Search results for ""liverpool university press""

William Klein’s Mr. Freedom (1969) is one of the most important American satirical films ever produced, the tale of an American superhero with disastrously misguided priorities. Although it was made in France and with a largely French cast, Klein was an American expatriate, and the film’s primary topic is American culture. That it is still so largely unseen seems to have something to do with a view of it as being, in the words of critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, “conceivably the most anti-American movie ever made”.In his contribution to the Constellations series, Tyler Sage argues that to call Mr. Freedom “anti-American” is to misunderstand not only the film but the satirical tradition of American arts and letters from which it descends. The film is challenging, Sage asserts, not because it is unpatriotic but because it lays bare the ideological nature of American films themselves. By interweaving a startling range of topics, including the cultural conditions surrounding the Vietnam War, the foundations of the American obsessions with race and violence, and our contemporary superhero film cycle, Sage explores the ways Mr. Freedom compels the viewer to come to terms with the fact that the stories we tell ourselves can never be separated from the larger forces of history, culture and film tradition.

Read more less

Beyond Trawlertown takes a journey through the British distant-water fishery and its port-city connections in an era of disruption. In 1976, defeat in the Anglo-Icelandic Cod Wars saw the British trawling fleet excluded from their traditional hunting grounds. Combining with wider global factors, the move brought an end to long-established trawling practices, with profound social, economic and cultural repercussions. Through a case study of the port of Hull, oral history and archival research explore the challenges, responses and legacy of rapid change. Although the emphasis is on Hull, this is far from a local history. Hull’s position among the world leading distant-water pioneers gives the story international significance. Focusing on memory, lived experience and place, the book goes beyond established narratives. Personal acts of remembering offer cultural perspectives on how global events and marine policy impact upon the seafaring communities that live with the consequences. The Cod Wars signaled an end, yet amid the disruption there were also new beginnings. And in the wake of an active fishery, the rhythms of the past continue to resonate in the negotiation of fishing heritage within the contemporary city. Through the convergence of time, place and memory, this holistic narrative of interweaving stories reveals the intricacies of our human interaction with the marine environment and the aftermath when its threads are broken.

Read more less

Vivre Ici invites the reader on a journey through the vast viewing landscape of contemporary French documentary film, a genre that has experienced a renaissance in the past twenty years. The films explored are connected not just by a general interest in engaging the “real,” but by a particular attention to French space and place. From farms and wild places to roads, schools, and urban edgelands, these films explore the spaces of the everyday and the human and non-human experiences that unfold within them. Through a critical approach that integrates phenomenology, film theory, eco-criticism and cultural history, Levine investigates the notion of documentary as experience. She asks how and why, in the contemporary media landscape, these films seek to avoid argumentation and instead, give the viewer a feeling of “being there.” As a diverse collection of filmmakers, both well-known and lesser-known, explore the limits and possibilities of these places, a collage-like, incomplete, and fragmented vision of France as seen and felt through documentary cameras comes into view. Venturing beyond film analysis to examine the production climate for these films and their circulation in contemporary France, Levine explores the social and political consequences of these “films that matter” for the viewers who come into contact with them.

Read more less

The cultural production of Spanish-speaking New York is closely linked to the Caribbean and to Latin America at large, but the city also plays a pivotal role in the work of a host of authors from the Iberian Peninsula, writing in Spanish, Catalan, and English. In many cases, their New York City texts have marked their careers and the history of their national literatures. Drawing from a variety of genres, Translating New York recovers cultural narratives occluded by single linguistic or national literary histories, and proposes that reading these texts through the lens of translation unveils new pathways of cultural circulation and influence. Looking beyond representations of the city's physical space, Translating New York suggests that travel to the city and contact with New York's multilingual setting ignited a heightened sensitivity towards both the verbal and non-verbal languages of the city, garnering literary achievement and aesthetic innovation. Analyzing the novels, poetry, and travel narratives of Felipe Alfau, José Moreno Villa, Julio Camba, and Josep Pla, this book uncovers an international perspective of Iberian literatures. Translating New York aims to rethink Iberian literatures through the transatlantic travels of influential writers.The pre-publication version of Translating New York was awarded the 2017 Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award for the best unpublished book-length manuscript on modern language literature.

Read more less

Sleuthing Miss Marple mirrors the structure and playful analytic style of a detective novel. Beginning at the ‘scene of the crime’, this investigation places Agatha Christie and the clue-puzzle in historical context, casting light on the methods, the motives, and, in a sense, the alibis that underpin Christie’s crime fiction. In keeping with the clue-puzzle analytical method devised for this book, each chapter builds towards a conclusion that delivers a surprising intellectual payoff.This enquiry is unapologetically textual in approach. It constructs a rigorous evidence base drawn from the Marple short stories and novels, and presents a useful interpretation of crime fiction scholarship. This provides a foundation for original literary analyses that reveal Christie’s engagements with gender roles and genre rules, and the sleights of hand that they conceal. Christie’s modus operandi is uncovered, as are the narrative strategies and literary devices that she deployed to ambush unwary readers. Crucially, this investigation shows how Christie’s ingenious methods made it possible for an elderly spinster to get away with solving murder. Sleuthing Miss Marple will be invaluable for students and researchers of crime fiction, twentieth-century literature, and creative writing.

Read more less

In April 1966, thousands of artists, musicians, performers and writers from across Africa and its diaspora gathered in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Premier Festival Mondial des arts nègres). The international forum provided by the Dakar Festival showcased a wide array of arts and was attended by such celebrated luminaries as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Aimé Césaire, André Malraux and Wole Soyinka. Described by Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, as ‘the elaboration of a new humanism which this time will include all of humanity on the whole of our planet earth’, the festival constituted a highly symbolic moment in the era of decolonization and the push for civil rights for black people in the United States. In essence, the festival sought to perform an emerging Pan-African culture, that is, to give concrete cultural expression to the ties that would bind the newly liberated African ‘homeland’ to black people in the diaspora. This volume is the first sustained attempt to provide not only an overview of the festival itself but also of its multiple legacies, which will help us better to understand the ‘festivalization’ of Africa that has occurred in recent decades with most African countries now hosting a number of festivals as part of a national tourism and cultural development strategy.

Read more less

Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century explores the complex interrelationships between race, gender, and sex as these are conceptualised within contemporary thought. Markers of identity are too often isolated and presented as definitive, then examined and theorised, a process that further naturalises their absoluteness; thus socially generated constructs become socialising categories that assume coercive power. The resulting set of oppositions isolate and delimit: male or female, black or white, straight or gay. A new kind of intervention is needed, an intervention that recognises the validity of the researcher’s own self-reflexivity. Focusing on the way identity is both constructed and constructive, the collection examines the frameworks and practices that deny transgressive possibilities. It seeks to engage in a consciousness raising exercise that documents the damaging nature of assigned social positions and either/or identity constructions. It seeks to progress beyond the socially prescribed categories of race, gender and sex, recognising the need to combine intellectualization and feeling, rationality and affectivity, abstraction and emotion, consciousness and desire. It seeks to develop new types of transdisciplinary frameworks where subjective and political spaces can be universalized while remaining particular, leaving texts open so that identity remains imagined, plural, and continuously shifting. Such an approach restores the complexity of what it means to be human.

Read more less

Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon analyzes the ways in which the Amazon has been represented in twentieth century cultural production. With contributions by scholars working in Latin America, the US and Europe, Intimate Frontiers reads against the grain commonly held notions about the region -its gigantism, its richness, its exceptionality, among other- choosing to approach these rather from quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The multinational, pluriethnic corpus of texts critically examined here, explores a wide range of cultural artifacts including travelogues, diaries, and novels about the rubber boom genocide, as well as indigenous oral histories, documentary films, and photography about the region. The different voices gathered in this book show that the richness of the Amazon lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness of its histories/stories in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.

Read more less

Roger Rosenblatt, writing in the New York Times in 2016, described Paul Muldoon as `one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems - word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.’ This is a selection (chosen by poet John Kinsella) of some of the more linguistically innovative and overtly 'experimental' poems from Muldoon’s extensive and verbally rich oeuvre. Muldoon is always innovative and `electric’, but the focus in this selection is on linguistic `departures’ in his own practice. Both inside and outside the avant-garde, Muldoon is ultimately a maverick whose unique voice is nonetheless steeped in the politics of a bilingual Irish poetics, with a forensic dissection of `New World’–`Old World’ (false) verbal dynamics. We see and hear his poems in juxtaposition and proximity, in terms of those elements of his work that are possibly less appreciated and discussed by those who cast him as a lyrical purist who 'plays' with language. Muldoon’s is a poetry that is compelled, propelled and is 'political' in complex arrays, and isn't about `gameplay’ per se, but a politics of language. Muldoon has a driving purpose in all he writes, and the reader and listener may begin to get a sense of the possibilities of this purpose through engaging with this book.

Read more less

This book examines how the political period in Spain following Franco's death, known as the Transición, is being remembered by a group of writers, filmmakers and TV producers born in the sixties and early seventies. Reading against the dominant historical account that celebrates Spain’s successful democratisation, this study reveals how recent television, film and fiction recreate this past from a generational perspective, linking the experience of the Transición to the country’s present political and financial crises. Privileging above all an emotional connection, these artists use personal feelings about the past to analyse and revisit the history of their coming-of-age years. Lost in Transition considers the implications of adopting such a subjective positioning towards history that encourages an unending narrative, always in search of more meaningful and intimate connections with the past. Taking into account recent theoretical approaches to memory studies, this book proposes a new look at the production of memory in contemporary Spain and its close relationship to popular culture, shifting the focus from what is remembered to how the past is recalled affectively to be made part of an ongoing and enduring everyday experience.

Read more less

Life on Earth can be traced back over three billion years into the past. Many examples of the Earth's former inhabitants are to be found in rocks, preserved as beautiful and fascinating fossils. The earliest life forms were bacteria and algae; these produced the oxygen that enabled more complex life forms to develop. About 600 million years ago multi-cellular organisms appeared on Earth, some of which could protect themselves with hard parts such as shells. Many of these life forms were readily fossilized and are used to subdivide geological time. Numerous species have evolved and most are now extinct. Lineages can be traced and extinctions explained as a consequence of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial events. Now in a revised, updated and expanded Second Edition Introducing Palaeontology will continue to provide readers with a concise and accessible introduction to the science of palaeontology.

Read more less

The nornir or norns were a group of female supernatural beings closely related to ideas about fate in Old Norse tradition. Karen Bek-Pedersen provides a thorough understanding of the role played by norns and other beings like them in the relevant sources. Although they are well known, even to people who have only a superficial knowledge of Old Norse mythology, this is the first detailed discussion of the norns to be published amongst the literature dealing with Old Norse beliefs. Surprisingly little has been written specifically about the norns. Although often mentioned in scholarship treating Old Norse culture, the norns are all too often dealt with in overly superficial ways. The research presented in this book goes much deeper in order to properly understand the nature and role of the norns in the Old Norse world view. The conclusions reached by the author overturn a number of stereotypical conceptions that have long dominated our understanding of these beings. The book has a natural focus on Old Norse culture and is especially relevant to those interested in or studying Old Norse culture and tradition. However, comparative material from Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Classical traditions is also employed and the book is therefore of interest also to those with a broader interest in European mythologies.

Read more less

Metamorphic rocks are one of the three main types of rock. Originally comprising either igneous or sedimentary rocks, metamorphic rocks are the products of change by heat and pressure, often at great depths in the earth’s crust, into a completely new form. One of the classic examples of the result of a metamorphic process is the transformation of sedimentary mudstone into slate.Introducing Metamorphism provides a succinct introduction to metamorphism. Ian Sanders explains how and why rocks change during metamorphic processes. He discusses the role of water in metamorphism and describes the different types of metamorphic processes including contact, shock and high pressure metamorphism and metamorphism in an orogenic belt.Copiously illustrated and written for those who wish to gain a clear understanding of metamorphic processes, Introducing Metamorphism is designed to make the processes that led to the formation of these rocks intelligible to its readers. Technical terms are kept to a minimum and are explained in a glossary.

Read more less

This guide is for those who wish to understand the interplay between rocks and scenery in a truly classic geology in Europe. Nowhere else in Britain is this link to be more clearly observed. Key geological localities that make the Scottish Highlands a unique region for the study of geology are linked together geographically in a series of journeys. The Western Highlands contain some of the oldest rocks in Europe in a landscape formed more than a billion years ago that has re-emerged from the depths. Geologists have been examining these rocks since the early nineteenth century and, in spite of intense research in this tiny fraction of the Earth's surface, major controversies still surround some of the rock formations. Many fundamentally important concepts in geology were first developed here and then applied elsewhere around the world. The region is an outstanding natural laboratory for the study of mountain building and folding, including the discovery that thick sequences of rocks have been turned completely upside down, and pushed sideways for over 100 kilometres. Representatives of all the major rocks types are found here, and their ages span three-quarters of geological time since the Earth began, some four and a half billion years ago. The journeys and localities are detailed in chapters: Tongue to Lochinver; Lochinver, Assynt, Ullapool; Ullapool to Gairloch; Gairloch to Kyle of Lochalsh; Kyle of Lochalsh, Glenelg, Mallaig, Cluanie, Glen Roy; Fort William, Loch Eil, Glenfinnan, Lochailort, Ardnamurchan, Strontian; Fort William, Ballachulish, Kentallen, Oban, Easdale, Kilmartin, Tayvallich and Kilmory; Fort William, Ben Nevis and Glen Nevis, Ballachulish, Glencoe, Glen Etive, Glen Orchy and Loch Lomond. Excursions are easily accessible, along footpaths and the coast, with a few more challenging options, including Ben Nevis, Scotland’s highest mountain.This is an ideal accompaniment for geologists and earth science students visiting the Western Highlands.

Read more less

Thomas Hoccleve (1368–426) was one of Chaucer’s first disciples and is represented in this book by a selection of his works, newly edited from his own copies and fully annotated. It provides students and other readers new to his work with a very fair indication of his range and achievement as original writer and translator and includes a full Introduction and marginal glosses. It also offers those more familiar with his work a fuller account than has hitherto been available of the manuscripts both of Hoccleve’s own texts and, when he was translating from Latin or French, of his sources. Some of the themes and topics explored, with Hoccleve's light and witty touch, include women (for them or against them); money (always short of it, and as likely as not to be paid in counterfeit coin); isolation and suffering (causes various, but always painful); the pains of hell and the joys of heaven; the serendipitous nature of literary production; the writer as translator, reporter, or even as gossip.

Read more less

Jason, in exile in Corinth, is marrying the king's daughter. It looks as though his problems are over, though it's hard on Medea, who has betrayed her family for him, followed him all the way from Colchis, killed for him, and borne him two sons. Euripides' Medea is a compelling study of love turned to hatred and a rejected woman's burning desire for revenge. Its central, shocking, act of infanticide comes as the climax of a psychological thriller in which Euripides' dramaturgical skills are shown at their finest and the audience's emotions are ruthlessly manipulated. Medea's conflicting urges and her dazzling rhetoric have exercised an enduring fascination over audiences and readers since the play was first performed in 431 BC. This edition examines a wide range of aspects of the play, including text, performance, interpretation, Euripides' sources, other lost plays about Medea and Euripides' portrayal of character and gender. Greek text with facing-page translation, introduction and commentary.

Read more less

The only Latin art of war to survive, Vegetius’ Epitome was for long a part of the medieval prince’s military education. The core of his proposals, the maintenance of a professional standing army, was revolutionary for medieval Europe, while his theory of deterrence through strength remains the foundation of modern Western defence policy.

Read more less

In 1967 Penguin Books published the work of Brian Patten, along with co-poets Roger McGough and Adrian Henri, in the collection The Mersey Sound, frequently credited as the single most significant anthology of this century in bringing poetry to new audiences. Some half a million copies have been sold, and thousands of poetry fans have flocked to theatres, arts centres and schools to watch Patten in performance. This is the first full-length critical evaluation of Patten’s work – as a poet, as a performer and as a hugely popular children’s writer. It seeks to explore his position in relation to his fellow “Liverpool Poets” and to contemporary poetry more widely. Consideration of Armada, Patten’s most recent poetry collection for adults, is central to this study. The author explores the ways in which themes and pre-occupations from earlier works have now sharpened and developed, and argues that Armada signals the maturation of his talent.

Read more less

One of the key ways in which the traditional Jewish world of eastern Europe responded to the challenges of modernity in the nineteenth century was to change the system for educating young men so as to reinforce time-honoured, conservative values. The yeshivas established at that time in Lithuania became models for an educational system that has persisted to this day, transmitting the talmudic underpinnings of the traditional Jewish way of life. To understand how that system works, one needs to go back to the institutions they are patterned on: why they were established, how they were organized, and how they operated. This is the first properly documented, systematic study of the Lithuanian yeshiva as it existed from 1802 to 1914. It is based on the judicious use of contemporary sources—documents, articles in the press, and memoirs—with a view to presenting the yeshiva in its social and cultural context. Three key institutions are considered. Pride of place in the first part of the book is given to the yeshiva of Volozhin, which was founded in 1802 according to an entirely new concept—total independence from the local community—and was in that sense the model for everything that followed. Chapters in the second part focus on the yeshiva of Slobodka, famed for introducing the study of musar (ethics); the yeshiva of Telz, with its structural and organizational innovations; and the kollel system, introduced so that married men could continue their yeshiva education. Topics covered include the leadership and changes in leadership; management and administration; the yeshiva as a place of study; and daily life. This English edition is based on the second Hebrew edition, which was revised to include information that became available with the opening of archives in eastern Europe after the fall of communism.

Read more less

Throughout history the image of the non-Jew in Judaism has profoundly influenced the way in which Jews interact with non-Jews. It has also shaped the understanding that Jews have of their own identity, as it determines just what distinguishes them from the non-Jews around them. A crucial element in this is the concept of Noahide law, understood by the ancient rabbis and subsequent Jewish thinkers as incumbent upon all humankind, unlike the full 613 divine commandments of the Torah, which are incumbent on Jews alone. The approach adopted in this now classic study is to consider the history of the idea of Noahide law, and to show how the concept is relevant to practical discussions of the halakhah pertaining to non-Jews and to relations between Jews and non-Jews. The seven chapters that make up the first part of the study examine each of the Noahide laws in turn, with a view to showing their halakhic development in the rabbinic sources, in the codes, and in the responsa literature. The discussion draws primarily on classical texts by traditional commentators as they attempt to deal with living issues from the rabbinic world as equally vital concerns in their own time. The second part deals with the theory of Noahide law, concluding with a consideration of why it is an appropriate starting point for Jewish philosophy today.

Read more less

Adult learners of ancient Greek are often attracted to it by the prospect of being able to read in the original a particular author or genre. Greek philosophical writing and Plato in particular is often the target. This book’s material has been tried and tested by the author over the years with adult classes, and can be used as a course textbook, or as a handbook for self-teaching.Each of 25 sections is clearly laid out – with tabulation of Greek word-forms and grammar. Each includes ample exercises and practice in reading Greek sentences. Readings in later sections consist of passages of continuous Greek from Plato’s Meno, a typical Platonic dramatic dialogue.

Read more less

National Jewish Book Awards Winner of the Maurice Amado Foundation Award for Sephardic Studies, 2000. In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam took in several thousand New Christians from the Iberian peninsula, descendants of Jews who had been forcibly baptized some two hundred years earlier. Shortly after their initial settlement, the members of this mostly Portuguese refugee community chose to manifest themselves as Jews again. No real obstacles were put in their way. The tolerance extended to them by the Amsterdam authorities was as exemplary as their new-found commitment to Jewish orthodoxy (barring a few famous instances) was strong. These circumstances engendered the new dynamic of a traditional Jewish society creatively engaged with the non-Jewish, secular world in relative harmony. Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewry was in this sense the first modern Jewish community. Through a fresh and rigorous approach to the documents, Daniel Swetschinki’s lively and original portrait of this justly famous community presents some unexpected conclusions. As well as characterizing the major dimensions of the New Christian migrations and identifying trends within an array of economic activities, it explores the appeal that Judaism as a religion and as a communal structure exercised. Throughout, the analysis focuses on the common rather than the exceptional and seeks the centre from which the interrelationship of all the constituent parts may be grasped. Swetschinski’s emphasis is on the social dimension of Portuguese Jewish economic and religious life, formal and informal. He thereby uncovers the internal dynamics of this remarkable Jewish community that moulded a renegade New Christian population into a model Jewish society, ‘model’ in the sense that it had the support of proponents of modernity and traditionalism alike and also won the respect of the Christian population. His research adds a broad and authentic vision to the panoply of images of early modern Jewish history and enables him to offer new insights into the troublesome question of the transition from medieval to modern Judaism.

Read more less

National Jewish Book Awards Winner of Sephardic Studies Award, 2001.The Book of Tahkemoni (The Book of Wisdom or the Heroic) is widely regarded as the crowning jewel of Hebrew maqama literature —rhymed prose interspersed with verse. In its fifty unlinked episodes we repeatedly encounter the somewhat roguish protagonist, Hever the Kenite, often disguised and assuming many and varied roles—teacher, beggar, adventurer, debater, magician, and so on. Whether preaching, spinning history or fantasy, or working a crowd, Hever the Kenite is ever a consummate story-teller and wordsmith enlightening or astounding his listeners. The author, generally considered to be the last major Hebrew poet of Spain, displays great scope, moving from prayers to tales of battlefield carnage, from philosophic reflection to droll satire targeting the pompous, the ignorant, and the mean. The whole is conveyed in a sensuous interweave of rhyme and rhythm, of literal and figurative speech, and copious biblical citations manipulated to serve unusual ends. David Simha Segal's translation captures the drama, wit, and satire of the original in a contemporary English that displays vigour and a sense of fun. Detailed annotations, printed on the same page as the text, identify the numerous allusions. Analyses of each chapter bring the reader more deeply into the text, illuminating plays on words, adroit uses of the frame tale, adaptations of Arabic and Hebrew literary conventions, and other subtleties of the original. A substantial Afterword sums up major features discussed in the analyses, especially the authorial game of hide-and-seek in the characters of the protagonist and the narrator.

Read more less

This study offers a reading of Don Quixote, with comparative material from Golden Age history and Cervantes life, to argue that his greatest work was not just the hilariously comic entertainment that most of his contemporaries took it to be. Rather, it belongs to a subversive tradition of writing that grew up in sixteenth-century Spain and which constantly questioned the aims and standards of the imperial nation state that Counter-reformation Spain had become from the point of view of Renaissance humanism. Prime consideration needs to be given to the system of Spanish censorship at the time, run largely by the Inquisition albeit officially an institution of the crown, and its effect on the cultural life of the country. In response, writers of poetry and prose fiction -- strenuously attacked on moral grounds by sections of the clergy and the laity -- became adept at camouflaging heterodox ideas through rhetoric and imaginative invention. Ironically, Cervantes success in avoiding the attention of the censor by concealing his criticisms beneath irony and humour was so effective that even some twentieth-century scholars have maintained Don Quixote is a brilliantly funny book but no more. Bob Britton draws on recent critical and historical scholarship -- including ideas on cultural authority and studies on the way Cervantes addresses history, truth, writing, law and gender in Don Quixote -- and engages with the intellectual and moral issues that this much-loved writer engaged with. The summation and appraisal of these elements within the context of Golden Age censorship and the literary politics of the time make it essential reading for all those who are interested in or study the Spanish language and its literature.

Read more less

Few areas on earth have more history, ancient and present, per inch of its territory than the Gaza Strip. In antiquity Gaza was a horn of plenty, the hub of fabulous networks of desert and maritime trade. Egyptian, Persian and Assyrian emperors fought over it, and so did Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart, Saladdin and Napoleon. More recently Gaza's fame has been of quite a different kind -- a place of crisis, anguish and misery. Since 170,000 Palestinian refugees arrived there in 1948, and the Strip became one more piece in the intractable Middle Eastern puzzle, it has gone through a succession of bloody upheavals: passing from Egyptian to Israeli to PLO to Hamas rule,- all the while remaining a volatile geopolitical flashpoint. Apart from separating between Israel and the refugees in the south-western corner of Palestine, the Strip's borders coincide with other momentous fault-lines: between Islamism and secularism, tradition and modernity, East and West -- and between the comfortable first and the wretched third world. Nathan Shachar is a veteran correspondent who has covered Gazan affairs for more than three decades. He has personally witnessed much of the turmoil which has made the Gaza Strip a permanent item of news bulletins for sixty years. This book relates the Gaza Strip's rich and tumultuous history in a highly readable text, which includes time-lines for all major events and personalities (from the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III to Hamas' leader Ismai'l Haniye). It brings perspective to the recent Israeli invasion of the Strip and its political and social aftermath.

Read more less

This book contains the first comprehensive examination of popular familiar belief in early modern Britain. It provides an in-depth analysis of the correlation between early modern British magic and tribal shamanism, examines the experiential dimension of popular magic and witchcraft in early modern Britain, and explores the links between British fairy beliefs and witch beliefs. In the hundreds of confessions relating to witchcraft and sorcery trials in early modern Britain there are detailed descriptions of intimate working relationships between popular magical practitioners and familiar spirits of either human or animal form. Until recently historians often dismissed these descriptions as elaborate fictions created by judicial interrogators eager to find evidence of stereotypical pacts with the Devil. Although this paradigm is now routinely questioned, and most historians acknowledge that there was a folkloric component to familiar lore in the period, these beliefs, and the experiences reportedly associated with them, remain substantially unexplored. This book examines the folkloric roots of familiar lore from historical, anthropological and comparative religious perspectives. It argues that beliefs about witches' familiars were rooted in beliefs surrounding the use of fairy familiars by beneficent magical practitioners or cunning folk', and corroborates this through a comparative analysis of familiar beliefs found in traditional Native American and Siberian shamanism. The author explores the experiential dimension of familiar lore by drawing parallels between early modern familiar encounters and visionary mysticism as it appears in both tribal shamanism and medieval European contemplative traditions. These perspectives challenge the reductionist view of popular magic in early modern Britain often presented by historians.

Read more less

Rene Guenon is a major figure for anyone who recognises a need to rediscover the spiritual roots from which Western society has become so comprehensively alienated. Immersing himself in the search for spiritual truth, he chose Islam as the vehicle for his spiritual life. Settling in Egypt, he clarified and deepened our understanding of the teachings of traditional metaphysics, his central message being that there is at the source of all humanity's traditions a 'Primordial Tradition' -- a Universal Metaphysics which sets out the principles that underlie this Tradition. The truths it embodies are universal and unchanging, and form part of a unified body of higher knowledge which transcends the multiplicity of religious dogmas and philosophical systems that abound in Western society. He wrote about the need to transcend the formal and emotional aspect of religion in order to prepare ourselves for an understanding of 'pure metaphysics'. He explained how traditional societies achieved this, exploring the symbols used, in order to help individuals forward to levels of understanding which are otherwise inaccessible to minds blinkered by the limitations of the currently prevailing Western approach to existence and its meaning.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. With humour and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn't hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life--even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on. This book is for anyone who's ever asked how to live in the face of suffering, and doesn't expect an easy answer. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive looks unflinchingly at painful realities, posing the question ‘What isn't hell?’ and finds the answer in a powerful eros, letting a loved one pull laughter out of the narrator's reluctant mouth like a red violet cerulean handkerchief.

Read more less

An analysis of the political and ecological consequences of charting the Amazon River basin in narrative fiction, Mapping the Amazon examines how widely read novels from twentieth-century South America attempted to map the region for readers. Authors such as José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, Márcio Souza, and Mário de Andrade travelled to the Amazonian regions of their respective countries and encountered firsthand a forest divided and despoiled by the spatial logic of extractivism. Writing against that logic, they fill their novels with geographic, human, and ecological realities omitted from official accounts of the region. Though the plots unfold after the height of the Amazon rubber boom (1850–1920), the authors construct landscapes marked by that first large-scale exploitation of Amazonian biodiversity. The material practices of rubber extraction resurface in the stories told about the removal of other plants, seeds, and minerals from the forest as well as its conversion into farmland. Smith places the counter-discursive impulses of each novel in dialogue with various modernizing projects that carve Amazonia into cultural and economic spaces: border commissions, extractive infrastructure, school geography manuals, Indigenous education programs, and touristic propaganda. Even the “novel maps” studied, however, have blind spots, and Mapping the Amazon considers the legacy of such unintentional omissions today.

Read more less

Is He Out There? is an interdisciplinary examination of the Christian reaction to Dawkinss The God Delusion. That reaction has offered a wide range of counter-arguments, among them: that Dawkinss demonstration of how God almost certainly doesnt exist addresses an out-dated conception of God; that science and religion are not conflictual as Dawkins contends and indeed may well be converging upon an understanding of how God acts in the universe; that Dawkinss denigration of the Bible depends on an overly literal reading; and that Dawkins assumes a narrative of progress in which human beings take the place of God in controlling the course of history. Is He Out There? responds to these arguments in the context of current scientific understanding, biblical criticism and philosophy. Paul Laffan demonstrates how the desire to meet the challenge posed by Dawkinss viewpoint has led to the perversion of scientific theories and accepted positions in other important fields of inquiry. It suggests that Christianity is wedded to a God who is the cause of the universe a classical conception of cause that is anachronistic; that denying the Bible was read for most of the Christian era as offering a literal account of divine creation is a significant misrepresentation of doctrinal history; and that a complete dismissal of progress requires the dismissal of scientific achievement. The author considers the extent to which attractive, secular values like tolerance and freedom of opinion are Christian in source and whether moral systems require God to underwrite them. The wide-ranging nature of Is He Out There? not only provides a review of the state of contemporary Christian apology but is a measured address of the arguments put forward in The God Delusion and indeed of the substantive commentary on Dawkinss thesis.

Read more less

‘What is Montmartre? Nothing. What must it be? Everything’, proclaimed Rodolphe Salis in 1881, when his cabaret Le Chat Noir launched an entertainment boom in the 9th and 18th Arrondissements of Paris which would dominate the worlds of popular and high culture until the First World War. Montmartre’s music-halls, circuses, cinemas, accompanied by extra frisson of crime and prostitution, coexisted with burgeoning art movements sprung from the cabarets, which spearheaded the avant-garde in painting, theatre and literature. The story, however, did not end in 1914 and Montmartre retained its role as a magnet for tourists, lured by the Moulin-Rouge and the Sacré-Coeur, and, despite the competition from Montparnasse, as a major centre for artistic creativity in the inter-war years. Crucial to this continuity was, not merely the survival of many of the most important players from the pre-War period, but especially the role of the humorous press and the Montmartre caricaturists and illustrators who congregated in the Restaurant Manière. In this new study, Nicholas Hewitt charts the continuity of Montmartre culture from the Belle Epoque to the Occupation through its many overlapping frontiers and explores its vital ingredients of sexuality, kitsch, bohemia, mass culture and the political and social ambiguities of such a mixture.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry 2017Claudia Rankine described the poems in Alsadir’s first book as 'lawless,' ‘provocative, and 'heartbreaking' as they 'converse from the inside out… come alive in the back and forth of a mind attempting to understand what it means to be in relation to.’ Fourth Person Singular continues to blow open the relationship between self and world in a working through of lyric shame, bending poetic form through fragment, lyric essay, aphorisms mined from the unconscious, and pop-up associations, to explore the complexities, congruities, disturbances - as well as the beauty - involved in self-representation in language. As unexpected as it is bold, Alsadir's ambitious tour de force demands we pay new attention to the current conversation about the nature of lyric – and human relationships – in the 21st century.

Read more less

Jonas of Bobbio was an Italian monk, author, and abbot, active in Lombard Italy and Merovingian Gaul during the seventh century. He is best known as the author of the Life of Columbanus and His Disciples, one of the most important works of hagiography from the early medieval period, that charts the remarkable journey of the Irish exile and monastic founder, Columbanus (d. 615), through Western Europe, as well as the monastic movement initiated by him and his Frankish successors in the Merovingian kingdoms. In the years following Columbanus’s death numerous new monasteries were built by his successors and their elite patrons in Francia that decisively transformed the inter-relationship between monasteries and secular authorities in the Early Middle Ages. Jonas also wrote two other, occasional works set in the late fifth and sixth centuries: the Life of John, the abbot and founder of the monastery of Réomé in Burgundy, and the Life of Vedast, the first bishop of Arras and a contemporary of Clovis. Both works provide perspectives on how the past Gallic monastic tradition, the role of bishops, and the Christianization of the Franks were perceived in Jonas’s time. Jonas’s hagiography also provides important evidence for the reception of classical and late antique texts as well as the works of Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours.This volume presents the first complete English translation of all of Jonas of Bobbio’s saints’ Lives with detailed notes and scholarly introduction that will be of value to all those interested in this period.

Read more less

Faulkner's authoritative English translation of Middle Kingdom coffin texts is essential for all Egyptologists. This new edition reprints his whole work in one volume. Filling the gap between the `Pyramid' texts and the New Kingdom Book of the Dead, these writings were intended to supply the deceased with the speeches he would need to achieve a secure and important position in the next world. As such they supply valuable insights into Egyptian beliefs and mortuary practices. Concise textual notes are kept to a minimum, allowing the character of the texts to be experienced as a whole. Indexes cover divinities, localities, celestial bodies, selected Egyptian words in translation and also the parts of boats and sailing gear that figure prominently in some spells.

Read more less

This edition of Daphnis and Chloe , the best known of the Greek romances, provides the first modern commentary in English on this intriguing work. This is the story of two young people growing up as goatherd and shepherdess, and their discovery of love, sex and their true selves. Beneath the charm of its deceptively simple surface, this novel explores perennial questions about the naturalness of conventional gender relations, about the roles of instinct and culture in love, about the pain and responsibilities involved in becoming an adult, and ultimately about the relationship between Art and Nature, Fiction and Truth. Morgan presents a sequential reading of the novel, using the tools of modern literary theory to explain how narrative articulates meaning, and exploring Longus' creative dialogue with the literary tradition. The Greek text and English translation are on facing pages.

Read more less

This new study of the fiction of Gene Wolfe, one of the most influential contemporary American science fiction writers, offers a major reinterpretation of Gene Wolfe’s four-volume The Book of the New Sun and its sequel The Urth of the New Sun. After exposing the concealed story at the heart of Wolfe’s magnum opus, Wright adopts a variety of approaches to establish that Wolfe is the designer of an intricate textual labyrinth intended to extend his thematic preoccupations with subjectivity, the unreliability of memory, the manipulation of individuals by social and political systems, and the psychological potency of myth, faith and symbolism into the reading experience.

Read more less

The riots that broke out in various British port cities in 1919 were a dramatic manifestation of a wave of global unrest that affected Britain, parts of its empire, continental Europe and North America during and in the wake of the First World War. During the riots, crowds of white working-class people targeted black workers, their families and black-owned businesses and property. One of the chief sources of violent confrontation in the run-down port areas was the ‘colour’ bar implemented by the sailors’ trades unions campaigning to keep black, Arab and Asian sailors off British ships in a time of increasing job competition. Black 1919 sets out the economic and social causes of the riots and their impact on Britain’s relationship with its empire and its colonial subjects. The riots are also considered within the wider context of rioting elsewhere on the fringes of the Atlantic world as black people came in increased numbers into urban and metropolitan settings where they competed with working-class white people for jobs and housing during and after the First World War. The book details the events of the port riots in Britain, with chapters devoted to assessing the motivations and make-up of the rioting crowds, examining police procedures during the riots, considering the court cases that followed, and looking at the longer-term consequences for the black British workers and their families. Black 1919 is a stark and timely reminder of the violent racist conflict that emerged after the First World War and the shockwaves that reverberated around the Empire.

Read more less

Rank and file soldiers were not ‘the scum of the earth’ but included a cross section of working-class men, who retained their former civilian culture. While they often exhibited pride in regiment and nation, soldiers could also demonstrate a growing class consciousness and support for political radicalism. The book will challenge assumptions that the British army was politically neutral, if privately conservative, by uncovering a rich vein of liberal and radical political thinking among some soldiers, officers and political commentators. This ranges from the Whig ‘militia’ tradition, through radical theories on tactics and army reform, to attempted ultra-radical subversion amongst troops, and the involvement of soldiers in riots and risings. Case studies are given of individual 'military radicals', soldiers or ex-soldiers who were reforming and later socialist activists. Popular anti-French feeling of the Napoleonic Wars is examined, alongside examples of rank and file bravery which fostered widespread loyalty and patriotism. This contributed to soldiers being used successfully in strike breaking, and deployed against rioters or Chartist revolts. By the late Victorian period, popular imperialism was an important part of working-class support for Conservatism. The book explores what impact this had on rank and file soldiers, whilst outlining minority support for socialism.

Read more less

Drawing on historical, literary and cultural studies perspectives, this book examines the phenomenon of the “Returned Yank” in the cultural imagination, taking as its point of departure the most exhaustively discussed Returned Yank narrative, The Quiet Man (dir. John Ford, 1952). Often dismissed as a figure that embodies the sentimentality and nostalgia of Irish America writ large, this study argues that the Returned Yank’s role in the Irish cultural imagination is much more varied and complex than this simplistic construction allows. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, s/he has been widely discussed in broadcast and print media, and depicted in plays, novels, short stories and films. The imagined figure of the Returned Yank has been the driving impetus behind some of Ireland's most well-known touristic endeavours and festivals. In the form of U.S. Presidential visits, s/he has repeatedly been the catalyst for questions surrounding Irish identity. Most significantly, s/he has been mobilised as an arbiter in one of the most important debates in post-Independence Ireland: should Ireland remain a "traditional" society or should it seek to modernise? His/her repeated appearances in Irish literature and culture after 1952 – in remarkably heterogeneous, often very sophisticated ways – refute claims of the “aesthetic caution” of Irish writers, dramatists and filmmakers responding to the tradition/modernity debate.

Read more less

Branding the Beur Author focuses on the mainstream media promotion of literature written by the descendants of North African immigrants to France (often called beurs). These conversations between journalists and ‘beur’ authors delve into contemporary debates such as the explosion of racism in the 1980s and the purported role of Islam in French society in the 1990s. But the interests of journalists looking for sensational subject matter also heavily shape the promotion and reception of these novels: only the ‘beur’ authors who employ a realist style to write about the challenges faced by the North African immigrant population in France—and who engage on-air with French identity politics and immigration—receive multiple invitations to participate in interviews. Previous scholarship has taken a necessary first step by analyzing the social and political stakes of this literature (using labels such as ‘beur’ and/or ‘banlieue,’ to designate its urban, economically distressed setting), but the book argues that we must move beyond this approach because it reproduces the selection criteria deployed by the media that determine which books receive the most commercial and critical support. By demonstrating how minority-based literary labels such as ‘francophone’ and ‘postcolonial’ are always already defined by the socio-political context in which books are published and promoted, the book establishes that these labels are tautological and cannot reflect the thematic and stylistic richness of beur (and other minority) production in France.

Read more less

The diversity of Scotland's mountains is remarkable, encompassing the isolated summits of the far northwest, the serrated ridges of Skye, the tor-studded high plateau of the Cairngorms and the rolling hills of the Southern Uplands. Born on ancient continents and uplifted by tectonic forces, the mountains of Scotland have been sculpted by successive ice sheets, landslides, frost, wind and running water. This book explains the geological evolution of Scotland's mountains, and how this has produced an unparalleled variety of mountain forms. It outlines the effects of successive ice sheets on mountain scenery, and explains the dramatic changes in climate that terminated the Ice Age only 11,500 years ago. In non-technical terms it explains the effects of frost action in forming the rubble that mantles many mountain summits, and how such debris has slowly migrated downslope by freezing and thawing of the ground. The dramatic effects of deglaciation and earthquakes in triggering catastrophic landslides and downslope displacement of entire mountainsides are described, along with accounts of more recent events involving the rapid downslope flow of saturated debris. The book also outlines how Scottish mountains experience frequent gale-force winds, and their impact of wind in scouring plateaus and depositing expanses of windblown sand on lee slopes. The role of floods in eroding upland terrain and depositing floodplains, terraces and fans of sediment is described in the context of possible human influence on river regime through forest clearance.Written in clear, non-technical language and abundantly illustrated, this book is designed to provide an essential guide to landforms for all those who walk, climb, live and work in the mountains of Scotland.

Read more less

Choice 'Outstanding Academic Title' award 2022Measures for Measure features once greatly-disturbed landscapes – now largely reclaimed, physically at least, by post-industrial activity. Yet the surviving machines, buildings and housing of the original Industrial Revolution, founded mostly upon Coal Measures strata, still loom large over many parts of Britain. They do so nowadays in the family-friendly and informative context of industrial museums, reconstructed industrial settlements, preserved landscapes and historic townscapes. Our society and its creative core of literature, visual arts and architecture were profoundly affected by the whole process. The British Carboniferous legacy for wider humankind was profound and permanent, more so with the realisation over the last 60 or so years that the emission of carbon dioxide during human utilisation of fossil fuels has caused global warming – with all its many unintended consequences. Coal, iron ore and other metallic ores and materials had been extracted from Carboniferous strata and traded for over five hundred years before the Industrial Revolution, notably since thirteenth century in the ‘London Trade’ of coal from Tyneside. By contrast, the neighbouring island of Ireland had no great deposits of coal and ironstone, although with gold, copper, lead and zinc aplenty. What produced this abundance of fossil carbon preserved in the Carboniferous rocks of Britain? Why did the Industrial Revolution originate in Britain in the early- to mid-eighteenth century and not elsewhere in mainland Europe where coal was also abundant?Linked geological, economic and social factors combined to enable the formation, preservation, exposure and exploitation of neighbouring coal- and iron-bearing reserves. The principal features of the distinctive industrial regions that grew up are traced back to their landscapes and geology in a major section of the book. Great industrial cities became wonders of the world, their entrepreneurs and industrialists proud at what they had created. However, industrial workers in their mines, foundries, forges, factories and mills had to collectively fight for economic, political and social rights and then to cope with the many traumas of de-industrialisation and unemployment.Measures for Measure will appeal to all with an interest in the industrial history of Great Britain and its impact on the landscape, economy, social history and culture of the island.

Read more less

Volume 2 of this series of documents with commentary covers the domestic aspects of the regime between 1933 and 1939: the political stystem, the economy and society, propaganda and indoctrination, policies towards youth and women, the SS system of terror, antisemitism and popular attitudes towards the regime - consent, dissent and resistance. The documents in the four volumes of this series are drawn from a wide range of sources - official and party documents, memoirs, letters, diaries and newspapers - and are linked with a commentary. The combination of documents and commentary represents at the same time a textbook, a contribution to scholarship and a source book for students and historians.

Read more less

This literary study is an exploration and a celebration of a writer who for the last half century has been at the forefront of modern African writing. Since the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958, Chinua Achebe has been credited with being the key progenitor of an African literary tradition and his five novels read as tracing the national narrative of Nigeria. Achebe depicts precolonial societies disturbed by British colonization, in the 1890s and the 1930s, the dog days of colonization in the 1950s, Independence in 1960 and the onset of neo-colonial problems of corruption and civil war and, in his final novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), the pervasive sense of postcolonial disenchantment. This study casts back over Achebe’s writing career to assess his considerable contribution to postcolonial writing and criticism, including his Editorship of Heinemann’s acclaimed African Writers Series which has shaped African literature for international audiences since 1962. Yousaf’s examination of Achebe’s fiction is carefully counterpointed with detailed discussion of the Nigerian national situation and of Achebe’s essays and criticism – including his most recent and most autobiographical collection Home and Exile (2000) published in the year the writer celebrated his seventieth birthday.

Read more less

This study analyses Bainbridge’s work in relation to some of the pressing debates in post-war literary studies.

Read more less

This book draws together the different aspects of Margaret Drabble's narrative practice, and looks at the increasing flexibility of her narrative methods, both in terms of the kind of narrator used and in the structuring of plot events.

Read more less

This text charts Sir Walter Scott's development as a poet and novelist.

Read more less