Search results for ""Liverpool University Press""

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM.A City Against Empire is the history of the anti-imperialist movement in 1920s Mexico City. It combines intellectual, social, and urban history to shed light on the city’s role as an important global hub for anti-imperialism, exile activism, political art, and solidarity campaigns. After the Russian and the Mexican Revolution, Mexico City became a space and a symbol of global anti-imperialism. Radical politicians, artists, intellectuals, scientists, migrants, and revolutionary tourists took advantage of the urban environment to develop their visions of an anti-imperialism for the twentieth-century. These actors imagined national self-determination, international solidarity, and an emancipation from what they called “the West.” Global, local, and urban factors interacted to transform Mexico City into the most important hub for radicalism in the Americas. By weaving together the intellectual history of Mexico, the urban and social histories of Mexico City, and the global history of anti-imperialist movements in the 1920s, this books analyses the perfect storm of anti-imperialism in Mexico City.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. As the prominence of the recent #WakingTheFeminists movement illustrates, the Irish theatre world is highly conscious of the ways in which theatre can foster social emancipation. This volume of essays uncovers a wide range of marginalised histories by reflecting on the emancipatory role that the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) has played in Irish culture and society, both historically and in more recent times. The Gate’s founders, Hilton Edwards and Michéal mac Liammóir, promoted the work of many female playwrights and created an explicitly cosmopolitan stage on which repressive ideas about gender, sexuality, class and language were questioned. During Selina Cartmell’s current tenure as director, cultural diversity and social emancipation have also featured prominently on the Gate’s agenda, with various productions exploring issues of ethnicity in contemporary Ireland. The Gate thus offers a unique model for studying the ways in which cosmopolitan theatres, as cultural institutions, give expression to and engage with the complexities of identity and diversity in changing, globalised societies. CONTRIBUTORS: David Clare, Marguérite Corporaal, Mark Fitzgerald, Barry Houlihan, Radvan Markus, Deirdre McFeely, Justine Nakase, Siobhan O'Gorman, Mary Trotter, Grace Vroomen, Ian R. Walsh, Feargal Whelan

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. Situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies, affect studies, and narratology, Affective Disorders explores the significance of emotion in a range of colonial and postcolonial narratives. Through close readings of Naguib Mahfouz, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, among others, Bede Scott argues that literary representations of emotion need not be interpreted solely at the level of character, individual psychology, or the contingencies of plotting, but could also be related to broader sociopolitical forces. We thus find episodes of anger that serve as a collective response to the 'modernity' of wartime Cairo, feelings of jealousy that are inspired by the slave economy of imperial Brazil, and an overwhelming sense of boredom that emerges, in the late eighties, out of the bureaucratic procedures of the Indian Administrative Service. Affective Disorders also explores in some detail the formal consequences of these feelings – the way in which affective states such as anger or jealousy can often destabilize narratives, provoking crises of representation, generic ambivalence, and discursive rupture. By emphasizing the social origin of these emotions, and by analysing their influence on literary discourse, this study provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between various sociopolitical forces and the affective and aesthetic 'disorders' to which they give rise.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Save the Womanhood is a fascinating new history about promiscuity, prostitution and the efforts of local social purists to ‘save’ working-class women from themselves. The book examines how the work of the Liverpool Vigilance Association was supplemented by others, such as the Women Police Patrols, the Liverpool House of Help and the local branch of the Catholic Women’s League. It argues that though these organizations helped many lost and stranded women, their work also enacted a form of moral surveillance on the streets. As such, the book uncovers how important twentieth-century anxieties about changing sexual practices, female immigration, white slavery and the rise of new consumer cultures played out at local level and with what consequences for women in Liverpool. The book also brings together a wide range of local and national sources to show that when female-run, local organizations concerned about immorality went into decline in the post-war years, it was because official institutions and local law enforcement had increasingly taken up their cause. Consequently, Save the Womanhood argues that young, working-class women who travelled through Liverpool in search of work and adventure continued to arouse moral anxiety even as the city’s social purists battled to maintain their influence.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. ‘Who ever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry’s fabled novel of the 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to the White Sea? Lord knows, I didn’t’ – Michael Hofmann, TLS This book breaks new ground in studies of the British novelist Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), as the first collection of new essays produced in response to the publication in 2014 of a scholarly edition of Lowry’s ‘lost’ novel, In Ballast to the White Sea. In their introduction, editors Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs show how the publication of In Ballast sheds new light on Lowry as both a highly political writer and one deeply influenced by his native Merseyside, as his protagonist Sigbjørn Hansen-Tarnmoor walks the streets of Liverpool, wrestling with his own conscience and with pressing questions of class, identity and social reform. In the chapters that follow, renowned Lowry scholars and newer voices explore key aspects of the novel and its relation to the wider contexts of Lowry’s work. These include his complex relation to socialism and communism, the symbolic value of Norway, and the significance of tropes of loss, hauntings and doublings. The book draws on the unexpected opportunity offered by the rediscovery of In Ballast to look afresh at Lowry’s oeuvre, to ‘remake the voyage’.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Steel City Readers* makes available, and interprets in detail, a large body of new evidence about past cultures and communities of reading. Its distinctive method is to listen to readers' own voices, rather than theorising about them as an undifferentiated group. Its cogent and engaging structure traces reading journeys from childhood into education and adulthood, and attends to settings from home to school to library. It has a distinctive focus on reading for pleasure and its framework of argument situates that type of reading in relation to dimensions of gender and class. It is grounded in place, and particularly in the context of a specific industrial city: Sheffield. The men and women featured in the book, coming to adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s, rarely regarded reading as a means of self-improvement. It was more usually a compulsive and intensely pleasurable private activity.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. Representations of China in Latin American Literature (1987-2016) analyses contemporary Latin American novels in which China is the main theme. Using ‘China’ as a multidimensional term, it explores how the novels both highlight and undermine assumptions about China that have shaped Latin America’s understanding of ‘China’ and shows ‘China’ to be a kind of literary/imaginary ‘third’ term which reframes Latin American discourses of alterity. On one level, it argues that these texts play with the way that ‘China’ stands in as a wandering signifier and as a metonym for Asia, a gesture that essentialises it as an unchanging other. On another level, it argues that the novels’ employment of ‘China’ resists essentialist constructions of identity. ‘China’ is thus shown to be serving as a concept which allows for criticism of the construction of fetishized otherness and of the exclusion inherent in essentialist discourses of identity. The book presents and analyses the depiction of an imaginary of China which is arguably performative, but which discloses the tropes and themes which may be both established and subverted, in the novels. Chapter One examines the way in which ‘China’ is represented and constructed in Latin American novels where this country is a setting for their stories. The novels studied in Chapter Two are linked to the presence of Chinese communities in Latin America. The final chapter examines novels whose main theme is travel to contemporary China. Ultimately, in the novels studied in this book ‘China’ serves as a concept through which essentialist notions of identity are critiqued.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Well-known in science fiction for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist has been a rich source for imagining ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds.’ But more than a well-spring for SF scenarios, the genre’s archaeological imaginary invites us to consider the ideological implications of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of very popular, though often critically-neglected, North American SF film and television texts–running the gamut of telefilms, pseudo-documentaries, teen serial drama and Hollywood blockbusters–Excavating the Future explores the popular archaeological imagination and the political uses to which it is being employed by the U.S. state and its adversaries. By treating SF texts as documents of archaeological experience circulating within and between scientific and popular culture communities and media, Excavating the Future develops critical strategies for analyzing SF film and television’s critical and adaptive responses to post 9/11 geopolitical concerns about the war on terror, homeland security, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, and the ongoing fight against ISIS.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.This book offers the first full-length study of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its ‘place’ – in multiple ways – in literary history as a work celebrated for ‘making it new’, yet deeply engaged with the literary past. It argues that Smith’s sonnets are constituted by three intertwined concerns: with tradition, place and the sonnet form itself, whereby the subjects of Smith’s sonnets – across birds, rivers, the sea, plants and flowers – are bound up with the literary context in which she wrote. Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet shows that Smith’s verse engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith’s career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England. The book also illuminates Smith’s place in posterity, as a popular poet – influencing figures ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Constable – who was subsequently obscured in literary history. It reveals the complex processes underpinning Smith’s reception and paradoxical position from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and shows that the appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition have been negotiated and understood by Smith, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors.

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This book studies Penelope Fitzgerald's writing and the compositional method behind it.

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In this illuminating and lucid study, Deborah Parsons examines the range of Djuna Barnes’s oeuvre; her early journalism, short stories and one act dramas, poetry, the family chronicle Ryder, the Ladies Almanack, and her late play The Antiphon, as well as her modernist classic Nightwood.

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The story of an all-female caving expedition gone horribly wrong, The Descent (2005) is arguably the best of the mid-2000s horror entries to return verve and intensity to the genre. Unlike its peers (Saw [2004], Hostel [2011], etc.), The Descent was both commercially and critically popular, providing a genuine version of what other films could only produce as pastiche. For Mark Kermode, writing in the Observer, it was "one of the best British horror films of recent years," and Derek Elley in Variety described it as "an object lesson in making a tightly-budgeted, no-star horror pic." Time Out's critic praised "this fiercely entertaining British horror movie;" while Rolling Stone's Peter Travers warned prospective viewers to "prepare to be scared senseless." Emphasizing female characters and camaraderie, The Descent is an ideal springboard for discussing underexplored horror themes: the genre's engagement with the lure of the archaic; the idea of birth as the foundational human trauma and its implications for horror film criticism; and the use of provisional worldviews, or "rubber realities," in horror.

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Here is an unexpected Gérard Genette, looking back at his life and time with humour, tenderness and lucidity. ‘Bardadrac’ is the neologism a friend of his once invented to name the jumbled contents of her handbag. A way of saying that one finds a little bit of everything in this book: memories of a suburban childhood, a provincial adolescence and early years in Paris marked by a few political commitments; the evocation of great intellectual figures, like Roland Barthes or Jorge Luis Borges; a taste for cities, rivers, women and music, classical or jazz; contingent epiphanies; good or bad ideas; true and false memories; aesthetic biases; geographical reveries; secret or apocryphal quotations; maxims and characters; asides, quips and digressions; reflections on literature and language, with an ironic take on the medialect, or dialect of the media; and other surprises. At the intersection, for instance, of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, Renard’s Journal, Roland Barthes’ Roland Barthes and Perec’s I Remember, this whimsical abecedarium invites you to stroll and gather. Gérard Genette (1930-2018) was research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and visiting professor at Yale University. Cofounder of the journal Poétique, he published extensively in the fields of literary theory, poetics and aesthetics, including, in English: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1980), Figures of Literary Discourse (1982), Fiction and Diction (1993), Mimologics (1995), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence (1997), The Aesthetic Relation (1999), Essays in Aesthetics (2005).

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How do communities tell and retell stories of catastrophe to explain their own origins, imagine their future, and work for their survival? This book contends that such stories are central to how communities claim a position within history. It explores this question, so vital for our present moment, through narratives produced in eighteenth-century France: a tumultuous period when a new understanding of a properly 'modern' national history was being elaborated. Who gets to belong to the modern era? And who or what is relegated to a gothic, barbarous or medieval past? Is an enlightened future assured, or is a return to a Dark Age inevitable? Following barbarians, bastards, usurpers, prophets and Revolutionary martyrs through stories of catastrophes real and imagined, the book traces how narrative temporalities become historicities: visions of the laws which govern the past, present and future. Ultimately it argues that the complex temporality of catastrophe offers a privileged insight into how a modern French historical consciousness was formed out of the multiple pasts and possible futures that coexisted alongside the age of Enlightenment. Further, examining the tension between a desire to place the imagined community definitively beyond catastrophic times, and a fascination with catastrophe in its revelatory or regenerative aspect, it offers an important historical perspective on the presence of this same tension in the stories of catastrophe that we tell in our own multiple, tumultuous present.

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Sex, Sea, and Self reassesses the place of the French Antilles and French Caribbean literature within current postcolonial thought and visions of the Black Atlantic. Using a feminist lens, this study examines neglected twentieth-century French texts by Black writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, making the analysis of some of these texts available to readers of English for the first time. This interdisciplinary study of female and male authors reconsiders their political strategies and the critical role of French creoles in the creation of their own history. This approach recalibrates overly simplistic understandings of the victimization and alienation of French Caribbean people. In the systems of cultural production under consideration, sexuality constitutes an instrument of political and cultural consciousness in the chaotic period between 1924 and 1948. Studying sexual imagery constructed around female bodies demonstrates the significance of agency and the legacy of the past in cultural resistance and political awareness. Sex, Sea, and Self particularly highlights Antillean women intellectuals’ theoretical contributions to Caribbean critical theory. Therefore, this analysis illuminates debates on the multifaceted and conflicted relationships between France and its overseas departments and expands ideas of nationhood in the Black Atlantic and the Americas.

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During what has become officially known as the genocide against the Tutsi, as many as one million Rwandan people were brutally massacred between April and July 1994. This book presents a critical study of fictional responses by authors inside and outside Rwanda to the 1994 genocide. Focusing on a large and original corpus of creative writing by African authors, including writers from Rwanda, Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994 examines the positionality of authors and their texts in relation to the genocide. How do issues of ‘ethnicity’, nationality, geographical location and family history affect the ways in which creative writers respond to what happened in 1994? And how do such factors lead to authors and their texts being positioned by others? The book is organized around the principal subject positions created by the genocide, categories that have particular connotations and have become fraught with political tension and ambiguity in the context of post-genocide Rwanda. Through analysis of the figures of tourists, witnesses, survivors, victims and perpetrators, the book identifies the ways in which readers of genocide stories are compelled to reevaluate their knowledge of Rwanda and take an active role in commemorative processes: as self-critical tourists, ethical witnesses, judges or culpable bystanders, we are encouraged to acknowledge and assume our own responsibility for what happened in 1994.

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For Louis Jacobs, the quest—the process of engaging with and thinking about Jewish faith—was a lifelong pursuit. He offered a model in the 1960s, a period characterized by general religious crisis, of an observant, committed, but intellectually curious Judaism that empowered individual seekers to address challenges to faith. In Orthodox Judaism at the time a battle was under way for religious control. Generating a widespread controversy in British Jewry known as the ‘Jacobs Affair’, his thought offers a lens for examining the trajectory of Orthodoxy. In a contemporary context marked by the changing cultural and intellectual concerns of a ‘post-secular’ age, the focus of some of these debates over religious control has shifted. Yet Jacobs’ emphasis on a personal quest is as relevant as ever, perhaps more so. This first book-length analysis of his theology unpacks the building blocks of his thought. It argues that, despite its particularities and limitations, his approach can provide a powerful model for contemporary religious seekers in the context of a growing impetus away from established, denominationally bound forms of religion. Many orthodox believers across a range of faiths continue to prefer the certainty of unquestionable religious truth claims rather than pursuing a subjective search for religious meaning. For those seeking alternative models for the contemporary Jewish quest, a reconsideration of Jacobs’ theology can offer valuable tools.

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Sa’adyah Gaon was an outstanding tenth-century Jewish thinker—a prominent rabbi, philosopher, and exegete. He was a pioneer in the fields in which he toiled, and was an inspiration and basis for later Jewish writing in all these areas. The last major English-language study of his work was published in 1921, long before Genizah research changed the understanding of the time in which he lived. Robert Brody’s masterly work, covering Sa’adyah’s biography and his main areas of creativity in an accessible way, is therefore a much-needed reassessment of an outstanding figure. The opening chapter, on the geonic period that formed the background to Sa’adyah’s life (a period on which there are few works in English), is followed by an overview that brings out the revolutionary aspects of his work and the characteristic features of his writings. Subsequent chapters consider his philosophical works; his Bible commentaries; his pioneering linguistic work; his poetry; his halakhic activity (including an examination of his use of the Palestinian Talmud compared to that of the Babylonian Talmud); and his activity as a polemicist, notably against the Karaites. An Epilogue sums up his importance in medieval Jewish culture. Particularly valuable features of the book are the copious quotations from Sa’adyah’s works, which facilitate familiarity with his style as well as his ideas; the clarity in presenting complex and difficult concepts; the constant assessment of his relationship to his predecessors in his various fields of study and his own unique contributions to each field; and the contextualization of his contribution within the political, cultural, and religious climate of his times so that both revolutionary and conservative elements in his thought can be identified and evaluated.

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Following tremendous advances in recent years in the study of religious belief, this volume adopts a fresh understanding of Jewish religious life in Poland. Approaches deriving from the anthropology, history, phenomenology, psychology, and sociology of religion have replaced the methodologies of social or political history that were applied in the past, offering fascinating new perspectives. The well-established interest in hasidism continues, albeit from new angles, but topics that have barely been considered before are well represented here too. Women’s religious practice gains new prominence, and a focus on elites has given way to a consideration of the beliefs and practices of ordinary people. Reappraisals of religious responses to secularization and modernity, both liberal and Orthodox, offer more nuanced insights into this key issue. Other research areas represented here include the material history of Jewish religious life in eastern Europe and the shift of emphasis from theology to praxis in the search for the defining quality of religious experience. The contemporary reassessments in this volume, with their awareness of emerging techniques that have the potential to extract fresh insights from source materials both old and new, show how our understanding of what it means to be Jewish is continuing to expand.

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With its five thematic sections covering genres from cantorial to classical to klezmer, this pioneering multi-disciplinary volume presents rich coverage of the work of musicians of Jewish origin in the Polish lands. It opens with the musical consequences of developments in Jewish religious practice: the spread of hasidism in the eighteenth century meant that popular melodies replaced traditional cantorial music, while the greater acculturation of Jews in the nineteenth century brought with it synagogue choirs. Jewish involvement in popular culture included performances for the wider public, Yiddish songs and the Yiddish theatre, and contributions of many different sorts---technical and commercial as well as creative---in the interwar years. Chapters on the classical music scene cover Jewish musical institutions, organizations, and education; individual composers and musicians; and a consideration of music and Jewish national identity. One section is devoted to the Holocaust as reflected in Jewish music, and the final section deals with the afterlife of Jewish musical creativity in Poland, particularly the resurgence of interest in klezmer music. The essays in this collection do not attempt to to define what may well be undefinable---what ‘Jewish music’ is. Rather, they provide an original and much-needed exploration of the activities and creativity of ‘musicians of the Jewish faith’.CONTRIBUTORS: Eliyana R. Adler, Michael Aylward, Sławomir Dobrzański, Paula Eisenstein-Baker, Beth Holmgren, Sylwia Jakubczyk-Ślęczka, Daniel Katz, James Loeffler, Michael Lukin, Filip Mazurczak, Bożena Muszkalska, Julia Riegel, Ronald Robboy, Robert Rothstein, Joel E. Rubin, Adam J. Sacks, Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel, Eleanor Shapiro, Carla Shapreau, Tamara Sztyma, Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota, Joseph Toltz, Maja Trochimczyk, Magdalena Waligórska, Bret Werb, Akiva Zimmerman

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Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. Scholars contributing to the present study were invited to consider how such regional identities were fashioned, propagated, reinforced, contested, and reshaped—and to reflect on the developments, events, or encounters that made these identities manifest. They were asked to identify how subcultural identities proved to be useful, and the circumstances in which they were deployed. The resulting volume spans the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor. In its own way, each contribution considers factors—demographic, geographical, historical, economic, political, institutional, legal, intellectual, theological, cultural, and even biological—that led medieval Jews to conceive of themselves, or to be perceived by others, as bearers of a discrete Jewish regional identity. Notwithstanding the singularity of each essay, they collectively attest to the inherent dynamism of Jewish regional identities.

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In the postmodern, relativist world-view with its refutation of a single, objective, and ultimate truth, it has become difficult if not impossible to argue in favour of one’s own beliefs as preferable to those of others. Miriam Feldmann Kaye’s pioneering study is one of the first English-language books to address Jewish theology from a postmodern perspective, probing the question of how Jewish theology has the potential to survive the postmodern onslaught that some see as heralding the collapse of religion. Basing her arguments on both philosophical and theological scholarship, Feldmann Kaye shows how postmodernism might actually be a resource for rejuvenating religion.Her response to the conception of theology and postmodernism as competing systems of thought is based on a close critical study of Rav Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg) and Tamar Ross. Rather than advocating postmodern ideas, she analyses their writings through the lens of the most radical of continental postmodern philosophers and cultural critics in order to offer a compelling theology compatible with that world-view. Whether the reader considers postmodernism to be inherently problematic or merely inconsequential, this study demonstrates why reconsidering these preconceptions is one of the most pressing issues in contemporary Jewish thought.

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The Ba'al Shem Tov is an elusive subject for historians because documentary evidence about his life is scanty and equivocal. Until now, much of what was known about him was based on stories compiled more than a generation after his death, many of which serve more to mythologize him than to describe him. The portrait Moshe Rosman provides is drawn from life instead of from myth. Based on innovative critical analysis of familiar and previously unexplored archival sources, and concentrating on accounts that can be attributed to the Besht or to contemporary eyewitnesses, this book goes further than any previous work in uncovering the historical Ba'al Shem Tov. Additionally, documents in Polish and Hebrew discovered by Professor Rosman during his research for the book enable him to give the first detailed description of the cultural, social, economic, and political context of the Besht's life. Founder of Hasidism supplies the history behind the legend. It presents the best, most convincing description that can be drawn from the existing documentary evidence, changing our understanding of the Besht and with it the master-narrative of hasidism.A substantial new introduction considers what has changed in the study of Hasidism since the influential first edition was published, these changes being in part due to the effect of the book. New approaches, new sources, and new interpretations have been introduced, and these are reviewed and critically assessed. Criticisms of the original edition are answered and key issues reconsidered, including the authenticity of the various versions of the Holy Epistle; the ways in which Jacob Joseph of Polonne's books can be utilized as historical sources; and the relationship to history of the stories about the Ba'al Shem Tov in the hagiographical collection Shivhei Ha-Besht.

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The essay that forms the core of this book is an attempt to understand the developments that have occurred in Orthodox Jewry in America in the last seventy years, and to analyse their implications. The prime change is what is often described as ‘the swing to the right’, a marked increase in ritual stringency, a rupture in patterns of behaviour that has had major consequences not only for Jewish society but also for the nature of Jewish spirituality. For Haym Soloveitchik, the key feature at the root of this change is that, as a result of migration to the ‘New Worlds’ of England, the US, and Israel and acculturation to its new surroundings, American Jewry—indeed, much of the Jewish world— had to reconstruct religious practice from normative texts: observance could no longer be transmitted mimetically, on the basis of practices observed in home and street. In consequence, behaviour once governed by habit is now governed by rule. This new edition allows the author to deal with criticisms raised since the essay, long established as a classic in the field, was originally published, and enables readers to gain a fuller perspective on a topic central to today’s Jewish world and its development.

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This book traces the historical evolution of Indian cinema through a number of key decades. The book is made up of 14 chapters with each chapter focusing on one key film, the chosen films analysed in their wider social, political and historical context whilst a concerted engagement with various ideological strands that underpin each film is also evident. In addition to exploring the films in their wider contexts, the author analyses selected sequences through the conceptual framework common to both film and media studies. This includes a consideration of narrative, genre, representation, audience and mise-en-scene. The case studies run chronologically from Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951) to The Elements Trilogy: Water (2005) and include films by such key figures as Satyajit Ray (The Lonely Wife), Ritwick Ghatak (Cloud Capped Star), Yash Chopra (The Wall) and Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!).

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Habsburg Bukovina no longer exists, save in the realms of historiography, nostalgia, and collective memory. Remembered for its remarkable multinational, multi-faith character, Bukovina and its capital city Czernowitz have long been presented as exemplars of inter-ethnic co-operation, political moderation, and cultural dynamism, with Jews regarded as indispensable to the region’s character and vitality. This is not mere rhetoric: the Jews of Bukovina were integral to, and at home in, local society. David Rechter’s important new history conveys the special nature of Bukovina Jewry while embedding it in the broader historical and intellectual frameworks of Galician, imperial Austrian, and east central European Jewries. Carefully tracing the evolution of the tangled relationship of state and society with the Jews, from the Josephinian Enlightenment through absolutism to emancipation, he brings to light the untold story of the Jewish minority in the monarchy's easternmost province, often a byword for economic backwardness and cultural provincialism. Here, at the edge of the Habsburg monarchy, Jews forged a new society from familiar elements, a unique hybrid of eastern and western European Jewries. Bukovina Jewry was both and neither: understanding its history can help us grasp the east/west fault lines within European Jewry, a key element in the Jewish experience in Europe.

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The exploration of Taoism and T'ai Chi begins by examining their origins and affiliations under the title of Beginnings. Subsequent chapters take up the themes of Harmony (expressing the duality and interrelation of yin and yang); The Way (which looks at the philosophy of the Tao and the path that leads to its practical expression through T'ai Chi); Change (which examines the influence of the I Ching and the Eight Energies); Direction (an analysis of the Five Elements); and Energy (which explores alchemy and the vital energy of ch'i). The primary focus is on Movement and Stillness, which harmonizes the softness of movement with the stillness of the inner self -- leading to the theme of Unity, the ultimate goal of philosophical Taoism and the practical dimensions of that philosophy in T'ai Chi.

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There has been little progress on the refugee problem because of official Palestinian public positions, other Arab countries' approach to the 'right of return' of all Palestinian refugees, and the contrasting Israeli public policy of not allowing any refugees to return to Israel. Such polar-opposite approaches can never resolve this difficult and longstanding humanitarian problem. By working collectively, the world's leading experts from Arab countries, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Europe and the United States have developed a chessboard of proposed solutions. The volume in part reflects the polarization that exists on the issue, and in part moves away from the political slogans of both sides, toward concrete proposals for negotiating a comprehensive agreement.

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Francis Tregian owned estates in Cornwall, and held a high place in court at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I. He made no secret of his Catholic faith. Banished from court on trumped-up charges, he was arrested for hiding a priest, St Cuthbert Mayne, and imprisoned for 30 years. Released under James I, he died in a Jesuit hospital at St Roque, Lisbon, Portugal, and was buried standing up because he had "stood up" to Elizabeth and her heresies. Francis Tregian is much revered on the Continent, where there have been recent attempts to have him elevated to sainthood. At his place of burial there is a detailed description of how he preferred the confiscation of his estates for the defence of the Catholic Faith. This booklet details the history of Francis Tregian, and includes all known details, including "Tregian" Elizabethan music. Includes a Prayer for the Beatification of Francis Tregian as authorized by the Right Reverend Christopher Budd, Bishop of Plymouth.

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From Palace to Power: an IIlustrated history of Whitehall is the 400-year story -- in contemporary pictures, maps and photographs, as well as letters and diaries -- of the historical transformation of 'The Street' recognised throughout the world as a symbol of Government. The illustrations have been gathered from diverse sources: some hang as oil paintings in the corridors of power, known only to the privileged who occupy these offices. Others have been gleaned from contemporary journals, old sepia prints and postcards from the early days of the camera. Extended captions to the 120 illustrations, the 8-page coloured plate section, map endpapers -- as well as a select bibliography, chronology, list of statues in Whitehall, and index -- make this book easy to read and follow for the historian and the browser. In this new work, which has taken five years to research, Susan Foreman has created a vivid image of how the most pre-eminent street in Britain has changed, and how the political fortunes of its dramatis personae have left their mark.

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The span of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg's life (1884-1966) illuminates the religious and intellectual dilemmas that traditional Jewry has faced over the past century. Rabbi Weinberg became a central ideologue of modern Orthodoxy because of his positive attitude to secular studies and Zionism and his willingness to respond to social change in interpreting the halakhah, despite his traditional training in a Lithuanian yeshiva. But Weinberg was an unusual man: even at a time when he was defending the traditional yeshiva against all attempts at reform, he always maintained an interest in the wider world. He left Lithuania for Germany at the beginning of the First World War, attended the University of Giessen, and increasingly identified with the Berlin school of German Orthodoxy. Although initially an apologist for the Nazi regime, he was soon recognized as German Orthodoxy's most eminent halakhic authority in its efforts to maintain religious tradition in the face of Nazi persecution. His approach, then and in his later halakhic writings, including the famous Seridei esh, derived from the conviction that the attempt to shore up Orthodoxy by increased religious stringency would only reduce its popular appeal. Using a great deal of unpublished material, including private correspondence, Marc Shapiro discusses many aspects of Weinberg's life. In doing so he elucidates many institutional and intellectual phenomena of the Jewish world, a number of which have so far received little scholarly attention: the yeshivas of Lithuania; the state of the Lithuanian rabbinate; the musar movement; the Jews of eastern Europe in Weimar Germany; the Torah im Derekh Eretz movement and its variants; Orthodox Jewish attitudes towards Wissenschaft des Judentums; and the special problems of Orthodox Jews in Nazi Germany. Throughout, he shows the complex nature of Weinberg's character and the inner struggles of a man being pulled in different directions. Compellingly and authoritatively written, his fascinating conclusions are quite different from those presented in earlier historical treatments of the period.

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Labour and the Caucus provides a new, innovative pre-history of the Labour party. In the two decades following the Second Reform Act there was a sustained and concerted campaign for working-class parliamentary representation from a range of labour organisations to an extent that was hitherto unseen in British political history. The franchise revolution of 1867 and the controversial introduction of more sophisticated forms of electoral machinery, which became known as the ‘caucus’, raised serious questions not only for a labour movement seeking to secure political representation but also for a Liberal party that had to respond to the pressures of mass politics. Through a close examination of the interactions between labour and the ‘caucus’ from the 1868 general election to Keir Hardie’s independent labour candidature in 1888, this book provides a comprehensive and multi-layered picture of the troubled relationship between working-class radicals and organised Liberalism. The electoral strategy of labour candidates, the links between urban and rural radicalism, the impact of the National Liberal Federation, the influence of American and Irish politics on the labour movement, the revival of socialism, and the contested identity of a ‘Labour party’ are all examined from fresh perspectives. In doing so, this book challenges the existing teleological assumptions about the rise of independent labour, and explores the questions that remain about how working-class radicals and Liberals shared and negotiated power, and how this relationship changed over time.

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Apparently innocuous, sugar is a substance which brings with it a profound disquiet, not least because of its direct links with the histories of slavery in the New World. These links have long been a source of critical fascination, generating several landmark analyses, ranging from Fernando Ortis’s Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940) and Noël Deerr’s monumental two-volume The History of Sugar (1949-50) to Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985). Unlike previous texts, Plasa’s meticulously researched book not only examines the traditional classic studies but also the hitherto largely ignored work produced by a number of expatriate Caribbean authors, both male and female, from the 1980s onwards. As a result Slaves to Sweetness provides the most comprehensive account to date of the historical transformations which sugar’s representation has undergone, providing a rich resource for scholars in Slavery, Caribbean, Black Atlantic, Postcolonial and Literary Studies.

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Liverpool was unique among English towns in the rate of its commercial development from the late seventeenth century. Liverpool, 1660–1750 provides the first significant detailed published study of the social and political structure of the town during this crucial period. The authors utilize a number of methodological approaches to early modern Liverpool, using parish registers, probate material and town government records to consider the characteristics of marriage, birth and death in a fast-growing and mobile population; the occupational structure, family lives and connections of workers in the town; and the political structures and struggles of the period. It is hoped that this book will provide a stimulus to further investigation of Liverpool’s early and precocious eighteenth-century growth.

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Since the 1980s the bird life of the Cotswolds has seen significant changes, many of them subtle but some spectacular. This beautifully illustrated and extensively researched book, the product of five years’ field work exposes these changes with the aid of simple and clear colour maps which give not only a detailed but easily understood picture of the breeding distributions of bird species in the area today, but also a comparison with 20 years ago. The maps are accompanied by descriptive accounts for each species, often containing fascinating local information. The book discusses the relative difficulties of surveying the different species, which will be of help to others undertaking the same task elsewhere. It is richly illustrated by colour photographs of the birds and their habitats. Its easy style and clarity will make this book of great interest not only to ornithologists, but to everyone with a concern for the natural environment of the Cotswolds, and to anyone planning a visit to this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

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This book examines the most polemical atrocity of the Spanish Civil War: the massacre of 2,500 political prisoners by Republican security forces in the villages of Paracuellos and Torrejâon de Ardoz near Madrid in November/December 1936. The atrocity took place while Santiago Carrillo -- later Communist Party leader in the 1970s -- was responsible for public order. Although Carrillo played a key role in the transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975, he passed away at the age of 97 in 2012 still denying any involvement in 'Paracuellos' (the generic term for the massacres). The issue of Carrillo's responsibility has been the focus of much historical research. Julius Ruiz places Paracuellos in the wider context of the 'Red Terror' in Madrid, where a minimum of 8,000 'fascists' were murdered after the failure of military rebellion in July 1936. He rejects both 'revisionist' right-wing writers such as Cesar Vidal who cite Paracuellos as evidence that the Republic committed Soviet-style genocide and left-wing historians such as Paul Preston, who in his Spanish Holocaust argues that the massacres were primarily the responsibility of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The book argues that Republican actions influenced the Soviets, not the other way round: Paracuellos intensified Stalin's fears of a 'Fifth Column' within the USSR that facilitated the Great Terror of 1937-38. It concludes that the perpetrators were primarily members of the Provincial Committee of Public Investigation (CPIP), a murderous all-leftist revolutionary tribunal created in August 1936, and that its work of eliminating the 'Fifth Column' (an imaginary clandestine Francoist organisation) was supported not just by Carrillo, but also by the Republican government. In Autumn 2015 the book was serialised in El Mundo, Spain's second largest selling daily, to great acclaim.

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With his Letter of 1493 to the court of Spain, Christopher Columbus heralded his first voyage to the present-day Americas, creating visions that seduced the European imagination and birthing a fascination with those "new" lands and their inhabitants that continues today. Columbus's epistolary announcement travelled from country to country in a late-medieval media event -- and the rest, as has been observed, is history. The Letter has long been the object of speculation concerning its authorship and intention: British historian Cecil Jane questions whether Columbus could read and write prior to the first voyage while Demetrio Ramos argues that King Ferdinand and a minister composed the Letter and had it printed in the Spanish folio. The Letter has figured in studies of Spanish Imperialism and of Discovery and Colonial period history, but it also offers insights into Columbus's passions and motives as he reinvents himself and retails his vision of Peter Martyr's Novus orbis to men and women for whom Columbus was as unknown as the places he claimed to have visited. The central feature of the book is its annotated variorum edition of the Spanish Letter, together with an annotated English translation and word and name glossaries. A list of terms from early print-period and manuscript cultures supports those critical discussions. In the context of her text-based reading, the author addresses earlier critical perspectives on the Letter, explores foundational questions about its composition, publication and aims, and proposes a theory of authorship grounded in text, linguistics, discourse, and culture.

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The two essays in the volume follow a long tradition in critical discourse that turns to Art's domain as a source of inspiration, instruction, and as material for the construction of its concepts and the development of its problems. The case study of Suite Grunewald, 159+1 variations, by the artist Titus-Carmel, returns to a subject that has been eclipsed in past decades by the imperative to remember: namely, the creation of the new as an event, or rather, the event of the new as creation. This is an especially vexatious problem following, on the one hand, the massive displacement of the subject as the author and creator of its works and, on the other, the introduction of the influential Deleuzian-Bergsonian notion of the new as immanent continuity rather than -- as the commonsense notion would have it -- a rupture, interruption, and discontinuity. The first essay develops this problematic by working alongside with Titus-Carmel variations / deconstruction of Grunewald's original painting of the "Crucifixion" as an exemplary site where the creation of the new -- at once incalculable and necessary -- finds a living and urgent expression. The second essay stages an encounter and sets free the resonances between the writing of Jean-Luc Nancy on and around the "body" and the cinema of Claire Denis as a cinema that mobilises the force of bodies that it itself invents, and to which it gives a unique form of presence.

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Piracy along American coastlines and in the Caribbean in the late 1600s and early 1700s is often seen today through a colourful set of modern media archetypes. The reality, however, was usually more ugly and frequently lethal. In this book, author Joseph Gibbs goes back to original memoirs, monographs, newspaper articles, and trial records to present a stark picture of piracy in the era of Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, and Ann Bonny and Mary Read. A "prequel" to Gibbs' well received On the Account: Piracy and the Americas, 1766-1835, this book similarly presents primary sources chosen for authenticity. The contents are introduced, annotated, and carefully edited for modern readers. They offer a glimpse of piracy far removed from, and often more engaging than, the romanticised version provided by later writers and filmmakers. They describe, for example, the ordeal-filled marches of the Caribbean boucaniers, who were tough enough to eat leather while sacking the cities of the Spanish empire. They also shed light on the pirates' tactics at sea and on land; their practice of "forcing" captives to join them; their often-sadistic cruelty; and their ships' "articles" and the primitive democratic standards they upheld. Enhanced with classic maps and illustrations, The Golden Age offers an unvarnished look at those who sailed and often died under the dreaded black and red flags of the era. Readers will see pirates as they actually were -- in pursuit of prey, in battle, and sometimes on the way to the gallows.

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This book investigates the presence of Chinese and Indian companies in Europe and the impact that the current global financial crisis has had on their corporate behaviour and strategies. Have investments been cancelled or postponed? Has the crisis created new opportunities for investment? Is the behaviour of Chinese and Indian firms to these new circumstances similar? In addressing these challenging questions the authors used a proprietary data base encompassing over 1,500 investments (greenfield operations, mergers-and-acquisitions, joint ventures, horizontal/vertical extensions) made throughout Europe by companies from China (Mainland and Hong Kong) and India since the 1990s. Comparisons were made according to several criteria (eg: spatial patterns, modes of entry, sector and function distribution) -- to pinpoint differences and likenesses. In addition, face-to-face interviews were conducted in order to elaborate congruent case studies in traditional sectors (textile/clothing), or in new sectors (software for Chinese companies). The crisis had an impact on both investors in the following terms: lower amounts of investment, more merger-and-acquisition deals in absolute and relative terms, more focus on the largest economies (particularly the UK), and a targeting of specific assets such as critical technologies, international management capability, renowned brands and sale networks. In conclusion, in the years following the global financial crisis Indian investments in Europe have been more significantly affected than Chinese investments due, to a large extent, to the support of the Chinese state.

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The first decade of the 20th century witnessed a calling into question of some of the central positions held by the late 19th century Positivists. There was a shift of paradigm in science as well as art, as elicited by Einstein, William James, Freud, Picasso, Bergson and Pound. The insufficiency of the Positivist world picture became increasingly evident. Importantly, the concept of what was conventionally called reality, and legitimate ways of describing it, were being transformed. Fenollosa's long essay, "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry", was a ground-breaking, if idiosyncratic, poetic criticism, as well as a significant illustration of prevalent intellectual concerns. The role of the individual word in creating images was central to Fenollosa's interest, as it was to the majority of contemporary poets and critics, but he found an intriguing prototype in the Chinese pictogram, which conveys an item of information via a concrete, more or less stylised, illustration. Flemming Olsen follows Fenollosa's theorising, showing the extent to which it is indebted to, and shaped by, post-Positivist tenets. The current cult of dynamism is reflected in Fenollosa's idea of metaphor, which he sees as a linguistic manifestation of the Bergsonian elan, which is the driving force behind everything. This explains his predilection for sentences with a transitive verb, which signals action, and his aversion to the stasis of grammar, logic and the copula. Equally, truth is not seen by Fenollosa as the accordance between observed facts and some pre-established metaphysical entity, as held by positivist science, but as a labile concept; it is "something that happens", determined by a context -- an idea pursued, for example, by the "absurd" dramatists. The picture of "reality" given by the poetical image could be just as truthful as the picture given by science. Reality thus moves from being "our" reality, to become "my" reality. Fenollosa was not a literary critic; he was an orientalist by profession. Yet his linguistic ideas, although presented in a rudimentary form and without any elaborate terminology, foreshadow linguists' concentration on, and analysis of, the medium just as much as the message. Pound's contention that Fenollosa's essay is a modern ars poetica is shown to be exaggerated; its interest rather lies in Fenollosa's endeavour to go to the roots of poetic creation.

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