Books published by Peter Lang Ltd

In 2011, New Zealand rugby fans erupted in celebration as the All Blacks narrowly defeated France to win the Rugby World Cup ¿ the team¿s first title since New Zealand hosted the inaugural tournament in 1987. In the years between these victories, the sport of rugby has been radically transformed from its amateur roots to a professional, global entertainment ¿product¿. This book explores these developments and focuses initially on the New Zealand Rugby Union¿s key deals with Rupert Murdoch¿s News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas in the 1990s. The new pay-per-view era has curtailed the traditional ¿viewing rights¿ of rugby fans to have live, free-to-air access to All Blacks test matches on public television. Adidas, meanwhile, has relentlessly commodified aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity in pursuit of local and global markets while exploiting labour in developing countries. Escalating merchandise costs and ticket prices have, at the same time, pushed the sport further out of the reach of ordinary New Zealanders. All of these issues, however, have not gone uncontested, and the authors argue that rugby remains a contested terrain in the face of a new set of limits and pressures in the global economy.

Popular newspapers played a vital role in shaping British politics, society and culture in the twentieth century. This book provides a concise and accessible historical overview of the rise of the tabloid format and examines how the national press reported the major stories of the period, from World Wars and general elections to sex scandals and celebrity gossip. It considers the appeal and influence of the most successful titles, such as the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and the Sun, and explores the emergence of the key elements of the modern popular newspaper, such as editorial campaigns, women¿s pages, advice columns, and pin-ups. Using a wealth of examples from across the century, the authors explain how tabloids provided an important forum for the discussion of social identities such as class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity, and how they scrutinised public figures with increasing intensity. In the wake of recent controversies about tabloid practices, this timely book provides the historical context to enable a proper assessment of how the popular press helped to define twentieth-century Britain.

Geoffrey Wall¿s narrative biography of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, the father of the author of Madame Bovary, follows him from his birth in a French provincial town a few years before the Revolution through to his distinguished career as a physician in an industrial city. Growing up under the corrosive anguish of the Terror, he emerged as a talented schoolboy who read Voltaire and imbibed the radical materialism of the 1790s. As an aspiring medical student in Paris, he embraced the new scientific medicine and climbed the ladder of his profession by avoiding military service. As a young doctor animated by humanitarian ideals, he was appointed to run a large hospital in Rouen where too many factory workers were dying young, the most insidious public health problem of the new age. He was to remain there for thirty years. Drawing on archival sources in Paris, Rouen and Sens, the book includes meticulous period details, such as an account of postoperative care in the age before anaesthetics. The author asks what happened to Enlightenment ideals in the age of industry and examines the conflict between science and religion. This is not only a biography of an eminent nineteenth-century physician but a collective moral history of the Napoleon generation.