Search results for ""Liverpool University Press""

As a minister of the Ostrogothic regime in the time of Theoderic, Cassiodorus had as brilliant a political career as any Roman of the late empire. Around 538 CE he published a collection of his state letters under the title of Variae (TTH 12), and disappeared from the public record. Half a century later, dying at his country estate in Calabria, he left behind the exemplars for another world of texts: that of the Christian universe of Scripture, now encompassing the Seven Liberal Arts. The grand plan of this new dispensation is contained in the two books of his Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, a work which would be excerpted and copied in monasteries throughout the Latin Middle Ages. The Institutions appears here in the first new English translation in more than fifty years. The treatise On the Soul, which was originally published as the thirteenth book of the Variae, is included as an appendix. For a long while mistakenly revered as a saviour of classical civilization, in recent times more often dismissed as an anachronism, Cassiodorus emerges from this edition of the Institutions as an exceptional but nonetheless representative exponent of the learned Christian culture of later Latin Antiquity. The work will be of interest to historians of the late Roman empire and the early Christian church, medievalists, and students of the classical tradition.

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W. G. Sebald was a literary phenomenon: a German literary scholar working in England, who took up creative writing out of dissatisfaction with German post-war letters. Within only a few years, his unique prose books made him one of the most celebrated authors of the late twentieth-century. Sebald died prematurely, aged 57, after the publication of his most celebrated prose fiction Austerlitz. This accessible critical introduction, written by a leading expert, highlights Sebald’s double role as writer and academic. It discusses his oeuvre in the order in which his works were published in German in order to offer a deeper understanding of the original development of his literary writings. In addition to concise but incisive interpretations of the main publications, Schütte demonstrates how Sebald’s critical writings (most of which still await translation) fed into his literary texts and concludes his study with a perceptive assessment of Sebald as a cult author.

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The Commentary on Revelation is Bede's first venture into Biblical exegesis -- an ambitious choice for a young monastic scholar in a newly Christianized land. Its subject matter – the climax of the great story of creation and redemption, of history and of time itself – adds to the Commentary's intrinsic importance, for these themes lie at the heart of Bede's concerns and of his achievement as a historian, exegete, scholar, and preacher. But Bede was also a man of his age. When he penned the Commentary around 703, speculation and anxiety about the end of the world was in the air. According to conventional chronology, almost 6000 years had passed since creation. If for God 'one day… is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day' (2 Peter 3:8), the world was destined to last six millennia, corresponding to the six days of creation. The end, then, was close. Bede vigorously opposed the temptation to calculate the time of the end. The Commentary argues that Revelation is not a literal prophecy, but a symbolic reflection on the perennial struggle of the Church in this world. At the same time, the young Bede is starting to shape his own account of how the end-times would unfold. This translation, prefaced by a substantial Introduction, will be of interest to students of medieval religious and cultural history, of Anglo-Saxon England, and of the history of Biblical exegesis in the Middle Ages.

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With their dramatic descriptions of black masses and cannibalistic feasts, the records generated by the Basque witch-craze of 160914 provide us with arguably the most demonologically-stereotypical accounts of the witches sabbath or akelarre to have emerged from early modern Europe. While the trials have attracted scholarly attention, the most substantial monograph on the subject was written nearly forty years ago and most works have focused on the ways in which interrogators shaped the pattern of prosecutions and the testimonies of defendants. Invoking the Akelarre diverts from this norm by employing more recent historiographical paradigms to analyze the contributions of the accused. Through interdisciplinary analyses of both French- and Spanish-Basque records, it argues that suspects were not passive recipients of elite demonological stereotypes but animated these received templates with their own belief and experience, from the dark exoticism of magical conjuration, liturgical cursing and theatrical misrule to the sharp pragmatism of domestic medical practice and everyday religious observance. In highlighting the range of raw materials available to the suspects, the book helps us to understand how the fiction of the witches sabbath emerged to such prominence in contemporary mentalities, whilst also restoring some agency to the defendants and nuancing the historical thesis that stereotypical content points to interrogatorial opinion and folkloric content to the voices of the accused. In its local context, this study provides an intimate portrait of peasant communities as they flourished in the Basque region in this period and leaves us with the irony that Europes most sensationally-demonological accounts of the witches sabbath may have evolved out of a particularly ardent commitment, on the part of ordinary Basques, to the social and devotional structures of popular Catholicism.

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This book brings together the studies of Jeaneane Fowler in Taoism, Chinese popular religion and the broader canvas of Chinese cosmogony, and those of Merv Fowler in Confucianism, Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism and Pure Land Buddhism. 'Chinese Religions' requires no previous knowledge and thereby serves as an introduction to the religions of China, and places it in the wider context of Chinese history and philosophy. The facets of Chinese religions are as broad, multilayered and varied as the geographical vastness of China itself, yet so many Chinese beliefs have found their way into the West -- the theory of yin and yang, the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching are good examples. One of the greatest characteristics of Chinese religions is that they encompass virtually every avenue of religious thought throughout the long span of Chinese pre-historic and historical pathways.

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Scholars from France and from countries of the Huguenot Refuge examine the situation of French Protestants before and after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in France and in the countries to which many of them fled during the great exodus which followed the Edict of Fontainebleau. Covering a period from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the volume examines aspects of life in France, from the debate on church unity to funeral customs, but its primary focus is on departure from France and its consequences -- both before and after the Revocation. It offers insights into individuals and groups, from grandees such as Henri de Ruvigny, depute general and later Earl of Galway, to converted Catholic priests and from businessmen and communities choosing their destination for economic as well as religious reasons, to women and children moving across European frontiers or groups seeking refuge in the islands of the Indian Ocean. The information-gathering activities of the French authorities and the reception of problematic groups such as the Camisard prophets among exile communities are examined, as well as the significant contributions which Huguenots began to make, in a variety of domains, to the countries in which they had settled. The refugees were extremely interested in the history of their diaspora and of the individuals of which it was composed, and this theme too is explored. Finally, the Napoleonic period brought some of the refugees up against France in a more immediate way, raising further questions of identity and aspiration for the Huguenot community in Germany.

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The confessions of Isobel Gowdie are widely recognised as the most extraordinary on record in Britain. Their descriptive power and vivid imagery have attracted considerable interest on both academic and popular levels. Among historians, the confessions are celebrated for providing a unique insight into the way fairy beliefs and witch beliefs interacted in the early modern mind; more controversially, they are also cited as evidence for the existence of Shamanistic visionary traditions, of pre-Christian origin, in Scotland in this period. On a popular level the confessions of Isobel Gowdie have, above any other British witch-trial records, influenced the formation of the ritual traditions of Wicca. The author's discovery of the original trial records (currently being authenticated by the National Archives of Scotland), deemed lost for nearly 200 years, provides a starting point for an interdisciplinary look at the confessions and the woman behind them. Using historical, psychological, comparative religious and anthropological perspectives this book sets out to separate the voice of Isobel Gowdie from that of her interrogators, and to determine the experiences and beliefs which may have generated her confessions. The book explores: How far did those accused of witchcraft self-consciously practice harmful magic? Did they really believe themselves to have made a Pact with an envisioned Devil? Did they ever participate in ecstatic cult rituals? The author argues that close analysis of Isobel's testimony supports the view that in seventeenth-century Britain popular spirituality was shaped by a deep interaction between Christian teachings and shamanistic visionary traditions, of pre-Christian origin. These findings confirm the value of witchcraft confessions as unique windows into the complexities of the early modern religious imagination.

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In this highly original study, David Gillis demonstrates that the Mishneh torah, Maimonides’ code of Jewish law, has the structure of a microcosm. Through this symbolic form, Maimonides presents the law as designed to perfect the individual and society by shaping them in the image of the divinely created cosmic order. The commandments of the law thereby bring human beings closer to fulfilling their ultimate purpose, knowledge of God. This symbolism turns the Mishneh torah into an object of contemplation that itself communicates such knowledge. In short, it is a work of art. Gillis unpacks the metaphysical and cosmological underpinnings of Maimonides’ scheme of organization with consummate skill, allowing the reader to understand the Mishneh torah’s artistic dimension and to appreciate its power. Moreover, as he makes clear, uncovering this dimension casts new light on one of the great cruxes of Maimonides studies: the relationship of the Mishneh torah to his philosophical treatise The Guide of the Perplexed. A fundamental unity is revealed between Maimonides the codifier and Maimonides the philosopher that has not been fully appreciated hitherto. Maimonides’ artistry in composition is repeatedly shown to serve his aims in persuading us of the coherence and wisdom of the halakhic system. Gillis’s fine exegesis sets in high relief the humane and transcendental purposes and methods of halakhah as Maimonides conceived of it, in an argument that is sure-footed and convincing.

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This Devil’s Advocate explores the cinematic wonders of Brian Desmond Hurst’s much loved 1951 adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge, through the prism of horror cinema, arguing that the film has less in common with cosy festive tradition than it does with terror cinema like James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and F.W. Murnau’s Faust. Beginning with Charles Dickens himself, a prolific writer of ghost stories, with A Christmas Carol being but one of many, Colin Fleming then considers earlier cinematic adaptations including 1935’s folk-horror-like Scrooge, before offering a full account of the Hurst/Sim version, stressing what must always be kept at the forefront of our minds: this is a ghost story.

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This first comprehensive English collection of the interviews of Jacques Rivette (19282016) documents his career through chronology, filmography, bibliography, and image stills. A comprehensive introduction places this work in the wider context of twentieth-century social change. Rivettes films, like many of the works of the French New Wave, seem to have avoided the aging process entirely, remaining as playful, fresh, and quietly spectacular as the day they were made. Indeed, his body of work may be the most impressive of the French New Wave. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) has been recognized as possibly the best film to emerge from the post-New Wave era, even as Paris Belongs to Us (1961) is one of the best pictures to emerge from the New Wave itself. Rivette was hardly the most prolific director, however, and the length of his films has often counted against him. Nonetheless, his clinical, self-reflexive essays in film form reveal him as a cinematic purist whose commitment to the celluloid muse hardly diminished from the heady days of the early 1950s to the end of his career in 2009. Beyond inspiring the New Wave movement and continuing to reflect, and reflect on, its central tenets, Rivettes enduring contribution to the history of film is unquestionably evident in his sensitive treatment of the histories and destinies of women, especially through strong roles for actresses. During the six decades of his career, nonetheless, he struck a subtle balance not only between female and male characters, but also between political and personal obsession, between myth and fiction, between theater and cinema, in films that, in addition to having influenced such contemporary filmmakers as Claire Denis, Jim Jarmusch, Olivier Assayas, and David Lynch, continue to redefine the art of cinema around the world.

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Digitizing Enlightenment explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of the Enlightenment. The featured projects are some of the best known, well-funded and longest established research initiatives in the emerging area of ‘digital humanities’, a field that has, particularly since 2010, been attracting a rising tide of interest from professional academics, the media, funding councils, and the general public worldwide. Advocates and practitioners of the digital humanities argue that computational methods can fundamentally transform our ability to answer some of the ‘big questions’ that drive humanities research, allowing us to see patterns and relationships that were hitherto hard to discern, and to pinpoint, visualise, and analyse relevant data in efficient and powerful new ways. In the book’s opening section, leading scholars outline their own projects’ institutional and intellectual histories, the techniques and methodologies they specifically developed, the sometimes-painful lessons learned in the process, future trajectories for their research, and how their findings are revising previous understandings. A second section features chapters from early career scholars working at the intersection of digital methods and Enlightenment studies, an intellectual space largely forged by the projects featured in part one. Highlighting current and future research methods and directions for digital eighteenth-century studies, the book offers a monument to the current state of digital work, an overview of current findings, and a vision statement for future research. Featuring contributions from Keith Michael Baker, Elizabeth Andrews Bond, Robert M. Bond, Simon Burrows, Catherine Nicole Coleman, Melanie Conroy, Charles Cooney, Nicholas Cronk, Dan Edelstein, Chloe Summers Edmondson, the late Richard Frautschi, Clovis Gladstone, Howard Hotson, Angus Martin, Katherine McDonough, Alicia C. Montoya, Robert Morrissey, Laure Philip, Jeffrey S. Ravel, Glenn Roe, and Sean Takats.

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Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020.Poetry Book Society Choice, Summer 2020.Bhanu Kapil’s extraordinary and original work has been published in the US over the last two decades. During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers. Her books often defy categorisation as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath, creating what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a ‘Literature that is not made from literature’. Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told. How To Wash A Heart, Kapil's first full-length collection published in the UK, depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care.

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Volume 4 of this acclaimed series of documents with commentary is the most substantial study of the German home front in World War II available in English. It illuminates the nature of Nazism and the regime it established by documenting politics and life in wartime Germany: government and party, law and terror, welfare and social planning, sex and population policy, women, youth, propoganda, morale and resistance.

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'Old Oligarch' is a label often applied to the unknown author of the Athenian Constitution preserved with the works of Xenophon. Probably written in the mid 420s B.C., it is the earliest surviving Athenian prose text, and its author was probably a young pupil of the teachers known as sophists. It is an essay which replies to oligarchic criticisms of the Athenian democracy by agreeing with the critics that democracy is distasteful but arguing that it is appropriate for Athens as a city whose power depends on the poorer citizens who row the navy's ships, and that it is successful and could not easily be overthrown. This edition provides a Greek text and English translation, with Introduction, Commentary and Appendixes which discuss the date, authorship and character of the work, the historical background, the statements and arguments presented by the author and features of the author's style.

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One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare's Hamlet is unsurpassed in its complexity and richness. Now the most extensively annotated version of Hamlet to date makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers, and the general reader in mind.Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations provide readers with all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. This version of Hamlet is unparalleled for its thoroughness and adherence to sound historical linguistics. In his introduction, Raffel offers important background on the origins and previous versions of the Hamlet story, along with an analysis of the characters Hamlet and Ophelia. And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom meditates on the originality of Shakespeare's achievement. The book also includes a careful selection of items for further reading.

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David Alexander provides a concise yet comprehensive and systematic primer on how to prepare for a disaster. The book introduces the methods, procedures, protocols and strategies of emergency planning, with an emphasis on situations within industrialized countries. It is designed to be a reference source and manual from which emergency mangers can extract ideas, suggestions and pro-forma methodologies to help them design and implement emergency plans.

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Animal Alterity uses readings of science fiction texts to explore the centrality of animals for our ways of thinking about human. It argues that the academic field of animal studies and the popular genre of science fiction share a number a critical concerns: thinking about otherness and the nature of human being; desiring communication across species difference; and interrogating the social and ethical consequences of changes in science and technology. We are living in a complex set of contradictory and conflicting relations with non-human animals. This book maps this complex terrain, arguing that we are better able to perceive options for a transformed politics if we perceive our various material relations with non-human animals within a deeper understanding of the functions of the category ‘animal’.

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Liminal periods in politics often serve as points in time when traditional methods and principles organizing society are disrupted. These periods of interregnum may not always result in complete social upheaval, but they do open the space to imagine social and political change in diverse forms. In Queering the Enlightenment: kinship and gender in the literature of eighteenth-century France, Tracy Rutler uncovers how numerous canonical authors of the 1730s and 40s were imagining radically different ways of organizing the masses during the early years of Louis XV’s reign. Through studies of the literature of Antoine François Prévost, Claude Crébillon, Pierre de Marivaux, and Françoise de Graffigny among others, Rutler demonstrates how the heteronormative bourgeois family’s rise to dominance in late-eighteenth-century France had long been contested within the fictional worlds of many French authors. The utopian impulses guiding the fiction studied in this book distinguish these authors as some of the most brilliant political theorists of the day. Enlightenment, for these authors, means reorienting one’s relation to power by reorganizing their most intimate relations. Using a practice of reading queerly, Rutler shows how these works illuminate the unparalleled potential of queer forms of kinship to dismantle the patriarchy and help us imagine what might eventually take its place.

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Dread Trident examines the rise of imaginary worlds in tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs), such as Dungeons and Dragons. With the combination of analog and digital mechanisms, from traditional books to the internet, new ways of engaging the fantastic have become increasingly realized in recent years, and this book seeks an understanding of this phenomenon within the discourses of trans- and posthumanism, as well as within a gameist mode.The book explores a number of case studies of foundational TRPGs. Dungeons and Dragons provides an illustration of pulp-driven fantasy, particularly in the way it harmonizes its many campaign settings into a functional multiverse. It also acts as a supreme example of depth within its archive of official and unofficial published material, stretching back four decades. Warhammer 40k and the Worlds of Darkness present an interesting dialogue between Gothic and science-fantasy elements. The Mythos of HP Lovecraft also features prominently in the book as an example of a realized world that spans the literary and gameist modes.Realized fantasy worlds are becoming ever more popular as a way of experiencing a touch of the magical within modern life. Reworking Northrop Frye’s definition of irony, Dread Trident theorizes an ironic understanding of this process and in particular of its embodied forms.

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Winner of the 2021 National University of Ireland’s Publication Prize in Irish History.Highly Commended, 2020 British Association for Irish Studies Book prize.This book provides the first detailed analysis of the influence of former Irish Parliamentary Party members and methods in independent Ireland and the place of the party’s leaders in public memory. Previous studies of the party have concluded with its dramatic fall in 1918 and shown little interest in the fate of its members thereafter. This study adopts a new approach, using biographical data to provide the first statistical analysis of the Irish Party heritage within each political party in the independent Irish state established in 1922. Utilising a wealth of archival material, as well as contemporary and critical writings, it explores how former Irish Party followers reacted to the changed circumstances of independent Ireland. One chapter undertakes a case study of the Irish National League, arguing that this organisation, founded and led by former MPs, effectively constituted a ‘legacy party’.Analysis of party politics is complemented by scrutiny of the practice of commemoration to ask how the Irish Party was remembered in a state founded on the sacrifice of the Easter Rising. This detailed study of the evolution of the party’s public memory sheds new and significant light on the way that figures such as Charles Stewart Parnell, John Redmond and Michael Davitt were remembered.

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An ‘Irish Cuba’ – on Britain’s doorstep? This book studies perceptions of the Soviet Union's influence over Irish revolutionaries during the Cold War. The Dublin authorities did not allow the Irish state’s non-aligned status to prevent them joining the West’s struggle against communism. Leading officials, such as Colonel Dan Bryan in G2, the Irish army intelligence directorate, argued that Ireland should assist the NATO powers. British and Irish officials believed communists in Ireland were directed by the British communist party, the CPGB. If Moscow's express adherents were too isolated to pose a threat in either Irish jurisdiction, the republican movement was a different matter. The authorities, north and south, saw that a communist-influenced IRA had potential appeal. This Cold War nightmare arrived with the outbreak of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Whitehall feared Dublin could become a Russian espionage hub, with the Marxist-led Official IRA acting as a Soviet proxy. To what extent did the Official republican movement's Workers’ Party serve the Soviets’ Cold War agenda?

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Revisioning French Culture brings together a remarkable group of leading intellectuals and scholars to explore new avenues of research in French and Francophone Studies. Covering the medieval period through the twenty-first century, this volume presents investigations into a vast array of subjects. Revisioning French Culture grapples with topics vital to the contemporary cultural landscape, including universalism, globalization, the idea of Francophonie, and religious and secular identity. This essay collection furthermore transcends and illuminates the contemporary by delving into matters that have long resonated in the humanities and letters, such as death, war, trauma, power and politics, notions of the truth, conceptions of the self, and modes of reading and writing. With contributions by a number of figures known across the humanities and the social sciences, Revisioning French Culture provides cultural, political, and historical context for the crisis facing democracy and liberalism around the world today. These essays were assembled in honor of Lawrence D. Kritzman, whose writing and editorial work in French studies inspired the wide-ranging themes examined here.

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In the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945-75), ‘contemporary’ French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-century French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’ In Beyond Return, Lucas Hollister proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels, radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, Hollister shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of ‘return,’ and thus redraw in different manners the boundaries of the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Hollister argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the ‘return to the story’ in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.

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The ambition of this book is to resituate the problem of ‘world literature’, considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. This theory has a long pedigree in the social sciences, where it continues to stimulate debate. But its implications for cultural analysis have received less attention, even though the theory might be said to draw attention to a central – perhaps the central – arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development, on the one hand, and the recently interrogated and expanded categories of ‘world literature’ and ‘modernism’, on the other, that this book looks for its specific contours. In the two theoretical chapters that frame the book, the authors argue for a single, but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature. In the four substantive chapters that then follow, the authors explore a selection of modern-era fictions in which the potential of their method of comparativism seems to be most dramatically highlighted. They treat the novel paradigmatically, not exemplarily, as a literary form in which combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies as a ‘modernising’ import. The peculiar plasticity and hybridity of the novel form enables it to incorporate not only multiple literary levels, genres and modes, but also other non-literary and archaic cultural forms – so that, for example, realist elements might be mixed with more experimental modes of narration, or older literary devices might be reactivated in juxtaposition with more contemporary frames.

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Volcanoes are intimately tied to the history of humanity, they help forge the Earth's crust and atmosphere, and they are very much an active feature of today. The archaeology of most ancient civilizations of Europe preserves the imprint of spectacular and volcanic phenomena while, in modern times life is still affected by large eruptions from Europe’s active volcanic systems. The eruption of Santorini, some 3600 years ago in the Aegean, probably inspired the Greek fables of Atlantis; the eruptions of Etna on Sicily are the origin of the forges of Cyclops and other myths; and the regular eruptions from Stromboli earned its Roman name, ‘the Lighthouse of the Mediterranean’. Eruptions in Iceland over the past few centuries have shaped more recent European history and highlight the dramatic effects that distant large eruptions can have on our modern way of living. This thoroughly revised and updated edition reflects modern research and is now illustrated in colour throughout. It presents the volcanoes of Europe, as they are today and tells how they have shaped our past. The volcanic systems of the Mediterranean basin, the Atlantic, and of mainland Europe are introduced and described in clear prose with a minimum of technical jargon. Some of Europe’s ancient volcanic systems is also described as these have been fundamental in shaping the science of volcanology. The origins, history and development of Europe’s volcanoes is presented against a background of their environmental aspects and contemporary activity. Special attention is given to the impact of volcanoes on the people who live on or around them. The book is written for student, amateur and professional earth scientists alike. To help guide the reader, a glossary of volcanic terms is included together with a vocabulary of volcanic terms used in European languages.

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The world is becoming more hazardous as natural and social processes combine to create complex situations of increased vulnerability and risk. There is increasing recognition that this trend is creating exigencies that must be dealt with. The common approach is to delegate the task of preparing an emergency plan to someone. Often that person is expected to get on with job but rarely is the means and instruction of how to write such a plan provided to them. There are a host of instances in which the letter of the law, not the spirit, is honoured by providing a token plan of little validity.David Alexander provides, in this book, the assistance needed to write an emergency plan. It is a practical ‘how to’ manual and guide aimed at managers in business, civil protection officers, civil security officials, civil defence commanders, neighbourhood leaders and disaster managers who have been tasked with writing, reviewing or preparing emergency plans for all kinds of emergency, disaster or catastrophe. He takes the reader through the process of writing an emergency plan, step by step, starting with the rationale and context, before moving on through the stages of writing and activating a basic, generic emergency plan and concludes with information on specific kinds of plan, for example, for hospitals and cultural heritage sites.This practical guide also provides a core for postgraduate training in emergency management and has been written in such a way that it is not tied to the legal constraints of any particular jurisdiction.

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

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Intellectual Disability and Ireland, 1947–1996 explores the varied experiences of the intellectually disabled during the latter half of the mid-twentieth century in Ireland. Addressing the evolution of disability policies and provision, it shows how a range of different actors became engaged in shaping the disability services landscape during this period. Drawing on a variety of sources, from government memoranda to RTÉ television programmes, David Kilgannon traces the development of disability services on paper and in reality. This narrative is marked by instances of both striking transformation and significant continuity, as the emergence of new policy thinking occurred in tandem with the consolidation of established approaches. The book describes not only how services changed but why, offering a unique perspective on the evolution of Irish social policy in the post-war years.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website (https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pages/essentials-of-financial-management-efm).Essentials of Financial Management is an Open Access e-textbook (paperback edition also available) suitable for students with limited knowledge of finance and financial markets. It answers the main questions of a corporate entity, such as how businesses finance their activities, how they select projects to invest in, the distribution of net cash flow and, of increasing importance, how businesses manage price risk relating to cost of goods sold or a decline in revenue. In providing invaluable guidance to finance, management and business students, Essentials of Financial Management employs two main philosophies: that finance is a real-life subject and that finance is a numerical subject, which is why this brilliant e-textbook contains real world examples as well as numerous Excel spreadsheet solutions for students to download and use.

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Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872-1945) was an accomplished painter, illustrator and designer whose artistic life bridged the Victorian and modern worlds. Her work was much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite artists whose love of detail, colour, symbolism, storytelling and nature was so hugely influential on mid Victorian Britain. Eleanor’s own work carried the Pre-Raphaelite style forward into the 20th century. Indeed she became known as ‘the last Pre-Raphaelite’. Despite her huge popularity in her own time, Eleanor’s work has been neglected since her death in 1945. This book is the first monograph on the artist. It is the result of extensive research by Pamela Gerrish Nunn, whose work on Pre-Raphaelite women artists has done so much to re-assess the art history of the Victorian period. Here, the author takes us on a journey through Eleanor’s training, career and achievements to re-establish her as an important and fascinating figure in the history of Pre-Raphaelite art. Published by Liverpool University Press with National Museums Liverpool.

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An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.In a world increasingly defined by the transnational and translingual, and by the pressures of globalization, it has become difficult to study culture as primarily a national phenomenon. A Handbook offers students across Modern Languages an introduction to the kind of methodological questions they need to look at culture transnationally. Each of the short essays takes a key concept in cultural study and suggests how it might be used to explore and illuminate some aspect of identity, mobility, translation, and cultural exchange across borders. The authors range over different language areas and their wide chronological reach provides broad coverage, as well as a flexible and practical methodology for studying cultures in a transnational framework. The essays show that an inclusive, transnational vision and practice of Modern Languages is central to understanding human interaction in an inclusive, globalized society. A Handbook stands as an effective and necessary theoretical and thematically diverse glossary and companion to the ‘national’ volumes in the series.

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This book accompanies the first exhibition entirely of Jamaican art to take place in the north-west of the UK. The exhibition, Jamaica Making: The Theresa Roberts Art Collection, is sited at the Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool in 2022, and is a comprehensive presentation of the best of Jamaican art since the 1960s. The Theresa Roberts Art Collection is the private collection of Theresa Roberts, a Jamaican-born businesswoman and philanthropist, who has made the UK her home. This collection offers an important insight into the development of Jamaican art since the country gained independence in 1962. Indeed, the exhibition also acts to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Jamaican independence in 2022. Included in the book are the following: an official welcome from the Prime Minister of Jamaica; an essay by the collector, exhibition donor and philanthropist, Theresa Roberts; an introduction by eminent British-Jamaican art historian, Edward Lucie-Smith; essays by Emma Roberts, the exhibition curator (Liverpool John Moores University), Davinia Gregory-Kameka, writer, educator and researcher (Columbia University, USA) and Sireita Mullings, arts practitioner and visual sociologist (University of Bedfordshire). The final section of the book is the full visual catalogue of the Jamaica Making exhibition – a unique record of this historic exhibition. An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Beggars and begging were ubiquitous features of pre-Famine Irish society, yet have gone largely unexamined by historians. This book explores at length for the first time the complex cultures of mendicancy, as well as how wider societal perceptions of and responses to begging were framed by social class, gender and religion. The study breaks new ground in exploring the challenges inherent in defining and measuring begging and alms-giving in pre-Famine Ireland, as well as the disparate ways in which mendicants were perceived by contemporaries. A discussion of the evolving role of parish vestries in the life of pre-Famine communities facilitates an examination of corporate responses to beggary, while a comprehensive analysis of the mendicity society movement, which flourished throughout Ireland in the three decades following 1815, highlights the significance of charitable societies and associational culture in responding to the perceived threat of mendicancy. The instance of the mendicity societies illustrates the extent to which Irish commentators and social reformers were influenced by prevailing theories and practices in the transatlantic world regarding the management of the poor and deviant. Drawing on a wide range of sources previously unused for the study of poverty and welfare, this book makes an important contribution to modern Irish social and ecclesiastical history.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Moving Histories is an original and enlightening book which details the lives of women who left Ireland after independence. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, this book traces new narratives to bring original insights into the migration of thousands of Irish women in the twentieth century. Despite having a strong tendency to leave Ireland like men, women’s migration to Britain has been less well studied. Yet Irish women could be found in all walks of life in Britain, from the more familiar fields of nursing and domestic service to teaching, factory work and more. This fascinating study also considers the public commentary made about Irish women from the pulpit, press and politicians, who thought the women to be flighty, in need of guidance and prone to moral failures away from home. The repeated coverage of the ‘emigrant girl’ in government memos and journals gave the impression Irish women were leaving for reasons other than employment. Moving Histories argues that the continued focus on Irish unmarried mothers in Britain was based on genuine concerns and a real problem, but such women were not representative. They were, rather, an indictment of the conservative socio-cultural environment of an Ireland that suppressed open discourse of sexuality and forced women to ‘hide their shame’ in institutions at home and abroad.

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

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Moving Histories is an original and enlightening book which details the lives of women who left Ireland after independence. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, this book traces new narratives to bring original insights into the migration of thousands of Irish women in the twentieth century. Despite having a strong tendency to leave Ireland like men, women’s migration to Britain has been less well studied. Yet Irish women could be found in all walks of life in Britain, from the more familiar fields of nursing and domestic service to teaching, factory work and more. This fascinating study also considers the public commentary made about Irish women from the pulpit, press and politicians, who thought the women to be flighty, in need of guidance and prone to moral failures away from home. The repeated coverage of the ‘emigrant girl’ in government memos and journals gave the impression Irish women were leaving for reasons other than employment. Moving Histories argues that the continued focus on Irish unmarried mothers in Britain was based on genuine concerns and a real problem, but such women were not representative. They were, rather, an indictment of the conservative socio-cultural environment of an Ireland that suppressed open discourse of sexuality and forced women to ‘hide their shame’ in institutions at home and abroad.

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Steve Vine’s study introduces the full range of William Blake’s poetry and illuminated books from the early Songs to the late epics, and focuses on the socially radical and challenging nature of his art.

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This study explores the inter-relationship between emotion and religion in women's poetry of the Romantic and Victorian eras.

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This book introduces the reader to the work for which Swinburne is most famous, concentrating on three major collections - Poems and Ballads 1 (1866), Songs before Sunrise (1871) and Poems and Ballads 2 (1878), as well as a number of his most influential essays.

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In this book, John Woolford specifies the precise meaning and scope of 'the grotesque' by placing Browning in a major aesthetic tradition running from the Romantic Sublime through to modern concepts and theorisations of the grotesque, such as the Bakhtinian.

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In this study, Robert Miles argues that many of the reasons for Austen’s construction as an English Cultural icon are to be found in the works’ formal qualities, and often in her most innovative techniques.

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Examining the whole range of J.G. Ballard’s writings, from the early science fiction stories to Cocaine Nights (1996), Delville’s study offers a critical and theoretically informed analysis of his achievements as a novelist and a commentator on contemporary culture.

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

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