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        Shakespeare studies & criticism
        May 2017

        The Renaissance of emotion

        Understanding affect in Shakespeare and his contemporaries

        by Edited by Richard Meek, Erin Sullivan

        This collection of essays offers a major reassessment of the meaning and significance of emotional experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Recent scholarship on early modern emotion has relied on a medical-historical approach, resulting in a picture of emotional experience that stresses the dominance of the material, humoral body. The Renaissance of emotion seeks to redress this balance by examining the ways in which early modern texts explore emotional experience from perspectives other than humoral medicine. The chapters in the book seek to demonstrate how open, creative and agency-ridden the experience and interpretation of emotion could be. Taken individually, the chapters offer much-needed investigations into previously overlooked areas of emotional experience and signification; taken together, they offer a thorough re-evaluation of the cultural priorities and phenomenological principles that shaped the understanding of the emotive self in this period.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 2015

        The Renaissance of emotion

        by Edited by Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2011

        Shakespeare's book

        Essays in reading, writing and reception

        by Richard Meek, Jane Rickard, Richard Wilson

        This collection of essays is part of a new phase in Shakespeare studies. The traditional view of Shakespeare is that he was a man of the theatre who showed no interest in the printing of his plays, producing works that are only fully realised in performance. This view has recently been challenged by critics arguing that Shakespeare was a literary 'poet-playwright', concerned with his readers as well as his audiences. Shakespeare's Book offers a vital contribution to this critical debate, and examines its wider implications for how we conceive of Shakespeare and his works. Bringing together an impressive group of international Shakespeare scholars, the volume explores both Shakespeare's relationship with actual printers, patrons, and readers, and the representation of writing, reading, and print within his works themselves. ;

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2022

        Home economics

        by Sacha Hepburn, Lynn Abrams

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        Children's & YA

        Grandpa and the Flying Dog

        by Anna Lott/Anja Grote

        Carla had a best friend – a friend with whom she could spend the loveliest afternoons. These were perfect Grandpa-Carla afternoons. But now Grandpa is gone. But Carla waits for him. One day she finds a big dog on the same bench where her grandfather always waited for her. Suddenly she feels very close to him again. Carla can even go flying on Grandpa’s back. But is it really Grandpa? Or just a big dog?

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2006

        The Tamer Tamed; or, The Woman’s Prize

        by Celia Daileader, Gary Taylor, David Bevington

        This is the first edition for students and general readers of this pro-woman reply to Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew' by a playwright (John Fletcher) who was more admired than Shakespeare in the seventeenth century. Co-edited by a feminist critic and a distinguished textual scholar, this new textbook makes clear why "The Tamer Tamed" should be restored to the theatrical repertoire and the literary canon. It includes the fullest commentary ever provided for the play, explaining for modern students Fletcher's verbal exuberance and his uninhibited sexual language. The full critical introduction describes the play's Renaissance context, its historical and literary sources (including Aristophanes's "Lysistrata"), and its subversive relationship to Shakespeare's "Shrew" and Ben Jonson's "The Silent Woman". It also surveys the play's subsequent theatrical and critical history. A unique and essential companion to the numerous textbook editions of Shakespeare's play, "The Tamer Tamed" provides exciting new material for current debates about the history of gender, marriage, and drama. ;

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2025

        The return of the housewife

        Why women are still cleaning up

        by Emma Casey

        An illuminating look at the world of cleanfluencers that asks why the burden of housework still falls on women. Housework is good for you. Housework sparks joy. Housework is beautiful. Housework is glamorous. Housework is key to a happy family. Housework shows that you care. Housework is women's work. Social media is flooded with images of the perfect home. TikTok and Instagram 'cleanfluencers' produce endless photos and videos of women cleaning, tidying and putting things right. Figures such as Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch have placed housework, with its promise of a life of love and contentment, at the centre of self-care and positive thinking. And yet housework remains one of the world's most unequal institutions. Women, especially poorer women and women of colour, do most low-paid and unpaid domestic labour. In The return of the housewife, Emma Casey asks why these inequalities matter and why they persist after a century of dramatic advances in women's rights. She offers a powerful call to challenge the prevailing myths around housework and the 'naturally competent' woman homemaker.

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        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.

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        Medicine
        January 2025

        Nursing the English from plague to Peterloo, 1665-1820

        by Alannah Tomkins

        This book studies the negative stereotypes around the women who worked as sick nurses in this period and contrasts them with the lived experience of both domestic and institutional nursing staff. Furthermore, it integrates nursing by men into the broader history of care as a constant if little-recognised presence. It finds that women and men undertook caring work to the best of their ability, and often performed well, despite multiple threats to nurse reputations on the grounds of gender norms and social status. Chapters consider nursing in the home, in general hospitals, in specialist institutions like the Royal Chelsea Hospital and asylums, plus during wartime, illuminated by multiple accounts of individual nurses. In these settings, it employs the sociological concept of 'dirty work' to contextualise the challenges to nurses and nursing identities.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2026

        Soviet materialities

        Socialist things, environments and affects

        by Mollie Arbuthnot, Christianna Bonin, Gabriella Ferrari

        Soviet materialities explores how material transforms our understanding of Soviet culture, from the textures of domestic space in 1960s apartment blocks to Gulag labour on the Moscow canal, and from avant-garde literary theory in the 1920s to conceptual art under perestroika. It starts from the ethos that the material world shapes people and society. Taking a material approach-or a range of material approaches-can therefore illuminate aspects of the cultural production and lived experiences of Soviet socialism that are not reflected in other kinds of historical records. This edited volume brings cutting-edge research by emerging scholars together with the established voices who have broken the ground in this sub-field over the last twenty years and promises to make a major intervention in the study of Soviet history and culture.

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        The Arts
        June 2017

        Gothic television

        by Helen Wheatley

        Gothic television is the first full length study of the Gothic released on British and US television. An historical account, the book combines detailed archival research with analyses of key programmes, from Mystery and Imagination and Dark Shadows, to The Woman in White and Twin Peaks, and uncovers an aspect of television drama history which has, until now, remained critically unexplored. While some have seen television as too literal or homely a medium to successfully present Gothic fictions, Gothic television argues that the genre, in its many guises, is, and has always been, well-suited to television as a domestic medium, given the genre's obsessions with haunted houses and troubled families. This book will be of interest to lecturers and students across a number of disciplines including television studies, Gothic studies, and adaptation studies, as well as to the general reader with an interest in the Gothic, and in the history of television drama.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Engendering whiteness

        White women and colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865

        by Cecily Jones

        Engendering whiteness represents a comparative analysis of the complex interweaving of race, gender, social class and sexuality in defining the contours of white women's lives in Barbados and North Carolina during the era of slavery. Despite their gendered subordination, their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white women a range of privileges. Hence, their whiteness, as much as their gender, shaped these women's social identities and material realities. Crucially, as the biological reproducers of whiteness, and hence the symbolic and literal embodiment and bearers of the state of freedom, they were critical to the maintenance and reproduction of the cultural boundaries of 'whiteness', and consequently the subjects of patriarchal measures to limit and control their social and sexual freedoms. Engendering whiteness draws on a wide variety of sources including property deeds, wills, court transcripts, and interrogates the ways in which white women could be simultaneously socially positioned within plantation societies as both agents and as victims. It also reveals the strategies deployed by elite and poor white women in these societies to resist their gendered subordination, to challenge the ideological and social constraints that sought to restrict their lives to the private domestic sphere, to protect the limited rights afforded to them, to secure independent livelihoods, and to create meaningful existences. A fascinating study that with be welcomed by historians of imperialism as well as scholars of gender history and women's studies.

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        March 2026

        The White Umbrella

        A Novel | An irresistible tale of courage, kindness – and a donkey called Pawlowa

        by Brian Sewell, Sally Ann Lasson

        On a journey through Pakistan, Mr. B, an unflappable English gentleman, spots a young donkey struggling under a crushing load. Her fragile legs tremble, her eyes plead for help. In a heartbeat, he makes a decision that will change both their lives: he will rescue her – and take her home to London. But donkeys, as it turns out, don’t fly. And so begins an unforgettable adventure: man and donkey, side by side, trekking across the Middle East and into Europe, step by impro>bable step. Along the way, they discover not just the kindness of strangers, but the sheer, kaleidoscopic wonder of the world itself. A charming gift book about friendship, wanderlust, and the courage to follow one’s heart – perfect for travelers, dreamers, donkey-lovers, and anyone who cherishes the kind of story you carry with you for a lifetime.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 2025

        Translating Petrarch in early modern Britain

        Canzoniere and Triumphi, c. 1530–1650

        by Marie-Alice Belle, Riccardo Raimondo, Francesco Venturi

        Translating Petrarch in early modern Britain gathers twelve essays by international scholars focusing on the translation of Petrarch's vernacular verse (Canzoniere and Triumphi) into English, from the Tudor age to the mid-seventeenth century (and beyond). Approaching translation as an interpretive process, but also a mode of literary emulation and cultural engagement with Petrarch's prestigious precedent, the collection explores the complex and interconnected trajectories of both poetic works in English and Scottish literary milieux. While situating each translation in its distinct historical, material, and literary context, the essays trace the reception of Petrarch's works in early modern Britain through the combined processes of linguistic and metric innovation, literary imitation, musical adaptation and cultural and material 'domestication'. The collection sheds light on the origins and development of early modern English Petrarchism as part of wider transnational - and indeed, translational-European literary culture.

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