Books published by Manchester University Press

This book explores rural societies in western Europe from 700-1050. It focuses on the bottom of the social hierarchy, rejectingviews that see rural society exclusively through the structures of lordship and challenging the teleological idea of the residential group as the prototype of the late-medieval structured community. -- .

This book is an accessible history of internal exile's origins and practices under Fascism and of its representation in film, literature and memoir. -- .

As museums across Europe reckon with the post-colonial legacies of their collections, this volume combines approaches from material anthropology, imperial and military history to shed light on the acquisition and appropriation of objects during British colonial warfare. The authors offer a nuanced view of how the amassing of objects was governed and understood within military culture. -- .

This volume updates current assumptions about the early modern English sonnet and its reception and inclusion in poetic collections. It deals both with major (Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser) and minor (Harvey, Barnes) sonneteers, and includes the first modern edition of a 1603 printed miscellany, The Muses Garland. -- .

From around 1850, London's street markets grew in number and scale, giving working-class Londoners a site for shopping, entertainment and sociability. Cheap Street is the first major study of this subject, analysing the street markets as a component of London's lively informal economy, and providing new insights into urban and consumer geographies. -- .

This collection focuses on the way the legacies of empire, race and colonialism persist in the present: from the early days of settler colonialism to contemporary extractive industries, from direct colonial rule to racist border regimes. -- .

Civil defence was the most significant voluntary organisation of the Second World War. It involved men and women of every class, generation and locality in Britain. This book examines how civil defence personnel developed local workplace communities, engaged with ideas about civil duty, and helped to create the myth of the 'people's war'. -- .

Home economics provides an innovative, comparative history of domestic service in southern Africa's post-colonial cities. Foregrounding labour relations in black households and the women and girl workers who predominated in these spaces, it provides new insights into the nature of gender, work and urban economies across the region. -- .

This book excavates forgotten histories of solidarity which were vital to radical political imagination during the long sixties. It decentres the conventional Western loci of this critical historical moment by instead foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. -- .

Global biographies offers a thorough historiographical intervention, a new set of biographical approaches to global history - 'time and periodization', 'exceptional normal' and 'space and scales' - and a broad and critically reflective set of case-studies spanning the globe. -- .

This book follows the afterlives of empire from 1945 to present day, providing an interdisciplinary analysis of how the legacy of empire continues to shape the cultures, politics, spaces and memories of contemporary Britain. The essays it contains illustrate this with reference to a series of local histories, individual texts and institutions. -- .

Challenging the subject's current interpretation, this microhistorical study traces the social and civic dynamics of the French Revolution's religious politics within five small towns. -- .

European cities: Modernity, race and colonialism is a collection of empirical and theoretical scholarly analyses of multiple urban processes across the East-West European divide, inviting the reader to reimagine urban Europe from non-Eurocentric perspectives, and to engage active thought and thoughtful action. -- .

his cutting-edge edited collection provides a novel terrain for rethinking intimacies through the lens of affect theories. -- .

This collection develops the field of ice humanities in order to reveal the centrality of ice and the need to understand better why, where, and how it matters to human and more than human life. -- .

F.G. Bailey's contributions to anthropological theory and method are illuminated in this edited volume. Chapters variously present, apply, and trace the origins of Bailey's seminal ideas regarding power's place in the relationship between agency and structure, and the way that people tactically deploy emotions and cultural norms for personal gain. -- .

Cold, hard steel anatomises the surgical stereotype in modern and contemporary Britain. It offers a new social, cultural and emotional history of this specialty, explores the development of its professional identity and foregrounds experiences of surgeons at work. -- .

The chapters of Painful pleasures offer new and worthwhile pathways of examination into medieval culture and invite further analyses into the kinkier side of human sexualities, a side that in fact could not be more central to a study of our culture. -- .

This edited collection showcases exciting new work on lesser-known histories of HIV/AIDS, from the earliest days of the crisis to the present day. Focusing on regions of western Europe, it offers new perspectives on the development and implementation of policy, the nature of activism and expertise and which (or whose) histories are remembered. -- .

This book argues that the interwar classroom shaped twentieth-century Britain. It recreates and analyses life in London's elementary schools in the 1920s and 1930s, building a mosaic of the educational experience. It argues that schools were grounded in their local communities and should be seen as key drivers of social change. -- .

This is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Fletcher and Massinger's The False One, with an introduction that offers new insights on the date and the theatre of the play's first performance, freshly examines its sources and explores the theatrical potential of a play that has hitherto been lost to the dramatic repertory. -- .

Medieval literary voices explores literary voice in relation to its authorial, scribal and socio-political settings. It reveals how literary voices evoke voices lurking beyond the text - the absent authorial voice, the traces of scribal voices and the aural soundscape of the uttered text - and how they mediate embodied life and material presence. -- .

Drawing on Strummer's lyrics, interviews and bootleg recordings, as well as interviews with friends and contemporaries like Billy Bragg, The punk rock politics of Joe Strummer reveals the wide-ranging political influence of one of the twentieth century's iconic rock'n'roll rebels. -- .

This original book explores the thinking behind Brown's murals in Manchester Town Hall. It argues that Brown was the most innovative artist in Victorian Britain and that he used this public commission to contest the liberal model of British history favoured by the Manchester Corporation. -- .

Drawing on an extensive range of sources, from newspapers and institutional records to oral histories and autobiography, Dangerous amusements explores the beginnings of a distinct youth culture in the streets and neighbourhood spaces of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. -- .

Researching urban space and the built environment is a unique and accessible guide to the planning, researching and writing of spatial histories. -- .

How and why do stereotypes continue affect public life and shape individual experience? This book tackles this question through case studies drawn from early modern England, a society shaken by divisive identity politics and increasingly commercial media. The book ends by exploring implications these case studies for the twenty-first century. -- .

This pioneering set of essays explores the key motifs and themes in the works of the Irish novelist, Deirdre Madden, about the Northern Irish Troubles and their aftermath and changing social values in contemporary Ireland. -- .

Jason Statham is Britain¿s most important post-millennial male film star. This book examines his work throughout a career encompassing film, television, music videos, multi-media platforms and video gaming.

Can reading make us better citizens? Fusing queer theory, citizenship studies, and border studies in its exploration of seven U.S., Canadian, and Indigenous authors, poets, and performance artists, Crossing borders and queering citizenship theorises how reading can work as a empowering tool in contemporary civic struggles in the North America. -- .