Balans is an independent publisher of quality non-fiction in the areas of history, politics, economy, biography, science, nature writing, memoirs, current affairs, religion and psychology. With our dedicated team, we publish approximately 40 new titles per year.
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One of our main goals is the consolidation of the Balearic Islands as a structured cultural market, the promotion of the islands' music, performing arts, literature and visual arts by means of grants, international actions and formative seminars in cultural affairs. The Institut d’Estudis Baleàrics coordinates, alone or in partnership with other departments of the Government of the Balearic Islands, the Institut Ramon Llull or the Institut Català d'Empreses Culturals, the institutional presence of the Balearic Islands in strategic events for the promotion of our culture overseas. Every year, our area of literature, thought, comics and illustration calls for grants to cover travelling and accommodation expenses of Balearic authors, and expenses for publishing books and producing promotional material for Balearic authors. Please, check our calls on our webpage for literature grants.
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The traditional narrative of the mid-century (1930s-60s) is that of a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the front. But as the burgeoning field of interwar and mid-century women's writing has demonstrated, this narrative is in desperate need of re-examination. Mid-century women's writing: Disrupting the public/private divide aims to revivify studies of female writers, journalists, broadcasters, and public intellectuals living or working in Britain, or under British rule, during the mid-century while also complicating extant narratives about the divisions between domesticity and politics.
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A moving exploration of the life and work of the celebrated American writer, blending biography and memoir with literary criticism. Since James Baldwin's death in 1987, his writing - including The Fire Next Time, one of the manifestoes of the Civil Rights Movement, and Giovanni's Room, a pioneering work of gay fiction - has only grown in relevance. Douglas Field was introduced to Baldwin's essays and novels by his father, who witnessed the writer's debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965. In Walking in the dark, he embarks on a journey to unravel his life-long fascination and to understand why Baldwin continues to enthral us decades after his death. Tracing Baldwin's footsteps in France, the US and Switzerland, and digging into archives, Field paints an intimate portrait of the writer's life and influence. At the same time, he offers a poignant account of coming to terms with his father's Alzheimer's disease. Interweaving Baldwin's writings on family, illness, memory and place, Walking in the dark is an eloquent testament to the enduring power of great literature to illuminate our paths.
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In A New Genre for Television?, filmmaker Justin Hardy argues the dramatised history documentaries broadcast by British public service channels in the 2000s constituted a distinct television genre. Offering a vital distinction between docudramas and drama documentaries, Hardy contributes to the field of television history through exclusive interviews with key figures from BBC and Channel 4 - many of whom have never been publicly interviewed before - and envisions a future model for the portrayal of national histories on screen.
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In this fascinating study, Samantha George explores the cultivation of the female mind and the feminised discourse of botanical literature in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, she discusses British women's engagement with the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and his unsettling discovery of plant sexuality. Previously ignored primary texts of an extraordinary nature are rescued from obscurity and assigned a proper place in the histories of science, eighteenth-century literature, and women's writing. The result is groundbreaking: the author explores nationality and sexuality debates in relation to botany and charts the appearance of a new literary stereotype, the sexually precocious female botanist. She uncovers an anonymous poem on Linnaean botany, handwritten in the eighteenth century, and subsequently traces the development of a new genre of women's writing - the botanical poem with scientific notes. The book is indispensable reading for all scholars of the eighteenth century, especially those interested in Romantic women's writing, or the relationship between literature and science.
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Colouring the Caribbean offers the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias's intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of colour - so called 'Red' and 'Black' Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race - made for colonial officials and plantocratic elites during the late-eighteenth century. Although Brunias's paintings have often been understood as straightforward documents of visual ethnography that functioned as field guides for reading race, this book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. The book offers provocative new insights about Brunias's work gleaned from a broad survey of his paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time.
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This book offers a critical reassessment of the uses of history in contemporary Irish literature and culture. It argues that in much recent Irish writing, history is approached not as the proverbial 'nightmare' from which Joyce's Stephen Dedalus tried to awake, but as a rich, imaginative resource. Drawing on recent debates in Irish literary and cultural criticism, On the uses of history in recent Irish writing explores the varied, creative, and often critically challenging forms of rewriting Ireland's troubled past in contemporary prose, drama and poetry. Individual chapters focus on literary treatments of the Tudor reconquest, the Famine, the Northern Irish Troubles and other key events in Irish history, highlighting in a series of close readings the unique forms of historical thought enabled by different literary forms and genres. Canonical works by authors such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Tom Paulin, Brian Friel, Stewart Parker and Frank McGuinness are considered alongside lesser known writers and texts, placing each in their wider social, cultural and historical contexts. ;
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Das darf ja wohl nicht wahr sein! Dirk Lloyd, auch bekannt als Dark Lord, Weltenzerstörer, lebt endlich das perfekte Leben. Da wird seine Ruhe brutal gestört. Ausgerechnet sein ehemaliger Schulleiter, Mr. Grausammer, macht sich bereit, ihm den Rang abzulaufen. Denn der rachsüchtige Rektor hat einen Tropfen Essenz des Bösen geleckt und nichts anderes im Sinn, als die Darklands zu übernehmen. Dort tut er das Naheliegende: Er richtet eine Schule ein. Eine Schule des Bösen. Bei den neun Höllen der Verdammnis - hier hört der Spaß nun wirklich auf!
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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.
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In early Christianity it was established that every church should have a light burning on the altar at all times. In this unique study, Eternal light and earthly concerns, looks at the material and social consequences of maintaining these 'eternal' lights. It investigates how the cost of lighting was met across western Europe throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, revealing the social organisation that was built up around maintaining the lights in the belief that burning them reduced the time spent in Purgatory. When that belief collapsed in the Reformation the eternal lights were summarily extinguished. The history of the lights thus offers not only a new account of change in medieval Europe, but also a sustained examination of the relationship between materiality and belief.
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Through close readings of almost twenty autobiographies written after the break-up of the British Empire, the book examines how individuals engage with the changing narrative landscape brought about by decolonisation. It considers the autobiographies less for what they may teach us about the moment remembered and more as windows on the act of remembering. This adds a crucial dimension to our understanding of the legacies of colonialism and how the ongoing process of decolonisation is reflected on the level of the individual. It argues that autobiographers are at once influenced by and seek to influence the cultural memory of empire and its legacies, and the authors' own position in both. Situated at the intersection of imperial/decolonisation history, memory studies, and life writing studies, the book uncovers this intimate afterlife of empire.
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Die Forscherin Marie Curie schuf mit ihrer Liebe zum Wissen Unglaubliches: Sie revolutionierte den Kampf gegen Krebs, indem sie die chemischen Elemente Radium und Polonium entdeckte, und gewann den Nobelpreis – zwei Mal! Little People, Big Dreams erzählt von den beeindruckenden Lebensgeschichte einer großen Persönlichkeit: Marie Curie hat Unvorstellbares erreicht. Dabei begann alles, als sie noch klein war: mit großen Träumen. Ein Kinderbuch ab 4 Jahre
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Writing otherwise is a collection of essays by established feminist and cultural critics interested in experimenting with new styles of expression. Leading figures in their field, such as Marianne Hirsch, Lynne Pearce, Griselda Pollock, Carol Smart, Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolff, all risk new ways of writing about themselves and their subjects. Aimed at both general and academic readers interested in how scholarly writing might be more innovative and creative, this collection introduces the personal, the poetic and the experimental into the frame of cultural criticism. This collection of essays is highly interdisciplinary and contributes to debates in sociology, history, anthropology, art history, cultural and media studies and gender studies. ;
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Writing otherwise is a collection of essays by established feminist and cultural critics interested in experimenting with new styles of expression. Leading figures in their field, such as Marianne Hirsch, Lynne Pearce, Griselda Pollock, Carol Smart, Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolff, all risk new ways of writing about themselves and their subjects. Aimed at both general and academic readers interested in how scholarly writing might be more innovative and creative, this collection introduces the personal, the poetic and the experimental into the frame of cultural criticism. This collection of essays is highly interdisciplinary and contributes to debates in sociology, history, anthropology, art history, cultural and media studies and gender studies.
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Blue wine or colour-matched letters, compass points seen in colour, or listening to music that is also an experience of forms and structures. Anyone with these kind of perceptions lives among the synaesthetes. This phenomenon was long overlooked by science. Nowadays, things are different. This book presents not only modern neuroscience’s standpoint on the puzzle of synaesthesia; it also ventures into philosophical peripheral areas. What does life look like for a synaesthete, and how does our perception work anyway?
