized, often less so—that circulate in the field, and beyond. In everyday use, a myth perpetuates a popularly held belief that is false or untrue. However, in social and cultural theory, myths are more complex, as partial truths that privilege particular versions of a shared social reality. We want to know what myths are, what they "do", and how they circulate and shape people's leisure lives. Myths can do more than obfuscate—they often animate people's lives, motivate collective action, and inspire change. In this Introduction, we map out the aims of the Special Issue to establish the conceptual terrain of leisure myths and mythmaking, and explore definitions and uses of myths, which are then brought into sharper focus in the eight papers that comprise the collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Porter's fictional works, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015) and Lanny (2019), display a dazzling abundance of narrative and poetic figures of repetition. As this paper seeks to demonstrate, Porter's use of repetition shows a profound scepticism towards the orthodox view about a secondary position of repetition in relation to the original, which translates into Porter's commitment to questioning the limits of literary conventions. Drawing on Søren Kierkegaard's notion of the repetition of self through the traumatic experience of a "thunderstorm", this article interrogates the extent to which Porter's probing of the aporia of grief and loss through the figures of repetition partakes in his tactical sabotaging of the closural status of the literary text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that history is a large-scale transmedia project that is not understood as such, and this causes friction when history is engaged with through media in which historical research is not usually presented. To do this, I go through Henry Jenkins' ten-step definition of transmedia and argue that history matches the definition very well. This transmedia discussion brings forth the concept of 'world-building', in which narrative is superseded by world-building as the all-encompassing concept and as the beginning point of analysis. In the analysis, history (as a product of historiography) is treated as phenomenon instead of a discipline and compared to other forms of transmedia world-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a project drawing together an artist working on creative GIS, a geomatics scholar, an NGO leader, a rural geographer and soil scientist, an environmental geochemist, and a political geographer. With a shared interest in the social and physical processes affecting people's lives in Malawi, and the possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration, the team engaged in practice-based mapping of our data sources and respective methodologies. The project relates to two sites in Malawi: Tikondwe Freedom Gardens and the Likangala River. The paper details our practices as we shared, debated, and repurposed our data as a means of situating these practices and data. Using paper and pen, whiteboard, PowerPoint, and web-design software, we note here our effort to map a 'space of experimentation' highlighting, and reflecting on, our diverse disciplinary orientations, training, instrumentation, recording, and reporting procedures, as well as bodily practices that enable and give animation to these factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers the cultural exploitation of bears, especially white ones, from the late sixteenth century to the present, both in drama and literary fiction and in the bear pits, theatres, circuses, zoos, and natural habitats in which real biological bears have found themselves mythologized and marketed. Beginning and ending with Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson's art project nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2006), the argument explores the use and abuse of fictive and real white bears in the changing contexts of Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and performance history, eighteenth and nineteenth century colonialism, and present day anxieties about habitat degradation and global warming, and also in the light of the perennial and "almost inescapable anthropomorphism" which, as Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson point out, causes us to see the bear as "a potent symbol" rather than a creature with its own life experience and autonomy. In addition to nanoq: flat out and bluesome, which attempts to break its audience out of that mind-set by confronting them with the mortal remains and individual histories of 34 taxidermic bears, the paper discusses George Peele's The Old Wives Tale (c. 1594), the anonymous 1590s play Mucedorus, Ben Jonson's masque Oberon, the Fairy Prince (1611), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760), Robert Bage's Jacobin novel Hermsprong (1796), James Hogg's novella The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon (1834), Philip Pullman's Northern Lights (1995), Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016), and Martin Rowe's The Polar Bear in the Zoo (2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper revisits Anthony Trollope's Victorian novel, The Way We Live Now, focusing on the main character of Augustus Melmotte. The paper analyzes the novel and its literary figure of a corrupt financier or swindler, drawing out theoretical and pedagogical contributions for organizational and management research. Contributions are framed in terms of imaginative organizational role archetypes embodied in swindler characterizations, swindlers' institutional work across societal elites, and the dark sides and grey areas associated with swindlers' organizational and financial misconduct. The rise and fall of Augustus Melmotte in Trollope's Victorian English society thus finds its cultural parallels today in outsiders who challenge financial and political elites and the status quo, at high personal risk to themselves and others complicit in their schemes. The conclusions concern the importance of recognizing dynamic figures that seize immense power over organizational, financial and political cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The originality of this paper lies in the ways in which it explores how the depiction of organised crime within Andrey Kurkov's novel Death and the Penguin can inform our understanding of organisational modularity. This non-orthodox approach might open up new avenues of thought in the study of organisational modularity while further illustrating how novelistic worlds can inform accounts of organisational realities. Two main research questions underlie the paper. How can Andrey Kurkov's novel further our understanding of the complexity of organisational worlds and realities by focusing our attention on different landscapes of organising? How does Kurkov's novel help us grasp the concept of modularity by drawing attention to new forms of modular organisation? Drawing from our reading of Kurkov's novel, we primarily explore organisational modularity through Kurkov's depiction of organised crime and consider the themes of alienation and isolation in the context of modular organising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]