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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2016

        The American bomb in Britain

        by Ken Young

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2002

        American society today

        by Edward Ashbee, Bill Jones

        American society today provides a balanced introduction to the defining features of contemporary American society. Includes the ways in which the US can be considered 'exceptional' - the character of the 'American dream', the role of ethnicity and race, and the differences between the regions. Considers in depth a number of contemporary debates including the claim that the US economy has lost its capacity to generate wealth and stimulate mobility, that there has been a process of civic disengagement as voluntary organisations have lost members, and that the traditional family is in decline. Includes a thorough investigation of the effects of the terrorist attacks of September 11 and their aftermath. Looks at the arguments put forward by those who assert that a common American identity has given way to a multitude of conflicting identities structured around factors such as race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        November 2021

        Joe Biden's America

        Introduction to a divided country

        by Roland Benedikter

        — "A precise, analytical insight into the phenomenon Trump." (Anton Pelinka, Central European University Budapest) — "An introduction to the contemporary US." (Heinrich Neisser, Jean Monnet Chair of European Integration, University of Innsbruck) — "Refreshingly different." (Herbert Dorfmann, Member of the European Parliament) Joe Biden's America is deeply divided. Donald Trump's term in office made many problems of modern US society visible, which Biden now has to solve. What do American politics look like under Joe Biden? What legacy did Donald Trump leave behind, and what kind of impact does it have? How can the deeper causes, factors and drivers of current US developments be put in a historical context? Roland Benedikter provides a thorough insight into a complex country. In a compact and comprehensible way, he explains the background, challenges and perspectives of the Biden era, while also providing an overview of the current state of US society and culture in general. His analysis is suitable for teaching, decision-makers and civil society as an introduction to today's USA.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        October 2017

        4 saints in 3 acts

        A snapshot of the American avant-garde in the 1930s

        by Patricia Allmer, John Sears

        Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson was a major avant-garde phenomenon of the 1930s, an experimental opera that nonetheless achieved remarkable popular success. Photography was a key element of that success, but its complex roles in the construction, representation and dissemination of the opera have hitherto received little critical attention. The photographic recording of the all-African American cast in particular affords a unique insight into the complexities of Four Saints in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and the New York avant-gardes of the time. This book, published in collaboration with The Photographers' Gallery, London, presents a wide selection of photographs of the cast, performances, and other material - many images reproduced for the first time - alongside essays by an international range of scholars exploring different aspects of the opera, including dance, fashion, music, and avant-garde writing, as well as photography.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2015

        Film modernism

        by Sam Rohdie

        This book is at once a detailed study of a range of individual filmmakers and a study of the modernism in which they are situated. It consists of fifty categories arranged in alphabetical order, among which are allegory, bricolage, classicism, contradiction, desire, destructuring and writing. Each category, though autonomous, interacts, intersects and juxtaposes with the others, entering into a dialogue with them and in so doing creates connections, illuminations, associations and rhymes which may not have arisen in a more conventional framework. The author refers to particular films and directors that raise questions related to modernism, and, inevitably, thereby to classicism. Jean-Luc Godard's work is at the centre of the book, though it spreads out, evokes and echoes other filmmakers and their work, including the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, João César Monteiro, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Orson Welles. This innovative and eloquently written text book will be an essential resource for all film students. ;

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2001

        Beginning ethnic American literatures

        by Helena Grice, Peter Barry, Candida Hepworth, John McLeod, Maria Lauret, Martin Padget, Annete Musker

        Since the late 1960s, American literature has been revitalised by the work of writers such as Toni Morrison, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros and Maxine Hong Kingston. An introduction to the study of ethnic American fictions organised into four sections, each written by a specialist in the fields of African American, Asian American, Chicano/a and native American literature. Writers are discussed in their cultural/political contexts and literary traditions (rather than as exceptions or as individuals, or on a generic basis). The book highlights common themes in ethnic writing as well as specificities, and has extensive suggestions for further reading as well as a critical introduction regarding the concept of 'ethnic writing'. No competing titles - there are no textbooks, no beginners' books nor any systematised combination of ethnic fictions such as this - only edited collections on each area. ;

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        New frontiers

        Imperialism's new communities in East Asia, 1842–1953

        by Robert Bickers, Christian Henriot

        In the new world order mapped out by Japanese and Western imperialism in East Asia after the mid-nineteenth century opium wars, communities of merchants and settlers took root in China and Korea. New identities were constructed, new modes of collaboration formed and new boundaries between the indigenous and foreign communities were literally and figuratively established. Newly available in paperback, this pioneering and comparative study of Western and Japanese imperialism examines European, American and Japanese communities in China and Korea, and challenges received notions of agency and collaboration by also looking at the roles in China of British and Japanese colonial subjects from Korea, Taiwan and India, and at Chinese Christians and White Russian refugees. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the history and anthropology of imperialism, colonialism's culture and East Asian history, as well as contemporary Asian affairs.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2009

        John Ashbery and American Poetry

        by David Herd

        starting point. David Herd sets out to provide readers with a new critical language through which they can appreciate the beauty and complexity of Ashbery's writing. Presenting the poet in all his forms -avant-garde, nostalgic, sublime and camp - the book argues that the perpetual inventiveness of Ashbery's work has always been underpinned by the poets desire to write the poem fit to cope with its occasion. Tracing Ashbery's development in the light of this idea, and from its origins in the dazzling artistic environment of 1950's New York, the book evaluates his poetry against the aesthetic, literary and historical backgrounds that have informed it. The story of a brilliant career, and a history of the period in which that career has taken shape, John Ashbery and American Poetry provides a compelling account of Ashbery's importance to Twentieth Century Literature. ;

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        The Arts
        June 2002

        American film and politics from Reagan to Bush Jr

        by Philip Davies, Paul Wells

        Covers a crucial two decades in American history, when the links between Hollywood and Washington DC were at their strongest.. The period is 'book-ended' by the mighty political and cinematic figures of Reagan and Clinton.. Covers a period in which movies have become targets of political rhetoric of 'family values'.. Essays examine cinematic views of key American political institutions - the presidency and electoral process, politically significant places such as New York City and the American South, the promotion of major issues like gender, family and race. This is a subject which has gained new significance in the wake of recent terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC, which have changed both the political climate, and the priorities of the movie industry. ;

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2021

        Passing into the present

        Contemporary American fiction of racial and gender passing

        by Sinead Moynihan

        This book is the first full-length study of contemporary American fiction of passing. Its takes as its point of departure the return of racial and gender passing in the 1990s in order to make claims about wider trends in contemporary American fiction. The book accounts for the return of tropes of passing in fiction by Phillip Roth, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Danzy Senna, Jeffrey Eugenides and Paul Beatty, by arguing meta-critical and meta-fictional tool. These writers are attracted to the trope of passing because passing narratives have always foregrounded the notion of textuality in relation to the (il)legibility of "black" subjects passing as white. The central argument of this book, then, is that contemporary narratives of passing are concerned with articulating and unpacking an analogy between passing and authorship. The title promises to inaugurate dialogue on the relationships between passing, postmodernism and authorship in contemporary American fiction.

      • Trusted Partner
        August 2016

        Der letzte beste Ort

        Stories

        by Callan Wink

        Literatur wie eine Nacht im Freien Es ist ein Ort, an dem die Arbeit für gewöhnlich hart, Geld knapp und die Natur prächtig ist, durchgezogen vom Band des Yellowstone River, mit den Rockies am Horizont. Für die Männer in Callan Winks Stories ist es der letzte beste Ort und ihr Zuhause. Doch jeder von ihnen läuft Gefahr, in der Weite des heutigen American West verloren zu gehen: Einer bezahlt einen Faustschlag mit zwei Jahren Gefängnis. Ein anderer schmeißt alles hin, um auf einer Farm zu schuften. Und noch ein anderer befreit aus Mitleid einen Hund, kurze Zeit später flieht er vor zwei bewaffneten Verrückten quer über die Felsen durch die Nacht, barfuß und nackt … Callan Wink hat ein Buch über Sehnsucht, Schuld und das Kräftemessen mit der Natur geschrieben. »Der letzte beste Ort« ist der fulminante Auftakt eines Erzählers, der Richard Ford und Philipp Meyer nachfolgt. Durchwirkt von der Ehrfurcht gegenüber der Schönheit seiner Heimat, in einer Sprache von kristalliner Vehemenz.

      • Trusted Partner
        August 2016

        Der letzte beste Ort

        Stories

        by Callan Wink, Hannes Meyer

        Literatur wie eine Nacht im Freien Es ist ein Ort, an dem die Arbeit für gewöhnlich hart, Geld knapp und die Natur prächtig ist, durchgezogen vom Band des Yellowstone River, mit den Rockies am Horizont. Für die Männer in Callan Winks Stories ist es der letzte beste Ort und ihr Zuhause. Doch jeder von ihnen läuft Gefahr, in der Weite des heutigen American West verloren zu gehen: Einer bezahlt einen Faustschlag mit zwei Jahren Gefängnis. Ein anderer schmeißt alles hin, um auf einer Farm zu schuften. Und noch ein anderer befreit aus Mitleid einen Hund, kurze Zeit später flieht er vor zwei bewaffneten Verrückten quer über die Felsen durch die Nacht, barfuß und nackt … Callan Wink hat ein Buch über Sehnsucht, Schuld und das Kräftemessen mit der Natur geschrieben. »Der letzte beste Ort« ist der fulminante Auftakt eines Erzählers, der Richard Ford und Philipp Meyer nachfolgt. Durchwirkt von der Ehrfurcht gegenüber der Schönheit seiner Heimat, in einer Sprache von kristalliner Vehemenz.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2006

        The My Lai massacre in American history and memory

        by Kendrick Oliver

        On 16 March 1968, two US infantry companies entered a Vietnamese village and in the course of a single morning killed over 400 of its unarmed, unresisting inhabitants . . . This is the first book to examine the response of American society to the My Lai massacre and its ambiguous place in American national memory. Kendrick Oliver argues that the massacre revelations left many Americans untroubled. It was only when the soldiers most immediately responsible came to be tried that opposition to the conflict grew, for these prosecutions were regarded by supporters of the war as evidence that the national leaders no longer had the will to do what was necessary to win. Oliver goes on to show that, contrary to interpretations of the Vietnam conflict as an unhealed national trauma or wound, many Americans have assimilated the war and its violence rather too well, and they were able to do so even when that violence was most conspicuous and current. US soldiers have been presented as the conflict's principal victims, and this was true even in the case of My Lai. It was the American perpetrators of the massacre and not the Vietnamese they brutalized who became the central object of popular concern. Both the massacre and its reception reveal the problem of human empathy in conditions of a counter-revolutionary war - a war, moreover, that had always been fought for geopolitical credibility, not for the sake of the Vietnamese. This incisive enquiry into the moral history of the Vietnam war should be essential reading for all students of the conflict, as well as others interested in the war and its cultural legacies. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2021

        Making home

        Orphanhood, kinship and cultural memory in contemporary American novels

        by Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, Helena Wahlstrom, Maria Holmgren Troy

        Making home explores the figure of the orphan child in a broad selection of contemporary US novels by popular and critically acclaimed authors Barbara Kingsolver, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Kaye Gibbons, Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez and Toni Morrison. The orphan child is a continuous presence in US literature, not only in children's books and nineteenth-century texts, but also in a variety of genres of contemporary fiction for adults. Making home examines the meanings of this figure in the contexts of American literary history, social history and ideologies of family, race and nation. It argues that contemporary orphan characters function as links to literary history and national mythologies, even as they may also serve to critique the limits of literary history, as well as the limits of familial and national belonging.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        October 2024

        Mexican muralist, international Marxist

        David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1941–74

        by Curtis Swope

        David Alfaro Siqueiros was perhaps the most important communist painter of the twentieth century. This book, the first sustained engagement with Siqueiros's work in the English language, focuses on the artist's late murals, which are both aesthetically innovative and politically provocative. It places Siqueiros in an international context, revealing that the dogmatism he has been charged with was in reality a complex phenomenon. It provided a foundation for - rather than an obstacle to - his efforts to create an art embedded in the day-to-day concerns and theoretical debates of the world-wide mass movement he saw himself as a part of.

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