Books published by Manchester University Press

Although formally equal, relations between citizens are actually characterised by many and varied forms of inequality. Rethinking Equality provides a clear, critical and very up-to-date account of the most important contemporary egalitarian theories.

Mike Leigh may well be Britain's greatest living film director; his worldview has permeated our national consciousness. Written with the co-operation of Leigh himself, this book gives detailed readings of the nine feature films he has made for the cinema, as well as an overview of his work for television.

Variously described as 'the average pilgrim', a 'wanderer', and 'a Buddha preaching in European clothes', Charlie Marlow is the voice behind Joseph Conrad's 'Youth' (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and Chance (1912). Conrad's Marlow offers a comprehensive account and critical analysis of one of Conrad's most celebrated creations, asking both who and what is Marlow: a character or a narrator, a biographer or an autobiographical screen, a messenger or an interpreter, a bearer of truth or a misguided liar? Reading Conrad's fiction alongside the work of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, and offering an investigation into the connection between narrative and death, this book argues that Marlow's essence is located in his liminality - in his constantly shifting position - and that the emergence of meaning in his stories is at all points bound up with the process of his storytelling.

R.K. Narayan's reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of "e;authentic"e; Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan's writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Narayan's imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan's career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan's fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer.

In this comprehensive and lucid critical study, Andrew Teverson examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie's fiction springs in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround the life and work of this major contemporary figure.

Robert Southwell's poetic view of Spenser's, Signey's and Shakespeare's England is a cold one. This book close reads and contextualises his lighter lyric poetry and its connections to English recusant culture from the music of Willian Bryd to the coded embroideries of Mary Queen of Scots.

This book offers an opportunity to reconsider the films of the British New Wave in the light of forty years of heated debate. Taylor presenting a new and innovative look at this famous cycle of British films.

This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland's career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction

This book undertakes a unique, coherent and comprehensive consideration of the depiction of naval warfare in the cinema. The films under discussion encompass all areas of naval operations in war, and highlight varying institutional and aesthetic responses to navies and the sea in popular culture. The examination of these films centres on their similarities to and differences from the conventions of the war genre and seeks to determine whether the distinctive characteristics of naval film narratives justify their categorisation as a separate genre or sub-genre in popular cinema. The explicit factual bases and drama-documentary style of many key naval films, such as In Which We Serve, They Were Expendable and Das Boot, also requires the consideration of these films as texts for popular historical transmission. Their frequent reinforcement of establishment views of the past, which derives from their conservative ideological position towards national and naval culture, makes these films key texts for the consideration of national cinemas as purveyors of contemporary history as popularly conceived by filmmakers and received by audiences.

Don Randall's comprehensive study situates acclaimed author David Malouf within the field of contemporary international and psotcolonial writing, but without losing sight of the author's affiliation with Australian contexts. The book presents an original reading of Malouf, but also engages with the full body of preceding Malouf criticism.

This book considers a range of printed and documentary evidence, the majority previously unpublished, for the way ordinary individuals thought about their houses and households; and it then explores how writers of domestic tragedies engaged those attitudes to shape their representations of domesticity.

This, the first book-length study of the Spanish-Basque filmmaker Julio Medem in English, contains profound analysis of his life and films in the context of contemporary Spain and World cinema and is based on original interviews with Medem and many of his collaborators by the author, an establish expert on Spanish cinema.

An interesting companion for students of cultural theory, concentrating on the four most influential thinkers - Adorno, Bourdieu, Foucault and Jameson

This book deals with a wide range of 'high-end', expensive and high concept, TV dramas from the UK and the USA and analyses the compositional principles of texts (technologies, institutions, economics, cultrual trends). Drama examined include Oz, Buried Carnivale, Blackpool, The Sopranos, Shameless, and Shooting the Past.

Amitav Ghosh is an authoritative critical introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of one of the most celebrated and significant literary voices to have emerged from India in recent decades. It is the first full-length study of Amitav Ghosh's work to be available outside India. Encompassing all of Ghosh's fictional and non-fictional writings to date, this book takes a thematic approach which enables in-depth analysis of the cluster of themes, ideas and issues that Ghosh has steadily built up into a substantial intellectual project. This project overlaps significantly with many of the key debates in postcolonial studies making this book both an introduction to Ghosh's writing and a contribution to the development of ideas on the 'postcolonial', in particular, its relation to postmodernism. Aimed at students and the general reader, this book is an ideal introduction to one of contemporary literature's most fascinating writers.

The secret vice: Masturbation in Victorian fiction and medical culture provides a unique consideration of writings on self-abuse in the long nineteenth century. The book examines the discourse on masturbation in medical works by English, Continental and American practitioners and demonstrates the influence and impact of these writings, not only on Victorian pornography but also in the creation of fictional characters by canonical authors such as Bram Stoker, J. S. Le Fanu, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. The book also features the first detailed and balanced study of the largely overlooked literature on masturbation as it pertains to women in clinical and popular medical works aimed at the female reader. Mason concludes with a consideration of the way the distinctly Victorian discourse on masturbation has persisted into the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries with particular reference to Willy Russell's tragic-comic novel, The Wrong Boy (2000) and to the construction of 'Victorian Dad', a character featured in the adult comic, Viz.

An innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature and its relation to visionary Romanticism through its examination of six late Victorian writers - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy.

The first full-length monograph in English about one of France's most important contemporary filmmakers, locating Andre Techine within historical and cultural contexts that include the Algerian war, contemporary globialisation, and the influence of Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, William Faulkner and the cinematic French wave.

James Kelman is Scotland's most influential contemporary prose artist. This is the first book-length study of his groundbreaking novels, and it analyses and contextualises each in detail. It argues that while Kelman offers a coherent and consistent vision of the world, each novel should be read as a distinct literary response to particular aspects of contemporary working-class language and culture. Richly historicised through diverse contexts such as Scottish socialism, public transport, emigration, 'Booker Prize' culture and Glasgow's controversial 'City of Culture' status in 1990, Simon Kovesi offers readings of Kelman's style, characterisation and linguistic innovations. This study resists the prevalent condemnations of Kelman as a miserable realist, and produces evidence that he is acutely aware of an unorthodox, politicised literary tradition which transgresses definitions of what literature can or should do. Kelman is cautious about the power relationship between the working-class worlds he represents in his fiction, and the latent preconceptions embedded in the language of academic and critical commentary. In response, this study is boldly self-critical, and questions the validity and values of its own methods. Kelman is shown to be deftly humorous, assiduously ethical, philosophically alert and politically necessary.

Innovative approach and study of Spenser's literature. Original ideas and perspectives methodolodgy when studying Spenser. Will appeal to wide market of Renaissance students.

Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular -- and controversial -- writers in the Asian American literary tradition. Grice traces Kingston's development as a writer and cultural activist to both ethnic and feminist discourses.

Beyond Representation poses the question as to whether over the last thirty years there have been signs of 'progress'/'progressiveness' in the representation of 'marginalised' or subaltern identity categories, within television drama in Britain and the US.

The most up-to-date survey of the leading British novelist of his generation, offering the fullest account to date of McEwan's sources, especially concerning his interest in popular science.

This book examines laughter in the Shakespearean theatre in the context of a cultural history of early modern laughter. It is the first study to focus specifically on laughter, not comedy. It argues that since the early modern period a paradigm shift has taken place in our attitudes to laughter and the role pivotal role of Shakespeare in this.

Playing for time explores connections between theatre time, the historical moment and fictional time. Geraldine Cousin persuasively argues that a crucial characteristic of contemporary British theatre is its preoccupation with instability and danger, and traces images of catastrophe and loss in a wide range of recent plays and productions.

The first book in English about Alex de la Iglesia, critically acclaimed former protege of Pedro Almodovar, and one of the highest grossing directors in Spain and Latin America. De la Iglesia's cinema is representative of a new generation of Spanish and European directors who combine avant-garde strategies with forms such as comedy and horror.

This is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer.

Explores the ways in which the unashamedly disturbing conventions of international horror cinema allow audiences to engage with the traumatic legacy of the recent past in a manner that has serious implications for the ways in which we conceive of ourselves both as gendered individuals and as members of a particular nation-state.

The Arc and the machine is an important and timely book. It insists on the centrality of narrative to informational culture, and forces a re-appraisal of how information technology, read as a material cultural form, is understood in relation to the questions of innovation and transformation.

Culture on drugs extends the discussion of drugs and drug culture beyond the boundaries of such disciplines as sociology, anthropology and criminology to cultural and literary studies and philosophy.