"How the West Was Won" contains articles in three main areas of the humanities. It focuses on various aspects of literary imagination, with essays ranging from Petrarch to Voltaire; on the canon, with essays on western history as one of shifting cultural horizons and ideals, and including censorship; and on the Christian Middle Ages, when an interesting combination of religion and culture stimulated the monastic and intellectual experiments of Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard. The volume is held together by the method of persistent questioning, in the tradition of the western church father and icon of the self Augustine, to discover what the values are that drive the culture of the West: where do they come from and what is their future? This volume is a Festschrift for Burcht Pranger of the University of Amsterdam.

The common saying is that people have a culture. This book argues that people live a culture - which may explain why they are so affectively attached to it. By considering cultural interactions on a global scale, this book investigates how cultures can be understood in terms of conflict and cooperation, in relation to the nation-state, a multiplicity of worlds, society, civilization and community. It considers how culture is at the basis of the construction of individual and collective selves; how they can come to be alienated; are defined in relation to others; are perhaps in-comparable; when they are considered to be dis-abled; and whether we can speak of animal cultural selves and mechanical cultural selves. Its twelve chapters consists of two parts each that both start with a piece of music. The pieces are taken from different cultures and all connote that getting to understand cultures depends on listening, first and foremost.

'Trolls for Trump', virtual rape, fake news - social media discourse, including forms of virtual and real violence, has become a formidable, yet elusive, political force. What characterizes online vitriol? How do we understand the narratives generated, and also address their real-world - even life-and-death- impact? How can hatred, bullying, and dehumanization on social media platforms be addressed and countered in a post-truth world? Violence and Trolling on Social Media: History, Affect, and Effects of Online Vitriol unpacks discourses, metaphors, dynamics, and framing on social media, in order to begin to answer these questions. Written for and by cultural and media studies scholars, journalists, political philosophers, digital communication professionals, activists and advocates, this book connects theoretical approaches from cultural and media studies with practical challenges and experiences 'from the field', providing insight into a rough media landscape.

This book looks at the way in which the 'call for justice' is portrayed through art and presents a wide range of texts from film to theatre to essays and novels to interrogate the law. 'Calls for justice' may have their positive connotations, but throughout history most have caused annoyance. Art is very well suited to deal with such annoyance, or to provoke it. This study shows how art operates as an interface, here, between two spheres: the larger realm of justice and the more specific system of law. This interface has a double potential. It can make law and justice affirm or productively disturb one another. Approaching issues of injustice that are felt globally, eight chapters focus on original works of art not dealt with before, including Milo Rau's The Congo Tribunal, Elfriede Jelinek's Ulrike Maria Stuart, Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends and Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives. They demonstrate how through art's interface, impasses are addressed, new laws are made imaginable, the span of systems of laws is explored, and the differences in what people consider to be just are brought to light. The book considers the improvement of law and justice to be a global struggle and, whilst the issues dealt with are culture-specific, it argues that the logics introduced are applicable everywhere.

In the Dutch Republic, in its Baroque forms of art, two aesthetic formal modes, theatre and drama, were dynamically related to two political concepts, event and moment. The Dutch version of the Baroque is characterised by a fascination with this world regarded as one possibility out of a plurality of potential worlds. It is this fascination that explains the coincidence in the Dutch Republic, strange at first sight, of Baroque exuberance, irregularity, paradox, and vertigo with scientific rigor, regularity, mathematical logic, and rational distance. In giving a new historical perspective on the Baroque as a specifically Dutch republican one, this study also offers a new and systematic approach towards the interactions among the notions of theatricality, dramatisation, moment, and event: concepts that are currently at the centre of philosophical and political debates but the modern articulation of which can best be considered in the explorations of history and world in the Dutch Republic.

This Element describes the development of an affective economy of violence in the early modern Dutch Republic through the circulation of images. The Element outlines that while violence became more controlled in the course of the 17th century, with fewer public executions for instance, the realm of cultural representation was filled with violent imagery: from prints, atlases and paintings, through theatres and public spectacles, to peep boxes. It shows how emotions were evoked, exploited, and controlled in this affective economy of violence based on desires, interests and exploitation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679) was the most prolific poet and playwright of his age. During his long life, roughly coinciding with the Dutch Golden Age, he wrote over thirty tragedies. He was a famous figure in political and artistic circles of Amsterdam, a contemporary and acquaintance of Grotius and Rembrandt, and in general well acquainted with Latin humanists, Dutch scholars, authors and Amsterdam burgomasters. He fuelled literary, religious and political debates. His tragedy 'Gysbreght van Aemstel', which was played on the occasion of the opening of the stone city theatre in 1638, was to become the most famous play in Dutch history, and can probably boast holding the record for the longest tradition of annual performance in Europe. In general, Vondel's texts are literary works in the full sense of the word, complex and inexhaustive; attracting attention throughout the centuries. Contributors include: Eddy Grootes, Riet Schenkeveld-van der Dussen, Mieke B. Smits-Veldt, Marijke Spies, Judith Pollmann, Bettina Noak, Louis Peter Grijp, Guillaume van Gemert, Jurgen Pieters, Nina Geerdink, Madeleine Kasten, Marco Prandoni, Peter Eversmann, Mieke Bal, Maaike Bleeker, Bennett Carpenter, James A. Parente, Jr., Stefan van der Lecq, Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Helmer Helmers, Kristine Steenbergh, Yasco Horsman, Jeanne Gaakeer, and Wiep van Bunge.

Lyric Address in Dutch Literature, 1250-1800 provides accessible and comprehensive readings of ten Dutch lyrical poems, discussing each poem's historical context, revealing its political or ideological framing, religious elements, or the self-representational interests of the poet. The book focuses on how the use of the speaker's "I" creates distance or proximity to the social context of the time. Close, detailed analysis of rhetorical techniques, such as the use of the apostrophe, illuminates the ways in which poetry reveals tensions in society.

This book looks at the way in which the 'call for justice' is portrayed through art and presents a wide range of texts from film to theatre to essays and novels to interrogate the law. 'Calls for justice' may have their positive connotations, but throughout history most have caused annoyance. Art is very well suited to deal with such annoyance, or to provoke it. This study shows how art operates as an interface, here, between two spheres: the larger realm of justice and the more specific system of law. This interface has a double potential. It can make law and justice affirm or productively disturb one another. Approaching issues of injustice that are felt globally, eight chapters focus on original works of art not dealt with before, including Milo Rau's The Congo Tribunal, Elfriede Jelinek's Ulrike Maria Stuart, Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends and Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives. They demonstrate how through art's interface, impasses are addressed, new laws are made imaginable, the span of systems of laws is explored, and the differences in what people consider to be just are brought to light. The book considers the improvement of law and justice to be a global struggle and, whilst the issues dealt with are culture-specific, it argues that the logics introduced are applicable everywhere.