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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2023Politics, performance and popular culture
Theatre and society in nineteenth-century Britain
by Peter Yeandle, Katherine Newey, Jeffrey Richards
This collection brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base. It works with the concept that politics is performative and performance is political. The book is organised into three parts in dialogue regarding specific approaches to popular performance and politics. Part I offers a series of conceptual studies using popular culture as an analytical category for social and political history. Part II explores the ways that performance represents and constructs contemporary ideologies of race, nation and empire. Part III investigates the performance techniques of specific politicians - including Robert Peel, Keir Hardie and Henry Hyndman - and analyses the performative elements of collective movements.
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Literature & Literary StudiesApril 2021Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture
by Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, Cassie M. Miura
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History of art & design styles: c 1600 to c 1800October 2014Material goods, moving hands
Perceiving production in England, 1700–1830
by Kate Smith
In eighteenth-century Britain, greater numbers of people entered the marketplace and bought objects in ever-greater quantities. As consumers rather than producers, how did their understandings of manufacturing processes and the material world change? Material goods and moving hands combines material culture and visual culture approaches to explore the different ways in which manufacturers and retailers presented production to consumers during the eighteenth century. It shows how new relationships with production processes encouraged consumers, retailers, designers, manufacturers and workers to develop conflicting understandings of production. Objects then were not just markers of fashion and taste, they acted as important conduits through which people living in Georgian Britain could examine and discuss their material world and the processes and knowledge that rendered it.
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Literature & Literary StudiesFebruary 2015Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700
1550–1700
by Edited by Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher
At once pervasive and marginal, appealing and repellent, exemplary and atypical, the women of the Bible provoke an assortment of readings across early modern literature. Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550-1700 draws attention to the complex ways in which biblical women's narratives could be reimagined for a variety of rhetorical and religious purposes. Considering a confessionally diverse range of writers, working across a variety of genres, this volume reveals how women from the Old and New Testaments exhibit an ideological power that frequently exceeds, both in scope and substance, their associated scriptural records. The essays explore how the Bible's women are fluidly negotiated and diversely redeployed to offer (conflicting) comment on issues including female authority, speech and sexuality, and in discussions of doctrine, confessional politics, exploration and grief. As it explores the rich ideological currency of the Bible's women in early modern culture, this volume demonstrates that the Bible's women are persistently difficult to evade. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2024British culture after empire
Race, decolonisation and migration since 1945
by Josh Doble, Liam Liburd, Emma Parker
British culture after Empire is the first collection of its kind to explore the intertwined social, cultural and political aftermath of empire in Britain from 1945 up to and beyond the Brexit referendum of 2016, combining approaches from the fields of history, English and cultural studies. Against those who would deny, downplay or attempt to forget Britain's imperial legacy, the various contributions expose and explore how the British Empire and the consequences of its end continue to shape Britain at the local, national and international level. As an important and urgent intervention in a field of increasing relevance within and beyond the academy, the book offers fresh perspectives on the colonial hangovers in post-colonial Britain from up-and-coming as well as established scholars.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2000Smoking in British popular culture 1800–2000
by Matthew Hilton, Jeffrey Richards
A concise history of smoking in British popular culture from the early nineteenth century to the present day.. Provides the historical backdrop to the current debates about the politics of tobacco and health, demonstrating that both pro- and anti-smokers have consistently failed to understand the position of smoking within popular culture.. Important themes explored include: the importance of consumption to constructions of masculinity and femininity, the role of the state in the official regulation of the 'minor vices', the morality of consumption and the position of scientific knowledge within popular culture.. Traces the production, promotion and consumption of tobacco as well as outlining the arguments that have variously opposed this ever-controversial drug.. Genuinely interdisciplinary, combining elements of social, cultural and economic history whilst contributing to debates in sociology and cultural studies, the anthropology of material culture, design history, medical history and public health policy. ;
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Industrial / commercial art & designApril 2017History through material culture
by Series edited by Simon Trafford, Leonie Hannan, Sarah Longair
History through material culture is a unique, step-by-step guide for students and researchers who wish to use objects as historical sources. Responding to the significant, scholarly interest in historical material culture studies, this book makes clear how students and researchers ready to use these rich material sources can make important, valuable and original contributions to history. Written by two experienced museum practitioners and historians, the book recognises the theoretical and practical challenges of this approach and offers clear advice on methods to get the best out of material culture research. With a focus on the early modern and modern periods, this volume draws on examples from across the world and demonstrates how to use material culture to answer a range of enquiries, including social, economic, gender, cultural and global history.
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2019Good Evening, Good Night
The cultural history of sleep
by Karoline Walter
What we associate with sleep is shaped by the culture we live in. Whereas the God of the Bible never sleeps, the sinful human falls asleep every night and is thus marked as an inferior being. In the Age of Enlightenment, (too much) sleep was considered a waste of strength, which could otherwise be used to change the world. These days, sleep seems to be subject to the same tenets of usefulness as everything else and is seen to assist with the optimization of one’s self. However, culture and technology also influence how we sleep: for example, the constant availability of light, the modern conditions of work and all sorts of distractions have meant that we no longer follow our natural rhythm – a first sleep before midnight and a second sleep after a longer period of wakefulness, during which we may be active. In “Good Evening, Good Night”, Karoline Walter uses numerous examples from history, literature and research to illustrate how sleep and sleeping have changed across cultures and eras – an entertaining read, certainly nothing to put you to sleep.
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Literature & Literary StudiesFebruary 2000Feminism, femininity and popular culture
by Joanne Hollows
Accessible, introductory student guide which identifies key feminist approaches to popular culture from the 1960s to the present.. The only introduction to both feminist cultural studies and feminism and popular culture published in the UK.. Presents its information in a reader friendly series of case studies on: women's film romantic fiction soap opera consumption and material culture fashion and beauty proactices youth culture and popular music. Will appeal to students across a wide range of disciplines as a variety of popular cultural forms are discussed. ;
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The ArtsSeptember 2009Nature and culture
Objects, disciplines and the Manchester Museum
by Samuel J. M. M. Alberti
This is a vital new work; the first to take the University of Manchester's Museum as its subject. By setting the museum in its cultural and intellectual contexts, Nature and culture explores twentieth-century collecting and display, and the status of the object in the modern world. Beginning with the origins of the Manchester Museum, accounting for its development as an internationally renowned university museum, and concluding at its major expansion at the turn of the millennium, this book casts new light on the history of museums. How did objects become knowledge? Who encountered museum objects on their way to museums? What happened to collections within the museum? How did visitors use and respond to objects? In answering these questions, Nature and culture illuminates not only the history of one institution, but also contributes to wider discussions in the history of science, cultural history and museology. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2001Railways and culture in Britain
The epitome of modernity
by Ian Carter, Jeffrey Richards
The nineteenth-century's steam railway epitomised modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. In Railways and culture in Britain Ian Carter delves into the cultural impact of train technology, and how this was represented in British society. Why, for example, did Britain possess no great railway novel? The book's first half tests that assertion by comparing fiction and images by some canonical British figures (Turner, Dickens, Arnold Bennett) with selected French and Russian competitors: Tolstoy, Zola, Monet, Manet. The second half proposes that if high cultural work on the British steam railway is thin, then this does not mean that all British culture ignored this revolutionary artefact. Detailed discussions of comic fiction, crime fiction and cartoons reveal a popular fascination with railways tumbling from vast (and hitherto unexplored) stores of critically overlooked genres. A final chapter contemplates cultural correlations of the steam railway's eclipse. If this was the epitome of modernity, then does the triumph of diesel and electric trains, of cars and planes, signal a decisive shift to postmodernity? ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2010The culture of regionalism
Art, architecture and international exhibitions in France, Germany and Spain, 1890–1939
by Eric Storm
This pioneering book studies the rise, heyday and demise of regionalism from the Belle Époque until the Eve of the Second World War. By using a novel comparative perspective it gives a fresh view of the relationship between cultural regionalism, political regionalism and nationalism. Storm further illuminates how during the first decades of the twentieth century the culture of regionalism slowly lost the battle against its main rival: the avant-garde. Regional identities, like national identities, were created and sometimes even invented; and this was equally the case in France, Germany and Spain. Artists, architects and international exhibitions played a highly influential role in this process. They all appropriated, and in some cases perverted, the regionalist message showing that strong regional identities would ultimately reinforce national unity. This book offers new perspectives to specialists of regionalism and nationalism, but will also be of interest to students of the cultural history of France, Germany and Spain and to specialists from the fields of politics, ethnology, art history, cultural studies and architectural history. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2008The culture of toleration in diverse societies
Reasonable tolerance
by Catriona McKinnon, Dario Castiglione
The idea of toleration as the appropriate response to difference has been central to liberal thought since Locke. Although the subject has been widely and variously explored, there has been reluctance to acknowledge the new meaning that current debates on toleration have when compared with those at its origins in the early modern period and with subsequent discussions about pluralism and freedom of expression. This collection starts from a clear recognition of the new terms of the debate. It recognises that a new academic consensus is slowly emerging on a view of tolerance that is reasonable in two senses. Firstly of reflecting the capacity of seeing the other's viewpoint, secondly on the relatively limited extent to which toleration can be granted. It reflects the cross-thematic and cross-disciplinary nature of such discussions, dissecting a number of debates such as liberalism and communitarianism, public and private, multiculturalism and the politics of identity, and a number of disciplines: moral, legal and political philosophy, historical and educational studies, anthropology, sociology and psychology. A group of distinguished authors explore the complexities emerging from the new debate. They scrutinise, with analytical sophistication, the philosophical foundation, the normative content and the broadly political implications of a new culture of toleration for diverse societies. Specific issues considered include the toleration of religious discrimination in employment, city life and community, social ethos, publicity, justice and reason and ethics. The book is unique in resolutely looking forward to the theoretical and practical challenges posed by commitment to a conception of toleration demanding empathy and understanding in an ever-diversifying world. ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesApril 2024Myth 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.
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September 2023Being Able to Stop
Against the delusion of permanent growth
by Edited by Jean-Pierre Wils
We moderns were the inhabitants of an age of impetuous forward movement and voracious discontent. Our main virtue was to increase our reach. Increasing our having and accelerating our being were the signposts towards the future. We just could not get enough. Using the blinkers of ignorance and self-anaesthesia, however, we managed to forget the tremendous costs incurred by this intoxication. Now disillusionment has set in. We look to the future with anxiety. We know that we have long since crossed a line and that a revision of our lifestyle is imminent. We have a bad feeling, and doubts about progress often give way to anger and rebellion. Which stocks of the modern narrative should we defend; which would we do better to let go? How will we even "be able to stop"? The path to a different society needs an attractive goal, because without the prospect of a different, better life, we will not move forward. We should start practising immediately. There is no time to lose.
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2020How Animals Hammer, Drill and Strike
Tool Use in the Animal Kingdom
by Peter-René Becker
From insects to fish as well as birds and primates: the use of tools is amazingly widespread in the animal kingdom. It’s a misnomer to presume that humans are distinguished by tool use and conscious capacity. So where is culture initiated? The biologist Peter-René Becker has evaluated numerous studies and cites plenty of evidence for the use of the hammer and anvil, lances, bait or sponges. Animals also use “tools as social implements”. Ultimately, the depth of man’s conscience singles him out from other animals.
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The ArtsJune 2021Medieval film
by Anke Bernau, Bettina Bildhauer
Medieval film explores theoretical questions about the ideological, artistic, emotional and financial investments inhering in cinematic renditions of the medieval period. What does it mean to create and watch a 'medieval film'? What is a medieval film and why are they successful? This is the first work that attempts to answer these questions, drawing, for instance, on film theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies and the growing body of work on medievalism. Contributors investigate British, German, Italian, Australian, French, Swedish and American film, exploring topics such translation, temporality, film noir, framing and period film - and find the medieval lurking in inexpected corners. In addition it provides in-depth studies of individual films from different countries including The Birth of a Nation to Nosferatu, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Medieval Film will be of interest to medievalists working in disciplines including literature, history, to scholars working on film and in cultural studies. It will also be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and to an informed enthusiast in film or/and medieval culture.
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The ArtsJanuary 2019Medieval film
by Anke Bernau, Bettina Bildhauer
Medieval film explores theoretical questions about the ideological, artistic, emotional and financial investments inhering in cinematic renditions of the medieval period. What does it mean to create and watch a 'medieval film'? What is a medieval film and why are they successful? This is the first work that attempts to answer these questions, drawing, for instance, on film theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies and the growing body of work on medievalism. Contributors investigate British, German, Italian, Australian, French, Swedish and American film, exploring topics such translation, temporality, film noir, framing and period film - and find the medieval lurking in unexpected corners. In addition it provides in-depth studies of individual films from different countries including The Birth of a Nation to Nosferatu, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Medieval film will be of interest to medievalists working in disciplines including literature, history, art history, to scholars working on film and in cultural studies. It will also be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and to an informed enthusiast in film or/and medieval culture.
