Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        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
        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 2022

        Edmund Spenser and the romance of space

        by Tamsin Badcoe

        Edmund Spenser and the romance of space advances the exploration of literary space into new areas, firstly by taking advantage of recent interdisciplinary interests in the spatial qualities of early modern thought and culture, and secondly by reading literature concerning the art of cosmography and navigation alongside imaginative literature with the purpose of identifying shared modes and preoccupations. The book looks to the work of cultural and historical geographers in order to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in the development of geographical knowledge: contexts ultimately employed by the study to achieve a better understanding of the place of Ireland in Spenser's writing. The study also engages with recent ecocritical approaches to literary environments, such as coastlines, wetlands, and islands, thus framing fresh readings of Spenser's handling of mixed genres.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2021

        Crafting identities

        Artisan culture in London, c. 1550–1640

        by Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Christopher Breward, James Ryan

        Crafting identities explores artisanal identity and culture in early modern London. It demonstrates that the social, intellectual and political status of London's crafts and craftsmen were embedded in particular material and spatial contexts. Through examination of a wide range of manuscript, visual and material culture sources, the book investigates for the first time how London's artisans physically shaped the built environment of the city and how the experience of negotiating urban spaces impacted directly on their distinctive individual and collective identities. Applying an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology to the examination of artisanal cultures, the book engages with the fields of social and cultural history and the histories of art, design and architecture. It will appeal to scholars of early modern social, cultural and urban history, as well as those interested in design and architectural history.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        March 2013

        Space and being in contemporary French cinema

        by James S. Williams

        This book brings together for the first time five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. Whatever their chosen habitats or shifting terrains, each of these highly distinctive auteurs has developed unique strategies of representation and framing that reflect a profound investment in the geophysical world. The book proposes that we think about cinematographic space in its many different forms simultaneously (screenspace, landscape, narrative space, soundscape, spectatorial space). Through a series of close and original readings of selected films, it posits a new 'space of the cinematic subject'. Accessible and wide-ranging, this volume opens up new areas of critical enquiry in the expanding interdisciplinary field of space studies. It will be of immediate interest to students and researchers working not only in film studies and film philosophy, but also in French/Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, gender and cultural studies. Listen to James S. Williams speaking about his book http://bit.ly/13xCGZN. (Copy and paste the link into your browser) ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2025

        Growing up and going out

        Youth culture, commerce, and leisure space in post-war Britain

        by Sarah Kenny

        In the decades following the Second World War, youthful sociability was remade as young people across Britain flocked to newly-opened coffee bars, beat clubs, and discos. These spaces, increasingly unknown and unfamiliar to the adults who passed by them, played a remarkable role in reshaping town and city centres after dark as sites of leisure and recreation. Telling the history of youth in post-war Britain from the ground up, through the towns and cities that young people moved through, this book traces how the new spaces of post-war youth leisure transformed both young people's relationship with their local environment and adults' perceptions of the possibilities and dangers of modern leisure. Growing up and going out offers a timely study of youth, commerce, and leisure that explores the reimagination, remaking, and regulation of the post-war city after dark.

      • Trusted Partner
        Teaching, Language & Reference
        February 2023

        Taking place

        by Erin Silver

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2025

        Charting space

        by Elize Mazadiego

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2021

        Crafting identities

        by Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Television
        November 2007

        Time and Relative Dissertations in Space

        Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who

        by Edited by David Butler

        Time and relative dissertations in space takes the reader on a rich and varied study of one of the greatest television programmes of all time: Doctor Who. This book is the first study of Doctor Who to explore the Doctor's adventures in all their manifestations: on television, audio, in print and beyond. Although focusing on the original series (1963-89), the collection recognises that Doctor Who is a cultural phenomenon that has been 'told' in many ways through a myriad of texts. Combining essays from academics as well as practitioners who have contributed to the ongoing narrative of Doctor Who, the collection encourages debate with contrasting opinions on the strengths (and weaknesses) of the programme, offering a multi-perspective view of Doctor Who and the reasons for its endurance.

      • Trusted Partner
        April 2006

        Sacred distance

        Representing the Virgin Mary in Italian altarpieces, c.1300–c.1630

        by Rosemary Muir Wright

        This fascinating and groundbreaking book explores the way in which the canonical image of the Virgin Mary developed out of the Italian Renaissance. Faced with the naturalistic effects of pictorial space and light, the Church had to ensure the distinction of Mary as being both the human mother of Christ and a doctrinal symbol in her own right. The intentions of patrons, artistic practice and operating circumstances all contributed to mark out this duality, and create the 'sacred distance' of Mary from the rest of humankind. Marian iconography has its own history, and the introduction discusses the visual tradition of the middle ages which shaped Marian iconography at the beginning of the 14th century. The book then deals with the doctrinal issues relating to the Virgin: Mary as Theotokos, Mary Annunciate, Mary as Queen of Heaven and Mary as the Immaculate Conception. A concluding chapter discusses the power of this image as a visual symbol. The book therefore discusses the various possible interpretations of Marian iconography in an attempt to understand an image, and the dangers of making assumptions about artistic intention and audience response. It should be of interest to anyone who is curious about the life of an image and its inherent power.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2025

        Polysituatedness

        A poetics of displacement

        by John Kinsella

        This book is concerned with the complexities of defining 'place', of observing and 'seeing' place, and how we might write a poetics of place. From Kathy Acker to indigenous Australian poet Jack Davis, the book touches on other writers and theorists, but in essence is a hands-on 'praxis' book of poetic practice. The work extends John Kinsella's theory of 'international regionalism' and posits new ways of reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the person occupies place. It provides alternative readings of writers through place and space, especially Australian writers, but also non-Australian. Further, close consideration is given to being of 'famine-migrant' Irish heritage and the complexities of 'returning'. A close-up examination of 'belonging' and exclusion is made on a day-to-day basis. The book offers an approach to creating poems and literary texts constituted by experiencing multiple places, developing a model of polyvalent belonging known as 'polysituatedness'. It works as a companion volume to Kinsella's earlier Manchester University Press critical work, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape to Lyricism.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2015

        Governing Europe's spaces

        European Union re-imagined

        by Dimitris Papadimitriou, Caitriona Carter, Martin Lawn, Simon Bulmer, Andrew Geddes, Peter Humphreys

        What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? To what extent is our understanding of the EU - of its development, its policies and its working processes - shaped by unacknowledged assumptions about what Europe really is? The book constructs a case for re-imagining Europe - not as an entity in Brussels or a series of fixed relations - but as a simultaneously real and imagined space of action which exists to the extent that Europeans and others act in and on it. This Europe is constantly being made in particular spaces, through specific actor struggles, whose interconnections are often ill-defined. We ask how do those concerned with building Europe, with extending and elaborating the EU, think of where they are and what they are doing? The book captures Europeans in the process of making Europe: of performing, interpreting, modelling, referencing, consulting, measuring and de-politicising Europe. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2011

        Screen/Space

        The projected image in contemporary art

        by Amelia Jones, Tamara Trodd, Marsha Meskimmon

        Projected-image art occupies an increasingly important place in the contemporary art-world. But does the projected image have its own specificity, beyond the histories of experimental film and video on the one hand, and installation art on the other? What is a projected image, and what is the history of projected-image art? These questions and others are explored in this thoughtful collection of nine essays by leading international scholars of film and projected-image art. Clearly structured in three sections - 'Histories', 'Screen', 'Space' - the book argues for recognition of the projected image as a distinctive category in contemporary art, which demands new critical and theoretical approaches. The contributors explore a range of interpretive perspectives, offering new insights into the work of artists including Michael Snow, Carolee Schneemann, Pipilotti Rist, Stan Douglas, Gillian Wearing, Tacita Dean, Jane and Louise Wilson, amongst others. The Introduction supplies a concise summary of the history of projected-image art and its interpretation, and there is a focus throughout the book on detailed analysis of individual artworks. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        July 2024

        Public information films

        British government film units, 1928–52

        by Alan Harding

        In the years after the First World War the British government had to adapt its communication policy to connect with the new mass electorate. This book examines the government's own Film Units and their slow development of the Public Information Film. By reviewing the entire film catalogue produced by the Empire Marketing Board, the General Post Office and Crown Film Units, particular themes are identified which not only reflect the demands of the Units' sponsors but also the anxieties and concerns of the 1930s and 1940s. The impact of the films is explored through the contemporary reaction of the audiences to them. By the time the Crown Film Unit was closed in 1952 a style of Public Information Film had been developed and continued into the 1970s.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2024

        How the other half lives

        by Samuel Burgum, Katie Higgins

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter