This chapter introduces the volume, explaining how O’Casey’s work has been widely read at school and university level, and frequently performed on the stage. The introduction points out that few major studies of O’Casey have been published in recent years, and argues that, by contrast with writers such as Joyce and Yeats, O’Casey is in need of updated critical reframing.

Parallel to the anti-Jewish policy of the National Socialists that culminated in mass murder, so-called “Judenforschung” was established in the Third Reich as an independent field of study, outside traditional disciplines, through a number of institutions, publications, and public events. In Nazi “Judenforschung,” antisemitism was the leading principle, and the antisemitically constructed “Jewish Question” was the focus of research activity. Thereby, contrary to the tradition of German academia, themes of Jewish history became in themselves respectable subjects of research. The chapter gives an overview of the different institutions for “Judenforschung” in the Third Reich and the dynamics of the field from the mid 1930s until the end of the Second World War; presents different responses to and perceptions of Nazi “Judenforschung” during and after the Second World War; analyzes the relationship between scholarship and antisemitism in Nazi “Judenforschung” that is crucial for the whole research field and its practice in the Third Reich; discusses the role of scholarship in the Holocaust; and finally explores the role of scholars in perpetrating Nazi crimes.

First, this chapter provides a general framework of international law at the time of the League of Nations, taking into account the practice of international law; second, a sample of the international legal literature of the period concerning a number of key and recurrent topics is offered; finally, a few historical treatments of international law that were recounted at the time are briefly summarised to show that certain developments in practice and in theory had repercussions also in the historical conceptualisations of international law.

This chapter addresses the role of, and prospects for, interdisciplinary scholarship in the law of international organisations. It argues that collaboration between scholars only works when those scholars share similar intuitions and sensibilities, and more generally adopts a broad approach: scholarship in the law of international organisations is at its best when informed by insights from a wide variety of academic disciplines. Yet (and this is often a problem) it should remain recognisably legal scholarship, if only because political and economic developments inevitably are channelled through law and legal procedure. Inter-disciplinarity means more than bowing to insights from International Relations scholarship, and should be driven by curiosity rather than theory or method.

This chapter takes seriously the concerns of Eliot’s early reviewers with a tension in her fiction between the devoted depiction of life later associated with realism, and a didactic impulse to which they increasingly felt she succumbed. Asking why Eliot interrupted representation with theorisation, the chapter takes as a case study her alternating dramatisation and analysis of incongruous versions of history in Chapter 20 of Middlemarch. It traces the lineage of such alternation, via an allusion to her friend John Sibree’s translation of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, into one of the notebooks Eliot used as she developed Middlemarch, which is read less as a source for either the novel’s theories or its facts than as a laboratory for its experiments in moving between them. The chapter suggests that Eliot valued the dissonance her reviewers detected when dogma intruded upon depiction. It thereby elucidates her contribution to the dialectical novel of ideas this book explores.

Chapter 3 addresses the suggestion that for a special regime to exist, there must be a mutual engagement of community members. As the chapter argues, in the context of international law, a mutual engagement among a group of international law specialists can be inferred from their participation in a distinct legal discourse, and from their further specialization and distinct way of ascribing functions to legal agents. More specifically, it can be inferred from: the publication of specialized international law journals; the way of organization of conferences and workshops; the creation of inter-governmental organization; the work of NGOs; the specialized research profile of international scholars and description of chairs; their separation of tasks and division of labour; and the function that they ascribe to the judiciary and to the international legal scholar.

This chapter demonstrates the growth and broadening reach of Jewish–Christian dialogue, and especially Christian reflections on the significance of the Holocaust. Documents discuss the significance of the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul, alongside fraught discussions about the State of Israel.

This chapter examines the ontological questions raised by the encounter with poems in archives, whether in the form of drafts, post-publication revisions, or unique or multiple versions circulating in manuscript alone. Most poems in most archives prompt the same question – what is this? – and they thereby challenge expectations of what a poem will be. When are two related texts versions of the same poem, for instance, and when are they instead two different poems? What about poems that were never finished or were never originally conceived of as “poems”? And how are poems in archives framed by surrounding materials, be those materials other poems or other kinds of writing altogether? Through a close study of Thomas Gray's commonplace book, this chapter focuses on the interpretative challenges prompted by such ontological questions. Using Gray's methods as its example, the chapter experiments with what it means to read manuscript poems synchronically within the archival documents in which they are found, rather than diachronically in search of sources or variants.

From the start of his career, Jonathan Swift was caught up in debates about the relative value of ancient and modern cultures. Swift’s first masterpieces, ‘The Battel of the Books’ and A Tale of a Tub (both pub. 1704), were brilliant satirical interventions on the side of ancient cultures against the moderns. This chapter unpicks the density of allusion in these works, explaining how they relate to the broader ‘quarrel’ between the ancients and moderns. A final section traces the legacy of this dispute in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in which Swift invokes ancient Sparta as a model for social integrity.

This chapter surveys the major scholarly and popular culture responses to the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, to a lesser extent, to Zelda Fitzgerald, between 2000 and 2020. The first part of the chapter discusses the films, TV and radio adaptations, stage and ballet versions, and novels based on Fitzgerald’s works or on the Fitzgeralds’ lives. The second part deals with the book-length scholarship and criticism on Fitzgerald’s life and work in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, which has greatly increased and expanded in this period in both subject matter and approach, partially because of the international conferences sponsored by The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, because of the annual issues of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, which began publication in 2002, and because of the completion, in 2019, of the eighteen-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The material in this second part of the chapter is divided into sections on Bibliographies and Other Reference Works, Editions, Correspondence, Biography, and Criticism, with the latter sub-divided into General Studies – Collections, General Studies – Full-Length Works, and Studies of Individual Works.

Scholars in late-antique Western Christendom relied both on ‘scientific’ knowledge and on theological interpretation of scripture to understand and explain the natural world. Previous scholarship discussing the process of seeking knowledge in general, and the investigation of science and theology in particular, has often centred on the issues of innovation and derivativeness. For centuries, following ideas developed during the Renaissance and ‘Enlightenment’, it was held that the fall of the Western Roman empire heralded a ‘Dark Age’ in which there was little intellectual development and scholarship was almost entirely derivative. More recently, scholars have argued instead that there was innovation in this period, at least to some degree. This chapter offers a preliminary examination of the methods and processes of inquiry used by late-antique scholars in their attempts to uncover knowledge, focusing on the topic of creation.

Numerous bands and their fans see themselves as having revolutionised rock music in the late 1960s and the early 1970s and given birth to a harder style that was to become known as heavy metal. British bands Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and The Kinks are considered pioneers within the two countries of metal’s origin; their counterparts in the US were Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly and Blue Cheer. Although it is safe to say that these bands were among those that gave the initial spark for a musical genre that has taken hold around the globe in the more than fifty years of its existence, this introduction is not meant to debate the origins of metal.

Today, metal music is a genre popular with fans worldwide, facilitated by a vast industry with specialised professions, such as journalists, artist and repertoire managers, record producers, concert promoters and stage crews.

Informal borrowings constitute an important linguistic phenomenon, yet they remain underrepresented in scholarly literature. This book is to remedy the situation. Drawing from the methodological framework of documentary linguistics and sociolinguistics, it relies on lexical material from a large database of citations from diverse sources – including spoken utterances, films and TV shows, print, and social media – to ensure authenticity and representativeness. Much space is devoted to the presentation, explanation, interpretation, and illustration of language data; the format of description is designed to be extensive, covering a wide range of themes which allow an examination from various perspectives. The description is amply supported throughout the text with usage examples that illustrate linguistic patterns, show the sociocultural context in which they are used, and attest to the very existence of these expressions.

This essay considers Sebald as an academic. Arguably, the acdemy as an institution shaped his entire life. Originating from a non-academic background, studying in Freiburg was his escape ticket from the Allgäu province. His transfers to the universities of Fribourg and Manchester in turn determined his life as an expat and his profile as a Germanist abroad. By remaining at the university, his academic profession provided the basis for his intellectual career and secured his livelihood. His literary work emerged as a frustrated reaction to the neoliberal reforms of UK HE; Sebald conquered his own free space through the writing of literature. In the second part of the essay, Sebald’s teaching style and didactics are examined, not least on the basis of the author’s personal experiences. Sebald was an unorthodox university teacher who aimed to encourage his students in their own talents and abilities.

The Introduction outlines crucial intellectual contexts and frameworks for thinking about how Cicero's Brutus is a crucial intervention in the the civic crisis and the writing of literary history. It also surveys the scholarship to date and examines how Cicero's project reflects general trends in academic inquiry and civic government.