Search results for ""University of Exeter Press""

This is the first book to explore the hold of TV series on our lives from a philosophical and ethical perspective. Sandra Laugier argues that this vital and ubiquitous expression of popular culture throughout the world is transformative in its effects on the activity of philosophy in everyday life. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s work on film and ordinary experience, Laugier contends that we are deeply affected by the formative role played by the TV series we watch, and by the ways they become interconnected with our daily lives. The philosophical thinking embodied in series empowers individuals in their capacity to experience, understand and appropriate elements of the world, and to educate themselves. Through our relationships with TV series, we develop our own tastes and competences, which are constitutive of our distinct experience of life. ‘Series-philosophy’ is thus a democratizing force. It also offers us a new ethics, for morality can be found not in general rules and abstract principles but in the narrative texture of characters in everyday situations facing particular ethical problems, and with whom we form attachments that result in our moral education—in sometimes surprising ways.

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The British cinema has drawn extensively on our national landscapes. Filmmakers have explored the entrenched myth of an idyllic rural tradition, intimately bound up with a popular definition of national heritage. Conversely, within a documentary-realist framework, they have looked at the contemporary urban aesthetic, derived partly from a Victorian tradition of social investigation. The fifth in a series of volumes from the annual British Silent Cinema Festival held in Nottingham (and the first to be published by Exeter), this collective study offers an original treatment of the relationship between pre-1930 cinema and landscape. The Nottingham festival from which this collection derives brought together a group of leading specialists – practitioners, academics and individual researchers – who between them provide a detailed investigation into the national cinema before the sound era.

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The main question addressed in this book: why has the Hollywood sound serial received so little scholarly attention? The sound serial was extremely popular in the 1930s and 1940s, with serials made by companies such as Universal and Columbia. At children’s matinees they were enthusiastically received, but were also part of a regular programme of neighbourhood cinemas in the United States. Eventually, this phenomenon went global and was a popular alternative to a feature film, regardless of whether they were screened individually or in a single sitting. Many works on the sound serial are written both by and for fans, with little more than a collection of image stills and brief summaries. Here, the author presents a thorough analysis based on detailed historical research, focusing on the period between 1930, when serials were born, and 1946, when Universal stopped their production. As well as exploring particular films, the author situates them in American film culture and societal practice of film viewing. The production of the serials is also considered, examining how it drew upon previous conventions such as silent cinema and melodrama. This book will be a vital component in the study of American film, as it explores a previously untouched niche in great detail, offering an accessible yet academic perspective on the growth and decline of Hollywood sound serials.

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New Arabian Studies is an international journal covering a wide spectrum of topics including geography, archaeology, history, architecture, agriculture, language, dialect, sociology, documents, literature and religion. It provides authoritative information intended to appeal to both the specialist and general reader. Both the traditional and the modern aspects of Arabia are covered, excluding contemporary controversial politics.

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Les Mains jointes (1909) was the collection of poetry that launched the long career of Nobel Prize-winning author François Mauriac (1885-1970). This critical edition provides the first ever overview of the volume’s complex textual history (spanning four decades). Drawing on Mauriac’s unpublished cahiers de jeunesse, Paul Cooke challenges the author’s claim that the majority of the poems in the collection were written while he was still at school. A selection of additional poems published between 1905 and 1923 (some of which have remained hidden for nearly a century) allows the reader to situate Les Mains jointes in relation to Mauriac’s wider verse output. In his Introduction, Cooke both explores the genesis and history of Les Mains jointes and offers some analysis of Mauriac’s style as a poet.

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This play dramatises a French sailor’s protest in 1948-49 against the brutality of the French military conduct of the Indochina war. Henri Martin was imprisoned in 1950 for five years for distributing pamphlets. The struggle to get him released became the ‘Henri Martin Affair’. This play was a vital part of that struggle, and was performed all over France, usually clandestinely, often out of doors, despite Government opposition and police harassment. Audiences were large and mainly working class. Sartre referred to it as the only example of true théâtre populaire in existence. In August 1953, Henri Martin was released after serving forty months of his sentence. Fifty years after his experiences in Indochina, Henri Martin is still alive and has been consulted by the editor of this volume, as have others connected with this unique saga in French theatre. This is a volume in the series Textes littéraires/Exeter French Texts. The text, introduction and essential notes are all in French.

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A tragi-comedy first performed in Paris in 1648.

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Depicts a group of characters in a mysterious land, but is more concerned with philosophical dialogue than exotic adventure. The characters debate the customs and thoughts of the Avaïtes, the people of the imaginary land of Calejava. An eighteenth-century work considered historically significant as it depicts ‘for the first time, a religious system which is unequivocally deistic.’ (Early Deism in France, C.J.Betts). This is a volume in the Exeter French Texts series. The text, introduction and essential notes are all in French.

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Although the 17th Century playwright Enríquez Gomez was well known for his comedies, Los Siete Planetas is a surprisingly orthodox play.

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William Jervois was a military engineer who rose to prominence as a result of Lord Palmerston’s extensive programme of fortification against a feared French invasion in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Ramparts of Empire is a detailed and engaging study of his life and works. As the first comprehensive study of this influential Victorian, the bookis an important contribution to military and engineering history as well as to the history of Imperial Britain. The text is richly illustrated with photographs and plans of Jervois’ forts, while supporting appendices provide a mine of supplementary information. This includes a gazetteer of Jervois’ works and documentary evidence of his involvement in plans for a Channel Tunnel and a proposal for attacking the seaboard of the United States. In 1860, Palmerston’s parliament sanctioned the construction of the largest system of fortifications that the British Isles had ever seen, or would ever see again, to defend against a feared French invasion. For William Jervois, then a young major in the Royal Engineers, his appointment as ‘design leader’ of this programme was a major step in a career in fortress construction that would see his work in Britain, the Channel Islands, Ireland, Canada, Bermuda, India, and later, Australia and New Zealand. Timothy Crick makes extensive use of extracts from Jervois’ diaries and illustrations of his fortresses to give the reader a rounded picture of this Royal Engineer’s wide-ranging career. He also captures a real sense of the fears of invasion that prevailed in this period. Throughout the book both the political background and the technical considerations involved in constructing forts and armaments are carefully explored to flesh out the motivations in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Golden Age’ of British fort building.

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Freemasonry played a major role in the economic and social life of the Victorian era but it has received very little sustained attention by academic historians. General histories of the period hardly notice the subject while detailed studies mainly confine themselves to its origins in the early eighteenth century and its later institutional development. This book is the first sustained and dispassionate study of the role of Freemasonry in everyday social and economic life: why men joined, what it did for them and their families, and how it affected the development of communities and local economies.

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The films made by the British Instructional Films (BIF) company in the decade following the end of the First World War helped to shape the way in which that war was remembered. This is both a work of cinema history and a study of the public’s memory of WW1. By the early twenties, the British film industry was struggling to cope with the power of Hollywood and government help was needed to guarantee its survival. The 1927 Cinematograph Films Act was intended to support the domestic film industry by requiring British cinemas to show a quota of domestically produced films each year. The Act was not the sole saviour of British cinema, but the government intervention did allow the domestic industry to exploit the talents of an emerging group of younger filmmakers including Michael Balcon, Walter Summers and Alfred Hitchcock, who directed the most influential of these BIF war constructions. This book shows that the films are micro-histories revealing huge amounts about perceptions of the Great War, national and imperial identities, the role of cinema as a shaper of attitudes and identities, power relations between Britain and the USA and the nature of popular culture as an international contest in its own right.

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From the authors of the successful Grand-Guignol and London’s Grand Guignol - also published by UEP – this book includes translations of a further eleven plays, adding significantly to the repertoire of Grand-Guignol plays available in the English language. The emphasis in the translation and adaptation of these plays is once again to foreground the performability of the scripts within a modern context – making Performing Grand-Guignol an ideal acting guide. Hand and Wilson have acquired extremely rare acting copies of plays which have never been published and scripts that were published in the early years of the twentieth century but have not been published since – even in French. Includes plays written by, or adapted from, such notable writers as Octave Mirbeau, Gaston Leroux and St John Ervine as well as examples by Grand-Guignol stalwarts René Berton and André de Lorde. Also included is the 1920s London translation of Blind Man’s Buff written by Charles Hellem and Pol d’Estoc and banned by the Lord Chamberlain. A brief history of the Parisian theatre is also included, for the benefit of readers who have not read the previous books.

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Charles Urban was a renowned figure in his time, and he has remained a name in film history chiefly for his development of Kinemacolor, the world’s first successful natural colour moving picture system. He was also a pioneer in the filming of war, science, travel, actuality and news, a fervent advocate of the value of film as an educative force, and a controversial but important innovator of film propaganda in wartime. The book uses Urban’s story as a means of showing how the non-fiction film developed in the period 1897-1925, and the dilemmas that it faced within a cinema culture in which the entertainment fiction film was dominant. Urban’s solutions – some successful, some less so – illustrate the groundwork that led to the development of documentary film. The book considers the roles of film as informer, educator and generator of propaganda, and the social and aesthetic function of colour in the years when cinema was still working out what it was capable of and how best to reach audiences. Luke McKernan also curates a web resource on Charles Urban at www.charlesurban.com

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The twentieth volume in the acclaimed paperback series . . . the only county series that can legitimately claim to represent the past and present of a nation. Cornish Studies has consistently - and successfully - sought to investigate and understand the complex nature of Cornish identity, as well as to discuss its implications for society and governance in contemporary Cornwall. Publication of Cornish Studies: Twenty marks two decades of this internationally acclaimed paperback series The volume discusses Cornish medieval and early modern studies, examines the efforts of Cornish language revivalists past and present, and considers the relation between Cornish folk tradition and Cornish identity, as well as evaluating Cornish literature in Cornwall and Australia, investigating the distinctive features of Cornish politics in the first half of the twentieth century, analysing the separation of wives and husbands during Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration, and reviewing Cornish mine accidents. “For the past twenty years, Cornish Studies has stood at the very heart of the ongoing scholarly conversation over what it means – and what is has meant – to be Cornish. Interdisciplinary and internationalist in its approach, the series adopts a wide variety of perspectives in order to set the people of Cornwall – and the wider Cornish diaspora – in a truly global context”. Mark Stoyle, Professor of History, University of Southampton

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This is the eighteenth volume in the acclaimed paperback series...the only county series that can legitimately claim to represent the past and present of a nation. "Cornish Studies" has consistently - and successfully - sought to investigate and understand the complex nature of Cornish identity, as well as to discuss its implications for society and governance in contemporary Cornwall. The article which provides the cover illustration is a fascinating account of the rise and importance of swimming matches in Victorian Cornwall. These demonstrated both the beneficial aspects of the sport, and the importance of swimming prowess in life-saving around the Cornish coast - an important consideration for the developing tourist trade - the latter providing a significant antidote to the simultaneous construction of maritime Cornwall by a range of English writers as a dangerous region inhabited by wreckers, smugglers and pirates. This latest and diverse collection also includes articles on mining in both nineteenth century and contemporary Cornwall, an exploration of identity using material gathered through individual interviews, an assessment of research into Cornish folklore, discussion of the modern growth of alternative 'Celtic spiritualities' in Cornwall, and a fresh perspective on the Middle Cornish language of medieval Cornish drama. Cover Illustration: Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1890, it shows the start of a race from the 1896 swimming matches in St Ives.

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The seventeenth volume in the acclaimed paperback series . . . the only county series that can legitimately claim to represent the past and present of a nation.

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The first book to document grass roots popular theatres which developed from within the working class Republican and Loyalist communities of Belfast and Derry during the latest phase of the four hundred year conflict between Ireland and Britain. Theatres of the Troubles explores the history of one of the most important periods of political theatre activity in post-war Europe. This significant study seeks to convey how the moment to moment unfolding of the conflict determined organisation, ‘texts’, performance contexts and reception, and how the theatres operated within Republican and Loyalist communities. All chapters draw upon previously unpublished primary sources, including texts, interviews and letters, shared workshops and witnessed performance. In examining not only how these theatres related to each other, but also their relationship to European traditions of radical theatre and to the liberation models which were developing in neo- and post-colonial contexts in the South, Theatres of the Troubles represents a key addition to our understanding of the critical relationship between historical conditions and the development of radical theatre forms.

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A companion to UEP’s Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (now in its third reprint). A genre that has left more of a mark on British and American culture than we may imagine” (Gothic Studies). London’s Grand Guignol was established in the early 1920s at the Little Theatre in the West End. It was a high-profile venture that enjoyed popular success as much as critical controversy. On its side were some of the finest actors on the English stage, in the shape of Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, and a team of extremely able writers, including Noël Coward. London's Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror considers the importance and influence of the English Grand Guignol within its social, cultural and historical contexts. It also presents a selection of ten remakarble English-language Grand Guignol plays, some of which were banned by the Lord Chamberlain, the censor of the day, and have never been published or publicly performed. Among the plays in the book is a previously unpublished work by Noël Coward, The Better Half, first performed at the Little Theatre in 1922. The reviewer in the journal Gothic Studies wrote, of the authors’ previous book: “having recently taught a module on Grand Guignol with third year drama students, it is also worth noting that this book captured their imaginations in a way that few other set texts seem to manage.”

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Translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations is a critique of the assumptions which currently underlie our thinking on literary translation. It offers an alternative vision; extending the parameters of literary translation by showing that such translation is itself a form of experimental creative writing. It also provides a reassessment of Rimbaud’s creative impulses and specifically his prose poems, the Illuminations. In the expanding field of translation studies, a brilliant and demanding book such as this has a valuable place. In addition, it also provides some fascinating ‘hands on’ translation work of a very practical kind. Published as a sequel to the author’s Translating Baudelaire (UEP, 2000), it will become part of the canon.

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This is the third volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson’s comprehensive four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives in the British Library and the Royal Archives at Windsor. Focusing on plays we know, plays we have forgotten, and plays which were silenced for ever, Censorship of British Drama demonstrates the extent to which censorship shaped the theatre voices of this decade. The book charts the early struggles with Royal Court writers such as John Osborne and with Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop; the stand-offs with Samuel Beckett and with leading American dramatists; the Lord Chamberlain’s determination to keep homosexuality off the stage, which turned him into a laughing stock when he was unable to prevent a private theatre club in London's West End from staging a series of American plays he had banned, including Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and the Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to persuade the government to give him new powers and to rewrite the law. This new edition includes a contextualising timeline for those readers who are unfamiliar with the period, and a new preface.

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The twelfth volume in the acclaimed paperback series . . . the only county series that can legitimately claim to represent the past and present of a nation.

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Jean Paulhan’s Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance was an important and contentious statement about the influence of communism in intellectual and literary circles. On publication in 1952, the pamphlet revived debates over collaboration with the Nazi authorities that had dominated French society since the Liberation, and that still have important echoes today. In this new edition, John Flower provides a full contextualising introduction. He also examines Paulhan’s evolution during the period and assesses his postion alongside that of other key figures: in particular Mauriac and Camus. The volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of this turbulent period and provides a documentary history of the post-war political and literary debates in Paris.

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From Goethe to Gide brings together twelve essays on canonical male writers (six French and six German) commissioned from leading specialists from Britain and North America. These essays, aimed at final year undergraduates and postgraduates, focus on Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Fontane, Zola, Kafka, Gide. The collection therefore foregrounds the major authors taught on British university BA courses in French and German. Working with the tools of feminist criticism, the authors demonstrate how feminist readings of these writings can illuminate far more than attitudes towards women.

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In the 1930s there were close to a billion annual admissions to the cinema in Britain and it was by far the most popular paid-for leisure activity. This book is an exploration of that popularity. John Sedgwick has developed the POPSTAT index, a methodology based on exhibition records which allows identification of the most popular films and the leading stars of the period, and provides a series of tables which will serve as standard points of reference for all scholars and specialists working in the field of 1930s cinema. The book establishes similarities and differences between national and regional tastes through detailed case study analysis of cinemagoing in Bolton and Brighton, and offers an analysis of genre development. It also reveals that although Hollywood continued to dominate the British market, films emanating from British studios proved markedly popular with domestic audiences.

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This book brings together the study of silent cinema and the study of British cinema, both of which have seen some of the most exciting developments in Film Studies in recent years. The result is a comprehensive survey of one of the most important periods of film history. Most of the acknowledged experts on this period are represented, joined by several new voices. Together they chart the development of cinema in Britain from its beginnings in the 1890s to the conversion to sound in the late 1920s. From these accounts the youthful British cinema emerges as far from innocent. On the contrary, it was a fascinatingly complex field of cultural and industrial practices. The book also includes guides to bibliographical and archival sources and an extensive bibliography.

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In this unique and entertaining collection of articles, a noted scholar and compiler of key works of reference reflects on the nature of language, the art of lexicography and the breath-taking developments in communication, the media and information technology in the late twentieth century. This book ranges widely over three main linked subjects: Language at large and in particular English, the most widely used language in the history of the world, The art and study of dictionaries and reference science, embracing all past, present and potential reference materials-from the OED to the Yellow Pages and The processes through which communication, information and knowledge have evolved-from cave art to the personal computer.

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Short fiction in France has made a major contribution to French culture and literature. This volume provides new insights into some of the best examples of this form of writing in the twentieth century and also includes a chapter which explores ways in which the genre is evolving as the century draws to a close. Each chapter has been written by specialists in their particular field; their interpretations are backed by the experience of teaching and writing about these authors. They invite the reader to go beyond the immediate context or circumstances of what is related in the story under scrutiny and illustrate some of the many ways in which short stories may be narrated. In some cases stories are revisited and subjected to new interpretations; in others those perhaps less well known are revealed as being no less rewarding. The book offers stimulating reading for those already familiar with some of the works under discussion as well as for those coming to them afresh.

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Brings together primary texts from influential Jewish and Christian writers, providing an accessible overview of the major issues and movements in the Christian-Jewish dialogue. The book includes key topics such as anti-Semitism, Jesus, Israel, women and the Holocaust.

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A collection of essays on the theme of Tudor and Stuart Devon. Subjects studied include Katherine Courtney, Countess of Devon; tinworking in four Devon stannaries; the legislative activities of local MPs during the reign of Elizabeth; landed society and the emergence of the country house; North Devon maritime enterprise; English wine imports, with special reference to the Devon ports- fishing and the commercial world of early Stuart Dartmouth; the clergy in Devon, 1641-1661.

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This book sets out to examine why the world regards the Gulf as important. Chapters either treat the way in which individual countries view their vital interest in the Gulf, or deal with specific themes such as the question of militarization and the international arms-trade. The book makes the point that different countries and continents are conscious of possessing a variety of practical interests in the region: for some, the Gulf represents a market for manufactured goods; for some a field of expatriate labour; for some a source of oil; and, for the Superpowers, an area of conspicuous political and strategic importance. This last topic, closely linked as it now is with changes in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, is analyzed at some length in this collection.

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A collection of poems in the 'ensaladas' tradition, a Renaissance style of rustic and pastoral lyricism.

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The Treaty of Bayonne of 1388 between Juan I, King of Castile, and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Pretender to the Castilian throne, was one of the most important treaties of the Hundred Years War. In the transcription of the documents, the original spellings of words, however inconsistent, have been respected.

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Critical edition of the comedy dating from 1664.

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Highly Commended for the W.G. Hoskins Prize in the Devon History Society Book of the Year awards. This book is one of the first to study the regional role of women in public and professional life, breaking new ground in early twentieth-century local and gender history. Covering politics (Eleanor Acland and Clara Daymond), medicine and education (Dr Mabel Ramsay and Jessie Headridge), and a variety of voluntary organizations (Florence Cecil, Georgiana Buller, Jane Clinton and Sylvia Calmady-Hamlyn), it shows how women worked individually and in collaboration to create new opportunities for women and girls in a large, mainly rural, county far from London and the industrial heartlands of England. These biographical studies are based on original research and reveal the huge public contribution made by these eight women, who up to now have been largely hidden from history. Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 1900–1950 is a contribution to the history of women in Britain between the wars, a period that has received less attention than the Edwardian era and the two World Wars. It also fills a major gap in the history of Devon women, on which almost nothing has been published, and on Devon in the inter-war period, similarly neglected by historians. It will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of gender history and the history of modern Britain, as well as everyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Devon.

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This is the third volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson’s comprehensive four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives in the British Library and the Royal Archives at Windsor. Focusing on plays we know, plays we have forgotten, and plays which were silenced for ever, Censorship of British Drama demonstrates the extent to which censorship shaped the theatre voices of this decade. The book charts the early struggles with Royal Court writers such as John Osborne and with Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop; the stand-offs with Samuel Beckett and with leading American dramatists; the Lord Chamberlain’s determination to keep homosexuality off the stage, which turned him into a laughing stock when he was unable to prevent a private theatre club in London's West End from staging a series of American plays he had banned, including Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and the Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to persuade the government to give him new powers and to rewrite the law. This new edition includes a contextualising timeline for those readers who are unfamiliar with the period, and a new preface. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/SEEA6021

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This volume is an edited collection of critical essays on British Asian theatre. It includes contributions from a number of researchers who have been active in the field for a substantial period of time. This title is complemented by British South Asian Theatres: A Documented History by the same authors, also available from University of Exeter Press.

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Describing in detail one of the most inventive periods in the history of English cinema, the volumes in this celebrated series are already established as classics in their field and represent a major contribution to international film studies. Each volume details the highlights of a single cinematic year, including details of production, manufacturers of equipment, dealers and exhibitors. This is augmented by numerous carefully chosen illustrations and a comprehensive filmography of English films, fiction and non-fiction, for the year. Particular attention is also paid to the ways in which the cinema of other countries affected the English industry. Volume 4 examines how in 1899 two major events influenced British cinema. The Boer War created a boom in film production as a result of an insatiable demand for news and pictures of the campaign brought on my fervent patriotism. Though actual battle could not be filmed, ‘fake’ war films based on incidents from the campaign began to be produced by English filmmakers. The University of Exeter Press editions of Volumes 2, 3, 4 are re-jacketed re-issues of the first editions. The long-awaited fifth and final volume in the series is published for the first time by UEP, and edited and introduced by Richard Maltby, Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University, Australia. Describing in detail one of the most inventive periods in the history of English cinema, this series represents a major contribution to international film studies. Each illustrated volume details a single cinematic year, including details of production, manufacturers of equipment, dealers and exhibitors, as well as a comprehensive filmography of English films, fiction and non-fiction, for the year. The previous volumes are aready established as classics in their field and have recently been re-jacketed and re-issued by University of Exeter Press.The fifth and final volume documents the year 1900, when the conflict in South Africa against the Boers and the Boxer uprising in China proved popular subjects for news films and fictional representations. It includes a full Introduction by Richard Maltby which places Victorian cinema in its cultural, social and historical context

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TEACHING RELIGION is the first book to trace the developments in religious education in England and Wales in the half century to 1994. It starts with the 1944 Butler Act and ends with the DFE Circular of 1994 which was issued to take further the RE provision in the 1988 Education Reform Act. TEACHING RELIGION sets the changes in religious education against changes in education as a whole and changes in society. The complex interaction between and influence of religious thinkers, religious educators and politicians is explored, as is the suggestion that how we handle religion within the national education system can offer insights into the sort of society we are and aspire to be.

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This is an edition of nine of McGrath's plays for the English 7:84 theatre company. It covers McGrath's work for the company spanning four decades, from the 1960s through to the 1990s The book has a substantial contextualising introduction and commentary on the plays by Nadine Holdsworth, one of the leading specialists in the work of John McGrath. This is set alongside supporting documents such as programme notes, reviews, letters etc. The plays and theatre work of John McGrath are studied in many theatre departments but they have not been available to the reader. The English plays constitute a powerful influence on the theatre in general, and are included in all theatre histories of the period; this collection should make them available to students, audiences and the public at large with an interest in theatre and in the social issues of their periods.

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Poet, novelist, sometime member of Mademoiselle de Montpensier’s circle and correspondent of the Mercure Galant, Cantenac (Bordeaux 1630-1714) was notorious in his own time but has only recently become the subject of serious study. This is the first critical edition of Les Marguerites, poèmes héroïque, a volume originally published in Bordeaux in 1676. Written in alexandrines, divided into five cantos (chants), Les Marguerities offers a fascinating example of playful contemporary poetic taste where epic heroism is transformed into gallantry. This is a volume in the Textes littéraires/Exeter French Texts. The text, introduction and essential notes are all in French.

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The African prince Anniaba is the first black hero in French fiction. With his French queen, he also forms the first mixed-race couple. Based on fact, Historie de Louis Anniaba was first published in 1740 but has never before been reprinted. The story allows a degree of narrative and geographical fantasy, but the legal context of the period, in this volume brought into play for the first time, throws into relief the author’s free-thinking stance. In other respects it is a period piece, full of travel and adventure in Africa, on the high seas, in France and on the Barbary Coast. Anniaba’s relatively fair complexion, impalusable for some, is a mark of his common humanity and of the author’s refusal to accept that everything out of Africa is monstrous. It is important to rediscover this forgotten text in a world still bearing ths cars of racism. This is a volume in the Textes littéraires/Exeter French Texts. The text, introduction and essential notes are all in French.

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Known principally for Bruges-la-Morte, a key work of Belgian Symbolism, Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) is also the author of other works worthy of present-day study. His collections of poetry, his plays, and his other novels subtly rework themes which evoke his native Flanders. This volume contains the texts of two of his plays: Le Voile enacts a whole network of themes with a connection to Bruges – a veritable summary of the “intimism” which was the glory of literary and artistic Belgium in the 1890s – while Le Mirage adapts Bruges-la-Morte for the stage, in an attempt to exteriorise thoughts which in the novel were essentially self-enclosed. This is a volume in the series Textes littéraires/Exeter French Texts. The text, introduction and essential notes are all in French.

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In 1810, Stendhal read the sentimental novella "Histoire d'Eleonore de Parme", whose anonymous author was certainly a woman. This text poses the question: can it be asserted that Stendhal took inspiration from this novella when he wrote "La Chartreuse de Parme", and not from real life?

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Having more literary than religious vocation, the young Capuchin monk Venance Dougados was sent on a fund-raising tour in 1786 among the peasants and gentry of the Monts de Lacaune in southern France. He came back with a remarkable work, La Quête du Blé, in verse and prose. The work was original, humorous, with pre-romantic undertones; it brought him much success, but at the same time it aroused the anger of his superiors. Rémy Cazals provides a critical edition of this little-known text accompanied by a biography of its author, who became inflamed by the passions of the Revolution, and who was guillotined in 1794. This title is Volume 101 in the series Exeter French Texts/Textes littéraires. It incldues an introduction and essential notes, all in French.

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Sick Heroes examines the cultural practices that created those remarkably offensive, though strangely appealing, romantic heroes that appeared in European and especially in French literature in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Romanticism has long been considered a literary movement, but Pasco broadens its scope and suggests that it was a cultural reality born of widespread social factors and sustained by a mass market for novels, poems and plays that popularized attitudes and behaviour.

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Le Philinte de Molière, or La suite du Misanthrope, was first published in 1791 and is here produced with variants from the manuscript held in the Bibliothèque nationale and with a selection of contemporary reviews of the first performance in 1790. The play is the eighteenth-century continuation of Molière’s classic comedy, Le Misanthrope, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The first performance caused a stir and was acclaimed by d’Eglantine’s contemporaries. It is an important work, particularly when presented in the context of the author’s life and the political backdrop against which it was written, and it is vital to any study of the legacy of Molière and of the history of the theatre in the late eighteenth century.

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In 1898, notoriously, Kipling urged the imperialist nations to 'Take up the White Man's Burden' the following year, in Satan Absolved, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt angrily replied, 'The White Man's Burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash'. Such ideological conflicts - and a whole range of intermediate positions - feature in much of the poetry British writers produced about the British Empire over the four centuries of its rise and fall. The discourses of postcolonialism have drawn attention to the major and continuing significance of the cultural products of the period of Western imperialism. But, so far, they have concentrated largely upon fiction and upon the writings and experiences of those parts of the world that were subject to colonialism and imperialist oppression. For the first time, The White Man's Burdens offers a cross-section of British poetry in which the Empire was the burden of the song. The material, much of it previously uncollected, is drawn from a broad cultural spectrum that includes narrative poetry, heroic verse, patriotic ballads, music hall monologues, and poems from Punch. A substantial Introduction sets the poems in the context of the economic, political, and ideological development of British imperial rule, and headnotes historicize the poems themselves, which are presented chronologically - from George Chapman's 'De Guiana: Carmen Epicum' of 1596 to Fred D'Aguiar's 'At the Grave of the Unknown African' of 1993. The result is a poetic summary of the changing attitudes of an imperialist nation to its own imperialism, attitudes which range from jingoism and racism, through religious idealism and liberal anxiety, to outright disgust at the whole enterprise.

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