Scholars agree that the turning point in the global history of the night occurred when public illumination enabled the expansion of daytime activities after dark. In the case of Japan, the modern transformation of the night is commonly associated with the Meiji era, when gas lamps and Western-style lighthouses were introduced. Because Tokugawa Japan lacked any kind of public illumination, it is an unlikely candidate for inclusion in a global history of the transforming night. This technological bias can be corrected with a history of everyday (and everynight) life. An array of early modern sources indeed reveals that many of the features associated with the global transformation of the night – regulation, production, consumption, fantasy, and sociability – were in fact firmly in place in Japan before the age of public illumination. A journey into early modern Japan after dark complicates the parameters by which we measure historical change, enriches the history of the global night, and compels us to rethink the ways in which we write history

The introduction covers the state of modernist studies within Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literatures today, with reference to broader scholarship on global, transnational, and planetary modernism. It explains the logic behind the seven sections of the book: Adab, Poetry, Prose, Politics, Aesthetics, Easterlies (about connections to Urdu, Russian, and Central Asia), and Comparison. Most extant studies of modernism and modernity in the field focus on singular national contexts in the Middle East in relation to Europe and the Orientalist hangover that the region continues to suffer. Contributors to this volume instead consider instances of modernist connections in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish that exist beyond Western influence and can be traced back through local channels to Arab Islamic turāth (cultural heritage) rather than to literary and artistic encounters with the West. To flesh out the theoretical underpinnings of the volume, the editor discusses major novels and films in relation to time, modernity, modernization, and modernism to begin defining the parameters of the investigations to follow.

In this chapter, the editors of the volume Turkish Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury 2021) work through the entanglements between modernization and modernism in Turkey in the fashion of a broad survey and present a framework to understand the various modernisms in the literary sphere as they convey the country’s unique dynamics. Alkan and Günay-Erkol discuss how various elements of modernism are utilized, appropriated, and transformed in the context of Turkey and examine how the term “modernist” gains different meanings in relation to modernity’s varying but constant powerful drive toward a radical break from the past. To this end, they first establish the essential premise of Ottoman Turkish modernization. They investigate the historical and cultural circumstances of literary production and the responses and reactions to modernity during this period. The chapter thus elaborates on how “modernist” works differ from the more broadly conceived “modern” ones in order to delineate a space for modernism as a literary mode in Turkey.

This chapter reads the work of experimental poets who emerged in the 1950s in Turkey. The loose poetic movement known as İkinci Yeni (the Second New) was radical in the context of mid-century Turkish letters for its dense language, unusual images, and intentional flouting of conventional grammatical and syntactical rules. When this new style of poetry appeared around 1956, İkinci Yeni gave rise to a vigorous and sometimes vicious debate between its defenders and detractors. In hindsight, the central locus of this conflict can be seen as positions taken for and against aesthetic autonomy, the sine qua non of literary modernism. In order to challenge Eurocentric narratives of modernism that take concepts such as aesthetic autonomy for granted in terms of when and how they appeared, this chapter attends to the ways local histories of capitalist modernization and political developments help shape the appearance of modernist literature in geographies like the Middle East.

This chapter turns to the Persianate tazkirah tradition to show how the shared discourse of literary modernization, with its inherent nationalism and Victorian-influenced puritanism, led modernizers to work together to remake their shared Persianate heritage and create chaste, heteronormative, nationally bounded literary histories. These literary histories, produced as they most often were for modernizing educational institutions, likely not only reflected changing conventions but also played a pedagogical role in spreading them. The generations who began to receive a modern education grew up writing poetry differently under such influences. In this way, the modernizing conventions that were first developed or deployed by literary historians impacted other genres of Persianate literature.

In conversation with recent scholarship which has revised the relevance of the Islamicate adab culture for Middle Eastern modernities, this chapter revisits the history of modern literature in the late Ottoman Empire. Conventionally, Ottoman/Turkish literary modernity is placed within the framework of Tanzimat (reorganization) which refers to a process of state-led politico-economic structural reforms across the empire. As in other kindred political–cultural reawakening periods overshadowed by Eurocentric comparative methodology, modern Ottoman/Turkish literature has largely been characterized as a set of anti-Islamicate gestures whereby the shared Perso-Ottoman literary culture was heavily criticized and rejected. In an attempt to counter this narrative, this chapter advances adab, Sufi poetics, and hermeneutics in particular, as the conceptual infrastructure of Ottoman literary modernity. After establishing how modern Ottoman/Turkish literature embodies hermeneutical practices associated with Sufi poetics, the chapter situates Ottoman literary modernity within an ethical–aesthetical tradition and calls for understanding modernity from the perspective of literary ethics.

This chapter begins by outlining the past trends and the present trajectory of employment-related dispute resolution at international organizations. Second, the historic evolution of the statutory basis of administrative tribunals at the United Nations is analysed, suggesting that Member State governance organs are prepared to revise procedures, but are reluctant to address the transparency of employment law at international organizations. Third, and in conclusion – extending this book’s emphasis on concisely and clearly introducing the law – the incorporation of general legal principles of international administrative law into the Statutes of international administrative tribunals is proposed.

This chapter examines the imbrication of late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century discourses on race and class, and thus of the formations of colonialism and capitalism, both within and beyond England as center of global empire and capital.  It performs readings of this imbrication in John Clare’s protestations against land enclosure in Northamptonshire in the Romantic period, and it shows how this nexus in Clare anticipates Palestinian protestations against the dispossession of ancestral land since 1948. In doing so, it juxtaposes resonant moments in connected histories of modernity and modernization that inform the history of global capitalism, which still enacts in many ways the racial antagonisms in Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation.

This chapter continues the discussion of how English came to function as the language of African self-expression in the twentieth century and was ultimately liberated from its colonial legacies. The chapter starts by exploring the so-called language question, a long-running debate on the status and function of the English language in the making of African letters, which has perhaps been the most divisive issue among African writers in the second half of the twentieth century. The debate was not simply a feud on language use but the expression of a deep anxiety about what it has meant to produce a literature of decolonization in the language of the former colonizer. The second part of the chapter provides an account of the evolution and transformation of English in Africa among different social groups including the slave traders of Calabar, Creole elites in West Africa, and the elites produced by the colonial schools and university colleges that produced the first generation of African writers.

The critical study of African literature has had a troubled relationship with different schools of European poststructuralism in general and postcolonial theory in particular. This chapter starts with a critique of the theoretical retreat from modernity that has been a signature gesture of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory since the 1990s. Poststructuralist theory attracted many critics of postcolonial literature at the end of the twentieth century because of its rejection of the universal theories of reason, history, and the human subject associated with modernity. What was the implication of this poststructuralist turn in the criticism of an Africa literary tradition that was bound up with the experience and expectation of modernity? The chapter discusses the tension between the experience and discourse of modernity, postcolonial criticism, and a set of African texts that complicated both modernist and postmodernist discourses. A central concern in this chapter is what happens when we read canonical African literary texts themselves as forms of theoretical intervention.

This chapter explores the European Union’s ongoing efforts to simplify and modernize company law to enhance legal clarity, reduce administrative burdens and support cross-border business activity. It examines key initiatives such as the Company Law Package, digitalization of company processes and the reduction of formalities for corporate operations. The chapter evaluates how these reforms aim to improve competitiveness, foster innovation and align company law with the needs of modern businesses. Challenges related to implementation, legal coherence and Member State diversity are also discussed. Overall, the chapter highlights the shift towards a more efficient, accessible and future-oriented company law framework in the EU.

China’s rapid economic development exerts significant political effects. Modernization theory posits, with an optimistic outlook, that sustained economic growth will foster increasing public demands for political liberalization and democratization. Empirical findings presented in this chapter reveal that a majority of Chinese citizens report heightened satisfaction with their civil liberties and political rights following improvements in their overall well-being. Specifically, life satisfaction in the economic sphere demonstrates a positive spillover effect on satisfaction with civic and political rights. Furthermore, life satisfaction across economic, social, and individual dimensions positively influences the political realm, resulting in inflated satisfaction regarding limited civil and political rights.