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Social-issue documentaries are art for civic imagination and social critique. Today, audiences experience documentaries that interrogate topics like sexual assault in the military (The Invisible War), the opioid crisis (Heroin(e)), racial injustice (13th), government surveillance (Citizenfour), animal captivity (Blackfish), and more. Along a continuum of social change, these intimate nonfiction films have changed national conversations, set media agendas, mobilized communities and policymakers, and provided new portals into social problems and lived experiences—accessed by expanding audiences in a transforming dual marketplace that includes mainstream entertainment outlets and grassroots venues. Against the activism backdrop of the participatory networked culture, the contemporary function of social-issue documentaries in civic practice is embodied also in parallel community engagement—the active role of civil society, communities, and individuals—that has dynamically evolved over recent decades. Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change explores the functions and public influence of social-issue documentary storytelling in the networked era. At the book’s core is an argument about documentary’s vital role in storytelling culture and civic practice with an impulse toward justice and equity. Intimate documentaries illuminate complex realities and stories that disrupt dominant cultural narratives and contribute new ways for publics to contemplate and engage with social challenges. Written by a documentary producer, scholar, and director of the Center for Media & Social Impact, the book features original interviews with award-winning filmmakers and field leaders to reveal the motivations and influence of some of most lauded, eye-opening stories of the evolving documentary age.

Asking why adaptation has been seen as more problematic to theorize than other humanities subjects, and why it has been more theoretically problematic in the humanities than in the sciences and social sciences, Theorizing Adaptation seeks to both explicate and redress “the problem of theorizing adaptation” through a metacritical history of theorizing adaptation from the late sixteenth century to the present, a metatheoretical theory of the relationship between theorization and adaptation in the humanities, and analysis of and experimentation with the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation. Adaptation was not always the bad theoretical object that it increasingly became from the late eighteenth century: in earlier centuries, adaptation was celebrated and valued as a means of aesthetic and cultural progress. Tracing the falling fortunes of adaptation under humanities theorization, the history nevertheless locates dissenting voices valorizing adaptation in every period. Adaptation studies can learn from history not only how to theorize adaptation more positively, but also to consider “the problem of theorization” for adaptation. The metatheoretical section finds that theorization and adaptation are rival, overlapping, inimical processes, each seeking to remake culture—and each other—in their images. It is not simply the case that adaptation has to adapt to theorization: rather, theorization needs to adapt to and through adaptation. The final section attends to the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation, analyzing how tiny pieces of rhetoric have constructed adaptation’s relationship to theorization, and turning to figurative rhetoric, or figuration, as a third process that can mediate between adaptation and theorization and refigure their relationship.

In the late 19th century, neurophysiology introduced techniques for detecting somatic signs of psychological processes. Scientific modes of recording, representing, and interpreting body movement as “expressive” soon found use in multiple cultural domains. Based on archival materials, this study charts the avenues by which physiological psychology reached the arts and evaluates institutional practices and political trends that promoted interdisciplinary engagements in the first quarter of the 20th century. In mapping the emergence of a paradigm it calls “psychomotor aesthetics,” this book uncovers little-known sources of Russian Futurism, Formalist poetics, avant-garde film theories of Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, and early Soviet programs for evaluating filmgoers’ reactions. Drawing attention to the intellectual exchange between Russian authors and their European and American counterparts, the book documents diverse cultural applications of laboratory methods for studying the psyche. Both a history and a critical project, the book attends to the ways in which artists and theorists dealt with the universalist fallacies inherited from biologically oriented psychology—at times, endorsing the positivist, deterministic outlook, and at times, resisting, reinterpreting, and defamiliarizing these scientific notions. In exposing the vastness of cross-disciplinary exchange at the juncture of neurophysiology and the arts at the turn of the 20th century, Psychomotor Aesthetics calls attention to the tremendous cultural resonance of theories foregrounding the somatic substrate of emotional and cognitive experience—theories, which anticipate the promises and limitations of today’s neuroaesthetics and neuromarketing.

St Paul’s Cathedral Precinct in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Spatial Practices is a study of London’s cathedral, its immediate surroundings, and its everyday users in early modern literary and historical documents and images, with a special emphasis on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Hentschell discusses representations of several of the seemingly discrete spaces of the precinct to reveal how these spaces overlap with and inform one another spatially. She argues that specific locations—including the Paul’s nave (also known as Paul’s Walk), Paul’s Cross pulpit, the bookshops of Paul’s Churchyard, the College of the Minor Canons, Paul’s School, the performance space for the Children of Paul’s, and the fabric of the cathedral itself—should be seen as mutually constitutive and in a dynamic, ever-evolving state. To support this argument, she attends closely to the varied uses of the precinct, including the embodied spatial practices of early modern Londoners and visitors, who moved through the precinct, paused to visit its sacred and secular spaces, and/or resided there. This includes the walkers in the nave, sermon-goers, those who shopped for books, the residents of the precinct, the choristers—who were also schoolboys and actors—and those who were devoted to church repairs and renovations. By attending to the interactions between place and people and to the multiple stories these interactions tell—Hentschell attempts to animate St Paul’s and deepen our understanding of the cathedral and precinct in the early modern period.

This book is about some of the ways in which the world got ready to be connected, long before the advent of the technologies and the concentrations of capital necessary to implement a global ‘network society’. It investigates the prehistory not of the communications ‘revolution’ brought about by advances in electronic digital computing from 1950 onwards, but of the principle of connectivity which was to provide that revolution with its justification and rallying cry. Connectivity’s core principle is that what matters most in any act of telecommunication, and sometimes all that matters, is the fact of its having happened. During the nineteenth century, the principle gained steadily increasing traction by means not only of formal systems such as the telegraph, but of an array of improvised methods and signalling devices. These methods and devices fulfilled not just an ever more urgent need, but a fundamental recurring desire, for near-instantaneous real-time communication at a distance. Connectivity became an end in itself: a complex, vivid, unpredictable romance woven through the enduring human desire and need for remote intimacy. Its magical enhancements are the stuff of tragedy, comedy, satire, elegy, lyric, melodrama, and plain description; of literature, in short. The book develops the concepts of signal, medium, and interface to offer, in its first part, an alternative view of writing in Britain from the Victorian era to modernism; and, in its second, case studies of European and African-American fiction, and of interwar British cinema, designed to open the topic up for further enquiry.

Meditating about death and the afterlife was one of the most important techniques that Christian societies in medieval and early modern Europe had at their disposal for developing a sense of individual selfhood. Believers who regularly and systematically reflected on the inevitability of death and the certainty of eternal punishment in hell or reward in heaven would acquire an understanding of themselves as unique persons defined by their moral actions; they would also learn to discipline themselves by feeling remorse for their sins, doing penance, and cultivating a permanent vigilance over their future thoughts and deeds. The book covers a crucial period in the formation and transformation of the technique of meditating on death: from the thirteenth century, when a practice that had mainly been the preserve of a monastic elite began to be more widely disseminated among all segments of Christian society, to the sixteenth, when the Protestant Reformation transformed the technique of spiritual exercise into a Bible-based mindfulness that avoided the stigma of works piety. The book discusses the textual instructions for meditation as well as the theories and beliefs and doctrines that lay behind them; the sources are Latin and vernacular and enjoyed widespread circulation in Roman Christian and Protestant Europe during the period under consideration.

Typographies of Performance is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality—from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage)—intelligible on the page. The coalescence of these experiments into a uniquely dramatic typography that was constantly responsive to performance effects made it possible for “plays” to be marketed, collected, and read in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a print genre distinct from all other genres of imaginative writing. It has been said, “If a play is a book, it is not a play.” Typographies of Performance shows that “play” and “book” were, in fact, mutually constitutive: it was the very bookishness of plays printed in early modern England that allowed them to be recognized by their earliest readers as plays in the first place.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 proposes an entirely new way of reading the transition into the modern. The first book in a three-part series which will take the reader up to the end of the First World War, Serial Forms looks at the rapid expansion of print in London after the Napoleonic Wars. It shows how the historical past and the contemporary moment are emerging into public visibility through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, shows, and new forms of mediation and it suggests that the growing importance and determining power of the form of seriality is a result of the parallel and connected development of a news culture alongside an emergent popular culture of historicism. Pettitt’s attention to the increasingly powerful cultural work of seriality in this period offers a fresh new way of thinking about print, media, literary and art history, as well as political, historical and social categories. The argument of Serial Forms rests on historical and archival material but the book also offers a philosophical and theoretical account of the impact of seriality. This first volume sets out the theoretical and historical basis for the subsequent two volumes in the series, which move out of London to encompass continental Europe and the imagination of the global. Serial Forms proposes fresh and frame-shifting analyses of familiar texts and authors, such as Scott, Byron and Gaskell, and sets out to change our thinking about new experiences of time and place in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This book argues that shifting attitudes to nonhuman animals in eighteenth-century Britain affected the emergence of radical political claims based on the concept of universal human rights. It examines a tension in 1790s radicalism between the anthropocentrism of the concept of the ‘rights of man’, and the challenge to human exceptionalism entailed by attempts to extend benevolent consideration to nonhuman animals. The development of a naturalistic and sympathetic literature of animal subjectivity is traced with particular attention to the innovatory representation of nonhuman animal perspectives within children’s literature. The study explores the complex relationship between animal representation and claims for human rights through an investigation of writing by and about four overlapping human groups—children, women, slaves, and the lower classes—whose social subordination was grounded in their cultural construction as less than fully human. Emancipatory movements of political reform, abolition, and feminism, and the animal representations produced within those movements, were affected by the varying forms of animalization applied to each oppressed group. A final chapter considers the legacy of 1790s animal rights discourses in the early-nineteenth-century campaign for anti-cruelty legislation. The book’s many literary animals include the ass, ambiguous emblem of sympathetic animal writing; the great ape or ‘orang-outang’, central to racist discourse; and the pig, adopted by 1790s radicals to signify their rebellion. Writers considered include Sterne, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Clare, Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Hays, Mary Robinson, Equiano, Sancho, Cugoano, Clarkson, Thomas Spence, Daniel Isaac Eaton, John Oswald, Joseph Ritson, Thomas Erskine, and John Lawrence.

Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde indeed “do” philosophy, and it illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The author traces the avant-garde’s philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how reflections on the creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself. This entails the avant-garde’s locating of cinema’s—and thought’s—ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found, that unites with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rectifying film-philosophy’s neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how, rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde’s interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerge from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. The author reads the avant-garde’s interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as an extension of Pragmatism’s commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde’s philosophies to Deleuze’s time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche’s “powers of the false.”