Search results for ""Author Matthew Beaumont""

You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of history and its racialized inequalities. Our posture and gait reflect our social and political experiences as we navigate the city under capitalism. Through a series of dialogues with thinkers and walkers, his book explores the relationship between freedom and the human bodyHow We Walk foregrounds the work of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and leading thinker of liberation, who was one of the first people to think about the politics of ‘walking while black’. It also introduces us to the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who wrote that one could discern the truth about a person through their posture and gait. For Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the ability to walk upright and with ease is a sign of personal and social freedom.Through these excursions, Beaumont reimagines the canonical literature on walking and presents

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Adventures in Realism offers an accessible introduction to realism as it has evolved since the 19th century. Though focused on literature and literary theory, the significance of technology and the visual arts is also addressed. Comprises 16 newly-commissioned essays written by a distinguished group of contributors, including Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson Provides the historical, cultural, intellectual, and literary contexts necessary to understand developments in realism Addresses the artistic mediums and technologies such as painting and film that have helped shape the way we perceive reality Explores literary and pictorial sub-genres, such as naturalism and socialist realism Includes a brief bibliography and suggestions for further reading at the end of each section

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A Concise Companion to Realism offers an accessible introduction to realism as it has evolved since the 19th century. Though focused on literature and literary theory, the significance of technology and the visual arts is also addressed. Comprises 17 newly-commissioned essays written by a distinguished group of contributors, including Slavoj Zizek, Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton Provides the historical, cultural, intellectual, and literary contexts necessary to understand developments in realism Addresses the artistic mediums and technologies such as painting and film that have helped shape the way we perceive reality Explores literary and pictorial sub-genres, such as naturalism and socialist realism Includes a brief bibliography and suggestions for further reading at the end of each section

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There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont, retraces a history of the walker. From Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement?

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Can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement?There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces a history of the walker from Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city including Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury. As the author shows, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution, and explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life.

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No existen los pasos perdidos. Cada paso y cada paseo están dotados de un sentido oculto, es decir, de una dirección, pero también de un significado, que apuntan hacia un índice utópico por conocer. Entre la maraña de trayectorias y tensiones que han dado forma a nuestras ciudades, Matthew Beaumont sigue en El caminante el rastro de las huellas que algunas de las voces más destacadas de la modernidad (Breton, Poe, Dickens, Chesterton, Woolf, Bataille) han dejado sobre las calles que transitaron infatigablemente para trazar los contornos de una poética y una política del caminar desde las que generar espacios de esperanza.

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'No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.' Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people's everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont's lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Ernest Ralph Gorse's heartlessness and lack of scruple are matched only by the inventiveness and panache with which he swindles his victims. With great deftness and precision Hamilton exposes how his dupes' own naivete, snobbery or greed make them perfect targets. These three novels are shot through with the brooding menace and sense of bleak inevitability so characteristic of the author. There is also vivid satire and caustic humour. Gorse is thought to be based on the real-life murderer Neville Heath, hanged in 1946.

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'art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake' In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), a diffident Oxford don produced an audacious and incalculably influential defence of aestheticism. Through his highly idiosyncratic readings of some of the finest paintings, sculptures, and poems of the French and Italian Renaissance, Pater redefined the practice of criticism as an impressionistic, almost erotic exploration of the critic's aesthetic responses. At the same time, reclaiming the Hellenism that he saw as the most characteristic aspect of the Renaissance, he implicitly celebrated homoerotic friendship. Pater's infamous 'Conclusion', which forever linked him with the decadent movement, scandalized many with its insistence on making pleasure the sole motive of life, even as it charmed fellow aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde. This edition of Studies reproduces the text of the first edition, recapturing its initial impact, and the Introduction celebrates its doomed attempt to stand out against the processes of industrialization. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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"Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night," wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today - home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun's down. If nightwalking is a matter of "going astray" in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city.In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets.With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night and the people they meet.

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G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday is a thrilling novel of deception, subterfuge, double-crossing and secret identities, and this Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Matthew Beaumont.The Central Anarchist Council is a secret society sworn to destroy the world. The council is governed by seven men, who hide their identities behind the names of the days of the week. Yet one of their number - Thursday - is not the revolutionary he claims to be, but a Scotland Yard detective named Gabriel Syme, sworn to infiltrate the organisation and bring the architects of chaos to justice. But when he discovers another undercover policeman on the Council, Syme begins to question his role in their operations. And as a desperate chase across Europe begins, his confusion grows, as well as his confidence in his ability to outwit his enemies, unravelling the mysteries of human behaviour and belief in a thrilling contest of wits. But he has still to face the greatest terror that the Council has: a man named Sunday, whose true nature is worse than Syme could ever have imagined ...In his introduction, Matthew Beaumont examines the book's themes of identity and confrontation, and explores its intriguing title. This edition also contains a chronology, notes and suggested further reading.G.K. Chesterton (1874-1938) attended the Slade School of Art, where he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown, before turning his hand to journalism. A prolific writer throughout his life, his best-known books include The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922) and the Father Brown stories. Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922 and died in 1938. If you enjoyed The Man Who Was Thursday, you might enjoy Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, also available in Penguin Classics.'The most thrilling book I have ever read'Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim

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A fascinating account of how the railway influenced more than a century of art in Europe and America Steam locomotives gripped the imagination when they first appeared in 19th-century Europe and America. Aboard these great machines, passengers traveled at faster speeds than ever before while watching the scenery transform itself and take on new forms. Common notions of time and space were forever changed.Through vivid illustrations and engaging texts, The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam captures both the fear and excitement of early train travel as it probes the artistic response to steam locomotion within its social setting. Featuring paintings, photography, prints, and posters, the book includes numerous masterpieces by 19th- and 20th-century artists, including J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Hopper.With its wide variety of themes—landscape painting, the conquest of the West, Impressionism, issues of social class, Modernism, the aesthetics of the machine, and environmental concerns—this work promises an exhilarating journey for both train and art enthusiasts and for anyone interested in one of the industrial age’s defining achievements.Published in association with The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and Walker Art Gallery, National Museums LiverpoolExhibition Schedule:Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool (April 18 – August 10, 2008)The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (September 13, 2008 – January 18, 2009)

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'The man's become inhuman ... He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.' One night in the depths of winter, a bizarre and sinister stranger wrapped in bandages and eccentric clothing arrives in a remote English village. His peculiar, secretive activities in the room he rents spook the locals. Speculation about his identity becomes horror and disbelief when the villagers discover that, beneath his disguise, he is invisible. Griffin, as the man is called, is an embittered scientist who is determined to exploit his extraordinary gifts, developed in the course of brutal self-experimentation, in order to conduct a Reign of Terror on the sleepy inhabitants of England. As the police close in on him, he becomes ever more desperate and violent. In this pioneering novella, subtitled 'A Grotesque Romance', Wells combines comedy, both farcical and satirical, and tragedy - to superbly unsettling effect. Since its publication in 1897, The Invisible Man has haunted not only popular culture (in particular cinema) but also the greatest and most experimental novels of the twentieth century.

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