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      • Trusted Partner
        History
        April 2017

        Dancing in the English style

        Consumption, Americanisation, and national identity in Britain, 1918–50

        by Allison Abra. Series edited by Jeffrey Richards

        Dancing in the English style explores the development, experience, and cultural representation of popular dance in Britain from the end of the First World War to the early 1950s. It describes the rise of modern ballroom dancing as Britain's predominant popular style, as well as the opening of hundreds of affordable dancing schools and purpose-built dance halls. It focuses in particular on the relationship between the dance profession and dance hall industry and the consumers who formed the dancing public. Together these groups negotiated the creation of a 'national' dancing style, which constructed, circulated, and commodified ideas about national identity. At the same time, the book emphasizes the global, exploring the impact of international cultural products on national identity construction, the complexities of Americanisation, and Britain's place in a transnational system of production and consumption that forged the dances of the Jazz Age.

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        The Arts
        May 2024

        Adaptation and resilience in the performing arts

        The pandemic and beyond

        by Pascale Aebischer, Rachael Nicholas

        This book offers insights into some of the digital innovations, structural adaptations and analogue solutions that enabled live performance in the UK to survive through the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides evidence of values-led policies and practices that have improved the wellbeing of the creative workforce and have increased access to live performance. Through sections that address digital innovations, workforce resilience and programming live performances outdoors and in community settings, this book provides practical insights into the challenges live performance faced during the pandemic. It shows how, in order to survive, individuals and companies within the sector drew on the creativity and resourcefulness of its workforce, and on new and existing networks. In these accounts, the pandemic functioned as catalyst for technological innovations, stock-taking regarding exploitative industry structures, and a re-valuing of the role of live performance for community-building.

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        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.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2026

        Ageing and new intimacies

        by Sarah Milton

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2026

        US cultural diplomacy after the Cold War

        Decline, recovery, and fall

        by Jeffrey H. Michaels, Giles Scott-Smith

        In the decades following the USSR's collapse, the US has gone from unrivalled hegemon to a position of relative decline. With America 'triumphant' after 1991, its culture, like its diplomatic, military and economic power, remained unmatched. Such favourable circumstances seemed to undercut the need for cultural diplomacy. Why should the US government sell a product that was already selling so well? After 9/11, however, it was apparent the US image was less popular than previously assumed. To reverse this negative image, cultural diplomacy was revived. Despite being beset by internal and external challenges, US officials supported various cultural initiatives and partnerships to promote the American brand globally. Along the way, cultural diplomacy has made use of new forms of expression to promote American culture and build positive foreign relations. The arrival of the second Trump administration in 2025 has clearly signalled an end to using cultural diplomacy to further causes of empowerment and diversity, making the future uncertain for this field of activity.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2025

        The Jacobites and the Grand Tour

        Educational travel and small-states' diplomacy

        by Jérémy Filet

        In the first monograph to fully examine the intersecting networks of Jacobites and travellers to the continent, Filet considers how small states used official diplomacy and deployed soft power - embodied by educational academies - to achieve foreign policy goals. This work uses little-known archival materials to explain how and why certain small states secretly supported the Jacobite cause during the crucial years surrounding the 1715 rising, while others stayed out of Jacobite affairs.At the same time, the book demonstrates how early modern small states sought to cultivate good relations with Britain by attracting travellers as part of a wider trend of ensuring connections with future diplomats or politicians in case a Stuart restoration never came.This publication therefore brings together a study of Britain, small states, Jacobitism, and educational travel, in its nexus at continental academies.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2025

        Love and anti-Judaism in medieval English romance

        Typologies of violence and desire

        by Hope Doherty-Harrison

        Love and anti-Judaism is a new examination of medieval romance for the questions it poses of the most significant events in Christian history. Providing new readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gowther and Sir Amadace, the book argues that romance explores depictions of love-and the sacrifices it may necessitate-in the Hebrew Bible, especially where they do not easily fit into interpretations asserting that this history must prefigure Christ and the crucifixion. An examination of anti-Judaism as a discourse of violence and desire that could be turned inwardly to expose the irresolution in Christianity, this book will provoke new investigations into the religious crises of medieval romance.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2026

        Dancing through the dissonance

        by Lesley Pruitt, Erica Rose Jeffrey

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        Teaching, Language & Reference
        June 2026

        Taking place

        by Erin Silver

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2026

        Flappers and the Jazz Age

        Women and leisure in Ireland, 1920s–30s

        by Eileen Hogan, Louise Ryan

        People's ordinary, everyday lives - and more specifically, their leisure activities - are often obscured within existing academic research on 1920s-30s Ireland. This book seeks to redress that neglect by exploring the relationship between identity, recreation, and culture both North and South of the border, with particular attention to women's lived experiences. Leisurely pursuits during this period were commonly overshadowed by religious influence and the nation-building projects in post-partition Ireland. Nevertheless, there existed alternative spaces, where people enjoyed dancing, singing, listening to music, shopping, glamour, reading magazines, swimming, travelling, and going to the cinema. Such activities reflected international trends beyond national borders. This book documents those activities and spaces through a feminist lens and intersectional analysis of gender, class, religion and rural/urban identities. It brings together multi-disciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, architecture, geography, fashion, and musicology. In so doing, we present new insights and advance understanding of this under-researched aspect of Irish history.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2025

        Taking travel home

        The souvenir culture of British women tourists, 1750–1830

        by Emma Gleadhill

        In the late eighteenth-century, elite British women had an unprecedented opportunity to travel. Taking travel home uncovers the souvenir culture these women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science. Key characters include forty-three-year-old Hester Piozzi (Thrale), who honeymooned in Italy; thirty-one-year-old Anna Miller, who accompanied her husband on a Grand Tour; Dorothy Richardson, who undertook various tours of England from the ages of twelve to fifty-two; and the sisters Katherine and Martha Wilmot, who travelled to Russia in their late twenties. The supreme tourist of the book, the political salon hostess Lady Elizabeth Holland, travelled to many countries with her husband, including Paris, where she met Napoleon, and Spain during the Peninsular War. Using a methodology informed by literary and design theory, art history, material culture studies and tourism studies, the book examines a wide range of objects, from painted fans "of the ruins of Rome for a sequin apiece" and the Pope's "bless'd beads", to lava from Vesuvius and pieces of Stonehenge. It argues that the rise of the souvenir is representative of female agency, as women used their souvenirs to form spaces in which they could create and control their own travel narratives.

      • Trusted Partner
        History of Art / Art & Design Styles
        July 2015

        Porous boundaries

        Art and essays

        by Edited by David Peters Corbett, Cyril Reade

        This innovative and exciting volume celebrates the career of Janet Wolff: a highly influential voice in the literature of sociology, cultural studies, visual studies and art history, as well as dance and modernism for several decades. Her work has significantly contributed to the way we view issues as diverse as modernism, the flâneur, British and American art in the early twentieth century, and the gendered literature of modernity. The volume contains contributions from a number of Janet Wolff's collaborators and others who are associated with the fields in which she has worked, including Zygmunt Bauman, Walid Raad and Griselda Pollock. The book includes original artworks, memoir and essays inspired by her example and which deal with questions she has discussed. The book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in any of these disciplines, as well as those interested by the form of a transatlantic academic career.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2016

        Dance and politics

        by Dana Mills

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        Biography & True Stories
        May 2025

        Mrs Dalloway

        Biography of a novel

        by Mark Hussey

        A compelling biography of one of the most celebrated novels in the English language. The fourth and best-known of Virginia Woolf's novels, Mrs Dalloway is a modernist masterpiece that has remained popular since its publication in 1925. Its dual narratives follow a day in the life of wealthy housewife Clarissa Dalloway and shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith, capturing their inner worlds with a vividness that has rarely been equalled. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel offers new readers a lively introduction to this enduring classic, while providing Woolf lovers with a wealth of information about the novel's writing, publication and reception. It follows Woolf's process from the first stirrings in her diary through her struggles to create what was quickly recognised as a major advance in prose fiction. It then traces the novel's remarkable legacy to the present day. Woolf wrote in her diary that she wanted her novel 'to give life & death, sanity & insanity. to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.' Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel reveals how she achieved this ambition, creating a book that will be read by generations to come.

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