Search results for ""Liverpool University Press""

Jose Maria Gil-Robles (18981980) was one of the major protagonists of twentieth-century Spanish politics. He founded the CEDA, the first modern party of the Spanish right, and did so during the Second Republic of 193136, at a critical moment for conservative Catholics opposed to several aspects of the new constitution. He sought to create a new legalist, possibilist right-wing movement that could win at the ballot box and demonstrate its strength in parliament. He achieved a great electoral victory in November 1933, but did not succeed in becoming prime minister. The left considered him a danger to the republican regime. In July 1936, after another election and a tense spring, there was an attempted coup detat, and the Civil War began. This brought a definitive end to party politics and, therefore, to the experience of the CEDA. From that point Gil-Robles lived in Portugal, and did not return to Spain until the 1950s. He supported the Allies during the Second World War, and argued for the restoration of the Spanish monarchy. He also played an important role in inspiring new movements for Christian Democracy. This book is an account of the republican period in the life of Gil-Robles. It is the first thoroughly-researched biography that examines in a balanced, well-documented manner the paramount, though still problematic, contribution he made to the democratization of Spanish conservative politics. It responds to certain crucial questions as to why the CEDA was unsuccessful, and what were the obstacles that it encountered in its attempts to amend the republican system. Equally, it also analyses the manner in which Gil-Robles led the forces of conservatism, one based on tenets that were clearly distant from fascism but equally opposed both to Marxism and liberal individualism.

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Electoral and parliamentary arenas play a crucial role in the configuration and dynamics of modern polities. This book explores the practices of citizenship and unveils the fabric of representation in the Iberian countries, during a significant period of liberal politics, that is, from its apogee to its collapse (from the 1870s to the 1920s). Part One examines the evolution of electoral norms and behaviour, as well as the recruitment profile of MPs. Portugal and Spain share fundamental features, such as the extensive clientelistic mobilisation of voters, the dissemination of fraud and corruption, the supremacy of governmental parties and the prevalence of the politics of notables. Part Two focuses on Parliament, questioning constitutional models, internal procedures, legislative action and political activity, as well as coetaneous perceptions and images of the institution and its actors as portrayed in novels, newspaper chronicles, cartoons and photographic reports. This collection of essays offers a detailed and cogent analysis, as well as a vivid picture, of the politics of representation in Portuguese and Spanish liberalism, revealing significant similarities and differences through cross-country comparisons.

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This collection brings together eleven interviews with J Hillis Miller from 1987 to 2014 conducted by distinguished scholars and critics from China, England, Ireland, and the United States. The volume offers the readers a rich gallery of representations and interventions occasioned by a critic whose intellectual and moral presence has been instrumental in the dynamic (re)definitions of the discipline of literary studies for the past five decades. The interviews cover both his life and the development of his thought in poetics and pedagogics, in ethics and politics as well. Reading Inside Out is the perfect companion to Millers many books, a lucid introduction to his thought, and a comprehensive commentary on Millers critical themes.

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The Spanish Civil War, fought between 1936 and 1939, was the first battle against fascism in Europe. Five months after the victory of dictator Francisco Franco in Spain the conflict moved to Europe with the outbreak of the Second World War. Fascism and anti-fascism again faced each other on the battlefield. Amid the heat of the Nazi invasions in Europe, anti-fascist resistance groups formed by ordinary citizens emerged in virtually all European countries. Although the Franco dictatorship was not directly involved in the world war, in Spain an anti-Franco resistance movement was organized in 1939 and lasted until 1952. Although the Spanish resistance constituted the first and last anti-fascist resistance movement in Europe, the Spanish case has been consistently overlooked by international studies. This book inserts the Spanish anti-Franco resistance into the European context, proposing a new narrative of anti-fascist resistances in Europe. At the same time, the book offers a new interpretation of guerrilla phenomena with a strongly peasant character, as was the case of the resistance in Spain. The author underlines the importance of primary groups (kinship, neighbourhood, friendship) and secondary groups (camaraderie and political loyalties) in the mobilisation and organisation of armed groups. For this study, Jorge Marco establishes twelve variables that permit him to distinguish between 'neighbours in arms' and 'modern guerrilla'. The studied combinations of groups and types demonstrates the plurality of the identities and cultures of the anti-fascist resistance in Spain. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

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Shaykh Yusuf Yassin (18921962) marked the contemporary history of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in his capacity as a favorite advisor who was the founder monarchs confidential secretary, relentless envoy and chief foreign policy consultant. Born in Latakiyyah, Syria, Yassin earned the confidence of King Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, and moved to Riyadh even before the Third Saudi Kingdom was inaugurated in 1932. After obtaining citizenship he participated in critical decisions reached by the ruler as regional and international actors honed in on the wealth of the Arabian Peninsula. Over the course of several decades Yusuf Yassin met with and negotiated on behalf of three monarchs, Abdul Aziz and his two successors, Saud and Faysal, with Arab and global leaders. He was present at the creation of the country and suggested that al-Saudiyyah be added to its very nameAl-Mamlakah al-Arabiyyah al-Saudiyyahwhich reflected his personality and political outlook as an Arab nationalist who cherished the founder. Joseph Kechichian has written the first political biography of the statesman, based on original documents [the Yassin Papers] as well as Western diplomatic correspondence. Kechichian provides insights into the Nationalist Al Saud Advisor who left his mark on Saudi Arabia. The volume provides essential background on a man who rose from humble origins in Syria to espouse Arabian values, and walks the reader through nearly five decades of Arab history, including the repercussions of the infamous 1916 SykesPicot Agreement, the creation of the League of Arab States, and various Arab crises. These events, experienced and engaged with by Shaykh Yusuf Yassin at the highest political and diplomatic levels, set the stage that empowered Saudi Arabia, along with other Arab States, with the wherewithal to succeed for their respective peoples.

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This book explores the role played by artists and intellectuals who constructed and disseminated various competing images of national identity which polarized Spanish society prior to the Civil War. The convergence of modern and essentialist discourses and practices, especially in literature and poetry, in what is conventionally called in Spanish letters "The Generation of '27", created fissures between competing views of aesthetics and ideology that cut across political affiliation. Silvina Schammah exposes the paradoxes facing Madrid's cultural vanguards, as they were torn by their ambition for universality, cosmopolitanism and transcendence on the one hand and by the centripetal forces of nationalistic ideologies on the other. Taking upon themselves roles to become the disseminators and populizers of radical positions and world-views first elaborated and conducted by the young urban intelligentsia, their proposed aim of incorporating diverse identities embedded in different cultural constructions and discourse was to have very real and tragic consequences as political and intellectual lines polarized in the years prior to the Spanish Civil War.

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The world-renowned Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938) was also a journalist, essayist, novelist and would-be dramatist. The study of his life and work has encountered problems since the 1950s, stemming from the fact that half of his writing was published posthumously under editorship of doubtful accuracy. The matter is further complicated in that his non-poetic work has been neglected in favour of his verse. A Struggle between Art and Politics reviews the evidence -- literary and historical -- now reliably to hand, and assesses the often conflicting body of opinion his work has generated. Three essential questions are pertinent: Where should Vallejo be placed in the canon of twentieth-century modernism? What effect did his mid-life conversion to Communism have on his writing? How should his prose fiction, journalism and essays be assessed in relation to his poetry? There are few writers whose literary output follows the twists and turns of their lives more closely than César Vallejo's. This new, comparative study maps his career onto the cultural, social, political and historical backdrop to his life in Peru, France, Spain and Russia, and analyses his writings in the light of his life circumstances. Vallejo's journey from Peru, the cultural "periphery", to the "centre" of inter-war Paris, his experience of European capitalism during the Depression, and the confrontation of Communism and Fascism, ultimately played out in the Spanish Civil War, forced him to wage a personal struggle to reconcile art with life and politics. This challenge is fought out in different ways in his various writings, but nowhere more movingly, passionately and humanely than in his posthumous poetry.

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Isaiah Berlin, in his "Tribute to a Friend", wrote about the historian Jacob L. Talmon (1916-1980): "No matter what his theoretical interests were, or the topics on which he was lecturing or writing, his deepest concern was with the Jewish people, its history, its religious, moral and social values, its place among the nations, its future in Israel and the diaspora." These words capture the essence of Talmon's political essays presented in Mission and Testimony. Talmon was chosen by an international committee of scholars as one of the twenty major historians of the twentieth century, declaring that "his historiography was a convincing apologia for human freedom." He owes his fame primarily to his magnum opus, the trilogy that began with The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), continued with Political Messianism (1960) and concluded with The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution (1981). This edited collection of Talmon's essays comprises the following: Part I, "The Nature of Jewish history", deals with the Jewish presence in history, the universal significance of Jewish history, and the impact of Jewish intellectuals. Part II, "From Anti-Semitism to the Holocaust", concerns the anti-Semitic climate of opinion that led to the Holocaust. Part III depicts the regional and global situation of the State of Israel. In Part IV, "Intellectual and Political Debates", Talmon confronts intellectuals and statesmen such as Arnold Toynbee and Menachem Begin. Part V, "Profiles in History", depicts the intellectual portraits of the historian Lewis Namier and the physicist and champion of human rights Andrei Sakharov.

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War is sometimes mistakenly construed as the chief impetus for medical innovation. Nevertheless, military conflict obliges the implementation of discoveries still at an experimental stage. Such was the case with the practice of blood transfusion during the Spanish Civil War, when massive demand for blood provoked immediate recourse to breakthroughs in transfusion medicine not yet integrated into standard medical practice. The Spanish Civil War marked a new era in blood transfusion medicine. Frederic Durán-Jordà and Carlos Elósegui Sarasoles, directors, respectively, of the blood transfusion services of the Republican Army and of the insurgent forces, were innovators in the field of indirect blood transfusion with preserved blood. Not only had they to create transfusion services, almost from scratch, capable of supplying campaigning armies with blood in wartime conditions, they also had to struggle against the medical establishment and to convince their medical peers of the value (not to mention the scientific significance) of what they were doing. The Blood Transfusion Service of the Republic was a truly international effort, with medical volunteers from all over the world carrying out transfusion work in primitive and often dangerous conditions. All took their lead from one man the young Catalan haematologist, Frederic Durán-Jordà, the indisputable pioneer of civil war blood transfusion medicine. From humble beginnings at the outbreak of war, blood transfusion services were created in Spain that would later become crucial in the treatment of casualties during the Second World War and would shape the future evolution of blood transfusion medicine throughout the developed world.

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Làzaro Càrdenas and Adalberto Tejeda, veterans of the Revolution and prominent governors of Michoacan and Veracruz from 1928 to 1932, strived to make Mexico a modern and just state on the basis of the revolutionary Constitution. Three key obstacles confronted them: the conservative approach of the political Center; the political weakness of their own power base; and the great opposing power of the farmers and their supporting elements, especially the Church and the army. This book discusses the different avenues to reform these leaders took and their short- and long-term implications. Càrdenas sought to strengthen his position through the ruling party (PNR), while reinforcing local agrarian forces and opening channels of direct empathetic communication with the Church and the army. Tejeda attempted to strengthen his position in the federative arena, bypassing the political Center via the National Peasant League (LNC -- Liga Nacional Campesina), whose establishment he was deeply involved in, making a sweeping radical reform while attacking uncompromisingly all the traditional elements of Veracruzan society. Both political projects had unprecedented success but totally different implications. The Càrdenista power base led its author to the next Presidency, during which he implemented a remarkable agrarian project. Tejeda's power base, however, led to the utter annihilation of his political power structure and many of his agrarian achievements, as well as to his failure in the struggle for presidency. From that point of view, only a heavy bureaucratic, centre-based reform initiative could succeed, while a local, radical, adventurous transformation was doomed to failure. The fate of the two governors corresponded to the fate of national revolutionary reformism and thus to the destiny of Mexico.

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The site of Recife's Brasília Teimosa favela emerged as a flash point of economic and political interests in the 1930s and the scene of subsequent strife into the 1980s. The name of this district is a contemptuous allusion to the new capital of Brazil, with its forward-thinking planning policies and urban design, in stark contrast to the favela. This concise account unearths events surfacing through periods of revolution, dictatorship, populism, Cuban Communism, the 1964 military coup d'etat and crackdown to the amplified reverberation of civil society voices and engagement decades later. Shifting ideologies and jolting transitions between regimes directly affected what occurred on this 110-acre parcel of urban land. Between 1934 and 1984 competing groups and individuals came to covet this space because of its strategic location and political consequence. Brasília Teimosa is about the politics of ouster and the power of resistance. What took place there still resonates in squatter settlements throughout Brazil; deplorable living conditions prevalent in favelas are the result of deprivation of access to market resources. This work examines the interactions between the state and neighbourhood associations regarding the allocation of public goods and services in the context of urban resources and their system of supply. In particular it focuses on the political struggles of shanty residents of Brasília Teimosa that are pertinent to the provision of and access to urban land tenure. Control and use of public lands have functioned as instruments of the state to pursue political projects in coalition with private real estate partners, to undermine the strength of opposing factions, or to seal populist pacts with the urban poor who, as illegal occupants of public land, are locked into a dependency relationship with the state. As will be shown, the residents of Brasília Teimosa discovered and exploited "space" for political manoeuvres in order to secure permanence on a centrally located, publicly-owned site.

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When a military coup provoked civil war in Spain in July 1936, many thousands of people around the world rallied to provide humanitarian aid. Britons were no exception. Collective efforts in Britain to provide aid for the Spanish Republic were vast in both scope and effect. Whilst such enterprise has formed the focus of a few previous studies, some of the most dramatic stories of the Spanish war have yet to be uncovered. This book seeks to shed light on the activities of two separate ventures that played important roles in British medical and humanitarian aid to Spain the Scottish Ambulance Unit and Sir George Young's Ambulance Unit. The volunteer members of these teams (those who went out to Spain and those who supported them in Britain) earned the unstinting praise of the Spanish government for their selfless commitment to the cause, as well as winning the respect and gratitude of the citizens whose welfare they strove so selflessly to protect. Recently discovered documentation reveals previously undisclosed details of these remarkably altruistic and, indeed, heroic enterprises, clarifying the reasoning behind their creation and documenting their endeavours in Spain endeavours of key relevance to the wider history of the conflict. In Spain, the volunteers of the Scottish Ambulance Unit and the George Young Ambulance Unit offered a heartening and inspiring antithesis to the suffering they sought to relieve. They deserve to be remembered for what they embodied during those days of untold cruelty and destruction outstanding examples of man's humanity to man.

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This book examines the creation of the Antients Grand Lodge and traces the influence of Ireland and the London Irish, and most especially that of Laurence Dermott, the Antients' Grand Secretary, in the development of freemasonry in the second half of the eighteenth century. The book demonstrates the relative accessibility of the Antients and contrasts this with the exclusivity of the 'Moderns' -- the original Grand Lodge of England. The Antients instigated what became a six decades long rivalry with the Moderns and pioneered fundamental changes to the social composition of freemasonry, extending formal sociability to the lower middling and working classes and creating one of the first modern friendly societies. Schism does not stand solely as an academic work but introduces the subject to a wider Masonic and non-Masonic audience and, most particularly, supplements dated historical works. The book contributes to the history of London and the London Irish in the long eighteenth century and examines the social and trade networks of the urban lower middling and working class, subjects that remains substantially unexplored. It also offers a prism through which Britain's calamitous relationship with Ireland can be examined.

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The Spanish Civil War is one of the most studied events in modern European history. Its origins, that is to say the politics of the Second Republic (1931-1936), have been much debated. The republican period has been much idealised and in particular the myth of Spanish democracy beset by fascism, of which Franco was its leading figure, has been much cultivated. But was this really the case? Recently historians of the Republic have proposed a new and non-ideological perspective on the 1930s. Spain's path was at once different yet in many ways similar to that of Europe during the inter-war period. The Spanish Second Republic Revisited brings together leading and innovative specialists to analyse the main obstacles to the consolidation of democracy in Spain and to debate the principal stereotypes of the traditional historiography of both left and right. The issues addressed include: the breakdown of democracy; whether the CEDA was an opportunity or a threat; the centrist appeal under the Republic; how the elections were viewed and conducted; the transformation of fascism; new revelations about the Communist party; the politics of exclusion at the local level; the perceived necessity for repression; new perspectives on the Civil Guard; the role of intellectuals in the Republic; and revisionism and sectarian history. The Spanish Second Republic Revisited offers a new and dynamic vision of why Spanish democracy failed to consolidate itself and why it finally fell into the terror of civil war. The book is essential reading for all those interested in modern European history.

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This book documents and analyses the transformations in the Jewish-owned economy active in Salonica during the period of the consolidating Greek nation-state, prior to World War II. Based on archival materials, the author provides a comprehensive, comparative inter-ethnic empirical study of Jewish entrepreneurial patterns for two distinct historical periods: the multi-ethnic business world of Greek Macedonia (1912-1922) after its incorporation into the Greek nation-state; and the era of minority-majority relations (1923-1940), following a radical modification of the city's demographic composition -- a process that culminated in Salonica's ethnic unification. A macro analysis combines a comparative static overview of the Jewish-owned firms vs. the Greek-owned firms active in the city at three points in time (1912, 1921, 1930), with a dynamic analysis focusing on transitions in structure and entrepreneurial behaviour. A micro analysis then examines the characteristics of Salonica's Jewish entrepreneurial elite, its businessmen and professionals, including class resources, familial and ethnic networks, business strategies and methods. Included in the analysis is a unique database illustrating Jewish entrepreneurial patterns during the 1930s. This study applies the "ethnic economy" approach in explaining Jewish entrepreneurial dynamics, and contributes new theoretical insights. The research presented provides hitherto unavailable details about the economic and demographic history of the Jewish community of Salonica, a city known as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans" due to it being home to the largest concentration of Sephardic Jews found in the territories once belonging to the Ottoman Empire.

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For the last two centuries, the nation state has posed a formidable challenge to multinational empires. It has served as a base for modernisation, secularisation and democratisation -- and also for the formation of totalitarian regimes. Today, the nation state faces challenges from multiple directions. National minorities demand self-determination while religious forces challenge secular governments, and global migration movements undermine the cultural uniformity once considered essential for the formation and preservation of nation states. This is the third of a three-volume set (detailed below) which addresses key challenges facing the contemporary nation state from a global perspective but with special emphasis on the Middle East and Israel. Publication reflects research conducted under the auspices of The Israel Democracy Institute's "Nation State Project", which analyses Israel's complex reality in which a Jewish majority contends with an Arab minority, ultra-Orthodox religious forces reject the authority of the nation state, and an immigrant society exhibits substantial cultural and ethnic variance. Volume III explores the cultural, social and political effects of immigration on the contemporary nation state -- its character, cohesion, and possible future, as well as on contemporary liberal democracy. Contributions deal with such issues as different liberal approaches to the issue of immigration and immigrant integration, nation-building narratives and their implications for immigrants and minorities, citizenship tests and integration policy in the United States and in Europe, as well as Israel's Law of Return and the debate about it and other aspects of immigration policy.

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The five-year period following the proclamation of the Republic in April 1931 was marked by physical assaults upon the property and public ritual of the Spanish Catholic Church. These attacks were generally carried out by rural and urban anticlerical workers who were frustrated by the Republic's practical inability to tackle the Church's vast power. On 17- 18 July 1936, a right-wing military rebellion divided Spain geographically, provoking the radical fragmentation of power in territory which remained under Republican authority. The coup marked the beginning of a conflict which developed into a full-scale civil war. Anticlerical protagonists, with the reconfigured structure of political opportunities working in their favour, participated in an unprecedented wave of iconoclasm and violence against the clergy. During the first six months of the conflict, innumerable religious buildings were destroyed and almost 7,000 religious personnel were killed. To date, scholarly interpretations of these violent acts were linked to irrationality, criminality and primitiveness. However, the reasons for these outbursts are more complex and deep-rooted: Spanish popular anti-clericalism was undergoing a radical process of reconfiguration during the first three decades of the twentieth century. During a period of rapid social, cultural and political change, anticlerical acts took on new -- explicitly political -- meanings, becoming both a catalyst and a symptom of social change. After 17--18 July 1936, anticlerical violence became a constructive force for many of its protagonists: an instrument with which to build a new society. This book explores the motives, mentalities and collective identities of the groups involved in anti-clericalism during the pre-war Spanish Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War, and is essential reading for all those interested in twentieth-century Spanish history. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

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John Betjeman was undoubtedly the most popular Poet Laureate since Tennyson. But beneath the thoroughly modern window on Britain that he opened during his lifetime lay the influence of his nineteenth-century forbears. This book explores his identity through such Victorianism via the verse of that period, but also its architecture, religious faith and -- more importantly -- religious doubt. It was, nevertheless, a process which took time. In the 1930s Betjeman's work was tinted with modernism and traditionalism. He found Victorian buildings 'funny' and wrote much in praise of the Bauhaus style, even though his early poetry was peppered with Victorian references. This leaning was incorporated into a greater sense of purpose during World War 2, when he transformed himself from precious humorist into propagandist. The resulting sense of cohesion grew when the dangers of post-war urban redevelopment heightened the need to critique the present via the poetics of the past, a mood which continued up to and beyond his gaining the Laureateship in 1972. This duty proved to be a millstone, so the 'official' poems are thus explored by the author more fully than hitherto. The conclusion of looks back to Betjeman's 1960 verse-autobiography, 'Summoned by Bells', which is seen as the apogee of his achievement and a snapshot of his identity. Included here is the first critical appreciation of the lyrics embodied within the text, which are taken as a map of the young poet's literary growth. Larkin's 1959 question 'What exactly is Betjeman?' then leads to a final appraisal of his originality, as evidenced by his glances towards postmodernism, feminism, and post-colonialism. The fact is that Betjeman never quite fits in anywhere. He is always a square peg in a round hole or a round peg in a square hole -- often for the sheer enjoyment of so being. In a sense, his desire to be as non-conformist as a Quaker meeting house makes him a radical, rather than the reactionary that his interests imply. He was a champion of beauty and the British Isles, and clearly did much to make us see the worth of our Victorian forebears. Greg Morse's book highlights this important facet of his work.

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This book sets out to analyse the schism in French public opinion during the Spanish Civil War that was to end in the tragic collapse of French national unity. It makes no claim to being a new history of the conflict, or even of the international events surrounding it. It touches only cursorily upon the events in Spain proper. It considers only tangentially French public opinion in regard to the two Spains. Instead, it examines how the French people viewed their position in the international imbroglio swirling around the Spanish question, and how news was manipulated as never before. And since opinion polls were inexistent and radio commentary had little influence, almost the only means of gauging public opinion is the press. Mainstream historical fact is presented merely as the skeleton on which French press reportage is grafted. Included in the historical material is the author's research in the archives of all five of the French departements bordering on Spain. Within the press, four areas predominate: editorial opinion; propaganda; French correspondents in Spain; and collateral events in France (frontier incidents, arms supplies, foreign volunteers, and espionage activities). The work is divided into two parts, the chronological hiatus coming in December 1936. This division is explained by the policy formulated by the democracies that went through no appreciable change; a policy sufficiently strong, perhaps, to deter the Axis powers from all-out intervention in Spain, but weak enough to allow them to pursue with impunity a victory by attrition. The periodic opening and closing of the French frontier played no decisive part in the outcome, since French aid to the Spanish Republic never came close to what the Axis provided the Nationalists. The book ends with the agony of the Republican exodus. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

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In Spain today the civil war remains 'the past that will not pass away'. The long shadow of the Second World War is now also bringing back centre frame its most disquieting aspects, revealing to a broader public the stark truth already known by specialist historians -- that in Spain, as in the many other internecine wars soon to convulse Europe, war was waged predominantly upon civilians -- millions were killed not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbours. Across the continent, Hitler's war of territorial expansion after 1938 would detonate a myriad 'irregular wars', of culture as well as of politics, which took on a 'cleansing' intransigence as those driving them sought to make 'homogeneous' communities, whether ethnic, political or religious. So much of this was prefigured with primal intensity in Spain in 1936, where, on 17-18 July, a group of army officers rebelled against the socially-reforming Republic. Saved from almost certain failure by Nazi and Fascist military intervention, and by a British inaction amounting to complicity, these army rebels unleashed a conflict in which civilians became the targets of mass killing. The new military authorities authorised and presided over an extermination of those sectors associated with Republican change -- especially those who symbolised cultural change and thus posed a threat to old ways of being and thinking: progressive teachers, self-educated workers, 'new' women. In the Republican zone, resistance to the coup also led to the murder of civilians. This extrajudicial and communal killing in both zones would fundamentally make new political and cultural meanings that changed Spain's political landscape forever. Helen Graham explores the origins, nature and long-term consequences of this exterminatory war in Spain, charting the resonant forms of political, social and cultural resistance to it and the memory/legacy these have left behind in Europe and beyond. Not least is our growing sense of the enormity of what, in greater European terms, the Republican war effort resisted: Nazi adventurism, and the continent-wide wars of ethnic and political 'purification' it would unleash.

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This is a follow-on volume to the author's highly successful "Baghdad, Yesterday" (Ibis Editions, Jerusalem, 2007), which told of Sasson Somekh's boyhood in the city of his birth and the circumstances under which his family decided to forsake Iraq, a land in which they were rooted for centuries, and move to Israel. It was highly acclaimed in the TLS and London Review of Books, and in the Israeli Ha'aretz, "It is hard to overstate the beauty, originality, lucidity, gentleness, wisdom and importance of Baghdad, Yesterday." This volume continues the story where the 2007 volume ends. Somekh, a noted student of modern Arabic culture, relates his life as a university professor and writer, taking the reader to Oxford, Princeton and Cairo, and introducing scholars and writers he befriended: S D Goitein, Mustafa Badawi and Haim Blanc, among others. He devotes a major section to Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) with whom he maintained a close comradeship for three decades, and from whom he received the following letter: "Both our peoples knew extraordinary partnership for many years in ancient times, during the Middle Ages, and in the modern era, with . . . quarrels being few and far between. Unfortunately, we have documented the disputes a hundred times more than the periods of friendship and co-operation . . ."

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A spiritualist, mystic, historian and lifelong collector of antiquities, J. S. M. Ward (18851949) embodied the cultural turmoil of an age of collapsing empires, religious fragmentation and world war. The Abbey Folk Park he started in 1934 at New Barnet, north of London, was an innovative history museum where Wards interest in esoteric heritage, world cultures and the occult attracted much attention. Unfairly disgraced in a sensational court case in May 1945, he and his followers departed England for Cyprus in self-imposed exile, along with his stunning collection of artefacts. After Wards death, both the community and his collection moved to Queensland, Australia, where a new Abbey Museum now thrives just north of Brisbane. Archangels & Archaeology traces John Wards extraordinary life and career for the first time, from Edwardian Freemasonry and wartime spiritualism to his apocalyptic visions as a second world war threatened to engulf Europe. His lively museum fused a passion for Britains disappearing heritage with a conviction that western civilization would shortly collapse. These vivid concerns so often treated in isolation come together in J. S. M. Wards curious and eccentric life story.

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This book examines the nexus between religion and politics, considered in one of its most controversial aspects. The starting point is the 2001 attack on the United States, which a Canadian commentator ingeniously described as the 'passion of America'. This designation suggested an interesting inquiry into other so-called national passions: the notion of the Christ-nation crucified by evil powers because of its higher virtue. . . . This motif is explored by analysing five modern nationalisms that have employed Christian symbolism in this manner: Poland, France, Germany, Ireland and Palestine. The author investigates the way in which fundamental Christian concepts are distorted and corrupted in the process, and points to the inherent dangers of this form of political self-glorification. Poets, philosophers, novelists and preachers have all played a major part in promoting the idea of the Christ-nation at certain times, mostly in the nineteenth century but also today. Famous examples are Adam Mickiewicz in Poland, Victor Hugo in France, the patriotic Lutherans during the First World War in Germany, Patrick Pearse in Ireland and certain Palestinian nationalist poets today. . . The clash of cultures, religions, nationalisms and civilisations in the world today is ever more strident. The passion narratives of the five nations are interwoven with historical circumstance in order to cast light on the endurance and power of the narratives, to arrive at a final critique and 'tract for the times'.

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Tuvia Rubner, winner of Israel Prize for Poetry (2008), is a Hebrew poet who lost his family in the Holocaust. He turned his personal trauma into a broad world view that engages with Western culture, his poetry highlighting correspondences with paintings by Chagall, Breughel, Holbein, Turner and Rembrandt. Death and loss are molding experiences in this poet's world. Paint and sculpture masterpieces are signalled as masks, as Ambassadors of Death. Rubner's poems enable us to examine the tradition of various forms of artistic representation, while addressing the experience of art in a century when God 'hid his face' from the fate of European Jewry. And as Shahar Bram discovers and elaborates, herein lies an exquisite example of the use of ekphrasis -- Rubner using his poetic language medium to explain and process the meaning and messages inherent in a select group of paintings and sculptures of cultural significance. This important book contributes to the interdisciplinary theory of "word and image", and the history of the relationships between "sister arts". The result is not only a unique perspective of traditional Western art form as reflected in the eyes of a Hebrew survivor of twentieth-century Holocaust atrocities, but, in the words of Ruskin, it is "the expression of one soul [one artistic form] talking to another". The result is a profound understanding of the central principles of word and image art forms. Konrad-Adenauer Prize for Literature 2012

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Arthur Hallam's early death was the subject of Tennyson's celebrated poem In Memoriam. As a result of its popularity, Hallam became a legendary figure, very much accepted on Tennyson's terms as being almost divinely gifted and of immense promise. While this representation of Hallam has remained generally accepted, A Life Lived Quickly' seeks both to supplement and challenge it, offering a more detailed and objective portrait of the man. That Hallam has a difficult relationship with his father (himself a famous literary figure), suffered a mental breakdown during his first year at Cambridge, and pursued an extremely fraught love affair with Tennyson's sister in the face of opposition from both families, are important but largely unknown aspects of his life. The author also repudiates the often-made suggestion that Hallam and Tennyson may have had a homosexual relationship. As well as examining Hallam's published writings, the book makes liberal use of his letters, of which a collected edition has been in existence since 1981, and includes treatments of hitherto unpublished poems and more recently discovered letters. Apart from presenting Arthur Hallam as a complex and interesting character in his own right, the book offers insight into the literary culture of early nineteenth-century England. In devoting attention to Hallam's time at Eton and Cambridge, the book also deals in detail with the experience of being educated in those unreformed institutions.

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This book is a history of the struggle for independence after East Timor was invaded by Indonesia in 1975. The occupation, which lasted 24 years, was immediately resisted through guerrilla warfare and clandestine resistance. A continuum of effort between the armed freedom fighters in the mountains, the resilience of urban supporters, and international activism and support eventually brought about liberation in September 1999. Given that the Timor rebels did not have a land border with a friendly state, had no external supplier of weapons and no liberated area in which to recover between guerrilla operations, their successful resistance is unique in the history of guerrilla warfare and independence struggles. Equally uncommon was an unexpected weapon in the struggle -- a remarkable display of strategic non-violent action. This is the first study to integrate all the major factors in East Timor's independence struggle. The multi-dimensional perspectives addressed in this volume include Indonesian, US and Australian diplomacy; Indonesian military operations and activities against the populace; East Timorese resistance at all social levels; human rights abuses; the issue of oil; and international diplomacy resulting from global solidarity activism.

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Jeaneane Fowler provides a text and detailed commentary on this important Hindu scripture, which is a dialogue between Arjuna the man and Krishna the God. Major Hindu concepts are examined in depth, and the background to the Gita is presented in a comprehensive introduction. Yoga is the key feature of the Gita but it has its own interpretation of what that yoga should be: thus, yoga features not only in each of the pathways of knowledge, desireless action and devotion, but in the way in which the divine is understood. The chapters of the Bhagavad Gita therefore describe Arjunas despondency followed by The Yoga of Sankhya, Action, Knowledge, Renunciation, Meditation, Knowledge and Realization, the Imperishable Brahman, Royal Knowledge and Royal Mystery, Manifestation, the Vision of the Universal Form, Devotion, the Differentiation of the Kshetra and Kshetrajna, the Differentiation of the Three Gunas, the Supreme Purusha, the Differentiation of the Divine and the Demonic, the Differentiation of the Threefold Shraddha and, finally, The Yoga of Liberation and Renunciation. The book also contains detailed notes to the Gita chapters, a Further Reading section, a combined Glossary and Index of Sanskrit Terms, and an Index of English words. The cover of the book is replete with symbolism. Krishna is always represented as blue in colour, hence the colour of the hands in the cover design. The chariot of Krishna and Arjuna is to be seen in the motif at the base, while the triple motif symbolizes the triple paths of the Gita action without desire for results, knowledge and devotion. There are also three strands that make up all phenomena light and radiance, energy, and inertia, as well as three aspects of the divine in the Gita the totally transcendent Absolute, the manifest deity that is also the essence of all things, and the personal God to whom devotion can be given. The main image of Krishna is superimposed on the roots of the ashvattha tree that features in chapter 15: its branches reach down into the earth and its roots ascend upwards and it represents phenomenal existence.

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Spain's first democracy was announced to popular jubilation in April 1931, a new dawn ushered in without a single shot being fired. Yet just over five years later the country was plunged into a brutal civil war that bequeathed hundreds of thousands of deaths and an authoritarian dictatorship under General Francisco Franco that lasted almost forty years. This book analyses Spain's dramatic political shift, reassessing the role of the right as it mobilised against the Second Republic, swinging from ostensibly "moderate" Catholic conservatism to fascist violence. By providing the first detailed study of the uniformed, paramilitary Juventud de Accion Popular (JAP), Sid Lowe challenges the historiographical orthodoxy on Spanish fascism and assumptions about the role of the hegemonic right-wing party during the Republican years, Jose Maria Gil Robles's CEDA. Drawing on a wide range of previously uncovered primary material, he demonstrates that much of the parliamentary right, its leadership included, abandoned the legal road to power when it could no longer use democracy as a Trojan Horse with which to conquer the state. It throws vital new light on the conspiracy to destroy the Republic, the Nationalist war effort, the creation of the new state, and the true social and political origins of the Franco regime. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

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Until quite recently, anthologies of English poetry contained very few poems by women, and histories of English poetry gave little space to women poets. How should poetry lovers respond? The book begins by suggesting four possible responses: the conservative, which claims that women have not written many good poems; individual recuperation, which salvages some fine poems by women but without altering the general view of English poetry; alternative canon, which claims that women do not write the same kind of poetry as men, so that their work should be judged by different standards; and cultural recuperation, which claims that women's poetry is a significant cultural phenomenon, and should be read and studied without subjecting it to any tests. All these positions can be defended, and this book has elements of them all. As the title indicates, this book is about reading women's poems, rather than forming theories about them: it explores the experience of reading Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Browning, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson and many others. Beginning with Katherine Philips, the first Englishwoman to achieve fame as a poet, it covers three centuries to the work of Marianne Moore and Stevie Smith, but does not include the many living women poets who deserve a volume to themselves. In order to discuss adequately the work of those included, it was necessary to omit many other women poets: the selection has been made on merit, and to readers who miss some of their favourite poets the only answer can be that the book does nothing to discourage reading other poets. Indeed, it is hoped that the form of discussion of the selected poems will be helpful in engaging further with women poets of all calibres. Do women write differently from men? The author assumes no predetermined answer but is very willing to ask the question; and in order to do so he frequently compares poems by women with poems by men, not so much to ask who writes better as to explore similarities and differences: thus Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is discussed along with Alexander Pope, Emily Dickinson along with Gerard Manly Hopkins and Elizabeth Browning along with her husband. Poems by women should be read, enjoyed, and argued about. They can be related to the time they were written and first admired, or to our views on women's history, or to our expectations of what poetry can offer -- but above all they should be enjoyed. And that is the faith in which this book is written.

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Manifestations of hatred of Jews and Israel have risen over the last few decades in the Arab and Muslim world. This hatred is demonstrated in many ways -- from propaganda to terrorism. But is such hatred the result of Islamic anti-Semitism, as widely claimed? Or does it have other roots and reasons? This book sets the record straight by explaining that while anti-Semitism is the credo of fanatic groups and regimes, such an attitude is not representative of traditional and contemporary Islam. For centuries Muslim attitudes to Jews were ambivalent: contempt and antagonism alongside tolerance and co-operation. In fact Jews under Islam were better off than their Christian neighbours, and much better off than their Jewish brethren under Christianity. A similar pattern of relations has developed over the last several decades between Muslim nations and the Jewish state of Israel: hostility and violence, mostly by Muslim Arabs, but also dialogue and co-operation by and with many other Muslims. These complex relations are discussed here by Muslim and Jewish scholars -- from Azerbaijan, Egypt, India, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, the USA, Palestine and Turkey -- who analyse the religious, cultural, political and economic factors that have shaped Muslim attitudes to Jews and Israel. Ideas and suggestions are put forward to improve Muslim-Jewish relations -- the theme of which was first conceived at an international conference organised by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Divinity School, Harvard University.

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This book explores the role played by the Female Section of the Spanish Fascist Party (Seccion Femenina de la Falange -- SF) in promoting women's political and professional rights within the authoritarian Franco regime in Spain. While acknowledging the organisational and financial ties, as well as the great ideological affinity between the SF and the regime, Inbal Ofer demonstrates how the SF's national leadership promoted an autonomous social and political agenda. Despite the need to constantly manoeuvre between the cultural and legal dictates of Francoist society, the unique activities and personal experiences of SF members at the heart of political power became a model for an array of policies and reforms that greatly improved the lives of Spanish women. From a unique gender perspective the topic of the Seccion Femenina de la Falange contributes to the debate on the nature of authoritarian regimes by reflecting on issues of policy formation and implementation; mass mobilisation; and the role of coercion alongside the creation of a "culture of consent". In exchange for a long-term commitment to the survival of the regime, both the Catholic Church and the Spanish Falange gained considerable administrative power and a measure of freedom to act on political and social matters. As explained, the promotion of women's legal and political equality (reflected in the struggle to amend the Civil Code and ratify the Law for Political and Professional Rights) is a good example of the way organs within the "regime" made use of their position in order to legitimise non-consensual forms of activism. The SF efforts to increase the number of gainfully employed women and improve their working-conditions is an example of the unexpected uses made by agents of the "regime" of the freedom of action accorded them in the public arena. Inbal Ofer raises questions regarding the nature of women's political activism and capacity for autonomous action within authoritarian regimes, setting out the debate on the nature of feminism and its relation to female activism and the promotion of women as a collective. More specifically she engages with those works that critically evaluate women's public contribution within Catholic and / or nationalist settings, and is required reading for interested in the history of modern Europe.

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"Beyond the Border" sets the lives and work of Huguenot goldsmiths in the context of the different societies in which they lived and worked. Distinguished international scholars explore the contributions of individual goldsmiths drawing on new research. Michele Bimbenet Privat examines the lives and work of Huguenot goldsmiths in France during times of tolerance of the Protestant religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. She explains how protestant craftsmen dominated regional centres but found establishing a presence in the metropolis more challenging. The influence of the Louis XIV style was greater on the leading Dutch goldsmiths in the late 17th and 18th centuries. In contrast to London, first generation Huguenot goldsmiths played only a minor role in their adopted cities of The Hague and Amsterdam. Those who settled in Berlin and Kassel, often from Metz in Northern France, made a greater impact through the purity of style in which they continued to work in the 18th century. Those who settled in the English speaking world benefited from ambitious patronage from noble and professional clients. Goldsmiths who settled in the American colonies had more in common stylistically with those who worked in Dublin and Cork. First generation Huguenot goldsmiths in London set the pace for the next generation which produced in Paul de Lamerie one of the most successful craft businesses of his generation. "Beyond the Border" explores the transatlantic links between the Huguenot goldsmiths who settled in Europe and America.

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This book highlights the so far unappreciated merit of the Syrian playwrights Durayd Lahham and Muhammad al-Maghout, whose plays are representative of the new wave of Arab theatrical realisation in general and Syrian protest plays in particular. 'Ghawwar', the famous character type created by Lahham, combines art with politics, the past with modern times, lower class-consciousness and identity with Pan-Arab nationalism, and East with West. He also symbolizes a poetical link between the 'bitter cup' of a miserable present and the 'holy rain' of a better future.

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This is the first comprehensive informational database of the major political, economic and legal issues that organisations world-wide need to know about in order to do business in Russia and surrounding countries. The text summarises the major economic developments in this dynamic region, provides accurate and up to date sources on business legislation, and gives crucial practical advice to business people and foreign investors. Using local as well as international sources, each country text provides detailed information on: Best business opportunities and sectors; Legal issues relevant to trade and business activities, including franchising; Information on investment laws, the judiciary, labor law, taxation, IPR laws, currency and banking, and business partnership opportunities; Contact details of government offices, business associations, calendars of business events, etc. While the Energy sector holds a global significance and tops the international business communities' investment priorities, especially in Russia and Kazakhstan, economic dynamism has been demonstrated over the last decade in all these countries, and there are substantial business opportunities in all economic sectors. Written by an Economics Analyst with a proven track record in providing business information, and a Corporate Lawyer with extensive experience of engaging at contractual level with business and government organisations in these countries, this book is essential reading for all those involved in Legal, Business, Investment and Political decision-making.

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'Bellicose Dove' is the first English biography of the Huguenot lawyer, preacher, diplomat and martyr Claude Brousson for 150 years. It examines his life (1647-98), letters, sermons, books, and the role he played in resisting Louis XIV's persecution of the Huguenots until his death on the scaffold in 1698. Unique features of the book include a detailed examination of biographical details in his letters, analysis of the symbolism in his sermons and books (especially his anti-Catholic rhetoric), the importance of his three missionary journeys into France, and the effectiveness of his international diplomatic efforts in England, Holland, and Prussia.

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Looks at the return of the sublime in post-modernity, and at intimations of a 'post-Romantic' sublime in Romanticism itself. The sublime is explored as a discourse of 'invention' -- taking the Latin meaning of to 'come upon', 'find', 'discover' that involves an encounter with the new, the unregulated and the surprising. Lyotard and Zizek, among others, have reconfigured the sublime for post-modernity by exceeding the subject-centred discourse of Romantic aesthetics, and promoting not a sublime of the subject, but of the unpresentable, the 'Real', the unknown, the other. 'Reinventing the Sublime' looks at 18th-century, Romantic, modernist and post-modern 'inventions' of the sublime alongside contemporary critical accounts of the relationship of sublimity to subjectivity, aesthetics, politics and history, including '9/11'. It reads Burke and Kant alongside post-modern discourses on the sublime, and Wordsworth, De Quincey and Mary Shelley in relation to temporality and materiality in Romanticism, and considers 'modernist' inflections of the sublime in T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes in relation to the themes of disjunction and excess in modernity. The author examines the postmodern revisiting of the sublime in Thomas Pynchon, D.M Thomas and Toni Morrison, and draws on Lyotard's reading of the sublime as an aesthetic of the avant-garde and as a singular and disruptive 'event', to argue that the sublime in its post-modern and contemporary forms encodes an anxious but affirmative relationship to the ironies of temporality and history. 'Reinventing the Sublime' focuses on the endurance of the sublime in contemporary thinking, and on the way that the sublime can be read as a figure of the relationship of representation to temporality itself.

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The turbulent events of World War II and the subsequent communist regime in Czechoslovakia strongly restricted Czech writers' freedom of expression. Many sought and found literary freedom in exile. As Czech literature was developing in two very different locations and conditions, writers on both sides created diverse, yet extraordinarily interesting and commendable works; all were united in their wish to see their homeland liberated from the totalitarian regime. The suffering and generally adverse conditions of those who stayed at home are reflected in the works written both at home and in exile, especially after the two parties found secret ways of communicating between themselves. Many works abound in wit and humour, despite the difficult circumstances. After the fall of communism had brought the desired freedom of expression for all writers, the recent past still occasionally echoes in Czech literary works, but is written and read from new perspectives. As the dark age now seems to be gradually falling into oblivion, it is important to be reminded that even in the darkest times talented writers were alert to Czech national and literary undertones, and produced works which English-speaking readers would find new, fresh and captivating. While the availability of books in English may be still in a minority, synoptic interpretations of prose writings not yet translated to English provided in this Handbook add integral features that help to complete the picture of life at a time when cultural links between two parts of Europe were painfully severed.

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This book is mindful of Geography's big dilemma. How can the subject curb the encroachments of other disciplines: environmental studies, human ecology, political science, geophysics...? The author believes that what we know as 'strategic studies' needs urgently to address a clutch of geography-related considerations customarily seen as outside its remit. Climate change is of singular import, security-wise. Moreover, other pressures on our planetary ecology and resource base, currently appear as critical, taken collectively. Societal and philosophic contradictions are deeply endemic, too, not least within the modern post-industrial nations. Again the attendant security implications may lend themselves well to geographical interpretations. Informing the study throughout will be an awareness of the interactions between Space and Time, addressed not metaphysically but in mundane terms. Then again, while linear distance and bearing are becoming less crucially important, the two-dimensional aspects of geographic space (areas and densities) are becoming more critical. Germane, too, is the medium-term (20 to 30 years?) prospect of biowarfare displacing nuclear bombs as the most menacing form of mass destruction. The classical Chinese concept of yin and yang will be examined as lending itself to singularly fruitful application to conflict limitation in an ever-shrinking world. Throughout a distinction is preserved between those questions the author believes can be answered definitively, and those which as yet can only be aired. For both, historical experience will be evaluated in order to give more depth to the interpretation of modern challenges... actual and predicted. Emphasis will be laid on the development of regional associations strong enough to deal with various aspects of a survival strategy: nuclear deterrence, peacekeeping, arms control, developing economic resources, rural and urban ecology. A final review concludes with how one might hope a planetary community can evolve in the longer term -- i.e. up to one or two centuries ahead.

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"The Prodigal Sign" sets out to characterise criticism as a set of prodigal practices that exceed the constraints of primary texts, history, and theory. This is not just because, as Derrida says, 'no practice is ever totally faithful to its principle', but also because critics are habitual runaways -- forever seeking to escape the jurisdiction of their forebears and of the academy. Always on the lookout for something new and distinctive to say about the same old texts or for texts that have escaped the professional attention of their peers, like the prodigal son, they live on their inheritance while trying to escape from their own disciplinary history. This work makes a case for celebrating the prodigal condition and for another escape -- breaking out of traditional constraints towards a hybrid form that combines the critical with the creative.

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This is the first book to tell the story of the Jews of Lebanon in the twentieth century. It challenges the prevailing view that Jews everywhere in the Middle East were second-class citizens, and were persecuted after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The Jews of Lebanon were just one of Lebanon's 23 minorities with the same rights and privileges, and subject to the same political tensions. The author discusses the Jewish presence in Lebanon under Ottoman Rule; Lebanese Jews under the French mandate; Lebanese Jewish identity after the establishment of the State of Israel; the increase of the community through Syrian refugees; the Jews' position in the first civil war; their involvement in the exfiltration of Syrian Jews; the beginning of their exodus after the 1967 War; the virtual extinction of the Jewish community as a result of the prolonged 1975 second civil war and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon; and finally the community's memory of their Lebanese past.

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This is the story of a regional process in the making: from the very concept of arms control as applied to the region, through the innovative regional forum and format for discussion that was devised for the talks, to the dynamics of the talks and the question of Egypt's position within this novel regional setting. The result was that what seemed at the outset to be a most likely unpromising forum became the setting of unprecedented regional dynamics.

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The Boke of Gostely Grace is a Middle English translation of the Liber specialis gratiae by the German visionary Mechthild of Hackeborn (12411298), a Benedictine/Cistercian nun at the convent of Helfta.

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The modernist poetry of Wallace Stevens is replete with moments of theorizing. Stevens regarded poetry as an abstract medium through which to think about and theorize not only philosophical concepts like metaphor and reality, but also a unifying thesis about the nature of poetry itself. At the same time, literary theorists and philosophers have often turned to Stevens as a canonical reference point and influence. In the centenary year of Wallace Stevens’s first collection Harmonium (1923), this collection asks what it means to theorize with Stevens today. Through a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this book seeks to describe the myriad kinds of thinking sponsored by Stevens’s poetry and explores how contemporary literary theory might be invigorated through readings of Stevens.

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Delving into Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, this book uncovers a plethora of conceptual paradigms. Apichatpong's films frequently utilize rural Thailand as a backdrop, showcasing daily life, interactions, rituals, and customs, all infused with a Southeast Asian essence. This utilization of local imagery provides a national quality to his works, allowing a global audience to explore both urban and rural aspects of Thai society, along with discourses on history, culture, politics, and practices. Beyond the surface, the films also address universal and intricate themes, transcending cultural boundaries. The book delves into a range of lesser-explored aspects regarding the films and filmmaking of Apichatpong, developing fresh perspectives on the representation of nonhumans, hybrid forms, transmedia plot, technique, production among others. With meticulous analyses of his key works this interdisciplinary study unveils the threads that bind Apichatpong’s creative practice, innovative techniques, and philosophical insights. An essential read for cinephiles, scholars, and seekers of cinematic depth, this book uncovers the vibrant tapestry of meaning within Apichatpong’s enigmatic film-worlds.

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The Findern Manuscript (Cambridge University Library, Ff.1.6): A New Edition of the Unique Poems is the first critical edition of the thirty-four unique and unattributed Middle English poems contained in Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.1.6. This collection of unique poems is significant for its size and thematic coherence, and for the insight it provides into regional literary culture, that of south Derbyshire, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The poems, mainly short lyric texts, but also the narrative poem, The Parliament of Love, two topical complaints, and a romance known as the ‘Alexander-Cassamus Fragment’, are significant for the evidence they provide for creative responses to the metropolitan literature of previous generations, especially to the works of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and Lydgate. The poems explore a range of amatory, religious and philosophical themes in a variety of lyric forms and genres. Their anonymity and experimentation with lyric voice and style make them an important site for exploring the contribution of women, as well as men, to late medieval regional literary culture.

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John Ridewall's Fulgencius metaforalis is a moralising commentary on Fulgentius's sixth-century Mitologiae, an introduction to the classical gods and their stories. Composed in Oxford in the 1330s and subject to almost immediate local (and broader English) use, the work was a pan-European success, and more than 100 manuscripts preserve Ridewall's text in some form. Fulgencius metaforalis has been edited before, nearly a century ago, by a great medievalist, Hans Liebeschütz; he, however, did not recognise that the manuscript he presented was a fragment, containing only about one-third of the whole. This volume provides Ridewall's entire text, as usually communicated, with a translation. In addition, it contains a substantial introduction; this outlines various difficulties in the transmission of Fulgencius and evidence for the work's extensive medieval reception. Annotation to the text identifies and indexes Ridewall's sources – most of his mythographic knowledge reflects either Remigius of Auxerre's commentary on Martianus Capella or the Third Vatican Mythographer; and offers one manuscript tabula/index, useful for seeing how readers may have accessed the work piecemeal (by manuscript consultation, not, as frequently claimed, as a set of 'memory diagrams').

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This volume plays on the double meaning of network in German and European Studies: configurations of people, objects, and texts as well as network analysis, the dominant Digital Humanities (DH) method featured in the book. Contributions from art history, history of the book, history, literary studies, and musicology contemplate the strengths and weakness of treating the period 1789-1810 as either continuous with or a departure from the centuries before and after by examining different facets of the longer period 1760-1830. While many chapters investigate German material, nearly all expand into other European cultures and cover important regions, protagonists, objects and constellations of bi-and multilingual life. They intersect Italian, French, and English networks and reach across the Atlantic into New England. The period’s bookends indicate a threshold or terminus for traditions, institutions, and national identities in Europe: marking the French Revolution (and its effects across the continent culminating on the Wars again Napoleon) and at times reactionary responses with delineation of national, regional, or group identities, respectively, and perhaps most pronounced in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna (1814-15). Overall, the collection of eleven chapters, introduction, and an epilogue explores European cultural histories at the turn of the nineteenth century in a nonlinear manner, that is, by accumulating critical perspectives on people, objects, and texts that test the boundaries of narratives of transmission, organization, and cohesion that often mark scholarly evaluations of this period in European history.

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