Search results for ""manchester university press""

The Treasury is one of Britain’s oldest, most powerful and secretive institutions, one that has played a central role in shaping the country's economic system. But all too often it has escaped public scrutiny when it comes to investigating the ups and downs of the UK economy. When portrayed, it is usually as a bedrock of government stability in times of crisis, repeatedly rescuing the nation’s finances from the hands of posturing politicians and the combustions of world financial markets. However, there is another side to the story. In between the highs there have been many lows, from botched privatizations to dubious private finance initiatives, from failing to spot the great financial crisis to facilitating ever-growing inequalities.Davis’s book goes behind the scenes to offer an inside history of the Treasury, in the words of the chancellors, advisors and civil servants themselves. It shows the shortcomings as well as the successes, the personalities and the thinking which have shaped Britain’s economy since the mid-1970s. Based on interviews with over fifty key figures, it offers a fascinating, alternative insight on how and why the UK economy came to function as it does today, and why reform is long overdue.

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Direct democracy makes you richer. Research shows that the average citizen earns nearly a $1000 for every referendum held, and that a strong correlation exists between the frequency of referendums and a GDP per capita. Referendums can also improve the quality of democracy. So why don’t we see more?Drawing on a three decades of research, Qvortrup presents a definitive statement on the benefits and history referendums, including examples of how this instrument of democracy has been both utilised and abused. The book outlines the history of referendums, explains when politicians have submitted issues to the voters, why these votes have been won or lost - and ultimately why it matters. Uniquely, the book also examines the role of social media in referendum campaigns and make suggestions for improving the process of direct democracyWritten in a lucid style by one of the world’s leading experts on referendums, Democracy on demand is a timely reminder of the importance of democracy in our politics, offering new insights into how direct democracy can both improve our lives and at the same time strengthen our societies.

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The BBC and HBO series Gentleman Jack brought Anne Lister to international attention, awakening tremendous interest in her diaries, which run to nearly five million words and are partly written in her secret code. They record in intimate detail Anne’s intellectual energy and her challenges to so many of society’s expectations of women at the time.In As Good as a Marriage, the sequel to Female Fortune, Jill Liddington’s edited transcriptions of the diaries show us Anne from 1836–38. She guides the reader through life at Shibden Hall after Anne’s unconventional ‘marriage’ to wealthy local heiress Ann Walker. The book explores the daily lives of these two women, from convivial evenings together to her ruthless pursuit of her own business and landowning ambitions.Yet the diaries’ coded passages also record tensions and quarrels, with Ann Walker often in tears. Was their relationship really as fragile as Anne’s coded writing suggests? This question is at the heart of As Good as a Marriage.

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During Brexit, political questions were continually framed in emotional terms. The referendum was presented as a conflict between reason and resentment, fear and hope, heads and hearts. The Leave vote was interpreted as the triumph of passion over rationality, and its aftermath triggered concerns about the divisive impact of feelings on political culture. This book examines how these stories about feelings shaped public experiences and determined political possibilities.The politics of feeling uses first-hand accounts to explore how ‘ordinary’ people understand their own feelings about the referendum, and how they reacted to the feelings of others. It shows how they drew on public narratives, while also rejecting and reworking them. The authors highlight a dangerous contradiction whereby feelings were simultaneously understood as dangerous and illegitimate, and as an authentic reflection of our inner selves. This had its own political consequences.

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Britain is sick and it needs saving. Covid-19 has brought death, disruption and disorder. It has revealed fundamental failures in public policy and our approach to health. For years, the same failures have perpetuated a host of modern plagues - long-running deadly epidemics in diabetes, depression and heart disease. These plagues pose systemic risks to society itself.In this timely book, Yuille and Ollier envisage a society that always puts the health of citizens first: the ‘Health Society’. The time for dithering and tinkering has passed. Prevention of disease is a task for all branches of government – not just the NHS but also for every workplace, employer, community and citizen. The ‘Health Society’ means working in radically new ways to extend our healthy lives and sustainably increase national prosperity.Saving sick Britain follows the science and lays down a challenge to us all: are we ready to make the change required to end these modern plagues? In answering the question the book helps steer the reader towards rethinking what both 'prevention' and ‘health’ mean in modern Britain.This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, Good health and well-being.

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Across Eastern Germany, where political allegiances are shifting to the right, the wolf is increasingly seen as a trespasser and threat to the local way of life. Styled by populist right-wing actors as an ‘invasive species’, the wolf evokes and resonates with anti-immigration sentiments and widespread fears of demographic catastrophe. To many people in Eastern Germany, the immigrant and the wolf are an indistinguishable problem that nobody in power is doing anything about. In this account of Eastern German agitation of wolves and migrants, Eastern German hunters, farmers, rioters and self-appointed 'saviours of the nation', Pates and Leser move beyond stereotypic representations of ‘the East’ and shine a light on the complexities of post-socialist life and losses.As nationalist parties are on the rise across Europe, The wolves are coming back offers an insight into the rise of the far right in Germany. The nationalist Alternative for Germany represents the third-largest party in the German federal parliament, with representation in the vast majority of German states. They draw much of their support from the ‘post-traumatic places’ in Eastern Germany, regions structured by realities of disownment, disenfranchisement and a lack of democratic infrastructure. Pates and Leser provide an account of the societal roots of a new group of radical right parties, whose existence and success we always assumed to be impossible.

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This book presents a socio-legal enquiry into the civic marginalisation of Roma in Europe. Instead of looking only at Roma’s position as migrants, an ethnic minority or a socio-economically disadvantage group, it considers them as European citizens, questioning why they are typically used to describe exceptionalities of citizenship in developed liberal democracies rather than as evidence for how problematic the conceptualisation of citizenship is at its core. Developing novel theoretical concepts, the book investigates a variety of topics including migration and free movement, statelessness and school segregation. It argues that while Roma are unique as a minority, the treatment that marginalises them is not. This is demonstrated by comparing their position to that of other marginalised minorities around the globe.

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What did it mean to be a ‘rebel woman’ in the interwar years? Taking the form of a multiple biography, this book traces the struggles, passions and achievements of a set of ‘fearlessly determined’ women who stopped at nothing to make their mark in the traditionally masculine environments of mountaineering, politics, engineering and journalism. From the motorist Claudia Parsons to the ‘star’ reporter Margaret Lane, the mountaineer Dorothy Pilley and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, the women charted in this book challenged the status quo in all walks of life, alongside writing vivid, eye-witness accounts of their adventures. Recovering their voices across a range of texts including novels, poems, journalism and diaries, Rebel women between the wars reveals their inch by inch gains won through courageous and sometimes controversial and dangerous actions.

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This book offers an innovative, comparative approach to the study of women’s legal rights during a formative period of Anglo–American history. It traces how colonists transplanted English legal institutions to America, examines the remarkable depth of women’s legal knowledge and shows how the law increasingly undermined patriarchal relationships between parents and children, masters and servants, husbands and wives. The book will be of interest to scholars of Britain and colonial America, and to laypeople interested in how women in the past navigated and negotiated the structures of authority that governed them. It is packed with fascinating stories that women related to the courts in cases ranging from murder and abuse to debt and estate litigation. Ultimately, it makes a remarkable contribution to our understandings of law, power and gender in the early modern world.

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This volume offers new practical and theoretical perspectives on one of the most complex questions regarding the formation of international law, namely that actors other than states contribute to the making of customary international law.Notwithstanding the International Law Commission’s valuable contribution, the making of customary international law remains riddled with acute practical and theoretical controversies that continue to be intensively debated. Making extensive reference to the case-law of international law courts and tribunals, as well as the most recent scholarly work on customary international law, this volume provides a comprehensive study of the contribution of international organisations and non-state actors to the formation of customary international law. With innovative tools and guidance for law students, legal scholars, and researchers in law, as well as legal practitioners, advisers, judges, arbitrators, and counsels, this collection is essential reading for those wishing to understand and address contemporary questions of international law-making.

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This unique and exciting collection, inspired by the scholarship of literary critic Stephanie Trigg, offers cutting-edge responses to the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer for the current critical moment. The chapters are linked by the organic and naturally occurring affinities that emerge from Trigg's ongoing legacy; containing diverse methodological approaches and themes, they engage with Chaucer through ecocriticism, medieval literary and historical criticism, and medievalism. The contributors, trailblazing international specialists in their respective fields, honour Trigg's distinctive and energetic mode of enquiry (the symptomatic long history) and intellectual contribution to the humanities. At the same time, their approaches exemplify shifting trends in Chaucer scholarship. Like Chaucer's pilgrims, these scholars speak to and alongside each other, but their essays are also attentive to 'hearing Chaucer speak' then, now and in the future.

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Aeron Davis takes a close look at the state of elites today. He argues that the Brexit vote and 2017 election outcome are signs of a deeper leadership crisis that has been developing over decades. The great transformations of the 1980s onwards have not only upended societies, they have reshaped elite rule itself. Too many leaders today, regardless of intent, are ignorant, precarious, rootless and self-serving. Although richer, they have lost coherence, influence and control. Increasingly, they are just reckless opportunists, getting what they can amid the chaos they have created. Their failings are not only damaging wider society, they are undermining the very foundations of the Establishment itself.The book, based on interviews with over 350 elite figures, asks: how did we end up producing the leaders that got us here and what can we do about it?

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Nationalism has reasserted itself today as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism’s confident return to the mainstream. Intellectual attempts to account for nationalism’s resurgence have however floundered. Desperately trying to read nationalism through one overarching cause – as capitalist crisis, as cultural backlash, or as social media led anti-Establishment politics – these accounts have proven woefully inadequate. This book argues that the only way to understand nationalism is through nationalism itself. To understand it as the key force of modernity that calls upon all existing ideological traditions in asserting its appeal: whether it is liberal, conservative, neoliberal or left-wing. This ideological clamour that characterises today’s British nationalism requires both recognition and theorisation. A meaningful understanding of new nationalism must reckon with the ideological range animating it and the deeply hostile aversion to different racial minorities that pervades its respective ideologies. Drawing on a variety of cultural and political themes – ranging from Corbyn’s dithering, the cult of Churchillism, the neoliberal fixation with a ‘point-system’ immigration policy, the muscular secularism of Richard Dawkins and friends, fears that the white working class have ‘become black’, and even simply the strange appeal of Harry Potter and Game of Thrones – this book provides a dazzling but always detailed study of how nationalism is the politics of today only because it is a politics of everything.

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Laurent Cantet is of one France’s leading contemporary directors. In a series of important films, including Human Resources, Time Out, Heading South, The Class and Foxfire, he takes stock of the modern world from the workplace, through the schoolroom and the oppressive small town to the world of international sex tourism. His films drive the hidden forces that weigh on individuals and groups into view but also show characters who are capable of reflection and reaction. If the films make their protagonists rethink their place in the world, they also challenge the positions of the viewer and the director. This is what makes them so worthy of study. Combining a fine eye for detail with broad contextual awareness, this book gives an account of all Cantet’s works, from the early short films to the major works. Martin O’Shaughnessy is a leading international writer on French cinema, especially in film and politics.

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This book addresses a topic of increasing importance to artists, art historians and scholars of cultural studies, migration studies and international relations: migration as a profoundly transforming force that has remodelled artistic and art institutional practices across the world. It explores contemporary art’s critical engagement with migration and globalisation as a key source for improving our understanding of how these processes transform identities, cultures, institutions and geopolitics. The author explores three interwoven issues of enduring interest: identity and belonging, institutional visibility and recognition of migrant artists, and the interrelations between aesthetics and politics, including the balancing of aesthetics, politics and ethics in representations of forced migration.

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Deindustrialising communities have called upon street theatre companies to re-animate public space and commemorate industrial heritage. How have these companies converted derelict factories into spaces of theatrical production? How do they connect their work to the industrial work that once occurred there? How do those connections manifest in theatrical events, and how do such events give shape and meaning to ongoing redevelopment projects? This book develops an understanding of the relationship between theatre and redevelopment that goes beyond accusations of gentrification or celebrations of radical resistance. Ultimately, Calder argues that deindustrialisation and redevelopment depend on theatrical events and performative acts to make ongoing change intelligible and navigable.Working memories brings together some of current theatre scholarship’s fundamental concerns while demonstrating the significance of those concerns to an interdisciplinary readership.

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Is the Atlantic World in a state of crisis? At a time when many political observers perceive indeed a crisis in transatlantic relations, critical evaluation of past narratives and frameworks in Transatlantic Relations and Atlantic History alike become crucial. This volume provides an academic foundation to critically assess the Atlantic World and to rethink transatlantic relations in a transnational and global perspective.The TransAtlantic reconsidered brings together leading experts such as Harvard historians Charles S. Maier and Bernard Bailyn and former ERC scientific board member Nicholas Canny. All the scholars represented in this volume have helped to shape, re-shape, and challenge the narrative(s) of the Atlantic World and can thus (re-)evaluate its conceptual basis in view of historiographical developments and contemporary challenges.

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Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars on seventeenth-century British literature, with a focus on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at specific cultural moments. With an eye to the elusive and complicated Andrew Marvell as tutelary figure of the age, the contributors have provided nuanced and sophisticated readings of a range of seventeenth-century authors, often foregrounding the uncertainties and complexities with which these writers were faced as the remarkable events of these years moved swiftly around them. The essays make important contributions, both methodological and critical, to the field of early modern studies and include examinations of prominent seventeenth-century figures such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden and Edmund Waller.

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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most popular novels in western literature. It has been adapted and re-assembled in countless forms, from Hammer Horror films to young-adult books and bandes dessinées. Beginning with the idea of the ‘Frankenstein Complex’, this edited collection provides a series of creative readings that explore the elaborate intertextual networks that make up the novel’s remarkable afterlife. It broadens the scope of research on Frankenstein while deepening our understanding of a text that, 200 years after its original publication, continues to intrigue and terrify us in new and unexpected ways.

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This book explores the concept of ‘quiet’ – an aesthetic of narrative driven by reflective principles – and argues for the term’s application to the study of contemporary American fiction. In doing so, it makes two critical interventions. Firstly, it maps the neglected history of quiet fictions, arguing that from Hester Prynne to Clarissa Dalloway, from Bartleby to William Stoner, the Western tradition is filled with quiet characters. Secondly, it asks what it means for a novel to be quiet and how we might read for quiet in an American literary tradition that critics so often describe as noisy. Examining recent works by Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, among others, the book argues that quiet can be a multi-faceted state of existence, one that is communicative and expressive in as many ways as noise but filled with potential for radical discourse by its marginalisation as a mode of expression.

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This book takes on a key problem in the history of drama: the ‘exceptional’ staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. Exploring the lives and performances of these previously anonymous women, the book brings the elusive figure of the female performer to centre stage. It integrates new approaches to drama, gender and patronage with a performance methodology to explore how the women of fifteenth-century Metz enacted varied kinds of performance that extended beyond the theatre. For example, decades before the 1468 play, Joan of Arc returned from the grave in the form of an impersonator named Claude. Offering a new paradigm of female performance that positions women at the core of public culture, Performing women is essential reading for scholars of pre-modern women and drama, and is also relevant to lecturers and students of late-medieval performance, religion and memory.

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Links acting traditions with cultural milieu.. No other book on Hamlet on the stage covers as much theoretical ground.. Covers a number of foreign productions and pays much attention to the role of scenography .

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With its fantasy of magical travel and inexhaustible riches, Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus is the quintessential early modern journeying play. The adventures of Fortunatus and his sons, aided by a magical purse and wishing-hat, offers the period’s most overt celebration of the pleasures of travel, as well as a sustained critique of the dangers of intemperance and prodigality. Written following a period of financial difficulty for Dekker, the play is also notable for its fascination with the symbolic, mercantile and ethical uses of gold.This Revels Plays edition is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Old Fortunatus. It offers scholarly discussion of the play’s performance and textual history, including attention to the German version printed and performed in the early seventeenth century. It provides a long overdue critical reappraisal of this unjustly neglected play.

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Acclaimed after the Second World War as England’s greatest historian, Sir Lewis Namier was an eastern European immigrant who came to idealise the English gentleman and enjoyed close friendship with leading figures of his day, including Winston Churchill. Today, Namier is associated with the belief that the thoughts and actions of elites matter most, and with a view of politics in which those who enter public life do so only in pursuit of personal and material advantage. This exaggerated view has made him a hero to social and political conservatives, and a demonic figure to the Left. Preoccupied by nationalism, empire, and human motivation, Namier also remains famous in academic circles for supposedly declaring that any reference to ideas in political discourse was nothing more than ‘flapdoodle’. The first biography of Namier in over thirty years, this book is based on a vast range of sources, including rich new archival material.

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That devil’s trick is the first study of nineteenth-century hypnotism based primarily on the popular – rather than medical – appreciation of the subject. Drawing on the reports of mesmerists, hypnotists, quack doctors and serious physicians printed in popular newspapers from the early years of the nineteenth century to the Victorian fin de siècle, the book provides an insight into how continental mesmerism was first understood in Britain, how a number of distinctively British varieties of mesmerism developed, and how these were continually debated in medical, moral and legal terms. Highly relevant to the study of the many authors – Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle among them – whose fiction was informed by the imagery of mesmerism, That devil’s trick will be an essential resource for anybody with an interest in the popular and literary culture of the nineteenth century, including literary scholars, medical historians and the general reader.

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Queer exceptions is a study of contemporary solo performance in the UK and Western Europe that explores the contentious relationship between identity, individuality and neoliberalism. With diverse case studies featuring the work of La Ribot, David Hoyle, Oreet Ashery, Bridget Christie, Tanja Ostojic, Adrian Howells and Nassim Soleimanpour, the book examines the role of singular or ‘exceptional’ subjects in constructing and challenging assumed notions of communal sociability and togetherness, while drawing fresh insight from the fields of sociology, gender studies and political philosophy to reconsider theatre’s attachment to singular lives and experiences. Framed by a detailed exploration of arts festivals as encapsulating the material, entrepreneurial circumstances of contemporary performance-making, this is the first major critical study of solo work since the millennium.

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This book examines one of the most fundamental issues in twelfth-century English politics: justice. It demonstrates that during the foundational period for the common law, the question of judgement and judicial ethics was a topic of heated debate – a common problem with multiple different answers. How to be a judge, and how to judge well, was a concern shared by humble and high, keeping both kings and parish priests awake at night. Using theological texts, sermons, legal treatises and letter collections, the book explores how moralists attempted to provide guidance for uncertain judges. It argues that mercy was always the most difficult challenge for a judge, fitting uncomfortably within the law and of disputed value. Shining a new light on English legal history, Justice and mercy reveals the moral dilemmas created by the establishment of the common law.

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This book makes the case for an inclusive form of socialist feminism that puts women with multiple disadvantages at its heart. It moves feminism beyond contemporary disputes, including those between some feminists and some trans women. Combining academic rigour with accessibility, the book demystifies some key feminist terms, including patriarchy and intersectionality, and shows their relevance to feminist politics today. It argues that the analysis of gender cannot be isolated from that of class or race, and that the needs of most women will not be met in an economy based on the pursuit of profit. Throughout, the book asserts the social, economic and human importance of the unpaid caring and domestic work that has been traditionally done by women. It concludes that there are some grounds for optimism about a future that could be both more feminist and more socialist.

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Staging the Old Faith is the first book length study to examine Caroline theatre as a space where the concerns of the English Roman Catholic community are staged.Rebecca Bailey juxtaposes a detailed analysis of Queen Henrietta Maria’s ground-breaking performances which showcased to an elite audience her role as defender of English Catholics, against an exploration of how this community responded to such a startling vision, in particular through the politically charged texts of James Shirley and William Davenant.This engagement on the stage with the anxieties and hopes of the English Catholic community (properly contextualised within the wider and increasingly fragmented religious landscape in the years leading to civil war) opens up Caroline commercial theatre as a site which energetically discussed the explosive religio-political topics of the cultural moment.

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This volume looks at how mid-seventeenth-century debates on the government and order of the Church related to the political crisis of the time. It explores debates concerning the relationship between church, state and people, the nature of the various post-Reformation settlements in the British Atlantic and how they impacted on each other, as well as central and local responses to ecclesiastical upheaval. This is one of the first scholarly collections to focus on the topic of church polity and its relation to politics during a critical period of transatlantic history. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the British revolutions as well as those working on the history of the Church and early dissenting tradition.

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The world of work is tightly entwined with the world of things. Hot metal illuminates connections between design, material culture and labour between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the traditional crafts of hot-metal typesetting and letterpress were finally made obsolete with the introduction of computerised technologies. This multidisciplinary history provides an evocative rendering of design culture by exploring an intriguing case: a doggedly traditional Government Printing Office in Australia. It explores the struggles experienced by printers as they engaged in technological retraining, shortly before facing factory closure. Topics explored include spatial memory within oral history, gender-labour tensions, the rise of neoliberalism and the secret making of objects 'on the side'. This book will appeal to researchers in design and social history, labour history, material culture and gender studies. It is an accessible, richly argued text that will benefit students seeking to learn about the nature and erosion of blue-collar work and the history of printing as a craft.

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Mass population displacement affected millions of Europe’s civilians across the different theatres of war in 1914–18. At the end of the war, a senior Red Cross official wrote ‘there were refugees everywhere. It was as if the entire world had to move or was waiting to move’. Europe on the move: refugees in the era of the Great War, 1912–23 is the first attempt to understand their experiences as a whole and to establish the political, social and cultural significance and ramifications of the wartime refugee crisis. Drawing on original research by leading specialists from more than a dozen countries, it will become the definitive work on the subject and will appeal to anyone who wishes to understand how governments and public opinion responded to refugees a century ago.

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Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was an English surrealist artist and writer who emigrated to Mexico after the Second World War. As the first comprehensive examination of Carrington's writing and art, this volume approaches her as a major international figure in modern and contemporary art, literature and thought. It offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the intellectual, literary and artistic currents that animate her contribution to experimental art movements throughout the Western Hemisphere, including surrealism and magical realism. In addition to a substantive editorial introduction, the book contains nine chapters from scholars of modern literature and art, each focusing on a major feature in Carrington's career. It also features a visual essay drawn from the 2015 Tate Liverpool exhibition Leonora Carrington: Transgressing Discipline, and two experimental essays by the novelist Chloe Aridjis and the scholar Gabriel Weisz, Carrington's son. This collection offers a resource for students, researchers and readers interested in Carrington's works, and contributes to her continued rise in global recognition.

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The Northern Ireland experience of conflict and agreement presents a salutary warning to the international community against the fashionable view that there is an 'Irish model' which can be exported to cauterise ethnic troubles around the globe.The book draws on extensive archive research in London and Dublin on the 1970s power-sharing experiment, and on interviews with senior officials and political figures from the two capitals-as well as reconciliation practitioners-about the negotiation and chequered implementation of the Belfast agreement. It shows how stereotyped conceptions of the problem as a product of 'ancient hatreds', allied to solutions based on Realpolitik, have failed to transform Northern Ireland from a fragile peace, following the exhaustion of protracted paramilitary campaigns, to genuine reconciliation. The book concludes with practical proposals for constitutional reforms which would favour genuine power-sharing-rather than merely sharing power out-and set Northern Ireland on the road to the 'normal', civic society its long-suffering residents desire. It will be essential reading not only for academics and postgraduates interested in ethnic conflict but also for policy-makers who confront it in practice.

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The study of the European Union has historically been a theoretical battleground. Since the 1990s, new theoretical directions such as neo-institutionalism, multi-level governance and constructivism have provided a new impetus. However, despite these new inroads, empirical work has often remained sociologically and empirically underspecified. This volume seeks to bridge the gap between theory and fieldwork by developing an actor-centred political sociology. In doing so, the volume engages in a critical dialogue with the constructivist framework and proposes to build on its insights through a sociological hardening centred on European actors.The renewal of European studies through political sociology is only useful if it generates new understandings through empirical observation. This volume seeks to take a new tack on constructivism by asking what it is that Europe constructs by looking at three areas- social spaces and professions, policy 'problems' and policies and policy instruments such as the Eurobarometer.

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In the lead essay for this volume, Joshua Foa Dienstag engages in a critical encounter with the work of Stanley Cavell on cinema, focusing skeptical attention on the claims made for the contribution of cinema to the ethical character of democratic life. In this debate, Dienstag mirrors the celebrated dialogue between Rousseau and Jean D'Alembert on theatre, casting Cavell as D'Alembert in his view that we can learn to become better citizens and better people by observing a staged representation of human life, with Dienstag arguing, with Rousseau, that this misunderstands the relationship between original and copy, even more so in the medium of film than in the medium of theatre. Dienstag's provocative and stylish essay is debated by an exceptional group of interlocutors comprising Clare Woodford, Tracy B. Strong, Margaret Kohn, Davide Panagia and Thomas Dumm. The volume closes with a robust response from Dienstag to his critics.

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If cinema can be approached as poetry and philosophy, it is because of Jean Epstein. Cocteau, Buñuel (who was his assistant), Hitchcock, Pasolini and Godard, and theoreticians Kracauer, Deleuze and Rancière are directly influenced by Epstein's pioneering film work, writings, and concepts. This book is the first in English to examine his oeuvre comprehensively.An avant-garde artist and an anti-elitist intellectual, Epstein wanted to craft moments of pure transformative cinema. Using familiar genres - melodramas and documentaries - he hoped to heal viewers of all classes and hasten social utopia. A lover of cinema as cognitive and sensorial technology, and a poet of the screen, he pushed cinematography - as photogénie - towards the experimental sublime, through daring close-ups, rhythmic montage, slow motion, even reverse motion. Polish-born, half-Jewish, and the author of a treatise on homosexuality, Epstein has been unfairly relegated to the shadows of film history. This book restores him to the limelight of interwar world cinema, on a par with Renoir, Lang, Capra and Eisenstein.

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In this volume, eighteen experts from a variety of academic backgrounds explore the use of songs in films from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds. This volume illustrates how - rather than simply helping to tell the story of - songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema commonly upset the hierarchy of the visual over the aural, thereby rendering their hearing a complex and rich subject for analysis.Screening songs... constitutes a ground-breaking, interdisciplinary collection. Of particular interest to scholars and academics in the areas of Film Studies, Hispanic Studies, Lusophone Studies and Musicology, this volume opens up the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cinema to vital, new, critical approaches. The soundtracks of films as varied as City of God, All About My Mother, Bad Education and Buena Vista Social Club are analysed alongside those of lesser-known works that range from the melodramas of Mexican cinema's golden age to Brazilian and Portuguese musical comedies from the 1940s and 1950s. Fiction films are studied alongside documentaries, the work of established directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura and Nelson Pereira dos Santos alongside that of emerging filmmakers, and performances by iconic stars like Caetano Veloso and Chavela Vargas alongside the songs of Spanish Gypsy groups, Mexican folk songs and contemporary Brazilian rap.

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After '89 takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After 1989, the theatre has retained its historical role as the crucial space for debating and interrogating cultural and political identities. Providing access to scholarship and criticism not readily accessible to an English-speaking readership, this study surveys the rebirth of the theatre as a site of public intervention and social criticism since the establishment of democracy and the proliferation of theatre makers that have flaunted cultural commonplaces and begged new questions of Polish culture. Lease argues that the most significant change in performance practice after 1989 has been from opposition to the state to a more pluralistic practice that engages with marginalised identities purposefully left out of the rhetoric of freedom and independence.

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How do you make a successful documentary in an era of media turmoil, network disruption and increasing financial restrictions? This is the question Alan Rosenthal, distinguished international filmmaker and teacher, sets out to answer in The documentary diaries. Using seven of his recent releases as case studies - ranging from high-budget historical and political documentaries to shoestring observational films and hybrid docudramas - he explores with style and humour the challenges facing the contemporary documentarian, and demonstrates how they can be overcome.Numerous aspects of film production are examined, notably proposal and script writing, fund raising, managing co-productions, dealing with commissioning editors and choosing distributors. Additional mini-chapters provide extra perspective on key topics, and the book is completed by a wealth of supplementary material, including excerpts from script drafts, variations on proposals and discussions of marketing strategies.The documentary diaries offers piercing insights into the world of documentary filmmaking, and will be essential reading for students and professionals alike.

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The fifteen groundbreaking essays contained in this book address the concept of adaptation in relation to horror cinema. Adaptation is not only a key cultural practice and strategy for filmmakers, but it is also a theme of major importance within horror cinema as a hole. The history of the genre is full of adaptations that have drawn from fiction or folklore, or that have assumed the shape of remakes of pre-existing films. The horror genre itself also abounds with its own myriad transformations and transmutations.The essays within this volume engage with an impressive range of horror texts, from the earliest silent horror films by Thomas Edison and Jean Epstein through to important contemporary phenomena, such as the western appropriation of Japanese horror motifs. Classic works by Alfred Hitchcock, David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara receive cutting-edge re-examination, as do unjustly neglected works by Mario Bava, Guillermo del Toro and Stan Brakhage.

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This volume, published in honour of Egyptologist Professor Rosalie David OBE, presents the latest research on three of the most important aspects of ancient Egyptian civilisation: mummies, magic and medical practice. Drawing on recent archaeological fieldwork, new research on human remains, reassessments of ancient texts and modern experimental archaeology, it attempts to answer some of Egyptology's biggest questions: how did Tutankhamun die? How were the Pyramids built? How were mummies made? Leading experts in their fields combine traditional Egyptology and innovative scientific approaches to ancient material. The result is a cutting-edge overview of the discipline, showing how it has developed over the last forty years and yet how many of its big questions remain the same.

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In 1857, a group of young people who had participated in an orgy in a private mansion was sentenced for contempt of public decency (outrage public à la pudeur) because a voyeur was able to watch them through a keyhole. For Marcela Iacub, the crux of such cases hinges on where the public ends and the private begins, and what one can reveal, and what one ought to hide. Today, the term pudeur has disappeared from the French penal code to be replaced by Sex. But, far from being an epic story of hard-won freedom, Iacub demonstrates that the transformation techniques used by the State in the last two centuries have rendered sexuality into a spectacle and have conditioned our spaces, our clothes, our comportment and even some of our mental illnesses. In so doing, Iacub offers us a politico-legal history of the gaze.

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In 1857, a group of young people who had participated in an orgy in a private mansion was sentenced for contempt of public decency (outrage public à la pudeur) because a voyeur was able to watch them through a keyhole. For Marcela Iacub, the crux of such cases hinges on where the public ends and the private begins, and what one can reveal, and what one ought to hide. Today, the term pudeur has disappeared from the French penal code to be replaced by Sex. But, far from being an epic story of hard-won freedom, Iacub demonstrates that the transformation techniques used by the State in the last two centuries have rendered sexuality into a spectacle and have conditioned our spaces, our clothes, our comportment and even some of our mental illnesses. In so doing, Iacub offers us a politico-legal history of the gaze.

Read more less