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Presents the first extended account of asbestos in literature, film and visual cultureConsiders the literary and cultural impact of asbestos over the long 20th CenturyTracks material intersections between Modernism and the Environmental and Health HumanitiesModels a new interdisciplinary approach to literature and history of modern materialsFew 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

Breath plays a small, but important, role in the work of Keri Hulme. My interest in this essay is to consider what happens when Hulme's representation of breath is brought into conversation with the respiratory poetics of modernism, modernist anthropology, and planetary modernism to address Hulme's contribution to an Aotearoa New Zealand modernism. This conversation is played out in Keri Hulme's treatment of hau or 'breath'. The essay argues that Keri Hulme, in her prose works the bone people (1984) and Te kaihau/The windeater (1986), develops a respiratory poetics: an interrogation of anthropology through experimentations with form.

This article considers how we might receive Émile Zola's Germinal (1885) in the Anthropocene. Recent Anthropocene literary criticism has frequently turned to various forms of reception when presenting new accounts of texts written prior to general public knowledge of anthropogenic climate change, but it seldom considers how this reception might be enriched by debates in Philosophy of History. Zola himself anticipates how Anthropocene Reading might be paired with Philosophy of History in a review essay that is known today as 'La géologie et l'histoire' (1865), where the catastrophism of geological time is granted an elevated agency. In Germinal, the text's catastrophism is used to reveal Zola's account of mining life and concomitant chronic illnesses. Nevertheless, it is perhaps in the account of populism that the novel proves most prescient of the uptake of coal politics in the present. My article will consider how Germinal anticipates these problems in its historiosophy.

This essay juxtaposes works about East Kentucky coal communities by Elmore Leonard and bell hooks to consider what "coal identity politics" might be in the Anthropocene. The election of Donald Trump enabled new performances of white supremacy, in part through his appeal to coal nostalgia. At the same time, his environmental policies pose a threat to that little progress achieved by the Paris Accord. This entanglement demands a more nuanced approach to the affective dimensions of nostalgia from scholars of the Anthropocene. This essay explores the consequences of the nostalgia evoked in representations of coal mining communities.

AbstractIn this paper, we analyse the particular phenomena of COVID-19 pandemic shaming. We examine Sartre's account of the undifferentiated other in the experience of 'the look', and his insistence on shame as a foundational relational affect, in order to give a robust theoretical frame to understand how pandemic shaming circulated both online and offline, in targeted and diffuse manners. We focus on two features of pandemic shaming. First, we draw attention to the structural necessity of an audience in acts of pandemic shaming, where the shamer acts on behalf of a community of others, the audience, to perform and enforce a set of standards, values or norms. We turn to the we-experience and collective emotions literature and discuss how the shamer believes themselves to be 'speaking' on behalf of a community who share their outrage along with their values. Second, we discuss how the presumption of a collective emotion was frequently mistaken in acts of pandemic shaming, where shaming frequently led to shame backlashes, where the audience revealed themselves not to share the emotion and values of the shamer, consequently shaming the shamer. We argue that Jean-Paul Sartre's voyeur example is usefully illustrative of the tripartite structure of (1) shamed, (2) shamer and (3) shamer of the shamer that occurs in iterative processes of pandemic shaming, which are accompanied by shaming backlashes. We conclude by reflecting on the socio-historical context for Sartre's accounts of shame and 'the look', namely the German occupation of Paris and Sartre's experience of the French Resistance movement, and how these yield a particular socio-historical framing that makes evident how the extraordinary pseudo-wartime conditions of COVID-19 rendered atmospheres of distrust and suspicion prevalent.

This book considers 'history' through its supplementary function to the field rather than the ground of a study, bringing new insights into historical thinking and historiography across the humanities. It fosters engagement from around the disciplines in historical thinking and invites historians and philosophers of history to see the impact of their work outside of their own specific fields.

Essays in this volume discuss music history, linguistics, dance studies, paintings, film and archaeology. This book is essential reading for those interested in the practice of history, philosophy and the humanities more broadly.

"This open access book examines the various ways that shame and stigma became an integral part of the United Kingdom's public health response to COVID-19 during 2020, this book argues that there is an urgent need for public health interventions that are "shame sensitive," addressing the experience of shame as a crucial, if often overlooked, consequence of such interventions. As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded in 2020, interventions by the UK government maximised rather than minimized experiences of shame and stigma. From healthcare workers insulted in the streets to the online shaming of "Covidiots" and the "lepers of Leiceister", for example, public animus about the pandemic found scapegoats for its frustrations. But, rather than intervene with robust strategies to sensitize people about the effects of this behaviour, the government's healthcare policies and rhetoric seemed to exacerbate experiences of shame and stigma, relying on a language that intensified oppositional, antagonistic thinking, while dissimulating about its own responsibilities. Through a series of case studies around topics such as 'fat shaming', the term 'covidiots', and racial profiling, this provocative book identifies a systemic failure to manage stigma and shame-producing circumstances in four key 'scenes': healthcare contexts, social situations, domestic life and political decision-making. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust"--

This open access book examines the various ways that shame, shaming and stigma became an integral part of the United Kingdom's public health response to COVID-19 during 2020. As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded in 2020, it quickly became clear that experiences of shame, shaming and stigma dominated personal and public life. From healthcare workers insulted in the streets to anti-Asian racism, the online shaming of "Covidiots" to the identification of the "lepers of Leicester", public animus about the pandemic found scapegoats for its frustrations. Interventions by the UK government maximised rather than minimized these phenomena. Instead of developing robust strategies to address shame, the government's healthcare policies and rhetoric seemed to exacerbate experiences of shame, shaming and stigma, relying on a language and logic that intensified oppositional, antagonistic thinking, while dissimulating about its own responsibilities. Through a series of six case studies taken from the events of 2020, this thought-provoking book identifies a systemic failure to manage shame-producing circumstances in the UK. Ultimately, it addresses the experience of shame as a crucial, if often overlooked, consequence of pandemic politics, and advocates for a "shame sensitive" approach to public health responses. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY NC ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.