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      • Trusted Partner
        Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure
        August 2016

        Culture in Manchester

        Institutions and urban change since 1850

        by Janet Wolff, Mike Savage

        This book brings together studies of cultural institutions in Manchester from 1850 to the present day, giving an unprecedented account of the city's cultural evolution. These bring to light the remarkable range of Manchester's contribution to modern cultural life, including the role of art education, popular theatre, religion, pleasure gardens, clubs and societies. The chapters show the resilience and creativity of Manchester's cultural institutions since 1850, challenging any simple narrative of urban decline following the erosion of Lancashire's industrial base, at the same time illustrating the range of activities across the social classes. This book will appeal to everyone interested in the cultural life of the city of Manchester, including cultural historians, sociologists and urban geographers, as well as general readers with interests in the city. It is written by leading international authorities, including Viv Gardner, Stephen Milner, Mike Savage, Bill Williams and Janet Wolff.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2023

        Politics, 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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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2022

        Class, work and whiteness

        Race and settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919–79

        by Nicola Ginsburgh

        This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2021

        Feeling the strain

        A cultural history of stress in twentieth-century Britain

        by Jill Kirby

        Examining the popular discourse of nerves and stress, this book provides a historical account of how ordinary Britons understood, explained and coped with the pressures and strains of daily life during the twentieth century. It traces the popular, vernacular discourse of stress, illuminating not just how stress was known, but the ways in which that knowledge was produced. Taking a cultural approach, the book focuses on contemporary popular understandings, revealing continuity of ideas about work, mental health, status, gender and individual weakness, as well as the changing socio-economic contexts that enabled stress to become a ubiquitous condition of everyday life by the end of the century. With accounts from sufferers, families and colleagues it also offers insight into self-help literature, the meanings of work and changing dynamics of domestic life, delivering a complementary perspective to medical histories of stress.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2021

        Culture is bad for you

        Inequality in the cultural and creative industries

        by Orian Brook, Dave O'Brien, Mark Taylor, Nneka Okoye

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2024

        Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition

        Words, ideas, interactions

        by Megan Cavell, Jennifer Neville

        Capitalising on developments in the field over the past decade, Riddles at work provides an up-to-date microcosm of research on the early medieval riddle tradition. The book presents a wide range of traditional and experimental methodologies. The contributors treat the riddles both as individual poems and as parts of a tradition, but, most importantly, they address Latin and Old English riddles side-by-side, bringing together texts that originally developed in conversation with each other but have often been separated by scholarship. Together, the chapters reveal that there is no single, right way to read these texts but rather a multitude of productive paths. This book will appeal to students and scholars of early medieval studies. It contains new as well as established voices, including Jonathan Wilcox, Mercedes Salvador-Bello and Jennifer Neville.

      • 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
        July 2023

        In the company of wolves

        Werewolves, wolves and wild children

        by Sam George, Bill Hughes

        In the company of wolves presents further research from the Open Graves, Open Minds Project. It connects together innovative research from a variety of perspectives on the cultural significance of wolves, wild children and werewolves as portrayed in different media and genres. We begin with the wolf itself as it has been interpreted as a cultural symbol and how it figures in contemporary debates about wilderness and nature. Alongside this, we consider eighteenth-century debates about wild children ­- often thought to have been raised by wolves and other animals - and their role in key questions about the origins of language and society. The collection continues with essays on werewolves and other shapeshifters as depicted in folk tales, literature, film and TV, concluding with the transition from animal to human in contemporary art, poetry and fashion.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2024

        Plagues of the heart

        Crisis and covenanting in a seventeenth-century Scottish town

        by Michelle D. Brock

        Using a wide range of archival material, Plagues of the heart provides a fresh understanding of religion and identity not only in seventeenth-century Scotland, but in protestant communities across the early modern world grappling with a range of interrelated crises. By examining the 'culture of covenanting' in the southwestern port-city of Ayr between the British civil wars and the Revolution of 1688, this book reveals how adherence to the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 informed the identities and lived experiences of a generation of Scots. This is the compelling story of one Scottish town and its remarkable minister, but it demonstrates how in the early modern period, especially when it came to matters of faith, the local was imbedded rather than isolated, engaged rather than insular.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2024

        The picture politics of Sir Francis Carruthers Gould

        Britain's pioneering political cartoonist

        by Mark Bryant

        This is the first major study of Britain's pioneering graphic satirist, Sir Francis Carruthers Gould (1844-1925), the first staff political cartoonist on a daily newspaper in Britain, and the first of his kind to be knighted. Written by the distinguished media historian, Colin Seymour-Ure, it is essential reading for anyone interested in cartoons, caricature and illustration and will also be welcomed by students of history, politics and the media. It examines Gould's career in Fleet Street until his retirement after the First World War. It also discusses his illustrations for magazines and books and there is an analysis of his use of symbolism and literary allusion to lampoon such eminent politicians as Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain. As Lord Baker says in his Foreword, this book is 'a major contribution to our knowledge of British cartooning.'

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2014

        The Open University

        by Daniel Weinbren

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2020

        Class, work and whiteness

        by Nicola Ginsburgh, Alan Lester

      • Trusted Partner
        Colonialism & imperialism
        May 2017

        Hong Kong and British culture, 1945–97

        by Mark Hampton. Series edited by Andrew S. Thompson, John Mackenzie

        This book examines the British cultural engagement with Hong Kong in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows how the territory fit unusually within Britain's decolonisation narratives and served as an occasional foil for examining Britain's own culture during a period of perceived stagnation and decline. Drawing on a wide range of archival and published primary sources, Hong Kong and British culture, 1945-97 investigates such themes as Hong Kong as a site of unrestrained capitalism, modernisation, and good government, as well as an arena of male social and sexual opportunity. It also examines the ways in which Hong Kong Chinese embraced British culture, and the competing predictions that British observers made concerning the colony's return to Chinese sovereignty. An epilogue considers the enduring legacy of British colonialism.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2024

        Culture is not an industry

        by Justin O'Connor

      • Trusted Partner
        Biography & True Stories
        November 2024

        Walking in the dark

        James Baldwin, my father and I

        by Douglas Field

        A moving exploration of the life and work of the celebrated American writer, blending biography and memoir with literary criticism. Since James Baldwin's death in 1987, his writing - including The Fire Next Time, one of the manifestoes of the Civil Rights Movement, and Giovanni's Room, a pioneering work of gay fiction - has only grown in relevance. Douglas Field was introduced to Baldwin's essays and novels by his father, who witnessed the writer's debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965. In Walking in the dark, he embarks on a journey to unravel his life-long fascination and to understand why Baldwin continues to enthral us decades after his death. Tracing Baldwin's footsteps in France, the US and Switzerland, and digging into archives, Field paints an intimate portrait of the writer's life and influence. At the same time, he offers a poignant account of coming to terms with his father's Alzheimer's disease. Interweaving Baldwin's writings on family, illness, memory and place, Walking in the dark is an eloquent testament to the enduring power of great literature to illuminate our paths.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 1999

        British Politics in an Age of Reform

        by Michael J. Turner, Mark Greengrass

        This work is a detailed examination of principal themes in the political history of late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain. It evaluates much recent research, links the politics of the elite with the politics of the people and seeks to explain significant developments with reference to both their long- and short-term causes. Among the issues addressed are the relative powers of crown, cabinet and parliament between 1760 and 1832; the impact on domestic politics of revolution and war abroad; the growth of radicalism and popular political activity; agitation for reform and the responses of government; the rise of party; the connections between extra-parliamentary pressure and instability; at the centre of power. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2024

        Decolonizing images

        by Ronnie Close

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