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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2025

        An unorthodox history

        British Jews since 1945

        by Gavin Schaffer

        A bold, new history of British Jewish life since the Second World War. Historian Gavin Schaffer wrestles Jewish history away from the question of what others have thought about Jews, focusing instead on the experiences of Jewish people themselves. Exploring the complexities of inclusion and exclusion, he shines a light on groups that have been marginalised within Jewish history and culture, such as queer Jews, Jews married to non-Jews, Israel-critical Jews and even Messianic Jews, while offering a fresh look at Jewish activism, Jewish religiosity and Zionism. Weaving these stories together, Schaffer argues that there are good reasons to consider Jewish Britons as a unitary whole, even as debates rage about who is entitled to call themselves a Jew. Challenging the idea that British Jewish life is in terminal decline. An unorthodox history demonstrates that Jewish Britain is thriving and that Jewishness is deeply embedded in the country's history and culture.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2024

        Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature

        by Carolyne Larrington

        Over the last twenty-five years, the 'history of emotion' field has become one of the most dynamic and productive areas for humanities research. This designation, and the marked leadership of historians in the field, has had the unlooked-for consequence of sidelining literature - in particular secular literature - as evidence-source and object of emotion study. Secular literature, whether fable, novel, fantasy or romance, has been understood as prone to exaggeration, hyperbole, and thus as an unreliable indicator of the emotions of the past. The aim of this book is to decentre history of emotion research and asks new questions, ones that can be answered by literary scholars, using literary texts as sources: how do literary texts understand and depict emotion and, crucially, how do they generate emotion in their audiences - those who read them or hear them read or performed?

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2023

        Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

        Emotions, ethics, dreams

        by Megan Leitch

        Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2024

        The history of emotions

        by Rob Boddice

      • Trusted Partner
        Folk & traditional music
        April 2005

        The Kiss in history

        by Edited by Karen Harvey

        Writers have previously placed the action of kissing into categories: kisses of love, affection, peace, respect and friendship. Each of the essays in this fascinating book take a single kind of kiss and uses it as an index to the past. For rather than offering a simple history of the kiss, this book is about the kiss in history. In this collection, an eminent group of cultural historians have explored this subject using an exceptionally wide range of evidence. They explore the kiss through sources as diverse as canonical religious texts, popular prints, court depositions, periodicals, diaries and poetry. In casting the net so wide, these authors demonstrate how cultural history has been shaped by a broad concept of culture, encompassing more than simply the canons of art and literature, and integrating apparently 'historical' and 'non-historical' sources. Furthermore, this collections shows that by analyzing the kiss and its position - embedded as it is as part of our culture - history can use small gestures to take us to big issues concerning ourselves and others, the past and the present. With an afterword by Sir Keith Thomas, this book will be fascinating reading for cultural historians working on a wide range of different societies and periods.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        December 2010

        In Strange Countries: Middle English Literature and its Afterlife

        Essays in memory of J. J. Anderson

        by Anke Bernau, David Matthews

        These essays by senior scholars in medieval studies celebrate the career of J.J. Anderson, editor, critic, and co-founder of the Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture series, who taught in medieval studies at the University of Manchester for forty years. The essays are rooted in medieval literature but frequently range beyond the confines of the Middle Ages. They reflect the breadth of Anderson's own scholarly interests, especially in drama and Arthurian literature. There is a particular focus on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl, poems which preoccupied him throughout his scholarly life. There are also new reconsiderations of La?amon's Brut, Mirk's Festial, the Passion plays, and the manuscripts of the Pore Caitif. Moving beyond the traditional purview of medieval literature, several contributors trace the afterlives of medieval themes in later literature. These essays include a consideration of the twinned trajectories of the medieval heroes Robin Hood and King Arthur from medieval literature to modern television, a comparison of La?amon's Brut and Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and a recreation of the Bishop Blase procession which took place in industrial Bradford. Contributors are Rosamund Allen, Ralph Elliott, Alexandra Johnston, Stephen Knight, Peter Meredith, Susan Powell, Gillian Rudd, Alan Shelston, and Kalpen Trivedi. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        March 2006

        Art history

        A critical introduction to its methods

        by Michael Hatt, Charlotte Klonk

        Art History: A critical introduction to its methods provides a lively and stimulating introduction to methodological debates within art history. Offering a lucid account of approaches from Hegel to post-colonialism, the book provides a sense of art history's own history as a discipline from its emergence in the late-eighteenth century to contemporary debates. By explaining the underlying philosophical and political assumptions behind each method, along with clear examples of how these are brought to bear on visual and historical analysis, the authors show that an adherence to a certain method is, in effect, a commitment to a set of beliefs and values. The book makes a strong case for the vitality of the discipline and its methodological centrality to new fields such as visual culture. This book will be of enormous value to undergraduate and graduate students, and also makes its own contributions to ongoing scholarly debates about theory and method. ;

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2020

        A history of humanitarianism, 1755–1989

        In the name of others

        by Silvia Salvatici

        The book traces the history of international humanitarianism from the anti-slavery movement to the end of the cold war. It is based on an extensive survey of the international literature and is retold in an original narrative that relies on a close examination of the sources. The reconstruction of humanitarianism's long history unfolds around some crucial moments and events: the colonial expansion of European countries, the two world wars and their aftermaths, the emergence of a new postcolonial order. In terms of its contents, narrative style, interpretative approach the book is aimed at a large and diverse public including: scholars who are studying and teaching humanitarianism; students who need to learn about humanitarianism as part of their training or research; operators and volunteers who are engaged in the field; non-specialist readers who are interested in the topic because of its relevance to current events.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2018

        Literature and psychoanalysis

        by Jeremy Tambling

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2020

        Incest in contemporary literature

        by Miles Leeson

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      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2023

        The gift of narrative in medieval England

        by Nicholas Perkins

        This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2024

        Myth and (mis)information

        Constructing the medical professions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature and culture

        by Allan Ingram, Helen Williams, Clark Lawlor

        This collection draws together original scholarship from international contributors on a range of aspects of professional and semi-professional medical work and its relations to British culture. It combines a diverse spectrum of scholarly approaches, from medical history to book history, exploring literary and scientific texts, such as satiric poetry, essays, anatomies, advertisements, and the novel, to shed light on the mythologisation and transmission of medical (mis)information through literature and popular culture. It analyses the persuasive and sometimes deceptive means by which myths, as well as information and beliefs, about medicine and the medical professions proliferated in English literary culture of this period, from early eighteenth-century household remedies to the late nineteenth-century concerns with vaccination that are still relevant today.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2025

        Invasions

        Fears and fantasies of imagined wars in Britain, 1871-1918

        by Christian K. Melby

        Invasions is an ambitious, new and authoritative study of one of the defining cultural products of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. By the outbreak of war in 1914 invasion-scare fiction had profoundly changed British society, becoming not just a vibrant part of popular culture, but a reference point among military planners, advertisers, and politicians. This intersection between politics and culture, between entertainment and war planning, sets invasion-scare stories apart as one of the most versatile and interesting fictional products in modern British history. Building on recent work in both history and literature studies, Invasions is the first study of invasion-scare fiction to examine both the form (that is, fiction) and the function (the political argument) of the genre.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2007

        On the uses of history in recent Irish writing

        by Bernhard Klein

        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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