Böcker utgivna av EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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.

Reconstructs Deleuze's methodology in its interdisciplinary context

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 edited collection brings together discussions of literary works from Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Palestinian and Jewish Diasporas, as well as from authors and creators not directly involved with the conflict who are seeking to unpack its complexities for a wider audience. It offers new perspectives into how the Palestine/Israel conflict is, and can be, represented after the Second Palestinian Intifada, an epochal event for both Israelis and Palestinians. This collection foregrounds the thematic concerns that link literary engagements with Palestine/Israel across the globe but also examines the role that aesthetic representation plays in framing the conflict and its power dynamics. It addresses how emergent forms of writing and representation illuminate but also redescribe conflict in the context of Israel and Palestine and how, as in the case of the investigative graphic novel for example, depicting this conflict has had reverberations for representing conflict and conflict zones more widely.

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.

Pop Cinema is the first book devoted to moving image works which engage with the central thematics and aesthetics of Pop Art. The essays in the collection focus in on the core concerns of Pop as a widespread and ideologically complex art movement, and examine the ways in which artists in various global locations have used forms of film practice outside of the mainstream to explore those preoccupations. The book's contributors also identify the ways in which dominant Pop aesthetics - flat planes of bold colour, mechanical forms of repetition, appropriation of materials from popular culture sources - were adopted, reworked, or abandoned by such filmmakers. At root, the book asks three basic questions: what shapes might a Pop form of cinema take, what materials would it engage with, and what might it have to say?

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.

This book offers an account of how the global popularity of the Nordic Noir wave of television crime drama such as The Killing/Forbrydelsen and The Bridge/Broen/Bron had a profound impact on the production of television crime drama in Australia. Through a series of case studies including Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, The Kettering Incident, Secret City and Mystery Road, the authors explore how the Australian television industry responded to the new streaming environment by producing shows with international reach and appeal. Central to this analysis is the concept of 'total value' which expands the notions of cultural and economic value to account for how these crime dramas generate value for the Australian screen industry in general, their creators in particular, as well as the social and financial benefits that may ensue for the communities in which they took place and audiences across the world.

This book provides a socio-legal perspective to critical military studies by asking socio-legal questions about military conscription in Turkey: How do the international and domestic laws approach the conflict between the law and conscience? Why does Turkey insist on the non-recognition of the right to conscientious objection? How are those pursuing their conscience affected by such non-recognition? These questions are important as the law is shaped by the socio-cultural structures in which it operates, and any attempt to create a social change also necessitates understanding and challenging the legal framework. In this light, the book argues that one cannot fully understand and, as a result, resist the militarisation of society without understanding the relationship between the law and social norms.

(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.

Data Justice and the Right to the City engages with theories of social justice and data-driven urbanism. It explores the intersecting concerns of data justice - both the harms and civic possibilities of the datafied society - and the right to the city - a call to redress the uneven distribution of resources and rights in urban contexts. These concerns are addressed through a variety of topics: digital social services, as cities use data and algorithms to administer to citizens; education, as data-driven practices transform learning and higher education; labour, as platforms create new precarities and risks for workers; and activists who seek to make creative and political interventions into these developments. This edited collection proposes frameworks for understanding the effects of data-driven technologies at the municipal scale and offers strategies for intervention by both scholars and citizens.

The Cultural Politics of Veterans' Narratives investigates the role of veterans' stories in our collective cultural and political life. Drawing on contemporary narrative theory, it offers a conceptual framework for studying veterans' narratives, followed by a series of unique empirical chapters dealing with different genres of veteran storytelling, including trauma, transition, culture and identity, and the Afghanistan war memoir. The book questions the British veteran as a political figure, exploring what their stories tell us about the morality and politics of war as well as military life. It also traces how social norms about militarism, nationalism, and patriotism pivot as a result. Caddick considers what the stakes are for veterans as their stories interact with wider cultural narratives, and for society in grappling with the 'militarist terms of reference' these stories impart to us.

Published in France in 2018, Henri Atlan's book Cours de philosophie biologique et cognitiviste: Spinoza et la biologie actuelle (Odile Jacob, 2018) represents a turning point in Spinoza's interpretations of contemporary life sciences. Henri Atlan is the first in this field of research, of applied epistemology and ontology, to effectively address contemporary questions in biology and cognitive sciences. Atlan presents us with a genuine understanding of Spinoza's monism, which is neither materialistic nor idealistic, and with an expertise in contemporary life sciences that will open an entire new field of research in Spinoza scholarship as well as in philosophy of sciences. Readers will better understand the connection between Spinoza's Ethics, his ontology and epistemology, and modern life sciences, allowing us to rethink the relationship between ethics and modern sciences.

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.

New studies on the interaction of various media in ancient Greek art This collection includes twenty-one new essays by leading scholars in the field of Greek art and archaeology. Exploring a range of media including vase painting, sculpture, gems and coins, they each address questions that cross the boundaries of specialised fields. They outline the range of visual experiences at stake in the various media used in antiquity and shed light on the specificities of each medium. They show how meaning is produced, according to the nature of the medium: its use, context and enunciative structure. Also explored are the different methodologies used to produce meaning: how do images 'make', or create, sense to their ancient viewers and how can we now access those meanings? This richly illustrated volume offers new interpretations and arguments concerning fundamental questions in the field which expands our knowledge and understanding of Greek art, patrons and viewers.

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.

With explosive interest in Romantic science and theories of mind and a renewed sense of the period's porousness to the world, along with new developments in cognitive theory and research, Romantic studies scholars have been called to revisit and re-map the terrain laid out in the highly influential 1970 volume Romanticism and Consciousness. Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited brings this shift in approach to Romantic "consciousness"--no longer the possession of a sole self but transactional, social, and entangled with the outside world--up to date.

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.