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1355613 results in Books

Page 1399 of 67781

Acts and apparitions
  • Discourses on the real in performance practice and theory, 1990–2010
  • Liz Tomlin
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book examines how new performance practices from the 1990s to the present day have been driven by questions of the real and the ensuing political implications of the concept's rapidly disintegrating authority. The first part of the book addresses the existing poststructuralist narrative of radicalism that currently dominates contemporary performance theory, and seeks to deconstruct its conclusions. It first traces the artistic and philosophical developments that laid the ground for the sustained twentieth-century interrogations of theatrical representations of the real. It examines the emergence of the discursive act which aligned the narrative of radicalism exclusively with such interrogations. The book also examines how key strands of Derrida's poststructuralist critique have been applied to performance practice to strengthen the ideological binary opposition between 'dramatic' representations of the real and 'postdramatic' deconstructions of representational practice. The second part of the book embarks on an ideological examination of a wide spectrum of performance models that share an engagement with the problematics of representation and the real. It directs this investigation specifically towards an analysis of the representations of 'real' people in performances which adopt verbatim methodologies drawn from the documentary theatre tradition. The book continues to explore performance environments that break down the dichotomy of performer/spectator and seeks to replace mediated representations with experiential realities.

The Ever Green
  • Allan Ramsay
  • Edited by Murray Pittock, James J. Caudle
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2024
  • Alongside the other volumes in this new Collected Works, The Ever Green will transform academic and popular understanding of this pivotal but, until now, largely under-researched literary figure. It offers the first full and consistent edition of this text, based on the Bannatyne and other MSS (including an allegedly lost printed text of Alexander Montgomerie's 'Cherrie and the Slae'). This volume contains the entire text of the 1724 two volume collection (including the prefatory material, also reproduced-but without MS variants- in Prose), an introduction explaining Ramsay's relationship with the material, how he came to be acquainted with it, and an explanation of his strategy to both present and co-create a Scottish literary tradition from before the Union of the Crowns in 1603. It also includes comprehensive notes on the text as Ramsay presents it.

The power of pragmatism
  • Knowledge production and social inquiry
  • Edited by Jane Wills, Robert W. Lake
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book makes the case for a pragmatist approach to the practice of social inquiry and knowledge production. Through diverse examples from multiple disciplines, contributors explore the power of pragmatism to inform a practice of inquiry that is democratic, community-centred, problem-oriented and experimental. Drawing from both classical and neo-pragmatist perspectives, the book advances a pragmatist sensibility in which truth and knowledge are contingent rather than universal, made rather than found, provisional rather than dogmatic, subject to continuous experimentation rather than ultimate proof and verified in their application in action rather than in the accuracy of their representation of an antecedent reality. The power of pragmatism offers a path forward for mobilizing the practice of inquiry in social research, exploring the implications of pragmatism for the process of knowledge production.

Derek Jarman
  • Rowland Wymer
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman as a true 'Renaissance Man' in the colloquial sense of the word, as well as having a strong and permanent interest in the art, thought, and literature of the Renaissance. Although the tone of Jarman's films is frequently melancholic, the threat which death poses for desire is sometimes modulated by an apparent desire for death. He was never comfortable with the label 'gay', regarding it as both too stable and too self-satisfied, too concerned to present a 'positive' image. He preferred the more fluid and mobile term 'queer'. Jarman's first feature-length film was remarkable in many ways and in at least three respects was virtually unique at the time for a commercially distributed picture. In 1977, the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, punk had spread beyond a handful of clubs and bands in London and New York and was starting to look like a complete new youth culture in the making. From 1978 to 1985, whatever else he was engaged in, Jarman's life was dominated by his desire to make a film about the life of the Italian painter Caravaggio. Wittgenstein had been a completely unexpected commission which Jarman, despite his failing health, had rapidly and brilliantly converted into 'A Derek Jarman Film' through his usual intense personal identification with his subject. Blue was one of a cluster of films addressing the issue of AIDS which were released in the early 1990s.

Five Irish women
  • The second republic, 1960–2016
  • Emer Nolan
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book is comprised of five interlinked portraits of exceptional Irish women from various fields – literature, journalism, music, politics – who have achieved outstanding reputations since the 1960s: Edna O’Brien, Sinéad O’Connor, Nuala O’Faolain, Bernadette McAliskey, and Anne Enright. Several of these could claim to be among the best-known Irish people of their day in the world. This book looks at their achievements – works of art in some cases, but also life-writing, interviews and speeches – and at their reception in Ireland and elsewhere, shedding light on some of their shared preoccupations, including equality, sexuality and nationalism. The main focus is on the ways in which these distinguished women make sense of their formative experiences as Irish people and how they in turn have been understood as representative modern figures in Ireland.

Testimony, Faith and Religion in Early Modern English Literature
  • Making Belief
  • Joseph Ashmore
  • Published online:
    13 March 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • The Protestant Reformation placed intense scrutiny on religious belief in early modern England. But how did this belief work? What resources did it draw on? How did such a faith differ from other kinds of assent? In this interdisciplinary study, Joseph Ashmore argues that early modern literature became a key site for handling these questions. Focusing on late sixteenth- to mid seventeenth-century writing, he shows how Protestant authors turned to contemporary legal discourses to represent and analyse faith. Techniques for evaluating courtroom testimony became a powerful tool for investigating what was distinctive about religious belief. Examining the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, the philosophy and prose fiction of Francis Bacon, and the poems of Henry Vaughan, Ashmore shows how legal notions of evidence shaped discussions of faith across a number of different genres, and within a variety of social and political contexts.

The Central Asian Revolt of 1916
  • A collapsing empire in the age of war and revolution
  • Edited by Aminat Chokobaeva, Cloé Drieu
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • The 1916 revolt was a key event in the history of Central Asia, and of the Russian Empire in the First World War. This volume is the first comprehensive reassessment of its causes, course and consequences in English for over sixty years. It draws together a new generation of leading historians from North America, Japan, Europe, Russia and Central Asia, working with Russian archival sources, oral narratives, poetry and song in Kazakh and Kyrgyz. These illuminate in unprecedented detail the origins and causes of the revolt, and the immense human suffering which it entailed. They also situate the revolt in a global perspective as part of a chain of rebellions and disturbances that shook the world’s empires, as they crumbled under the pressures of total war.

Medical societies and scientific culture in 19-century Belgium
  • Joris Vandendriessche
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • When physicians gathered in medical societies to present, share, discuss, evaluate, publish and even celebrate their medical studies, they engaged in a community with specific practices, rules and manners. This book explores the formal and subtle ways in which such norms were set. It analyzes societies’ scientific publishing procedures, traditions of debate, (inter)national networks, and social and commemorative activities, uncovering a rich scientific culture in 19-century medicine. The book focuses on medical societies in Belgium, a young nation-state eager to take its place among the European nations, in which the constitutional freedoms of press and association offered new possibilities for organized sociability. It situates medical societies within an emerging civil culture in Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp, and shows how physicians’ ambitions to publish medical journals and organize scientific debates corresponded well to the values of social engagement, polite debate and a free press of the urban bourgeoisie. As such, this book offers new insights into the close relation between science, sociability and citizenship. The development of a professional academic community in the second half of the century, which centered around the laboratory, went hand in hand with a set of new scientific codes, mirroring to a lesser extent the customs of civil society. It meant the end of a tradition of ‘civil’ science, forcing medical societies to reposition themselves in the scientific landscape, and take up new functions as mediators between specialties and as centers of postgraduate education.

The never-ending Brief Encounter
  • Brian McFarlane
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Brian McFarlane’s The never-ending Brief Encounter is above all a book intended for those who have seen and never forgotten the famous 1945 film in which two decent, middle-class people meet by chance, unexpectedly fall in love, but in the end acknowledge the claims of others. The book grew out of an article, the writing of which revealed that there was so much more to the after-life of the film than the author had realised. This book examines David Lean’s film in sufficient detail to bring its key situations vividly to life, and to give an understanding of how it reworks Nöel Coward’s somewhat static one-act play to profound effect. It also examines the ways in which the ‘comic relief’ is made to work towards the poignant ending. However, the main purpose of the book is to consider the remarkable after-life the film has given rise to. The most specific examples of this phenomenon are, of course, the appalling film remake with its miscast stars, and the later stage versions – both bearing the original title and attracting well-known players and positive audience and critical response – and an opera! As well, there are films and TV series which have ‘quoted’ the film (usually via black-and-white inserts) as commentary on the action of the film or series. There are many other films that, without direct quotation, seem clearly to be echoing their famous predecessor; for example, in the haunting visual quality of a deserted railway platform.

Political cartoons and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
  • Ilan Danjoux
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Cartoon analysis is the study of a non-elite communication. Ilan Danjoux examined over 1200 Israeli and Palestinian editorial cartoons to explore whether changes in their content anticipated the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in October of 2000. Political Cartoons and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict provide readers an engaging introduction to cartoon analysis and a novel insight into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Conflict researchers benefit from paying attention to popular fears because they influence the policies of career-minded politicians and autocratic leaders seeking to placate domestic dissent. The book begins by outlining the rationale for this research project, while explaining the choice of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a case study. It identifies the challenges of cartoon research and outlines the methodological approaches available to researchers. After laying the framework for this study, the book details the collapse of the Israel-Palestinian Peace Process into full-scale violence by October 2000. A description of Israeli and Palestinian media production follows. The book demonstrates the cartoon's ability to chronicle changes in conflict. Not only did both Israeli and Palestinian cartoons change their focus with the outbreak of violence, the mood of cartoons also shifted. It also shows that Israeli and Palestinian cartoons also changed the way that each portrayed the other. Changes in both Israeli and Palestinian cartoons corresponded with, but did not precede, the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

Ekphrastic encounters
  • New interdisciplinary essays on literature and the visual arts
  • David Kennedy, Richard Meek
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of ekphrasis: the verbal representation of visual art. In the past twenty-five years numerous books and articles have appeared covering different aspects of ekphrasis, with scholars arguing that it is a fundamental means by which literary artists have explored the nature of aesthetic experience. However, many critics continue to rely upon the traditional conception of ekphrasis as a form of paragone (competition) between word and image. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to complicate this critical paradigm, and proposes a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between visual and textual cultures. This critical and theoretical shift demands a new form of ekphrastic poetics, which is less concerned with representational and institutional struggles, and more concerned with ideas of ethics, affect, and intersubjectivity. The book brings together leading scholars working in the fields of literary studies, art history, modern languages, and comparative literature, and offers a fresh exploration of ekphrastic texts from the Renaissance to the present day. The chapters in the book are critically and methodologically wide-ranging; yet they share an interest in challenging the paragonal model of ekphrasis that has been prevalent since the early 1990s, and establishing a new set of theoretical frameworks for exploring the ekphrastic encounter.

This is your hour
  • Christian intellectuals in Britain and the crisis of Europe, 1937–1949
  • John Carter Wood
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • From the late 1930s to the end of the 1940s a high-profile group of mostly Christian intellectuals met to discuss the related crises of totalitarianism, war and cultural decline in the democratic West. Brought together by the leading missionary and ecumenist Joseph H. Oldham, the group included prominent writers, thinkers, activists and scholars, among them T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, Karl Mannheim, John Baillie, Alec Vidler, H. A. Hodges, Christopher Dawson, Kathleen Bliss and Michael Polanyi. Among its wider circle of correspondents and supporters were the era’s most influential Christian authors and thinkers – such as Reinhold Niebuhr, William Temple, Jacques Maritain, Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis. The participants in the Oldham group saw faith as a uniquely powerful resource for cultural and social renewal, and they sought to integrate diverse Christian viewpoints, reconcile faith and secular society, and reshape post-war British society. In an ‘age of extremes’ they pursued a variety of ‘middle ways’ with regard to topics such as the social relevance of faith, the relationship of Christianity to secularity, the legitimacy of capitalism, the role of State planning, the value of patriotism, the meaning of freedom and the value of egalitarianism.

Rebel angels
  • Space and sovereignty in Anglo-Saxon England
  • Jill Fitzgerald
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Over six hundred years before John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Anglo-Saxon authors told their own version of the fall of the angels. This book brings together various cultural moments, literary genres, and relevant comparanda to recover that story, from the legal and social world to the realm of popular spiritual ritual and belief. The story of the fall of the angels in Anglo-Saxon England is the story of a successfully transmitted exegetical teaching turned rich literary tradition that can be traced through a diverse range of genres: sermons, saints’ lives, royal charters, riddles, as well as devotional and biblical poetry, each genre offering a distinct window into the ancient myth’s place within the Anglo-Saxon literary and cultural imagination.

Understanding Chinese politics
  • An introduction to government in the People’s Republic of China
  • Neil Collins, Andrew Cottey
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • The Chinese political system is the subject of much media and popular comment in part because China supports an economy with an apparently inexorable dynamic and impressive record of achievement. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to China's political system, outlining the major features of the Chinese model and highlighting its claims and challenges. It explores the central role of the Communist Party in the country's politics and the way in which the Party controls most elements of the political system. The collapse of the imperial system in 1911, the subsequent decades of turmoil and war and the coming to power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 constitutes a truly revolutionary period in Chinese political history. The People's Republic of China (PRC) represents an unanticipated challenge to the logic of history. The key organising principle of the political system of the PRC is the leadership of the CCP. China remains a Leninist party-state. The book also examines the role of the National People's Representatives Congress (NPC) and then the State Council and the associated structures of central government departments. Greater democracy is facilitated, as are other reforms, by the recasting of China's foreign policy to encourage a calmer international environment. China's re-emergence as a major power is the single most important geo-political trend of the early twenty-first century.

Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific
  • Edited by Anthony Burke, Matt McDonald
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book addresses some of the neglected problems, people and vulnerabilities of the Asia-Pacific region. It talks about emancipation, human security, 'security politics', language and threat-construction. The book is divided into three sections: agents; strategies and contexts; and futures. The first section outlines a range of possible agents or actors potentially capable of redressing individual suffering and vulnerability in the region. It examines East Asian regional institutions and dynamics of regionalism as potential sources of 'progressive' security discourses and practices. There is focus on the progressive security potential of regional institutions and regionalism has become increasingly prominent in literature on security in the Asia-Pacific. Two common interpretations of the role of epistemic communities in the construction of security are contested: that they are either passive sources of governmental legitimacy, or autonomous agents with the capacity of constructing or creating state interests. The second section reviews strategies and contexts, outlining a range of different sites of insecurity in the region, the ways in which dominant security discourses and practices emerge, and the extent to which such discourses are contested in different contexts. Indonesian government's approach to minority groups and separatism, the issue of civil unrest and human rights abuses in Burma, and the Australian government's attitude towards refugees and asylum-seekers are discussed. The third section deals with security futures, specifically discussing the question of what alternative security discourses and practices might look like. Finally, the book outlines a feminist critical security discourse and examines its applicability to the Asia-Pacific region.

Lollards in the English Reformation
  • History, radicalism, and John Foxe
  • Susan Royal
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book addresses a perennial question of the English Reformation: to what extent, if any, the late medieval dissenters known as lollards influenced the Protestant Reformation in England. To answer this question, this book looks at the appropriation of the lollards by evangelicals such as William Tyndale, John Bale, and especially John Foxe, and through them by their seventeenth-century successors. Because Foxe included the lollards in his influential tome, Acts and Monuments (1563), he was the most important conduit for their individual stories, including that of John Wyclif (d. 1384), and lollard beliefs and ecclesiology. Foxe’s reorientation of the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects portrayed them as Protestants’ spiritual forebears. Scholars have argued that to accomplish this, Foxe heavily edited radical lollard views on episcopacy, baptism, preaching, conventicles, tithes, and oaths, either omitting them from his book or moulding them into forms compatible with a magisterial Reformation. This book shows that Foxe in fact made no systematic attempt to downplay radical lollard beliefs, and that much non-mainstream material exists in the text. These views, legitimised by Foxe’s inclusion of them in his book, allowed for later dissenters to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their theological and ecclesiological positions. The book traces the ensuing struggle for the lollard, and indeed the Foxean, legacy between conformists and nonconformists, arguing that the same lollards that Foxe used to bolster the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.

European erotic romance
  • Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance translation and English literary politics
  • Victor Skretkowicz
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Relatively late manifestations of the European philhellene revival of Greco-Roman letters presented to readers complex, extended prose fiction in which the trials of love mask an implicit moral and political allegory. Inevitably, coming during the Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Reformation, this cultural phenomenon was not without its religious and political dimensions. Longus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus were the three principal English exponents of rhetorically conscious Greco-Roman erotic romance. This book enhances the understanding of the erotic romances of Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth by setting them within an integrated political, rhetorical, and aesthetic context. It investigates how Renaissance translators alter rhetorical styles, and even contents, to accord with contemporary taste, political agendas and the restrictions of censorship. Particular attention is paid to differences between the French courtly style of Jacques Amyot and François de Belleforest and the more literal translations of their English counterparts. Valuable perspective on the early translations is offered through the modern English versions in B.P. Reardon's Collected Ancient Greek Novels. The book considers the three texts of Sidney's Arcadia, as a political romance sharing many of the thematic and rhetorical concerns of the ancients. It focuses on a narrow range of Shakespeare's plays including Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The book identifies Mary Sidney Wroth's masque-like prose allegory, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, as philhellene Protestant political propaganda.

Borrowed objects and the art of poetry
  • Spolia in Old English verse
  • Denis Ferhatović
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Borrowed objects and the art of poetry examines seven Exeter riddles, three Anglo-Saxon biblical poems (Exodus, Andreas, Judith), and Beowulf to uncover the poetics of spolia, an imaginative use of fictional recycled artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. Old English poetry famously – and for a corpus rather interested in the enigmatic and the oblique, appropriately – lacks an explicit ars poetica. This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts – especially within texts concerned with translation, transformation, and the layering of various pasts – gives us a previously unrecognised means for theorising Anglo-Saxon poetic creativity. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry works at the intersections of recent interest in materiality and poetics, balancing insights of thing theory, and related approaches with close readings of specific passages from Old English texts.

The politics of Middle English parables
  • Fiction, theology, and social practice
  • Mary Raschko
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • The politics of Middle English parables examines the dynamic intersection of fiction, theology, and social practice in translated Gospel stories. Parables occupy a prominent place in Middle English literature, appearing in dream visions and story collections as well as in lives of Christ and devotional treatises. While most scholarship approaches these scriptural stories as stable vehicles of Christian teachings, this book characterises Gospel parables as ambiguous, riddling stories that invited audience interpretation and inspired the construction of new, culturally inflected narratives. In parables related to labour, social inequality, charity, and penance, the book locates a creative theological discourse through which writers reconstructed scriptural stories and, in doing so, attempted to shape Christian belief and practice. Analysis of these diverse retellings reveals not what a given parable meant in a definitive sense but rather how Middle English parables inscribe the ideologies, power structures, and cultural debates of late medieval Christianity.

Syria and the chemical weapons taboo
  • Exploiting the forbidden
  • Michelle Bentley
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book analyses the Syria crisis and the role of chemical weapons, in relation to US foreign policy. The Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons and their subsequent elimination would dominate the US’ response to the conflict, where these are viewed as particularly horrific arms – a repulsion known as the chemical taboo. On the surface, this would seem an appropriate reaction: these are vile and intolerable weapons, and eradicating them would ostensibly comprise a ‘good’ move. But this book reveals two new aspects of the taboo that challenge this view. First, actors employ the taboo strategically to advance their own self-interested policy objectives. This is in contrast to the highly static and constructivist approaches that have informed conceptualisation of the taboo until now. Far from a situation of normative adherence, this is a case in which the taboo exists as a strategic political resource, used to achieve aims that may have nothing to do with preventing chemical warfare. Second, it is argued that applying the taboo to Syria has exacerbated the crisis. While many expound the benefits of the taboo, it is demonstrated here that the exact opposite is true. The taboo has actually made the conflict significantly worse. As such, this book not only provides a timely analysis of Syria, but also a major and original rethink of the chemical taboo, as well as international norms more widely.

Page 1399 of 67781