Search results for ""Liverpool University Press""

Celebrating its eightieth birthday since being rebuilt in 1938, Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre is a vital part of the city’s cultural identity. There has been a theatre on the site for nearly two hundred years, since Cooke’s New Circus started life as the result of an argument about a broken sewer in 1826. Quickly renamed the Royal Amphitheatre (and affectionately known as the Amphi), the theatre went on to serve the city in a number of guises. From an establishment where horses were the entertainers, to the home of ‘Scouse’ comedy, by way of a music venue, the Royal Court has become a popular, people’s theatre. Over the years, it has hosted its share of world-class actors including the debut stage appearances of both Judi Dench and Richard Burton. Wonderfully illustrated, this fascinating book is the first to tell the story of the oldest surviving theatre in the city. The 1938 prospectus declared it to be “a brave venture” and courage has characterised its history. Full of surprises, this book challenges perceptions of the Royal Court celebrating and commemorating an institution that has endured, flourished and re-shaped itself, on its own terms.

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Spatial Ecologies takes a new look at the “spatial turn” in French cultural and critical theory since 1968. Verena Andermatt Conley examines how Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Augé, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour and Etienne Balibar reconsider the experience of space in the midst of considerable political and economic turmoil. The book considers why French critical theorists turned away from questions of time and looked instead toward questions of space. It asks what writing about space can tell us about life in late capitalism. Conley links this question to the problematic of habitality, taking us back to Heidegger and showing how it informs much of French theory. Building on the author's acclaimed earlier study Ecopolitics, Spatial Ecologies argues, through the voices of the authors taken up the eight chapters, for recognition of the virtue of spatial theory and its pragmatic applications in the global milieu. It will be required reading for scholars of literary and cultural theory, and twentieth- and twenty-first century French culture.

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The first 2,500 million years of the geological history of Britain are stored in the gneisses of the Lewisian Complex of North West Scotland. This book explores the long journey of discovery in which this history has been gradually deciphered since the end of the 19th Century when these rocks were first investigated in detail. The usual tools of stratigraphic investigation were of no value in dealing with such a complex assemblage of highly deformed and metamorphosed rocks; there was no fossil evidence and few signs of recognisable sedimentary strata.This book charts the increasing sophistication of the geochronological and geochemical techniques used to decipher the complex. The first important breakthrough was the recognition that a set of intrusive metamorphosed dykes could be used, perhaps, to separate episodes of deformation and metamorphism that occurred before the dykes were intruded, from those that occurred subsequently.Geochronological dating methods evolved from the first relatively crude potassium-argon and uranium-lead dates in the 1950s to the present amazingly accurate lead isotope dates. Geochemical techniques have also advanced to the point when mafic igneous assemblages can be identified as having oceanic volcanic arc signatures or were the products of intra-continental magmatism. Thus, from a stratigraphy composed of three events, Scourian, dyke intrusion and Laxfordian, has grown a complex history covering many separate events of igneous, metamorphic and tectonic activity spanning 2,500 million years of Precambrian time.Much of the extensive literature on the Lewisian is highly specialised and not easily accessible to the general reader; this book is an attempt to distil the most important results of this research into a more user-friendly form. It will appeal to many geologists including students, geological visitors to the North West of Scotland and academics seeking a readable account of remarkable and significant advances in earth science.

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Volcanoes have an endless fascination. Their eruptions are a regular reminder of the power of nature and our vulnerability to this raw geological phenomenon, however volcanic activity, and its plumbing from beneath, is an essential element of the forces that shaped and constantly reshape our planet. Dougal Jerram answers the questions: What are volcanoes? What other volcanic activity is there? How do volcanoes relate to plate tectonics and the movement of continents? What are eruptions and why do they occur? How have volcanoes affected the earth's climate? Can we predict eruptions? He also describes the most notable eruptions in history and their effect. Copiously illustrated throughout Introducing Volcanology is a concise and accessible introduction to the science of hot rocks for those with an adult curiosity and for those contemplating a course of formal study. As with sister volumes, technical terms are kept to a minimum and a glossary is provided covering the whole subject from ash to zeolites.

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The island of Robert Graves, Joan Miro and Archduke Ludwig Salvador has become the most popular holiday destination in the Mediterranean with nearly 10 million visitors a year. Few, however, are aware of the 5000 year history of Mallorca and its resulting landscape featuring late Bronze Age navetes and talayots, Roman cities, and a major medieval trading port with one of Europe's largest cathedrals. Mallorca's landscape has been formed with a pattern of important country houses and enclosed fields, and the relics of major nineteenth century industries including textiles and shoe-making workshops. One hundred and twenty years of tourism, latterly on a massive scale, endangers much of what has gone before. Professor Buswell's pioneering work, based on more than ten years of local research, describes and analyses all these elements that together form the contemporary landscape. Written in an accessible style and well-illustrated with maps and photographs, this book will appeal to student and concerned reader alike and should be read by all who are inquisitive about what they see around them when they visit the island.

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Wace's "Brut" is an 1155 French verse rendering of Geoffrey of Monmouth's earlier Latin "history" of Britain, from the time of Brutus, the eponymous founder, to the 7th century. Wace uses Geoffrey's stories, such as those of King Lear and King Arthur, with a lively inventiveness and originality, drawing on oral sources and his own knowledge of parts of Britain, imaginatively re-interpreting the material. This is the first complete English translation and is presented in parallel with the French text, enabling those who wish to have access to the original to do so easily. This new reprint has been revised by Judith Weiss, taking account of comments in reviews, and includes a full introduction, footnotes and bibliography.

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Rational persuasion and appeal to an audience's emotions are elements of most literature, but they are found in their purest form in oratory. The speeches written by the Greek Orators for delivery in law-courts, deliberative councils and assemblies enjoyed an honoured literary status, and rightly so, for the best of them have great vitality. There is no crude, primitive stage of development: the earliest speeches are perfect in form and highly sophisticated in technique. They inform the reader about aspects of Greek society and about their moral values, in a direct and illuminating way not paralleled in other literature.This edition offers a contrasting pair of early orators. In his speech The Murder of Herodes, edited by Michael Edwards, Antiphon relies on a varied and resourceful use of probability argument, presented with great force and gravity. Motivation of both defendant and prosecutor is also explored thoroughly, as are the religious aspects of homicide. The five speeches by Lysias, edited by Stephen Usher, illustrate that orator's skill in using narrative to portray character and his talent for creating and dispelling personal and political prejudice in difficult cases. The Commentary seeks to call attention to the orators' rhetorical and stylistic skills to a degree not previously attempted in editions of the orators, to elucidate historical and legal matters and to explain textual and grammatical difficulties. The notes are keyed to the translation, rendering the speeches accessible to the reader with little or no Greek.Greek text with translation, commentary and notes.

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Kenneth Parker gives a historical and critical exposition of commentaries of the play. These are traced back to firmly held assumptions, about theories of literary production and consumption as well as political relations, not yet wholly shed in the present. Dominant traditions (of Cleopatra as ‘whore’ and ‘gypsy’; of Antony as ‘deserter’; of ‘Rome’ as the measure by which it, as well as ‘Egypt’ should be read) are not simply questioned, but instead, close reading of the text of the play provides a comprehensive set of alternative readings based upon mostly postcolonial and feminist theories. From this there emerges the concluding argument that, of all Shakespeare’s plays, Antony and Cleopatra is the text for our times; one that is ‘past the size of dreaming’.

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Most famous for his much-filmed novel Dracula, Bram Stoker was nonetheless a prolific writer. This accessible book offers an introduction to a range of his work – novels, short stories, biography, and criticism. It provides a discussion of recent scholarship on Stoker including the many attempts to write his life and find the ‘real’ Bram Stoker, and the lurid speculation this provokes. Moving beyond this, the author focuses on Stoker’s career as a late-Victorian and Edwardian novelist in the commercial marketplace, looking at the fictional trends – horror, romance, adventure, crime – which his work encompasses. The study discusses Stoker’s bid for fame as a writer, how his novels were received, and their engagement with contemporary anxieties about gender and nationhood.

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This is the first monograph of George Edmund Street, a prolific High Victorian architect of churches and other buildings, the best known of which is the Royal Courts of Justice (the Law Courts).

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This is the seventeenth volume in the series the Public Sculpture of Britain, part of the PMSA National Recording Project, which will eventually cover the whole of the country. The introduction considers the ways in which the rural and urban landscapes of Sussex, from market town, rural village and country estate, to city, major seaside resort and new town development, are reflected in the county’s public sculptures. The historical period covered ranges from the allegedly pre-historic (the Long Man of Wilmington) to the present day (the most recent entry is Maggi Hambling’s The Resurrection Spirit, 2013). There is a high proportion of nineteenth- century sculptures, including significant works by John Flaxman, Michael Rysbrack, Frances Chantrey and John Edward Carew; the ‘statuemania’ that characterised the last part of this century is well illustrated by Thomas Brock’s imposing statue celebrating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee on Hove seafront. The achievements of major twentieth and twenty-first century sculptors are represented by Elisabeth Frink and William Pye among others. Many works from this period are the result of public art initiatives by local councils, often as part of more wide-ranging regeneration schemes for Sussex towns. The patronage of health authorities, influenced by new thinking about the calming and healing qualities of art in public places has also benefitted both local sculptors and those based elsewhere in the country. Each individual work is catalogued, with precise details of location, condition and history, including commissioning, opening ceremonies and re-siting. Most are individually illustrated in black and white. Biographies of local and less well-known sculptors, together with a selected bibliography are included at the end of the volume.

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This book explores the diversity of Hindu goddesses and the variety of ways in which they are worshiped. Although they undoubtedly have ancient origins, Hindu goddesses and their worship is still very much a part of the fabric of religious engagement in India today. The book offers an introduction to a complex and often baffling field of study. Part I, "Beliefs" provides a series of encounters with a range of Hindu goddesses starting with the idea of 'Goddess' as a philosophical concept. Topics include textual evidence for belief structures, goddess mythology, and the importance of 'the Goddess' in Tantrism. Part II, "Practices" leads the reader through the tangled web of goddess worship, pausing along the way to examine the contrast between temple and local worship, the splendour of festivals and the importance of pilgrimage to those places in India where goddesses are considered to reside. A Conclusion provides details of contemporary developments in goddess worship, such as the appearance of new deities who supply the needs of worshipers in the twenty-first century. No prior knowledge is necessary as the book is aimed at undergraduate students and anyone interested in the religions and philosophy of India.

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Toward the end of his administration (2010-2015), then Uruguayan President Jose 'Pepe' Mujica made headlines across the world with a couple of unusual speeches at United Nations assemblies in Rio de Janeiro and New York that were heatedly anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, anti-globalisation and anti-climate change all fuelled by a libertarian socialist concept of freedom. This Sancho Panza-like figure was not only one of the few presidents of developing countries not to have somehow got personally rich while in government, but was known to live modestly as a practicing farmer and gave away two-thirds of his salary to his left-wing political organisation and to social housing projects. Even more bizarre was the fact that he had become president of the country whose government he had tried to overthrow forty years earlier in a revolutionary guerrilla war, an exploit for which he spent over a decade in military jails after being shot, severely wounded and tortured. This book is an introduction to the politics and philosophy of an unrepentant permanent militant whose evolution took him from defeated guerrilla warrior to successful presidential candidate without inconsistencies or betrayals, whatever his adversaries from right and left may claim. The study sets Mujica not only in his Uruguayan and Latin American context but also within an International Left that is coming out of mourning for the loss of so-called existing socialism as they search for solutions to lessen the damage done by rampant neoliberal economics and to find creative alternatives. Stephen Gregory's polemic is essential reading for all those interested in discovering Uruguay's unique position in a Latin America where the political right is in decline and leftist governments are moving to the middle ground.

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Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain's major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.

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Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2021Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2022PBS Special Commendation Summer 2021Alice Hiller’s debut performs an act of witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of winter creates a redemptive language to speak the darkness of being sexually abused by a family member. Through the excavated histories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, these poems additionally document the grooming that prepares a child for sexual abuse, and the vulnerability which remains afterwards. Calling up the landscapes and relationships which sustained her, as well as the injury she experienced, Hiller reflects the nature and impact of a crime to which millions around the world are subjected – and asks how we may find our ways towards healing.

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In the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Like many popular writers of the period, Besant suffered from years of critical neglect. Yet his centrality to Victorian society and culture all but ensured a revival of interest. While literary critics are now rediscovering the more than forty works of fiction that he penned or co-wrote, as part of a more general revaluation of Victorian popular literature, legal scholars have argued that Besant, by advocating for copyright reform, played a crucial role in consolidating a notion of literary property as the exclusive possession of the individuated intellect. For their part, historians have recently shown how Besant – as a prominent philanthropist who campaigned for the cultural vitalization of impoverished areas in east and south London – galvanized late Victorian social reform activities. The expanding corpus of work on Besant, however, has largely kept the domains of authorship and activism, which he perceived as interrelated, conceptually distinct. Analysing the mutually constitutive interplay in Besant’s career between philanthropy and the professionalization of authorship, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform highlights their fundamental interconnectedness in this Victorian intellectual polymath’s life and work.

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The rapidity of postwar globalization and the structural changes it has brought to both social and spatial aspects of everyday life has meant, in France as elsewhere, the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging, as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. Maps and Territories identifies such preoccupations as a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel. Indeed, like France itself, the protagonists of its best fiction are constantly called upon to renegotiate their identity in order to maintain any sense of belonging within the troubled territories they call home. Maps and Territories reads today’s French novel for how it re-maps such territories, and for how it positions its protagonists vis-à-vis the pressures of globalization, uncovering previously unseen affinities amongst, and offering fresh readings of—and offering exciting new perspectives on—a diverse set of authors: namely, Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, and Marie Darrieussecq. In the process, it sets the literary works into dialogue with a range of today’s most influential theorists of postmodernity and globalization, including Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Peter Sloterdijk, Bruno Latour, Fredric Jameson, Edward Casey, David Harvey, and Ursula K. Heise.

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Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies is an extensive compendium of texts and images, combining scholarly, creative and critical writing on photography with new work in photography. The contributions to the compendium range from academic essays on fine art and documentary photographies to photo-essays, community-based and pedagogical photographic projects, personal testimonies, creative writing, activist interventions and accounts of participatory action research using photography. Home/Land is global in its reach, exploring women’s lives in Britain and other European nations, the United States, Canada, the Middle East, South Africa, Asia and Australia. Bringing together texts and images produced by an international group of feminist scholars, activists, artists and educators, the book demonstrates how women have used photographic practices to find places for themselves as citizens, denizens, exiles or guests, within or beyond the nation as currently conceived, and, in so doing, how they actively produce new and different forms of identity, community and belonging.

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The extraordinary and beautiful scenery of the Northern Scottish Highlands has been created by a geological history lasting over three billion years. The new and thoroughly up-dated edition of this popular book takes its readers through those three billion years, shows the rocks, visits the places, introduces some famous researchers and presents the geological theories that have been inspired by the Highlands. Even though the influence of this magnificent place can be overwhelming, the book is about geology and the modern science involved. It is written for all to understand. It is a book for non-specialists interested in modern science, scientists and all lovers of the Northern Scottish Highlands.The text is sometimes light-hearted, but the science is serious. The subjects covered are as wide as he the splitting open of the North Atlantic Ocean: a time when the Earth resembled modern Mars; early continent formation; billion year old bacteria; the very beginnings of human evolution; Snowball Earth; and, inevitably, climate change. This is modern science wrapped up in good writing and humour: a rare combination.

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Geologists are among that group of scientists who must factor the passage of time into their investigations and they thus have a perspective on time that sets them apart from many other researchers. The proposition that geological time is vast, encompassing thousands of millions of years, is relatively recent. It is a concept that remains controversial and unacceptable to many people today who still consider the Earth to have been made to a timetable covering no more than ten thousand years.Paul Lyle examines how our fascination with time has developed from our earliest ancestors' recognition of the cycles of the sun and the moon. It considers the passage of time as a series of non-repeatable events, Time's Arrow, in contrast to time as a series of repeated processes, Time's Cycle, both of which can be used to explain geological features on the Earth's surface.The author argues for a greater understanding of geological or ‘deep time’ as society becomes more aware of the vulnerability of the Earth's resources to over-exploitation by an expanding consumer society. This debate and the controversy surrounding global warming emphasises the importance of geological time to the process of economic and political decision-making. It is a book for those interested in the intellectual challenge presented by the extent of geological time. It is written for environmentalists and policy-makers who wish to better place their concerns and decisions in proper context but, above all, it is a book that offers to share a geologist’s appreciation of time with the widest possible audience.

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In recent years Brendan's voyage has become increasingly popular as a topic of interest, not only in medieval studies, but also within the history of travel literature in general. One of the legend's charms is that it can be read in a number of ways: as a thinly disguised account of Irish travels and discoveries in the Atlantic, as a seafaring story in the fashion of the Irish immrama (literally 'rowings out'), or as an allegorical tale of Man's journey through life. It also has links with the monastic culture of its day, and contains echoes of the Odyssey and the Aeneid, Sinbad the Sailor and the quest for the Holy Grail.Barron and Burgess's volume collects the most important versions of the voyage from a wide variety of cultures, and presents them in modern English translations together with a general introduction to Brendan, explanatory commentaries and an extensive bibliography.This new paperback edition also includes a comprehensive index of story-elements specially devised with the Brendan student in mind to allow easy comparison of the different versions.

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The Book of Marvels, a compilation of marvellous events of a grotesque, bizarre or sensational nature, was composed in the second century A.D. by Phlegon of Tralles, a Greek freedman of the Roman emperor Hadrian. This remarkable text is the earliest surviving work of pure sensationalism in Western literature. The Book is arranged thematically: Ghosts; Sex-Changers and Hermaphrodites; Finds of Giant Bones; Monstrous Births; Births from Males; Amazing Multiple Births; Abnormally Rapid Development of Human Beings; Discoveries of Live Centaurs. This volume also contains and Introduction and commentary on the texts, as well as translations of fragments of two other works and a translation of Goethe's well-known vampire poem, The Bride of Corinth, which was inspired by Phlegon's Book of Marvels.

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This new research in English on the work of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto provides a comprehensive introduction to the critical terrain of Couto's literary thought. Already well-established in the Lusophone world, Mia Couto is increasingly acknowledged as a major voice in World literature. Winner of the Camões Prize for Literature in 2013, the most prestigious literary prize honouring Lusophone writers, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Yet, despite this high profile there are very few full-length critical studiesin English about his writing. Mia Couto is known for his imaginative re-working of Portuguese, making it distinctively Mozambican in character. This book brings together some of the key scholars of his work such as Phillip Rothwell, Luís Madureira, and his long-time English translator David Brookshaw. Contributors examine not only his early works, which were written in the context of the 16-year post-independence civil war in Mozambique, but alsothe wide span of Couto's contemporary writing as a novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. There are contributions on his work in ecology, theatre and journalism, as well as on translation and Mozambican nationalist politics. Most importantly the contributors engage with the significance of Couto's writing to contemporary discussions of African literature, Lusophone studies and World literature. Grant Hamilton is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the editor of Reading Marechera (James Currey, 2013). David Huddart is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kongand is author of Involuntary Associations: World Englishes and Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2014]

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