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1376199 results in Books

Page 1587 of 68810

Clanship to crofters’ war
  • The social transformation of the Scottish Highlands
  • T. M. Devine
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • This book charts the story of the people of the Scottish Highlands from before the '45 to the great crofters' rebellion in the 1880s - a powerful story of defeat, social dissolution, emigration, rebellion and cultural revival. The conventional and familiar division of Scotland into 'Highlands' and 'Lowlands' is a comparatively recent development. Strangely, fourteenth century chroniclers who noted differences in culture, dress, speech and social behaviour between the Highlands and the Lowlands failed to comment on clanship as a distinguishing characteristic. During the Wars of Independence against England, soldiers from the Highlands fought on the Scottish side but were not given clan affiliations. The penetration of feudal structures into the Highlands blurred the distinction between clanship and social systems elsewhere in Scotland and many of the greatest clan chiefs were feudal lords as well as tribal leaders. This can be best illustrated from the history of the Lordship of the Isles. Successive heads of the MacDonald dynasty practised primogeniture, issued feudal charters to major landowners in the lordship and employed feudal rules in marital contracts. It used to be thought that Highland clanship died on Culloden Moor in 1746 and was effectively buried by the punitive legislation imposed on Gaeldom after the final defeat of the last Jacobite rebellion. It is clear that clan society was undergoing a process of gradual and protracted decline long before the '45 and that the climax to this was reached in the decades after the failure of the rebellion.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
  • Unofficial Laureate
  • Edited by Catherine Maxwell, Stefano Evangelista
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne is acknowledged to be one of the most important Victorian poets, a founding figure for British aestheticism, and the dominant influence for many fin-de-siècle and modernist poets. This book is a collection of essays that re-evaluate his literary contribution. It brings together some of the best new scholarship on Swinburne, resituating him in the light of current critical work on cosmopolitanism, politics, print culture, form, Victorian Hellenism, religious controversy, gender and sexuality, the arts, and aestheticism and its contested relation to literary modernism. The first section lays emphasis on Swinburne's embeddedness and centrality in a culture from which he has been partly written out. It examines Swinburne's involvement in the history of cosmopolitanism, a field of enquiry that is attracting growing attention among literary critics. This section provides complementary accounts of the difficult and often invisible dynamics behind influence and marginalisation, unveiling narratives of problematic acceptance and problematic rejection, by a female and a male poet respectively. Through a detailed examination of Swinburne's unpublished flagellatory poem 'The Flogging-Block', the book discovers a web of connections between the nineteenth-century culture of metrical discipline and the pedagogic discipline of minors portrayed through sexual fantasy. The last section of the book examines Swinburne's own influence on his modernist successors. The twin mechanics of poetic dialogue and cultural polemic is also discussed. T. S. Eliot's ambivalence towards Swinburne left a strong mark on twentieth-century criticism.

Spectacular Performances
  • Essays on theatre, imagery, books and selves in early modern England>
  • Stephen Orgel
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • This book focuses on performance construed in the largest sense, as the deployment of a personal style, as imagery of various kinds, and even as books, which in the early modern era often include strongly performative elements. The chapters in the book fall logically into four groups: on personal style and the construction of the self, on drama, on books, and on the visual arts. Personal style is performative in the simple sense that it is expressive and in the more complex sense that it thereby implies that there is something to express. The book takes a broad view of the question of performance through disguise. Disguises in Elizabethan drama are nearly always presumed to be impenetrable, effectively concealing the self, whereas costume is designed to adorn the self, to make the self more strikingly recognizable. The book considers the changing effects of disguise and costume both on concepts of the self and on assumptions about the kind of reality represented by theater. As a practice that makes performance visible as such, theater is characterized by an ongoing reflection on the very norms that make dramatic performance legible and indeed possible. Images are never more performative in and for a culture than when they offer a view onto the differences through which culture is made.

Mobilizing nature
  • The environmental history of war and militarization in Modern France
  • Chris Pearson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • This book traces the creation, maintenance, and contestation of the militarized environments from the establishment of France's first large-scale and permanent army camp on the Champagne plains in 1857, to military environmentalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In doing so, it focuses on the evolving and profoundly historical relationship between war, militarization, and the environment. The book treats militarized environments as simultaneously material and cultural sites that have been partially or fully mobilized to achieve military aims. It focuses on the environmental history of sites in rural and metropolitan France that the French and other militaries have directly mobilized to prepare for, and to wage, war. They include such sites as army camps, weapons testing facilities, and air bases, as well as battlefields and other combat zones, but not maritime militarized environments, which arguably deserve their own book. First World War cemeteries and the memorial landscapes of the D-Day beaches remain places of international importance and serve as reminders of the transnational character of many French militarized environments. And although the book focuses on the environmental history of militaraization within metropolitan France, it speaks to issues that mark militarized environments across the globe, such as civilian displacement, anti-base protests, and military environmentalism. By focusing on the French case, the author aims to encourage reflection and discussion on the global issue of military control and use of the environment.

A lark for the sake of their country
  • The 1926 General Strike volunteers in folklore and memory
  • Rachelle Hope Saltzman
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • The 1926 General Strike lasted officially from midnight on 3 May until 12 May. Over the course of nine days, four million workers came out in sympathy with coal miners, who were protesting against attempts by mine owners and managers to reduce wages and lengthen hours. The General Strike was not merely evidence of class divisions and a postwar society in transition; the event and its participants have become national folk symbols for Britishness. The university lads, society women, Bright Young People, and businessmen who served as volunteers did not regard their acts as motivated by class divisions but fuelled by a desire to keep their country moving. Clearly, volunteering was an adventure, a way of making oneself important to the community at large. But it was also an act limited to those of a certain age and socio-economic status, those who had both the leisure and few responsibilities to others. The very nature of the activities required of volunteers restricted who could or could not join up. Furthermore, the semi-official nature of the organization of the call-up dictated that the more desirable jobs would go to those of higher social status. The defining features of the General Strike were its good humour and the ways in which all involved used a variety of comic forms of speech and behaviour to frame the event and express particular visions of the national community.

Witchcraft and Whigs
  • The life of Bishop Francis Hutchinson, 1660–1739
  • Andrew Sneddon
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • Historians who have written about Francis Hutchinson have tended to study a small part of his life and his literary output as part of larger studies on other subjects. Bishop Hutchinson is thus many things to many historians. To some he represents the archetypal eighteenth-century Protestant bibliophile, to others the type of clerical, social and economic improver and antiquarian that flourished in Ireland in the early eighteenth century. Despite this interest in his life in Ireland, most academics have been drawn to his life and work on account of his seminal, sceptical witchcraft tract, the Historical essay, published in London in 1718. Their interpretations of why Hutchinson rejected traditional witchcraft beliefs in this book reflect the changing face of the historiography of decline in educated belief in witchcraft. The book suggests that Hutchinson dedicated his life firstly to protecting the position of the established Church within society, and secondly to forging and maintaining the political hegemony of the Whig and Hanoverian regime, first in England and then in Ireland. It is suggested that the way he defended these ideals and institutions was in the manner of a moderate, principled, career-minded, Latitudinarian-Whig reformer. Furthermore, it was this outlook that fuelled his third main concern in life, the social and economic improvement of Ireland.

The Life of Freedom in Kant and Hegel
  • Thomas Khurana
  • Published online:
    07 April 2026
    Print publication:
    20 August 2026
  • Autonomy is one of the central aspirations of our time, yet there is a growing worry that autonomy, as we have understood and practised it, has not liberated us but subjected us to new forms of domination. In his ground-breaking reinterpretation of Kant and Hegel, Thomas Khurana reveals the source of these problems in the very concept of autonomy and develops a new understanding of human self-determination. While the dominant conception of autonomy gives rise to the paradox of self-legislation and remains caught up in a dualistic opposition of freedom and nature, we can overcome these problems by understanding freedom as a form of life. Elaborating both Kant's and Hegel's compelling concepts of life, Khurana shows that we are not autonomous despite or against our living nature, but by inhabiting it in the right way. To understand freedom, we need a critical theory of our second nature.

Prisoners of Britain
  • German civilian and combatant internees during the First World War
  • Panikos Panayi
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • This book recognizes three types of internees in First World War Britain. They are: civilians already present in the country in August 1914; civilians brought to Britain from all over the world; and combatants, primarily soldiers from the western front. Soldiers from the western front included naval personnel and a few members of zeppelin crews whose vessels fell to earth. These three groups faced different internment experiences, particularly in terms of the length of time they spent behind barbed wire and their ability to work. Many combatants viewed internment almost as a relief from the fighting they had experienced on the western front, while, for civilians, the spell behind barbed wire represented their key wartime experience. Throughout the narrative, from the first days behind barbed wire until the last, the book recognizes the varying experiences faced by the differing groups of prisoners. Nevertheless, one needs to consider all internees together because they became victims of one of the first mass incarcerations in history. While the prisoner of war has a long history, imprisonment on the scale practised in the First World War, by both Britain and the other belligerent states, of both soldiers and civilians, represents a new phenomenon.

‘England’s darling’
  • The Victorian cult of Alfred the Great
  • Joanne Parker
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • This book provides a broad account of the nineteenth-century cult of King Alfred. It reveals the rich cultural interest of the corpus of texts as a whole. The book redresses a misleading modern emphasis on Arthur and the Victorians, and addresses a genuine gap in the current literature on nineteenth-century medievalism. The book focuses on what was probably the apex of Victorian Alfredianism. It provides the background to this event both in terms of the wider cultural movements and in the sense of the Alfredian tradition which the nineteenth century inherited. The intersection of the cult of Alfred with nineteenth-century British politics is considered in the book, which focuses upon the role that Alfredianism played in debate about the future of the monarchy. The book speculates how the Saxon king was enlisted to vindicate and ennoble those institutions of which Victorian Britain was most proud - notably its navy, law-code, constitution and empire. It examines the conceptions of ninth-century Wessex as a time of immense cultural change - the mirror-image of the nineteenth century - and reviews Victorian appropriations of Alfred's reign as a prestigious starting point for myths of national progress. The book further focuses upon more domestic narratives - the use of Alfred, by Victorian authors, to exemplify moral values, and the rewriting of his life as a parable of error and redemption. Finally, the crucial question of Alfred's decline in fame is addressed in the book, which surveys the diminished interest in the Saxon king after 1901.

Killing and Christian Ethics
  • Christopher O. Tollefsen
  • Published online:
    07 April 2026
    Print publication:
    14 May 2026
  • Everyone recognizes that it is, in general, wrong to intentionally kill a human being. But are there exceptions to that rule? In Killing and Christian Ethics, Christopher Tollefsen argues that there are no exceptions: the rule is absolute. The absolute view on killing that he defends has important implications for bioethical issues at the beginning and end of life, such as abortion and euthanasia. It has equally important implications for the morality of capital punishment and the morality of killing in war. Tollefsen argues that a lethal act is morally permissible only when it is an unintended side effect of one's action. In this way, some lethal acts of force, such as personal self-defense, or defense of a polity in a defensive war, may be justified --  but only if they involve no intension of causing death.  Even God, Tollefsen argues, neither intends death, nor commands the intentional taking of life.

Gender and warfare in the twentieth century
  • Textual representations
  • Edited by Angela K. Smith
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • The changes in warfare during the twentieth century could be addressed from a variety of perspectives, political, cultural, and national. This book addresses the issue of how gender is constructed by exploring a range of historical events. It also asserts that a focus on gender, rather than producing a depoliticised reading of our culture, offers an informed debate on a range of political issues. The book explores the impact of warfare on women whose civilian or quasi-military roles resulted in their exile or self-exile to the role of 'other'. The book first draws upon a number of genres to use Richard Aldington and H. D. (the poet Hilda Doolittle), to understand the social and cultural implications of warfare for both parties in a relationship. Then, it examines the intricate gender assumptions that surround the condition of 'shell shock' through a detailed exploration of the life and work of Ver a Brittain. Continuing this theme, considering the nature of warfare, the gendered experience of warfare, through the lens of the home front, the book discusses the gendered attitudes to the First World War located within Aldous Huxley's novella 'Farcical History of Richard Greenow'. Wars represented in Western cinema are almost universally gendered as male, which corresponds to the battlefield history of twentieth-century warfare. As this situation changes, and more women join the armed services, especially in the United States, a more inclusive cinematic coding evolves through struggle. The book considers three decades of film, from the Vietnam War to the present.

Communism in Britain 1920–39
  • From the cradle to the grave
  • Thomas Linehan
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • This book is a study of the communist life and the communist experience of membership. The study places itself on the interface between the membership and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) by considering the efforts of the latter to give shape to that experience. For those who opted to commit fully to the communist way of life it would offer a complete identity and reach into virtually all aspects of life and personal development. In regard to the latter, through participation in the communist life 'joiners' gained a positive role in life, self-esteem, intellectual development, skills in self-expression, and opportunities to acquire status and empowerment through activities like office-holding or public speaking. The British Communist Party had a strong and quite marked generational focus, in that it sought to address the experience of Party life and membership at the principal phases of the life cycle. The Party developed rites of passage to guide its 'charges' through the different stages of the life cycle. Thus its reach extended to take in children, youth, and the adult experience, including marriage and aspects of the marital and family relationship. The Party did not disengage even at the beginning and termination of the life cycle. Its spokespersons advised communist mothers on birth and mothercraft, 'red' parents on childrearing, and addressed the experience of death and mourning within the communist domain.

Revolutionary Shi'i Modernism in Iraq
  • The Thought and Legacy of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr
  • Rachel Kantz Feder
  • Published online:
    07 April 2026
    Print publication:
    07 May 2026
  • While Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr has often been portrayed as a fundamentalist or sectarian Islamist, this study repositions the scholar as a revolutionary Shi'i modernist and a critical figure in global intellectual history. Drawing on a range of previously neglected primary sources, Rachel Kantz Feder explores how Sadr synthesized Islamic tradition with Marxist thought, Arab modernism, and global leftist critiques to articulate a distinct vision of religious, political, and cultural renewal. Set against the backdrop of mid-twentieth-century Iraq, the book situates Sadr within broader Arab and Islamic debates on modernity, nationalism, and state-building. It demonstrates how Sadr challenged both secular ideologies and clerical conservatism to promote popular sovereignty, social justice, and individual agency within an Islamic framework. Offering fresh insights into Islamic reform, Shi'i thought, and Cold War-era Arab intellectual history, this is an essential work for scholars and students of Islamic studies, Middle East history, political theology, and religious modernism.

Family rhythms
  • The changing textures of family life in Ireland
  • Jane Gray, Ruth Geraghty, David Ralph
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • Family Rhythms is a comprehensive, user-friendly text that opens a new window on family change in Ireland. The authors draw on major new qualitative longitudinal datasets to develop a rich account of continuity and change in the textures, meanings and rhythms of family life in Ireland since the early years of the state. Consistent with the recent turn to more inductive approaches in family studies, the book focuses on changing everyday practices in different family life stages: childhood, early adulthood, the middle years and grandparenthood. Readers acquire insights on the diverse experiences of family life from different historical and generational points of view and on the associated challenges for social policy. Throughout, qualitative findings are placed in the context of societal shifts in demography, value systems, household economies, and patterns of kinship, community and public life. For each life stage, the Irish experience is also placed in a comparative European context. The book includes a state-of-the-art introduction to contemporary sociological perspectives on family life and introduces readers to the wealth of historical and contemporary research on family life in Ireland. Highlighted panels invite readers to look in more detail at selected landmark Irish studies and to explore extracts from the qualitative data for themselves.

Photography and social movements
  • From the globalisation of the movement (1968) to the movement against globalisation (2001)
  • Antigoni Memou
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • Throughout its brief history, photography has had a close relationship to social movements. From the Commune of Paris in 1871, the first political uprising to be captured by camera, to the 1990s anti-globalisation movement, the photographic medium has played a crucial role in political struggles. The book reflects critically on the theory of photography and the social movements themselves. It draws on a range of humanities disciplines, including photography theory and history, social movement theory, political theory, cultural history, visual culture, media studies and the history and theory of art. The book takes as a starting point 1968 - a year that witnessed an explosion of social movements worldwide and has been interpreted as a turning point for political practice and theory. The finishing point is 2001 - a signpost for international politics due to September 11 and a significant year for the movement because of the large-scale anti-capitalist protests in Genoa. Within these chronological limits, the book focuses on a selection of distinctive instances in which the photographic medium intersects with the political struggle. The three case studies are not the only pertinent examples, by any means, but they are important ones, not only historically and politically, but also iconographically. They are the student and worker uprising in France in May 1968 and two moments of the contemporary anti-capitalist movement, the indigenous Zapatista movement in Mexico and the anti-capitalist protests in Genoa in 2001.

Discourse, normative change and the quest for reconciliation in global politics
  • Judith Renner
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • This book offers a new and critical perspective on the global reconciliation technology by highlighting its contingent and highly political character as an authoritative practice of post-conflict peacebuilding. After retracing the emergence of the reconciliation discourse from South Africa to the global level, the book demonstrates how implementing reconciliation in post-conflict societies is a highly political practice which entails potentially undesirable consequences for the post-conflict societies to which it is deployed. Inquiring into the example of Sierra Leone, the book shows how the reconciliation discourse brings about the marginalization and neutralization of political claims and identities of local populations by producing these societies as being composed of the ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ of past human rights violations which are first and foremost in need of reconciliation and healing.

War and politics in the Elizabethan counties
  • Neil Younger
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    07 April 2026
  • This book assesses the English national war effort during the Anglo-Spanish war (1585–1603), examining wartime government in a wide-ranging set of contexts. It looks first at political problems: the structure of the wartime state, popular attitudes to the war and the government’s efforts to influence them, resistance to demands, and the problems of governing a country divided in religion and a regime deeply fearful of the future. It then assesses the machinery in practice, looking at the work of the central regime under the Queen herself alongside the local government machinery of lord lieutenancies which carried the demands of the centre into the counties, towns and parishes of England. These mechanisms of rule were crucial to the success of the war effort, by providing troops to fight overseas, running the militia which defended against the Spanish Armada (1588) and other invasion attempts and paying for them both through local taxes. The book draws evidence and case studies from across the country and from politics and government at all levels, from the court and Privy Council to the counties and parishes, but it seeks to examine England as a single polity. In this way it ranges much more widely than the war alone and provides a new assessment of the effectiveness of the Elizabethan state as a whole. It challenges many existing assumptions about the weakness of the state in the face of military change, finding a political system in much better health than has previously been thought.

Page 1587 of 68810