Search results for ""manchester university press""

Founded in 1935 by a young publisher disillusioned with the class prejudices of the interwar publishing trade, Penguin Books set out to make good books available to all. The ‘Penguin Specials’, a series of current affairs books authored by leading intellectuals and politicians, embodied its democratising mission. Published over fifty years and often selling in vast quantities, these inexpensive paperbacks helped to shape popular ideas about subjects as varied as the welfare state, homelessness, social class and environmental decay. Using the ‘Specials’ as a lens through which to view Britain’s changing political landscape, Dean Blackburn tells a story about the ideas that shaped post-war Britain. Between the late-1930s and the mid-1980s, Blackburn argues, Britain witnessed the emergence and eclipse of a ‘meritocratic moment’, at the core of which was the belief that a strong relationship between merit and reward would bring about social stability and economic efficiency. Equal opportunity and professional expertise, values embodied by the egalitarian aspirations of Penguin’s publishing ethos, would be the drivers of social and economic progress. But as the social and economic crises of the 1970s took root, many contemporary thinkers and politicians cast doubt on the assumptions that informed meritocratic logic. Britain’s meritocratic moment had passed.

Read more less

This is the definitive account of the rise, fall and future prospects of the Liberal Democrats, the party that threatened to break the mould of British politics but suffered electoral calamity after entering government with the Conservatives.Retracing the Lib Dems’ path to government and subsequent near oblivion, the book explores the relationship between the party and the electorate in a post-coalition, post-Brexit, post-pandemic era. It offers a deep analysis of the electoral strategy that enabled growth and precipitated failure, explaining how and why the party got the coalition so wrong and plotting a potential future. Drawing on extensive survey data and original interviews with Lib Dem politicians and activists, the authors expertly capture the relationship between the party and voters, revealing the foundations of Liberal Democrat campaigning and performance in the search for credibility and viability. The Liberal Democrats remain contradictory: a minor party with ambitions to upset the status quo, a party that depends on decisive leadership but relies on grassroots activism to remain relevant. This book helps unravel these apparent contradictions.

Read more less

This timely book explains how recognition and misrecognition have the power to fuel conflict and to initiate reconciliation. Constance Duncombe presents a detailed conceptual and empirical investigation of one of the most significant flashpoints in global politics: the fraught bilateral relations between the US and Iran. Duncombe uses this relationship to explore the importance of representation in shaping the identity of a state, as well as how it is recognised by others on the world stage. In 2015, Iran and the US reached an agreement on the framework for a long-term deal that allows Iran limited nuclear technological capacity in exchange for the lifting of debilitating economic sanctions. In light of decades of animosity between Iran and the US, which previously thwarted attempts on both sides to reach an amicable agreement, this book asks how we can best explain the initial success of this deal given the Trump administration’s 2018 US withdrawal from the agreement.

Read more less

This book offers an original interpretation of Britain’s relationship with Europe over a 25 year period: 1959-84 and advances the argument that the current problems over EU membership resulted from much earlier political machinations. This evidence based account of the seminal period analyses the applications for EEC membership, the 1975 referendum, and the role of the press. Was the British public misled over the true aims of the European project? How significant was the role of the press in changing public opinion from anti, to pro Common Market membership? Why, after over 40 years since Britain became a member of the European community, does the issue continue to deeply divide not only the political elite, but also the British public? These, and other pertinent questions are answered in this timely book on a subject that remains topical and highly controversial.

Read more less

The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute’s erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man’s lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. Shedding new light on American sexual history, the topics covered are both fascinating and wide-ranging: the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city. This book will appeal to a wide readership: those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.

Read more less

This is the definitive study of the Irish general election of 2016 – the most dramatic election in a generation, which resulted in the worst electoral outcome for Ireland’s established parties, the most fractionalized party system in the history of the state, and the emergence of new parties and groups. These outcomes follow a pattern seen across a number of Western Europe’s established democracies in which the ‘deep crisis’ of the Great Recession has wreaked havoc on party systems. The objective of this book is to assess this most extraordinary of Irish elections both in its Irish and wider cross-national context. With contributions from leading scholars on Irish elections, and using a unique dataset – the Irish National Election Study 2016 – this volume explores voting patterns at Ireland’s first post crisis election and it considers the implications for the electoral landscape and politics in Ireland.

Read more less

This is the first book to examine the relationship between English nationalism, Brexit and ‘the Anglosphere’ – a politically-contested term used to denote English-speaking countries sharing cultural and historical roots with the UK. In the aftermath of the UK’s EU referendum some pointed to a ‘revolt’ of those ‘left behind’ by globalisation. Ben Wellings argues instead that Brexit was and is an elite project, firmly situated within the tradition of an expansive English nationalism. Far from being parochial ‘Little Englanders’, elite Brexiteers sought to replace the European Union with trade and security alliances between ‘true friends’ and ‘traditional allies’ in the Anglosphere. Brexit was thus reassuringly presented as a giant leap into the known. As the UK’s future relationship with the rest of the world is negotiated, the need to understand this ‘English moment’ has never been more pressing.

Read more less

In postwar Britain, journalists and politicians predicted that the class system would not survive a consumer culture where everyone had TVs and washing machines, and where more and more people owned their own homes. They were to be proved hopelessly wrong. Lifestyle revolution charts how class culture, rather than being destroyed by mass consumption, was remade from flat-pack furniture, Mediterranean cuisine and lifestyle magazines. Novelists, cartoonists and playwrights satirised the tastes of the emerging middle classes, while sociologists claimed that an entire population was suffering from 'status anxiety', but underneath it all, a new order was being constructed out of duvets, quiches and mayonnaise, easy chairs from Habitat, white emulsion paint and ubiquitous pine kitchen tables. More than just a world of symbolic goods, this was an intimate environment alive with new feelings and attitudes.

Read more less

Bess of Hardwick was one of the most extraordinary figures of Elizabethan England. She was born the daughter of a country squire. But by the end of her long life (which a recent redating of her birth suggests was even longer than previously thought) she was the richest woman in England outside the royal family, had risen to the rank of countess and seen two of her daughters do the same and had built one of the major ‘prodigy houses’ of the period. While married to her fourth husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, she had been jailer to Mary, Queen of Scots, and her granddaughter by her second marriage, Lady Arbella Stuart, was of royal blood and might have succeeded to the throne of England. This wide-ranging collection brings out the full range of her activities and impact.

Read more less

Throughout the long nineteenth-century the sounds of liberty resonated across the Anglophone world. Focusing on radicals and reformers committed to the struggle for a better future, this book explores the role of music in the transmission of political culture over time and distance. Following in the footsteps of relentlessly travelling activists – women and men - it brings to light the importance of music making in the lived experience of politics. It shows how music encouraged, unified, divided, consoled, reminded, inspired and, at times, oppressed. The book examines iconic songs; the sound of music as radicals and reformers were marching, electioneering, celebrating, commemorating as well as striking, rioting and rebelling; and it listens within the walls of a range of associations where it was a part of a way of life, inspiring, nurturing, though at times restrictive. It provides an opportunity to hear history as it happened.

Read more less

Conversions is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. Chapters deal with topics as diverse as convent architecture and missionary enterprise, the replicability of print and the representation of race. Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history and art history, Conversions offers new insights into the varied experiences of, and responses to, conversion across and beyond Europe. A lively Afterword by Professor Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) drives home the contemporary urgency of these themes and the lasting legacies of the Reformations.

Read more less

From the early 1970s, working class writing and publishing in local communities rapidly proliferated into a national movement. This book is the first full evaluation of these developments and opens up new perspectives on literature, culture, class and identity over the past 50 years. Its origins are traced in the context of international shifts in class politics, civil rights, personal expression and cultural change. The writing of young people, older people, adult literacy groups as well as writing workshops is analysed. Thematic chapters explore how audiences consumed this work, the learning of writers, the fierce debates over identity, class and organisation, as well as changing relations with mainstream institutions. The book is accessibly written but engages with a wide range of scholarly work in history, education, cultural studies, literature and sociology. It will be of interest to lecturers and students in these areas as well as the general reader.

Read more less

Recognising that corruption is a serious problem in the globalised world of the early twenty-first century, the book takes the reader on a journey – beginning with what corruption is, why its study is important and how it can be measured. From there it moves on to explore corruption’s causes, its consequences and how it can be tackled – before discovering how these things are playing out in the established liberal democracies, in the former communist regimes and in the newly industrialised and ‘developing’ world. On the way it takes a couple of detours – first, to explore corruption’s mechanisms and dynamics and second to survey the scandals to which it may give rise. The book is therefore offered as an informative ‘travel guide’ of potential interest to journalists and policy makers as well as to students and academics.

Read more less

This volume offers a new interpretation of one of the most innovative directors in the history of cinema. It is the first book to cover the whole of Godard's career, from the French New Wave to the recent triumphs of Histoire(s) du cinéma and Eloge de l’amour. Drawing on a wide range of literary, filmic and philiosophical texts, the book places Godard's work within its intellectual context, examining how developments in French culture and thought since 1950 have been mirrored in - and sometimes anticipated by - Godard's films.Numerous sequences from Godard's films are singled out for close analysis, demonstrating how the director's radical approaches to narrative, editing, sound and shot composition have made the cinema into an analytical tool in its own right.The book will be essential to all students of Godard's films, and of interest to scholars of modern and contemporary French cinema, culture and thought.

Read more less

The Art of The Faerie Queene is the first book centrally focused on the forms and poetic techniques employed by Spenser. It offers a sharp new perspective on Spenser by rereading The Faerie Queene as poetry which is at once absorbing, demanding and experimental. Instead of the traditional conservative model of Spenser as poet, this book presents the poem as radical, edgy and unconventional, thus proposing new ways of understanding the Elizabethan poetic Renaissance. The book moves from the individual words of the poem to metre, rhyme and stanza form onto its larger structures of canto and book. It will be of particular relevance to undergraduates studying Elizabethan poetry, graduate students and scholars of Renaissance poetry, for whom the formal aspect of the poetry has been a topic of growing relevance in recent years.

Read more less

Writing for radio brings together theoretical and practical aspects of radio writing. It deals with writing for all principal radio genres – short stories, plays, documentaries/drama documentaries, talks and features, adaptations/dramatisations, poems, and advertisements. It contains historical overviews of the genesis and development of each of these categories and attempts an analysis of the nature of radio itself. For the first time there is an attempt to isolate a 'radio language', a syntax and vocabulary guaranteed to produce pictures in the mind of the listener. This means radio can be taught as an academic subject as all writing – prose, drama and verse, can be tested as radio and examples for analysis are used from both broadcast and non-broadcast work.

Read more less

In this book, available for the first time in paperback, the complexity and the significance of the foods we eat are analysed from a variety of perspectives, by sociologists, economists, geographers and anthropologists. Chapters address a number of intriguing questions: how do people make judgements about taste? How do such judgements come to be shared by groups of people? What social and organisational processes result in foods being certified as of decent or proper quality? How has dissatisfaction with the food system been expressed? what alternatives are thought to be possible? The multi-disciplinary analysis of this book explores many different answers to such questions. The first part of the book focuses on theoretical and conceptual issues, the second part considers processes of formal and informal regulation, while the third part examines social and political responses to industrialised food production and mass consumption. Qualities of food will be of interest to researchers and students in all the social science disciplines that are concerned with food, whether marketing, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, human nutrition or economics.

Read more less

Contesting home defence is a new history of the Home Guard, a novel national defence force of the Second World War composed of civilians who served as part-time soldiers: it questions accounts of the force and the war, which have seen them as symbols of national unity. It scrutinises the Home Guard’s reputation and explores whether this ‘people’s army’ was a site of social cohesion or of dissension by assessing the competing claims made for it at the time. It then examines the way it was represented during the war and has been since, notably in Dad’s Army, and discusses the memories of men and women who served in it. The book makes a significant and original contribution to debates concerning the British home front and introduces fresh ways of understanding the Second World War.

Read more less

Can reading make us better citizens? In Crossing borders and queering citizenship, Feghali crafts a sophisticated theoretical framework to theorise how the act of reading can contribute to the queering of contemporary citizenship in North America. Providing sensitive and convincing readings of work by both popular and niche authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, this book is the first to not only read these authors together, but also to discuss how each powerfully resists the exclusionary work of state-sanctioned citizenship in the U.S. and Canada. This book convincingly draws connections between queer theory, citizenship studies, and border studies and sheds light on how these connections can reframe our understanding of American Studies.

Read more less

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

Read more less

Theatre and empire explores the genesis of British national identity in the reign of King James VI and I. While devolution is currently decentralising Britain, this book examines how the idea of a 'united kingdom' was created in the first place. It does this by studying two things: the political language of the King's project to replace England, Scotland and Wales with a single kingdom of Great Britain and cultural representations of empire on the public and private stages. The book argues that between 1603 and 1625 a group of playwrights celebrated a new national consciousness in works as diverse as Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Specifically Jacobean interdisciplinary studies are few compared with Elizabethan and Caroline works, but the book attempts to redress the balance by offering a fresh appraisal of James Stuart’s reign.

Read more less

What were the cultural factors that held the British world together? How was Britishness understood at home, in the Empire, and in areas of informal British influence? This book makes the case for a ‘cultural British world’, and examines how it took shape in a wide range of locations, ranging from India to Jamaica, from Sierra Leone to Australia, and from south China to New Zealand. Eleven original essays explore a wide range of topics, including images of nakedness, humanitarianism, anti-slavery, literary criticism, travel narratives, and household possessions. The book argues that the debates around these issues, as well as the consumer culture associated with them, helped give the British world a sense of cohesion and identity. The cultural construction of the British world will be essential reading for historians of imperialism and globalisation, and includes contributions from some of the most prominent historians of British imperial and cultural history.

Read more less

Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and selected works, before moving on to discuss four key writers: Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien.The absurd in literature will be of compelling interest to a considerable range of students of comparative, European (including Russian and Central European) and English literatures (British Isles and American) – as well as those more concerned with theatre studies, the avant-garde and the history of ideas (including humour theory). It should also have a wide appeal to the enthusiastic general reader.

Read more less

The importance of money as one of the key variables in the workings of the medieval economy is often overlooked. This new study first provides the reader with a background to the problems of modelling the medieval economy and the value of the Fisher equation of exchange to monetary historians, to the pratical processes of strking coins from silver and gold acquired through foreign trade and to the importance of royal control over mints and exchanges. These theories are then used to analyse how money worked within the economy of the early, central and late middle ages with fluctuations in the size of the circulating medium and the availability of credit acting as either a brake on or a stimulus to economic expansion. A full money economy did not emerge until c. 1300 but its existence and flexibility helped the economy survive the severe shocks of the late middle ages.

Read more less

This collection investigates the methodological problem of how to see, or read, art that references literature through a series of object-focused chapters on post-1960 artworks. Variously eccentric, playful, reverential and procedural, the diverse range of works engage with literary history by testing the limits of artistic form. -- .

Read more less

West Indies legend Sir Clyde Walcott was one of the greatest cricketers of all time, but he was also an important administrator and activist. This first biography offers a detailed examination of his extraordinary life and achievements. -- .

Read more less

Screenwriters have been central figures in French cinema since the conversion to sound, from early French-language talkies for the domestic market to lavish literary adaptations of the notorious 'quality tradition' of the 1950s, and from the ‘aesthetic revolution’ of the New Wave to the contemporary popular and auteur film in the 2000s. The first English language study to address screenwriters in French cinema, this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of French film and screenwriting. Taking a diachronic approach, it includes case studies drawn from the early sound period to the present day in order to offer an alternative historiography of French cinema, shed light on these overlooked figures and revisit the vexed question of film authorship.

Read more less

This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of ekphrasis: the verbal representation of visual art. Ekphrasis has been traditionally regarded as a form of paragone (competition) between word and image. This interdisciplinary collection of essays seeks to complicate this critical paradigm and proposes a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between visual and textual cultures. This critical and theoretical shift demands a new form of ekphrastic poetics, which is less concerned with representational and institutional struggles, and more concerned with ideas of ethics, affect and intersubjectivity. Ekphrastic encounters brings together leading scholars working in the field of word-and-image studies and offers a fresh exploration of ekphrastic texts from the Renaissance to the present day. Taken together, the chapters establish a new set of theoretical frameworks for exploring the ekphrastic encounter.

Read more less

The religion of Orange politics offers an in-depth anthropological account of the Orange Order in Scotland. Based on ethnographic research collected before, during, and after the Scottish independence referendum, Joseph Webster details how Scotland’s largest Protestant-only fraternity shapes the lives of its members and the communities in which they live. Within this Masonic-inspired 'society with secrets', Scottish Orangemen learn how transform themselves and their fellow brethren into what they regard to be ideal British citizens. It is from this ethnographic context – framed by ritual initiations, loyalist marches, fraternal drinking, and constitutional campaigning – that the key questions of the book emerge: What is the relationship between fraternal love and sectarian hate? Can religiously motivated bigotry and exclusion be part of human experiences of ‘The Good?’ What does it mean to claim that one’s religious community is utterly exceptional – a literal ‘race apart’?

Read more less

This is a vital new work; the first to take the University of Manchester’s Museum as its subject. By setting the museum in its cultural and intellectual contexts, Nature and culture explores twentieth-century collecting and display, and the status of the object in the modern world. Beginning with the origins of the Manchester Museum, accounting for its development as an internationally renowned university museum, and concluding at its major expansion at the turn of the millennium, this book casts new light on the history of museums. How did objects become knowledge? Who encountered museum objects on their way to museums? What happened to collections within the museum? How did visitors use and respond to objects? In answering these questions, Nature and culture illuminates not only the history of one institution, but also contributes to wider discussions in the history of science, cultural history and museology.

Read more less

This book aims to intervene in current critical contexts for the study of nineteenth-century literature within the academy and beyond. Topics discussed include science and technology, poetry and philosophy, the Gothic, anatomical exhibitions, the global spread of liberalism, Anglo-American publishing, Punjabi popular culture and the neo-Victorian in literature, film and performance. By bringing together a broad range of intellectually challenging perspectives, the book offers an engaging critical overview of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies that will appeal both to scholars working within the field and students and teachers encountering this fascinating area of study for the first time.

Read more less

Rethinking Right-Wing Women explores the institutional structures for and the representations, mobilisation, and the political careers of women in the British Conservative Party since the late 19th century. From the Primrose League (est.1883) to Women2Win (est.2005), the party has exploited women’s political commitment and their social power from the grass-roots to the heights of the establishment. Yet, although it is the party that extended the equal franchise, had the first woman MP to sit Parliament, and produced the first two women Prime Ministers, the UK Conservative Party has developed political roles for women that jar with feminist and progressive agendas. Conservative women have tended to be more concerned about the fulfilment of women’s duties than the realisation of women’s rights. This book tackles the ambivalences between women’s politicisation and women’s emancipation in the history of Britain’s most electorally successful and hegemonic political party.

Read more less

This book offers a new and critical perspective on the global reconciliation technology by highlighting its contingent and highly political character as an authoritative practice of post-conflict peacebuilding. After retracing the emergence of the reconciliation discourse from South Africa to the global level, the book demonstrates how implementing reconciliation in post-conflict societies is a highly political practice which entails potentially undesirable consequences for the post-conflict societies to which it is deployed. Specifically, the book shows how the reconciliation discourse brings about the marginalisation and neutralisation of political claims and identities of local post-conflict populations by producing these societies as being composed of the ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ of past human rights violations which are first and foremost in need of reconciliation and healing.This book will interest students and teachers of transitional justice and international relations.

Read more less

This book considers the ways that representations of Africa have contributed to the changing nature of British national identity. Using interviews, photo archives, media coverage, advertisements, and web material, the book focuses on major Africa campaigns: the abolition of slavery, anti-apartheid, 'Drop the Debt', and 'Make Poverty History'. Using a hybrid theoretical framework, the book argues that the representation of Africa has been mainly about imagining virtuous Britishness rather than generating detailed understandings of Africa. The book develops this argument through a historical review of 200 years of Africa campaigning. It also looks more closely at recent and contemporary campaigning, opening up new issues and possibilities for campaigning: the increasing use of consumer identities, electronic media, and aspects of globalisation. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in postcolonial politics, relations between Britain and Africa, and development studies.

Read more less

This collection of essays addresses research trends in the history of British leisure while also presenting a wide range of articles on cultural conflict and leisure in the twentieth century. It includes innovative research on a number of topics, including television, cinema, the circus, women’s leisure, dance, football and drug culture. It provides an excellent entry to leisure studies and history, while addressing the contributions of other disciplines and exploring key historiographical trends. Three broad topics structure the collection; cultural contestation and social conflict in leisure; regulation and standardisation; and national identity embodied in leisure and popular culture. The book will be useful to students and educators of twentieth-century and British history, as it offers accessible and topical studies that pique historical curiosity. In addition, historians, sociologists and cultural analysts of the twentieth century will find it essential for understanding pleasure and recreation in twentieth-century British society.

Read more less

This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the Model Arab League (MAL) programme for first time and returning students. Drawing on over fourteen years of combined experience in successfully leading award-winning MAL delegations, Philip D’Agati and Holly A. Jordan provide students with an introduction to being a delegate and tips on effective research techniques as well as simplifying the complex process of taking on the identity of a state and then representing it effectively in a MAL debate.

Read more less

A widespread perception exists among political commentators, campaign operatives and presidential candidates that vice presidential (VP) running mates can deliver their home state's electoral votes in a presidential election. In recent elections, presidential campaigns have even changed their strategy in response to the perceived VP home state advantage. But is the advantage real? And could it decide a presidential election? In the most comprehensive analysis to date, Devine and Kopko demonstrate that the VP home state advantage is actually highly conditional and rarely decisive in the Electoral College. However, it could change the outcome of a presidential election under narrow but plausible conditions. Sophisticated in its methodology and rich in historical as well as contemporary insight, The VP Advantage is essential and accessible reading for anyone interested in understanding how running mates influence presidential elections.

Read more less

This book argues that John Dewey should be read not as a 'local' American thinker but rather as a philosopher of globalisation. Although his work is rooted in late-nineteenth and early twentieth century America, its principal concern is with the role of the United States in a globalised world. Tracing Dewey’s emergence as a global democrat through an examination of his work from The Public and Its Problems (1927) onward, the book shows how he sets out an evolutionary form of global and national democracy, one that has not been fully appreciated even by contemporary scholars of pragmatism. In returning to and recovering this neglected dimension of Dewey's political philosophy, the book highlights how his insights about globalisation and democracy can inform present theoretical debates.

Read more less

Edward Tomarken's previous book, Filmspeak, was a study of literary theory in relation to contemporary mainstream films. Some of the abstruse ideas of early literary theorists (1950–70) had in fact permeated our thinking to such an extent that both films and theories enriched and shed light upon one another. One early response to Filmspeak was the question 'Why theory?’, a remark that provides the title of this new and exciting exploration of literature.In pursuit of an answer, Tomarken turns to the 'second generation' of critics (1970–2000), and analyses television programmes as well as films. He considers scholars such as Clifford Geertz and Martha Nussbaum who saw themselves as working in the field of cultural studies. Why theory? thus has a dual focus – on both culture and literary theory. The result of integrating cultural ideas with media interpretation sees Tomarken grapple with the question of the title: theory has become a part of our cultural life.

Read more less

This book explores the legal and social consequences of growing up illegitimate in England and Wales. Unlike most other studies of illegitimacy, Frost's book concentrates on the late-Victorian period and the early twentieth century, and takes the child's point of view rather than that of the mother or of 'child-saving' groups. Doing so allows for an extended analysis of criminal and civil cases involving illegitimacy, including less-studied aspects such as affiliation suits, the poor law and war pensions. In addition, the book explores the role of blended, extended and adoptive families, the circulation of children through different homes and institutions, and the prejudices children endured in school, work and home. While showing how the effects of illegitimacy varied both by class and gender, the book highlights the ways in which children showed resilience in surviving the various types of discrimination common in this period. It will appeal to anyone interested in British social history, childhood studies, or legal history.

Read more less

Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home in France argues for a cultural, rather than a sociological or economic, approach to understanding how immigrants become part of their new country. In contrast to the language of integration or assimilation which evaluates an immigrant's success in relation to a static endpoint (e.g. integrated or not), 'settling' is a more useful metaphor. Immigrants and their descendants are not definitively 'settled', but rather engage in an ongoing process of adaptation. In order to understand this process of settling, it is important to pay particular attention to immigrants not only as consumers, but also as producers of culture, since artistic production provides a unique and nuanced perspective on immigrants' sense of home and belonging, especially within the multi-generational process of settling. In order to anchor these larger theoretical questions in actual experience, this book looks at music, theatre and literature by artists of Turkish immigrant origin in France.

Read more less

This book is about how kids become engaged with brands, and how their relationship with them changes over time as they mature as consumers. Children are introduced to brands at an early age, and they have become increasingly brand conscious. As consumer markets have developed and become more crowded and competitive, so brands have become more important in enabling consumers to make informed choices. However, it may not always be in a child’s best interests to develop a preoccupation with brands, particularly if they influence the way they think about themselves. This book examines the emergence of brand awareness among children and the importance of their cognitive development to their understanding of brands and consumer socialisation. It also sheds light on problems caused by the emergence of new forms of branding in the digital era, especially in online social media and virtual environments where so many children now spend a great deal of time, and explores the implications for children and for regulators.

Read more less

This title sets out to write new transnational South Asian art histories - to make visible histories of artworks that remain marginalised within the discipline of art history. However, this is done through a deliberate 'productive failure' - specifically, by not upholding the strictly genealogical approach that is regularly assumed for South Asian art histories. For instance, one chapter explores the abstract work of Cy Twombly and Natvar Bhavsar. The author examines 'whiteness', the invisible ground upon which racialized art histories often pivot, as a fraught yet productive site for writing art history. This book also provides original commentary on how queer theory can deconstruct and provide new approaches for writing art history. Overall, this title provides methods for generating art history that acknowledge the complex web of factors within which art history is produced and the different forms of knowledge-production we might count as art history.

Read more less

Embryo research, cloning, assisted conception, neonatal care, saviour siblings, organ transplants, drug trials - modern developments have transformed the field of medicine almost beyond recognition in recent decades and the law struggles to keep up.In this highly acclaimed and very accessible book, now in its sixth edition, Margaret Brazier and Emma Cave provide an incisive survey of the legal situation in areas as diverse as fertility treatment, patient consent, assisted dying, malpractice and medical privacy. The book has been fully revised and updated to cover the latest cases, from assisted dying to informed consent; legislative reform of the NHS, professional regulation and redress; European regulations on data protection and clinical trials; and legislation and policy reforms on organ donation, assisted conception and mental capacity. Essential reading for healthcare professionals, lecturers, medical and law students, this book is of relevance to all whose perusal of the daily news causes wonder, hope and consternation at the advances and limitations of medicine, patients and the law.

Read more less

This volume examines the films of Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers from the 1930s to the present day. It establishes productive connections between film practices across these geographical areas by identifying common areas of concern on the part of these female filmmakers. Focusing on aesthetic, theoretical and socio-historical analyses, it questions the manifest or latent gender and sexual politics that inform and structure the emerging cinematic productions by women filmmakers in Portugal, Spain, Latin America and the US. With a combination of scholars from the UK, the US, Spain and Latin America, the volume documents and interprets a fascinating corpus of films made by Hispanic and Lusophone women and proposes research strategies and methodologies that can expand our understanding of socio-cultural and psychic constructions of gender and sexual politics. An essential resource to rethink notions of gender identity and subjectivity, it is a unique contribution to Spanish and Latin American Film Studies and Film Studies.

Read more less

Golden Mummies of Egypt presents new insights and a rich perspective on beliefs about the afterlife during an era when Egypt was part of the Greek and Roman worlds (c. 300 BCE–200 CE). This beautifully illustrated book, featuring photography by Julia Thorne, accompanies Manchester Museum’s first-ever international touring exhibition. Golden Mummies of Egypt is a visually spectacular exhibition that offers visitors unparalleled access to the museum’s outstanding collection of Egyptian and Sudanese objects – one of the largest in the UK.

Read more less

This book examines how Ireland’s relationship with the EU was affected by a succession of crises in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The financial crisis, the Brexit crisis and the migration crisis were not of equal significance on the island of Ireland. The financial crisis was a huge issue for the Republic but not Northern Ireland, Brexit had a major impact in both polities, the migration and populism issues were less controversial, while foreign policy challenges had a minimal impact. The book provides a summary of the main features of each of the crises to be considered, from both the EU and the Irish perspective.Ireland and the European Union is the first volume of its kind to provide a comprehensive analysis on British–Irish relations in the context of Brexit. It assesses the Withdrawal Agreement and Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, the devolution settlement and the 1998 Agreement, as well as the European dimension to Northern Ireland’s peace process. The contributors explore a number of policy areas that are central to the understanding of each of the crises and the impact of each for Ireland. Chapters examine issues such as security, migration and taxation as well as protest politics, political parties, the media, public opinion and the economic impact of each of these crises on Ireland’s relationship with the EU.

Read more less