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      • Trusted Partner
        August 1988

        Gedichte für Städtebewohner

        Herausgegeben und mit einem Nachwort von Franco Buono

        by Bertolt Brecht, Franco Buono, Franco Buono

        Seit den Anfängen der Massengesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert ist sie nicht mehr aus der ›lyrischen‹ Produktion wegzudenken: die Stadt. Vervielfältigung wie Zerstörung menschlicher Beziehungen, Befreiung von (dörflicher) Naturbornierung und Zerstörung natürlicher Bedürfnisse, kurz: Faszination und Grauen sind die Pole dieses genuin ›modernen‹ Motivs. Seine raffiniertesten Versionen verschränken beides: entdecken die Trauer des Berauschenden großer Städte und die Faszination noch ihres Unmenschlichen. Auch Brechts Stadt-Gedichte sind, obwohl gewiß das Trostlose und Unmenschliche akzentuierend, nicht ohne eine solche dialektische Kehrseite. Denn ihre gesellschaftliche Hoffnung wie ihre didaktische Maxime ist, daß »die tiefste Verzweiflung die Bedingung für die Rettung« ist – so Franco Buono, der diese Auswahl zusammengestellt hat. Buonos Nachwort hebt das Besondere von Brechts Stadt-Gedichten hervor und skizziert die Geschichte des Stadt-Motivs in Brechts Werk.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2025

        Bordering social reproduction

        Migrant mothers and children making lives in the shadows

        by Rachel Rosen, Eve Dickson

        Bordering social reproduction explores what happens when migrants subject to policies that seek to deny them the means of life nonetheless endeavour to make and sustain meaningful lives. Developing innovative theorisations of welfare bordering, the volume provides rich ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of destitute mothers and children who are denied mainstream welfare support in the United Kingdom due to their immigration status. This book shows how enforced destitution and debt work alongside detention and deportation as part of a tripartite of exclusionary technologies of the racial state. It advances the novel concept of weathering to comprehend mother's and children's life-making practices under duress - arguing that these are neither acts of heroic resilience nor solely symptomatic of lives rendered disposable, but indications of the fragilities of repressive migration regimes and, on occasion, refusals to accept their terms of existence.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2025

        Beyond the Pale and Highland Line

        The Irish and Scottish Gaelic world

        by Simon Egan

        This book offers important new insights into the history and culture of the Gaelic-speaking world from the mid-fifteenth century through to the reign of James VI and I. Throughout this period, the reach of the English and Scottish crowns within these western regions was limited. The initiative lay with local communities and royal power was contingent upon negotiating with well-established and largely autonomous aristocratic lineages. Moreover, events within this western world could exert a powerful, often unpredictable, influence upon the affairs of the wider archipelago. Using a series of case studies, this collection examines the evolving relationship between Ireland and Scotland in rich detail. It demonstrates how this world interacted with the encroaching English and Scottish states and underlines the importance of paying closer attention to this neglected area of Irish and British history.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2025

        Fertile expectations

        The politics of involuntary childlessness in twentieth-century France

        by Margaret Cook Andersen

        An engaging history of motherhood, demography, and infertility in twentieth-century France, this book explores fraught political and cultural meanings attached to the notion of an "ideal" family size. When statistics revealed a sustained drop in France's birthrate, pronatalist activists pushed for financial benefits, propaganda, and punitive measures to counter declining fertility. Situating infertility within this history, the author details innovations in fertility medicine, cultural awareness of artificial insemination, and changing laws on child adoption. These practices offered new ways of responding to infertility and formed part of a growing expectation of being able to control one's fertility and family size. This book presents the political and cultural context for understanding why private questions about when to start a family, how many children to have, and how to cope with involuntary childlessness, evolved and became part of state demographic policies.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2011

        Bourgeois consumption

        Food, space and identity in London and Paris, 1850–1914

        by Rachel Rich

        Bourgeois Consumption looks at how the middle classes in late nineteenth-century London and Paris used food and dining as forms of social expression and identity. This engaging treatise about how class and gender informed people's eating habits focuses on the complex interactions between bodies, ritual and identity. Forgoing the traditional food history territory of recipes and ingredients in favor of how people ate in different circles, Bourgeois Consumption explores the role of real and imagined meals in shaping Victorian lives. The perception of the middle classes as rigid and upright, found in the extensive pages of their etiquette books, is contrasted with a more flexible and spontaneous bourgeoisie, gleaned from the pages of their own colorful memoirs, diaries and letters, leading us on a lively journey into eating spaces, mealtimes, manners, and social interactions between diners. Further, contrasting Paris with London reveals some of the ways each city shaped its inhabitants but, more surprisingly, throws up a range of similarities that suggest the middle classes were, in fact, a transnational class. Rachel Rich's work will be of interest to anyone intrigued by the history of food, consumption and leisure, as well as to a broader audience curious about how the Victorian middle classes distinguished themselves through daily life and manners. ;

      • The Arts
        March 1905

        Concerning the Spiritual in Art

        by Wassily Kandinsky

        A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own groundbreaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art. Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts. The first part, called "About General Aesthetic," issues a call for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art. In the second part, "About Painting," Kandinsky discusses the psychology of colors, the language of form and color, and the responsibilities of the artist. An Introduction by the translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, offers additional explanation of Kandinsky's art and theories, while a new Preface by Richard Stratton discusses Kandinsky's career as a whole and the impact of the book. Making the book even more valuable are nine woodcuts by Kandinsky himself that appear at the chapter headings. This English translation of Über das Geistige in der Kunst was a significant contribution to the understanding of nonobjectivism in art. It continues to be a stimulating and necessary reading experience for every artist, art student, and art patron concerned with the direction of 20th-century painting.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2025

        Empirical art

        Filmmaking for fieldwork in practice

        by Andy Lawrence, Martha-Cecilia Dietrich

        Empirical art: Filmmaking for fieldwork in practice is an insightful exploration of what the craft of filmmaking brings to social science research. Providing creative avenues on how to narrate encounters, relationships, and experiences during fieldwork, this comprehensive volume offers a rich tapestry of theoretical explorations and explorative methodologies. Skilfully connecting the worlds of ethnography, art and cinema, the contributors in this book act as a compass for filmmakers and researchers venturing to use a camera and microphone to relate and narrate their research collaborations and fieldsites. Drawing from the authors' extensive experience in disciplines like social anthropology, environmental humanities, and political science, "Empirical Art" breaks down the intricate process of crafting ethnographic films that departs from the researcher's subjectivity. Covering aspects of filmmaking from conceptualisation to production and distribution, readers are equipped with a treasure trove of collaborative techniques, innovative approaches, and ethical considerations necessary to generate and examine storytelling practices in contemporary fields of study. The authors discuss the significance of the multiple roles that technologies of filmmaking play in reflecting on cultural practices, social dynamics, and (beyond) human storytelling and their transformative potentials. Whether a seasoned filmmaker, an aspiring ethnographer, or an academic seeking new dimensions for their research, Empirical Art serves as a guide to integrating visual storytelling, cinema craft and empirical research.

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        The Arts
        June 2026

        Borderline bodies in art and visual culture

        Unsettling identity and place since 1800

        by Keren Hammerschlag, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, Tania Anne Cleaves

        Borderline bodies offers original interpretations of visual representations of human bodies as bounded and unbounded, fortified and permeable, mobile and static-subject to borders and able to traverse and challenge them. It also takes as its focus images and objects that might be considered 'borderline' because they sit at the intersection of disciplines or sit outside accepted notions of what constitutes serious 'art.' By mapping the ways human bodies traverse borders and straddle-even dismantle-categories, this volume's essays approach afresh the relationship of bodies to traditional modes of representation, especially in art and medicine, and encourage us to think anew about how we understand the relationship between human corporeality, identity and place. Critical transdisciplinary and transnational analyses of objects and images from a range of geographies shed new light on the themes of: bodies and identity; typologies of the body; racialised bodies; 'normal' and 'abnormal' bodies; encounters between bodies; bodies in transition; bodies and mobility; and the bounded and unbounded human body. The outcome is a fresh approach to depictions of the human body produced for the purposes of artistic and medical education, aesthetic edification, and scientific and professional advancement, which disrupts assumptions about the normative human body perpetuated through Western image-making traditions.

      • Trusted Partner
        October 2014

        Der Bourgeois

        Eine Schlüsselfigur der Moderne

        by Franco Moretti, Frank Jakubzik

        Die industrielle Revolution hat keinen Stein auf dem anderen gelassen. Sie hat alle »altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und Anschauungen« aufgelöst, alles »Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige« entweiht, konstatieren Marx und Engels im »Kommunistischen Manifest«. Die Protagonisten dieser Umwälzung sind die Bürger, die Kaufleute und Industriekapitäne. Die Figur des Bourgeois hat nicht nur Max Weber, Werner Sombart und Joseph Schumpeter fasziniert, sie spielt auch eine Hauptrolle in den großen Werken der Weltliteratur: bei Defoe und Goethe, Balzac und Dickens, bei Thomas Mann und Henrik Ibsen. Franco Moretti rekonstruiert die Mentalität dieser Ära durch das Fenster Literatur: Warum hört Robinson Crusoe auch dann nicht auf zu arbeiten, als sein Überleben auf der paradiesischen Insel längst gesichert ist? Was verraten Ton, Schlüsselwörter und Grammatik der großen Romane des 19. Jahrhunderts über den Geist des Kapitalismus? Und was haben uns die Stücke Ibsens heute, das heißt in unseren postbürgerlichen Zeiten, noch zu sagen, in denen die Wachstumsideologie ebenso hinterfragt wird wie die Integrität von Bankern, Beratern und Analysten?

      • Trusted Partner
        January 2009

        Kurven, Karten, Stammbäume

        Abstrakte Modelle für die Literaturgeschichte

        by Franco Moretti, Florian Kessler, Alberto Piazza

        Man könne auch als Literaturwissenschaftler durchaus über Bücher reden, ohne jemals eines gelesen zu haben – mit solch provokanten Thesen bringt Franco Moretti seit Jahren die internationale Literaturtheorie durcheinander. In seinem neuen Buch demonstriert Moretti, der ob seiner innovativen Verve bereits mit Umberto Eco verglichen wird, wie eine »abstrakte Literaturwissenschaft« aussehen könnte: Anstatt sich mit einzelnen kanonischen Texten auseinanderzusetzen, kartographiert er die Landschaft englischer Dorfgeschichten oder erprobt die Anwendbarkeit evolutionstheoretischer Konzepte auf die Entwicklung des Detektivromans.

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