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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2025The 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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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2025Taking 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.
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Biography & True StoriesNovember 2024Walking 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.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2023
United Nations peace operations and International Relations theory
by Kseniya Oksamytna, John Karlsrud
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The ArtsJuly 2025An idea for a theatre ecology
Methods, theories, histories and practices
by Carl Lavery
An Idea for a Theatre Ecology is the first book in the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies to provide a rigorous and coherent theory of the ecology that is immanent to the theatrical medium. Over six clearly written chapters, the book provides a genealogy, outlines a method, provides a lexicon and demonstrates an alternative practice of ecoperformance analysis grounded in the figure of the archipelago. Focusing on Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty, the book argues that theatre has no need to provide ecological messages nor to transform itself into a platform for the narration of ecological stories. Instead, more is to be gained, environmentally and politically, by concentrating on the power of images, gestures and voices to create corporeal affects and sensations that implicate the spectators in a terrestrial event.
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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2022Class, 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.
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The ArtsSeptember 2020Science in performance
Theatre and the politics of engagement
by Simon Parry
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from Broadway musicals to educational theatre, from Somali drama to grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. Science in performance is essential reading for researchers, students and practitioners working between science and the arts within fields such as theatre and performance studies, science communication, interdisciplinary arts and health humanities.
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The ArtsJune 2025
Death in modern theatre
Stages of mortality
by Adrian Curtin
Death in modern theatre offers a unique account of modern Western theatre, focusing on the ways in which dramatists and theatre-makers have explored historically informed ideas about death and dying in their work. It investigates the opportunities theatre affords to reflect on the end of life in a compelling and socially meaningful fashion. In a series of interrelated, mostly chronological, micronarratives beginning in the late nineteenth century and ending in the early twenty-first century, this book considers how and why death and dying are represented at certain historical moments using dramaturgy and aesthetics that challenge audiences' conceptions, sensibilities, and sense-making faculties. It includes a mix of well-known and lesser-known plays from an international range of dramatists and theatre-makers, and offers original interpretations through close reading and performance analysis.
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The ArtsJuly 2024Theatre, activism, subjectivity
Searching for the Left in a fragmented world
by Bishnupriya Dutt, Silvija Jestrovic
Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.
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The ArtsNovember 2009Portraiture and social identity in eighteenth-century Rome
by Sabrina Eliasson
Portraiture and Social Identity in Eighteenth-Century Rome sheds new light on the relationship between portraiture, social affirmation and the myth of Antiquity as it was experienced and elaborated in eighteenth-century Rome. Drawing upon a wealth of unpublished documents and previously unexamined literary texts, it offers new insights and readings into how the experience of the City in terms of abstract or concrete appropriation affected the ways of portraying native or visiting elite sitters. The Grand Tour portrait, usually discussed as a purely British phenomenon, is here put in its original context of production and compared to the portraits of the Romans themselves. Portraiture and social identity in eighteenth-century Rome will become essential reading for anyone with a particular interest in eighteenth-century art and its social use. ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2022Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 98/1
The Artist of the Future Age: William Blake, Neo-Romanticism, Counterculture and Now
by Douglas Field
This special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library is devoted to William Blake. It explores the British and European reception of Blake's work from the late nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular focus on the counterculture. Opening with two articles by the late Michael Horovitz, an important figure in the 'Blake Renaissance' of the 1960s, the issue goes on to investigate the ideological struggle over Blake in the early part of the twentieth century, with particular reference to W. B. Yeats. This is followed by articles on the artistic avant-garde and underground of the 1960s and on Blake's significance for science fiction authors of the 1970s. The issue closes with an article on the contemporary Belgian art collective maelstrÖm reEvolution.
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September 2022Identity or Not?
by Jean-Pierre Wils (ed.)
Questions of identity trigger controversial and highly emotional discussions in the political and social debate. The positions range from radically emancipatory perspectives to authoritarian and restorative efforts on the far right wing of politics. Liberal democracies are now opening up – slowly – as identity- and gender-sensitive forums. Opposite them are the 'new ethics' of illiberal democracies and totalitarian states that are aimed at ethnic homogeneity and gender uniformity. But that's not to say that there is unity in the liberal settings on the necessary degree of identity politics. Both language and gender politics are deeply controversial. Do we need an 'identity' and, if so, which one or how many? Can the identity debate be extended by means of other concepts?
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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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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2023Transitional justice in process
Plans and politics in Tunisia
by Mariam Salehi
After the fall of the Ben Ali regime in 2011, Tunisia swiftly began dealing with its authoritarian past and initiated a comprehensive transitional justice process, with the Truth and Dignity Commission as its central institution. However, instead of bringing about peace and justice, transitional justice soon became an arena of contention. Through a process lens, the book explores why and how the process evolved, and explains how it relates to the country's political transition. Based on extensive field research in Tunisia and the US, and interviews with a broad range of international stakeholders and decision-makers, this is the first book to comprehensively study the Tunisian transitional justice process. It provides an in-depth analysis of a crucial period, examining the role of justice professionals in different stages, as well as the alliances and frictions between different actor groups that cut across the often-assumed local-international divide.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2020Class, work and whiteness
by Nicola Ginsburgh, Alan Lester
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