Open Access Books

Whether you look at quantity, quality, or readership, we are in an unprecedented era of fan fiction. Thus far, however, the genre has been subject to relatively little rigorous qualitative or quantitative study—a problem that Judith May Fathallah remedies here through close analysis of fanfiction related to Sherlock, Supernatural, and Game of Thrones. Her large-scale study of the sites, receptions, and fan rejections of fanfic demonstrate how it often legitimates itself through traditional notions of authorship even as its explicit discussion and deconstruction of the author figure contests traditional discourses of authority and opens new spaces for writing that challenges the authority of media professionals.

The release of No Time To Die in 2021 heralds the arrival of the twenty-fifth installment in the James Bond film series. Since the release of Dr. No in 1962, the cinematic James Bond has expedited the transformation of Ian Fleming’s literary creation into an icon of western popular culture that has captivated audiences across the globe by transcending barriers of ideology, nation, empire, gender, race, ethnicity, and generation. The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007 untangles the seemingly perpetual allure of the Bond phenomenon by looking at the non-canonical texts and contexts that encompass the cultural life of James Bond. Chronicling the evolution of the British secret agent over half a century of political, social, and cultural permutations, the fifteen chapters examine the Bond-brand beyond the film series and across media platforms while understanding these ancillary texts and contexts as sites of negotiation with the Eon franchise.

A reference book for the musician’s practical work of interpretation, this volume, after a general presentation of 18th century principles for determining a tempo, offers a compendium of all Mozart’s autograph tempo markings in 420 lists of pieces of similar character. Thus, a comparison of slower and quicker movements is made possible by 434 music examples, and there follows a wide-ranging collection of relevant texts taken from historical sources.

The book does not claim to know “the single correct tempo” for the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It hopes to be of assistance in the unavoidable search by every interpreter for the “true mouvement” of each work—for the work itself, for the performer, the instrument or instruments, the room, the public, the nature of the event. It follows that there can be no absolutely “authentic” tempo for Mozart’s works. And yet his tempo markings, since he chose them so meticulously, should be taken equally seriously with the other parameters of his famously precise notation.

This book describes how accelerators, the ‘schools of startup entrepreneurship’, help startups to become successful companies in Silicon Valley, the world’s most successful innovation region.

Was sind die gegenwärtigen Herausforderungen der Europäischen Union? Wie reagiert sie auf internationale Veränderungen und Krisen? Und wie antwortet sie auf ihre Kritiker in den Mitgliedsstaaten? 16 Beiträge von internationalen Experten geben auf diese Fragen eine Antwort.

Neue Technologien bedeuten neue Herausforderungen für das Recht. Das Internet ist kein Neuland mehr, kritische Themen wie Cyberattacken, Privatsphäre, der Schutz Minderjähriger oder auch das Cloud Computing sind jedoch keinesfalls ausdiskutiert. Die zunehmende Digitalisierung und Technisierung beschränkt sich nicht auf das World Wide Web. Der automatisierte Straßenverkehr ist ein ebenso zukunftsweisendes Thema, dessen Entwicklung rechtlich begleitet werden muss. Im vorliegenden Band sind Forschungsarbeiten von Rechtwissenschaftlern aus Deutschland, den USA, Kanada und Griechenland zusammengefasst.

Amicus curiae participation in international courts is steadily growing since the late 1990 despite lack of clarity on the concept’s nature, function and utility in international dispute settlement. Does amicus curiae infuse international judicial proceedings with alternative views, including the public interest in a case, as often advocated by NGOs? Does it increase the legitimacy and transparency of international dispute settlement, or the coherence of international law? Or is it an unhelpful impostor that impedes negotiated solutions and derails the proceedings at the expense of the parties to advance its own agenda?

By way of an empirical-comparative analysis of the laws and practices of the ICJ, the ITLOS, the ECtHR, the IACtHR, the IACtHPR, WTO panels and the Appellate Body, and investment arbitration the dissertation examines the status quo of amicus curiae before international courts and tribunals to determine if the current amicus curiae practice is of added value to international proceedings and international dispute settlement in general.

The dissertation shows that there is no common concept of international amicus curiae, but that amicus curiae before the international courts examined share a few characteristics. A proposed functional systematization highlights overlaps and diverging uses of the concept before international courts and helps scholars and practitioners to assess the opportunities and limits of the concept. Analysis of the concept’s current regulatory framework and its substantive effectiveness reveals a hesitation in particular by courts with a strong adversarial tradition to take into account the views of a non-party despite the positive experience with the concept in regional human rights courts. The dissertation concludes that neither the expectations nor the concerns attached to amicus curiae participation in international proceedings have materialized. It argues that the concept can contribute to improved decisions and decision-making in international dispute settlement if regulated and used properly.

The central form of communication on social network sites (sns) is the communication with and through images. Accordingly, the present volume highlights images and image-based communication on sns, such as Facebook, and on nightlife platforms, such as Tilllate. First, the authors analyze the two central image categories in depth – profile images and photo albums. What follows is the portrayal of dramaturgical and staging strategies of the (semi) professional photography on the nightlife platforms, which leads to an evaluation of the importance of the international glamour photography as a parameter of private photographic self-expression. Other questions that the authors ponder in the volume are: Which functions and meanings do images have for the communications between users on social network sites? To what extent could certain design characteristics in the image-based communication on sns establish themselves as prototypical staging patterns? Which staging traditions are followed thereby? Which staging strategies are followed on different online platforms by the users’ (self) visualizations?

Why do some individuals choose to protest political grievances via non-violent means, while others take up arms? What role does whom we trust play in how we collectively act? This book explores these questions by delving into the relationship between interpersonal trust and the nature of the political movements that individuals choose to join. Utilizing the examples of the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Syria, a novel theoretical model that links the literature on social capital and interpersonal trust to violent collective action is developed and extended. Beyond simply bringing together two lines of literature, this theoretical model can serve as a prism from which the decision to join terrorist organizations or violent movements may be analyzed. The implications of the theory are then examined more closely through an in-depth look at the behavior of members of political movements at the outset of the Arab Spring, as well as statistical tests of the relationship between interpersonal trust and terrorism in the Middle East and globally.

Since antiquity it has been known that without the freedom to speak, and later to publish, the road to fanaticism and totalitarianism lies wide open. This book focuses on how the ‘press’ reacted, when press freedom was under strain in number of cases in the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Contemporary literature on the freedom of the press has its focus on the role of the press in relation to democracy; how media influences democracy, how the political and the ethical aspects are managed etc. This book is on the one hand part of this central discourse. On the other hand, it attempts to broaden views by focusing on the historical and contemporary experiences, when press freedom was under strain in significant periods since the 1930s. Also, its geographical scope is broader than most books, and it brings together experienced journalists and known academics adding to the dynamism of the discussion and challenging the reader to find his own position concerning censorship, self-censorship and press ethics.

Kafka’s Zoopoetics is the first extensive account of animals and human-animal relations in the work of Franz Kafka. The book appeals to a broad audience, including scholars and students of Comparative Literature, German Studies, Cultural Studies, and Human-Animal Studies. Kafka’s pivotal role in world literature cannot be overestimated. Exploring the multidimensional relations between humans and animals, the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of Human-Animal Studies intertwines political and environmental critical paradigms, which are at the core of the contemporary intellectual discussion.

In this pathbreaking history, Donna J. Guy shows how feminists, social workers, and female philanthropists contributed to the emergence of the Argentine welfare state through their advocacy of child welfare and family-law reform. From the creation of the government-subsidized Society of Beneficence in 1823, women were at the forefront of the child-focused philanthropic and municipal groups that proliferated first to address the impact of urbanization, European immigration, and high infant mortality rates, and later to meet the needs of wayward, abandoned, and delinquent children. Women staffed child-centered organizations that received subsidies from all levels of government. Their interest in children also led them into the battle for female suffrage and the campaign to promote the legal adoption of children. When Juan Perón expanded the welfare system during his presidency (1946–1955), he reorganized private charitable organizations that had, until then, often been led by elite and immigrant women.
Drawing on extensive research in Argentine archives, Guy reveals significant continuities in Argentine history, including the rise of a liberal state that subsidized all kinds of women’s and religious groups. State and private welfare efforts became more organized in the 1930s and reached a pinnacle under Juan Perón, when men took over the welfare state and philanthropic and feminist women’s influence on child-welfare activities and policy declined. Comparing the rise of Argentina’s welfare state with the development of others around the world, Guy considers both why women’s child-welfare initiatives have not received more attention in historical accounts and whether the welfare state emerges from the top down or from the bottom up.

The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as it was experienced in the capital city of Santo Domingo. Focusing on everyday forms of state domination, Lauren Derby describes how the regime infiltrated civil society by fashioning a “vernacular politics” based on popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race and class mobility. Derby argues that the most pernicious aspect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated quotidian practices such as gossip and gift exchange, leaving almost no place for Dominicans to hide or resist.
Drawing on previously untapped documents in the Trujillo National Archives and interviews with Dominicans who recall life under the dictator, Derby emphasizes the role that public ritual played in Trujillo’s exercise of power. His regime included the people in affairs of state on a massive scale as never before. Derby pays particular attention to how events and projects were received by the public as she analyzes parades and rallies, the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following a major hurricane, and the staging of a year-long celebration marking the twenty-fifth year of Trujillo’s regime. She looks at representations of Trujillo, exploring how claims that he embodied the popular barrio antihero the tíguere (tiger) stoked a fantasy of upward mobility and how a rumor that he had a personal guardian angel suggested he was uniquely protected from his enemies. The Dictator’s Seduction sheds new light on the cultural contrivances of autocratic power.

This bold collection of essays demonstrates the necessity of understanding fascism in cultural terms rather than only or even primarily in terms of political structures and events. Contributors from history, literature, film, art history, and anthropology describe a culture of fascism in Japan in the decades preceding the end of the Asia-Pacific War. In so doing, they challenge past scholarship, which has generally rejected descriptions of pre-1945 Japan as fascist. The contributors explain how a fascist ideology was diffused throughout Japanese culture via literature, popular culture, film, design, and everyday discourse. Alan Tansman’s introduction places the essays in historical context and situates them in relation to previous scholarly inquiries into the existence of fascism in Japan.
Several contributors examine how fascism was understood in the 1930s by, for example, influential theorists, an antifascist literary group, and leading intellectuals responding to capitalist modernization. Others explore the idea that fascism’s solution to alienation and exploitation lay in efforts to beautify work, the workplace, and everyday life. Still others analyze the realization of and limits to fascist aesthetics in film, memorial design, architecture, animal imagery, a military museum, and a national exposition. Contributors also assess both manifestations of and resistance to fascist ideology in the work of renowned authors including the Nobel-prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Kawabata Yasunari and the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shirō. In the work of these final two, the tropes of sexual perversity and paranoia open a new perspective on fascist culture. This volume makes Japanese fascism available as a critical point of comparison for scholars of fascism worldwide. The concluding essay models such work by comparing Spanish and Japanese fascisms.
Contributors. Noriko Aso, Michael Baskett, Kim Brandt, Nina Cornyetz, Kevin M. Doak, James Dorsey, Aaron Gerow, Harry Harootunian, Marilyn Ivy, Angus Lockyer, Jim Reichert, Jonathan Reynolds, Ellen Schattschneider, Aaron Skabelund, Akiko Takenaka, Alan Tansman, Richard Torrance, Keith Vincent, Alejandro Yarza

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