Dr Adrian Paylor

Existentialism and comic books have a long association. Existentialist themes within comic books have often been identified and explored by scholars. Such examinations have, however, generally neglected the ideas of Albert Camus. This is perhaps surprising given the popularity of superhero comic books and the fact that one of Camus’s most famous works examines what constitutes an existentialist, absurd, hero. This article seeks to redress this relative neglect. The intention of this article is to demonstrate that the Marvel Comics character Gwenpool embodies the qualities which Camus prescribed to an absurd hero in his philosophical essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’ To achieve this, this article examines Gwenpool’s awareness of what Camus describes as the absurd. That is to say, Gwenpool’s recognition of the antimony which exists between her desire to live a meaningful life and the meaninglessness of the universe she inhabits. This article then examines Gwenpool’s rejection of two possible responses to the “absurd”: suicide and philosophical suicide. Following this, Gwenpool’s adherence to the third response to the absurd which Camus outlines, and the only response of which he approves, is explored: revolt.

This article examines the role J.A. Smith played in introducing Croce’s conception of history into British philosophy. In particular, it examines his influence on R.G. Collingwood’s incorporation of the Italian idealist conception of history into his own philosophy. The contentions that Smith was a key popularizer of Italian idealist ideas into Britain and that he helped to shape Collingwood’s intellectual developed is not new. Yet these interrelated topics have not been explored in any great depth. Collingwood’s own reticence over his intellectual debt to Smith, a lack of interest in Smith and an unfamiliarity with his philosophy have all contributed to this neglect. This article seeks to redress this neglect through analysing how Smith nurtured Collingwood’s adoption of a Crocean conception of history. To achieve its aim, this article first analyses Smith’s own reception of Croce’s conception of history. From this, it presents a contextualist analysis of Collingwood’s development of a Crocean conception of history and the role Smith played in its adoption. Finally, this article examines why, despite Smith’s influence over his intellectual development, Collingwood failed to acknowledge the intellectual debt he owed to Smith.

This article explores the global social–economic impact of shale gas extraction, comparing the differing social and economic impacts shale gas extraction may have on communities in developed and developing countries. It argues that the benefits of fracking are more likely to be enjoyed by communities in highly and very highly developed countries rather than by those in countries with low or medium levels of development. Additionally, it shows that the potential risks and drawbacks of shale gas and its extraction are more likely to be experienced by communities in these latter countries than by those in highly or very highly developed countries. However, it also demonstrates that even communities in developed countries are vulnerable to environmental and health risks associated with shale gas extraction.

R.G. Collingwood was one of the staunchest intellectual opponents of Nazism in Britain throughout the interwar years and Second World War until his death in 1943. However, the ideological basis of his philosophical critique of Nazism is a matter of serious dispute among scholars. It has been described as liberal, Marxist and conservative. The aim of this article is to de-contest the ideological nature of Collingwood’s critique. Through performing a philosophical analysis on the theoretical components that made up Collingwood’s critique of Nazism, this article rejects the Marxist reading and argues that its ideological basis was both liberal and conservative. As a result, this article claims that, although the liberal and conservative readings can account for part of its ideological basis, by themselves both readings ultimately provide inadequate accounts of Collingwood’s critique. Instead, it is only when taken together that the liberal and conservative readings are able to adequately account for the ideological nature of Collingwood’s critique of Nazism. Indeed, this article demonstrates that the liberalconservative basis of Collingwood’s critique is a product of a broader tension between the two ideologies that runs throughout his political philosophy on account of his understanding of the dynamic nature of politics.

The Victorian age was a period in which Christian Orthodoxy was undermined by new and emerging forms of reasoned inquiry. The commonly-held view amongst historians is that the intellectual life in the era was composed of two hostile camps; those who defended Christian Orthodoxy and those who championed the new sciences. The received view is that, when faced by the new fields of reasoned inquiry, Christianity’s prominence within British intellectual life and discourse went into terminal decline. The intention of this article is to demonstrate that there was a middle ground between the two camps. In particular, this article aims to demonstrate that attempts were made to reconcile Christianity with the findings of the emerging forms of reasoned inquiry. This will be achieved through providing an examination of T. H. Green’s theory of Human Agency. Green was one of the most prominent philosophers of the Victorian age. Through his theory of human agency, Green consciously engaged in the debate that existed between theistic Christianity and the emerging forms of reason inquiry of the time.

Summary: The purpose of this article is to critically undermine two commonly held and closely related contentions regarding the British idealist tradition. The first is that the British idealist tradition went into rapid and terminal decline shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. The second is that J. A. Smith was largely responsible for it. These aims are achieved through a diachronic analysis of Smith's conception of human imperfection as well as an assessment of Smith's intellectual legacy. As this article will show, contrary to the received view, Smith was a philosophical innovator who instigated an intellectual evolution within the British idealist. In particular, this article shows that Smith substituted aspects of his early Greenian philosophy with elements of Italian idealism. As a result, Smith was instrumental in moving British idealism away from its traditional underpinnings and towards more a Croce–Gentilian foundation. It is this neglected philosophical innovation which has given scholars the false impression of the tradition's collapse. By establishing Smith's intellectual innovation this article intends to show that Smith made a much more significant intellectual contribution to the philosophical tradition to which he belongs than has so far been recognised.

The Situationist International (1957–1972) was one of the most radical intellectual groups of the second half of the 20th century. One of the distinguishing, albeit overlooked, features of the Situationist International was the importance it placed on the medium of comics. The Situationist International was perhaps the first philosophical movement in the history of Western thought to place a value on the production, consumption and overall worth of comics as a medium. Moreover, it was one of the first intellectual movements to propagate its philosophy through comics. This article examines the historical reasons as well as how form and content of comics predisposed the Situationist International towards affinity for the medium. In particular, the popularity of comics in France during the period the Situationist International was active is explored as well as how the form and content of comics at the time lent themselves to the situationist concepts of constructed situation, détournement and the spectacle.

This article examines Charles Bukowski and Kay ‘Kaja’ Johnson’s literary relationship. Despite Bukowski’s outsider status within the literary world, he corresponded widely with literary figures, including Johnson. Johnson was an early and active member of the Beat Generation who has largely been overlooked in literary histories. Recently scholarly interest in Johnson and her works, including her correspondence with Bukowski, has increased. However, due to the lack of primary sources and biographical information relating to Johnson, these scholarly works have understandably contained minor errors. This article aims to correct these errors, provide a fuller account of the Bukowski-Johnson relationship, and explore how it influenced, and was represented in, their respective literary productions.

Even the most reclusive writers do not exist in complete isolation. They operate within complex networks of family, friends, fellow writers, editors, publishers, and readers. Traces of these networks often survive in fragmented forms. They do so most obviously in archives, whether their own or those of their interlocutors.Footnote1 Such archives are invaluable for scholars seeking to reconstruct the intellectual worlds from which the writer emerged. However, as Collins states, “archives are always fragmentary, made up of what happens to have survived.”Footnote2 Accordingly, archives will never perfectly preserve a writer’s network. Much, perhaps most, of a writer’s network is inevitably lost. As a result, any scholarly biography or reconstruction of a writer’s social network remains partial, shaped as much by the absences that cannot be recovered as by what has survived. As Derrida argues in Archive Fever (1996), the archive is not a neutral space but a contested one, governed by institutional power that decides what is remembered and what is erased.Footnote3 Accordingly, these archival gaps are not random but reflect systemic biases. Lapp has pointed out that one of the principal systemic biases which has been identified is the “heteropatriarchal” nature of most traditional archives.Footnote4 That is to say, traditional archives have generally prioritized the preservation of material relating to straight, white, middle and upper class men, over other members of society.Footnote5 As a result traditional archives have stifled many voices, particularly those of the Global South, women, and the LGBTQIA+ community.Footnote6 Writers from these communities have been overlooked, overshadowed, or marginalized. What is often lost is not merely an isolated letter or reference, but the entire web of relationships that shaped a writer’s intellectual life. For such writers, evidence of these connections may have been lost, never collated, or never recorded in the first place. The archival papers that do exist will likely not be concentrated in one archive but rather sparsely scattered throughout other more prominent people’s archives. As a result, uncovering these networks is extremely difficult. This has two main consequences. Firstly, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to fully determine with whom lesser-known writers communicated and how those relationships may have shaped their work or career. Secondly, the lack of archival sources means that individuals who might connect two or more lesser-known writers are often rendered invisible, making it harder to identify shared communities, movements, or intellectual exchanges that fall outside dominant literary histories. This article has two aims. First, it illustrates the challenges of reconstructing the networks that linked LGBTQIA+ writers, using the elusive figure of Louis Marbury, a near-invisible but crucial connection between Kay “Kaja” Johnson, Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. Whilst Johnson was part of the vibrant Bohemian scene in New Orleans during the late 1950s, Spicer and Duncan were key figures in the San Francisco Renaissance during the same period. The meager evidence available of this connective figure is collated from a combination of sources: scant references in letters housed in traditional archives, within the primary texts of the writers in question, and fleeting mentions in the secondary literature. Second, this article serves as a call to action for the academic community, urging scholars to help uncover the identity of the elusive Louis Marbury, the enigmatic connective thread between these writers. Any assistance would be invaluable to my ongoing work on a biography of Johnson, from which this research stems.