Part I. What's the Problem?: 1. What are they shouting about 2. Lineaments of contention 3. Comparisons, mechanisms, and episodes Part II. Tentative Solutions: 4. Mobilizations in comparative perspective 5. Contentious action 6. Transformations of contention Part III. Applications and Conclusions: 7. Revolutionary trajectories 8. Nationalism, national disintegration, and contention 9. Contentious democratization 10. Conclusions.

Dynamics of Contention

Oxford Dictionary of National BiographyEditors: MatthewColin and others 60 vols Price £7500: online personal subscription £295 per annum [www.oxforddnb.com] Oxford: Oxford University Press

The terms terror, terrorism, and terrorist do not identify causally coherent and distinct social phenomena but strategies that recur across a wide variety of actors and political situations. Social scientists who reify the terms confuse themselves and render a disservice to public discussion. The U.S. government's own catalogs of terrorist events actually support both claims.

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Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists*:

(2000). Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 84-84.

Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India

Introduction: the crowd problem 1. Setting the stage: crowds and modern French society 2. Disciplinary struggles: the crowd in early French sociology 3. Weimar developments: toward a distinctively sociological theory of crowds 4. Liberal attitudes: crowd semantics in the USA 5. From crowd to mass: problematizing classless society 6. Reactions to totalitarianism: new fusions of sociological and psychological thinking 7. The culmination and dissolution of crowd semantics 8. Postmodern conditions: the rise of the post-political masses Epilogue: the politics of crowds.

The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology

Between 1800 and 1850, political demonstrations and the tumult of a ballooning street life not only brought novel kinds of crowds onto the streets of London, but also fundamentally changed British ideas about public and private space. "The Crowd" sets out to demonstrate the influence of these new crowds, riots, and demonstrations on the period's literature. John Plotz offers compelling readings of works by Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Bronte, arguing that new 'representative' crowds became a potent rival for the representational claims of literary texts themselves. As rivals in representation, these crowds triggered important changes not simply in how these authors depicted crowds, but in their notions of public life and privacy in general. "The Crowd" is the first book devoted to an analysis of crowds in British literature. In addition to this being a noteworthy and innovative contribution to literary criticism, it addresses ongoing debates in political theory on the nature of the public-political realm and offers a new reading of the contested public discourses of class, nation, and gender. In the end, it provides a sophisticated and rich analysis of an important facet of the beginning of the modern age.

The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics

List of Illustrations xi Preface: Getting Hold of Portable Property xiii INTRODUCTION: The Global, the Local, and the Portable 1 CHAPTER ONE: Discreet Jewels: Victorian Diamond Narratives and the Problem of Sentimental Value 24 CHAPTER TWO: The First Strawberries in India: Cultural Portability Abroad 45 CHAPTER THREE: Someone Else's Knowledge: Race and Portable Culture in Daniel Deronda 72 CHAPTER FOUR: Locating Lorna Doone: R. D. Blackmore, F. H. Burnett, and the Limits of English Regionalism 93 CHAPTER FIVE: Going Local: Characters and Environments in Thomas Hardy's Wessex 122 CHAPTER SIX: Nowhere and Everywhere: The End of Portability in William Morris's Romances 144 CONCLUSION: Is Portability Portable? 170 Notes 183 Bibliography 235 Index 257

Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move

It used to be that "living things" were mainly found in eighteenth-century speaking-object narratives. Scholars interested in talkative objects might have stretched a point to include late-nineteenth-century "commodity fetishes" and horror films. No longer. What is coming to be called "thing theory" urges us to take our account of "things that talk" as far back as Hieronymous Bosch monsters (in Joseph Koerner's persuasive "Bosch's Equipment"), and as far afield as Rorschach blots and the exemplary soap bubbles (anatomized in Simon Schaef fer's "A Science Whose Business Is Bursting") by which late Victorian physicists demonstrated universal laws of molecular behavior to bedazzled audiences (both articles appear in Lorraine Daston's impressive new collection, Things That Talk). Defining what one even means by talking about things can rapidly become an arcane dispute, especially when waged by scholars quoting and counterquoting Heidegger's chewy phenomenological account of the "thingness of things." But ordinary language can provide some useful guidance here. Harriet Beecher Stowe's original subtitle for Uncle Tom's Cabin, "The Man Who Was a Thing," is

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Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory

This article examines a deep-seated Victorian preoccupation with the ways that portable property becomes the vector for the transplantation of national culture and individual identity. It argues that england's empire, the territory Charles Dilke labeled "Greater Britain," was the forcing bed from which cultural portability emerged as a new way of imagining self, community, and nation. A range of Anglo-Indian texts— among them Julia maitland's Letters from Madras, emily eden's Up the Country, and the anonymous 1873 Overland, Inland, and Upland—suggest that self-styled exiles from england cultivated a connection with their fellow expatriates through objects and prac - tices transported to the colonies from england. These mobile containers of Britishness strengthened settlers' bond to their alma mater, even as they reminded them of their distance from home. The long-distance attachments thus reified by cultural portability allowed Anglo-Indians to draw a cordon of inattention that separated them from their Indian surroundings and to engage in the willful fiction that life in India was merely a continuation of the english experience. In this way, portable repositories of mobile memory in Victorian Britain served to unify an otherwise disparate global community.

The First Strawberries in India: Cultural Portability in Victorian Greater Britain

In News from Nowhere and his neglected prose romances (1891-1896), William Morris aims to refute a Victorian novelistic commonplace: that personal identity and cultural privilege are portable properties, and that empathic identification depends on individuals' carrying a durable sense of self with them, housed in such portable properties. Influenced by the Chartists and by a subterranean tradition of English radical writing, Morris produced these romances as a series of anti-novels, aiming for a deindividuating aesthetic of surfaces over depths, an aesthetic that erased not only apparent differences between words, but also between persons.

John Plotz

Papers

The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics

Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move

Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory

The First Strawberries in India: Cultural Portability in Victorian Greater Britain

Nowhere and Everywhere: The End of Portability in William Morris's Romances