Join thousands of book lovers
Sign up to our newsletter and receive discounts and inspiration for your next reading experience.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.You can, at any time, unsubscribe from our newsletters.
Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval 1847-1890), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century, focusing on new types of cultural work by women and establishing Duval as a unique but exemplary figure in a transformational period of the nineteenth century. -- .
Every Siddal poem is close read alongside works by Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin, Tennyson and Keats and with reference to prevailing cultural, political and religious contexts to give the most comprehensive analysis yet of this enigmatic, previously undervalued poetic voice. -- .
Birth controlled analyses the world of selective reproduction - the politics of who gets to legitimately reproduce the future - through a cross-cultural analysis of three modes of 'controlling' birth: contraception, reproductive violence and repro-genetic technologies. It argues that as fertility rates decline worldwide, the fervour to control fertility, and fertile bodies, does not dissipate; what evolves is the preferred mode of control. Although new technologies like those that assist conception or allow genetic selection may appear to be an antithesis of other violent versions of population control, this book demonstrates that both are part of the same continuum. All population control policies target and vilify women (Black women in particular), and coerce them into subjecting their bodies to state and medical surveillance; Birth controlled argues that assisted reproductive technologies and repro-genetic technologies employ a similar and stratified burden of blame and responsibility based on gender, race, class and caste. To empirically and historically ground the analysis, the book includes contributions from two postcolonial nations, South Africa and India, examining interactions between the history of colonialism and the economics of neoliberal markets and their influence on the technologies and politics of selective reproduction. The book provides a critical, interdisciplinary and cutting-edge dialogue around the interconnected issues that shape reproductive politics in an ostensibly 'post-population control' era. The contributions draw on a breadth of disciplines ranging from gender studies, sociology, medical anthropology, politics and science and technology studies to theology, public health and epidemiology, facilitating an interdisciplinary dialogue around the interconnected modes of controlling birth and practices of neo-eugenics.
This volume sheds fresh light on Irish courts and court culture in the age of the European Renaissance. It contains chapters written by historians and literary scholars working with English, Irish and Latin sources. It is divided into three thematic and roughly chronological sections. The first, 'Indigenous court society in Ireland', considers the European aspects of Gaelic and Gaelicized aristocratic courts prior to the revolutionary religious and political changes instituted by Henry VIII. Looking back as far as the mid-fifteenth century, it demonstrates how Irish elite society was developing in ways similar to those found in England and on the continent. Part II, 'Made in Whitehall: Irish policy and a regnal court', argues that London, rather than viceregal Dublin, must be seen as the center for policy making in the new kingdom of Ireland. How that policy was created, debated, and implemented - or not - is surveyed from both English and Irish viewpoints. The third and concluding section, 'Positioning Ireland in the Renaissance court world', sets Irish élite culture within the broader dynamics of the late Renaissance. Its chapters reveal some of the ways in which Irish people, both at home and abroad, participated in an emergent, multi-lingual republic of letters and transnational intellectual community. Ireland and the Renaissance court is an essential guide to the European aspects of Irish high politics and society and, conversely, the Irish and Gaelic elements of the Renaissance world.
Readers and mistresses: Kept women in Victorian literature addresses the question of what to do when someone is invisible in both official documents and literature. Readers and mistresses studies the women who cannot be found in marriage registries, censuses, or much of mainstream, nineteenth-century British literature. Instead of considering kept mistresses as embodying one stage on the way to certain sex work and death, Peel uses the term 'kept woman' to unite women in a variety of kinds of keeping relationships, including some perceived as quite positive. In doing so, she offers a way to read that removes the stigma of the sexual, and appreciates the decisions of kept women as survival choices in a time and culture that actively disprivileges them. Using recent scholarship in empathy and carework, Peel takes a queer approach to Victorian narrative and encourages an active readership. Ultimately, this queer reading offers a path of reader engagement that centers the often illegible experience of kept women, and renders readers themselves the keepers of these women's narratives. Authors included in this study are, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Gissing. This book offers a way to read old material with new eyes and a social justice ethic.
Delving into the intricate web of clinical research and psychotropic drugs, On Trial illuminates the captivating story of psychiatrist Roland Kuhn. Long celebrated as the discoverer of the first antidepressant Tofranil, more recently he has become the subject of controversy after patients exposed his extensive drug testing on unwitting subjects at the Münsterlingen Psychiatric Clinic in Switzerland. But is it fair to condemn him according to today's ethical standards, which themselves emerged from the research practices of his time?Drawing on Kuhn's extensive, newly accessible private archive, the book explores the early era of industry-sponsored clinical research in psychiatry. It unravels the interplay between the clinic, patients, physicians, nurses, corporations, and authorities, examining the forces that converged during the experiments.Spanning the decades from the 1940s to the 1980s, the Münsterlingen drug trials are meticulously situated within the evolving landscape of medical experimentation. Which people and institutions were involved, and who knew what? How were substances tested, which patients were affected? According to which patterns were the drugs administered? When did which values, guidelines, and standards apply, and what role did they play in practice?On Trial not only reconstructs the Münsterlingen drug tests but also weaves them into a broader tapestry about the historical development of clinical trials. This thought-provoking exploration enriches our understanding of the psychopharmaceutical journey while challenging us to consider the enduring ethical dilemmas that underpin medical research.
How robust are children's rights in a highly interdependent world? How have these cherished rights fared in the face of adversity, and what has driven these pressing challenges?In 1989, the United Nations General Assembly unveiled the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), receiving endorsement from 196 states worldwide--every UN member except the United States. This pivotal moment raised expectations of an era where children's rights would hold sway. The lofty ideals of human rights and the sanctity of children's dignity resound in policy documents, but on the ground, a complex range of challenges unfolds. The interplay of global governance structures, national strategies, and local factors creates a landscape where children's rights often teeter on the precipice. Considering more than three decades since the CRC's inception, this book comprehensively explores a wide range of contemporary crises, raising crucial questions about the effectiveness of international commitments in children's rights. Unlike conventional human rights scholarship, this book spotlights often-neglected crises, unveiling the blind spots in scholarly and policy dialogues. It champions a global perspective, recognizing the profound influence of global and transnational forces. The book's accomplished contributors, hailing from various academic disciplines including international relations, law, education, political science, and public policy, collectively enrich this examination with diverse perspectives. Their multidisciplinary expertise enables the readers to gain deeper insights into complex global issues, transcending conventional boundaries and fostering a holistic understanding.
An important interdisciplinary collaboration that contextualises how Brexit has changed citizens' rights and presents the experiences of Brexit in the UK, EU and beyond. The authors contributing to the project come from different disciplines, including sociology, law, anthropology and political sciences. The book analyses citizenship and migration policies and how Brexit has changed the rights of British, EU and third-country nationals. Further, it locates such policy changes within the longer histories of British and EU migration policies. This highlights how Brexit was not an isolated event, but rather has found place within wider trends of restriction of citizenship rights on both sides of the Channel. Through different ethnographic and cultural studies, the book presents the experiences of British and EU nationals in the UK, Belgium and Spain. It discusses issues of citizenship and naturalisation, belonging, conviviality and hostility, families, risk and political mobilisation, to show the wide-ranging consequences of Brexit. By triangulating different experiences and perspectives, it shows how Brexit involves a loss of formal rights (and attempts to contain them). At the same time, it shows how Brexit involves wider issues of transformation of British and EU societies, and questions of who and how is accepted in such societies. Taken together, the analyses of the book aim to put at the centre the citizens impact by Brexit and to show the long-term consequences of the Brexit process. A wide-ranging analysis that allows to understand the ramifications of Brexit in the future of the UK and the EU.
Relics, dreams, voyages conjures a new cultural map of the early-modern world. Its main theme is centre and periphery, and many exiles are celebrated here: Jacobites and recusant Catholics; wandering Gaelic scholars; mercenary soldiers in Moravia and Slovenia; art dealers in c18 Rome. This book also considers centres of baroque culture outside the mainstream: exiled English Catholic Colleges in Flanders and Spain; a remote symbolic garden in rural Scotland; architectural fantasies from an isolated circle at Birr in the midlands of Ireland. It meditates on cultural transmission from Asia and the Americas to Europe: one test case is the painter Rubens, his circle of Antwerp Jesuits, and what they learned from the New Worlds. Many of the essays consider the secretive cultures of exiled or persecuted British Roman Catholics, including the pseudo-relics constructed in Antwerp for the posthumous cult of Mary Queen of Scots, and the triumphal procession of a vandalised statue at the exiled English College in Valladolid. The visual arts are examined across a wide temporal and geographical span, and many subversive iconographies are decoded: at the French and English courts, in remote Scotland, in Nagasaki, in Valladolid. Drawing on original research in libraries, collections, and archives in five countries, and in as many languages, this book draws many astonishing, unfamiliar and beautiful texts, things and events, into a cartography of the subtle, sometimes secret patterns of baroque culture worldwide. This books offers a new, extraordinary cultural geography of the baroque world, opening doors to many rich and strange cultural artefacts, from "China to Peru."
John Polidori is the least regarded figure in the history of literary vampirism and yet his novella The Vampyre (1819) is perhaps 'the most influential horror story of all time' (Frayling). Polidori's story transformed the shambling, mindless monster of folklore into a sophisticated, seductive aristocrat that stalked London society rather than being confined to the hinterlands of Eastern Europe. Polidori's Lord Ruthven was thus the ancestor of the vampire as we know it. This collection is a first book-length critical study that explores the genesis of Polidori's vampire. It tracks his bloodsucking progeny across the centuries and maps his disquieting legacy from the melodramatic vampire theatricals in the 1820s, through further Gothic fictions and horror films, to twenty-first-century paranormal romance. It includes a critique of the fascinating and little-known The Black Vampyre (1819) - a text inspired by Polidori and the first Black vampire in fiction. Leading and emerging scholars of the vampire and Gothic provide innovative analyses of the variations on monstrosity and deadly allure spawned by Polidori's revenant. The collection advances from the ground-breaking research of Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day and the first special issue of Gothic Studies devoted to vampires. Appended is an annotated edition of the text of The Vampyre and supplementary material.Polidori died a suspected suicide aged 25; he has been sorely neglected. This stimulating collection makes a coherent case for the importance of John Polidori's tale and redeeming 'poor Polidori'.
Based on the findings of a 15-month research project led by the Centre for Cultural Value, this significant new book offers a comprehensive overview of the impacts of Covid-19 on the UK's cultural sector and highlights implications for its future direction.The book provides a summary of the local, regional and national policy responses to the crisis. It offers a rigorous statistical analysis of the impacts of these policy responses and of the pandemic itself on the cultural workforce across the UK and a mixed-methods analysis of audiences' responses to the pandemic. These insights are nuanced and illustrated via detailed case studies of a number of key sub-sectors of the cultural industries (theatre, museums and galleries, screen industries, libraries and festivals) and via an ecosystem analysis of the Greater Manchester city-region. The book identifies and critically reflects on the core, recurrent themes that have emerged from the research and highlights the implications for cultural practitioners, organisations, funders and policymakers as we move into the endemic stage of Covid-19. It advocates for a more equitable and regenerative cultural sector, where freelancers and marginalised cultural workers and audiences are valued and included, and for a more engaged and collaborative approach to cultural sector research to enable to sector to know itself better and adapt to rapid change.
Exhibiting Irishness traces constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays between the 1850s and 1960s. Exhibitions were a global phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As sources of entertainment and education, they were enmeshed in the politics of nationalism, trade and tourism. The book explores how the politics of display influences the production of Irish identity according to a host of contexts. It considers how the practices of display were shaped by issues of funding, organisers' motives, and the larger purpose of the event itself. This in turn fed back into Irish understandings of themselves politically, economically, socially or culturally. The chapters examine exhibitions in Ireland, the British Empire and the United States. As a valuable contribution to scholarship, each exhibition is placed in the wider political, economic and cultural locale of its time. By thinking transnationally, the book explores how Irishness worked itself out through gender, capitalism and race in a larger network of empire and whiteness from the 1850s to the 1960s. A saleable Irishness emerged in historic exhibits and are now the product of a lucrative global phenomena of Irish culture. Tourism today offers the Irish landscape, the Irish people, and Irish products. Exhibiting Irishness tells the story of how an international Irish identity has always been about selling Irishness - an Irish identity always on sale.
Public Information Films were one of the responses by the British Government to the communication challenges of a mass electorate. This book explores its somewhat tortuous progress in the 1930s and 1940s by examining the Government's own attempts at filmmaking through the film units of the Empire Marketing Board, the General Post Office and, eventually the Ministry of Information's Crown Film Unit. These Units enabled many who regarded themselves as documentarists to develop their skills and techniques over the course of two decades. Whilst acknowledging that Grierson, Jennings and others made significant contributions to the Public Information Film this book takes a slightly different perspective. Its focus is upon the entire film catalogue produced by the Government Film Units from 1930 to 1952 rather than the personalities. From this perspective it is possible to identify significant themes in the films and consider whether they addressed the demands of their sponsors or reflected more widespread national concerns and anxieties. To achieve that the impact of these films is further explored by assessing their reception amongst contemporary audiences. The overall success of the film units was such that they developed a template for Public Information Film production which was used until the 1970s. The book makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Government communication by film and its responses to the issues facing the British public in the 1930s and 1940s.
This is the first English translation of Hariulf's History of St Riquier, which describes the history of an important monastic community in northern France from its foundation in the seventh century until the closing years of the eleventh century. Writing in a period of intense religious and political change, Hariulf presents the history of his house as he would like it remembered, as a source of social and political stability and a centre of monastic excellence. Under the protection of its founder and patron, Richer, whose miracles recur throughout the history, Hariulf portrays his brothers in religion at work and worship. He recounts the support the community received from the emperor Charlemagne in building the great monastic church and his work is important for the description of the treasures, both material and spiritual, accumulated by the monks. In his pages we see the creation of a great monastic estate, the problems of maintaining it and the complexities of its management as experienced by a succession of abbots. The seizure in the tenth century of the relics of the community's patron and their recovery during the many conflicts that took place as the Carolingian empire collapsed reveal the political as well as the religious importance of relics. Hariulf's is a long and sweeping narrative with a cast of many characters; this new translation offers the opportunity to consider the work as an exercise in the writing of history, the creation and representation of the past, and how a community's history might be presented to foster a communal identity in a changed and changing society.
Courteous Exchanges demonstrates the importance of courtesy as a discourse shaping reader and audience experiences in the English Renaissance. It focuses on significant correspondences between the works of Spenser and Shakespeare, but it also considers how Castiglione's Book of the Courtier provided these two authors with a rich mine of concepts and vocabulary and a predecessor in the art of encouraging reader engagement in these terms of analysis.Wareh analyses Love's Labour's Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter's Tale in tandem with The Faerie Queene, examining how such topics as education, gender, religion, race, and aristocratic identity are offered up to reader and audience interpretation. She suggests that Renaissance audiences and readers, through the reflections and responses provoked by this process, were led into a recognition of their overlapping roles as judges of texts and people. The habits of thought they thus developed supported a critical evaluation of the cultural fiction of inherited gentility and the social performance of courtesy that supports it. The works of Spenser and Shakespeare contributed to the social construction of Renaissance aristocratic identity, but they also provided tools for its critique.
What should we do with heritage damaged in conflict? Instead of succumbing to the tempting response of 'reconstruct it, just as it was!', British Iraqi archaeologist, Dr Zena Kamash, invites readers to think first and foremost about what might be most beneficial to the local communities of Syria and Iraq.Charting a path through the colonial histories of, and into the trauma of war in, Syria and Iraq, this book examines the projects and responses currently on offer and explores their flaws and limitations, including issues of digital colonialism, technological solutionism, geopolitical manoeuvring, media bias and community exclusion. By drawing on current research into the psychology and neuroscience of trauma and trauma recovery, as well as inspiration from artists and creative thinkers who challenge the status quo, readers are encouraged to reflect on how we might use heritage to promote healing and wellbeing for Syrian and Iraqi communities. In so doing, this book asks us to envisage gentler, ethically-driven ways to respond to heritage damaged in conflict that recentres people, and their hopes, dreams and needs, into the heart of these debates.
This book systematically explores how the politics of memory impacts peace in societies transitioning from a violent past. The book argues that the quality of peace is affected by the entanglement of memories. It develops an original theoretical framework that connects sites, agency, narratives, and events in memory politics. Memorials, monuments, and museums are sites that demonstrate the materiality of memory, agents drive memory politics, narratives of memory reflect the power of language, and commemorative events illustrate the importance of performativity. This framework is used to analyse mnemonic formations that function as 'diagnostic sites' in the study of peace. The empirical investigations demonstrate the strength with which memories of past violence affect the quality of peace in the present. The power of the past is evident from the comparative analysis of the mnemonic formations of nationalisms dividing the island of Cyprus, the lingering legacies of colonialism in South Africa, contestations regarding the use of human remains in Cambodia, the unsettled memory of the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian memoryscape, and on-going controversies around the role of internationals in the Rwandan genocide. The analysis shows that three elements of memory politics - inclusivity, pluralism, and dignity - play a key role in the construction of a just peace. The book generates original and important findings on how memory politics affects the quality of peace and contributes new and timely knowledge about societies that grapple with the painful legacies of the past.
Peace processes around the world are not sustainable unless they take young people-who have the most to lose from continued conflict-seriously. The recent global Youth, Peace, and Security Agenda (YPS) officially recognised the "positive" role that young people can play in peacebuilding processes, which means that the time is ripe to consider exactly how youth are or are not "inclusively represented", do and do not undertake "meaningful participation", and are recognized-or fail to be recognized-in the in the institutions and practices of global peacebuilding. The contributors to this volumeexplore the significance of YPS and use case studies from around the world-from South Sudan to the Asia-Pacific region, from Colombia to the USA-to assess the current state of young people's participation, inclusion and innovation in peacebuilding. They argue that states are often afraid of the potential revolutionary power of their young people, which lead them to systematically marginalise their youth. When formal "youth participation" becomes a way of safely invisibilizing young people in official peace processes, it falls far short of the contributions young people need to make to ensure that peace is sustainable. Youth often find more success working outside of official systems to create and nurture peace on their own terms.The contributors offer guidance for ways to bridge the disconnect that exists between institutional assumptions and expectations for youth as peacebuilders and the actual sustainable peace leadership of youth.
This book offers a new analytical framework for the multi-layered processes of politicising and gendering care for older people, understood as an inherently political and gendered condition of human existence. It brings together contributions that focus on different manifestations and interpretations of these processes in several European settings and at various societal and political levels. It investigates how care for older adults varies across time and place and aims to provide an in-depth comprehension of how it becomes an arena of political struggle and the object of public policy and political intervention. The book comprises multidisciplinary research stemming from gender studies, history, political science, public policy, social anthropology, social work, and sociology. These analyses examine the issue of care for older people as a political concern from many angles, such as problematising care needs, long-term care policies, home care services, institutional services and family care. The book's contributions reveal the diversity of situations in which the processes of politicising and gendering care for older adults overlap, contradict or reinforce each other while leading to increased gender (in)equalities on different levels - familial, professional, and societal. Both caring for older adults or being taken care of when becoming old(er) or frail are potentially a feature of any personal trajectory, which is always contextually situated. Therefore, this book is an invitation to reflect upon care for older people as an issue particularly significant at any time and relevant at any societal level or socio-political sphere.
False profits of ethical capital is an important and unique contribution to understanding sustainability politics.Moving beyond observations of the inadequacies of responsible business as a vehicle for social change, this book argues that ESG investing and related corporate responsibility practices facilitate profit through speculation on ethics. Parfitt frames ethical capital as a process through which political challenges to capital accumulation on social and environmental grounds are transformed into opportunities for profit. A speculative moral economy prevails, in which it is assumed that business can do well and do good at the same time, belying the conflicts between different "stakeholders". The practices of stakeholder capitalism aim to neutralise the ethical dilemmas presented by overlapping social, ecological and economic crises, and in the process, alienate ethics from the human being and transform them, via financial calculus, into metrics that inform value relations. These processes manifest in ESG investing, sustainability reporting and corporate branding exercises.False profits exposes the contradictions that are concealed by sustainability politics, and suggests an alternative frame for thinking through the strategic challenges of contesting ethical capital.
After the end studies the enduring legacy of Cold War culture in current debates and concerns around risk, security, borders, environmental justice, inequality, and apocalypse. The chapters trace this legacy from the ideologies of survivalism through global fantasies of bunkering from Switzerland and Alban to Taiwan and India to current imaginings of post-apocalyptic worlds. Pike argues that the real and imagined spaces of sheltering continue to inform in foundational and often unrecognized ways; not only in cultural forms such as literature, film, comics, music, and the built environment, but also policy and political formulations. The book documents the ways the Cold War affected its primary antagonists and how the rest of the world processed the fallout of this antagonism. It surveys the fate of Cold War fortifications and shelters as they are repurposed for twenty-first century needs. After the end shows how counter-visions appropriating those same apocalyptic forms have emerged from the global South and from marginalized populations within the U.S. and elsewhere to challenge the lingering verities of the Cold War years.
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. -- .
Sign up to our newsletter and receive discounts and inspiration for your next reading experience.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.