Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2009

        Consumerism and the Co-operative movement in modern British history

        Taking stock

        by Lawrence Black, Nicole Robertson

        Despite the abundance and quality of recent historical writing on consumerism, it cannot be said that the modern Co-operative movement (Co-op) has been well served. It has also been by-passed in studies that locate Britons' identity in their consumption. The reasons for this can be found in the widely perceived decline of the Co-op since the 1950s, but also in various historiographical agendas that have resulted in its relative invisibility in modern British history. This book, by demonstrating the variety of broader issues that can be addressed through the Co-op and the vibrancy of new historical research into consumption, seeks to remedy this. Taking stock, both of the Co-op in a broader context and of new approaches to the history of consumption, combines the work of leading authorities on the Co-op with recent scholarly research. It explores the Co-op's distinctive interface between everyday issues and grander idealistic concerns. The chapters intersect to examine a broad range of themes, notably: the politics of consumerism including consumer protection, ethical and fair trading and alternatives to corporate commerce; design and advertising; the Co-op's relations with other components of the labour movement; and its ideology, image and memory. The collection looks at the Co-operative movement locally (through specific case studies), nationally and also in comparison to the European movement. This collection will appeal to academics, researchers, teachers and students of the economic, cultural and political history of twentieth-century Britain. It will also be of interest to academics and students of business studies, and co-operative members themselves. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2024

        Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas

        by Linda Levy Peck, Adrianna E. Bakos

        Exile, its pain and possibility, is the starting point of this book. Women's experience of exile was often different from that of men, yet it has not received the important attention it deserves. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas addresses that lacuna through a wide-ranging geographical, chronological, social and cultural approach. Whether powerful, well-to-do or impoverished, exiled by force or choice, every woman faced the question of how to reconstruct her life in a new place. These essays focus on women's agency despite the pressures created by political, economic and social dislocation. Collectively, they demonstrate how these women from different countries, continents and status groups not only survived but also in many cases thrived. This analysis of early modern women's experiences not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women.

      • Trusted Partner
        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2008

        The family tree detective

        Tracing your ancestors in England and Wales

        by Colin Rogers

        The long-awaited fourth edition of this best-selling manual continues to offer up-to-date guidance both to newcomers and to the more experienced, on how to make best use of the labyrinth of genealogical sources in England and Wales. It takes into account recent, and even some future, changes to the civil registration system, and incorporates many of the vast sources newly available on the internet. There is also a substantial bibliography for those who discover that their ancestors migrated from other countries. New appendices provide research into underregistration of birth and death, and hitherto unpublished details from the 1915 and 1939 National Registers. The family tree detective remains an indispensible source of information on how to locate births, marriages and deaths, and alternative strategies if those searches fail. Dr Colin D. Rogers is a Fellow of the Society of Genealogists, a member of AGRA (the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives), and was for thirty years the Hon. General Editor of the Lancashire Parish Register Society. He runs a consultancy helping banks and solicitors to identify and locate beneficiaries. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2023

        Forensic cultures in modern Europe

        by Willemijn Ruberg, Lara Bergers, Pauline Dirven, Sara Serrano Martínez

        This edited volume examines the performance and role of scientific experts in modern European courts of law and police investigations. It discusses cases from criminal, civil and international law to parse the impact of forensic evidence and expertise in different European countries. The contributors show how modern forensic science and technology are inextricably entangled with political ideology, gender norms and changes in the law and legal systems. Discussing fascinating case studies, they highlight how the ideology of authoritarian and liberal regimes has affected the practical enactment of forensic expertise. They also emphasise the influence of images of masculinity and femininity on the performance of experts and on their assessment of evidence, victims and perpetrators. This book is an important contribution to our knowledge of modern European forensic practices.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2021

        Sara Paretsky

        Detective fiction as trauma literature

        by Cynthia Hamilton

        Sara Paretsky is known for her influential V.I. Warshawski series, which transformed the masculine hard-boiled detective formula into a vehicle for feminist values. But Paretsky does more than this. Her novels also illustrate the extent to which detective fiction acts as a literature of trauma, allowing Paretsky to address the politics of agency in ways that go beyond the personal, for trauma always has a social and a political dimension. Paretsky's work also exploits the way detective fiction mirrors the writing of history. Here, Paretsky uses the form to expose the partiality of historical accounts - whether they be personal, institutional, or national - that authorise 'forgetting' of a particularly insidious kind. Significantly, all these issues are explored within the framework of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel. As a result, Paretsky's achievement forces us to acknowledge the deeply subversive potential of detective fiction.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA

        Missi Moppel - Detective for all Cases (2). The Floating Teapot and other Weird Wonders

        by Andreas H. Schmachtl

        The master detective is after a cunning thief who steals colourful, random objects like Leonardo da Vinci’s paintbrush or antique sugar bowls. During a visit to Grandpa Pots, she uncovers the secret of Ghost Island and solves the puzzle of the floating teapot in Mr Goldrand’s junk shop. Only the nasty blackmailing letters from the mysterious “Magpie” present her with a seemingly insoluble mystery. Someone is testing the powers of the great investigator to their very limit…Will she be able to crack even this case? 15 original detective stories told in masterly fashion by the Spiegel bestselling author Andreas H. Schmachtl.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2022

        The early modern English sonnet

        Ever in motion

        by Laetitia Sansonetti, Rémi Vuillemin, Enrica Zanin

        This volume questions and qualifies commonly accepted assumptions about the early modern English sonnet: that it was a strictly codified form, most often organised in sequences, which only emerged at the very end of the sixteenth century and declined as fast as it had bloomed, and that minor poets merely participated in the sonnet fashion by replicating established conventions. Drawing from book history and relying on close reading and textual criticism, this collection offers a more nuanced account of the history of the sonnet. It discusses how sonnets were written, published and received in England as compared to mainland Europe, and explores the works of major (Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser) and minor (Barnes, Harvey) poets alike. Reflecting on current editorial practices, it also provides the first modern edition of an early seventeenth-century Elizabethan miscellany including sonnets presumably by Sidney and Spenser.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 2023

        Poison on the early modern English stage

        Plants, paints and potions

        by Lisa Hopkins, Bill Angus

        Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans' relationship to the environment.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2018

        The social world of early modern Westminster

        Abbey, court and community, 1525–1640

        by Peter Lake, J. F. Merritt, Anthony Milton, Jason Peacey, Alexandra Gajda

        Early modern Westminster is familiar as the location of the Royal Court at Whitehall, parliament, the law courts and the emerging West End, yet it has never been studied in its own right. This book is the first study to provide an integrated picture of the town during this crucial period in its history. It reveals the often problematic relations between the diverse groups of people who constituted local society - the Court, the aristocracy, the Abbey, the middling sort and the poor - and the competing visions of Westminster's identity which their presence engendered. Different chapters study the impact of the Reformation and of the building of Whitehall Palace; the problem of poverty and the politics of communal responsibility; the character and significance of the increasing gentry presence in the town; the nature and ideology of local governing elites; the struggles over the emerging townscape; and the changing religious culture of the area, including the problematic role of the post-Reformation Abbey. A comprehensive study of one of the most populous and influential towns in early modern England, this book covers the entire period from the Reformation to the Civil War. It will make fascinating reading for historians of English society, literature and religion in this period, as well as enthusiasts of London's rich history.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 2024

        Instead of modernity

        The Western canon and the incorporation of the Hispanic (c. 1850–75)

        by Andrew Ginger

        Instead of modernity goes to the very heart of comparative cultural study: the question of what happens when intimate, dynamic connections are made over place and time, what it is to feel at home amid the lavish diversity of culture. This ambitious interdisciplinary book reconsiders foundational figures of the modern western canon, from Darwin to Cameron, Baudelaire to Whistler. It weaves together brain images from France, preserved insects from the Americas, glass in London, poetry from Argentina, paintings from Spain. Flaubert, Whitman, and Nietzsche find themselves with Hostos from Puerto Rico and Gorriti from Argentina. The book ranges over theoretical fields: trauma and sexuality studies, theories of visuality, the philosophy of sacrifice and intimacy, the thought of Wittgenstein. Instead of modernity is an adventure in the practice of comparative writing: resonances join suggestively over place and time, the textures of words, phrases and images combine to form moods.

      • Trusted Partner
        Medicine
        June 2012

        Poison, detection and the Victorian imagination

        by Ian Burney, Bertrand Taithe, Roger Cooter, Carolyn Steedman

        This fascinating book looks at the phenomenon of murder and poisoning in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the case of William Palmer, a medical doctor who in 1856 was convicted of murder by poisoning, it examines how his case baffled toxicologists, doctors, detectives and judges. The investigation commences with an overview of the practice of toxicology in the Victorian era, and goes on to explore the demands imposed by legal testimony on scientific work to convict criminals. In addressing Palmer's trial, Burney focuses on the testimony of Alfred Swaine Taylor, a leading expert on poisons, and integrates the medical, legal and literary evidence to make sense of the trial itself and the sinister place of poison in wider Victorian society. Ian Burney has produced an exemplary work of cultural history, mixing a keen understanding of the contemporary social and cultural landscape with the scientific and medical history of the period. ;

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter