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  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Portrayals and perceptions of AI and why they matter
    (The Royal Society, 2018-12-11) Cave, Stephen; Craig, Claire; Dihal, Kanta; Dillon, Sarah; Montgomery, Jessica; Singler, Beth; Taylor, Lindsay; Cave, Stephen [0000-0002-0764-0874]; Dihal, Kanta [0000-0003-2292-7221]; Dillon, Sarah [0000-0002-6321-1273]; Singler, Beth [0000-0001-9471-0924]
    How researchers, communicators, policymakers, and publics talk about technology matters. Shared understandings about the nature, promise and risks of new technologies develop through the explicit or implicit stories that different groups tell about technology and its place in our lives. The AI narratives project – a joint endeavour by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Royal Society – has been examining which narratives currently influence public debates about AI, and how these portrayals might shape public perceptions of the capabilities, risks, and benefits of AI technologies. Many of the current ideas about AI technologies that are pervasive in public consciousness – typically that AI is an embodied, super-human intelligence – are shaped by hundreds of years of stories that people have told about humans and machines, and our places in the world. This cultural hinterland shapes how AI is portrayed in media, culture, and everyday discussion; it influences what societies find concerning – or exciting – about technological developments; and it affects how different publics relate to AI technologies. Building a well-founded public dialogue about AI technologies will be key to continued public confidence in the systems that deploy AI technologies, and to realising the benefits they promise across sectors. Since the launch of the machine learning project, the Royal Society has been creating spaces for public discussion about AI technologies, and their implications for society. In a series of four workshops, the Royal Society and Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence explored: which narratives around intelligent machines are most prevalent, and their historical roots; what can be learned from how the narrative around other complex, new technologies developed, and the impact of these; how narratives are shaping the development of AI, and the role of arts and media in this process; and the implications of current AI narratives for researchers and communicators. The report brings together the conclusions of these workshops, and is for anyone interested in how AI is portrayed and perceived.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    The Return of the "Spiritual Soldier": Rebecca West's Henry James
    (Johns Hopkins University Press) Bryan, RE; Bryan, Rachel [0000-0003-3361-2671]
    Since Rebecca West’s death in 1983, her critical study Henry James (1916) has received a range of divergent, often antithetical, responses from those who frame it as the final act of the debate between the Master and West’s then lover, H. G. Wells. This paper instead draws attention to West’s Henry James as one of a series of early critical and fictional works that saw West engage with James’s oeuvre from the perspective of her civilian experience of the Great War: a conflict in whose psychological disquiet she would find need for, and a creative resonance with, James’s late writings.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    On the Character of a 'Great Patriot': A New Essay Ascribed to Bolingbroke
    (Cambridge University Press, 2018-07) Hone, J; Skjönsberg, Max
    This article presents the first addition in recent years to the canon of the British eighteenth-century statesman and political thinker Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751), a manuscript essay 'On the Character of a Great Patriot'. For the first time, this article identifies Bolingbroke as the likely author of this unascribed, undated, and untitled essay in the Senate House Library manuscript collection. Using internal and contextual evidence, the article demonstrates that the 'Character' is a description of Bolingbroke's opposition colleague William Pulteney, and that it was written in the final months of 1731, mostly likely for publication in the opposition journal the Craftsman. The 'Character' dates from a period in which Bolingbroke wrote very little, and it is thus a crucial addition to his biography as well as an early exposition of his theory of opposition politics. Moreover, study of the essay shows that Bolingbroke drew extensively on the example of Pultneye when formulating his idea about the necessity of a systematic opposition party, not fully formulated until On the Spirit of Patriotism (1736). The 'Character' thus sheds further light on the important relationship between political practice and theory in the age of Walpole.
  • ItemOpen AccessPublished version Peer-reviewed
    The Earliest Welsh Genealogies: Textual Layering and the Phenomenon of 'Pedigree Growth'
    (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018) Guy, BD; Guy, Ben [0000-0001-9329-9862]
    This article examines the ways in which early medieval genealogical texts might be augmented over time in order to reflect changing political situations. Two early ninth-century tracts from the kingdoms of Powys and Dyfed in Wales are taken as case studies. Textual and chronological problems with the tracts are discussed, and contexts are proposed for the circumstances of their composition. It is suggested that each of these tracts stands at the head of a process of ‘pedigree growth’, whereby, during the course of textual transmission, the genealogical content of each tract was extended both backwards and forwards in time.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    The Convergence of the Twain: Early Modern encounters between Japan and Britain
    Hartle, PN
    This essay combines two papers given at successive ACMRS conferences in 2015 and 2016, in which I shared the first fruits of what I hope will develop into a larger project exploring the cultural encounters between Japan and Britain in the period between 1600, when the famous William Adams (more celebrated now in Japan than in his homeland) made landfall in a new country, and 1673, when the last Englishmen to enter Japanese waters before the nineteenth century were forbidden to set foot upon its soil. Inevitably, the essay therefore bears the marks both of its origin as oral performance and of its new portmanteau status; I hope the reader will be indulgent to both. The central thesis of the combined essay is that cultural interconnections between the two countries in the Early Modern period were both more various and – often but not always - more imbued with a desire to understand and value difference than has usually been argued; however, almost every aspect of this relationship needs fuller and broader exploration than is attempted here, whether it be the admiration in Britain for Japanese arms, medicine or writing or for British engravings, spectacles or even cuisine in Japan. I hope that, for myself and others, it will prove to be a waymark.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Ecocriticism in the modernist imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden
    (Informa UK Limited, 2018-04-03) Kennedy, Sarah; Kennedy, Sarah [0000-0002-8401-6776]
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    A correction to the identity of 'Mrs. Furnivall' in Harvard's Houghton Library Archives
    (OUP, 2018-09) Yarn, MG
    Harvard University’s Houghton Library contains a manuscript entitled ‘Mrs. Furnivall transcript copies of old plays’ (MS Eng 1660), described as ‘Manuscript transcript copies of pre-Shakespearian plays made by Mrs. Furnivall, the wife of Frederick James Furnivall.’ This paper corrects the identity of 'Mrs Furnivall' suggested by the library's catalogue, and provides an overview of the life of Agnes Furnivall.
  • ItemRestrictedAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    ‘The active and the contemplative’: Charles Mauron, Virginia Woolf, and Roger Fry
    (Clemson University Press/Liverpool, 2018-06-29) Tobin, CA; Wilson, Nicola; Battershill, Claire
    If the French scientist and aesthetician, Charles Mauron (1899-1966) has received critical attention in Woolf studies it is largely for his role as a translator of Bloomsbury writers and for his theory of ‘psychological volumes’ (The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature, 1927). However, Mauron and Woolf met and corresponded on numerous occasions during the 1930s and their relationship strengthened while she was writing Roger Fry’s biography. My point of departure in this essay is the nexus between Woolf, Fry, and Mauron. At the centre of my discussion is Mauron’s second book of essays, Aesthetics and Psychology, which was published by the Hogarth Press in 1935. I suggest that Mauron presents a theory of aesthetic attention and experience, which invites reading alongside Woolf’s art and life-writing of the 1930s. I consider Mauron’s revision of Fry’s apparent separation of ‘art’ and ‘life’ and his notion of a dialectic between ‘two attitudes of mind’, the ‘active and contemplative’, in relation to Woolf’s ‘philosophy’ of ‘non-being’ and ‘being’. In conclusion, I propose Woolf’s anticipation of Mauron’s theory of inactive contemplation in To the Lighthouse.
  • ItemOpen AccessPublished version Peer-reviewed
    Continuing Without Closure: Analysing Irresolution in the Old Norse Hildr Legend
    (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2018-07) Olley, KM; Olley, KM [0000-0002-3077-9399]
    The article introduces Old Norse material into the ongoing critical discussion about resistance to closure in medieval literature, a discussion traditionally dominated by Old French and Middle English texts. The failure of narrative accounts of the Old Norse Hildr legend to resolve is embodied by the tableaux of the eternal battle at the legend’s climax, an impasse which nevertheless functions as a closural device and unites the retellings of the legend around the theme of battle. The open nature of the impasse, however, encouraged medieval authors to work on constructing narrative closure within their own accounts of the legend, not only by writing new endings but also new beginnings for the battle, elaborating on the motivations behind it. Such a strategy confirms that in Old Norse texts, as in wider medieval literature, concepts of closure involved more than merely the ending of a narrative but embraced its broader structure and invites further comparison with other medieval European texts. Finally, in taking as its starting point not a text but a legend, the article aims to explore how issues of openness versus closure can be usefully applied to a narrative unconfined by a single text but represented rather in a nexus of texts with little in common besides a brief overlap in subject matter. The article argues for the necessity of the legendary perspective, in spite of its methodological challenges, in order to distinguish between closure on a textual and closure on a narrative level.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Afterword: Writing Religion and the Genealogy of the Literary Aesthetic
    (Wiley, 2018) Connell, Philip; Connell, Philip [0000-0002-7730-872X]
    AbstractThis afterword takes as its starting‐point the suggestion that the category of the ‘literary’ might be implicated within a historical process of secularisation. This possibility is resisted, at least in respect of its applicability to the influential circle of eighteenth‐century clerical literati associated with Bishop William Warburton, who ranged themselves against the growing influence of the third earl of Shaftesbury and his followers, for reasons that could be construed as at once matters of orthodoxy and questions of taste. In doing so, they helped to form ‘pre‐Romantic’ cultural prejudices while simultaneously defending the interests of the eighteenth‐century Church.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Cinema 66–8: The original London film-makers
    (Intellect, 2017-12-01) Miller, Henry K; Miller, Henry [0000-0001-5255-3764]
    Abstract A history of the mostly London-dwelling experimental film-makers, all of them associated with art schools, who came together to form the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative in 1966, and who mostly withdrew from it shortly afterwards.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Algebra and the Art of War: Marlowe's Military Mathematics in Tamburlaine 1 and 2
    (SAGE Publications, 2018-04-01) Jarrett, J
    In his Tamburlaine plays, Marlowe broached a difficulty of dramaturgy: how can an acting company of a dozen men convey to their audience the scale of military battles involving thousands? Here, I argue that algebra provided Marlowe his solution. I reconsider the numbers critics have noticed are ubiquitous throughout Tamburlaine 1 and 2 in terms of their algebraic functions and their role in effecting an algebraic stage. My contention is that Marlowe utilized algebra to create a unique aesthetic of warfare, in which the enormity of battle could be played out imaginatively within the small space of the Elizabethan theatre.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    MEDIEVAL TREATIES AND THE DIPLOMATIC AESTHETIC
    (2018) Berenbeim, Jessica; Berenbeim, Jessica [0000-0001-8364-8838]
    The charters of medieval diplomacy are essays in formulating a lingua franca of documentary communication. Through the process of realizing a mutually authentic textual object, they make negotiation visible. This essay examines some examples in detail from treaties concluded among England, France, and Portugal, in the context of a broader methodological intervention: to join the forces of New Diplomatic History with the study of material texts as visual culture.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    The Biblical Genealogies of the King James Bible (1611): Their Purpose, Sources and Significance
    (Oxford University Press, 2018-06-01) Macfarlane, Kirsten
    This article provides a systematic analysis of the genealogies prefixed to the King James Bible (1611), giving the first examination of their contemporary significance and purpose, as well as the collaboration between the Hebraist Hugh Broughton and the cartographer John Speed that produced them. By placing the diagrams within the context of Speed and Broughton's greater interests, as well as through the use of several previously unstudied drafts, it will show that the genealogies had a clear polemical function, emerged from a subsidiary of the thriving field of chronology, and can be placed within a longstanding visual tradition capable of explaining many of the peculiarities on which modern scholars have remained silent. Finally, it will argue that the genealogies were an ingenious kind of ‘reading technology’ produced through a synthesis of sacred and secular scholarship that aimed to transmit the products of learned, neo-Latin scholarship to an unlearned, English readership.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    "That ye mowe redely fynde . . . what ye desyre": Printed Tables of Contents and Indices, 1476-1550
    (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) da Costa, A
    How the conventions governing the structure and divisions of codices and the characteristic features of their parts made their way from the scholarly manuscripts of the late medieval period into printed books has been only cursorily examined by scholars. This essay traces the development in English print before 1540 of two paratextual elements, the table of contents and the index, which were at this time not strictly distinguished from one another. How did English printers describe tables of contents and indices, and what can these descriptions tell us about why printers found them worthwhile additions? The essay contends that writers and printers marketed these features as time-saving innovations and—in the case of early Reformation works—valued them as means to shaping and constraining how readers read.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    The Pardoner’s Passing and How It Matters
    (Berghahn Books, 2017-01-01) da Costa, Alex
    This article looks again at the gure of the Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales and reconsiders the possibility that ‘he’ is a woman passing as a man. The importance of such a reading is revealed by exploring the anxieties this raises over the relationship between outward appearance and inner substance or reality, and demonstrating parallels with medieval anxieties over the authenticity of relics and the validity of religious speech acts, including those involved in the transubstantiation of the elements of the Eucharist.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Selling Forbidden Books: Profit and Ideology in Thomas Godfray’s Evangelical Printing
    (Pace University Press, 2017) da Costa, A
    Reformation scholars have tended to take for granted English demand for evangelical books without considering how writers and printers persuaded readers steeped in traditional religion to engage with verboten and challenging material. This article explores the commercial difficulties they faced in selling forbidden books and some of the tactics they adopted to nurture illicit demand. Thomas Godfray is presented as an example of a printer who combined ideological commitment to evangelical belief with an astute ability to negotiate censorship and manipulate the market.
  • ItemRestrictedAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Ghostly Sensations in Walter de la Mare's Texts: Reading the Body as a Haunted House
    (ELT Press) Kajita, Y; Kajita, Yui [0000-0002-8617-6837]
    Although de la Mare, whose literary career spanned from 1895 to 1956, is a significant figure for both contemporary and later writers, he occupies a somewhat marginal place in current accounts of literary history, even in the genre of supernatural fiction for which he is known. This essay addresses this by exploring how he stretched out and redefined the boundaries of the ghost story, or, more broadly speaking, what it is to experience the ghostly in literature. I take as my starting point T. S. Eliot’s assessment of his stories as “shivers” to analyse how the ghostly in de la Mare is often internal, immaterial, and inexplicable, which arouses a distinct kind of auditory attention in the reader. His awareness of the volatility of matter, informed by modern physics, animates his imagination of the unknown. Drawing on unpublished material as well as his poems and short stories, I demonstrate his recurring concerns with ghosts of imagined voices in literature, the recalling of other texts, and the ghostly sensations in the embodied experience of reading. Haunted by past texts and haunting them by listening for their echoes, de la Mare’s writings illuminate how reading is an inherently ghostly experience, even in the way in which language affects the reader. Rather than merely scaring readers for their amusement, the ghostly in de la Mare’s texts offer a fluid theory of reading.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Heaney, Joyce: Namings and Nation
    (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2018-04-01) Dukes, Hunter
    During an interview with Dennis O'Driscoll published in the 2008 volume Stepping Stones, Seamus Heaney recalls a two-line poem from his childhood: 'Two sticks standing and one across / Spells Willie Brennan in Hillhead Moss'. If, as Heaney suspects, the poem appeals to a child's mind, it is probably because it conjures an image that appears untrue. At right angles, a pair of vertical sticks crossed by a horizontal makes an 'H' shape, a letter that does not begin to 'spell' Willie Brennan in Hillhead Moss in any literal sense. If the sticks are placed at acute angles, forming an 'A', the same problem arises. With both images lacking correspondence, one begins to wonder if 'spell' is meant in a different sense - closer to 'signifies' or 'evidences'. That is Heaney's understanding of the line, anyway, for he describes the poem as an '"unlettered" performance' before drawing a parallel with Ulysses.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Hopkins' 'mixed insight'
    (Cambridge Quarterly Association) Nickerson, AJ; Nickerson, Anna [0000-0001-5203-4999]
    ‘I am in so much doubt how it is best to begin that I am going to bifurcate and counterpoint myself in parallel columns.’ So begins Hopkins’ remarkable letter to Baillie, 14 May 1881. The letter divides into two neat columns. On the left, Hopkins begins, ‘On this side, what a burning shame it is that I have not [...] written to you’, and, on the right, ‘Here an ethical and Theophrastic observation’. The two lines of thought run in parallel until – their nervous energy exhausted and the poet confessing himself ‘much fagged’ – they ‘merge and surcease’ (CW, I, 440).