Books published by University of Exeter Press

A striking and famous feature of the English landscape, Dartmoor is a beautiful place, with a sense of wildness and mystery. This book provides a new perspective on an important aspect of Dartmoor's past. Its focus is transhumance: the seasonal transfer of grazing animals to different pastures.In the Middle Ages, intensive practical use was made of Dartmoor's resources. Its extensive moorlands provided summer pasture for thousands of cattle from the Devon lowlands, which flowed in a seasonal tide, up in the spring and down in the autumn. This book describes, for the first time, the social organisation and farming practices associated with this annual transfer of livestock. It also presents evidence for a previously unsuspected Anglo-Saxon pattern of transhumance in which lowland farmers spent the summers living with their cattle on the moor.Winner of the Devon Book of the Year Award 2013.

This compact book reproduces fifty-two memorials in Latin taken from churches situated largely in the West Country. Each memorial is accompanied by a translation and by notes on the grammar.The book is aimed at all who would like to be able to read Latin epitaphs in churches, and whose knowledge of the language may be sketchy.The introduction explains the conventions involved in lettering, abbreviations, Latinized personal names, and stock phrases. It is followed by a very brief Latin grammar and notes on Roman numerals and dates. At the back of the book there is a word list containing all those words found in the inscriptions with numbered references, plus a selection of words which are commonly found in inscriptions generally, though not in those printed here.By combining these resources in one book, the author equips the reader with the tools to tackle other epitaphs beyond the pages of this book and further afield.Every attempt is made to help the reader understand the context in which each inscription was composed. For instance it is stressed that the composers of such epitaphs were skilled Latin scholars, and that there are very few errors to be seen. Errors attributable to the stonemasons or sign-writers are noted and corrected.

This book offers the first full account of the film society movement in Britain and its contribution to post-World War Two film culture. It brings to life a lost history of alternative film exhibition and challenges the general assumption that the study of film began with university courses on `Film Studies'.

This is the first full-length study of one of the most popular, profitable and persistent genres in British cinema. It redraws the map of British film history by arguing that comedy was the most successful, and important, genre of the 1930s, and that the very qualities which ensured the comedy film's low status are also its particular strengths.

The birth of cinema coincided with the heyday of the short story. This book studies the relationship between popular magazine short stories and the very early British films.

Quintessentially English, Betjeman was an 'outsider' in England - and doubly so in Cornwall where he was a `foreigner'. And yet, as this book describes, Betjeman also strove to acquire a veneer of `Cornishness', cultivating an alternative Celtic identity, and finding inspiration in Cornwall's Anglo-Catholic tradition.

William Jervois was a military engineer who rose to prominence as a result of Lord Palmerston's extensive programme of fortification against a feared French invasion in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Ramparts of Empire is a detailed and engaging study of his life and works. As the first comprehensive study of this influential Victorian, the bookis an important contribution to military and engineering history as well as to the history of Imperial Britain.The text is richly illustrated with photographs and plans of Jervois' forts, while supporting appendices provide a mine of supplementary information. This includes a gazetteer of Jervois' works and documentary evidence of his involvement in plans for a Channel Tunnel and a proposal for attacking the seaboard of the United States.In 1860, Palmerston's parliament sanctioned the construction of the largest system of fortifications that the British Isles had ever seen, or would ever see again, to defend against a feared French invasion. For William Jervois, then a young major in the Royal Engineers, his appointment as ';design leader' of this programme was a major step in a career in fortress construction that would see his work in Britain, the Channel Islands, Ireland, Canada, Bermuda, India, and later, Australia and New Zealand.Timothy Crick makes extensive use of extracts from Jervois' diaries and illustrations of his fortresses to give the reader a rounded picture of this Royal Engineer's wide-ranging career. He also captures a real sense of the fears of invasion that prevailed in this period. Throughout the book both the political background and the technical considerations involved in constructing forts and armaments are carefully explored to flesh out the motivations in what is sometimes referred to as the ';Golden Age' of British fort building.

British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years offers an understanding of British Cinema between 1928 and 1939 through an analysis of the relationship between the British film industry and other ';culture industries' such as the radio, music recording, publishing and early television.This relationship has been seen as a weakness of the British film-making tradition, but Lawrence Napper stages a re-appraisal of that tradition, arguing that it is part of a specific strategy of differentiation from Hollywood cinema, designed to appeal to the ';middlebrow' aesthetic of the most rapidly expanding audience of the periodthe lower middle class.Lawrence Napper argues that the ';middlebrow' reputation for aesthetic conservatism masks an audience and popular culture marked by dynamism. ';Middlebrow' texts addressed a British audience on the move, physically (into the new suburbs), socially (as upwardly mobile consumers), economically (employed in new and developing industries, and involved in new modes of living), and culturally (embracing new forms of mass cultural consumption, such as the cinema, the wireless and the best-selling novel). The ability of these audiences to adapt cultures of the past to the media of modern life (through stage or screen adaptations) ensured their negative reputation amongst Modernist commentators and intellectual elites.

This book explores an industry that was of profound importance both in terms of the local economy and the history of mining nationally, but is long forgotten: the late medieval royal silver mines at Bere Ferrers in the Tamar Valley.The Bere Ferrers silver mines employed up to 400 men, mining on a scale and at depths not previously possible, and changed forever the way that mining was carried out in medieval Britain.

In this innovative study of early film exhibition, Joe Kember demonstrates that prior to the emergence of a specific discipline of screen acting and the arrival of picture personalities, the early cinema inherited its human dimensions from diverse earlier traditions of performance, from the magic lantern lecture to the fairground and variety theatre.Uncovering new sources, including previously neglected films, industrial documentation, memoirs, trade and popular periodicals, the book reveals a rich landscape of popular entertainments during the mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and charts the development of film institutions in relation to this complex industrial context.Marketing Modernity re-evaluates the relationship between early film and the broader cultural conditions of industrial modernity. Investigating such diverse topics as performance practices in music hall and magic theatre, the celebrity of adventurer-cameramen, and the exhibition of everyday life on screen, Kember argues that early film shows offered new opportunities to recover a sense of intimacy a quality that was popularly considered to be under threat in the rapidly modernising world of the 1890s and 1900s.

The nineteenth volume in the acclaimed paperback series . . . the only county series that can legitimately claim to represent the past and present of a nation.

TEACHING RELIGION is the first book to trace the developments in religious education in England and Wales in the half century to 1994. It starts with the 1944 Butler Act and ends with the DFE Circular of 1994 which was issued to take further the RE provision in the 1988 Education Reform Act.

The sixteenth volume in the acclaimed paperback series . . . the only county series that can legitimately claim to represent the past and present of a nation.

Winner of the 2008 Holyer An Gof Award for non-fiction. An investigation of the popular tradition of ';Australia's Little Cornwall': how one town in South Australia gained and perpetuated this identity into the twenty-first century. This book is about Moonta and its special place in the Cornish transnational identity. Today Moonta is a small town on South Australia's northern Yorke Peninsula; along with the neighbouring townships of of Wallaroo and Kadina, it is an agricultural and heritage tourism centre. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Moonta was the focus of a major copper mining industry.This book is about Moonta and its special place in the Cornish transnational identity. Today Moonta is a small town on South Australia's northern Yorke Peninsula; along with the neighbouring townships of of Wallaroo and Kadina, it is an agricultural and heritage tourism centre. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Moonta was the focus of a major copper mining industry.From the beginning, Moonta cast itself as unique among Cornish immigrant communities, becoming ';the hub of the universe' according to its inhabitants, forging the myth of ';Australia's Little Cornwall': a myth perpetuated by Oswald Pryor and others that survived the collapse of the copper mines in 1923and remains vibrant and intact today.

This book analyses the diverse historical and geographical circumstances in which audiences have viewed American cinema. It looks at cinema audiences ranging from Manhattan nickelodeons to the modern suburban megaplex, and from provincial, small-town or rural America to the shanty towns of South Africa.

The fifteenth volume in the acclaimed paperback series . . . the only county series that can legitimately claim to represent the past and present of a nation.

In the first book-length study to concentrate specifically on Britain, Jamie Sexton examines the rise of avant-garde and experimental film-making between the wars.The book provides a detailed view of how modernist and anti-mainstream currents emerged in the film industry in Britain.Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain is the first book-length study of a number of currents which opposed mainstream filmmaking and which championed film as an intellectual, modern art. It traces the growth of new approaches to film through exhibition and writing on cinema, and looks at how this cultural formation shaped certain areas of filmmaking. As such, it takes an interdisciplinary approach in which a study of independent filmmaking in this era is firmly placed within a cultural context, linking the ways in which films were presented, received and produced.This is the first in-depth look at 'alternative film culture' in Britain between the wars will excite many in the film, and film studies, worlds. It combines the history with analysis of the films themselves, and of their reception. It looks at the operations of a key contemporary institution, the original Film Society.

Sam Turner's important new interpretation of early medieval patterns of landscape development traces landscape change in the South West from the introduction of Christianity to the Norman Conquest (AD c. 450-1070).

Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet is the first book to explore in detail the vital connections between today's digital culture and an absorbing history of screen entertainments and technologies. Its range of coverage moves from the magic lantern, the stereoscope and early film to the DVD and the internet.By reaching back into the innovative media practices of the nineteenth century, Multimedia Histories outlines many of the revealing continuities between nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century multimedia culture. Comprising some of the most important new work on multimedia culture and history by key writers in this growing field, Multimedia Histories will be an indispensable new sourcebook for the discipline. It will be an important intervention in rethinking the boundaries of Anglo-American film and media history.

This edition will replace the long out-of-print edition of Edward Edwards published in 1868. It contains the full text, in the original spelling, with modern punctuation, of all known surviving letters, 240 in all, compared with Edwards' 160, in most cases taken from the original manuscripts, many never before published.

The Exeter English-Russian Dictionary of Cultural Terms is a unique work of reference whose aim is to provide English speakers who possess at least some knowledge of Russian with the Russian equivalents of foreign and cultural terms in widespread use.

Translating Rimbaud's Illuminations is a critique of the assumptions which currently underlie our thinking on literary translation. It offers an alternative vision; extending the parameters of literary translation by showing that such translation is itself a form of experimental creative writing.

These three tales, unpublished for over a century (and in one case for nearly two centuries), are a fictional exploration of Otherness and the intercultural set in the New World, either among native Americans (Abenakis, Iroquois) or runaway slaves in Jamaica befriended by Quakers.

The extraordinary performers collected here have altered the history of popular entertainment in America and Europe. Some have rarely had their story told, others are familiar figures. The essays explore what made these performers extraordinary.

West Britons provides a fresh interpretation of the bloodiest, most devastating years in Cornwall's history and a wholly new perspective on the history of the far South West of Britain. The book also includes transcriptions of a number of previously unpublished documents, and a list of some 300 Cornish Royalist officers.

The poems in this book, first published in 1890, present not only a poet searching for a voice, but also a female poet searching for a voice while breaking down rules of both versification and gender-determined source of expression. They went straight to the heart of the male-dominated poetry of the time and effectively threatened its existence.

This book combines film studies with environmental history and politics, aiming to establish a cultural criticism informed by 'green' thought. David Ingram argues that Hollywood cinema has largely perpetuated romantic attitudes to nature and has played an important ideological role in the 'greenwashing' of ecological discourses.

For the first time, The White Man's Burdens offers a cross-section of British poetry in which the Empire was the burden of the song. The material, much of it previously uncollected, is drawn from a broad cultural spectrum that includes narrative poetry, heroic verse, patriotic ballads, music hall monologues, and poems from Punch.

In this new edition, John Flower provides a full contextualising introduction of Jean Paulhan's Lettre aux directeurs de la Resistance. The volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of this turbulent period and provides a documentary history of the post-war political and literary debates in Paris.