Search results for ""Liverpool University Press""

This volume explores Italian science fiction from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, covering literary texts, films, music and visual works by figures as diverse as Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Peter Kolosimo, Primo Levi, Antonio Margheriti, Gilda Musa and Roberto Vacca. It broadens the horizons of both Italian studies and the environmental humanities by addressing a long-neglected genre, and expands our understanding of relations between the ecological, the imaginary and the sociopolitical. The chapters draw on a variety of methodological frameworks, including animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, eco-media studies, energy humanities and posthumanism. The reader will gain insights into consequential topics such as anthropocentrism/speciesism, ecomodernist thought, environmental justice struggles at the planetary and regional level, non-human and new materialist ontologies, utopian/dystopian philosophies and prospects for transitioning beyond the crisis of petro-modernity through the construction of post-depletion futures. Open Access versions of the introduction and six of the book chapters are available on the Liverpool University Press website.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. This book examines the grass-roots relationship between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the civilian population during the Irish Revolution. It is primarily concerned with the attempts of the militant revolutionaries to discourage, stifle, and punish dissent among the local populations in which they operated, and the actions or inactions by which dissent was expressed or implied. Focusing on the period of guerilla war against British rule from c. 1917 to 1922, it uncovers the acts of ‘everyday’ violence, threat, and harm that characterized much of the revolutionary activity of this period. Moving away from the ambushes and assassinations that have dominated much of the discourse on the revolution, the book explores low-level violent and non-violent agitation in the Irish town or parish. The opening chapter treats the IRA’s challenge to the British state through the campaign against servants of the Crown – policemen, magistrates, civil servants, and others – and IRA participation in local government and the republican counter-state. The book then explores the nature of civilian defiance and IRA punishment in communities across the island before turning its attention specifically to the year that followed the ‘Truce’ of July 1921. This study argues that civilians rarely operated at either extreme of a spectrum of support but, rather, in a large and fluid middle ground. Behaviour was rooted in local circumstances, and influenced by local fears, suspicions, and rivalries. IRA punishment was similarly dictated by community conditions and usually suited to the nature of the perceived defiance. Overall, violence and intimidation in Ireland was persistent, but, by some contemporary standards, relatively restrained. Additional resources supporting this book can be found on the Liverpool University Press Digital Collaboration Hub (https://liverpooluniversitypress.manifoldapp.org/projects/defying-the-ira)

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM.A City Against Empire is the history of the anti-imperialist movement in 1920s Mexico City. It combines intellectual, social, and urban history to shed light on the city’s role as an important global hub for anti-imperialism, exile activism, political art, and solidarity campaigns. After the Russian and the Mexican Revolution, Mexico City became a space and a symbol of global anti-imperialism. Radical politicians, artists, intellectuals, scientists, migrants, and revolutionary tourists took advantage of the urban environment to develop their visions of an anti-imperialism for the twentieth-century. These actors imagined national self-determination, international solidarity, and an emancipation from what they called “the West.” Global, local, and urban factors interacted to transform Mexico City into the most important hub for radicalism in the Americas. By weaving together the intellectual history of Mexico, the urban and social histories of Mexico City, and the global history of anti-imperialist movements in the 1920s, this books analyses the perfect storm of anti-imperialism in Mexico City.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. As the prominence of the recent #WakingTheFeminists movement illustrates, the Irish theatre world is highly conscious of the ways in which theatre can foster social emancipation. This volume of essays uncovers a wide range of marginalised histories by reflecting on the emancipatory role that the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) has played in Irish culture and society, both historically and in more recent times. The Gate’s founders, Hilton Edwards and Michéal mac Liammóir, promoted the work of many female playwrights and created an explicitly cosmopolitan stage on which repressive ideas about gender, sexuality, class and language were questioned. During Selina Cartmell’s current tenure as director, cultural diversity and social emancipation have also featured prominently on the Gate’s agenda, with various productions exploring issues of ethnicity in contemporary Ireland. The Gate thus offers a unique model for studying the ways in which cosmopolitan theatres, as cultural institutions, give expression to and engage with the complexities of identity and diversity in changing, globalised societies. CONTRIBUTORS: David Clare, Marguérite Corporaal, Mark Fitzgerald, Barry Houlihan, Radvan Markus, Deirdre McFeely, Justine Nakase, Siobhan O'Gorman, Mary Trotter, Grace Vroomen, Ian R. Walsh, Feargal Whelan

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Steel City Readers* makes available, and interprets in detail, a large body of new evidence about past cultures and communities of reading. Its distinctive method is to listen to readers' own voices, rather than theorising about them as an undifferentiated group. Its cogent and engaging structure traces reading journeys from childhood into education and adulthood, and attends to settings from home to school to library. It has a distinctive focus on reading for pleasure and its framework of argument situates that type of reading in relation to dimensions of gender and class. It is grounded in place, and particularly in the context of a specific industrial city: Sheffield. The men and women featured in the book, coming to adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s, rarely regarded reading as a means of self-improvement. It was more usually a compulsive and intensely pleasurable private activity.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. The early twentieth century was awash in revolutionary scientific discourse, and its uptake in the public imaginary through popular scientific writings touched every area of human experience, from politics and governance to social mores and culture. Feeling Strangely argues that these shifting scientific understandings and their integration into Hispanic and Lusophone society reshaped the experience of gender. The book analyzes gender as a felt experience and explores how that experience is shaped by popular scientific discourse by examining the “strange” femininity of young protagonists in four novels written by women in Spanish and Portuguese: Rosa Chacel’s Memorias de Leticia Valle (published in Argentina in 1945); Norah Lange’s Personas en la sala (Argentina, 1950); Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Spain, 1945); and Clarice Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem (Brazil, 1943). It pairs each novel with a broad scientific theme selected from those that captured the contemporary popular imagination to argue that the young female protagonists in these novels all put forth visions of young womanhood as an experience of strangeness. Building on Carmen Martín Gaite’s term chicas raras, Rankin proposes this strangeness as constitutive of a gendered experience inextricable from affective and material engagements with the world.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. Situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies, affect studies, and narratology, Affective Disorders explores the significance of emotion in a range of colonial and postcolonial narratives. Through close readings of Naguib Mahfouz, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, among others, Bede Scott argues that literary representations of emotion need not be interpreted solely at the level of character, individual psychology, or the contingencies of plotting, but could also be related to broader sociopolitical forces. We thus find episodes of anger that serve as a collective response to the 'modernity' of wartime Cairo, feelings of jealousy that are inspired by the slave economy of imperial Brazil, and an overwhelming sense of boredom that emerges, in the late eighties, out of the bureaucratic procedures of the Indian Administrative Service. Affective Disorders also explores in some detail the formal consequences of these feelings – the way in which affective states such as anger or jealousy can often destabilize narratives, provoking crises of representation, generic ambivalence, and discursive rupture. By emphasizing the social origin of these emotions, and by analysing their influence on literary discourse, this study provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between various sociopolitical forces and the affective and aesthetic 'disorders' to which they give rise.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Save the Womanhood is a fascinating new history about promiscuity, prostitution and the efforts of local social purists to ‘save’ working-class women from themselves. The book examines how the work of the Liverpool Vigilance Association was supplemented by others, such as the Women Police Patrols, the Liverpool House of Help and the local branch of the Catholic Women’s League. It argues that though these organizations helped many lost and stranded women, their work also enacted a form of moral surveillance on the streets. As such, the book uncovers how important twentieth-century anxieties about changing sexual practices, female immigration, white slavery and the rise of new consumer cultures played out at local level and with what consequences for women in Liverpool. The book also brings together a wide range of local and national sources to show that when female-run, local organizations concerned about immorality went into decline in the post-war years, it was because official institutions and local law enforcement had increasingly taken up their cause. Consequently, Save the Womanhood argues that young, working-class women who travelled through Liverpool in search of work and adventure continued to arouse moral anxiety even as the city’s social purists battled to maintain their influence.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Michel Houellebecq is perhaps the single most successful and controversial of all contemporary novelists writing in French. Houellebecq has become a global publishing phenomenon: his books have been translated worldwide, three film adaptations of his work have been produced, and the author has been the subject of million-euro publishing deals and of successive media scandals in France. If Houellebecq is unique in contemporary French writing, it is thanks not only to his extraordinary success, but to the unparalleled scope of his narrative ambition. In the work which most forcefully marked his breakthrough to the mainstream – Les Particules élémentaires – Houellebecq made a significant appeal to the science-fiction genre in order to undergird his critique of contemporary society. For Houellebecq presents humanity – at least modern, western humanity – as in a terminal state of decadence and decline and ripe for replacement by its post-human successor. His novels narrate a metaphysical mutation or paradigm shift through which humanity as we know it ceases to be the over-riding value or focus of our world when it comes into conflict with a competitor in the form of a post-human or neo-human species. It is the aim of this book to appraise the global significance of Houellebecq’s novelistic visions while at the same time situating them within the context of French literature, culture and society.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. ‘Who ever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry’s fabled novel of the 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to the White Sea? Lord knows, I didn’t’ – Michael Hofmann, TLS This book breaks new ground in studies of the British novelist Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), as the first collection of new essays produced in response to the publication in 2014 of a scholarly edition of Lowry’s ‘lost’ novel, In Ballast to the White Sea. In their introduction, editors Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs show how the publication of In Ballast sheds new light on Lowry as both a highly political writer and one deeply influenced by his native Merseyside, as his protagonist Sigbjørn Hansen-Tarnmoor walks the streets of Liverpool, wrestling with his own conscience and with pressing questions of class, identity and social reform. In the chapters that follow, renowned Lowry scholars and newer voices explore key aspects of the novel and its relation to the wider contexts of Lowry’s work. These include his complex relation to socialism and communism, the symbolic value of Norway, and the significance of tropes of loss, hauntings and doublings. The book draws on the unexpected opportunity offered by the rediscovery of In Ballast to look afresh at Lowry’s oeuvre, to ‘remake the voyage’.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Well-known in science fiction for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist has been a rich source for imagining ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds.’ But more than a well-spring for SF scenarios, the genre’s archaeological imaginary invites us to consider the ideological implications of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of very popular, though often critically-neglected, North American SF film and television texts–running the gamut of telefilms, pseudo-documentaries, teen serial drama and Hollywood blockbusters–Excavating the Future explores the popular archaeological imagination and the political uses to which it is being employed by the U.S. state and its adversaries. By treating SF texts as documents of archaeological experience circulating within and between scientific and popular culture communities and media, Excavating the Future develops critical strategies for analyzing SF film and television’s critical and adaptive responses to post 9/11 geopolitical concerns about the war on terror, homeland security, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, and the ongoing fight against ISIS.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. Representations of China in Latin American Literature (1987-2016) analyses contemporary Latin American novels in which China is the main theme. Using ‘China’ as a multidimensional term, it explores how the novels both highlight and undermine assumptions about China that have shaped Latin America’s understanding of ‘China’ and shows ‘China’ to be a kind of literary/imaginary ‘third’ term which reframes Latin American discourses of alterity. On one level, it argues that these texts play with the way that ‘China’ stands in as a wandering signifier and as a metonym for Asia, a gesture that essentialises it as an unchanging other. On another level, it argues that the novels’ employment of ‘China’ resists essentialist constructions of identity. ‘China’ is thus shown to be serving as a concept which allows for criticism of the construction of fetishized otherness and of the exclusion inherent in essentialist discourses of identity. The book presents and analyses the depiction of an imaginary of China which is arguably performative, but which discloses the tropes and themes which may be both established and subverted, in the novels. Chapter One examines the way in which ‘China’ is represented and constructed in Latin American novels where this country is a setting for their stories. The novels studied in Chapter Two are linked to the presence of Chinese communities in Latin America. The final chapter examines novels whose main theme is travel to contemporary China. Ultimately, in the novels studied in this book ‘China’ serves as a concept through which essentialist notions of identity are critiqued.

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**An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. A selection of essays on symbola, as the tokens of Classical Athens were called, bringing together scholars of various disciplines and professional categories (numismatists, historians, museum curators) that intends to reshape our knowledge on the roles these objects played in the Athenian Democracy. This is a series of case studies which aspires to test old theories and probe new assumptions. The first section explores the extent to which our knowledge has evolved since symbola were first distinguished from coins. Four essays demonstrate how tokens, as material manifestations of particular institutions, contributed to the formation of civic and political identity in the city-state of Athens and the roles they played in ensuring legal and political equality. The second section of the volume on new finds aims to develop expertise in studying tokens and increase relevant knowledge. Finally, a third section contains comparative studies from Sicily, Jerusalem and Ephesos, aiming to adopt a comparative methodology for a better understanding of the characteristics and roles of tokens from across the ancient Mediterranean. Contributors: Vera Geelmuyden Bulgurlu, Tumay Hazinedar Coscun, Antonino Crisà, Yoav Farhi, P. J. Finglass, Mairi Gkikaki, Irini Karra, James Kierstead, John H. Kroll, Stamatoula Makrypodi, Christian Mondello, Daria Russo, Martin Schäfer.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.This book offers the first full-length study of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its ‘place’ – in multiple ways – in literary history as a work celebrated for ‘making it new’, yet deeply engaged with the literary past. It argues that Smith’s sonnets are constituted by three intertwined concerns: with tradition, place and the sonnet form itself, whereby the subjects of Smith’s sonnets – across birds, rivers, the sea, plants and flowers – are bound up with the literary context in which she wrote. Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet shows that Smith’s verse engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith’s career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England. The book also illuminates Smith’s place in posterity, as a popular poet – influencing figures ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Constable – who was subsequently obscured in literary history. It reveals the complex processes underpinning Smith’s reception and paradoxical position from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and shows that the appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition have been negotiated and understood by Smith, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. The world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution is now firmly established in mainstream history. Yet Haiti’s nineteenth-century has yet to receive its due, this despite independent Haiti’s vital importance as the first nation to permanently ban slavery and its ongoing struggle for sovereignty in the Atlantic World. Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855–1911) is one of the foremost Haitian intellectuals and diplomats of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His prolific oeuvre offered enduring challenges to racist slanders of Haiti and critiques of the global inequalities that arose from European colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Through his writings, Janvier influenced the international debates about slavery, race, nation, and empire that shaped his era and, in many ways, remain unresolved today. Arguably his most powerful work, Haiti for the Haitians (1884) provides a searing critique of European and U.S. imperialism, predatory finance capitalism, and Haiti’s domestic politics. It offers his vision of Haiti’s future expressed through a remarkable phrase: Haiti for the Haitians. Haiti for the Haitians is the first major English translation of Janvier. Accompanied by an introduction, annotations, and an interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, this volume offers unprecedented access to this vital Haitian thinker and an important contribution to the scholarship on Haiti’s nineteenth century.

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An Open Access edition of this book, supported by the LUP OA author fund, is available on the Liverpool University Press website, the OAPEN library and our Digital Collaboration Hub. In the 1968 local elections the Liverpool Conservatives won 62 percent of the vote and 78 percent of the seats on Liverpool City Council. By 1972 the party had held a majority on Liverpool’s municipal government for 85 of the previous 100 years. But in 1983 they lost their last two MPs, and in 1998 they lost their final councillor. The Conservatives have not won an electoral contest in the city since. Whatever happened to Tory Liverpool? Success, decline, and irrelevance since 1945 explores the history of Conservative electoral performance in Liverpool from the end of the Second World War to the present day, and challenges a number of myths regarding the city’s political history: Conservative post-war success was not due to sectarian tensions or false consciousness, and neither was Conservative decline due to Margaret Thatcher. The book takes a multi-method approach to the study of Conservative Party history in Liverpool. It proposes a tripartite framework, which separates the periods of success (1945–1972), decline (1973–1986), and irrelevance (1987 onwards), and argues that each period should be explained by recourse to different phenomena. Only in this way can the complex post-war history of the Conservative Party in Liverpool truly be understood.

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Rollerball, the Canadian-born director and producer Norman Jewison’s 1975 vision of a future dominated by anonymous corporations and their executive elite, in which all individual effort and aggressive emotions are subsumed into a horrifically violent global sport, remains critically overlooked. What little has been written deals mainly with its place within the renaissance of Anglo-American science fiction cinema in the 1970s, or focuses on the elaborately shot, still visceral to watch, game sequences, so realistic they briefly gave rise to speculation Rollerball may become an actual sport.Drawing on numerous sources, including little examined documents in the archive of the film’s screenwriter William Harrison, Andrew Nette examines the many dimensions of Rollerball’s making and reception: the way it simultaneously exhibits the aesthetics and narrative tropes of mainstream action and art-house cinema; the elaborate and painstaking process of world creation undertaken by Jewison and Harrison; and the cultural forces and debates that influenced them, including the increasing corporate power and growing violence in Western society in late 1960s and early 1970s. Nette shows how a film that was derided by many critics for its violence works as a sophisticated and disturbing portrayal of a dystopian future that anticipates numerous contemporary concerns, including "fake news" and declining literary and historical memory. The book includes an interview with Jewison on Rollerball’s influences, making, and reception.

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Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) has been called "a ghost story for adults." Certainly, in contrast to the more explicitly violent and bloodthirsty horror films of the 1970s, Don't Look Now seems of an entirely different order. Yet this supernaturally inflected tale of a child's accidental drowning, and her parents' desperate simultaneous recoil from her death and pursuit of her ghost, Don't Look Now is horrific at every turn. This book argues for it as a particular kind of horror film, one which depends utterly on the narrative of trauma-on the horror of unknowing, of seeing too late, and of the failures of paternal authority and responsibility. This study works to position Don't Look Now within a discourse of midcentury anxiety narratives primarily existing in literary texts. In this context, it represents a cross over or a hinge between literature and film of the 1970s, and the ways in which the women's ghost story or uncanny story turns the horror film into a cultural commentary on the failures of the modern family.

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For Louis Jacobs, the quest—the process of engaging with and thinking about Jewish faith—was a lifelong pursuit. He offered a model in the 1960s, a period characterized by general religious crisis, of an observant, committed, but intellectually curious Judaism that empowered individual seekers to address challenges to faith. In Orthodox Judaism at the time a battle was under way for religious control. Generating a widespread controversy in British Jewry known as the ‘Jacobs Affair’, his thought offers a lens for examining the trajectory of Orthodoxy. In a contemporary context marked by the changing cultural and intellectual concerns of a ‘post-secular’ age, the focus of some of these debates over religious control has shifted. Yet Jacobs’ emphasis on a personal quest is as relevant as ever, perhaps more so. This first book-length analysis of his theology unpacks the building blocks of his thought. It argues that, despite its particularities and limitations, his approach can provide a powerful model for contemporary religious seekers in the context of a growing impetus away from established, denominationally bound forms of religion. Many orthodox believers across a range of faiths continue to prefer the certainty of unquestionable religious truth claims rather than pursuing a subjective search for religious meaning. For those seeking alternative models for the contemporary Jewish quest, a reconsideration of Jacobs’ theology can offer valuable tools.

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Sa’adyah Gaon was an outstanding tenth-century Jewish thinker—a prominent rabbi, philosopher, and exegete. He was a pioneer in the fields in which he toiled, and was an inspiration and basis for later Jewish writing in all these areas. The last major English-language study of his work was published in 1921, long before Genizah research changed the understanding of the time in which he lived. Robert Brody’s masterly work, covering Sa’adyah’s biography and his main areas of creativity in an accessible way, is therefore a much-needed reassessment of an outstanding figure. The opening chapter, on the geonic period that formed the background to Sa’adyah’s life (a period on which there are few works in English), is followed by an overview that brings out the revolutionary aspects of his work and the characteristic features of his writings. Subsequent chapters consider his philosophical works; his Bible commentaries; his pioneering linguistic work; his poetry; his halakhic activity (including an examination of his use of the Palestinian Talmud compared to that of the Babylonian Talmud); and his activity as a polemicist, notably against the Karaites. An Epilogue sums up his importance in medieval Jewish culture. Particularly valuable features of the book are the copious quotations from Sa’adyah’s works, which facilitate familiarity with his style as well as his ideas; the clarity in presenting complex and difficult concepts; the constant assessment of his relationship to his predecessors in his various fields of study and his own unique contributions to each field; and the contextualization of his contribution within the political, cultural, and religious climate of his times so that both revolutionary and conservative elements in his thought can be identified and evaluated.

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Women are conspicuously absent from the Jewish mystical tradition. Even if historically some Jewish women may have experienced mystical revelations and led richly productive spiritual lives, the tradition does not preserve any record of their experiences or insights. Only the chance survival of scant evidence suggests that, at various times and places, individual Jewish women did pursue the path of mystical piety or prophetic spirituality, but it appears that they were generally censured, and efforts were made to suppress their activities. This contrasts sharply with the fully acknowledged prominence of women in the mystical traditions of both Christianity and Islam. It is against this background that the mystical messianic movement centred on the personality of Sabbatai Zevi (1626 - 76) stands out as a unique and remarkable exception. Sabbatai Zevi addressed to women a highly original liberationist message, proclaiming that he had come to make them 'as happy as men' by releasing them from the pangs of childbirth and the subjugation to their husbands that were ordained for women as a consequence of the primordial sin. This unprecedented redemptive vision became an integral part of Sabbatian eschatology, which the messianists believed to be unfolding and experienced in the present. Their New Law, superseding the Old with the dawning of the messianic era, overturned the traditional halakhic norms that distinguished and regulated relations between the sexes. This was expressed not only in the outlandish ritual transgression of sexual prohibitions, in which Sabbatian women were notoriously implicated, but also in the apparent adoption of the idea - alien to rabbinic Judaism - that virginity, celibacy, or sexual abstinence were conducive to women's spiritual empowerment. Ada Rapoport-Albert traces the diverse manifestations of this vision in every phase of Sabbatianism and its offshoots. These include the early promotion of women to centre-stage as messianic prophetesses; their independent affiliation with the movement in their own right; their initiation in the esoteric teachings of the kabbalah; and their full incorporation, on a par with men, into the ritual and devotional life of the messianic community. Their investment with authority was such as to elevate the messiah's wife (a figure mostly absent from traditional messianic speculations) to the rank of full messianic consort, sharing in her husband's redemptive mission as well as his divine dimension. By the late eighteenth century, a syncretistic cult had developed that recognized in Eva - the unmarried daughter of Jacob Frank, one of Sabbatai Zevi's apostate messianic successors - an incarnate female aspect of the kabbalistic godhead, worshipped by her father's devotees as 'Holy Virgin' and female messiah. This was the culmination of the Sabbatian endeavour to transcend the traditional gender paradigm that had excluded women from the public arena of Jewish spiritual life. This work is translated by Deborah Greniman.

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Following tremendous advances in recent years in the study of religious belief, this volume adopts a fresh understanding of Jewish religious life in Poland. Approaches deriving from the anthropology, history, phenomenology, psychology, and sociology of religion have replaced the methodologies of social or political history that were applied in the past, offering fascinating new perspectives. The well-established interest in hasidism continues, albeit from new angles, but topics that have barely been considered before are well represented here too. Women’s religious practice gains new prominence, and a focus on elites has given way to a consideration of the beliefs and practices of ordinary people. Reappraisals of religious responses to secularization and modernity, both liberal and Orthodox, offer more nuanced insights into this key issue. Other research areas represented here include the material history of Jewish religious life in eastern Europe and the shift of emphasis from theology to praxis in the search for the defining quality of religious experience. The contemporary reassessments in this volume, with their awareness of emerging techniques that have the potential to extract fresh insights from source materials both old and new, show how our understanding of what it means to be Jewish is continuing to expand.

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With its five thematic sections covering genres from cantorial to classical to klezmer, this pioneering multi-disciplinary volume presents rich coverage of the work of musicians of Jewish origin in the Polish lands. It opens with the musical consequences of developments in Jewish religious practice: the spread of hasidism in the eighteenth century meant that popular melodies replaced traditional cantorial music, while the greater acculturation of Jews in the nineteenth century brought with it synagogue choirs. Jewish involvement in popular culture included performances for the wider public, Yiddish songs and the Yiddish theatre, and contributions of many different sorts---technical and commercial as well as creative---in the interwar years. Chapters on the classical music scene cover Jewish musical institutions, organizations, and education; individual composers and musicians; and a consideration of music and Jewish national identity. One section is devoted to the Holocaust as reflected in Jewish music, and the final section deals with the afterlife of Jewish musical creativity in Poland, particularly the resurgence of interest in klezmer music. The essays in this collection do not attempt to to define what may well be undefinable---what ‘Jewish music’ is. Rather, they provide an original and much-needed exploration of the activities and creativity of ‘musicians of the Jewish faith’.CONTRIBUTORS: Eliyana R. Adler, Michael Aylward, Sławomir Dobrzański, Paula Eisenstein-Baker, Beth Holmgren, Sylwia Jakubczyk-Ślęczka, Daniel Katz, James Loeffler, Michael Lukin, Filip Mazurczak, Bożena Muszkalska, Julia Riegel, Ronald Robboy, Robert Rothstein, Joel E. Rubin, Adam J. Sacks, Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel, Eleanor Shapiro, Carla Shapreau, Tamara Sztyma, Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota, Joseph Toltz, Maja Trochimczyk, Magdalena Waligórska, Bret Werb, Akiva Zimmerman

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Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. Scholars contributing to the present study were invited to consider how such regional identities were fashioned, propagated, reinforced, contested, and reshaped—and to reflect on the developments, events, or encounters that made these identities manifest. They were asked to identify how subcultural identities proved to be useful, and the circumstances in which they were deployed. The resulting volume spans the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor. In its own way, each contribution considers factors—demographic, geographical, historical, economic, political, institutional, legal, intellectual, theological, cultural, and even biological—that led medieval Jews to conceive of themselves, or to be perceived by others, as bearers of a discrete Jewish regional identity. Notwithstanding the singularity of each essay, they collectively attest to the inherent dynamism of Jewish regional identities.

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In the postmodern, relativist world-view with its refutation of a single, objective, and ultimate truth, it has become difficult if not impossible to argue in favour of one’s own beliefs as preferable to those of others. Miriam Feldmann Kaye’s pioneering study is one of the first English-language books to address Jewish theology from a postmodern perspective, probing the question of how Jewish theology has the potential to survive the postmodern onslaught that some see as heralding the collapse of religion. Basing her arguments on both philosophical and theological scholarship, Feldmann Kaye shows how postmodernism might actually be a resource for rejuvenating religion.Her response to the conception of theology and postmodernism as competing systems of thought is based on a close critical study of Rav Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg) and Tamar Ross. Rather than advocating postmodern ideas, she analyses their writings through the lens of the most radical of continental postmodern philosophers and cultural critics in order to offer a compelling theology compatible with that world-view. Whether the reader considers postmodernism to be inherently problematic or merely inconsequential, this study demonstrates why reconsidering these preconceptions is one of the most pressing issues in contemporary Jewish thought.

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The Ba'al Shem Tov is an elusive subject for historians because documentary evidence about his life is scanty and equivocal. Until now, much of what was known about him was based on stories compiled more than a generation after his death, many of which serve more to mythologize him than to describe him. The portrait Moshe Rosman provides is drawn from life instead of from myth. Based on innovative critical analysis of familiar and previously unexplored archival sources, and concentrating on accounts that can be attributed to the Besht or to contemporary eyewitnesses, this book goes further than any previous work in uncovering the historical Ba'al Shem Tov. Additionally, documents in Polish and Hebrew discovered by Professor Rosman during his research for the book enable him to give the first detailed description of the cultural, social, economic, and political context of the Besht's life. Founder of Hasidism supplies the history behind the legend. It presents the best, most convincing description that can be drawn from the existing documentary evidence, changing our understanding of the Besht and with it the master-narrative of hasidism.A substantial new introduction considers what has changed in the study of Hasidism since the influential first edition was published, these changes being in part due to the effect of the book. New approaches, new sources, and new interpretations have been introduced, and these are reviewed and critically assessed. Criticisms of the original edition are answered and key issues reconsidered, including the authenticity of the various versions of the Holy Epistle; the ways in which Jacob Joseph of Polonne's books can be utilized as historical sources; and the relationship to history of the stories about the Ba'al Shem Tov in the hagiographical collection Shivhei Ha-Besht.

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The essay that forms the core of this book is an attempt to understand the developments that have occurred in Orthodox Jewry in America in the last seventy years, and to analyse their implications. The prime change is what is often described as ‘the swing to the right’, a marked increase in ritual stringency, a rupture in patterns of behaviour that has had major consequences not only for Jewish society but also for the nature of Jewish spirituality. For Haym Soloveitchik, the key feature at the root of this change is that, as a result of migration to the ‘New Worlds’ of England, the US, and Israel and acculturation to its new surroundings, American Jewry—indeed, much of the Jewish world— had to reconstruct religious practice from normative texts: observance could no longer be transmitted mimetically, on the basis of practices observed in home and street. In consequence, behaviour once governed by habit is now governed by rule. This new edition allows the author to deal with criticisms raised since the essay, long established as a classic in the field, was originally published, and enables readers to gain a fuller perspective on a topic central to today’s Jewish world and its development.

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This book traces the historical evolution of Indian cinema through a number of key decades. The book is made up of 14 chapters with each chapter focusing on one key film, the chosen films analysed in their wider social, political and historical context whilst a concerted engagement with various ideological strands that underpin each film is also evident. In addition to exploring the films in their wider contexts, the author analyses selected sequences through the conceptual framework common to both film and media studies. This includes a consideration of narrative, genre, representation, audience and mise-en-scene. The case studies run chronologically from Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951) to The Elements Trilogy: Water (2005) and include films by such key figures as Satyajit Ray (The Lonely Wife), Ritwick Ghatak (Cloud Capped Star), Yash Chopra (The Wall) and Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!).

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Like all game changers within the horror genre, SAW was an independent success, a low-budget champion that flourished without the patronage of a big studio. Not bad for the most successful horror franchise ever, which has spawned subsidiary media and masses of merchandise, including a theme park rollercoaster ride. What is it about SAW that attracted such a following? In his contribution to the "Devil's Advocates" series, Ben Poole considers the SAW phenomenon from all aspects of film and media studies – from its generic pedigree in both literature and film, to the visceral audience pleasures ("what would I do?") of the text, to the contrasting representations of men and women and the film's implicit criticism of masculinity.

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These days it takes a very special vampire movie to stand out. Like Twilight, the Swedish film Let the Right One In is a love story between a human and a vampire but there the resemblance ends. Let the Right One In is not a romantic fantasy but combines the supernatural with social realism. Set on a housing estate in the suburbs of Stockholm in the early 1980s, it's the story of Oskar, a lonely, bullied child, who makes friends with Eli, the girl in the next apartment. 'Oskar, I'm not a girl,' she tells him and she's not kidding. They forge a relationship which is oddly innocent yet disturbing, two outsiders against the rest of the world. But one of these outsiders is, effectively, a serial killer. While Let the Right One In is startlingly original, it nevertheless couldn't have existed without the near century of vampire cinema that preceded it. Acclaimed film critic and horror novelist Anne Billson looks at how it has drawn from, and wrung new twists on, such classics as Nosferatu (1922), how vampire cinema has already flirted with social realism in films like Near Dark (1987) and how vampire mythology adapts itself to the modern world.

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The tyrants of Greece are some of the most colourful figures in antiquity, notorious for their luxury, excess and violence, and provoking heated debates among political thinkers. Greek Tyranny examines the phenomenon of autocratic rule outside the law in archaic and classical Greece, offering a new interpretation of the nature of tyranny. The development of tyrannical government is examined in theory and in practice, embracing lesser-known rulers such as the tagoi of Thessaly and the Hecatomnids of Halicarnassus, as well as canonical figures like the Pisistratid rulers of Athens and the Dionysii at Syracuse. The book considers the different forms which sole rulership took – the violent usurper, the appointed magistrate, the general and the Hellenistic king – and the responses which tyranny evoked, both from the citizens of the polis and from intellectuals such as Plato and Aristotle. Lewis replaces the longstanding theory of an ‘age of tyranny’ in Greece with powerful new arguments, suggesting tyranny was a positive choice for many Greek states.

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Habsburg Bukovina no longer exists, save in the realms of historiography, nostalgia, and collective memory. Remembered for its remarkable multinational, multi-faith character, Bukovina and its capital city Czernowitz have long been presented as exemplars of inter-ethnic co-operation, political moderation, and cultural dynamism, with Jews regarded as indispensable to the region’s character and vitality. This is not mere rhetoric: the Jews of Bukovina were integral to, and at home in, local society. David Rechter’s important new history conveys the special nature of Bukovina Jewry while embedding it in the broader historical and intellectual frameworks of Galician, imperial Austrian, and east central European Jewries. Carefully tracing the evolution of the tangled relationship of state and society with the Jews, from the Josephinian Enlightenment through absolutism to emancipation, he brings to light the untold story of the Jewish minority in the monarchy's easternmost province, often a byword for economic backwardness and cultural provincialism. Here, at the edge of the Habsburg monarchy, Jews forged a new society from familiar elements, a unique hybrid of eastern and western European Jewries. Bukovina Jewry was both and neither: understanding its history can help us grasp the east/west fault lines within European Jewry, a key element in the Jewish experience in Europe.

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The exploration of Taoism and T'ai Chi begins by examining their origins and affiliations under the title of Beginnings. Subsequent chapters take up the themes of Harmony (expressing the duality and interrelation of yin and yang); The Way (which looks at the philosophy of the Tao and the path that leads to its practical expression through T'ai Chi); Change (which examines the influence of the I Ching and the Eight Energies); Direction (an analysis of the Five Elements); and Energy (which explores alchemy and the vital energy of ch'i). The primary focus is on Movement and Stillness, which harmonizes the softness of movement with the stillness of the inner self -- leading to the theme of Unity, the ultimate goal of philosophical Taoism and the practical dimensions of that philosophy in T'ai Chi.

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There has been little progress on the refugee problem because of official Palestinian public positions, other Arab countries' approach to the 'right of return' of all Palestinian refugees, and the contrasting Israeli public policy of not allowing any refugees to return to Israel. Such polar-opposite approaches can never resolve this difficult and longstanding humanitarian problem. By working collectively, the world's leading experts from Arab countries, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Europe and the United States have developed a chessboard of proposed solutions. The volume in part reflects the polarization that exists on the issue, and in part moves away from the political slogans of both sides, toward concrete proposals for negotiating a comprehensive agreement.

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Francis Tregian owned estates in Cornwall, and held a high place in court at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I. He made no secret of his Catholic faith. Banished from court on trumped-up charges, he was arrested for hiding a priest, St Cuthbert Mayne, and imprisoned for 30 years. Released under James I, he died in a Jesuit hospital at St Roque, Lisbon, Portugal, and was buried standing up because he had "stood up" to Elizabeth and her heresies. Francis Tregian is much revered on the Continent, where there have been recent attempts to have him elevated to sainthood. At his place of burial there is a detailed description of how he preferred the confiscation of his estates for the defence of the Catholic Faith. This booklet details the history of Francis Tregian, and includes all known details, including "Tregian" Elizabethan music. Includes a Prayer for the Beatification of Francis Tregian as authorized by the Right Reverend Christopher Budd, Bishop of Plymouth.

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From Palace to Power: an IIlustrated history of Whitehall is the 400-year story -- in contemporary pictures, maps and photographs, as well as letters and diaries -- of the historical transformation of 'The Street' recognised throughout the world as a symbol of Government. The illustrations have been gathered from diverse sources: some hang as oil paintings in the corridors of power, known only to the privileged who occupy these offices. Others have been gleaned from contemporary journals, old sepia prints and postcards from the early days of the camera. Extended captions to the 120 illustrations, the 8-page coloured plate section, map endpapers -- as well as a select bibliography, chronology, list of statues in Whitehall, and index -- make this book easy to read and follow for the historian and the browser. In this new work, which has taken five years to research, Susan Foreman has created a vivid image of how the most pre-eminent street in Britain has changed, and how the political fortunes of its dramatis personae have left their mark.

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The span of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg's life (1884-1966) illuminates the religious and intellectual dilemmas that traditional Jewry has faced over the past century. Rabbi Weinberg became a central ideologue of modern Orthodoxy because of his positive attitude to secular studies and Zionism and his willingness to respond to social change in interpreting the halakhah, despite his traditional training in a Lithuanian yeshiva. But Weinberg was an unusual man: even at a time when he was defending the traditional yeshiva against all attempts at reform, he always maintained an interest in the wider world. He left Lithuania for Germany at the beginning of the First World War, attended the University of Giessen, and increasingly identified with the Berlin school of German Orthodoxy. Although initially an apologist for the Nazi regime, he was soon recognized as German Orthodoxy's most eminent halakhic authority in its efforts to maintain religious tradition in the face of Nazi persecution. His approach, then and in his later halakhic writings, including the famous Seridei esh, derived from the conviction that the attempt to shore up Orthodoxy by increased religious stringency would only reduce its popular appeal. Using a great deal of unpublished material, including private correspondence, Marc Shapiro discusses many aspects of Weinberg's life. In doing so he elucidates many institutional and intellectual phenomena of the Jewish world, a number of which have so far received little scholarly attention: the yeshivas of Lithuania; the state of the Lithuanian rabbinate; the musar movement; the Jews of eastern Europe in Weimar Germany; the Torah im Derekh Eretz movement and its variants; Orthodox Jewish attitudes towards Wissenschaft des Judentums; and the special problems of Orthodox Jews in Nazi Germany. Throughout, he shows the complex nature of Weinberg's character and the inner struggles of a man being pulled in different directions. Compellingly and authoritatively written, his fascinating conclusions are quite different from those presented in earlier historical treatments of the period.

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Hasidism has been a seminal force and source of controversy in the Jewish world since its inception in the second half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, almost every ideological trend that has made itself felt among Jews since that time-from Zionism and Orthodoxy to contemporary Jewish feminism and movements within the yeshiva world-has claimed to have derived some inspiration from this vibrant movement. While this is sure testimony to its vitality and originality, it has also given rise to many misconceptions as to what hasidism is about. This major work, the first comprehensive critical study of hasidism in English, offers a wide-ranging treatment of the subject in all its aspects by what is effectively the entire present generation of scholars working in the field. With contributions ranging from the history of theology and of ideas through social and economic history to contemporary sociology, Hasidism Reappraised encompasses a complete field of modern scholarship in a discipline that is central to the understanding of modern Jewish history and the contemporary Jewish world. The twenty-eight authors who have contributed to the main body of the book are almost without exception established scholars with international reputations. The volume as a whole is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Weiss, and its opening section assesses his contribution to the study of hasidism in the context of his relationship with Gershom Scholem and Scholem's long-standing influence on the field. The remaining contributions are arranged thematically under seven headings: the social history of hasidism; the social functions of mystical ideals in the hasidic movement; distinctive outlooks and schools of thought within hasidism; the hasidic tale; the history of hasidic historiography; contemporary hasidism; and the present state of research on hasidism. The book also incorporates an extensive introduction that places the various articles in their intellectual context, as well as a bibliography of hasidic sources and contemporary scholarly literature. Hasidism Reappraised shows an intellectual world at an important juncture in its development and points to the direction in which scholarly study of hasidism is likely to develop in the years to come.CONTRIBUTORS: Jacob Barnai, Israel Bartal, Joseph Dan, Rachel Elior, Immanuel Etkes, Shmuel Ettinger, Morris M. Faierstein, Roland Goetschel, Arthur Green, Zeev Gries, Karl Erich GROZINGER, Moshe Hallamish, Gershon David Hundert, Moshe Idel, Louis Jacobs, Jacob Katz, Naftali Loewenthal, Daniel Meijers, Yehoshua Mondshine, Gedaliah Nigal, Mendel Piekarz, Ada Rapoport-Albert, Moshe J. Rosman, Bracha Sack, Yoseph Salmon, Chone Shmeruk, Sara Ora Heller Wilensky, Elliot R. Wolfson.

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Labour and the Caucus provides a new, innovative pre-history of the Labour party. In the two decades following the Second Reform Act there was a sustained and concerted campaign for working-class parliamentary representation from a range of labour organisations to an extent that was hitherto unseen in British political history. The franchise revolution of 1867 and the controversial introduction of more sophisticated forms of electoral machinery, which became known as the ‘caucus’, raised serious questions not only for a labour movement seeking to secure political representation but also for a Liberal party that had to respond to the pressures of mass politics. Through a close examination of the interactions between labour and the ‘caucus’ from the 1868 general election to Keir Hardie’s independent labour candidature in 1888, this book provides a comprehensive and multi-layered picture of the troubled relationship between working-class radicals and organised Liberalism. The electoral strategy of labour candidates, the links between urban and rural radicalism, the impact of the National Liberal Federation, the influence of American and Irish politics on the labour movement, the revival of socialism, and the contested identity of a ‘Labour party’ are all examined from fresh perspectives. In doing so, this book challenges the existing teleological assumptions about the rise of independent labour, and explores the questions that remain about how working-class radicals and Liberals shared and negotiated power, and how this relationship changed over time.

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John Scattergood's 'The Complete English Poems of John Skelton', originally published in 1983 and long out of print, was the leading academic edition with comprehensive notes. Students are currently limited to searching for Skelton's poems in anthologies. This new, revised edition contains the poems, accompanied by around 150 pages of revised notes. There is an entirely new introduction, covering all developments in Skelton scholarship since the early 1980's, and an updated reading list. Scattergood also reproduces much of the Latin paratexts, considered by readers to be so essential to Skelton - and therefore to scholars of his work. Reviews of previous edition: 'Skelton's greatest poems are learned, difficult, allusive, multilingual, intensely self-conscious and self-reflexive. With their verbal play and many-layered meaning they demand careful and repeated reading; and the most important reason why Skelton's reputation [...] does not correspond to the reality of his work is that there has been no complete edition of the authentic text of his poems since that of Alexander Dyce in 1843. [...] Scattergood's is a splendid achievement: it must be the product of many years of learned and intelligent labour, and it is likely to be the standard edition of Skelton for many years to come.' The Cambridge Review '[Skelton] sits in an awkward historical corner beween the regular "middle ages" and the Shakespeare epoch; and is not nearly well-enough known today. Splendid then, to have [...] this new, complete edition of his works with both the original spellings and explanatory notes, indeed the only such edition since 1843.' The Morning Star

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