Books published by Palgrave MacMillan

This volume explores the ethical and philosophical paradigms presented by most of the influential Matriarchs of the Circle of African Women Theologians. It critically evaluates the effectiveness of their ethical and philosophical theories, models, and frameworks in pursuing justice and liberation for women in Africa and globally. The authors address critical questions: How have African women theologians reimagined existing ethical paradigms? What original ethical and philosophical ideas have they generated? How have their ethical frameworks influenced the theologies and interpretations they have developed? What purposes do their ethical and philosophical paradigms serve? How do these renderings intersect with various social categories, including gender, race, class, sexuality, capitalism, and colonialism? What liberating frameworks do they propose? The volume further explores the dialogue between distinct African contexts and universal experiences and values. It explores how universal themes such as humanity, human dignity, rights, justice, motherhood, and more can coexist with communal African concepts and themes. It contemplates how embracing African approaches engages these themes more globally, bringing together particular African contexts of women and the universal ethical, philosophical, and theological theories, models, and frameworks to advance the cause of justice and liberation for African women and women worldwide into the future.

This edited book analyses current trends in science communication and gathers research on practices related to the construction of digital identity and visibility, emerging conflicts related to the public availability and appropriation of scientific culture, and ways of validating and disseminating scientific knowledge in new digital contexts. Drawing on a selection of papers presented in the InterGedi Conference (Zaragoza, December 2021), the main goal of the volume is to identify and explore emerging professional practices and challenges in the digital communication of science through innovative multimodal genres. This book will be of interest to postgraduates, doctoral students, practitioners and researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, digital media, multimodality and communication studies.

American Borders: Inclusion and Exclusion in US Culture provides an overview of American culture produced in a range of contexts, from the founding of the nation to the age of globalization and neoliberalism, in order to understand the diverse literary landscapes of the United States from a twenty-first century perspective. The authors confront American exceptionalism, discourses on freedom and democracy, and US foundational narratives by reassessing the literary canon and exploring ethnic literature, culture, and film with a focus on identity and exclusion. Their contributions envision different manifestations of conviviality and estrangement and deconstruct neoliberal slogans, analyzing hospitable inclusion in relation to national history and ideologies. By looking at representations of foreignness and conditional belonging in literature and film from different ethnic traditions, the volume fleshes out a new border dialectic that conveys the heterogeneity of American boundaries beyond the opposition inside/outside.

This edited book fills a void in the existing research concerning anti-communist movements in Central and Eastern Europe, outlining the linguistic implications of the cultural, social and political metamorphoses brought about by the (change of) regime. The authors included in this volume approach the topic from a variety of perspectives, but, ultimately, focus on language seen as a fundamental tool for simultaneously subjugating and liberating, concealing and revealing truth, discouraging dissidence and fostering revolt. Readers are invited to discover the linguistic implications of the many shapes and forms that the 1989 anti-communist revolutions took. Equally interesting are the investigations of the revolution aftermath, in the first years of transition to democracy. Perceived as a whole throughout the Cold War (1947-1991), the so-called "Eastern Bloc" managed to reveal its heterogeneity, the singularity of each of its comprising states and the multitude of itsinternal contrasts, most vividly perhaps, in the manifold manifestations of the 1989 anti-communist fight. This book will be of interest to academics and researchers from various fields, including history, (socio)linguistics, political studies, and conflict studies.

Shakespeare was not only aware of the socio-cultural fears and anxieties generated by the older woman's body but with the characterization of his tragic ageing females, Shakespeare becomes the first literary giant to explore the physiological and psychosocial condition that we have come to know as 'menopause'. Although 'menopause' was not defined as a medical, physiological or sociocultural event for the early moderns, this book argues that such a medical and cultural transition can, in fact, be identified by sub-textual clues distinguished by various embodied anxieties. It explores several ageing women of the Shakespearean tragedies as they transition through this liminal menopausal period. Theoretically underscored by humoral theory, the analysis is metonymically centered upon the womb as the seat of menopausal anxiety. These menopausal undercurrents, not only permeate the dramatic action of each play, but also emanate outward to reflect the medical, physiological, cultural, social, and religious concerns generated by the ageing woman of the early modern period at large.

This open access book offers an entangled history of hygiene by showing how knowledge of purity, health and cleanliness was shaped by evangelical medical missionaries and their encounters with people in West Africa. By tracing the interactions and negotiations of six Basel Mission doctors, who practised on the Gold Coast and in Cameroon from 1885 to 1914, the author demonstrates how notions of religious purity, scientific health and colonial cleanliness came together in the making of hygiene during the age of High Imperialism. The heyday of evangelical medical missions abroad coincided with the emergence of tropical medicine as a scientific discipline during what became known as the Scramble for Africa. This book reveals that these projects were intertwined and that hygiene played an important role in all three of them. While most historians have examined modern hygiene as a European, bourgeois and scientific phenomenon, the author highlights both the colonial and the religious fabric of hygiene, which continues to shape our understanding of purity, health and cleanliness to this day.

This book explores the conceptualization of time in early twentieth-century literature and thought, based on a transnational and translational model of literary history, focusing on Turkish, French and German literary traditions. Each from different cultural backgrounds, these modernists provide a radical critique of modern time regimes, which calibrate time in singular temporal narratives. The book traces the philosophical strand of this critical chronometry from Henri Bergson's theory of time, through Walter Benjamin's ambivalence towards decay of tradition, and finally to A.H. Tanpınar and Robert Walser's modernist fiction. Negotiating regionally marked concepts and topoi of temporality, it discusses networks of cultural circulations and maps a revised intersection of Turkish and Western European literary histories. It is an essential read for scholars and students of comparative and world literature, modernist studies, and cultural history.

What is the value of conversation measured by? Are there more valuable and inferior types of conversation? What role do the contents, the people, and the circumstances play? Do times and epochs shape their own conversations? Conversation norms from handbooks as well as conversations reproduced in texts or reconstructed from texts shed light on these questions. The contributions in this volume are grouped around conceptual questions, specific contexts such as the salon and the table conversation, bring studies on individual literary texts and cover the European cultural history from Plato to the 20th century. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

Contemporary British Theatre surveys the complex and dynamic theatre of the eighties and early nineties reflecting a country that is multicultural, multiethnic and multinational. The contributors - artists, scholars and critics - offer insights into the unique forms of theatre performance devised to express the tensions and pressures of our time. For the paperback edition a new preface has been written, including several updating pieces from individual contributors.

This book constitutes the first full volume dedicated to an academic analysis of theatrically-released spinoff films derived from British radio and television sitcoms. Regularly maligned as the nadir of British film production and marginalised as a last resort for the financially-bereft industry during the 1970s, this study demonstrates that the sitcom spinoff film has instead been a persistent and important presence in British cinema from the 1940s to the present day, and includes (occasional) works with distinct artistic merit. Alongside an investigation of the economic imperative underpinning these productions, i.e. the exploitation of proven product with a ready-made audience, it is argued that, with a longevity stretching from Arthur Askey and his wartime Band Waggon (1940) to the crew of Kurupt FM and their recent People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan (2021), the British sitcom spinoff can be interpreted as following a full generic 'life cycle'. Starting with the 'formative' stage where works from Hi Gang! (1941) to I Only Arsked! (1958) establish the genre's characteristics, the spinoff genre moves to its 'classic' stage where, secure for form and content, it enjoys considerable popular success with films like Till Death Us Do Part (1969), On the Buses (1971), The Likely Lads (1976) and Rising Damp (1980); the genre's revival since the late-1990s reveals a more 'parodic' final stage, with films like The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse (2005) adopting a consciously self-reflective mode. It is also posited that the sitcom spinoff film is a viable source for social history, with the often-stereotypical re-presentations of characters and events an (often blatant) ideological metonym for the concerns of wider British society, notably in issues of class, race, gender and sexuality.

Two of the most notable figures from the Middle Ages-the volatile, brilliant Abelard and the equally brilliant Heloise-became the parents of their son Astralabe before Abelard's infamous, brutal castration. The couple spent the rest of their lives as monastics, in each other's orbits if not in shared presence, as they became movers in the glittering monastic world of the early twelfth-century France. What happened to their strangely named Astralabe? Astralabe: The Life and Times of the Son of Heloise and Abelard rescues the "lost son" from footnotes and fiction and attempts to tell instead the story of a real man living in Europe in the twelfth century. This book assembles the references to Astralabe, provides background in the history of France and Switzerland, uncovers Abelard's relationships with his family, with the ruling house of Brittany and more, and most importantly draws together all that is known of Astralabe.

This book provides a theoretically informed account of Gothic Hauntology. It is distinctive foremost in two ways. It shows hauntology at work in modern as well as older gothic narratives and it has a unique focus on everyday gothic as well as everyday hauntology. The chapters perform a historical circle going from Munro to Poe and then back again, offering novel readings of works by well-known authors that are contextualized under the umbrella of the theme. Anchored in a well-known topic and genre, but with a specific phenomenological framework, this book will be of interest to both students and more advanced scholars.

This book examines Thomas Hardy's writing in both prose and poetry, focusing on issues of perception, 'being', class and environment. It illustrates the ways in which Hardy represents a social world which serves as a 'horizon' for the individual and explores the dialectic between the perceptible world and human consciousness. Ebbatson demonstrates how, in Hardy's oeuvre, modern life becomes alienated from its roots in rural life - individual freedom is achieved in works like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure or The Woodlanders at the cost of personal insecurity and a deepening sense of homelessness. However, this development occurs against the marginalisation of dialect forms of speech. This book also explores how Hardy's impressionist vision serves to undermine the prevailing conventions of plot structure.

This book looks at Neobaroque Latin American fiction, poetry, essay and performance from the 1970s to the early 2000s in order to explore the cultural hybridization and transgressive identity transformations at play in these works. It shows how the ornamental style and boldly experimental techniques are an effective strategy in presenting decentered identities in sexually ambiguous, multiethnic, interracial, transcultural, and mutant characters, as well as in metafictional narrators and authors. In this way, the book demonstrates the potential of Neobaroque works to destabilize normative, essentialist and binary categories of identity. The study focuses on Latin America as a cultural macroregion, drawing on examples from a variety of countries, including Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and the US-Mexican border. Drawing on gender, queer, trans and Chicana feminist theory, it argues for an alternative approach to a model of the Self, or a theory of selfhood, derived from the exuberant style and experimental techniques of the Neobaroque.

This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental knowledge in African American writing ranging from antebellum slave narratives and pamphlets to Charlotte Forten's journals, Booker T. Washington's autobiographies, and Charles W. Chesnutt's short fiction. The volume highlights how literary forms of environmental knowledge in the African American tradition were shaped by the histories of slavery and race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and African American forms of expression and intertextuality. Turning to the Underground Railroad, debates over education and home-building, and the aesthetics of the pastoral and the georgic, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature provides an original perspective on the African American ecoliterary tradition that uncovers new facets of canonical and understudied texts and offers new directions for ecocriticism and African American studies.

This book traces how Gottfried Feder and Fritz Todt made technology essential to the Nazi 'world view'. They groomed engineers with a racist technical ideology that prepared them to later supervise slave labor and the Holocaust. Their concepts evolved from völkisch technocracy to an idealized harmony of man, machine and nature, and were eclipsed by Albert Speer's total war. Partially due to willing 'self-coordination' from engineers, they gained political control over the engineering profession. Destined to be pillars of the Volksgemeinschaft, engineers were indoctrinated with Nazi principles of Aryan superiority at the Reich School of Technology, the Plassenburg. Nazi propaganda announced a bright future through technology, furthering a sense of normalcy in Germany, despite the ruthless exclusion of those unwanted.

This book shows how Latin American writers and artists in the crisis-decades of the 1920s and 1930s used modernist techniques to explore national issues in relation to global capitalism. Drawing on a rich interdisciplinary archive of novels, poetry, essays, photography, and architecture, it includes chapters on major figures and the transformations that marked Latin American cities at the beginning of the twentieth century: the poet Manuel Maples Arce and Mexico City; the essayist José Carlos Mariátegui and Lima; the novelist Roberto Arlt and Buenos Aires; the novelist Patrícia Galvão and São Paulo. Tavid Mulder argues that the Latin American city should be understood as a peripheral metropolis: a social space that is simultaneously peripheral relative to the center of the world economy and a metropolis in relation to the region's vast, underdeveloped hinterlands. Conceiving of modernist techniques as ways of understanding how the dualisms of Latin American societies--urban and rural, wealth and poverty, cosmopolitan and national--are bound together by the internal contradictions of capitalism, this volume insists on the ability of literary and artistic works to grasp the process through which untenable situations of crisis are not overcome but stabilized in the periphery. It thereby sheds light on issues in Latin America that have become increasingly urgent in the twenty-first century: inequality, indigenous migration, surplus populations, and anomie.

From its genesis in 1921, Kimbanguism has constituted one of the most fascinating socio-cultural movements of the Kongo region. This interdisciplinary collection covers the socio-cultural dynamics of the Kimbanguist church and its contribution to African studies over the past hundred years. Scholars renowned for their Kongo studies work, such as Wyatt MacGaffey, John M. Janzen, and John K. Thornton, contributed to this collection.

Directing Desire explores the rise of consent-based and trauma-informed approaches to staging sexually and sensually charged scenes for theater in the contemporary U.S., known as intimacy choreography. From 2015 to 2020, intimacy choreography transformed from a grassroots movement in experimental and regional theaters into a best practice accepted in Hollywood and on Broadway. Today, intimacy choreographers have become a veritable "intimacy industry" in the cultural sphere, sparking attention from Rolling Stone to The New York Times to the sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live. This book analyzes the forces that have led to intimacy choreography¿s meteoric rise and asks what implications the field has for theater practice more broadly. Building a theoretical framework for intimacy directing, Directing Desire also strives to reorient the conversation in the field so that artists understand not only best practices in consent but also intersectional frameworks that expand and rework consent.

This open access book examines the depiction of Korean history in recent South Korean historical films. Released over the Hallyu ("Korean Wave") period starting in the mid-1990s, these films have reflected, shaped, and extended the thriving public discourse over national history. In these works, the balance between fate and freedom--the negotiation between societal constraints and individual will, as well as cyclical and linear history--functions as a central theme, subtext, or plot device for illuminating a rich variety of historical events, figures, and issues. In sum, these highly accomplished films set in Korea's past address universal concerns about the relationship between structure and agency, whether in collective identity or in individual lives. Written in an engaging and accessible style by an established historian, Fate and Freedom in Korean Historical Films offers a distinctive perspective on understanding and appreciating Korean history and culture.

This book analyzes Shakespeare's use of biblical allusions and evocation of doctrinal topics in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. It identifies references to theological and doctrinal commonplaces such as sin, grace, confession, damnation, and the Fall in these plays, affirming that Shakespeare's literary imagination is very much influenced by his familiarity with the Bible and also with matters of church doctrine. This theological and doctrinal subject matter also derives its significance from genres as diverse as travel narratives, sermons, political treatises, and royal proclamations. This study looks at how Shakespeare's deployment of religious topics interacts with ideas circulating via other cultural texts and genres in society. It also analyzes how religion enables Shakespeare's engagement with cultural debates and political developments in England: absolutism and law; radical political theory; morality and law; and conceptions of nationhood.

This book explores Della Cruscan poetry in the late eighteenth-century literary scene. A sociable, ornate, and deeply theatrical type of poetry, Della Cruscanism was associated with writers like Robert Merry, Mary Robinson, and Hannah Cowley. While Merry is the poet most commonly associated with the Della Cruscan school, this book argues that Della Cruscanism was a movement dominated by female poets and that this was one of the key reasons for the later disavowal and downgrading of its poetic accomplishments. It offers a close examination of these women writers and their role in shaping the poetic culture of the fashionable newspaper. In doing so, this study offers the first account of the feminization of the fashionable newspaper and of popular literary culture in the final years of the eighteenth century.

Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to broader conclusions about medieval history and the way we do and understand history in general. Paul Dutton provides an overview of microhistorical approaches and theorizes about its use in pre-modern history. As opposed to studying history "from above" or history "from below," Dutton shows the advantages for historians of doing history "from the inside out," starting from some single, overlooked, but potentially knowable thing, delving deep inside, and then reattaching it to its time and place. Such an approach has one abiding advantage: its insistence on being grounded in the particularity of the evidence. The book highlights what the microhistorical is, its conceptual and practical challenges. Dutton argues that the attention to the micro has always been with us and is a constitutive, cognitive part of who we are as human beings.

This volume presents an analytical and empirical overview of the array of issues that the Mexican media faces in the post-authoritarian age, which jointly explains how a partially accomplished democracy, its authoritarian inertias, and its unintended consequences hinder the democratic performance of the media. This is analyzed from three points of view: the stalemate Mexican media system and ineffective regulations, the conditions of risk and insecurity of the journalists on the field, and the limits of freedom of expression, political substance, and inclusiveness of media content. A binational effort, with research from US and Mexican authors, a wide analytic perspective is provided on the macro, meso, and micro levels, allowing for a deep conceptual richness and a comprehensive understanding of the Mexican case. With leading researchers in the field, the volume revolves around the problems of the media in post-authoritarian democracies. By answering the questions of how and why the Mexican media has not fully democratized, the works encompassed here can resonate with and are relevant to other post-authoritarian countries and academic disciplines.

The project offers a collection of new interdisciplinary critical autoethnographic engagements with Hélène Cixous écriture feminine and work Three steps on the ladder of writing. Critical autoethnography shares a reciprocal, and inter-animating relationship with Hélène Cixous' écriture feminine ("feminine writing"), and in this collection authors explore that inter-animation by explicitly engaging with Three steps on the ladder of writing. Three steps is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving reflection on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for writing: The School of the Dead-the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; The School of Dreams-the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and The School of Roots-the importance of depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Topics covered include: ways Cixous' work can address the need for loss and reparation in writing critical autoethnography, how Cixous' writing "makes our body speak" through concepts of birth and the body in, through and of critical autoethnography, whether writing in this way recast and reform prevailing orders of domination and oppression, and how Cixous' writing around the ethics of loving and giving translates into response-able and non-violent forms of critical autoethnography in relation to otherness and difference. In this collection, we invite you to "Let us go to the school of [critical autoethnographic] writing" (Cixous, 1993, p. 3) with the work of Hélène Cixous, and speak in a different way and through a different medium of academic language, in an approach that reveals the tensions, the paradoxes, the pains and the pleasures of writing with critical autoethnography in the contemporary university.

This book addresses a conundrum. Alone of the major competing political interests during the civil wars of the 1640s, royalism needed to transcend attachment to one nation or one religious tradition and recruit a support base in each of England, Ireland and Scotland. This book aims to provide a concise interpretation and reassessment of royalism during these crucial years and focuses on this dilemma, and on the resources, intellectual and practical, deployed to address it, with mixed success. It focuses on the key ideas and values which made royalism a formidable political alternative, rather than on the more usual factional, military or literary perspectives. It argues that a 'three-kingdom' perspective not only gives a broader view but also clarifies the distinctive characteristics of English royalism, more robust than its counterparts in the other nations.

This book 'plays up' stories of mostly unknown figures and their journeys through a life affected by movement, and a search for home. It engages with individuals and groups whose passions have carried the subjects through 'uncharted' or unhomely territories, here told in a series of 'tracks' depicting their roles in community memories and histories. Side A engages with individual journeys, such as Lewis, the American black literature book seller; the civil rights activist, Izzy, an American-Swedish folklorist; Eugene, a black classical pianist; and Pi, the Jew transported to Sweden during WWII. Side B focuses on communal histories and alternative educational and artistic spaces, addressing life writing and memory in German comic books; alternative educational spaces in Israel-Palestine and Africa, and 'small press passions' of zines/newsletter culture. Tellers and their interpreters are mediating identities where nationality, race, and class (and other markers of identity) have influenced selfhood and collective belonging - revealing how individuals and outsider cultures have the power to influence dominant cultures and inspire societal change.

Anthropocene Poetry: Place, Environment and Planet argues that the idea of the Anthropocene is inspiring new possibilities for poetry. It can also change the way we read and interpret poems. If environmental poetry was once viewed as linked to place, this book shows how poets are now grappling with environmental issues from the local to the planetary: climate change and the extinction crisis, nuclear weapons and waste, plastic pollution and the petroleum industry. This book intervenes in debates about culture and science, traditional poetic form and experimental ecopoetics, to show how poets are collaborating with environmental scientists and joining environmental activist movements to respond to this time of crisis. From the canonical work of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, to award-winning poets Alice Oswald, Pascale Petit, Kei Miller, and Karen McCarthy Woolf, this book explores major figures from the past alongside acclaimed contemporary voices. It reveals Seamus Heaney's support for conservation causes and Ted Hughes's astonishingly forward-thinking research on climate change; it discusses how Pascale Petit has given poetry to Extinction Rebellion and how Karen McCarthy Woolf set sail with scientists to write about plastic pollution. This book deploys research on five poetry archives in the UK, USA and Ireland, and the author's insider insights into the commissioning processes and collaborative methods that shaped important contemporary poetry publications. Anthropocene Poetry finds that environmental poetry is flourishing in the face of ecological devastation. Such poetry speaks of the anxieties and dilemmas of our age, and searches for paths towards resilience and resistance.

This book brings together contributions from ten academics and a commentary from a Muslim community leader on how the British media represent some of the most important terminologies related to Islam and Muslims. It takes a nuanced approach to language within Muslims in the media research by focusing on terminologies. Each contributor in this volume focused on one terminology and its associated words to show how the representation of these terminologies have major implications on the lives of British Muslims. The book also includes some key recommendations on the usage of these terms from the Media Style Guide of the Centre for Media monitoring - a research organisation of the Muslim Council of Britain. This book's link with the Muslim community can be a step towards new approaches in this field where academics will engage with communities and practitioners to ensure better impact of their academic works. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners ina range of fields, including Journalism, Media and Communication Studies, English Language and Linguistics, Sociology, Cultural and Religious Studies.

The Groovology of White Affect theorizes white aesthetics and race-formation in South Africa from a perspective rooted in the sonic. The book treats music, affect and whiteness as three interlinked commandeering ontologies. It offers a music-based theory of race formation steeped in boeremusiek's incredibly rich vernacular language and practices, and with South Africa's race ideologies always simmering in the background. The first few chapters each identifies and explores one of boeremusiek's pragmatic affective registers: embarrassment, blackface, epiphany, and disavowal. The final chapter argues that, when considered together, these modalities outline the parameters of a corrupted white aesthetic faculty that help explain how whiteness perpetuates itself in the present day. Racism is thereby defined not primarily as matter of prejudice, but as a matter of pleasure and a matter of taste. The book also articulates a sound studies from the South; it is an attempt to write in a South Africa-centered way - amidst the collapse of colonial disciplines and a resulting disciplinary and methodological catholicism - for a broad, international audience interested in the affective constitution of race and racism.