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1341657 results in Books

Page 813 of 67083

Eric Rohmer
  • Derek Schilling
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • The book aims to provide a balanced appraisal of Eric Rohmer's oeuvre in historical context. Although interpretation of individual films will not be its main objective, representative examples from the director's twenty-five features and fiction shorts will be presented throughout. The focus is on production history and reception in the mainstream French press. This key stylistic editing trait cannot be appreciated without reference to André Bazin's concept of ontological realism, of which Rohmer was a major exponent at Cahiers du cinéma. To establish the intertexts and artistic principles his films put into play, the book reviews the abundant critical writings Rohmer published in France from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. It explores how sound and image are configured, and to what effect. The book then broaches issues central to the director's finest work for the screen. 'Seriality and theme', devoted to the Contes moraux, Comédies et proverbes, and Contes des quatre saisons, looks at how Rohmer's decision to work by thematic series forces the viewer to intuit relations of complementarity, identity, and opposition that lend each cycle a complex, musical texture. It pays close attention to four of the director's costume films. The book concludes with a brief excursus on le rohmérien, that inimitable, instantly recognisable variant of the French language that spectators come to love or to hate.

Agnès Varda
  • Alison Smith
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • The study of film as art-form and as industry has become a popular and widespread element of French Studies, and French cinema has acquired an important place within Film Studies. Agnès Varda's reputation in Britain rests largely on a handful of major films, which are far from indicative of the scope of her work. Varda's best-known films come into the category 'fiction' with the exception of Jacquot de Nantes, and indeed they represent her entire fictional output with the exception of two fiction films released in conjunction with documentaries In 1994, Varda published a book about her life and work, Varda par Agnès, in conjunction with Cahiers du Cinéma. This book presents an overview of how her early interest in art history has had a great influence on her vision. Varda's background, before La Pointe Courte, was in the still image and the theatre. The sense of place is a constant throughout Varda's films. At different times she has explored the South of France and the châteaux of the Loire Valley, the streets of Paris or of Los Angeles. Varda's films show the still image to be connected to the object. Her œuvre is exceedingly varied, comprising documentaries and fiction films, short films and features, and also a large number which lie between the two, since Varda's care to give appropriate formal expression to what she has to say includes a determination not to add padding in order to make up for the required length.

Law across imperial borders
  • British consuls and colonial connections on China’s western frontiers, 1880–1943
  • Emily Whewell
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • This book tells the story of British imperial agents and their legal powers on the British-Chinese frontiers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It offers new perspectives on the British presence in Yunnan and Xinjiang in western China and the legal connections to the British colonies of India and Burma. It examines how the mobility of people across borders forced consuls to adapt and shape law to accommodate them. Salt and opium smugglers, Indian and Afghan traders, and itinerant local populations exposed the jurisdictional gaps between consular and colonial authority. Local and transfrontier mobility defined and shaped British jurisdiction across the frontier in complex ways. It argues that frontier consular agents played key roles in creating forms of transfrontier legal authority in order to govern these migratory communities. Consular legal practices coexisted alongside, and often took advantage of, other local customs and legal structures. The incorporation of indigenous elites, customary law and Chinese authority was a distinctive feature of frontier administration, with mediation an important element of establishing British authority in a contested legal environment. The book is essential reading for historians of China, the British Empire, and socio-legal historians interested in the role of law in shaping semicolonial and colonial societies.

Eradicating deafness?
  • Genetics, pathology, and diversity in twentieth-century America
  • Marion Andrea Schmidt
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • Is deafness a disability to be prevented or the uniting trait of a cultural community to be preserved? Combining the history of eugenics and genetics with deaf and disability history, this book traces how American heredity researchers moved from trying to eradicate deafness to embracing it as a valuable cultural diversity. It looks at how deafness came to be seen as a hereditary phenomenon in the first place, how eugenics became part of progressive reform at schools for the deaf, and what this meant for early genetic counselling. Not least, this is a story of how deaf people’s perspectives were pushed out of science, and how they gradually reemerged from the 1950s onwards in new cooperative projects between professionals and local signing deaf communities. It thus sheds light on the early history of culturally sensitive health care services for minorities in the US, and on the role of the psycho-sciences in developing a sociocultural minority model of deafness. For scholars and students of deaf and disability studies and history, as well as health care professionals and activists, this book offers new insight to changing ideas about medical ethics, reproductive rights, and the meaning of scientific progress. Finally, it shows how genetics came to be part of recent arguments about deafness as a form of biocultural diversity.

The devil’s highway
  • Urban anxieties and subaltern cultures in London’s sailortown, c. 1850–1900.
  • Brad Beaven
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • Between 1850 and 1900, London’s Ratcliffe Highway was the infamous ‘sailor’s playground’. It was a place where sailors longed for while at sea, and a district where the local population worked and was entertained. However, for social investigators, it was a place of fascination and fear as it haboured ‘exotic’ and heathen communities. Sailortowns featured in most international ports in the nineteenth century and were situated at the interface between urban and maritime communities. They were transient, cosmopolitan, and working class in character, and they provide us with an insight into class, race, and gendered relations within subaltern communities. This book goes beyond conceptualising sailortown as a global economic hub that entangled sailors into vice and exploitation. It will examine how, in the mid-nineteenth century, anxieties relating to urban modernity encouraged Victorians to reimagine Ratcliffe Highway as a chaotic and dangerous urban abyss. Certainly, the sailortown population was mixed and varied and engaged in numerous working-class trades connected with the marine and leisure industries such as dockers, stevedores, sailmakers, sex workers, and international seafarers. Sailortowns were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated, and at other times clashed with one another. However, the book argues that despite these challenges, sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The book uncovers a robust sailortown community in which an urban–maritime culture shaped a sense of themselves and the traditions and conventions that governed subaltern behaviour in the district.

Foreign policy as public policy?
  • Promises and pitfalls
  • Edited by Klaus Brummer, Sebastian Harnisch, Kai Oppermann, Diana Panke
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • This edited volume examines how and under which conditions foreign policy analysis can be enriched by “domestic realm” public policy approaches, concepts, and theories. Public policy scholars dealing with the analysis of domestic policy fields, such as social and economic policy, interior affairs, or environmental policy, use a broad array of heuristics, concepts, and theories, including, for example, multiple streams, advocacy coalition or punctuated equilibrium approaches. However, the possible contribution of such approaches to the analysis of foreign policy has yet to be fully explored. With this purpose in mind, this edited volume devotes a chapter each on a selection of arguably the most important domestic public policy approaches and examines their transferability and adaptability to foreign policy analysis. Thereby the book points out how bridging the intra-disciplinary divide between the analysis of public policy and foreign policy can enrich foreign policy studies and shows how exactly foreign policy analysis can benefit from broadening its instruments for analysis. The edited volume also discusses under what conditions such a transfer is less promising due to the “sui generis” character of foreign policy.

The genres of Renaissance tragedy
  • Edited by Daniel Cadman, Andrew Duxfield, Lisa Hopkins
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • This collection of essays explores tragedy, the most versatile of Renaissance literary genres, revealing its astonishing thematic, stylistic and emotional range. Each chapter consists of a case study, offering not only a definition of a particular kind of Renaissance tragedy but also new research into an important example of that genre. There is only one chapter on Shakespeare; instead contributors attend to subgenres of tragedy – biblical tragedy and closet drama, for example – in which Shakespeare did not engage and others in which the nature of his influence is interrogated, producing original critical readings of individual plays which show how interventions in these subgenres can be mapped onto debates surrounding numerous important issues, including national identity, the nature of divine authority, early modern youth culture, gender and ethics, as well as questions relating to sovereignty and political intervention. The chapters also highlight the rich range of styles adopted by the early modern tragic dramatists and show how opportunely the genre as a whole is positioned for speaking truth to power. Collectively, these essays reassess the various sub-genres of Renaissance tragedy in ways which respond to the radical changes that have affected the critical landscape over the last few decades.

Shell-shocked British Army veterans in Ireland, 1918–39
  • A difficult homecoming
  • Michael Robinson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • Shell-shocked British Army veterans in Ireland, 1918–39: A difficult homecoming tells the story of Irish veterans of the First World War who suffered from psychoneurotic ailments as a result of war service. Relying on previously untouched and newly released archival material, this monograph is a thematic analysis dedicated to the rehabilitation of mentally ill pensioners who returned to civil society and those who received institutional treatment. The unique socio-political and economic circumstances in Ireland ensures the Irish experience of post-war mental illness and disability does not reflect previous British-centric works. This case study argues that the post-war care and rehabilitation of mentally ill veterans of the Great War was dictated by unique bio-psycho, socio-economic, cultural and political concerns.

A landscape of words
  • Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250
  • Amy C. Mulligan
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • In recent decades, spatiality—the consideration of what it means to be situated in space and place—has become a key concept in understanding human behavior and cultural production across the disciplines. Texts produced by and about the medieval Irish contain perhaps the highest concentration of spatial writing in the wider medieval European milieu, and only in Ireland was a distinct genre of placelore formalized. As Mulligan shows, Ireland provides an extensively documented example of a culture that took a pre-modern ‘spatial turn’ and developed influential textual models through which audiences, religious and secular, in Ireland and Europe, could engage with landscapes near and far. Ireland’s peripheral geographic position, widespread monastic practices of self-imposed exile and nomadism, and early experiences of English colonialism required strategies for maintaining a place-based identity while undergoing dispossession from ancestral lands. These cultural developments, combined with the early establishment of Latin and vernacular literary institutions, primed the Irish to create and implement this poetics of place. A landscape of words traces the trajectory of Irish place-writing through close study of the ‘greatest hits’ of (and about) medieval Ireland—Adomnán’s De locis sanctis, Navigatio Sancti Brendani, vernacular voyage tales, Táin Bó Cualnge, Acallam na Senórach, the Topographia and Expugnatio Hibernica of Gerald of Wales, and Anglo-Latin accounts of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. A landscape of words provides rigorous source analysis in support of new ways of understanding medieval Irish literature, landscape and place-writing that will be essential reading for scholars on medieval Ireland and Britain. Mulligan also writes for non-specialist students and researchers working on the European Middle Ages, travel and pilgrimage, spatial literature, and Irish and British history and culture, and allows a wide readership to appreciate the extensive impact of medieval Irish spatial discourse.

Egypt of the Saite pharaohs, 664–525 BC
  • Roger Forshaw
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • This volume discusses the history, culture and social conditions of one of the less well-known periods of ancient Egypt, the Saite or 26th Dynasty (664–525 BC). In the 660s BC Egypt was a politically fragmented and occupied country. This is an account of how Psamtek I, a local ruler from Sais in northern Egypt, declared independence from its overlord, the Assyrian Empire, and within ten years brought about the reunification of the country after almost four hundred years of disunity and periods of foreign domination. Over the next century and a half, the Saite rulers were able to achieve stability and preserve Egypt’s independence as a sovereign state against powerful foreign adversaries. Central government was established, a complex financial administration was developed and Egypt’s military forces were reorganised. The Saites successfully promoted foreign trade, peoples from different countries settled in Egypt and Egypt recovered a prominent role in the Mediterranean world. There were innovations in culture, religion and technology, and Egypt became prosperous. This era was a high-achieving one and is often neglected in the literature devoted to ancient Egypt. Egypt of the Saite Pharaohs, 664–525 BC reveals the dynamic nature of the period, the astuteness of the Saite rulers and their considerable achievements in the political, economic, administrative and cultural spheres.

Emotional monasticism
  • Affective piety in the eleventh-century monastery of John of Fécamp
  • Lauren Mancia
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • Scholars of the Middle Ages have long taught that highly emotional Christian devotion, often called ‘affective piety’, originated in Europe after the twelfth century, and was primarily practised by late medieval communities of mendicants, lay people, and women. As the first study of affective piety in an eleventh-century monastic context, this book revises our understanding of affective spirituality’s origins, characteristics, and uses in medieval Christianity.Emotional monasticism: Affective piety at the eleventh-century monastery of John of Fécamp traces the early monastic history of affective devotion through the life and works of the earliest-known writer of emotional prayers, John of Fécamp, abbot of the Norman monastery of Fécamp from 1028 to 1078. The book examines John’s major work, the Confessio theologica; John’s early influences and educational background in Ravenna and Dijon; the emotion-filled devotional programme of Fécamp’s liturgical, manuscript, and intellectual culture, and its relation to the monastery’s efforts at reform; the cultivation of affective principles in the monastery’s work beyond the monastery’s walls; and John’s later medieval legacy at Fécamp, throughout Normandy, and beyond. Emotional monasticism will appeal to scholars of monasticism, of the history of emotion, and of medieval Christianity. The book exposes the early medieval monastic roots of later medieval affective piety, re-examines the importance of John of Fécamp’s prayers for the first time since his work was discovered, casts a new light on the devotional life of monks in medieval Europe before the twelfth century, and redefines how we should understand the history of Christianity.

Early modern war narratives and the Revolt in the Low Countries
  • Raymond Fagel, Leonor Álvarez Francés, Beatriz Santiago Belmonte
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • In the sixteenth century, many different stories on the Revolt in the Low Countries spread throughout Europe, written by very different authors with very different intentions. Over time this plethora of sources and interpretations faded away, leaving us with only a couple of canonical narratives, extremely opposed in essence. In this way, the Dutch and Spanish national myths were forged on the basis of two different visions of the conflict: as a liberation war and act of rebellion against cruel Spanish oppressors or as a glorious part of the history of the Spanish Empire. This book revolves around the concept of episodic narratives, factual texts on the events and its protagonists, which can be seen at first sight as anecdotic, but that happen to be the building blocks of history. This approach renders the book thought-provoking for anybody interested in the history of the Revolt in the Low Countries, but also for those who wish to understand the dynamics of early modern narratives. Since it offers a wide array of sources in different languages it also provides readers with the chance to engage with texts they do not have easy access to. How did the Spanish write about the Revolt, what can we find in Italian chronicles, what were the Jesuits writing in their letters and how does the war look like from the perspective of a local nobleman or a Spanish commander?

Comrades in conflict
  • Labour, the trade unions and 1969’s In Place of Strife
  • Peter Dorey
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • This book examines the 1969 attempt by Harold Wilson’s Labour Government to enact legislation to reform industrial relations. There was a particular concern to curb strikes by the trade unions. Published in the 50th anniversary of this ill-fated episode, this scholarly study makes extensive use of primary sources, many of them previously unpublished, most notably the archives of the Labour Party, the left-wing Tribune Group, the TUC, and the personal papers of the three key political figures involved, namely Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle and James Callaghan. The chapters are organised both thematically and chronologically, each one focusing on a particular aspect of the events leading to the proposed Industrial Relations Bill, and its subsequent abandonment. The book commences with an examination of the key economic and industrial developments of the early 1960s, to indicate how the ‘trade union problem’ was initially identified and defined. This led the Labour Government, elected in 1964, to establish a Royal Commission to examine industrial relations, but its report, published in 1968, was a cautious document, and therefore a deep disappointment to Harold Wilson and his Employment Secretary, Barbara Castle. They thus pursued their own industrial relations legislation, via a White Paper called In Place of Strife, but were overwhelmed by the scale and strength of opposition this aroused, and which eventually compelled them to abandon the legislation via a humiliating climb-down.

Contemporary Korean cinema
  • Identity, culture and politics
  • Hyangjin Lee
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • Film in Korea has always been under governmental censorship. This book examines the ways in which Korean film reveals the ideological orientation of the society in which it is created and circulated. It examines the social and political milieu in which the Korean film industry developed from its beginning during the Japanese colonial period to its bifurcation into South and North Korean cinemas. The book presents a critical analysis of the selected films, which were all made between 1960 and 1990. It discusses the cultural identity of contemporary Koreans by analysing five films based on a popular traditional folk tale, Ch'unhyangjŏn. Three of the five films were made in South Korea: Shin Sangok's Song Ch'unhyang, Pak T'ae-wŏn's The Tale of Song Ch'unhyang and Han Sanghun's SongCh'unhyang. The significance of gender and class issues in Ch'unhyangjŏn can be glimpsed through the three variants of the film title. The book then examines the notion of nationhood held by contemporary Koreans from two interrelated perspectives, political and cultural. It explores the films in relation to the conflicting ideological orientations of North and South Korea. In the North Korean films, anti-imperialism constitutes the core of their definition of nationhood. Class is one of the foremost factors in the formation of cultural identities of contemporary Koreans living as a divided nation. The book discusses six films in this context: The Untrodden Path, The Brigade Commander's Former Superior, Bellflower, A Nice Windy Day, Kuro Arirang and Black Republic.

Civic identity and public space
  • Belfast since 1780
  • Dominic Bryan, S. J. Connolly, John Nagle
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • Civic identity and public space, focussing on Belfast, and bringing together the work of a historian and two social scientists, offers a new perspective on the sometimes lethal conflicts over parades, flags and other issues that continue to disrupt political life in Northern Ireland. The first part of the book shows how these disputes had their origins in the changes that took place during the nineteenth century in the character of urban living, creating new forms of public space whose regulation was from the start a matter of contention and debate. Later chapters show how the establishment of a new Northern Ireland state, with Belfast as its capital, saw unionism and Protestantism achieve a near-complete monopoly of public space. In more recent decades, this monopoly has broken down, partly as a result of political violence, but also through the influence of new ideas of human rights and of a more positive vision of political and cultural diversity. Today policy makers and politicians struggle to devise a strategy for the management of public space in a divided city, while endeavouring to promote a new sense of civic identity that will transcend long-standing political and sectarian divisions.

Into the woods
  • An epistemography of climate change
  • Meritxell Ramírez-i-Ollé
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • This book is a detailed exploration of the working practices of a community of scientists whose work was questioned in public, and of the making of scientific knowledge about climate change in Scotland. For four years, the author joined these scientists in their sampling expeditions into the Caledonian forests, observed their efforts in the laboratory to produce data from wood samples, and followed their discussions of a graph showing the fluctuations of the Scottish temperature over the past millennium in conferences, workshops and peer-review journals. This epistemography of climate change is of broad social and academic relevance – both for its contextualised treatment of a key contemporary science, and for its original formulation of a methodology for investigating and writing about expertise.

Bertrand Blier
  • Sue Harris
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • Whether one 'likes' his work or not, Bertrand Blier is undisputably an important and influential presence in modern French film-making. For those who would understand the nature and function of popular French culture, it has now become impossible to ignore his work. Blier's career began in 1957 as an assistant stagiaire, as it was still relatively conventional in the French film-making tradition. This book hopes to be able to start formulating some answers to the puzzle that is Blier's work. The aim is to identify strategies for finding one's way through a body of work, which has disconcerted spectators, to identify some reference points that the curious spectator can use as a map to navigate through Blier's preferred themes and stylistic techniques. One way of understanding the system of dramatic cohesion that unifies the action of Blier's films is to read it in terms of an 'absurdist' conception. The comic momentum of Blier's films relies on the elaboration of a system of images which might be termed 'festive-ludic' or 'anarchocomic'. His deliberate attempt to go beyond the conventional limits of gender representation is as important example of the many processes of narrative subversion. Discussions reveal that the key tropes around which Blier's work is structured point to an engagement with a tradition of popular discourse, translated into both content and form, which finds an echo in the wider cultural apparatus of the post-1968 period and which is all the more significant for its location in mainstream visual culture.

Carol Reed
  • Peter William Evans
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • This book combines mainly chronological coverage of all major stages of Carol Reed's career with special attention not only to the acknowledged masterpieces but also to films that deserve re-appraisal (e .g. Outcast of the Islands, Trapeze, Oliver!) . Reed's interest in the parent-child relationship, an interminable inquest across all the films into the origins of the self, is remarkable from the outset. Reed's characteristic fondness for low angle shots intensifies the atmosphere of doom from which none of the characters ever ultimately finds relief. Followed by The Third Man, Outcast of the Islands, The Man Between and A Kid for Two Farthings, The Fallen Idol was the first of five films made for Alexander Korda's London Films. Looking back at the film now it is clear that Outcast belongs to that group of 1950s films that challenge the conformist reputation of British films made during the decade. Reed's eye for detail and for creating atmosphere through photography or editing is unsurpassed in the British cinema. While the preponderance of father/son narratives may indeed be partly attributable, as some have argued, to feelings prompted by his illegitimacy, Reed's closeness to his mother is an equally significant contributory factor to the films' representation of personal and family relationships.

Chantal Akerman
  • Marion Schmid
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    12 March 2026
  • Chantal Akerman was one of Europe's most acclaimed and prolific contemporary directors, who came to prominence with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, and 1080 Bruxelles. Her family history is intimately bound up with the horrors of the Holocaust. Akerman was born in Brussels on 6 June 1950, the first child of Jewish Polish immigrants who settled in Belgium in the late 1930s. Filmmaking, for her, was an imaginative and creative engagement with the silence that weighed heavily on her childhood. Behind the multiple guises of Akerman, this book seeks to present a cinema that crystallises questions that are at the heart of our post-war, post-Holocaust, post-feminist sensibility. It identifies the characteristics of her avant-garde work of the 1970s, the period most closely influenced by American structuralist film and performance art. The book surveys her work in the following decade in the context of post-modernism, the new aesthetic of kitsch and the emergence of a new hedonism in Western critical discourses. It is dedicated to her documentary work of the 1990s and 2000s, which sheds light on the central ethical and aesthetic concerns behind her work. The book discusses her attempts to penetrate into the mainstream, her renewed engagement with the themes of love and desire, and her further exploration of the permeable boundaries between autobiography and fiction. What emerges forcefully in Akerman's cinema, is a persistent engagement with the forms and conditions of human existence.
Teaching Shakespeare's Emotions

Teaching Shakespeare's Emotions
  • Anne Sophie Refskou
  • Published online:
    12 March 2026
    Print publication:
    23 April 2026
  • Drawing on critical insights from the history of emotion and Shakespearean emotion studies, this Element offers a pedagogy rooted in a historicist approach as a stimulating alternative to the teaching of Shakespeare's emotions as universally and transhistorically relatable. It seeks to provide a roadmap – by way of contextual and analytical frameworks and suggested learning activities – for teaching students how to mind the gap between Shakespeare's emotional moment and their own. The benefits to this approach include not only students' enhanced understanding of Shakespeare's plays in the context of early modern emotion culture but also their enhanced ability to think historically and critically about emotions, both in Shakespeare's day and now.

Page 813 of 67083