Books published by Manchester University Press

Home front heroism investigates how civilians were celebrated as heroic during the Second World War. It explores how conflict altered the relationship between the civilian and state, and how this shift created unique opportunities for civilians to behave heroically and be framed as heroic. From acts of life-risking bravery to displays of endurance, this book explores how constructions of Home Front heroism were flexible and malleable, and directly linked to the impact of war. Through exploring the spatial, material, corporeal and ritualistic dimensions of heroic representations, this book offers the first comprehensive study of Home Front heroism. Through a focus on London, it explores how heroism was manufactured through the way that civilians occupied spaces of production and danger, through the use of uniforms and gallantry medals, and in the way that civilians were wounded and killed during periods of bombardment. It particularly questions why certain individuals or virtues were identified and raised as heroic, and the motivations behind the constructions. This study provides a valuable contribution to the study of heroism and promotes new ways of thinking about the meaning and value of heroism during periods of conflict. By drawing on a range of sources, including films, posters, art, legislation, government correspondence, newspapers, diaries and memoirs, this study reveals that Home Front heroism was produced on a national, local and personal level. It will appeal to anyone interested in the social and cultural history of the Second World War as well as the sociology and psychology of heroism.

This book opens the doors to the homes of the forgotten poor and traces the goods they owned before, during and after the industrial revolution. Using a vast range of sources, it argues that the poor owned greater numbers and varieties of items with each generation and that poverty did not always mean living in squalor.

This illuminating, entertaining book offers philosophical and personal reflections on twinhood and how it can help us imagine the possibility of a more interconnected human future. -- .

Transitional justice in process is the first book that comprehensively studies the Tunisian transitional justice process, covering its initiation, design, and performance.

According to numerous scholars and policymakers, Roma are the most disadvantaged ethnic minority in Europe. But while the predicament of Roma has often been discussed, it is invariably seen as an unfortunate anomaly in otherwise inclusive liberal democratic states. The fringes of citizenship offers a novel socio-legal enquiry into the position of Roma as marginalised citizens, using the perspective of global citizenship studies. It argues that while the Romani minorities in Europe are unique, the forms of civic marginalisation they face are not. States around the globe have applied similar legislation and policies that made traditionally settled minorities marginalised. The book examines topics such as free movement and migration, statelessness and school segregation, as well as how minorities themselves respond to marginalisation. It shows how minorities can have a wide spectrum of 'multicultural rights' and still face racism and significant human rights violations. To understand this paradox, the book offers new theoretical concepts, such as the 'invisible edges' of citizenship and 'citizenship fringes'. The fringes of citizenship will be of interest to students and scholars of citizenship, migration, ethnic and racial studies. It also contains much that will be of value to policymakers dealing with human and minority rights, as well as to general readers eager to understand the position of Roma as citizens.

This book brings a new classroom approach for primary teachers to teach the explicit knowledge of scientific question-asking. This is an essential skill when children are involved in finding out about the world around them through science enquiry. This book challenges the assumption that because children ask lots of questions in science, that this automatically leads to meaningful learning of the enquiry curriculum. QuBuild is important for all children developing as scientific thinkers. It outlines an approach to explicitly plan for, practice and develop the craft of scientific question-asking. Unlock your children's science learning potential exploring the QuBuild Process.

For fifty years Anne Lake Prescott has been a central force in the study of Anglo-French literary relations in the early modern period and her work anticipates recent scholarship on history, religion, and gender. This selection of her essays combines a tight focus on textual and historical particularities with an expansive sense of context--what she calls the "cultural forcefield surrounding and sustaining the poem". The essays connect different fields. They consider the reformation as it affects ideas of poetic vocation and the sense of time, and show how the Biblical David became a model for Renaissance poets and also for slandered courtiers. Several essays deal with Edmund Spenser's epic and his sonnet sequence, and many bring understudied texts to illuminate Donne, Ronsard, the Sidneys and other early modern writers. Three little-known French poems with lesbian speakers illuminate Donne's "Sappho to Philaenis", while the language of ruin in Mary Sidney's psalm translations prepare for her treatment of religious renewal. An introduction by Ayesha Ramachandran, Susan Felch and Susannah Monta places Prescott's work in the context of early modern scholarship. The essays collected here--penetrating, generous and witty--use close reading to illuminate the large cultural issues of the early modern period.

This book calls upon globalisation, queer, cinema, and affect studies to explore key Robert Lepage productions from 1984 to 2008, analysing the systems through which his work is produced and disseminated. -- .

This is the first edition of The Family of Love to be attributed to London playwright and impresario, Lording Barry (1580-1629). Performed by the short lived Children of the King's Revels, this ribald Jacobean comedy indulges coterie playgoers' curiosity about religious separatism in the wake of King James I's damning attack on Familists early in his reign. The Family of Love satirises the religious fellowship of the title but with an undercurrent of sympathy, especially for women. Sophie Tomlinson detaches The Family of Love from its reputations both as Middleton's worst play and as a product of collaborative authorship. Her lively introduction demonstrates Barry's techniques of parody and pastiche, relentless punning and scatological humour which make the play compellingly stageable. Barry's responsiveness to the confined playing space of the Whitefriars theatre and the possibility that the text was censored during printing are among the many reasons why The Family of Love deserves a fresh hearing. The volume includes a short biography of Barry, comprehensive commentary and appendices documenting marginal annotations in one copy of the 1608 quarto together with extracts from contemporary representations of the Family of Love. It will find its audience with students, actors, academics, playwrights and other creatives interested in early modern drama.

Celebrities, heroes and champions explores the role of the popular politician in British and Irish society from the Napoleonic Wars to the Second Reform Act of 1867. Covering movements for parliamentary reform up to and including Chartism, Catholic Emancipation, transatlantic Anti-Slavery and the Anti-Corn Law League, as well as the receptions of international celebrities such as Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi, it offers a unique perspective on the connections between politics and historical cultures of fame and celebrity. This book will interest students and scholars of Britain, Ireland, continental Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, as well as general readers with an interest in the history of popular politics. Its exploration of the relationship between politics and celebrity, and the methods through which public reputations have been promoted and manipulated for political ends, have clear contemporary relevance.

Hyde Park (1632) is one of the best-loved comedies of James Shirley, considered to be one of the most important Caroline dramatists. The play showcases strong female characters who excel at rebuking the outlandish courtship of various suitors. Shirley's comic setting, London's Hyde Park, offers ample opportunity for witty dialogue and sport - including foot and horse races - across three love plots. This is the first critical edition of the play, including a wide-ranging introduction and extensive commentary and textual notes. Paying special attention to the culture of Caroline London and its stage, the Revels Plays edition unpicks Shirley's politics of courtship and consent while also underlining the play's dynamics of class and power. A detailed performance history traces productions from 1632, across the Restoration to the present day, including that of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987. A textual history of the play's first quarto determines how it was printed and what relationship Hyde Park has to other texts by Shirley from the same publishers.

John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid, first staged by the King's Men in 1615, is a fascinating exploration of the performativity of gender and the transformative power of human desire. Based on a Spanish Golden Age comedia, the play is a provocative take on the construction of gender identity in its unusual retelling of the lives of two transgender characters. The play dramatises the story of two siblings, Clara and Lucio, who have been brought up as members of their opposite genders. Clara has lived with their father as a male soldier in Flanders, while the mother has educated Lucio at home as a lady. After twenty years apart, their family is reunited and they are ordered to switch around their genders. The play explores the struggle they face within the fiercely heteronormative society of early modern Seville. The aftermath of the brutal siege of Ostend, and the bitter family feud between the siblings' domineering father, Álvarez, and his mortal enemy, the young Vitelli, serve as tragicomic backdrop for their difficult re-education and add flavour to this superbly performable play. This Revels Plays volume is the first fully annotated critical edition of the play ever to be published. It provides a modernised text and thorough commentary that clarifies the play's language and cultural references. The introduction sheds new light on the play's engagement with its Spanish sources and it discusses the dating, authorship, and literary and theatrical reception of this hidden jewel of Jacobean drama.

The Carolingian period (c. 750-900) has traditionally been described as one of 'reform' or 'renaissance', where cultural and intellectual changes were imposed from above in a programme of correctio. This view leans heavily on prescriptive texts issued by kings and their entourages, foregrounding royal initiative and the cultural products of a small intellectual elite. However, attention to understudied texts and manuscripts of the period reveals a vibrant striving for moral improvement and positive change at all levels of society. This expressed itself in a variety of ways for different individuals and communities, whose personal relationships could be just as influential as top-down prescription. The often anonymous creators and copyists in a huge range of centres emerge as active participants in shaping and re-shaping the ideals of their world. A much more dynamic picture of Carolingian culture emerges when we widen our perspective to include sources from beyond royal circles and intellectual elites. This book reveals that the Carolingian age did not witness a coherent programme of reform, nor one distinct to this period and dependent exclusively on the strength of royal power. Rather, it formed a particularly intense, well-funded and creative chapter in the much longer history of moral improvement for the sake of collective salvation.

Bestsellers and masterpieces investigates the strange fact that many of the texts we now study and teach as the most canonical representations of European and Middle Eastern medieval writing were, in fact, not popular - or even read at all - in their day. On the other hand, those texts that were popular, as evidenced by the extant manuscript record, are taught and studied with far less frequency. The most dramatic demonstration of this disparity can be found in the surprising number of medieval texts now regarded as 'masterpieces' that have survived in just one single copy, in an unicum manuscript. On the European side this list includes Beowulf, El Poema de mio Cid and others; similarly canonical Arabo-Mediterranean examples include Ibn Hazm's Tawq al-Hamama (The Neck-Ring of the Dove) and Usama ibn Munqidh's Kitab al-I'tibar (Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh). While respecting the complicated history of each, contributors explore the processes that have contributed to the rise or eclipse of these canonical or neglected texts. Bestsellers and masterpieces provides cross-cultural insight into both the literary tastes of the medieval period and the cultural and political forces behind the creation of the 'modern canon' of medieval literature.

Riddles at work assembles multiple scholarly voices to explore the vibrant, poetic riddle tradition of early medieval England and its neighbours. The chapters 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. Following the introduction, which situates the book in its scholarly context, Part I (Words) presents philological approaches to early medieval riddles - interpretations rooted in close readings of texts - since riddles work by making readers question what words really mean. However, while reading carefully may lead to elegant solutions, such solutions are not the end of the riddling game. Part II (Ideas) therefore explores how riddles work to make readers think anew about objects, relationships, and experiences, using literary theory to facilitate new approaches. Part III (Interactions) then looks at how riddles work through connections with other fields, languages, times, and places. Together, the chapters reveal that there is no single, right way to read these texts but rather a multitude of productive paths - some explored here, some awaiting future work. Riddles at work will appeal to students and scholars of early medieval studies. It features a mixture of new and established voices, including Jonathan Wilcox, Mercedes Salvador-Bello, and Jennifer Neville.

Representing the first in-depth qualitative study of how social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are used to mediate contentious public parades and protests in Northern Ireland, this book explores the implications of mis-and dis-information spread via online platforms for peacebuilding in societies transitioning out of conflict. -- .

Intimacy and injury maps the travels of the global #MeToo movement in India and South Africa. Both countries have shared the infamy of being labelled the world's 'rape capitals', with high levels of everyday gender-based and sexual violence. At the same time, both boast long histories of resisting such violence and its location in wider cultures of patriarchy, settler colonialism and class and caste privilege. Voices and experiences from the global north have dominated debates on #MeToo which, although originating in the US, had considerable traction elsewhere, including in the global south. In India, #MeToo revitalised longstanding feminist struggles around sexual violence, offering new tactics and repertoires. In South Africa, it drew on new cultures of opposing sexual violence that developed online and in student protests. There were also marked differences in the ways in which #MeToo travelled in both countries, pointing to older histories of power, powerlessness and resistance. Through the lens of the #MeToo moment, the book tracks histories of feminist organising in both countries, while also revealing how newer strategies extended or limited these struggles. Intimacy and injury is a timely mapping of a shifting political field around gender-based violence in the global south. In proposing comparative, interdisciplinary, ethnographically rich and analytically astute reflections on #MeToo, it provides new and potentially transformative directions to scholarly debates that are rarely brought into conversation with one another. With contributors located exclusively in South Africa and India, this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.

Knowing COVID-19 shows how COVID-19 moved from being a mysterious and frightening novel infectious disease to something that was subject to an enormous amount of knowledge production. This volume focuses specifically on the role of humanities research within this vast epistemological engine. Across eight empirical chapters, the volumes traces the role of researchers in the humanities as they brought their expertise to bear on vital unknown questions in and around the pandemic. These included: how to make at-home diagnostic tests understandable; how to communicate the risks of public transport without stigmatising people who use that transport; what problems a suddenly touch-free world would create for deafblind people; what forms of racism and racialized experience were likely to be worsened by the pandemic; and how workers in places like museums were going to be able to deal with sudden closures and furlough schemes. Across eight chapters, the volume shows how humanities research does not simply comprise a set of tools for interpretation and meaning, to be applied when a crisis has safely passed; rather it shows how collaborative, experimental, and risky humanities research has been vital to actually resolving - and living through - the COVID-19 crisis.

European cities: Modernity, race and colonialism is a multidisciplinary collection of scholarly studies which rethink European urban modernity from a race-conscious perspective, being aware of (post-)colonial entanglements. The twelve original contributions empirically focus on such various cities as Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Cottbus, Genoa, Hamburg, Madrid, Mitrovica, Naples, Paris, Sheffield, and Thessaloniki, engaging multiple combinations of global urban studies, from various historical perspectives, with postcolonial, decolonial and critical race studies. Primarily inspired by the notion of Provincializing Europe (Dipesh Chakrabarty) the collection interrogates dominant, Eurocentric theories, representations and models of European cities across the East-West divide, offering the reader alternative perspectives to understand and imagine urban life and politics. With its focus on Europe, this book ultimately contributes to decades of rigorous critical race scholarship on varied global urban regions. European cities is a vital reading for anyone interested in the complex interactions between colonial legacies and constructions of 'modernity', in view of catering to social change and urban justice.

A range of European filmmakers in the 1970s sought ways of making commercially minded films that explored some of the key political questions of the 1970s. This HOME film dossier revisits them in short, accessible pieces that will inspire those who are new to them to seek them out, and those who remember have seen them before to rush to see them again. With street-fighting, political conspiracies and violent acts of terror taking place across the continent, the 1970s was a period of great social upheaval in Europe. Taking an accessible approach, this HOME film dossier gathers a range of contributors to revisit some of the key political thrillers that explored these issues on screen. Often marginalised in the writing about political cinema, this dossier offers an engagement with some of the films that were box-office successes, bringing politics to commercial cinema audiences. Taking examples from across Europe, States of danger and deceit offers insights into a range of films that contributed to some of the key debates of the era. Running throughout is a concern with the idea of what constitutes a political cinema that would be seen by audiences. This fact brought criticism from some parts of the film community whilst others championed the likes of Costa-Gavras, Francesco Rosi and Elio Petri as some of the most significant filmmakers of the time. States of danger and deceit brings back into focus some of the best and most influential, politically motived films made during one of Europe's most turbulent decades.

Based on an ethnographic study on the Andean Tri-border (between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia), this volume addresses the experience of Aymara cross-border women from Bolivia employed in the rural valleys on the outskirts of Arica (Chile's northernmost city). As protagonists of transborder mobility circuits in the Atacama Desert, these women are intersectionally impacted by different forms of social vulnerability. With a feminist anthropological perspective, the book investigates how the boundaries of gender are constructed in the (multi)situated experience of these transborder women. By building a bridge between classical anthropological studies on kinship and contemporary debates on transnational and transborder mobility, the book invites us to rethink structuralist theoretical assertions on the elementary character of family alliances. The women's life histories and the ethnographic data analyzed show that the limits of gender are configured as a triad between gender violence, kinship restrictions, and female mobility for the study's protagonists. This contributes to denaturalizing both the androcentrism of the classic arguments on kinship and the emphasis on the experiences of circulation of contemporary theories. Consequently, this book also contributes to the field of border studies by overcoming the insistent invisibility of the role of women in border regions through a model of analysis that privileges female discourses, experiences, affections, and practices. The book's focus on the reproductive tasks performed by the women allows a rethinking of the relationship between gender violence and female care as a key element to the survival of indigenous groups in border areas.

This groundbreaking book explores key methods for investigating emotions in medieval literary texts, proposing innovative approaches, drawing upon psychological theory, 'history of emotions' research and close critical reading, to uncover the emotional repertoire in play in English literary culture between 1200-1500. The extensive introduction lays out medieval philosophical and physiological theorisations of emotion, closely bound up with cognitive processes. Following chapters investigate the changing lexis for emotion in Middle English, examining how translations from French affect the ways in which feelings are imagined. Bodily affect, both involuntary displays and deliberate gesture, is discussed in detail. Performativity - getting things done with emotions - and performance are shown to become interlinked as more sophisticated models of selfhood emerge. Concepts of interiority and the public persona, the self and self-presentation complicate the changing modes through which feeling is expressed. Literary texts are pre-eminently devices for producing emotion of various kinds; the book proposes ways of tracing how authors built techniques for eliciting emotions into their narratives and their effects on their audiences. By the end of the medieval period two vital developments had expanded the possibility for varied and complex emotional expression in texts: the development of the long-form romance, encouraged by the advent of printing, and the concept of auto-fiction: new possibilities emerged for authors to write the emotional self. Through its comprehensive account of emotions in the medieval period, Approaches to emotion explores how literary texts educated and informed their audiences about changing ways to be human in medieval England.