Search results for ""liverpool university press""

Plautus' Bacchides is one of the best and most typical of his plays which in its treatment of character, theme and dialogue provides an excellent introduction to Plautus. Since the rediscovery of a passage from its Greek model, Menander's Dis Exapaton, it is now in the fore-front of scholarly discussion as direct comparisons can now be made of style and methods. The line-by-line verse translation aims to reproduce the sense and also to represent Plautus' linguistic liveliness and metrical variety, while the commentary explores the literary and dramatic qualities of the play in the light of modern scholarship. The Dis Exapaton fragment is given in text and translation. Latin text with facing-page translation, introduction and commentary.

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Informed by critical race theory and based on a wide range of sources, including official sources, memoirs, and anthropological studies, this book examines multiple forms of racial discrimination in Jamaica and how they were talked about and experienced from the end of the First World War until the demise of democratic socialism in the 1980s. It also pays attention to practices devoid of racial content but which equally helped to sustain a society stratified by race and colour, such as voting qualifications. Case studies on the labour market, education, the family and legal system, among other areas, demonstrate the extent to which race and colour shaped social relations in the island in the decades preceding and following independence and argue that racial discrimination was a public secret – everybody knew it took place but few dared to openly discuss or criticise it. The book ends with an examination of race and colour in contemporary Jamaica to show that race and colour have lost little of their power since independence and offers some suggestions to overcome the silence on race to facilitate equality of opportunity for all.

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In contrast to recent theories of the ‘global’ Latin American novel, this book reveals the enduring importance of the national in contemporary Venezuelan fiction, arguing that the novels studied respond to both the nationalist and populist cultural policies of the Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuela’s literary isolation. The latter results from factors including the legacy of the Boom and historically low levels of emigration from Venezuela. Grounded in theories of metafiction and intertextuality, the book provides a close reading of eight novels published between 2004 (the year in which the first Minister for Culture was appointed) and 2012 (the last full year of President Chávez’s life), relating these novels to the context of their production. Each chapter explores a way in which these novels reflect on writing, from the protagonists as readers and writers in different contexts, through appearances from real life writers, to experiments with style and popular culture, and finally questioning the boundaries between fiction and reality. This literary analysis complements overarching studies of the Bolivarian Revolution by offering an insight into how Bolivarian policies and practices affect people on an individual, emotional and creative level. In this context, self-reflexive narratives afford their writers a form of political agency.

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Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction examines fantastic representations of sport in science fiction, both cataloguing this almost entirely unexamined literary tradition and arguing that the reason for its neglect reflects a more widespread social suspicion of the athletic body as monstrous. Combining scholarship of monstrosity with a biopolitically focused philosophy of embodiment, this work plumbs the depths of our abjection of the athletic body and challenges us to reconsider sport as an intersectional space. In this latter endeavour it contradicts the image presented by both the most dystopian films such as Deathrace and Rollerball as well as social criticism of sport that limits its focus to an essentially violent masculinity. The book traces an alternative tradition of sport sf through authors as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Steven Barnes, and Joan Slonczewski, exploring the way the intersectional categories of gender, race, and age in these works are negotiated in, for example, a solar wind sailing race or futuristic anti-gravity boxing. These complex athletic bodies display the social mobility that sport allows and challenge us to acknowledge our own monstrously animal bodies and our place in a “cycle of living and dying.”

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This bilingual edition presents Luis Vélez de Guevara’s 1613 play La Serrana de la Vera (The Mountain Girl from La Vera) for the first time ever in English translation. This long-forgotten tragedy has come back into focus in recent years because of its extraordinary protagonist, Gila, a peasant girl who calls herself a man, takes fierce pride in doing things men do, and falls in love with Queen Isabel. Her betrayal by an army captain who she has humiliated leads to lawlessness, violence and tragedy. Dramatized by the playwright as an heroic rebel, Gila has been variously described as feminist, homosexual, bisexual, lesbian, transsexual, hybrid, queer, and transgender. Highly relevant today, The Mountain Girl from La Vera is also a great piece of theatre, full of dramatic confrontations, colourful vignettes, striking moments of music and spectacle, and plentiful comic relief. This bilingual edition presents the entirety of the play, annotated, along with a Critical Introduction by the translator that contextualizes the work.

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This book draws on a lengthy experience of teaching graduates how to approach medieval books. It leads the reader through the stages of the editorial process, using part of Richard Rolle's Commentary on the Song of Songs as the working exemplar. In the humane sciences, the need for texts is ubiquitous; they provide the regular objects of study. But far less prevalent than editions is any discussion of the premises underlying these objects, or the mechanisms by which they have been constructed. This volume takes up both challenges. First, in a preliminary chapter, it discusses what is at stake in any edition one might read; the persistent argument is that these represent products of modern scholarly decision-making, the imposition of various kinds of unity on the extremely diverse evidence medieval books offer for any literary work. This chapter also explains broadly various options for the presentation of texts – and the difficulties inherent in them all. The remainder of the volume is given over to a step-by-step guide to the process of editing (and eventually to a finished presentation of) a heretofore unpublished medieval text. The discussion seeks to exemplify the decisions editors routinely face, and to suggest ways of addressing them.

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Dombey and Son (1846–48), Dickens’s seventh novel, stands at the mid-point of his career. It was begun in Switzerland after a break from near-continuous novel writing and bears the hallmarks of its long gestation and Dickens’s deepening engagement with the many cross-currents shaping Britain’s social, cultural and political life. Predominant among them are public debates about the need to provide schooling for young children, ethical questions prompted by the demolition of neighbourhoods to make way for railways, the discussion of sanitary reforms to improve the nation’s health, and divergent responses to prostitution and other crimes inextricably linked with poverty, illiteracy and deprivation. Drawing on contemporary documentation, Dickens’s letters, his journalism and the novelist’s own personal involvement with schemes to improve the lives of the poor, this Companion to Dombey and Son offers an authoritative and exhaustive study of the many contemporary contexts that inform Dickens’s panoramic examination of mid-Victorian life. Of equal importance and intimately connected with the novel’s engagement with public issues is the moral thread that binds the whole, a familial story about pride and the pursuit of riches. Private matters accordingly receive comparable attention as Dickens exposes some of the consequences of mid-century domestic ideology, examining the nursing of infants, the education of young children, and the pressure on both men and women to marry. In compelling scenes artfully interwoven, the story of the novel’s prosperous merchant unfolds, in language, as the annotations show, enriched from fairy tale, science and pseudo-science, archaeology, popular and classical literature, poetry, the Bible and voyages and travels. Dombey and Son also illuminates in its extended portrait of a Lear-like figure truths about loss and love central to Dickens’s fiction.

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Geomorphology is the study of the earth’s landforms and the processes that made the landscape look the way it does today. What we see when we look at a scenic view is the result of the interplay of the forces that shape the earth’s surface. These operate on many different timescales and involve geological as well as climatic forces. Adrian Harvey introduces the varying geomorphological forces and differing timescales which thus combine: from the global, which shape continents and mountain ranges; through the regional, producing hills and river basins; to the local, forming beaches, glaciers and slopes; to those micro scale forces which weather rock faces and produce sediment. Finally, he considers the effect that humans have had on the world’s topography.

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Geological research does not flow steadily onwards by means of small incremental advances but can be better understood as a series of significant discoveries or changes in interpretation that transformed the way we understand the Earth. Each of these changes or new ideas encouraged a burst of activity as researchers attempted to apply them more widely in order to test their universality, and thereby their validity as a scientific theory. Probably the best example of such a transformative idea is Plate Tectonics, which, although questioned at the time it was introduced, is now universally accepted as a general principleA large number of the subsequent advances in geological understanding have been based upon this breakthrough. Each of the 12 chapters in this book represents a new idea or discovery, which is discussed in its historical context. In each case the salient features of these ideas are described, together with some biographical details of the individual scientists credited with them - but also mentioning others whose role in the generation of the idea is perhaps not so obvious. Of instant appeal to geologists and other earth scientists interested in how their science evolved over time by means of a number of revolutionary ideas, this book also serves as a paradigm for the history of science across many disciplines.

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People have been fascinated by minerals since prehistory. The attractions of minerals lie in their colours, their beautiful crystals and the discoveries of their uses and the metals that can be obtained from them. Minerals receive attention from a wide variety of people: mining executives, collectors, prospectors and scientists unravelling their molecular structure and origins. But, for someone new to mineralogy, the subject can appear to be overwhelmingly complex.In Introducing Mineralogy John Mason considers the essence of mineralogy in a clear and logical manner. The book begins with the basic chemistry of minerals and the way in which the mineral kingdom is classified. It then considers mineral occurrences, both typical, such as the minerals that largely make up common rocks like granite, and atypical, such as concentrations of rare metals in ore-deposits. The ways in which minerals are studied using microscopes and the importance of careful observation and interpretation are discussed and the topics of mineral collecting and related issues are addressed. The final chapters explore the uses of minerals, both industrial and scientific, and take a look at environmental issues associated with mineral extraction and usageLavishly illustrated in colour and complete with a glossary, the book is aimed at students embarking on courses in the Earth Sciences and at the amateur collector who wants to find out more about the colourful rocks they may find when out walking.

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'Outstanding Academic Title' Choice, magazine of the Association of College & Research Libraries, American Library Association.Most mountains on Earth occur within relatively well-defined, narrow belts separated by wide expanses of much lower-lying ground. Their distribution is not random but is caused by the now well-understood geological processes of plate tectonics. Some mountains mark the site of a former plate collision – where one continental plate has ridden up over another, resulting in a zone of highly deformed and elevated rocks. Others are essentially volcanic in origin.The most obvious mountain belts today – the Himalayas, the Alps and the Andes, for example - are situated at currently active plate boundaries. Others, such as the Caledonian mountains of the British Isles and Scandinavia, are the product of a plate collision that happened far in the geological past and have no present relationship to a plate boundary. These are much lower, with a generally gentler relief, worn down through millennia of erosion.The presently active mountain belts are arranged in three separate systems: the Alpine-Himalayan ranges, the circum-Pacific belt and the mid-ocean ridges. Much of the Alpine-Himalayan belt is relatively well known, but large parts of the circum-Pacific and ocean-ridge systems are not nearly as familiar, but contain equally impressive mountain ranges despite large parts being partly or wholly submerged.This book takes the reader along the active mountain systems explaining how plate tectonic processes have shaped them, then looks more briefly at some of the older mountain systems whose tectonic origins are more obscure. It is aimed at those with an interest in mountains and in developing an understanding of the geological processes that create them.

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This book offers the intelligent new reader a critically evaluative guide to Keats’s major poems and letters, from a perspective which aims to counter the historical emphasis of recent critical work

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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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A fresh account of the development and achievement of the novelist and essayist who became Britain's greatest political writer of modern times.

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Denise deCaires Narain discusses Senior's technique of alerting the reader to the historical narratives of the individuals she writes about, and foregrounds the writer's work as a distinct and invaluable intervention in Caribbean Literature.

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This book explores contemporary anxieties over language and genre in Johnson's literature.

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This study examines the scope and depth of Neil Gunn's work and assesses him as a writer of European stature.

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Co-written by Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan and British novelist Angela Carter, and based on several short stories from Carter's collection The Bloody Chamber, The Company of Wolves (1984) is a provocative reinvention of the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Unraveling a feverish metaphor for the blossoming of a young girl's sexuality and her subsequent loss of innocence, the film entwines symbolism and metaphor with striking visuals and grisly effects. Released in the early 1980s, a time which produced several classic werewolf films (including An American Werewolf in London and The Howling), The Company of Wolves sets itself apart from the pack with its overtly literary roots, feminist stance, and art-house leanings. The film's narrative takes the form of a puzzle box, unfolding as dreams within dreams, and stories within stories, which lead further into the dark woods of the protagonist's psyche, as she finds herself on the cusp of womanhood. This Devil's Advocate explores all these aspects, as well as placing the film in the context of the careers of its creators and its position as an example of the "Female Gothic."

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Fight Club is, on one level, pop-culture phenomena and on another, a deeply philosophical and satirical exploration of modern life. David Fincher's 1999 film (and Chuck Palahniuk's source novel) has had a huge impact on audiences worldwide leading to spoofs, homage, merchandising and numerous Internet fan sites. On initial release the film was met with wide hostility from critics who either failed to appreciate its satirical intent or believed the film failed to deliver on its satirical promise. Early in its DVD afterlife, however, a wider audience began to appreciate the film's significance and radical message. Although attracted by the film's playfulness and star wattage, however, many students struggle with its theoretical notions such as Capitalism, materialism, anarchy and so on. This is one film, which therefore merits a thoughtful and provocative analysis but also an accessible one, and Mark Ramey has provided just that.

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This book sets out to explain the very particular characteristics of Spanish infrastructure policy. The capital city of Madrid plays a central role. It not only achieved the status of economic capital of Spain in recent decades but together with its status as administrative and political capital Madrid endowed itself as absolute capital. The challenge is to understand why such development has taken place. First: radial policies in transport infrastructure, which were primarily subordinate to political and administrative objectives, could not be supported by the dynamics of economic activity. For that reason these policies demanded the use of extensive budgetary resources in the form of subsidies and grants that made possible what legislation alone could not achieve. Second: these policies respond to a regular and continuing historical pattern in Spanish politics, which began with the accession to the Spanish Crown of the Bourbon dynasty in the early eighteenth century. The new dynasty tried hard to translate into practice the vision of building a Nation like France, with a Capital like Paris. Third: the enduring strength of this historical pattern allows us to understand why infrastructural policies in Spain today are so unique and different from those of surrounding and comparable countries. Originally published to great acclaim in Spanish and Catalan, Professor Bel places the historical perspective in contemporary viewpoint in discussing the Spanish enthusiasm for high-speed railway, with the prospect of Madrid being connected with all provincial capitals, albeit while freight by train has been neglected; a fully centralised model of airport management that is unmatched among comparable countries; and a mixed (toll and toll-free motorways) and highly asymmetric territorial highway funding model for motorways.

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Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World seeks to illuminate important aspects of daily living and the experience of the environment through sense and emotion, using archaeological, art and textual sources. Twelve papers explore sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, and emotions such as anger, horror, grief and joy. Similar in theme and method to the first, second and third volumes in the Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World series, the collected articles illuminate how an understanding of the sensory and emotional landscape that helped form the daily lives of the peoples and the environments of early medieval England can inform the study of England before the Norman Conquest. The sights, smells, and sounds that informed the physical and emotional landscape of town, scriptoria, and hall, for example, explain urban planning, literary imagery and emotional attachment evident among the early medieval English peoples. Experienced senses and emotions are thus as central to understanding the inner and outer landscape of the pre-Conquest English as crafts, towns or water structures.

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In contemporary society, ‘the visual’ becomes a traversing denominator passing through the most diverse articulations: from new media, branding, drone vision and robot culture to cityscapes, design and art. The transvisuality project in three volumes promotes the turn away from the predominance of a focus on representations in studies of visual culture. Volume 2 introduces visual organisation in-the-making as an effect of manifold traversing articulations and interconnected practices: how is the ‘stuff’ of visuality—an image like a photograph, an incident on TV, a cinematic oeuvre—intertwined in a range of cultural practices, transformed and transgressed by them in transvisuality. The aim of the book is to map how visual organizations are traversing culture as articulatory practices in situ. The resulting case studies take their departure in different materialities and agencies of empirical, embedded visuality—from canvas to drone camera—and illustrate how transvisuality evolves in and around publics and communities on the one hand and through bodies and media on the other. The visual articulations analysed in this volume span from cellphone videos to forensic images, from biomedia to robots, from bunker ruins to Kalighat pat paintings, from a Palestinian wedding dress to video footage of unknown strangers in a metro, from the Gorgon Stare to movies becoming art installations. While the first volume addresses the boundaries of the notion of visuality and creative openings that visual culture studies offer, the third volume maps visuality in contexts of design, creativity and brand management.

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An Open Access edition of this book will be made available on publication on our website and on the OAPEN Library, funded by the LUP Open Access Author Fund. The history of Louisiana from slavery until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shows that unique influences within the state were responsible for a distinctive political and social culture. In New Orleans, the most populous city in the state, this was reflected in the conflict that arose on segregated streetcars that ran throughout the crescent city. This study chronologically surveys segregation on the streetcars from the antebellum period in which black stereotypes and justification for segregation were formed. It follows the political and social motivation for segregation through reconstruction to the integration of the streetcars and the white resistance in the 1950s while examining the changing political and social climate that evolved over the segregation era. It considers the shifting nature of white supremacy that took hold in New Orleans after the Civil War and how this came to be played out daily, in public, on the streetcars. The paternalistic nature of white supremacy is considered and how this was gradually replaced with an unassailable white supremacist atmosphere that often restricted the actions of whites, as well as blacks, and the effect that this had on urban transport. Streetcars became the 'theatres' for black resistance throughout the era and this survey considers the symbolic part they played in civil rights up to the present day.

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The dispassionate intellectual examination of the concepts of death & dying contrasts dramatically with the emotive grieving process experienced by those who mourn. Death & dying are binary concepts in human cultures. Cultural differences reveal their mutual exclusiveness in philosophical outlook, language, and much more. Other sets of binaries come into play under intellectual consideration and emotive behavior, which further divide and shape perceptions, beliefs, and actions of individuals and groups. The presence or absence of religious beliefs about life and death, and disposition of the body and/or soul, are prime distinctions. Likewise the age-old binary of reason vs. faith. To many observers, the topic of death and dying in the Hispanic cultural tradition is usually limited to that of Mexico and its transmogrified religious festival day of Dia de los Muertos. The studies presented in the ten chapters, and editorial introductions to the themes of the book, seek to widen this representation, and set forth the implications of the binary aspects of death and dying in numerous cultures throughout the so-called Hispanic world, including indigenous and European-derived beliefs and practices in religion, society, art, film & literature. Contributions include engagement with the pre-Hispanic world, Picassos poetry, cultural norms in Cuba, and the literary works of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Underlying the arguments presented is Saussurean structuralist theory, which provides a platform to disentangle cultural context in comparative settings.

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The ancient Israelite authors of the Hebrew Bible were not philosophers, so what they could not say about God in logical terms, they expressed through metaphor and imagery. To present God in His most impenetrable otherness, the image they chose was the desert. The desert was Ancient Israels southern frontier, an unknown region that was always elsewhere: from that elsewhere, God has come -- God came from the South (Hab 3:3); God, when you marched from the desert (Ps 68:8); from his southland mountain slopes (Deut 33:2). Robert Miller explores this imagery, shedding light on what the biblical authors meant by associating God with deserts to the south of Israel and Judah. Biblical authors knew of its climate, flora, and fauna, and understood this magnificent desert landscape as a fascinating place of literary paradox. This divine desert was far from lifeless, its plants and animals were tenacious, bizarre, fierce, even supernatural. The spiritual importance of the desert in a biblical context begins with the physical elements whose impact cognitive science can elucidate. Travellers and naturalists of the past two millennia have experienced this and other wildernesses, and their testimonies provide a window into Israel's experience of the desert. A prime focus is the existential experience encountered. Confronting the desert's enigmatic wildness, its melding of the known and unknown, leads naturally to spiritual experience. The books panoramic view of biblical spirituality of the desert is illustrated by the ways spiritual writers -- from Biblical Times to the Desert Fathers to German Mysticism -- have employed the images therefrom. Revelation and renewal are just two of many themes. Folklore of the Ancient Near East, and indeed elsewhere, that deals with the desert / wilderness archetype has been explored via Jungian psychology, Goethean Science, enunciative linguistics, and Hebrew philology. These philosophies contribute to this exploration of the Hebrew Bible's desert metaphor for God.

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For at least fifteen years, any keen observer of European society has been aware that antisemitism is no longer a matter of racial theory, nationalism, or exclusion of the 'other.' While in the past antisemites saw Jews as all too modern 'rootless cosmopolitans' (to use Stalin's expression), today's European antisemitism construes them as obsolete precisely because they are attached to their roots, their land, their community, their origin. The Jews are now perceived as a reactionary force that hinders the progress of humankind toward multiculturalism, understood as the peaceful, infinitely enriching coexistence of ethnicities, races, religions, and cultures within the same territory. The antisemite of yore viewed the Jews as an inferior race; today he views them as racist. By looking back to the emergence of a postwar theoretical discourse on trauma, memory, victims, suffering, the Holocaust and the Jews, Is Theory Good for the Jews? explores how 'French thought' is implicated in intellectual, literary and ideological components of the global and local upsurge of antisemitism. The author probes the legacy of Heidegger in France and exposes the shortcomings of radical social critique and postcolonial theory confronted to the challenge of Islamic terrorism and Jew hatred. This book is the first effort to analyze French responses that have regrettably played their part in generating the new antisemitism.

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This exhaustive history of Provençal Jewry examines the key aspects of Jewish life in Provence over some 1,500 years of cultural florescence with far-reaching consequences. A seminal examination of the crucial role of the Jews of Provence in shaping medieval Jewish culture in the Mediterranean basin.

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The eighth century was a turbulent time for Byzantium. Beset by war, plague and religious division, this remnant of the Rome fought for survival. Severe decline and dislocation necessitated far reaching reform and soul searching. In particular, Byzantines asked why God had so punished the Chosen People they believed themselves to be. Attempting to formulate solutions to these problems were the new imperial dynasty, the Isaurians. Taking power in 717 as Constantinople was under siege by the Arabs, they would rule until 802 when Irene, the first empress to rule in her own right, was overthrown. However, our understanding of this critical period is clouded by the Iconoclast controversy, the debate over the validity of religious images that dominates the traditional narrative of the era. The vast majority of our sources were penned by the victors of that debate, the iconophiles, who make the controversy the driver of all events. Fortunately, there is one set of sources that survives that is free from the prism of iconoclasm. For in 741 Leo III and Constantine V promulgated the Ecloga, a concise legal handbook that proved a watershed moment in Roman Law. Over the next three decades, it is argued, the Ecloga was buttressed with several further texts, before Irene used her own laws to attack the dynasty she had married into, and whose policy of iconoclasm she had reversed. For the first time all these texts are gathered together and translated, providing new insights into this crucial but murky period.

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Edward Lear wrote a well-known autobiographical poem that begins ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’ But how well do we really know him? On the one hand he is, in John Ashbery’s words, ‘one of the most popular poets who ever lived’; on the other hand he has often been overlooked or marginalized by scholars and in literary histories. James Williams’s account, the first book-length critical study of the poet since the 1980s, sets out to re-introduce Lear and to accord him his proper place: as a major Victorian figure of continuing appeal and relevance, and especially as a poet of beauty, comedy, and profound ingenuity. Williams approaches Lear’s work thematically, tracing some of its most fundamental subjects and situations. Grounded in attentive close readings, Williams also connects Lear’s nonsense with his various other creative endeavours: as a zoological illustrator and landscape painter, a travel writer, and a prolific diarist and correspondent.

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This title is a study of Tennyson's lyrical imagination, describing its complex fascinations with recurrence, progress, narrative, and loss, and its doubts about its own artfulness.

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Richard III has the status of a monster, in British culture, and the continuous popularity of Shakespeare’s play has done much to foster this. Deformity and distortion operate through this myth on many levels. This study is an essay in five ‘distortions’, tracking the way the play manipulates and explores fundamental human concerns; the body, history,, theatre, childhood and family and the mirrors and shadows of individual identity and self-knowledge.

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Drawing on biographical information, letters, reminiscences and anecdotes, John Lucas pieces together Gurney’s difficult, indeed tragic life, in order to show that Gurney’s poetry, while undoubtedly affected by his mental problems, his trench experiences in World War One, and his complex relationship to Gloucester, the Cotswalds and London, is the sane utterance of a deeply radicalized writer. There is no suggestion that Gurney’s experiences were unique. On the contrary, they were typical, as he well knew, and as he declares in poems which celebrate the implications of comradeship. What is unique is Gurney’s ability to turn these experiences into major poetry. Gurney is the greatest of all those poets who fought in and survived the war and his achievement drastically affects our understanding of twentieth century poetry.

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Few filmmakers could even attempt the fearlessness of Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema and his most ambitious work, Stalker (1977), is arguably the most thoughtful science-fiction film ever made. Stalker parallels its speculative elements with a harrowing narrative of human fragility and philosophy. It is as much a movie about the complexity of its characters as it is the mysteriousness of its labyrinthine landscape, the ambiguous Zone and its heart, the Room of Desire. It is at once a darkly nihilistic film, ominous and threatening, and yet also profoundly hopeful and at its core a story of true faith. This book attempts to unravel the film’s complexities, from its difficult production and through its many cinematic elements: its composition and cinematography, the many philosophies it engages with, its poetic and literary influences, along with the cultural and historical landscapes that cultivated it, and the enormity of its influence across the following generations. Stalker challenges us to engage with film in a different way: a poetic cinema that asks much more of you as a viewer than most. Most of all, to explore why this film—even forty years since its original release—still affects us as an audience as profoundly as ever.

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Amid a recent resurgence in horror films, David Robert Mitchell's It Follows stands out as a particularly bold entry, a horror fan's dream come true that sparked a renewed creativity. Pulling a robust 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, It Follows was hailed as a "teen movie you've never seen before," a "creepy, mesmerizing exercise in minimalist horror," "the best horror film in years," and simply, "so damn good." Mitchell uses a variety of approaches to reinvent genre bromides while simultaneously embracing and challenging tropes that audiences and filmmakers rely on a little too heavily. It Follows is one of the best because it is one of the most unique. In this Devil's Advocate, Joshua Grimm focuses on how this film helped reinvent the rules of a horror movie, particularly along the lines of genre, style, sex, and gender.

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Daughters of Darkness (1971) is a vampire film like no other. Heralded as psychological high-Gothic cinema, loved for its art-house and erotic flavors, Harry Kümel's 1971 cult classic is unwrapped in intricate detail by writer Kat Ellinger to unravel the many mysteries surrounding just what makes it so appealing. This book, as part of the Devil’s Advocates series, examines the film in the context of its peers and contemporaries, in order to argue its place an important evolutionary link in the chain of female vampire cinema. The text also explores the film's association with fairy tales, the Gothic genre, and fantastic tradition, as well as delving into aspects of the legend of Countess Bathory, traditional vampire lore, and much more. The book contains new and exclusive interviews with director Harry Kümel and actress and star Danielle Ouimet.

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Is Michael Mann an auteur? Mann is a formidable filmmaking personality, no doubt, but the notion that today's celebrity cult of director immediately correlates with the mysterious sect of 'auteur' is questionable and deserves to be investigated. In doing so this book strives to emulate the methodology of the man himself, by ranging over not only the films he has made, from 1979’s The Jericho Mile to 2015's Blackhat, but also the scope of intellectual interests that they exemplify in an attempt to mine the commonalities, themes and traits that may suggest the presence of an auteur. Through his investigation of Mann's filmography and the personality that flows through it, author Deryck Swan provides the reader with accessible and new ways of thinking about his films to date, including, amongst myriad other things, references to painter Morris Louis, desert modernism, West Coast prison culture, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Strain Theory, journalist Mike Royko, Chicago's Auditorium building and a largely forgotten Charles Bronson film.

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Philip G Johnston's new translation of Un rio, un amor (One River, One Love) by Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) is faithful to the author's quasi-Surrealist intentions. Written in France and Spain in 1928-1929, this collection reflects the influences, conflicts and impulses that governed the poet's life then. It speaks of the alienation of a marginalised, disaffected individual in a Spain which he described as "decrepit and decomposing", of a shy homosexual gradually and painfully coming to terms with his orientation in a rigid, hostile society, of a passion for American popular culture (Jazz, Blues and cinema), filtered through a Hispanic sensitivity, and eventually somewhat tempered by the disappointments of daily life. The collection's later poems see Cernuda finding an admirable and resonant voice of protest. Very much a part of the broad European Modernist ethos (Cernuda can justifiably be compared to, say, T S Eliot), One River, One Love is furthermore written in the spirit of Spain's famous Generation of 1927 (spearheaded by figures such as Dali, Lorca and Bunuel) which set about reacting to "what had already been said", seeking the radical reform of the Spanish aesthetic and, in doing so, created a second Spanish Golden Age. Intriguingly balanced between what Cernuda himself would later term "Reality and Desire", this collection also involves a significant flirtation with the conventions of Surrealism. Lautreamont's famous formula involving the sewing machine, the umbrella and the dissection table is most certainly nodded to here in the characteristic Cernudian harnessing of shocking, incongruous and unexpected elements in imagery. That flirtation, however, stops short of full consummation of the relationship (Cernuda never, for example, gives himself completely over to unfettered, automatic writing, or, "dictee de la pensee") -which fact in itself speaks of a peculiarly Spanish twist to the European avant-garde.

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Satyric is the most thinly attested genre of Greek drama, but it appears to have been the oldest and according to Aristotle formative for tragedy. By the 5th Century BC at Athens it shared most of its compositional elements with tragedy, to which it became an adjunct; for at the annual great dramatic festivals, it was performed only together with, and after, the three tragedies which each poet was required to present in competition. It was in contrast with them, aesthetically and emotionally, its plays being considerably shorter and simpler; coarse and half-way to comedy, it burlesqued heroic and tragic myth, frequently that just dramatised and performed in the tragedies. Euripides'Cyclops is the only satyr-play which survives complete. It is generally held to be the poet's late work, but its companion tragedies are not identifiable. Its title alone signals its content, Odysseus' escape from the one-eyed, man-eating monster, familiar from Book 9 of Homer's Odyssey. Because of its uniqueness, Cyclops could afford only a limited idea of satyric drama's range, which the many but brief quotations from other authors and plays barely coloured. Our knowledge and appreciation of the genre have been greatly enlarged, however, by recovery since the early 20th Century of considerable fragments of Aeschylus, Euripides' predecessor, and of Sophocles, his contemporary - but not, so far, of Euripides himself. This volume provides English readers for the first time with all the most important texts of satyric drama, with facing-page translation, substantial introduction and detailed commentary. It includes not only the major papyri, but very many shorter fragments of importance, both on papyrus and in quotation, from the 5th to the 3rd Centuries; there are also one or two texts whose interest lies in their problematic ascription to the genre at all. The intention is to illustrate it as fully as practicable.

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The Portuguese Jewish diaspora was born out of a double tragedy: the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the forced conversion/expulsion of the Jews from Portugal in 1497. The potent combination of expulsion, Inquisition, and crypto-Judaism left people neither wholly Jewish nor wholly Christian in their identity. Subsequently many left the Iberian peninsula; some found refuge in the Caribbean, but succeeded in maintaining strong connections with Portuguese Jews in western Europe, the Ottoman empire, and the Far East, while they also forged ties with the surrounding peoples and cultures. This book looks at many different aspects of this complex past. Its interdisciplinary approach allows a wealth of new information to be brought together to create a comprehensive picture. Part I sets the context, and also considers the relationship of Caribbean Jewry to European trading systems; its special ties to Amsterdam and Dutch-ruled Curaçao; and the role of Jewish merchants in Jamaica’s commerce. Part II examines the material and visual culture of Jews in the British and Dutch Caribbean, while Part III looks at Caribbean Jewish identity and heritage and their modern manifestations. Part IV contains archival studies that illuminate other subjects of importance—adventure and piracy, Jewish participation in a nineteenth-century revolt of black slaves and in the first Jamaican elections after Jews were granted the right to vote, and questions of concubinage and sexual relations between Jews and blacks. Part V moves from the local to the international, in particular the connection with mainland America. In their diversity, the contributions to this volume suggest the many ways in which the formation of the Caribbean Jewish diaspora can be understood today: as a Jewish diaspora dispersed under different European colonial empires; as a Jewish cultural entity created by a set of shared traditions and historical memories; and as one component in a web of relationships that characterized the Atlantic world. Defining it is no simple matter: like all diaspora identities it was constantly in flux, reinventing itself under changing historical circumstances. CONTRIBUTORS: Aviva Ben-Ur, Miriam Bodian, Judah M. Cohen, Eli Faber, Rachel Frankel, Noah L. Gelfand, Jane S. Gerber, Josette Capriles Goldish, Matt Goldish, Jonathan Israel, Stanley Mirvis, Gérard Nahon, Joanna Newman, Ronnie Perelis, Jackie Ranston, James Robertson, Jessica Roitman, Dale Rosengarten, Barry L. Stiefel, Hilit Surowitz-Israel, Karl Watson, Swithin Wilmot

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For many centuries Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the Jewish world: right up to the Second World War the area was home to over 40 per cent of the world's Jews. Nearly three and a half million Jews lived in Poland alone, with nearly three million more in the Soviet Union. Yet although the majority of the Jews of Europe and the United States, and a large proportion of the Jews of Israel, originate from these lands, and many of the major movements that have characterized the Jewish world in recent times have their origins there, the history of their Jewish communities is not well known. Rather, it is the subject of mythologizing that fails both to bring out the specific features of the Jewish civilization that emerged there and to illustrate what was lost in its destruction: Jewish life in these parts, though often poor materially, was marked by a high degree of spiritual and ideological intensity and creativity. Antony Polonsky re-creates this lost world - brutally cut down by the Holocaust and seriously damaged by the Soviet attempt to destroy Jewish culture - in a study that avoids both sentimentalism and the simplification of the east European Jewish experience into a story of persecution and martyrdom. It is an important story whose relevance reaches far beyond the Jewish world or the bounds of east-central Europe, and Professor Polonsky succeeds in providing a comprehensive overview that highlights the realities of Jewish life while also setting them in the context of the political, economic, and social realities of the time. He describes not only the towns and shtetls where the Jews lived, the institutions they developed, and their participation in the economy, but also their vibrant religious and intellectual life, including the emergence of hasidism and the growth of opposition to it from within the Jewish world. By the late eighteenth century other factors had come into play: with the onset of modernization there were government attempts to integrate and transform the Jews, and the stirrings of Enlightenment led to the growth of the Haskalah movement that was to revolutionize the Jewish world. Polonsky looks at developments in each area in turn: the problems of emancipation, acculturation, and assimilation in Prussian and Austrian Poland; the politics of integration in the Kingdom of Poland; and the failure of forced integration in the tsarist empire. He then shows how the deterioration in the position of the Jews between 1881 and 1914 encouraged a range of new movements - Zionism, socialism, and autonomism - as well as the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He also examines Jewish urbanization and the rise of Jewish mass culture. The final part of the volume deals with the twentieth century. Starting from the First World War and the establishment of the Soviet Union, it looks in turn at Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union up to the Second World War. It then reviews Polish - Jewish relations during the war and examines the Soviet record in relation to the Holocaust. The final chapters deal with the Jews in the Soviet Union and in Poland since 1945, concluding with an epilogue on the Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia since the collapse of communism. This is an abridged version of a three-volume hardback edition which won the 2011 Kulczycki Book Prize for Polish Studies (awarded by the American Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) and also the Pro Historia Polonorum Prize for the best book on the history of Poland published in a foreign language between 2007 and 2011 (a prize established by the Polish Senate and awarded by the Polish Historical Association).

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