Search results for ""author frances"

In this compelling new study of the disastrous 1940 campaign in France and Flanders, Matthew Richardson reconstructs in vivid detail the British army's defeat as it was experienced by the soldiers of a single battalion, the 2nd/5th Leicesters. These men typified the ill-equipped, under-trained British battalions that faced the blitzkrieg and the might of Hitler's legions. They were thrown into a series of desperate, one-sided engagements that resulted in a humiliating retreat, then evacuation from Dunkirk. This is their story.Matthew Richardson is curator of social history at Manx National Heritage and was formerly assistant keeper of the Liddle Collection at the University of Leeds. He has a long-term interest in military history and research, focusing in particular on the First and Second World Wars and on the history of the Leicestershire Regiment. In addition to writing many magazine articles on military history, he has published the following books: The Tigers and Fighting Tigers. He is currently working on 1914: Clash of Empires.

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In annotated texts based on those of the acclaimed Florida Edition of The Works of Laurence Sterne, this edition features the two works Sterne produced in the final year of his illness-plagued life: the witty, bawdy, pathetic, and thoughtful A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy; and Continuation of the Bramine's Journal, Sterne's correspondence to a twenty-two-year-old married Englishwoman living in India ("a Diary," as he put it, "of the miserable feelings of a person separated from a Lady for whose Society he languish'd").Together, these mutually illuminating works offer rich insight into their author's hopes, fears, loves, longings, and philosophy as he prepared to face death and judgment. Excerpts from related texts provide context for understanding the title works in relation to the earlier writings and life of this exuberant yet subtle genius of eighteenth-century English literature.

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A novel look at the relationship between Impressionist painting and photography and the forging of a national identity in France between 1850 and 1880 Between 1850 and 1880, Impressionist landscape painting and early forms of photography flourished within the arts in France. In the context of massive social and political change that also marked this era, painters and photographers composed competing visions of France as modern and industrialized or as rural and anti-modern. Impressionist France explores the resonances between landscape art and national identity as reflected in the paintings and photographs made during this period, examining and illustrating in particular the works of key artists such as Édouard Baldus, Gustave Le Gray, the Bisson Frères, Édouard Manet, Jean-François Millet, Claude Monet, Charles Nègre, and Camille Pissarro. This ambitious premise focuses on the whole of France, exploring the relationship between landscape art and the notion of French nationhood across the country’s varied and spectacular landscapes in seven geographical sections and four scholarly essays, which provide new information regarding the production and impact of French Impressionism.Distributed for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art(10/19/13-02/09/14)Saint Louis Art Museum(03/16/14–07/06/14)

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Between 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, millions of nude photographs of the female form—artistic, pornographic, and everything in-between—were produced in France, the birthplace of photography. Drawing upon government records, legal decisions, newspaper accounts, and contemporary literature, Raisa Rexer recounts the history of these illicit and ubiquitous images and elucidates their immense cultural and artistic reach. Rexer focuses in particular on the ways that nude photographic imagery influenced some of the greatest authors of the period, including Charles Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, and Émile Zola, and sets their work against historical records and nonfiction print sources to tell the story of evolving perceptions of nude photography. In the period immediately after photography's invention, nude photographs were vitally connected to the questions of art and artistry, particularly with regard to photography's aspirations to high cultural status. By the end of the century, however, as production and sales expanded internationally and as photographs of nudes flooded the streets and shops, proliferation of these pictures was increasingly viewed as one of a host of social problems plaguing France. Illustrated with nearly ninety period images, The Fallen Veil offers the first full treatment of the photographic nude in the nineteenth century and considers how this history continues to influence many of the same questions we ask today about art, pornography, and the relation between the two.

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From the critically acclaimed author of The Library of Legends comes a vividly rendered novel set in WWI France about two young women—one Chinese, one French—whose lives intersect with unexpected, potentially dangerous consequences.“East meets West in World War I France. In The Porcelain Moon, Janie Chang exhibits her signature trademarks—lyrical prose, deftly drawn characters, and skillful excavation of little-known history—to give us a rare jewel in a sea of wartime fiction!”— Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling authorFrance, 1918. In the final days of the First World War, a young Chinese woman, Pauline Deng, runs away from her uncle’s home in Paris to evade a marriage being arranged for her in Shanghai. To prevent the union, she needs the help of her cousin Theo, who is working as a translator for the Chinese Labour Corps in the French countryside. In the town of Noyelles-sur-Mer, Camille Roussel is planning her escape from an abusive marriage, and to end a love affair that can no longer continue. When Camille offers Pauline a room for her stay, the two women become friends. But it’s not long before Pauline uncovers a perilous secret that Camille has been hiding from her. As their dangerous situation escalates, the two women are forced to make a terrible decision that will bind them together for the rest of their lives.Set against the little-known history of the 140,000 Chinese workers brought to Europe as non-combatant labor during WWI, The Porcelain Moon is a tale of forbidden love, identity and belonging, and what we are willing to risk for freedom.

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"Slick, sick and not for the faint-hearted. It will make you cry out (for more)" - Mark Sanderson, The Times"Exhilarating . . . This is not conventional crime" Barry Forshaw, Independent Introducing Olivier Norek: Former police officer, writer on Spiral and an award-winning, million-copy bestseller.A corpse that wakes up during the autopsy. A case of spontaneous human combustion. There is little by the way of violent crime that Capitaine Victor Coste has not encountered in his fifteen years policing France's most notorious suburb ­- but nothing like this. As he struggles to find a link between the cases, he receives a pair of anonymous letters highlighting the fates of two women whose deaths were never explained - two more blurred faces among the ranks of the lost and the damned.Why were their murders not investigated? Coste is not the only one asking that question. Someone out there believes justice is best served on a cold mortuary slab. What readers are saying about The Lost and the DamnedYou can see the similarities with the TV series Spiral, which can only be a major positive!A hard hitting and gritty French crime read that makes an impact.A great thriller, sardonic, humorous, dark.I loved this book. Well written and had an authentic feel to it. A complete page turner.Translated from the French by Nick Caistor

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Industry and Society in Europe examines changes in industrial organization in Britain, Germany and France from the perspectives of economic sociology and political economy. This important new textbook presents a systematic, comparative analysis of recent processes of industrial and social change in these societies and assesses the contribution each country will make to the emerging European social and economic entity. Written in an accessible, jargon-free style, the book covers a wide range of highly topical themes, including the finance-industry nexus, corporate restructuring, the impact of globalization, the role of small and medium-sized firms, state - industry relations and new developments in work organization and industrial relations. Introducing a sociological perspective to the study of business and economic life, Christel Lane critically engages with some of the main theories in the field including flexible specialization, regulation theory and the new institutionalism in sociology.

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During World War II, French citizens expressed that the German occupiers behaved more "correctly" than the American combat troops who replaced them. In The Struggle for Cooperation: Liberated France and the American Military, 1944--1946, author Robert L. Fuller presents a unique perspective on the relations between France and the United States during the Second World War. Until the summer of 1944, the German Army made real efforts to fare well with the French to make their occupation duties easier. The Americans also tried to get along with the French; however, American GIs were subjected to looser discipline than German soldiers. Most GIs behaved appropriately, but the small number who did not created an unfavorable impression among the French -- which created tension, mutual feelings of suspicion and dislike, and occasional displays of outright hostility. Yet, because the war against the Axis powers was also France's war, most French, especially officials, wanted to work cooperatively with the Americans to play their part in winning it.Fuller reveals how the French handled various issues that demanded cooperation, including the requisition of French property, the treatment of Axis prisoners of war, the utilization of French transportation networks, GI crime, and the effective American takeover of the port of Marseille. Other interactions, such as controlling black markets and caring for displaced persons, fostered both cooperation and friction. Fuller establishes how all of these issues offered the possibility of working together peacefully or in conflict, and how -- more often than not -- the results ended with positive and amicable actions.

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This is an exploration into the darkest side of cinema. Explosive images of sex and violence in films by directors such as Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noe, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier have attracted media attention for the ways in which they seek to shock and provoke the spectator into powerful affective and visceral responses. This first collection of essays devoted to the new extremism in contemporary European cinema critically interrogates this highly contentious body of work and demonstrates that these films and the controversies they engender are indispensable to the critical task of rethinking the terms of spectatorship. Through critical discussions of key films and directors, this book sheds new light on cutting-edge debates in Film Studies regarding sexuality, violence and spectatorship, affect and ethics, and the political dimensions of extreme cinema. Including important new work from internationally renowned scholars Martin Barker and Martine Beugnet, as well as combining a range of approaches to extreme cinema across audience research and theories of spectatorship, this exploration of the darkest side of cinema is an invaluable resource for film scholars and students.

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Inspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public is a compelling addition to the long-running debate about the link between the Enlightenment and the political struggle that followed. Elizabeth Andrews Bond scoured France's local newspapers spanning the two decades prior to the Revolution as well as its first three years, shining a light on the letters to the editor. A form of early social media, these letters constituted a lively and ongoing conversation among readers. Bond takes us beyond the glamorous salons of the intelligentsia into the everyday worlds of the craftsmen, clergy, farmers, and women who composed these letters. As a result, we get a fascinating glimpse into who participated in public discourse, what they most wanted to discuss, and how they shaped a climate of opinion. The Writing Public offers a novel examination of how French citizens used the information press to form norms of civic discourse and shape the experience of revolution. The result is a nuanced analysis of knowledge production during the Enlightenment. Thanks to generous funding from The Ohio State University Libraries and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes, available on the Cornell University Press website and other Open Access repositories.

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In fin-de-siecle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women", a group of primarily urban middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home. Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of these famous new women active in journalism and the theatre, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper "La Fronde"; the journalists Severine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of "La Fronde" itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men - even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for "La Fronde" put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny. Lively, sophisticated and persuasive, "Disruptive Acts" should be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies and the theatre.

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- A climbing guidebook to over 250 cliffs, with all grades included 3a-8c. - A highly cost effective and practical guidebook to the best areas. - Ideal for beginners, families, regular climbers; with 12,000+ routes. - GPS info, great access maps, campsites and picnic spots. - Bi-lingual French-English guidebook. This title is the first of this 4 book series to general sport climbing and bouldering in France, and is designed for all levels of climber. It is written by David Atchison-Jones, who has written many major guidebooks to Fontainebleau, Bourgogne, and other areas of France. This book includes the main 8 departments of Bourgogne and Auvergne, along with many other cliffs from nearby departments that are easy to access en-route and natural to include. 1) FONTAINEBLEAU, a simple introduction to the 30 main areas. 2) YONNE-MORVAN, spectacular Saussois, plus hidden granite areas. 3) AUXOIS-BEAUNE-MACON, a big concentration of classic limestone. 4) CLERMONT-FERRAND-CANTAL, all of the Auvergne volcanic towers. 5) SAINT-ETIENNE-HAUTE LOIRE, the quiet areas of Massif Central. 6) ARDECHE-LOZERE, a place to seek sunshine and magnificent rock.

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Updated annually, MICHELIN National Map France Route Planning (map 726) will give you an overall picture of your journey thanks to its clear and accurate mapping scale 1/1 000 000 Our National Map Series will help you easily plan your safe and enjoyable journey thanks to a comprehensive key, a complete name index as well a clever time & distance chart. Michelin's driving information will help you navigate safely in all circumstances. In addition, some MICHELIN National Maps are cross-referenced with the MICHELIN Green Guide highlighting destinations worth stopping for! With MICHELIN National Maps, find more than just your way! MICHELIN NATIONAL MAPS feature: * Up-to-date mapping * A scale adapted to the size of the country * A clear and comprehensive key * Distance and time chart * Place name index * Driving and road safety information * Tourist sights information Our maps are regularly updated even if the ISBN does not change.

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In Entrepreneurial States, an innovative examination of the comparative politics of reform in stakeholder systems, Yves Tiberghien analyzes the modern partnership between the state and global capital in attaining structural domestic change. The emergence of a powerful global equity market has altered incentives for the state and presented political leaders with a "golden bargain"—the infusion of abundant and cheap capital into domestic stock markets in exchange for reform of corporate governance and other regulatory changes. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with policy and corporate elites in Europe and East Asia, Tiberghien asks why states such as Korea and France have embraced this opportunity and engaged in far-reaching reforms to make their companies more attractive to foreign capital, whereas Japan and Germany have moved forward much more grudgingly. Interest groups and electoral institutions have their impacts, but by tracing the unfolding dynamic of reform under different constraints, Tiberghien shows that the role of political entrepreneurs is critical. Such policy elites act as mediators between global forces and national constraints. As risk takers and bargain builders, Tiberghien finds, they use corporate reform to reshape their political parties and to stake out new policy ground. The degree of political autonomy available to them and the domestic organization of bureaucratic responsibility determine their ability to succeed.

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Much recent writing about international politics understandably highlights the many changes that have followed from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. This book, by contrast, analyzes an important continuity that, the author argues, will characterize international strategic affairs well into the new century: nuclear deterrence will remain at the core of the security policies of the world's great powers and will continue to be an attractive option for many less powerful states worried about adversaries whose capabilities they cannot match. The central role of nuclear deterrence persists despite the advent of a new international system in which serious military threats are no longer obvious, the use of force is judged irrelevant to resolving most international disputes, and states' interests are increasingly defined in economic rather than military terms. Indeed, the author suggests why these changes may increase the appeal of nuclear deterrence in the coming decades. Beginning with a reconsideration of nuclear deterrence theory, the book takes issue with the usual emphasis on the need for invulnerable retaliatory forces and threats that leaders can rationally choose to carry out. The author explains why states, including badly outgunned states, can rely on nuclear deterrent strategies despite the difficulty they may face in deploying invulnerable forces and despite the implausibility of rationally carrying out their threats of retaliation. In the subsequent empirical analysis that examines the security policies of China, Britain, and France and taps recently declassified documents, the author suggests that the misleading standard view of what is often termed rational deterrence theory may well reflect the experience, or at least aspirations, of the Cold War superpowers more than the logic of deterrence itself. Case studies assessing the nuclear deterrent policies of China, Britain, and France highlight the reasons why their experience, rather than that of the more frequently studied Cold War superpowers, better reflects the strategic and economic factors likely to shape states' security policies in the twenty-first century. The book concludes by drawing out the implications of the author's theoretical and empirical analysis for the future role of nuclear weapons.

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Thirty-five years of nonfiction films offer a unique lens on twentieth-century French social issuesCritical Mass is the first sustained study to trace the origins of social documentary filmmaking in France back to the late 1920s. Steven Ungar argues that socially engaged nonfiction cinema produced in France between 1945 and 1963 can be seen as a delayed response to what filmmaker Jean Vigo referred to in 1930 as a social cinema whose documented point of view would open the eyes of spectators to provocative subjects of the moment.Ungar identifies Vigo’s manifesto, his 1930 short À propos de Nice, and late silent-era films by Georges Lacombe, Boris Kaufman, André Sauvage, and Marcel Carné as antecedents of postwar documentaries by Eli Lotar, René Vautier, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Jean Rouch, associated with critiques of colonialism and modernization in Fourth and early Fifth Republic France. Close readings of individual films alternate with transitions to address transnational practices as well as state- and industry-wide reforms between 1935 and 1960. Critical Mass is an indispensable complement to studies of nonfiction film in France, from Georges Lacombe’s La Zone (1928) to Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai (1963).

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In 2004, the first same-sex couple legally married in Quebec. How did homosexuality – an act that had for centuries been defined as abominable and criminal – come to be sanctioned by law?Judging Homosexuals finds answers in a comparative analysis of gay persecution in France and Quebec, places that share a common culture but have diverging legal traditions. In both settings, Patrice Corriveau explores how various groups – family and clergy, doctors and jurists – tried to manage people who were defined in turn as sinners, as criminals, as inverts, and as citizens to be protected by law.By bringing to light the various discourses that have over time supported the control and persecution of individual homoerotic behaviour in France and Quebec, this book makes the case that when it came to managing sexuality, the law helped construct the crime.

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April 6, 1944. A detachment of German soldiers arrive in a rural French town, hunting down resistance fighters, many of whom are hiding in the region. More than sixty years later, the villagers clearly remember the day when four peasants from a nearby village were taken hostage and shot as an example to others. But do they remember the whole story? Jean-Marie Borzeix sets out to investigate the events of Holy Thursday 1944, and to reveal the hidden truths of that fateful day. He uncovers the story of a mysterious 'fifth man' shot alongside the resisters and eventually unravels a trail which leads him to Paris, Israel and into the darkest corners of the Holocaust in France. A captivating story, the events of this day in a small, entirely typical, town illuminate the true impact of World War II in France.

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This book explores how Theodore de Banville's remarkably coherent body of verse theory and practice, shaped debates about poetic value and how to identify it during a period of aesthetic uncertainty caused by diverse social, economic, political and artistic factors.

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In "Dream Worlds", Rosalind Williams examines the origins and moral implications of consumer society, providing a cultural history of its emergence in late nineteenth-century France.

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This volume studies the impact of French thought on the American world of learning during the 1970s and the 1980s as well as the American response to the various discourses ranging from literary theory and philosophy to psychoanalysis and anthropology. The typical American reception of Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze is discussed as well as the accommodation of French Ofeminists,O including Cixous, Wittig, and Irigaray. Contributors include Edward Said and Martin Jay.

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In the nineteenth century France became fixated on infant sleep. Pictures of sleeping babies proliferated in paintings, posters, and advertisements for cradles and toys. Childcare manuals and medical writings insisted on the importance of sleep as a measure of a child’s future health and vigour. Infant sleep was transformed from an unremarkable event to a precarious stage of life that demanded monitoring, support, and, above all, the constant presence and attention of mothers. Hush Little Baby uncovers the cultural, medical, and economic forces that came to shape Western ideas about infants’ sleeping patterns, rituals, and settings. By the mid-nineteenth century doctors were advising that infant sleep should be carefully controlled by caregivers according to medical guidelines, and that to do otherwise would risk compromising a child’s development. A sleeping baby was seen as the sign of a good mother – an idea that was reinforced through countless pictures of mothers watching vigilantly over their sleeping children, even as the reality of postpartum depression was known to doctors. The medical advice literature also helped to create a commercial infant industry, encouraging the production of clothing, bedding, cradles, and accessories designed to foster sleep, and providing new ways for families to demonstrate social status. In Hush Little Baby Gal Ventura shows how these images and ideas about babies’ sleep created many of the standards and expectations that keep parents awake today.

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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

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From the Liberation purges to the Barbie trial, France has struggled with the memory of the Vichy experience: a memory of defeat, occupation, and repression. In this provocative study, Henry Rousso examines how this proud nation—a nation where reality and myth commingle to confound understanding—has dealt with les années noires. Specifically, he studies what the French have chosen to remember—and to conceal.

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As the postwar mass media in France imagined her, the teenage girl was no longer a demure and daughterly jeune fille. Instead, she was an enfant terrible, a "bad girl"-implying that she was unapologetically and unsentimentally no longer a virgin. Focusing on the role of gender in representations of youth in post-World War II France, Susan Weiner traces how, after 1945, young men and women came to symbolize different aspects of social order and disorder in a country traumatized by the Nazi Occupation and Cold War paranoia, seduced by consumerism and Americanization, and engaged in an undeclared war in Algeria. While overtly political discourses about "youth" generally referred to middle-class young men, Weiner argues that it was in media representations of "bad girls" that anxieties over the loss of a morally and socially coherent national identity found their expression. Enfants Terribles looks at French culture from the Liberation to 1968 through images of the teenage girl which appeared in a broad range of texts and institutions: magazines such as Elle and Mademoiselle, newspapers, novels, popular essays, popular music, surveys, and film. Weiner highlights the new importance of youth as a social category of identity in the context of the postwar explosion of the mass media and explores the ways in which girls both defined and disrupted this category.

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This study considers the figure of the female dancer in French literary, visual, and performing art from 1830 to 1930. It explores how manifestations of the la danseuse shape notions of Modernism and asks why dance occupies a privileged position in a variety of Modernist media.

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Louis XIV, regency, rococo, neoclassical, empire, art nouveau, and historicist pastiche: furniture styles march across French history as regimes rise and fall. In this extraordinary social history, Leora Auslander explores the changing meaning of furniture from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century, revealing how the aesthetics of everyday life were as integral to political events as to economic and social transformations. Enriched by Auslander's experience as a cabinetmaker, this work demonstrates how furniture served to represent and even generate its makers' and consumers' identities.

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An innovative history of deep social and economic changes in France, told through the story of a single extended family across five generationsMarie Aymard was an illiterate widow who lived in the provincial town of Angoulême in southwestern France, a place where seemingly nothing ever happened. Yet, in 1764, she made her fleeting mark on the historical record through two documents: a power of attorney in connection with the property of her late husband, a carpenter on the island of Grenada, and a prenuptial contract for her daughter, signed by eighty-three people in Angoulême. Who was Marie Aymard? Who were all these people? And why were they together on a dark afternoon in December 1764? Beginning with these questions, An Infinite History offers a panoramic look at an extended family over five generations. Through ninety-eight connected stories about inquisitive, sociable individuals, ending with Marie Aymard’s great-great granddaughter in 1906, Emma Rothschild unfurls an innovative modern history of social and family networks, emigration, immobility, the French Revolution, and the transformation of nineteenth-century economic life.Rothschild spins a vast narrative resembling a period novel, one that looks at a large, obscure family, of whom almost no private letters survive, whose members traveled to Syria, Mexico, and Tahiti, and whose destinies were profoundly unequal, from a seamstress living in poverty in Paris to her third cousin, the cardinal of Algiers. Rothschild not only draws on discoveries in local archives but also uses new technologies, including the visualization of social networks, large-scale searches, and groundbreaking methods of genealogical research.An Infinite History demonstrates how the ordinary lives of one family over three centuries can constitute a remarkable record of deep social and economic changes.

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A study of the literature of the 'art of travel' in eighteenth-century France, showing how consideration of who should travel and for what purpose provided an occasion for wider debate about the social status quo. Early modern educational travel is usually associated with the Grand Tour: a young nobleman's journey through the established highlights of Europe. Lessons of Travel presents how, in eighteenth-century France, this practice was heavily contested, and the idea of educational travel had far wider implications. Through the study of a huge range of both canonical and little-known sources discussing "the art of travel", from abbé Pluche's educational best seller, The Spectacle of Nature, through Rousseau's Émile to practical prospectuses for collective educational travel in the revolutionary period, Gelléri investigates what it meant to 'think about travels' in eighteenth-century France. Consideration of who should travel and for what purpose, he argues, contributed to an international intellectual tradition but also provided a pretext for debate on the social status quo, including such issues as the place of the merchant class, the necessity for professional training, the uses of travel for young women and the education of a new generation of citizens of the Revolution.

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Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter, Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic practices to the economic and social conditions that enabled them: an ascendant class of art collectors who embraced fragile objects as a means of showcasing their disposable wealth.While studies of Rococo art have traditionally focused on style and subject matter, this book reveals how the physical construction of paintings and sculptures was central to the period’s reconceptualization of art. Drawing on sources ranging from eighteenth-century artists’ writings to twenty-first-century laboratory analyses, Wunsch demonstrates how the technical practices of eighteenth-century painters and sculptors provoked a broad transformation in the relationship between art, time, and money. Delicacy, which began the eighteenth century as a commodified extension of courtly sociability, was by century’s end reimagined as the irreducible essence of art’s autonomous value.Innovative and original, A Delicate Matter is an important intervention in the growing body of scholarship on durability and conservation in eighteenth-century French art. It challenges the art historical tendency to see decay as little more than an impediment to research, instead showing how physical instability played a critical role in establishing art’s meaning and purpose.

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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 SPORTS BOOK AWARDS CYCLING BOOK OF THE YEAR*The gripping and revealing autobiography of one of Britain's most successful international cyclists of the modern era'Getting in a break was my one chance of winning. The hard part was working out, again and again, how to make that chance count'Sharp, resourceful and a permanent outsider; for nearly 20 years Steve Cummings determinedly blazed his own winning trail in international cycling. A maverick who defied the dominant teams, to record a sequence of gloriously improbable victories, he has lived and raced with legends of the sport - Cavendish, Wiggins, Froome, Thomas and others - about whom he has strong views and untold stories.This autobiography of one of Britain's most successful international riders of the modern era takes the reader from Steve's earliest days as a junior, pounding across the flatlands of the Wirral, through his love-hate relationships with the British Cycling track cycling squad, to his series of top-level breakaway victories in the Tour de France, Tour of Britain and Vuelta a España and - rather than standout physical talent - how developing his own strategies and training techniques enabled him to succeed against the odds.The Break will be the first full-length account of the life and times of, in the words of ProCycling magazine, a 'universally popular and respected rider in the cycling world'.

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In the first decade of the twenty-first century, France underwent a particularly turbulent period during which urban riots in 2005 and labor protests in 2006 galvanized people across the country and brought the question of youth unemployment among its poorer, multiethnic outer cities into the national spotlight. Drawing on more than a year of ethnographic field research in the housing projects of the French city of Limoges, Yearning to Labor chronicles the everyday struggles of a group of young people as they confront unemployment at more than triple the national rate—and the crushing despair it engenders. Against the background of this ethnographic context, John P. Murphy illuminates how the global spread of neoliberal ideologies and practices is experienced firsthand by contemporary urban youths in the process of constructing their identities. An original investigation of the social ties that produce this community, Yearning to Labor explores the ways these young men and women respond to the challenges of economic liberalization, deindustrialization, and social exclusion. At its heart, Yearning to Labor asks if the French republican model of social integration, assimilation, and equality before the law remains viable in a context marked by severe economic exclusion in communities of ethnic and religious diversity. Yearning to Labor is both an ethnographic account of a certain group of French youths as they navigate a suffocating job market and an analysis of the mechanisms underlying the shifting economic inequalities at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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Agnes of Harcourt is an important though little known thirteenth-century author. Born into a leading Norman noble family, she became an abbess at the new royal Franciscan abbey of Longchamp, founded just outside of Paris by Isabelle of France, sister of Louis IX. In the 1280s Agnes wrote a substantial biography of Isabelle of France, as well as a brief letter detailing Louis IX’s involvement with the abbey. These texts were based on Agnes’s first-hand observations and contained many lively stories about their royal subjects. Agnes’s writings provide a fascinating window on religious life at the court of St. Louis and on the lives of some of the most interesting and powerful men and women of the day. More significantly, they preserve one of the very few female perspectives we have for this period, and, in The Life of Isabelle, offer what is probably the first biography of one woman by another in French. Based on new research into the surviving archives of Longchamp, The Writing of Agnes of Harcourt presents the first English translation of her texts, and the first substantial introduction to her life and work. This critical edition includes both the old French and English versions of the text.

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In this unique study, Machen explores a moment of intense religious upheaval and transformation in France between 1880 and 1920. In these pre-World War I years, a powerful Catholic community was pitted against equally powerful anticlerical members of the French Third Republic. During this time, women became increasingly involved in faith-based organizations, engaging in social and political action both to expand women's rights and to ensure that religion remained part of the public debate about France's identity. By representing their faith communities as modern, progressive, and in some cases democratic, women positioned themselves to help guide a modernizing France. Women of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths also reshaped the narrative of female power within the French nation and within their own religious groups. Their activism provided them with social, religious, and political influence unattainable through any other French institutions, enabling them in turn to push France toward becoming a more democratic, equitable society. Machen's timely examination of the critical role women played in shaping the nation's religious identity helps to illuminate contemporary issues in France as Muslim communities respond to civic pressure to secularize and as the country debates the role of women in Islam.

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The Faber Early Organ Series is among the most comprehensive anthologies of early organ music ever published. In 18 volumes it spans two centuries and six geographical regions, presenting a broad and balanced view of the main forms, styles and composers. Within each geographical region the pieces, most of which are for manuals only, are arranged by date of composition or publication. The presentation is both scholarly and practical; all of the music has been newly edited from the earliest surviving sources according to a systematic editorial method that preserves as many features of the original notation as possible while making it fully accessible to modern players. In every volume, an informative Introduction sets the music in historical context. There are also helpful sections on Ornamentation and Registration, and a Critical Commentary giving detailed information on the sources.

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The Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, marked the beginning of the German defeat in the West. Military historian Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. vividly recaptures the desperation of the Wehrmacht as the thin gray line in Normandy finally snapped, the 5th Panzer and 7th Armies collapsed, and the survivors fled the Allied steamroller in a mad dash back to the Reich. From the reactions of soldiers in the field to military decisions at the highest levels, this is the story of the Reich's unraveling told from a German perspective. Fighting hedgerow to hedgerow in the pitted Normandy landscape would delay the Allied Advance and make each small victory a costly one. Western forces would achieve their first strategic objective, the port of Cherbourg, but they would find it reduced to rubble, a result of the best-planned demolition in history. Still, the Allies did benefit from an ongoing anti-Hitler conspiracy that relayed false information to Berlin. While German forces would finally bring the Allied juggernaut to a halt on the borders of the Reich itself, this brief success would only delay the inevitable. With colorful descriptions and informative details, Mitcham recounts the German military retreat and the erosion of Germany's stronghold on Europe—as viewed through the eyes of a defiant, but ultimately defeated Wehrmacht.

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An examination of the complex network of relationships and identity between England, Scotland and France in the thirteenth century. Following King John's loss of Normandy to King Philip Augustus in 1204, the familial ties that bound the Anglo-French nobility across the Channel spreading into Scotland gradually dissipated. Scotland's pivotal relationship with England and France transformed as Scottish families began to redefine their identity within a native Scottish and English context apart from their French roots. This book argues that the loss of Normandy ushered in a deep andprofound shift in the political and cultural mentality of the Anglo-Scottish nobility. By the end of the thirteenth century, the number of Scottish families who still held land in France or made French marriages was slashed by two thirds. Cross-Channel relations were maintained mainly through the extended kin of the Scottish royal family, while the crown of Scotland focused more on promoting relations with England. Ironically, it was precisely this disintegration of kin-based, personal relations between the nobility of these three polities that made it necessary for a formal bond (The Treaty of Paris) to be forged between France and Scotland in 1295, referred to as an "Auld Amitie". M.A. Pollock gained her PhD from the University of St Andrews. She has since taught at St Andrews, the University of Edinburgh, Trinity College, Dublin, and University College Dublin.

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Act Up-Paris became one of the most notable protest groups in France in the mid-1990s. Founded in 1989, and following the New York model, it became a confrontational voice representing the interests of those affected by HIV through openly political activism. Action=Vie, the English-language translation of Christophe Broqua’s study of the grassroots activist branch, explains the reasons for the group’s success and sheds light on Act Up's defining features—such as its unique articulation between AIDS and gay activism.Featuring numerous accounts by witnesses and participants, Broqua traces the history of Act Up-Paris and shows how thousands of gay men and women confronted the AIDS epidemic by mobilizing with public actions. Act Up-Paris helped shape the social definition not only of HIV-positive persons but also of sexual minorities. Broqua analyzes the changes brought about by the group, from the emergence of new treatments for HIV infection to normalizing homosexuality and a controversy involving HIV-positive writers’ remarks about unprotected sex. This rousing history ends in the mid-2000s before marriage equality and antiretroviral treatments caused Act Up-Paris to decline.

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Focusing on language's political power, these essays discuss how representation, through language norms, plays and court spectacles, manipulations and adaptations of texts and images, both constitutes and reflects a cultural milieu. The volume brings together various disciplinary approaches, offering a complex appreciation of these questions. While a core of the essays focuses on France, the contributions engage a broad range of geographical contexts, from Byzantium to eastern Germany and England from the early centuries of the Common Era to the seventeenth century, revealing the prevalence and persistence of the key interconnected issues of images and authority. Contributors: Carla Bozzolo; Philippe Caron; Robert L. A. Clark; Paul Cohen; Thomas Conley; Jean-Philippe Genet; Douglas Kibbee; Gillette Labory; Nicole Pons; Mara R. Wade.

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In fin-de-siècle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home.Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper La Fronde; the journalists Séverine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of La Fronde itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men—even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for La Fronde put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny.Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, Disruptive Acts will be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.

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