Alice's evidence : examining the cultural afterlife of Lewis Carroll in 1932

In the context of recent work on Charles Lutwidge Dodgson/Lewis Carroll, this paper argues that, given the scarcity of new archival information on the author and his life, the cultural ‘afterlife’ of Carroll and his books, such as Alice in Wonderland, provides a rich alternative avenue for scholarly research. It uses as a case study the 1932 centenary of Lewis Carroll’s birth, which, it argues, marks a key transition point in cultural discourses around the author and Alice. While the Alice books had, by 1932, been adapted to cinema, adopted into advertising and incorporated into a society very different from the 1860s Britain in which they were first published, they were also subject to conservative notions of authenticity and fidelity to the original. Carroll, who died in 1898, was already considered in terms of literary ‘immortality’, and his work associated with a nostalgic past, yet he also remained within living memory; the reminiscences of those who had known him when they were children were foregrounded in the press, while ‘the real Alice’, Mrs Hargreaves, was still alive, and feted as one of the text’s cultural curators. Both Carroll and Alice were, meanwhile, subject to new contemporary discourses such as psychoanalysis, and became key to literary tourism and heritage on both a local and national level. This dynamic, complex point in Carroll’s cultural history, studied here through an analysis of primary documents from the period, is presented as an example of the rich potential for detailed scholarship into the afterlife of Alice and its author

Comics and human rights: a change is gonna come. Women in the superhero genre

Sam LeBas is a comic book editor and journalist from Louisiana. She works with the independent publisher ComixTribe, editing comic books, as well as helping aspiring creators learn about the process of making and publishing comics. In addition to writing comic book reviews and related articles, she is the co-author of a monthly Batgirl column for the Eisner-Nominated site Multiversity Comics. Find her on Twitter as @comicsonice Will Brooker is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University. He has written extensively on comic books and their audiences, and co-authors a column on Batgirl for the Eisner-Nominated site Multiversity Comics. His next book is the co-edited Many More Lives of the Batman, in 2015. He tweets as @willbrooke

Filling in the gaps : creative imagination and nostalgia in ZX Spectrum gaming

The ZX Spectrum home computer and its fans have largely been neglected in both popular and academic histories of videogames. This article helps to address that omission through extensive audience research with players who fondly remember their experiences of playing ZX Spectrum games in the 1980s. Drawing on approaches from literary theory and visual art, as well as audience studies and games scholarship, it explores the ways in which these players ‘filled in the gaps’ of the computer’s simple, often abstract graphics, and effectively co-created fictional worlds in which they became vividly immersed. It argues that the intensity of their nostalgic memories is precisely due to this imaginative, creative investment, and the fact that the experience cannot be recovered. Finally, it proposes ways in which this approach to ZX Spectrum players could be extended to other gaming systems, in other cultural and historical contexts

A post-Newtonian diagnosis of quasiequilibrium configurations of neutron star-neutron star and neutron star-black hole binaries

We use a post-Newtonian diagnostic tool to examine numerically generated quasiequilibrium initial data sets for non-spinning double neutron star and neutron star-black hole binary systems. The PN equations include the effects of tidal interactions, parametrized by the compactness of the neutron stars and by suitable values of ``apsidal'' constants, which measure the degree of distortion of stars subjected to tidal forces. We find that the post-Newtonian diagnostic agrees well with the double neutron star initial data, typically to better than half a percent except where tidal distortions are becoming extreme. We show that the differences could be interpreted as representing small residual eccentricity in the initial orbits. In comparing the diagnostic with preliminary numerical data on neutron star-black hole binaries, we find less agreement.Comment: 17 pages, 6 tables, 8 figure

Relativistic tidal properties of neutron stars

We study the various linear responses of neutron stars to external relativistic tidal fields. We focus on three different tidal responses, associated to three different tidal coefficients: (i) a gravito-electric-type coefficient G\mu_\ell=[length]^{2\ell+1} measuring the \ell^{th}-order mass multipolar moment GM_{a_1... a_\ell} induced in a star by an external \ell^{th}-order gravito-electric tidal field G_{a_1... a_\ell}; (ii) a gravito-magnetic-type coefficient G\sigma_\ell=[length]^{2\ell+1} measuring the \ell^{th} spin multipole moment G S_{a_1... a_\ell} induced in a star by an external \ell^{th}-order gravito-magnetic tidal field H_{a_1... a_\ell}; and (iii) a dimensionless ``shape'' Love number h_\ell measuring the distortion of the shape of the surface of a star by an external \ell^{th}-order gravito-electric tidal field. All the dimensionless tidal coefficients G\mu_\ell/R^{2\ell+1}, G\sigma_\l/R^{2\ell+1} and h_\ell (where R is the radius of the star) are found to have a strong sensitivity to the value of the star's ``compactness'' c\equiv GM/(c_0^2 R) (where we indicate by c_0 the speed of light). In particular, G\mu_\l/R^{2\l+1}\sim k_\ell is found to strongly decrease, as c increases, down to a zero value as c is formally extended to the ``black-hole (BH) limit'' c^{BH}=1/2. The shape Love number h_\ell is also found to significantly decrease as c increases, though it does not vanish in the formal limit c\to c^{BH}. The formal vanishing of \mu_\ell and \sigma_\ell as c\to c^{BH} is a consequence of the no-hair properties of black holes; this suggests, but in no way proves, that the effective action describing the gravitational interactions of black holes may not need to be augmented by nonminimal worldline couplings.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures. Matches the published versio