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1335468 results in Books

Page 405 of 66774

  • 9 - Colonial monarchy and decolonisation in the French Empire: Bao Dai, Norodom Sihanouk and Mohammed V

  • Edited by Robert Aldrich, Cindy McCreery
  • Book:
    Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia
    Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2026, pp 152-174

  • Summary

    In 1945, when the French scrambled to rebuild their empire shaken by the Second World War, only the Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai appeared to challenge colonial rule in Indochina. Sihanouk and Mohammed V appeared to be the docile ones in Cambodia and Morocco. All of that changed within a decade as Bao Dai threw in his lot with the French, while Sihanouk and Mohammed V led independence crusades against their colonial kingmakers. This chapter uses a comparative framework to explain why two colonially crowned monarchs in the French empire – Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia and Mohammed V in Morocco – survived decolonisation to become the fathers of independent nations while Bao Dai in Vietnam did not. Four main factors help explain these two different outcomes: the nature of French colonial monarchy in each protectorate; the specific local, national and international circumstances; the individual personalities of each sovereign; and the strategies they employed.

  • 2 - Comic negotiations

  • Celestino Deleyto
  • Book:
    The secret life of romantic comedy
    Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2026, pp 55-102

  • Summary

    This chapter is devoted to two films directed by two of the most prestigious figures in the history of Hollywood comedy: Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be became part of the canon as one of the most brilliant comedies in the history of Hollywood in so far as its romantic comedy elements remained invisible. Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid was almost universally rejected because its satire was too base, too obscene, too vulgar, or because its satirical view of love, sex and marriage was too hard to take. The chapter argues that the study of the two films from the point of view of romantic comedy would help to change dominant views of what the genre has been or should be. It is devoted to cases of texts in which romantic comedy interacts with other comic subgenres, such as marriage comedy, satire, and comedian comedy.

  • 2 - Losey in exile: <italic>The Sleeping Tiger</italic> (1954), <italic>A Man on the Beach</italic> (1955) and <italic>The Intimate Stranger</italic> (1956)

  • Colin Gardner
  • Book:
    Joseph Losey
    Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2026, pp 14-39

  • Summary

    The 1950s proved to be a difficult decade for Joseph Losey, a period marked by prolonged exile, the ever-lengthening reach of the blacklist and the constant fear of betrayal. This chapter discusses Losey's three films during his period of exile in the 1950s. While it is clear that the films of this period represent a scattered potpourri of projects undertaken by a director simply trying to survive, both economically and artistically, it would be a mistake to dismiss them as anomalous or peripheral to the central themes and narrative continuities of Losey's seemingly more mainstream, 'signature' productions. The Sleeping Tiger, The Intimate Stranger and A Man on the Beach mark the beginning of a certain stylistic excess, as a means both to explore and mitigate the realities of historical rupture and to draw a concrete analogy between exile and the cultural estrangement of class and gender division.

Colour
  • Steven Peacock
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Film writing has rather overlooked cinematic colour. In a scrutiny of cinematic moments, and when colour comes to the fore, films open up in new ways. This book explores a spectrum of colourful applications. It begins by considering films that use colour in sparing amounts, and moves on to discuss increasingly abundant displays. While highlighting the use of colour, the book also considers the connections between different stylistic elements such as camerawork, editing, performance, music, and lighting. It also offers an alternative to national, socio-political, and historically chronological approaches to film style. Six films present chromatic measures moving from understatement to amplification. Leading from one end of narrative cinema's colour spectrum, the book examines Three Colours: White. It then explores Equinox Flower hat is similarly restrained and concerned with reservation. The book discusses how delicate colours accrue to convey a fragile sensibility in The Green Ray. Written on the Wind is about Technicolor schemes. It also considers the resemblances, after Sirk's work, of a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Next, it addresses The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a multicoloured fantasia of the everyday. The music, story, and colour combine and clash in surprising ways in this film, in shifting forms of the 'style-subject economy'. The book looks for language matching the rhetoric of the films under scrutiny. It notes and moves beyond generally inscribed meanings of certain colours, paying attention to shifting connections and comparisons.

Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition
  • Words, ideas, interactions
  • Edited by Megan Cavell, Jennifer Neville
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Riddles at work is the first volume to bring together multiple scholarly voices to explore the vibrant, poetic riddle tradition of early medieval England and its neighbours. The chapters in this book present a wide range of traditional and experimental methodologies. They treat the riddles both as individual poems and as parts of a tradition, but, most importantly, they address Latin and Old English riddles side-by-side, bringing together texts that originally developed in conversation with each other but have often been separated in scholarship. The ‘General Introduction’ situates this book in its scholarly context. Part I, ‘Words’, presents philological approaches to early medieval riddles—interpretations rooted in close readings of texts—for riddles work by making readers question what words really mean. While reading carefully may lead to elegant solutions, however, such solutions are not the end of the riddling game. Part II, ‘Ideas’, thus explores how riddles work to make readers think anew about objects, relationships, and experiences, using literary theory to facilitate new approaches. Part III, ‘Interactions’, explores how riddles work through connections with other fields, languages, times, and places. Together, the sixteen chapters reveal that there is no single, right way to read these texts but many productive paths—some explored here, some awaiting future work.

Poetry for historians
  • Or, W. H. Auden and history
  • Carolyn Steedman
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book discusses W. H. Auden's poetry, and other poetry of the modern era; some of it concerns Auden himself. Auden was particularly important for thinking about the relationship between the extraordinary and the everyday as experienced by historical actors and in the histories written about them. Discussing the twentieth-century development of recording and writing systems among the Vai people of Liberia, anthropologist Jack Goody noted that several Vai records had been compiled by men who had worked as cooks at some point. To employ a poetical maid was a fashionable thing to do and literacy in a cook was certainly a useful commodity. The book explores to what did Auden pay homage to in 'Homage to Clio'; and why might a poet evoke the Muse of History. Auden wrote a number of poems about historical events; two are famous for his later renunciation of their historiography. 'Spain 1937' was about a civil war that had already been designated 'historical'. He had spent time in Spain, was witness to violence perpetrated by both sides during the Civil War. Historiography is to history as poetics is to poetry. In Homage to Clio, the poet reveals the Muse of History as a blank-faced girl, always, forever, present when anything happens, but with absolutely nothing to say. The book explores whether Auden's Historia is silent on the page as well as mute in her person.

Historical literatures
  • Writing about the past in England, 1660–1740
  • Noelle Gallagher
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • For Restoration and early-eighteenth-century writers, history proper was only one of a wide range of forms that could be used to represent the past. Accordingly, while some sought to record historical phenomena using large-scale formal narrative, others chose to depict the past as satire, secret history, scandal chronicle, biography, journal, letter, and memoir. A poem like John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, for example, could claim to be fulfilling neoclassical history's moral purpose of warning readers against vice, but it could present historical phenomena with an undisguised political bias. Equally, Daniel Defoe's Secret History of the White-Staff could address the same public events as a formal historical narrative, but recount them through the eyes of a politically opposed narrator. Writing for a broader audience, memoirists, scandal chroniclers, historians, and satirists were naturally prompted to depict historical phenomena in ways that differed from the neoclassical ideal. The increased attention to topical events and individual characters likely helped to attract new groups of readers to historical literature, but it was not without its critics. The genres of memoirs, satires, and secret histories, often painted portraits using far more than the 'two or three Colours' recommended by artes historicae. By mid 1750, the perceived 'ebb' in English historiography had ended - but also had the sense that history could be authoritatively defined as 'a continued narration of things true, great, and publick'. The full-length narratives of John Oldmixon, and other 'hack' historians had by mid-century been hastily consigned to the library or the dustbin.

Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries
  • Essays for Stephanie Trigg
  • Edited by Helen M Hickey, Anne McKendry, Melissa Raine
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • For 700 years, Geoffrey Chaucer has spoken to scholars and amateurs alike. How does his work speak to us in the twenty-first century? This volume provides a unique vantage point for responding to this question, furnished by the pioneering scholar of medieval literary studies, Stephanie Trigg: the symptomatic long history. While Trigg's signature methodological framework acts as a springboard for the vibrant conversation that characterises this collection, each chapter offers an inspiring extension of her scholarly insights. The varied perspectives of the outstanding contributors attest to the vibrancy and the advancement of debates in Chaucer studies: thus, formerly rigid demarcations surrounding medieval literary studies, particularly those concerned with Chaucer, yield in these essays to a fluid interplay between Chaucer within his medieval context; medievalism and ‘reception’; the rigours of scholarly research and the recognition of amateur engagement with the past; the significance of the history of emotions; and the relationship of textuality with subjectivity according to their social and ecological context. Each chapter produces a distinctive and often startling interpretation of Chaucer that broadens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the medieval past and its ongoing re-evaluation. The inventive strategies and methodologies employed in this volume by leading thinkers in medieval literary criticism will stimulate exciting and timely insights for researchers and students of Chaucer, medievalism, medieval studies, and the history of emotions, especially those interested in the relationship between medieval literature, the intervening centuries and contemporary cultural change.

How to be a historian
  • Scholarly personae in historical studies, 1800–2000
  • Edited by Herman Paul
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • What makes a good historian? When historians raise this question, as they have done for centuries, they often do so to highlight that certain personal attitudes or dispositions are indispensable for studying the past. Yet their views on what virtues, skills or competencies historians need most differ remarkably, as do their models of how to be a historian (‘scholarly personae’). This volume explores why scholarly personae were, and are, so important to historians as to generate lots of debate. Why do historians seldom agree on the marks of a good historian? What impact do these disagreements have on historical research, teaching and outreach? And what does this tell about the unity, or disunity, of the field called historical studies? In addressing these questions, How to be a historian develops a fascinating new perspective on the history of historiography. It challenges conventional narratives of professionalization by demonstrating that the identity of the ‘professional’ was often contested. At the same time, it shows that personae could be remarkably stable, especially in relation to race, class and gender assumptions. With chapters by Monika Baár, Ian Hunter, Q. Edward Wang and other recognized specialists, How to be a historian covers historical studies across Europe, North America, Africa and East Asia, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes alike. The volume will appeal not only to readers of historiography, but to all historians who occasionally wonder: what kind of a historian do I want to be?

Literature, theology and feminism
  • Heather Walton
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book generates a critical framework through which to interrogate the way in which religious feminists have employed women's literature in their texts. This is in order that both the way we read literature and the literature we read might be subject to scrutiny, and that new reading practices be developed. Having both the critical and constructive agenda, this is a book in two parts. The first part locates the study of the use of women's writing by religious feminists in a much wider frame than has previously been attempted. In the past individual religious feminists have been criticised, often publicly and loudly, for the use they have made of particular literary texts. Having critically surveyed previously unacknowledged constraints under which religious feminists read women's literature, the second part of the book explores how the work of women poststructuralist thinkers and theorists can enrich the reading practices. It offers alternative models for an engagement between literature and theology. Julia Kristeva is best known within the academy for her unorthodox application of Lacanian theory to contemporary culture. Her work challenges religious feminists to reassess the utilitarian approaches to literary texts and enquire into whether these might have a more powerful political role when their status as literature is recognised and affirmed. The book elucidates Luce Irigaray's thinking on sexual difference and also demonstrates its significance for feminist religious readers.

Queer Muslim diasporas in contemporary literature and film
  • Alberto Fernández Carbajal
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • This book explores representations of queer migrant Muslims in international literature and film from the 1980s to the present. It brings together a variety of contemporary writers and filmmakers of Muslim heritage engaged in vindicating same-sex desire from several Western locations. The book approaches queer Muslims as figures forced to negotiate their identities according to the expectations of the West and of their migrant Muslim communities. It coins the concept of queer micropolitical disorientation via the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Sara Ahmed and Gayatri Gopinath. The author argues that depictions of queer Muslims in the West disorganise the social categories that make up contemporary Western societies. The study covers three main themes: queer desire across racial and national borders; Islamic femininities and masculinities; and the queer Muslim self in time and place. These thematic clusters examine the nuances of artistic depictions of queer Muslims’ mundane challenges to Western Islamophobia and Islamicate heteronormativity. Written in a scholarly but accessible style, this is a timely contribution to the controversial topic of Islam and homosexuality, forging understanding about the dissident position of Muslims who contravene heteronormative values and their equivocal political position in the West.

The implementation of environmental policy in Ireland
  • Lessons from translating EU directives into action
  • Bernadette Connaughton
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • EU environmental directives illustrate the challenges involved for the effective implementation of European Union policies. This book explores the response of Ireland’s political-administrative system to the implementation of environmental directives in the cases of waste management, water reform and biodiversity. Ireland represents the implementation challenges of a small EU member state with a weak background in environmental governance, and has struggled to adapt to the complexities of enforcing environmental rules. This has resulted in infringement proceedings and critical rulings against Ireland from the Court of Justice of the European Union. The book details how efforts to comply with these measures have been a source of significant pressure on Ireland’s institutional framework but have also prompted considerable learning and adaptation in environmental governance. Using a theoretical framework inspired by traditional implementation analysis and insights from the Europeanisation literature, the book traces the implementation process in three directives. The main conclusion of this study is that Ireland’s implementation performance in waste management, water reforms and nature conservation is influenced by the low issue salience of environmental policy and the need to overcome structural problems in the public administration system in order to give effect to EU legislation.

Claude Chabrol
  • Guy Austin
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Claude Chabrol's films break down the dubious critical barrier between art cinema and popular cinema. Rejecting the avant-garde and the experimental, Chabrol chooses to work within the confines of established genres. He has in fact filmed farce, melodrama, fantasy, war films, spy films and glossy literary adaptations. Chabrol has excellent new-wave credentials and is in some ways a representative figure for this innovative film movement in French cinema. For the small budget of 32 million old francs, he was able to shoot Le Beau Serge over nine weeks in the winter of 1957/8 and film it in what was essentially his home village. Chabrol has known periods of great success (the launching of the new wave in 1958, the superb Hélène cycle of the late 1960s, including his most famous film Le Boucher for his return to form in the 1990s). He also has had periods of inactivity and failure. His depiction of the middle classes usually concentrates on the family. Le Cri du hibou begins as Masques ends, with a framed image from which the camera slowly tracks back to reveal the presence of a spectator. Given that in Chabrol's cinema women are often lacking in financial or social power, there are limits to the ways in which they can either define themselves or escape their situation. This is spelled out most clearly in Les Bonnes Femmes, where the potential escape routes are sex, marriage into the bourgeoisie, a career, romance or death.

Sanctuary cities and urban struggles
  • Rescaling migration, citizenship, and rights
  • Edited by Jonathan Darling, Harald Bauder
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Recent debates over migration, refuge, and citizenship are challenging the assumed primacy of the nation-state as the key guarantor of rights and entitlements. Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles makes the first sustained intervention into exploring how such considerations of citizenship, rights, and mobility are recast when examined from different spatial scales. The collection brings together discussions from across political geography, urban geography, citizenship studies, socio-legal studies, and refugee studies to explore the role of urban social movements, localised practices of belonging and rights claiming, and diverse articulations of sanctuary in reshaping where and how responses to the governance of migration are articulated. Working from the intimate relations of the body and interpersonal accounts of sanctuary, through to strategies for autonomous settlement as part of Europe’s ‘summer of migration’, the collection sets out to challenge the often assumed primacy of the nation-state as the dominant lens through which to understand questions of citizenship and mobility. In its place, Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles proposes not a singular alternative, but rather a set of interlocking sites and scales of political practice and imagination, all of which respond to, and variously rework, the governmental demands of the contemporary nation-state. Mixing empirical cases and conceptualisations that move beyond ‘seeing like a state’, this collection will be of interest to geographers, political sociologists, migration scholars, social anthropologists, and urbanists.

Literature and psychoanalysis
  • Jeremy Tambling
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    13 March 2026
  • Not only did Sigmund Freud know literature intimately, and quote liberally from literatures of several languages, he has also inspired twentieth-century writers and philosophers, and created several schools of criticism, in literary and cultural studies. Freud was not just practising psychotherapy on his patients, helping them in difficult situations, but helping them by studying the unconscious as the basis of their problems. This book deals with Freud and psychoanalysis, and begins by analysing the 'Copernican revolution' which meant that psychoanalysis decentres the conscious mind, the ego. It shows how Freud illuminates literature, as Freud needs attention for what he says about literature. The book presents one of Freud's 'case-histories', where he discussed particular examples of analysis by examining obsessional neurosis, as distinct from hysteria. It analyses Freud on memory, in relation to consciousness, repression and the unconscious. Guilt was one of his central topics of his work, and the book explores it through several critical texts, 'Criminals from a Sense of Guilt', and 'The Ego and the Id'. The book discusses Melanie Klein, a follower of Freud, and object-relations theory, while also making a reference to Julia Kristeva. One of the main strands of thought of Jacques Lacan was the categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, as well as paranoia and madness, which are linked to literature here. The book finally returns to Freud on hysteria, and examines him on paranoia in Daniel Paul Schreber, and the psychosis of the 'Wolf Man'.

Page 405 of 66774