Books published by Manchester University Press

A person who is not recognised as a citizen anywhere is typically referred to as 'stateless'. Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship redirects focus away from legal analyses of statelessness to uncover a more fundamental 'problem of citizenship', and interrogates how citizenship is used as a governance tool around the world.

With original case studies of a more than a dozen countries, Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia offers new perspectives on how both European monarchs who reigned over Asian colonies and Asian royal houses adapted to decolonisation. As colonies became independent states (and European countries, and other colonial powers, lost their overseas empires), monarchies faced the challenges of decolonisation, republicanism and radicalism. These studies place dynasties - both European and 'native' - at the centre of debate about decolonisation and the form of government of new states, from the sovereigns of Britain, the Netherlands and Japan to the maharajas of India, the sultans of the East Indies and the 'white rajahs' of Sarawak. It provides new understanding of the history of decolonisation and of the history of modern monarchy.

Transplantation is a boundary practice unsettling distinctions between self and other, life and death. This book identifies a Gothic mode in representations of the practice in literature, film and science from the nineteenth century to the present, considering hybrid bodies and precarious lives under neoliberal late capitalism. -- .

This collection explores the presence within television of the epic and the everyday, with reference to a range of fictional television programming, including episodic series and serial dramas, sitcoms, science-fiction, spy dramas, children's TV and detective shows.

Questioning what the term 'Chinese art' means in the era of global art, this book situates Chinese contemporary art in the matrix of global expositions and political transnationalisms. Its case studies explore the changing political concept of Chineseness by examining performative, body-oriented video and eco-feminist works. -- .

The collection brings together theoretical discussions and rigorous empirical analysis by key scholars in order to move Urban Political Ecology into current debates about urbanization and climate change.

This book develops a novel framework for studying relational peace and applies it to several empirical cases. It contributes to a more nuanced understanding of peace, beyond the absence of war, by recognising peace as a web of multiple interactions across time, space and levels of analysis.

This book analyses the normative avoidance of cyber-espionage, arguing that it is neither prohibited nor authorised by international law. This situation did not emerge by chance but through the purposeful silence of States, leaving them free to pursue cyber-espionage themselves at the same time as they both try to prevent and fall victim to it.

How do pictures tell stories? This ground-breaking book analyses visual narrative in nineteenth-century history and genre paintings across Europe. It reveals how artists constructed plots via objects, managing the tension between narrative and style and prompting viewers to weave their own tales.

Water struggles as resistance to neoliberal capitalism is an important intervention into social reproduction theory and eco-socialist debates. It provides a timely analysis of the role of expropriation in the current global water crisis and makes a persuasive argument for understanding class as an emergent process constituted through struggle.

This book addresses the vexed status of literary value, focusing on everyday scholarly and pedagogical activities, using Chaucer studies as a case in point. It explores how we may reconcile literary value's inevitability with its uncertainties and complicities, seeking to forge a viable rationale for literary studies generally.

This book examines the preaching and printing of sermons by royalists during the English Revolution. It shows how and why preaching became an indispensable tool for those who sought to resist the seismic changes in Church and state that England experienced between 1640 and 1662.

Imperial steam explores the early history of a steamship route which was at the heart of the functioning of the British Empire. More so than the practical changes wrought by steam, the book argues that the modernity associated with the steamship provided a powerful imaginative frame of reference for narrating Britain's place in its imperial world.

The comparative ethnography of young airtime sellers in Abidjan and delivery riders in Berlin analyses experiences of precarity for young men in the urban digital economy. It points to the relevance of symbolic capital in relational mechanisms of closure, domination and exploitation for making a living in globalised precarity.

Based on award-winning research, Love and revolution brings classical and contemporary anarchist thought into a mutually beneficial dialogue with a global cross-section of ecological, anti-capitalist, feminist and anti-racist activists - discussing real-life examples of the loving-caring relations that underpin many contemporary struggles. Such a (r)evolutionary love is revealed to be a common embodied experience among the activists contributing to this collective vision, manifested as a radical solidarity, as political direct action, as long-term processes of struggle, and as a deeply relational more-than-human ethics. The theory developed in this book is brought to life through the voices of Tom at the G20 protests in Toronto, Maria and her permaculture community in Mexico, Hassan on the streets in Syria, Angelo and his comrades occupying squares in Brazil, Dembe and his affinity group in Kampala, and many more. Love and revolution provides an essential resource for all those interested in building a free society grounded in solidarity and care, and offers a timely contribution to contemporary movement discourse.

This is the first book to focus on women illustrators in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It features critical essays by an international group of scholars on fourteen women illustrators from Britain, Canada and the United States.

Blending theatre history and sensory studies this book recaptures the sound of early modern drama, acknowledging its intangibility while attempting to both describe those sounds heard on the stage and to try and identify those sound's effects on the playgoers.

This book brings leading historians of South Africa together to consider new methodological and theoretical approaches within the field.

Charting the decline and recent resurgence of the landed gentry in British public life, The fall and rise of the English upper class explores how traditionalist worldviews, centred on kinship, inheritance, and the image of the house, have come to shape our politics and culture.

This book documents the lives and historical pursuits of the generations in Australia, Britain and Germany who grew up in the shadow of the First World War. Although they were not direct witnesses to the conflict, through the intimate experience of coming after, they have played a key role in shaping the memory of the First World War since 1918

How does our perception of time shape our political ideas and commitments? This cutting-edge monograph makes a major contribution to the history of time by exploring how thinkers and activists of the French radical left and right conceived of the past, present and future in the period between the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War.

Newly commissioned essays from world-leading Kazuo Ishiguro scholars with chapters on the novels (including the first publication on Klara and the Sun (2021)), short fictions, and screenplays, this book offers a critical reappraisal of the 2017 Nobel Laureate while also uncovering important new thematic and stylistic insights

This is the first edited collection on Hari Kunzru. With new individual essays on each of Kunzru's novels as well as his short fiction and creative non-fiction, the book situates his writing within current debates on contemporary literature, and in relation to key historical events such as Brexit, the election of Trump, and the Covid-19 pandemic.