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1355613 results in Books

Page 1398 of 67781

The British political elite and Europe, 1959–1984
  • A higher loyalty
  • Robert Lister Nicholls
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book argues that the current problems over Britain’s membership of the European Union are largely as a result of the absence of quality debates during the 1959–84 period. The situation today is also attributed to members of the political elite subordinating the question of Britain’s future in Europe to short-term, pragmatic, party management or career considerations. A particular and original interpretation of Britain and Europe is advanced, aided by recently discovered evidence. This includes the methods used by the Conservative government to ensure it won the vote following the 1971 parliamentary debate on Britain’s proposed entry into the EEC. It also delves into the motives of the sixty-nine rebel Labour MPs that voted against their own party on EEC membership, and how the British public were largely misled by political leaders in respect of the true aims of the European project. This is a study of a seminal period in Britain’s relationship with Europe. Starting from the British government’s early attempts at EEC membership, and concluding with the year both major political parties accepted Britain’s place in Europe, this book examines decision-making in Britain. As such, it contributes to a greater understanding of British politics. It answers a number of key questions and casts light on the current toxic dilemma on the issue of Europe.

Hartly House, Calcutta
  • Phebe Gibbes
  • Edited by Michael J. Franklin
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.

AI in the Movies
  • Paula Murphy
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2024
  • AI in the Movies analyses film representations of artificial intelligence, from their first emergence in the 1950s up to 2020. These strong or general artificial intelligences take different forms: some are digital AIs, some robot AIs, some move between material and digital forms. Some are indistinguishable from humans, and some have no material existence at all.

    Analysis of these representations demonstrates filmmakers eroding the division between human and AI, by presenting character doubles, narrative parallels and eventually, identities in which the biological and artificial overlap and intersect in new hybrid forms.

    The book identifies the aspects of AI science that fascinate filmmakers and outlines the key themes and tropes in AI film, including parent-child relationships, the female robot, human-AI doubles, parallels and hybrids, and AI death and mortality.

Christianity in Western and Northern Europe
  • Edited by Kenneth R. Ross, Annemarie C. Mayer, Todd M. Johnson
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2024
  • Although the origins of Christianity lie in the Near East, Europe and Christianity have an exceptional relationship, since most Europeans perceive Christianity as a Western - more precisely, as a European - religion. The region has seen rapid social change in the twenty-first century, set off by factors including energy crisis and environmental awareness, poverty and exclusion, falling birthrates and increased migration, changing attitudes to sexuality, gender and family life, and challenges to Europe's idea of itself and place in the global order. Amidst all this flux, this volume focuses on one particular issue: the rapidly changing profile of the Christian faith that has shaped the life of the European continent for a millennium and more.

    At a time when patterns of Christian life and worship appear to be dying out, yet traces of new life are also appearing, this volume maps out the current reality of Christianity in Western and Northern Europe with all its questions and uncertainties.

Ultras
  • The passion and performance of contemporary football fandom
  • Mark Doidge, Radosław Kossakowski, Svenja Mintert
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Since their emergence in Italy in 1968, ultras have become the most dominant style of football fandom in the world. Since its inception, the ultras style has spread from Southern Europe across North Africa to Northern and Eastern Europe, South East Asia and North America. This book argues that ultras are an important site of enquiry into understanding contemporary society. They are a passionate, politically engaged collective that base their identity around a form of consumption (football) that links to modern notions of identity like masculinity and nationalism. The book seeks to make a clear theoretical shift in studies of football fandom. While it sits in the body of literature focused on political mobilisations, social movements and hooliganism, it emphasises more fundamental sociological questions about group formation, notably collective performances and emotional relationships. By focusing on the common form of expression through the performance of choreographies, chants and sustained support throughout the match, this book shows how members build an emotional attachment to their club that valorises the colours and symbols of that team, whilst mobilising members against opponents. It does this through recognising the importance of gender, politics and violence to the expression of ultras fandom, as well as how this is presented on social media and within the stadium through specular choreographies.

Shakespeare’s histories and counter-histories
  • Edited by Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, Stephen Longstaffe
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • In the Renaissance, the archetype for history was the classical muse Clio, a much-painted figure in an era when the 'history painting' was one of the predominant genres in European visual art. One Renaissance dramatist and poet who never made reference to Clio was William Shakespeare. This book is about official and unofficial versions of the past, histories and counter-histories, in Shakespeare's works and their subsequent appropriations. It builds on a long period in which those of us working in literary and theatre studies have developed an awareness of the extent to which conventional recreations of the past are mediated through the fictionalising structures of narrative. The book explores how the history plays construct counter-historical representations of the dead. It argues that the 'dislocutionary' threat of grief and the performance of the suffering body is a version of the kind of spectator/spectre relationship drawn in any ritualised encounter with the cult of the ancestor. The book combines four historicist readings which explore counter-histories in the early modern period. It examines the relationship between Shakespeare's history plays and alternative dynastic histories. The book also explores questions of history and identity, particularly as they can be configured through performance. It challenges the view that women become progressively marginalised across the histories by arguing that Shakespeare's warlike women enact a power onstage which forces us to rethink official, patriarchal history.

Sickness, medical welfare and the English poor, 1750–1834
  • Steven King
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book explores the experiences of the sick poor between the 1750s and through the so-called crisis of the Old Poor Law ending in the 1830s. It provides a comprehensive and colourful overview of the nature, scale and negotiation of medical welfare. At its core stand the words and lives of the poor themselves, reconstructed in painstaking detail to show that medical welfare became a totemic issue for parochial authorities by the 1830s. The book suggests that the Old Poor Law confronted a rising tide of sickness by the early 19 century. While there are spectacular instances of parsimony and neglect in response to rising need, in most places and at most times, parish officers seem to have felt moral obligations to the sick. Indeed, we might construct their responses as considerate and generous. To some extent this reflected Christian paternalism but also other factors such as a growing sense that illness, even illness among the poor, was and should be remediable and a shared territory of negotiation between paupers, advocates and officials. The result was a canvas of medical welfare with extraordinary depth. By the 1820s, more of the ill-health of ordinary people was captured by the poor law and being doctored or sojourning in an institution became part of pauper and parochial expectation. These trends are brought to vivid life in the words of the poor and their advocates, such that the book genuinely offers a re-interpretation of the Old Poor Law from the bottom up.

Power Over Progress
  • How Politics Shape Development Finance in Africa
  • Keyi Tang
  • Published online:
    13 March 2026
    Print publication:
    26 March 2026
  • Why do some communities have access to roads and schools while others go without for decades? Keyi Tang's Power Over Progress investigates how external accountability and domestic political competition shape the allocation of fund in development finance across 48 African countries. While traditional donors attempt to curb favoritism through stricter conditions, their efforts are frequently undercut by domestic political incentives. Tang reveals how development finance from China, the World Bank, and Western donors often favors political power over need. She draws on newly geocoded data of subnational electoral results and development projects, alongside case studies of Zambia, Ethiopia, and Ghana, to explain how heightened political competition can intensify favoritism, diverting funds to strongholds or swing regions rather than the most underserved areas. Offering convincing data-driven analysis, Tang challenges conventional wisdom with crucial insights for rethinking development partnerships in the Global South.

Ethnography for a data-saturated world
  • Edited by Hannah Knox, Dawn Nafus
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Data is not just the stuff of social scientific method; it is the stuff of everyday life. The presence of digital data in an ever widening range of human relationships profoundly unsettles notions of expertise for both ethnographers and data scientists alike. This collection situates digital data in broader knowledge-production practices. It asks about the kinds of social worlds that data scientists are creating as the profession coalesces, and looks at the contemporary possibilities available to both ethnographers and their participants for knowing, formatting and intervening in the world. It shows what digital data is doing to the empirical methods that sustain claims to expertise, with a particular focus on implications for ethnography.The contributors offer empirically grounded accounts of the cultures, infrastructures and epistemologies of data production, analysis and use. They examine the professionalisation of data science in a variety of national and transnational contexts. They look closely at specific data practices like archiving of environmental data, or claims-making about how software is produced. They also offer a glimpse into the new methodological and pedagogical possibilities for teaching and doing ethnography in a data-saturated world.

Gunslinging justice
  • The American culture of gun violence in Westerns and the law
  • Justin A. Joyce
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Gunslinging justice explores American Westerns in a variety of media alongside the historical development of the American legal system to argue that Western shootouts are less overtly ‘anti-law’ than has been previously assumed. While the genre’s climactic shootouts may look like a putatively masculine opposition to the codified and mediated American legal system, this gun violence is actually enshrined in the development of American laws regulating self-defense and gun possession. The climactic gun violence and stylized revenge drama of seminal Western texts then, seeks not to oppose ‘the law,’ but rather to expand its scope. The book’s interdisciplinary approach, which seeks to historicize and contextualize the iconographic tropes of the genre and its associated discourses across varied cultural and social forms, breaks from psychoanalytic perspectives which have long dominated studies of film and legal discourse and occluded historical contingencies integral to the work cultural forms do in the world. From nineteenth-century texts like Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Reconstruction-era dime novels, through early twentieth-century works like The Virginian, to classic Westerns and more recent films like Unforgiven (1992), this book looks to the intersections between American law and various media that have enabled a cultural, social, and political acceptance of defensive gun violence that is still with us today.

Death in modern theatre
  • Stages of mortality
  • Adrian Curtin
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book provides an ambitious overview of how topics related to death and dying are explored in modern Western theatre, covering a time-span of over a hundred years and engaging multiple cultural contexts. In a series of micronarratives beginning in the late nineteenth 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. Chapters focus on the ambiguous evocation of death in symbolist theatre; fantastical representations of death in plays about the First World War; satires of death denial in absurdist drama; ‘theatres of catastrophe’ after Auschwitz and Hiroshima; and drama about dying in the early twenty-first century. The book includes a mix of well-known and lesser-known plays and performance pieces from an international range of dramatists and theatre-makers. It offers original interpretations through close reading and performance analysis, informed by scholarship from diverse fields, including history, sociology and philosophy.It investigates the opportunities theatre affords to reflect on the end of life in a compelling and socially meaningful fashion. Written in a lively, accessible style, this book will be of interest to scholars of modern Western theatre and those interested in death studies.

The Bourdieu paradigm
  • The origins and evolution of an intellectual social project
  • Derek Robbins
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • In two parts, the book examines, first, the attempts of three thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century to reconcile, in different socio-cultural contexts, the legacy of idealist philosophy with the claims of empirical social science, and, secondly, the trajectory of Bourdieu’s career in France from philosophy student to sociological researcher to political activist. It traces a progression from thought to action, but an emphasis on action informed by thought. It poses the question whether Bourdieu’s attempted integration of intellectualism and empiricism correlated with his particular socio-historical situation or whether it offers a global paradigm for advancing inter-cultural understanding. The book is of interest in confronting the question whether socio-political organization is best understood by social scientists or by participants in society, by experts or by the populace. It will stimulate general consideration of the relevance of a sociological perspective in everyday life and how much that perspective should be dependent on inherited concepts. Part I analyses the work of Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Part II that of Pierre Bourdieu. The book is methodologically meticulous in situating these works socio-historically. It provides an introduction to some ideas in social philosophy and shows how these ideas became instrumental in generating a theory of practice. The book is aimed at post-graduate students and staff in all disciplines in the Humanities, and Human and Social sciences, but, more generally, it should interest all academics concerned about the contemporary social function of intellectuals.

Ballads and songs of Peterloo
  • Alison Morgan
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book is the first edited collection of poems and songs written in the immediate aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. Of the seventy or so poems included in the anthology, many were published as broadsides and almost half were published in radical periodicals, such as the moderate Examiner and the ultra-radical Medusa with many from the Manchester Observer. Although I have provided headnotes and footnotes to support the reading of the texts, I intend them to stand alone, conveying as much of the original publication as possible, in order not to dilute the authenticity.Following an introduction outlining the events before, during and after the massacre as well as background information on the radical press and broadside ballad, the poems are grouped into six sections according to theme, rather than chronologically or by publication because I want the reader to note the similarity between so many of the poems. Grouped in this manner, one cannot avoid the voices echoing down the centuries, speaking to us of the horrors of the time in texts that can no longer be ignored. Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy is included as an appendix in acknowledgement of its continuing significance to the representation of Peterloo.This book is primarily aimed at students and lecturers of Romanticism and social history. With the bicentenary of the massacre in 2019 and Mike Leigh’s forthcoming film, I envisage the potential for a wider readership of people interested in learning more about one of the most seminal events in English history.

The English Language on Trial
  • Witnessing Disputed Meanings in American Courts
  • John A. Hawkins
  • Published online:
    13 March 2026
    Print publication:
    26 March 2026
  • Many lawsuits arise over disagreements about language and about the meanings of everyday words, phrases, and sentences. This book draws on over fifty cases involving disputed meanings in the American legal system where the author served as an expert witness or consultant, to explore the interaction between language and law. Stepping back from the legal specifics and their outcomes, it analyzes the disputes from the perspective of the language sciences, especially semantics and pragmatics, and language comprehension. It seeks to understand why, and in what areas of English grammar, lexis, and usage, they have arisen among speakers who do not normally miscommunicate and disagree like this. The cases involve contracts, patents, advertising, trademarks, libel, and defamation, and descriptive insights and methods from the language sciences are applied to each case to make explicit the meanings that speakers would normally assign to English.

Beyond Realism
  • Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice
  • Robert Singer
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2024
  • Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice is the first major critical study of international naturalist cinema.

    Often mistaken for realist film, international naturalist cinema has a unique cultural and critical history. From its earliest representation in silent films such as Walsh's 'Regeneration' (1915), and Eisenstein's 'Stachka/Strike' (1925), to recent productions such as Chukwu's 'Clemency' (2019), and Aronofsky's 'The Whale' (2022), the naturalist film narrative encompasses the whole of film history, traversing language, movement, and genre. The naturalist film is predicated on two foundational, intersecting paradigms that configure as one ideological system in an overarching scientific and social experimental narrative. Either the scientific or social paradigm may be dominant in the film narrative or they may simply co-exist, but a naturalist film reveals both templates and, most significantly, suggests an implicit cinematic anthropology that renders the body as an observed spectacle.

Defending Democracy
  • Citizenship as a Vocation
  • David M. Ricci
  • Published online:
    13 March 2026
    Print publication:
    26 March 2026
  • To defeat demagogues like Donald Trump, citizens must vote to defend democracy, otherwise it will not be there to defend them. Taking off from Max Weber's 'Vocation Lectures,' David Ricci's Defending Democracy therefore explores the idea of 'citizenship as a vocation,' which is a commitment to defending democracy by supporting leaders who will govern according to the Declaration of Independence's self-evident truths rather than animosity and polarizations. He examines the condition of democracy in states where it is endangered and where modern technology – television, internet, smart phones, social media, etc. – provides so much information and disinformation that we sometimes lack the common sense to reject candidates who have no business in politics. Arguing for the practice of good citizenship, Ricci observes that as citizens we have become the rulers of modern societies, in which case we have to fulfill our democratic responsibilities if society is to prosper.

The Existential drinker
  • Steven Earnshaw
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Drinking to excess has been a striking problem for industrial and post-industrial societies – who is responsible when a ‘free’ individual opts for a slow suicide? The causes of such drinking have often been blamed on heredity, moral weakness, ‘disease’ (addiction), hedonism, and Romantic illusion. Yet there is another reason which may be more fundamental and which has been overlooked or dismissed, and it is that the drinker may act with sincere philosophical intent. The Existential Drinker looks at the convergence of a new kind of excessive, habitual drinking, beginning in the nineteenth century, and a new way of thinking about the self which in the twentieth century comes to be labelled ‘Existential’. A substantial introduction covers questions of self, will, consciousness, authenticity, and ethics in relation to drinking, while introducing aspects of Existential thought pertinent to the discussion. The Existential-drinker canon is anchored in Jack London’s ‘alcoholic memoir’ John Barleycorn (1913), where London claims he can get at the truth of existence only through the insights afforded by excessive and repeated alcohol use. The book then covers drinker-texts such as Jean Rhys’s interwar novels, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend and John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, along with less well-known works such as Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow–Petushki, and A. L. Kennedy’s Paradise. The book will appeal to anybody with an interest in drinking and literature, as well as those with more specialised concerns in drinking studies, Existentialism, twentieth-century literature, and medical humanities.

The genesis of international mass migration
  • The British case, 1750–1900
  • Eric Richards
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Very large numbers of people began to depart the British Isles for the New Worlds after about 1770. This was a pioneering movement, a rehearsal for modern international migration. This book contends that emigration history is not seamless, that it contains large shifts over time and place, and that the modern scale and velocity of mobility have very particular historical roots. The Isle of Man is an ideal starting point in the quest for the engines and mechanisms of emigration, and a particular version of the widespread surge in British emigration in the 1820s. West Sussex was much closer to the centres of the expansionary economy in the new age. North America was the earliest and the greatest theatre of oceanic emigration in which the methods of mass migration were pioneered. Landlocked Shropshire experienced some of the earliest phases of British industrialisation, notably in the Ironbridge/Coalbrookdale district, deep inland on the River Severn. The turmoil in the agrarian and demographic foundations of life reached across the British archipelago. In West Cork and North Tipperary, there was clear evidence of the great structural changes that shook the foundations of these rural societies. The book also discusses the sequences and effects of migration in Wales, Swaledale, Cornwall, Kent, London, and Scottish Highlands. It also deals with Ireland's place in the more generic context of the origins of migration from the British Isles. The common historical understanding is that the pre-industrial population of the British Isles had been held back by Malthusian checks.

Film editing: history, theory and practice
  • Looking at the invisible
  • Don Fairservice
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • One of the most surprising facts about film-editing technology is that until about 1916 there was none. This book discusses filmed fiction as it has evolved in America and Europe. It explores the history of filmmaking in a way that it is not usually done, looking in detail at films specifically to discover the way that they construct meaning rather than evaluating them in the context of the cultural circumstances of their production and reception. The book examines the primitive and unsophisticated early structuring methods of silent films to discover what steps brought film language to its most recognisable form and to explore any other avenues of experiment that might have suggested themselves on the way. It also examines such methods to discover why most films continue to be shot and structured in the ways that they are. The book evaluates new approaches that challenge convention, explaining how current practice accommodates to those conventional editing forms that have been historically determined. It is instructive to consider the structure and editing of The Great Train Robbery because in some ways it also defines a point from which filmmaking was restarted. A film of particular significance which constructs a narrative by carrying action across different scenes to produce an unbroken continuity is Rescued by Rover. The films examined bend the form to provide explorations of human emotions. Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves has a painful bleakness within it that seems to sit somewhat ill with its faith-confirming conclusion.

Shakespeare for the wiser sort
  • Solving Shakespeare’s riddles in The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, King John, 1–2 Henry IV, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth and Cymberline
  • Steve Sohmer
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Knowing William Shakespeare better, we are better equipped to know his plays. Better knowing his plays brings us closer to knowing him. This book suggests that Shakespeare wrote not only for the mass audience, but simultaneously for that stratum of cognoscenti whom Gabriel Harvey dubbed 'the wiser sort.' It identifies many passages in the plays which Shakespeare resolves famous cruces which scholars have never been able to unravel, and casts new light on Shakespeare's mind and method. Shakespeare wrote into Julius Caesar more than one passage intelligible only to that handful of the wiser sort who had read Plutarch and knew their Suetonius. Into Macbeth Shakespeare injected a detail accessible only to the few intrepid souls brave or reckless enough to have cast the horoscope of King James I. We find a poem in Hamlet, where the prince invites his love and bandies matters of cosmology which were burning issues (literally) throughout Shakespeare's lifetime. While Julius Caesar's old Julian calendar prevailed in England its rival, the scientifically correct Gregorian reformed calendar, dominated most of Europe. Shakespeare suffused his plays with references to calendrical anomalies, as seen in Othello. By relating Shakespeare's texts, the Renaissance calendars and the liturgy, the book produces a lexicon apt for parsing the time-riddles in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare handled religious subjects, examined and interrogated the dogmas of the received religions, and parodied the Crucifixion by exploiting Holinshed's account of the persecution and assassination of York.

Page 1398 of 67781