Search results for ""Liverpool University Press""

Sold as a multi-volume set the individual volumes are also available for purchase. This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women's playwriting with forty-two essays written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners.

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Science fiction might not be the first thing that springs to mind when we think of Irish literature. But in the post-war period in Belfast, two authors, Bob Shaw and James White, began producing science fiction stories, eventually selling them to international markets and gaining the respect of luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss and Stanley Kubrick.Although lauded in the international science fiction scene for their innovations in the genre, Shaw and White’s work has been relatively ignored within Irish Studies. This book connects the emergence of science fiction in Belfast with the position of the city as the locus of technological development on the island of Ireland, and the development of a corresponding technological imaginary. Breaking new ground in the study of Irish modernity, Richard Howard draws parallels between the narratives of Shaw and White and the persistent influence of historical narratives embodied by the two-traditions paradigm in the region, as well as exploring the figure of the alien both in science fiction and in the history of Northern Ireland. He also considers the works of Shaw and White as utopian gestures against the backdrop of the Irish Troubles, finding both repressive and redemptive elements therein. The book makes an important contribution to the growing conversation about Irish science fiction and our understanding of modernity in Ireland.

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In mid-eighteenth-century Paris, the encyclopedists launched a campaign to radically redefine the public dimension of all ‘imaginative’ arts, starting with music – with the querelle des bouffons – then theatre, the novel and finally the visual arts. Diderot, Rousseau and the Politics of the Arts in the Enlightenment exposes the correlation between the prejudices and hierarchies of the political and social system of the time and what d’Alembert calls ‘literary superstitions’. The book reconstructs the role of Diderot and Rousseau, frères ennemis, as they engaged in a dispute that was above all else political, despite revolving entirely around forms of artistic expression. Throwing a light on this important cultural event is all the more necessary because the essentially political dimension of Diderot’s Salons has since the nineteenth-century been completely obscured from view. Indeed, at first misunderstood and then totally neglected, for over two centuries their true significance has been systematically ignored by the aesthetic-idealist school of criticism.

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This book advocates for the ethically formative labor that fiction accomplishes. As a force of production, the fictional labor of literature and the visual arts shapes the formation of collective meaning in an era marked by the negligence of social, financial, and environmental responsibility. As neoliberalism’s hegemony since the 1980s has intensified through the proliferation of digital technologies in the 21st century, considering works of creative art as an ethically productive force is a necessary complement to political and economic critiques. The book invites readers to rethink how mutations in the production, circulation, and consumption of literary and visual materials are implicated in the commodification of information and attention for private gain. The link can have a positive effect that transforms the social relation from a capitalist ethos that expends life for profit to an alterity-driven ethos that defends life. But remedying the paucity of moral sentiments of social existence requires fictional labor to generate ethical sensibilities, cares, desires, and wills. The book’s close analyses demonstrate the aesthetic and formal aspects of literary and visual art that mediate between social relations to yield a dependence alterity, including the otherness of a precarious present, a menacing future beyond economic mastery, and an environment enmeshed with living beings and things.

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This collection sheds new light on the nature, role and practice of philosophy and science in the renewed Berlin Academy from the mid-1740s to the 1770s, and in so doing provides a robust new instalment of materials for the broader task of constructing a historiography of philosophy at this important Enlightenment institution. The collection ranges from discussions of the roles of philosophy and natural philosophy in the formation of the reinvigorated Academy in the mid-1740s, to conceptions of the correct philosophical methodology to be deployed by the Academy. It provides the first ever study of the nature and arrangement of the new classes of the Academy, and a fresh appraisal of the Academy’s methodological eclecticism. One recurring theme is the status of metaphysics: there are studies of both special metaphysics, including the study of the soul; general metaphysics, that is, the study of being in general; and foundational metaphysical principles and concepts, such as Maupertuis’s Principle of least action, Euler’s concept of space and Lambert’s notion of an experimental metaphysics. The collection also takes the study of the Academy in new directions through focused studies of important figures whose writings deserve to be better understood, such as Jean Bernard Merian, Louis de Beausobre, Jean Henri Samuel Formey and Johann Georg Sulzer.

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Rupert Brooke died in April 1915, on the eve of the Gallipoli landings. During the First World War Brooke was the iconic poet-soldier, adored and mimicked by readers and would-be writers—both in and out of uniform—with an international following that has neither been examined nor explained since. The general shift in attitudes toward war and the manner in which the war poets are presented meant that Brooke was recast as the exemplar of pre-war innocence, forever swimming in faintly saccharine, nakedly patriotic streams born of his famous poems. Rupert Brooke in the First World War takes a celebrity of the war who became an idol for fellow writers, politicians, literary elites and the general public, and tells the story of his life and famously romantic death, providing readers a fuller sense not only of the human being and his singular life and circumstances, but also of the world he inhabited, and the passions and tastes of men and women living through a period of great upheaval.

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Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood examines three major currents in the historiography of Brazilian slavery: manumission, miscegenation, and creolisation. It revisits themes central to the history of slavery and race relations in Brazil, updates the research about them, and revises interpretations of the role of gender and reproduction within them. First, about the preponderance of women and children in manumission; second, about the association of black female mobility with intimate inter-racial relations; third, about the racialised and gendered routes to freed status; and fourth, about the legacies of West African female socio-economic behaviours for modalities of family and freedom in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. The central concern within the book is how African and African descendant women navigated enslaved motherhood and negotiated the divide between enslavement and freedom for themselves and their children. The book is, therefore, organised around the subject position of the enslaved mother and the reproduction of her children in enslavement, while the condition of enslaved motherhood is examined through overlapping historical praxis evidenced in nineteenth-century Bahia: contested freedom, racialised mothering, and competing maternal interests - biological, ritual, surrogate. The point at which these interests converged historically was, it is argued, a conflict over black female reproductive rights.

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This study reassesses modern architecture and town planning in mid-twentieth-century England, highlighting ideas and debates that were in circulation as modernist ideals gradually took root. The book reveals an architectural culture that was serious, active, and visionary, with impact that extended into the postwar years. Through close studies of specific works and writings, the author acknowledges the importance of the international context of modern architecture as it intersected with the variety of narratives that defined English modernism, such as national identity, the New Empiricism, and the picturesque, taking into account the large community of émigré architects who settled in England with the approach of World War II, as well as a more general dissemination of international style forms and theories from continental Europe. The book places familiar figures such as Berthold Lubetkin and Ernö Goldfinger, as well as projects such as Tecton’s Penguin Pool and the Festival of Britain’s “Live Architecture” Exhibition, in new light, presenting a rich picture of the modern architectural climate in England. The study draws attention to the debates, proposals, and processes that fed into the development of modernist, urban-minded, and forward-looking architectural ideals.

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George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) is celebrated both as a ‘splatter’ movie and as a satire of 1970s consumerism. One of the most financially successful independent films ever produced, Dawn of the Dead presented a strong vision to audiences of the time in terms of its excessive, often shocking violence. It challenged censorship internationally and caused controversy in the United States and the UK. The film created problems with distributors because of its length and its graphic content; with the MPAA who awarded it an ‘X’ in America (a rating usually reserved for pornography); with the BBFC in the UK who completely recut it; and in various European territories where it was released in several versions. Arguably, excess is at the heart of Dawn of the Dead, integral to its meaning: not only in its scenes of gore, its in-your-face social satire and its gaudy pop-kitsch style but in the production history of the film itself. This Devil’s Advocate explores the various ways in which Romero took Dawn of the Dead into areas of extremity during its scripting, production and distribution; and the responses of industry, censorship bodies, reviewers and audiences of the time to the film’s excesses. Taking the approach of a micro-historical study, Jon Towlson offers a close analysis of the film’s production context to explore the cultural significance of Dawn of the Dead as a ‘rebel text’ and an example of oppositional cinema.

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Finalist for National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship 2022. Karaite Judaism emerged in the ninth century in the Islamic Middle East as an alternative to the rabbinic Judaism of the Jewish majority. Karaites reject the underlying assumption of rabbinic Judaism, namely, that Jewish practice is to be based on two divinely revealed Torahs, a written one, embodied in the Five Books of Moses, and an oral one, eventually written down in rabbinic literature. Karaites accept as authoritative only the Written Torah, as they understand it, and their form of Judaism therefore differs greatly from that of most Jews. Despite its permanent minority status, Karaism has been an integral part of the Jewish people continuously for twelve centuries. It has contributed greatly to Jewish cultural achievements, while providing a powerful intellectual challenge to the majority form of Judaism. This book is the first to present a comprehensive overview of the entire story of Karaite Judaism: its unclear origins; a Golden Age of Karaism in the Land of Israel; migrations through the centuries; Karaites in the Holocaust; unique Jewish religious practices, beliefs, and philosophy; biblical exegesis and literary accomplishments; polemics and historiography; and the present-day revival of the Karaite community in the State of Israel.

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Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. Third Prize winner of the Laurel Prize 2022.What is still wild in us – and is it recoverable? The poems in Wilder, Jemma Borg’s second collection, are acts of excavation into the deeper and more elusive aspects of our mental and physical lives. Whether revisiting Dante’s forest of the suicides, experiencing the saturation of new motherhood or engaging in a boundary-dissolving encounter with a psychedelic cactus, these meticulous and sensuous poems demonstrate a restless intelligence, seeking out what we are losing and inviting us to ‘break ourselves each against the beauty of the other’. They call on us to remember ourselves as the animals we are, in connection with the complex web of life in what Mary Midgley called an ‘extended sympathy’, and to consider wildness as a process of becoming, reforming and growth. We do not live in a time when we can afford denial. Instead, by being willing to enter despair, might we find what Gary Snyder described as ‘the real world to which we belong’ and recover the means to save what we are destroying?

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This work makes an original and important contribution both to the field of British fascist/extreme Right studies and to the Ulster question. Given that British fascism was a phenomenon of the inter-war period, first making its appearance shortly after the Irish question had been constitutionally settled by the creation of the Irish Free State and the autonomous entity of Northern Ireland, it has been understandable that British historians should focus chiefly on developments in Britain. In the process, however, Northern Ireland as a site of fascist interest and activity has been largely overlooked; yet it engaged the attention of all the significant fascist movements, from Rotha Lintorn-Orman’s British Fascists and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists to the less significant Imperial Fascist League in the inter-war period, Mosley’s Union Movement in the post-war period and the National Front and British National Party during the period of the Troubles, together with smaller formations thereafter. In focusing on Northern Ireland, this study provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of British fascist organisations throughout the twentieth century. It also demonstrates that the region was an extremely difficult terrain for those organisations to cultivate, whether they were supportive of nationalism/republicanism or Unionism/loyalism.

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Using a broad range of archival material from Washington University, St. Louis, the University of Glasgow, and the British Library, Useless Activity: Work, Leisure and British Avant-Garde Fiction, 1960-1975 is the first study to ask why the experimental writing of the 1960s and 1970s appears so fraught with anxiety about its own uselessness, before suggesting that this very anxiety was symptomatic of a unique period in British literary history when traditional notions about literary work – and what 'worked' in terms of literature – were being radically scrutinised and reassessed. The study is divided into five chapters with three of those dedicated to the close analysis of work produced by three writers representative of the 1960s British avant-garde: Eva Figes (1932–2012), B.S. Johnson (1933–1973), and Alexander Trocchi (1925–1984). The book argues that these writers’ preoccupations with concepts related to work, such as leisure, debt, and various forms of neglected labour like housework, allow us to rethink the British avant-garde's relation to realism while posing broader questions about the production and value of post-war literary avant-gardism more generally. Useless Activity proposes that only with an understanding of the British avant-garde’s engagement with the idea of work and its various corollaries can we appreciate these writers' move away from certain forms of literary realism and their contribution to the development of the modern British novel during the mid-twentieth century.

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Few features have shaped east European Jewish history as much as the extent and continuity of Jewish self-rule. Offering a broad perspective, this volume explores the traditions, scope, limitations, and evolution of Jewish self-government in the Polish lands and beyond. Extensive autonomy and complex structures of civil and religious leadership were central features of the Jewish experience in this region, and this volume probes the emergence of such structures from the late medieval period onwards, looking at the legal position of the individual community and its role as a political actor. Chapters discuss the implementation of Jewish law and the role of the regional and national Jewish councils which were a remarkable feature of supra-communal representation in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.The volume reflects on the interaction between Jewish legal traditions and state policies, and offers an in-depth analysis of the transformation of Jewish self-government under the impact of the partitions of Poland–Lithuania and the administrative principles of the Enlightenment. Co-operation between representatives of the Jewish and non-Jewish communities at the local level is discussed down to the interwar years, when Jewish self-government was considered both a cherished legacy of pre-partition autonomy and a threat to the modern nation state.

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This book tells the little-known story of a fascinating crypto-Jewish community through two centuries and three continents. Beginning as a precarious settlement of a few families in mid-18th-century Mashhad, an Islamic holy city in northern Iran, the community grew into a closely-knit group in response to their forced conversion to Islam in 1839. Muslim hostility and a culture of memory sustained by intra-communal marriages reinforced their separate religious identity, vesting it in strong family and communal loyalty. Mashhadi women became the main agents of the cultural transmission of communal identity and achieved social roles and high status uncharacteristic for contemporary Jewish and Muslim communities. The Mashhadis maintained a double identity, upholding Islam in public while tenaciously holding onto their Jewish identity in secret. The exodus from Mashhad after 1946 relocated the communal center to Tehran, later to Israel, and, after the Khomeini revolution, to New York. The relationship between the formation and retention of communal identity and memory practices - with interconnected issues of religion and gender - draws upon existing research on other crypto-faith communities, such as the Judeoconversos, the Moriscos, and the French Protestants, who, through the special blend of memory-faith and ethnicity, emerged strengthened from their underground period. For the immigration period, the author challenges the old paradigm that "modernity and religion are mutually exclusive." The book also explores the sometimes uncomfortable yet intimate relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past, both secular and religious.

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A Critical Introduction proposes a new didactic and dynamic way of reading the great twentieth-century poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). The aim is to present a holistic vision of this complex poet, promoting his literary geniality in order to better understand his orthonymic-heteronymic poetry. A guiding motif is Pessoa's own Be as plural as the universe. In leading the reader through the poet's published literary work, Jerónimo Pizarro allows an intimate perspective, alongside an academic one, to better understand the workings of Pessoa's mind and life. Discussion centres on the dilemmas an editor faces when editing posthumously. A prime question revolves around the genesis of Pessoa's heteronyms and orthonyms. Understanding is revealed by a critical perspective on the unity that exists in all of Pessoa's literary work. Interpretations of the poems; explanation of the profundity of The Book of Disquiet; and his isms of Paulism, Caeirism, Intersectionism and Cessationism, are discussed and analysed. The issue of Pessoa's astrological predictions his birth year and the effects of this event on Portuguese national history is debated. A chapter is devoted to the effect that translating Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát had on the poet. The work contains eleven texts written by Pessoa in English (including an autobiographical note from 1935), a substantive dual language bibliography, and is highly illustrated with facsimiles of the poet's own written material. A Critical Introduction is essential reading for all scholars and students of Pessoa's literary output and life circumstances. The work has been written to appeal to cultural studies (arts and aesthetics) enthusiasts in general at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, but given the engagement of new critical material it also provides a structured resource for future research.

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The contributors to Transnational French Studies situate this disciplinary subfield of Modern Languages in actively transnational frameworks. The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities – both material and non-material – that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book considers the transnational dimensions of being human in the world by focussing on four key practices which constitute the object of study for students of French: language and multilingualism; the construction of transcultural places and the corresponding sense of space; the experience of time; and transnational subjectivities. The underlying premise of the volume is that the transnational is present (and has long been present) throughout what we define as French history and culture. Chapters address instances and phenomena associated with the transnational, from prehistory to the present, opening up the geopolitical map of French studies beyond France and including sites where communities identified as French have formed.

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Although posterity has generally known Bernardin de Saint-Pierre for his bestselling Paul et Virginie, his output was encyclopaedic. Using new sources, this monograph explores the many facets of a celebrity writer in the Ancien Régime, the Revolution and the early nineteenth century. Bernardin attracted a readership to whom, irrespective of age, gender or social situation, he became a guide to living. He was nominated by Louis XVI to manage the Jardin des plantes, by Revolutionary bodies to teach at the École normale and to membership of the Institut. He deplored unquestioning adherence to Newtonian ideas, materialistic atheism and human misdeeds in what could be considered proto-ecological terms. He bemoaned analytical, reductionist approaches: his philosophy placed human beings at the centre of the universe and stressed the interconnectedness of cosmic harmony. Bernardin learned enormously from travel to Eastern Europe and the Indian Ocean. He attacked slavery, championed a national education system and advocated justice for authors. Fresh information and interpretation show that he belonged to neither the philosophe or anti-philosophe camp. A reformist, he envisioned a regenerated France as a nation of liberty offering asylum for refugees. This study demonstrates the range of thought and expression of an incontournable polymath in an age of transformation.

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As publishers in private printing presses, as writers of dissident texts and as political campaigners against censorship and for intellectual freedom, a radical group of twentieth-century Irish women formed a female-only coterie to foster women’s writing and maintain a public space for professional writers. This book documents the activities of the Women Writers’ Club (1933–1958), exploring its ethos, social and political struggles, and the body of works created and celebrated by its members. Examining the period through a history of the book approach, it covers social events, reading committees, literary prizes, publishing histories, modernist printing presses, book fairs, reading practices, and the various political philosophies shared by members of the Club. It reveals how professional women writers deployed their networks and influence to carve out a space for their writing in the cultural marketplace, collaborating with other artistic groups to fight for creative freedoms and the right to earn a living by the pen. The book paints a vivid portrait of the Women Writers’ Club, showcasing their achievements and challenging existing orthodoxy on the role of women in Irish literary life.

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Finalist for Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Philosophy and Jewish Thought 2023. This book untangles a web of ideas about politics, religion, exile, and community that emerged at a key moment in Jewish history and left a lasting mark on Jewish ideas. In the shadow of their former member Baruch Spinoza’s notoriety, and amid the aftermath of the Sabbatian messianic movement, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam underwent a conceptual shift that led them to treat their self-governed diaspora community as a commonwealth. Preoccupied by the question of why and how Jews should rule themselves in the absence of a biblical or messianic sovereign state or king, they forged a creative synthesis of insights from early modern Christian politics and Jewish law and traditions to assess and argue over their formidable communal government. In so doing they shaped a proud new theopolitical self-understanding of their community as analogous to a Christian state. Through readings of rarely studied sermons, commentaries, polemics, administrative records, and architecture, Anne Albert shows that a concentrated period of public Jewish political discourse among the community’s leaders and thinkers led to the formation of a strong image of itself as a totalizing, state-like entity—an image that eventually came to define its portrayal by twentieth-century historians. Her study presents a new perspective on a Jewish population that has long fascinated readers, as well as new evidence of Jewish reactions to Spinoza and Sabbatianism, and analyses the first Jewish reckoning with modern western political concepts.

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This book examines the phenomenon of work suicides in France and asks why, at the present historical juncture, conditions of work can push individuals to take their own lives. During the 2000s, France experienced what commentators have described as a ‘suicide epidemic’, whereby increasing numbers of workers in the face of extreme pressures of work, chose to kill themselves. The book analyses a corpus of testimonial material linked to 66 suicide cases across three large French companies during the period from 2005 to 2015. It aims to consider what the extreme and subjective act of self-killing, narrated in suicide letters, can tell us about the contemporary economic order and its impact on flesh and blood bodies. What do rising work-related suicides reveal about conditions of human labour in the twenty-first century? Does neoliberal economics condition a desire for suicide? How do suicidal individuals describe the causes and motivations of their act? Combining critical perspectives from sociology, history, testimony studies, economics, cultural studies and public health, the book raises critical questions about the human costs of the shift to a finance-driven neoliberal order and its everyday effects within the French workplace.

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Sculpture Journal provides an international forum for writers and scholars in the field of post-classical sculpture and public commemorative monuments in the Western tradition. Sculpture Journal offers a keen critical overview and a sound historical base, and is Britain's foremost scholarly journal devoted to sculpture in all its aspects. Periods covered extend to public and private commissions for present-day sculptors. While being academic and traditional, the journal encourages contributions of fresh research from new names in the field.

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Expanding upon the 2017 Radio 4 series ‘Britain’s Black Past’, this book presents those stories and analyses through the lens of a recovered past. Even those who may be familiar with some of the materials will find much that they had not previously known, and will be introduced to people, places, and stories brought to light by new research. In a time of international racial unrest and migration, it is important not to lose sight of similar situations that took place in an earlier time. In chapters written by scholars, artists, and independent researchers, readers will learn of an early musician, the sales of slaves in Scotland, the grave—now a shrine—of a black enslaved boy left to die in Morecombe Bay, of a country estate owned by a mixed-race slave owner, and of the two strikingly different people who lived in a Bristol house that is now a museum. Black sailors, political activists, memoirists, appear in these pages, but the book also re-examines living history, in the form of modern plays, television programmes, and genealogical sleuthing. Through them, Britain’s Black Past is not only presented anew, but shown to be very much alive in our own time.

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Bluecoat is a unique and much-loved Liverpool institution, its oldest city centre building. This book tells the fascinating story of its transformation from charity school to contemporary arts centre, the UK’s first. Its early 18th century origins shed light on the religious and maritime mercantile environment of the growing port, whose merchants supported the school. Echoes from then are revealed in themes explored by artists in the 20th century, including slavery and colonial legacies. The predominant focus is on an inclusive building for the arts, starting with colourful bohemian society, the Sandon, who established an artistic colony in 1907, hosting significant exhibitions by the Post-Impressionists and many leading modern British artists. Bluecoat Society of Arts emerged as the building’s custodians, paving the way for the arts centre which, despite financial struggles and wartime bomb damage, survived and continues to play a prominent role in Liverpool’s and the UK’s culture. Bluecoat is described as where ‘village hall meets the avant-garde’. In its rich story, Picasso, Stravinsky, Yoko Ono, Captain Beefheart, Simon Rattle and the inspirational Fanny Calder are just some of the names encountered, as key strands, including music, visual art, performance and the building’s tenants, are traced.

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Exodus is an exceptional Old English poem, written at a time when in the age of Bede Northern England held the intellectual leadership of Europe. It offers a vernacular gateway to the study of early medieval christian poetry. Focussing in dramatic fashion on the crossing of the Red Sea enabling the Israelites to escape captivity in Egypt the poem is stylistically outstanding, showing a use of metaphor and fusion of disparate concepts (such as abstract and concrete, literal and allegorical) unparalleled in Old English poetry. The exodus, the greatest of Old Testament events, is interpreted both within the historical perspective of other Old Testament events (the Deluge and the Offering of Isaac) and within the allegorical perspective of the exodus to the Promised Land seen as the christian's journey through life to the ultimate heavenly home.This book, now in its third edition, aims to make the poem more accessible, and better understood and appreciated than hitherto. A number of changes to the Introduction, Commentary and Glossary, as well as a new Select Bibliography, help to bring the apparatus up to date and draw attention to the many fine contributions to the poem made by other scholars.

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This is a book of strategies and tactical plays, written by practitioners, for practitioners. It is designed to help innovators develop more effective approaches to benefitting from early stage university research. The authors are commercial innovators, experienced in the creation of partnerships to create and exploit valuable new ideas. They have decades of senior level experience in the research, innovation and product development teams of large multi-nationals, smaller high-tech companies, and start-up businesses. The unique perspectives offered by the authors cover all the key issues that an innovator needs to understand to help them achieve high-impact and mutually beneficial partnerships with academic researchers.

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Finalist for National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material 2022. Jewish political and cultural behaviour during the first half of the twentieth century comes to the fore in this portrayal of a forgotten movement with contemporary relevance. Commencing with the Zionist rejection of the Uganda proposal in 1905, the Jewish Territorialist Movement searched for areas outside Palestine in which to create settlements of Jews. This study analyses the Territorialists’ ideology and activities in the Jewish context of the time, but their thought and discourse also reflect geopolitical concerns that still have resonance today in debates about colonialist attitudes to peoplehood, territory, and space. As the colonial world order rapidly changed after 1945, the Territorialists did not abandon their aspirations in overseas lands. Instead, in their attempts to find settlement solutions for Europe’s ‘surplus’ Jews, they moved from negotiating predominantly with the European colonizers to negotiating also with the ever more powerful non-Western leaders of decolonizing nations. This book reconstructs the rich history of the activities and changing ideologies of Jewish Territorialism, represented by Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Territorial Organisation (the ITO) and, later, by the Freeland League for Jewish Colonization under the leadership of Isaac Steinberg. Via Uganda, Angola, Madagascar, Australia, and Suriname, this story eventually leads us to questions about yidishkeyt, and to forgotten early twentieth-century ideas of how to be Jewish.

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Emilia Pardo Bazán, the most prolific and influential Spanish female writer of the nineteenth century, was a very controversial figure, vilified for her embracement of naturalism and her robust feminist stance.When Insolación was published in 1889 it provoked a litany of negative comments and personal insults. This subtle, psychological novel, drawing on many aspects of its author's personal life, deals with the relationship between Asís, a respectable Galician widow, and Pacheco, a feckless womaniser from Andalucía. Although they scarcely know each other, Asís accepts Pacheco's invitation to visit the San Isidro Fair, where a heady cocktail of sun, alcohol and revelry causes her to behave in an uncharacteristic manner.Insolación explores the conflict between Asís's self-recrimination and concern for the 'qué dirán' and her nascent sexuality. Finally, despite her determination to banish Pacheco from her mind and her intention to go back to Galicia, the couple sleep together and decide to marry.The perceived promiscuity of this work of fiction scandalised the reading public as well as many leading critics. Pereda considered Asís's behaviour reprehensible and Clarín dismissed the novel as a pseudo-erotic boutade. Nowadays, Insolación is recognised as an important novel.

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Eating and drinking are essential to survival. Yet for human animals, they are intrinsically ambivalent, proliferating with ideological, historical and psychological leftovers. This study reveals and mobilizes the provisional meanings, repressed experiences and unacknowledged tensions bound up with representations of food, drink and their consumption. It creates a flexible critical framework by bringing together an unexploited convergence of post-war French thinkers who use – or whose thought is legible through – figures of eating and drinking, including Barthes, Bataille, Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Certeau, Cixous, Derrida, Fischler, Giard, Kristeva, Lacan, Lefebvre, Lévi-Strauss, Mayol and Sartre. New combinations emerge for elucidating the intersecting effects of incorporation; constructs of class, gender and racial difference; bad faith; distinction; secondary ideological signifying systems; provisional meanings bound up with linguistic traces; economies of excess; everyday ‘making-do’; the ethics of consuming the other; the return of the repressed; lack; abjection; and notions of ‘eating on the sly’, ‘mother’s milk’, the ‘omnivore’s paradox’ and ‘gastro-anomie’. The vast possibilities for re-thinking with eating and drinking are further exemplified in case studies of novels in which – often beyond authorial intentions – food and drink are structurally important and interpretatively plural. These are Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes/The Erasers (1953); Ernaux’s Les Armoires vides/Cleaned Out (1974); Darrieussecq’s Truismes/Pig Tales (1996); and Houellebecq’s La Carte et le territoire/The Map and the Territory (2010). New understandings of post-war French cultural production are revealed in these case studies. But above all, the analyses demonstrate the potential for literary, comparative, cultural, film, gender and food studies of re-thinking with eating and drinking across genres, periods and places.

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This timely study sheds new light on debates about humour and identity in France, and is the first book about humour and identity in France to be published in either English or French that analyses both debates about Charlie Hebdo and standup comedy. It examines humour, freedom of expression, and social cohesion in France during a crucial time in France’s recent history punctuated by the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015. It evaluates the state of French society and attitudes to humour in France in the aftermath of the events of January 2015. This book argues that debates surrounding Charlie Hebdo, although significant, only provide part of the picture when it comes to understanding humour and multiculturalism in France. This monograph fills significant gaps in French and international media coverage and academic writing, which has generally failed to adequately examine the broader picture that emerges when one examines career trajectories of notable contemporary French comedians. By addressing this failing, this book provides a more complete picture of humour, identity, and Republican values in France. By focusing primarily on contemporary comedians in France, this book explores competing uses of French Republican discourse in debates about humour, offensiveness, and freedom of expression. Ultimately, it argues that studying humour and identity in France often reveals a sense of national unease within the Republic at a time of considerable turmoil.

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Each of the three volumes of this magisterial work provides a comprehensive picture of the realities of Jewish life in the Polish lands in the period it covers, while also considering the contemporary political, economic, and social context. Volume I: 1350 to 1881 provides a wide-ranging overview down to the mid-eighteenth century, including social, economic, and religious history. The period from 1764 to 1881 is covered in more detail, with attention focused on developments in each country in turn, especially with regard to the politics of emancipation, acculturation, assimilation, and forced integration. Volume II: 1881 to 1914 explores the factors that had a negative impact on Jewish life as well as the political and cultural movements that developed in consequence: Zionism, socialism, autonomism, the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Jewish urbanization, and the rise of popular Jewish culture. Galicia, Prussian Poland, the Kingdom of Poland, and the tsarist empire are all treated individually, as are the main cities. Volume III: 1914 to 2008 covers the interwar period, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, including Polish–Jewish relations and the Soviet record on the Holocaust. A survey of developments since 1945 concludes with an epilogue on the situation of the Jews since the collapse of communism.

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Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa emerges from, and performs, an ongoing debate concerning the role of transatlantic approaches in the fields of Iberian, Latin American, African, and Luso-Brazilian studies. The innovative research and discussions contained in this volume’s 35 essays by leading scholars in the field reframe the intertwined cultural histories of the diverse transnational spaces encompassed by the former Spanish and Portuguese empires. An emerging field, Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of the traditional academic notions of area studies, while critically engaging the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. Crucially, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries without dehistoricizing or decontextualizing the texts it seeks to incorporate within this new framework.

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Liverpool Beyond the Brink is a fascinating commentary on the economic decline that caused the physical, social and political fragmentation of the imperial city during the 1970s and the efforts since then to revive and reconnect it. It charts Liverpool’s fall in the 1980s, its gradual normalisation in the 1990s, its staggering achievements and, as a European city in the first part of this century, its efforts to be ambitious in an age of austerity. This thought-provoking work asks: how far has Liverpool come and where does it now stand in comparison with thirty years ago and alongside other cities in the UK? What were the most important forces driving change? Who helped the most and who helped the least? Who and where gained the most and who and where gained the least? Finally, the author asks what is next for Liverpool: what are the current challenges for the city? Liverpool Beyond the Brink identifies the key economic, social and political challenges facing the city today to ensure there is increased productivity, future development is high quality and that the benefits of the city’s renaissance are experienced by all the people in Liverpool in all parts of the city. [Cover image: Liverpool Waterfront 2017 © McCoy Wynne (mccoywynne.co.uk)]

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Winner of the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year 2019. Janette Ayachi’s dazzling first collection moves between remembered and imagined spaces as she celebrates the world’s variousness, and the energies and exhaustions of the body. Revelling in the many voices she might find for herself, Ayachi locates herself in both her Algerian and Scottish roots, her relationships with her family and lovers, her own motherhood, and an equally joyful but more precarious exploration of desire. More than anything, this book is a celebration of all Ayachi loves and has loved, especially her own daughters. It is a book that makes a space for itself in the disruptive pleasures of writing, in the face of all that might stifle her, alive to all the potentials of laughter and silence as well as song.

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Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) was the founder of Irish Republican nationalism. As such his political ideas and the circumstances of his life and early death have become powerful political weapons in the hands of later nationalists. Today his name still arouses strong passions and he is hailed as the first prophet of an independent Ireland. Published originally in 1989, Marianne Elliott’s book was the first major biography of Tone, using a wealth of new material to examine his personal life and public actions. Tracing him from his upbringing as a member of the Protestant elite, through his involvement in Irish radical politics, his exile in America, his secret negotiations with the French and return to Ireland with a French invasion force, to his trial for treason and his suicide while awaiting execution, it was a monumental publication that won numerous awards and gained much praise. This second edition brings this award-winning book up to date with new scholarship, new historical insights and fresh insights by Professor Marianne Elliott herself, making a crucial publication for all scholars and readers of Irish history.

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In the midst of the freezing winter of 1978–79, more than 2,000 strikes, infamously coined the “Winter of Discontent,” erupted across Britain as workers rejected the then Labour Government’s attempts to curtail wage increases with an incomes policy. Labour’s subsequent electoral defeat at the hands of the Conservative Party under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher ushered in an era of unprecedented political, economic, and social change for Britain. A potent social myth also quickly developed around the Winter of Discontent, one where “bloody-minded” and “greedy” workers brought down a sympathetic government and supposedly invited the ravages of Thatcherism upon the British labour movement. 'The Winter of Discontent' provides a re-examination of this crucial series of events in British history by charting the construction of the myth of the Winter of Discontent. Highlighting key strikes and bringing forward the previously-ignored experiences of female, black, and Asian rank-and-file workers along-side local trade union leaders, the author places their experiences within a broader constellation of trade union, Labour Party, and Conservative Party changes in the 1970s, showing how striking workers’ motivations become much more textured and complex than the “bloody-minded” or “greedy” labels imply. The author further illustrates that participants’ memories represent a powerful force of “counter-memory,” which for some participants, frame the Winter of Discontent as a positive and transformative series of events, especially for the growing number of female activists. Overall, this fascinating book illuminates the nuanced contours of myth, memory, and history of the Winter of Discontent.

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This book translates the sections on pre-Islamic Persia in three Muslim Arabic chronicles, those of Ahmad al-Ya‘qubi (d. ca. 910), ‘Ali al-Mas‘udi (d. ca. 960) and Hamza al-Isfahani (d. ca. 960s). Their accounts, like those of many other Muslim historians on this topic, draw on texts that were composed in the period 750-850 bearing the title ‘The History of the Kings of the Persians’. These works served a growing audience of well-to-do Muslim bureaucrats and scholars of Persian ancestry, who were interested in their heritage and wished to make it part of the historical outlook of the new civilization that was emerging in the Middle East, namely Islamic civilization. This book explores the question of how knowledge about ancient Iran was transmitted to Muslim historians, in what forms it circulated and how it was shaped and refashioned for the new Perso-Muslim elite that served the early Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, a city that was built only a short distance away from the old Persian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon.

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How did Latin Americans represent their own countries as modern? By treating modernity as a ubiquitous category in which ideas of progress and decadence are far from being mutually exclusive, this book explores how different groups of intellectuals, between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, drew from European sociological and medical theories to produce a series of cultural representations based on notions of degeneration. Through a comparative analysis of three country case studies − Argentina, Uruguay and Chile − the book investigates four themes that were central to definitions of Latin American modernity at the turn of the century: race and the nation, the search for the autochthonous, education, and aesthetic values. Using a transnational approach, it shows how civilizational constructs were adopted and adapted in a post-colonial context where cultural modernism foreshadowed economic modernization. In doing this, this work sheds new light on the complex discursive negotiations through which the idea of ‘Latin America’ became gradually established in the region.

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The Libation Bearers (Choephori) of Aeschylus is the central tragedy of his Oresteia, the only Greek trilogy that survives in full and one of the acknowledged masterpieces of Greek literature. The play enacts and explores in profound detail the unsettling myth of Orestes, the young hero who was obliged to avenge the murder of his father Agamemnon by killing his mother Clytemnestra. The standard commentary, by A. F. Garvie, is intended for advanced students and professional scholars and makes few concessions to the less experienced. This edition, while taking full account of the latest advances in scholarship and criticism, seeks to make the play accessible to a much wider range of readers. Besides an introduction and bibliography it includes a newly constituted Greek text (with critical apparatus), a facing translation closely matched to this, and a commentary keyed to the translation. The commentary seeks to interpret the play at all levels, not avoiding detailed issues of textual criticism and the meaning of individual words but also exploring the play’s imagery, questions of stagecraft and dramatic effect, the poet’s use of existing mythical and poetic material, and the wider significance of the play in relation to the rest of the trilogy.

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This is the first such study of Operation Banner, the British Army’s campaign in Northern Ireland. Drawing upon extensive interviews with former soldiers, primary archival sources including unpublished diaries and unit log-books, this book closely examines soldiers’ behaviour at the small infantry-unit level (Battalion downwards), including the leadership, cohesion and training that sustained, restrained and occasionally misdirected soldiers during the most violent period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It contends that there are aspects of wider scholarly literatures – including from sociology, anthropology, criminology, and psychology - that can throw new light on our understanding of the British Army in Northern Ireland. It also offers fresh insights and analysis of incidents involving the British Army during the early years of Operation Banner, including the 1972 ‘Pitchfork murders’ of Michael Naan and Andrew Murray in County Fermanagh, and that of Warrenpoint hotel owner Edmund Woolsey in South Armagh. The central argument of this book is that British Army small infantry units enjoyed considerable autonomy during the early years of Operation Banner and could behave in a vengeful, highly aggressive or benign and conciliatory way as their local commanders saw fit. The strain of civil-military relations at a senior level was replicated operationally as soldiers came to resent the limitations of waging war in the UK. The unwillingness of the Army’s senior leadership to thoroughly investigate and punish serious transgressions of standard operating procedures in Northern Ireland created uncertainty among soldiers over expected behaviour and desired outcomes. Overly aggressive groups of soldiers could also be mistaken for high-functioning units – with negative consequences for the Army’s overall strategy in Northern Ireland.

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Was pre-Famine and Famine Ireland a violent society? The dominant view among a range of commentators at the time, and in the work of many historians since, is that violence was both prevalent and pervasive in the social and cultural life of the country. This book explores the validity of this perspective through the study of homicide and what it reveals about wider experiences of violence in the country at that time. The book provides a quantitative and contextual analysis of homicide in pre-Famine and Famine Ireland. It explores the relationship between particular and prominent causes of conflict – personal, familial, economic and sectarian – and the use of lethal violence to deal with such conflicts. Throughout the book, the Irish experience is placed within a comparative framework and there is also an exploration of what the history of violence in Ireland might reveal about the wider history of interpersonal violence in Europe and beyond. The aim throughout is to challenge the view of nineteenth-century Ireland as a violent society and to offer a more complex and nuanced assessment of the part played by violence in Irish life.

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Over the last twenty years there has been a growing international interest in the city of Barcelona. This has been reflected in the academic world through a series of studies, courses, seminars, and publications. The Barcelona Reader hinges together a selection of the best academic articles, written in English, about the city, and its main elements of identity and interest: art, urban planning, history and social movements. The book includes scholarly essays about Barcelona that can be of interest to the student and the general public alike. It focuses on cultural representations of the city: the arts (including literature) provide a complex yet discontinuous portrait of the city, similar to a patchwork. The authors selected create a kaleidoscope of views and voices thus presenting a diverse yet inclusive Barcelona portrait. The Barcelona Reader offers a multifaceted assessment that will be essential reading for anyone interested in this iconic city.

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Accompanied along the way by John’s characteristic wit, and with prints ranging from magazine covers, comics and specialist commissioned pieces, Beyond Watchmen and Judge Dredd presents a tour de force of graphic illustration. This beautifully designed book is not only an intricately narrated portfolio from one of the industry’s most celebrated and long serving artists, but also an essential book for all art, graphic and comic enthusiasts.

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