Books published by Manchester University Press

This book offers a comprehensive account of the methods and practice of learning modern languages, especially Italian, in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England.

The first full-length critical study of Alan Clarke, one of Britain's greatest auteur directors which examines the full range of Clarke's work, and goes beyond the violent image garnered from work like 'Scum' and 'The Firm'.

One of the most gifted French directors of the post New Wave, Maurice Pialat is frequently compared to such legendary filmmakers as Jean Renoir and Rebert Bresson. This is the first book-length study of his work in English.

Tony Garnett is the first book-length study of one of the most respected producers working in British television, responsible for both Cathy Come Home (1966) and This Life (1996-8). The book discusses the ways in which Garnett has shaped the role of the creative producer, and analyses his contribution to a distinctively televisual social realism.

A biography of a long-standing Liberal MP. As well as the revival of the Liberal Party and the formation of the Liberal Democrats, it examines his experiences as a Conscientious Objector in the Second World War; his work in the Methodist Church; his role in the resignation of Jeremy Thorpe and in the Lib-Lab Pact.

This ground-breaking study analyses Beckett's television plays in relation to the history and theory of television. It argues that they are in dialogue with innovative television traditions connected to Modernism in television, film, radio, theatre, literature and the visual arts.

A study of Anthony Asquith, which sets his work in the context of the history of British cinema from the silent period to the 1960s, and examines the artistic and cultural influences within which his films can be understood.

This is a revised and expanded edition of Woodcock's accessible study, now including detailed readings of Carey's latest novels, 'Jack Maggs' and 'True History of the Kelly Gang'.

This groundbreaking analysis of nineteenth-century European clinical case histories of hermaphrodites shows how sex changed from an outward appearance inscribed in a social body to something to be found deep inside body and self.

A rich and original study of the culture of association, showing the 'Big Society' in action in interwar Britain. First full-length study of a major British pressure-group, the League of Nations Union, since 1981, making extensive use of local archives. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of social movements in modern Britain.

Drawing on a wide range documentary and oral sources, including interviews with refugees, this book explores the responses in Manchester to those threatened by the rise of Fascism in Europe.

This book challenges the assumptions that reporters and their audiences alike have about the way the journalistic trade operates and how it sees the world. It unpacks the taken-for-granted aspects of the lives of war correspondents, exposing the principles of interaction and valorisation that usually go unacknowledged.

Offers a unique and fascinating insight into how two of Europe's longest serving prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, sought to radically reshape the EU policy making process in the UK and Ireland in order to further their strategic policy agendas

Examines the impact of globalisaton across the ideological landscape of British politics by profiling the discourse on globalisation of several political groups involved in making and contestign British foreign economic policy.

Critically explores Britain's fascination with 'doing good' in Africa under New Labour, and in particular under the premiership of Tony Blair, and, in so doing, sets out to explain the role of idealisation in international relations.

This book explores the marital relationships of the Scottish elites, 1650-1850, looking at how they negotiated love, intimacy and power in a patriarchal culture.

An in depth study of the IRA in the years leading up to the conflict that broke out in 1969. This book explores the internal divisions that existed within the IRA and Sinn Fein in this period.

A celebration of Englishness in the sixteenth century. Appeals equally to students of early modern history and its literary culture, presenting a view of 'Tudor England' and offering a firmer historical background to evaluating the English Renaissance.

This book is an intellectual biography of EP Thompson, as well as an exercise in the sociology of knowledge: as such, it considers not just Thompson's ideas and arguments, but also the question of why he adopted those ideas, and made those arguments.

A comprehensive study of the relationship between the Conservative party and the far-right in Britain from 1945 to 1975.

This is the first book to compare the experiences of displaced Chagos islanders in Mauritius with the experiences of those Chagossians who have moved to the UK since 2002. It provides a unique ethnographic comparative study of forced displacement and onward migration within the living memory of one community.

Explores why the Liberal Democrats continue to overwhelmingly return male MPs to Westminster.

This book comparitively explores the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

This book is about the EU's role in conflict resolution and reconciliation in Europe. It examines critically important cases: the exemplary process of the Franco-German reconciliation during the 1950s, the EU's involvement in reconstructing peace in Northern Ireland, the conflict in Cyprus, and Kosovo's independence.

This book traces a number of common themes relating to the representation of Irish Travellers in Irish popular tradition and how these themes have impacted on Ireland's collective imagination.

Acceptable words' comprises a series of highly individual essays covering the whole of Geoffrey Hill's poetry to date, including the remarkable late flowering of the years since 1996. The essays offer detailed readings of many poems whilst making many - often surprising - associations with history, philosophy, religion, art and music.

Realism is an essential concept in literary studies, yet for a variety of reasons it has not received the attention and clarity it deserves, often being dismissed as 'too slippery' to be of use. This accessible study remedies that failing for students and scholars of English Literature and Literary Theory alike, plainly setting out what realism is, the issues surrounding it, and its role in other major literary modes such as modernism and postmodernism. Beginning Realism gives detailed coverage of the nineteenth-century realist novel through its focus on novels by Gaskell, Eliot, Trollope, Dickens, Mrs Oliphant, Thackeray and Zola. As well as discussing 'the novel', the book also includes chapters on the use of realism in drama and poetry and a chapter on 'the language of realism', another aspect often overlooked in analysis of the concept.

Treading the bawds breaks the traditional boundaries that have separated the histories of the first actresses and the early female playwright. This is a story of collaboration and influence, played out on the seventeenth-century London stage as women's words and women's bodies come together for the first time.

Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism is the first study in English on the literary relation between Beckett and Dante. It is an innovative reading of Samuel Beckett and Dante's works and a critical engagement with contemporary theories of intertextuality. It is an informative intertextual reading of Beckett's work, detecting previously unknown quotations, allusions to, and parodies of Dante in Beckett's fiction and criticism. The volume interprets Dante in the original Italian (as it appears in Beckett), translating into English all Italian quotations. It benefits from a multilingual approach based on Beckett's published works in English and French, and on manuscripts (which use English, French, German and Italian). Through a close reading of Beckett's fiction and criticism, the book will argue that Dante is both assumed as an external source of literary and cultural authority in Beckett's work, and also participates in Beckett's texts' sceptical undermining of authority. Moreover, the book demonstrates that the many references to various 'Dantes' produce 'Mr Beckett' as the figure of the author responsible for such a remarkably interconnected oeuvre. The book is aimed at the scholarly communities interested in literatures in English, literary and critical theory, comparative literature and theory, French literature and theory and Italian studies. Its jargon-free style will also attract third-year or advanced undergraduate students, and postgraduate students, as well as those readers interested in the unusual relationship between one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and the medieval author who stands for the very idea of the Western canon.

Drawing on a range of sources from the papers of landed families this book provides fresh insight into the place of women in the Irish wealthy landed class.