Books published by University of Exeter

This is the first historical atlas of a major region of the United Kingdom. Its aim is to create and communicate the history of the south-western peninsula of England-Cornwall, Devon and the Isles of Scilly - from the beginnings of man's occupation to the present day.

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.

Drawing on archive material and a series of personal interviews, this exciting new book reverses the neglect of this vital element in the history of contemporary theatre - the vibrant presence of South Asians in theatre in Britain.

This volume is an edited collection of critical essays on British Asian theatre. It includes contributions from a number of researchers who have been active in the field for a substantial period of time.This title is complemented by British South Asian Theatres: A Documented History by the same authors, also available from University of Exeter Press.

Winner of the Society for Theatre Research Book Prize - 2016This is the final volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson's definitive four-volume survey of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material, covering the period 1960-1968. This brings to its conclusion the first comprehensive research on the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives for the 20th century. The 1960s was a significant decade in social and political spheres in Britain, especially in the theatre. As certainties shifted and social divisions widened, a new generation of theatre makers arrived, ready to sweep away yesterday's conventions and challenge the establishment. Analysis exposes the political and cultural implications of a powerful elite exerting pressure in an attempt to preserve the veneer of a polite, unquestioning society.

Mining in Cornwall and Devon is an economic history of mines, mineral ownership, and mine management in the South West of England. The work brings together material from a variety of hard-to-find sources on the thousands of mines that operated in Cornwall and Devon from the late 1790s to the present day.

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 Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, first staged in 1913 in St Petersburg, was a key event of the Russian avant-garde, notorious for its libretto, its unconventional score and its pioneering abstract sets and costumes designed by Kazimir Malevich. The iconic importance of Victory over the Sun as a theatrical event is universally acknowledged.This volume brings together the first fully annotated translation of the libretto of this ';anti-opera' and other important primary source materials, including the score, the set and costume designs and contemporary newspaper reviews. The second part of the volume provides a wide-ranging collection of interpretive essays which explore the artistic, literary and musical dimensions of the staging, its theatrical and historical context, its relationship to Italian Futurism, and its position within the Russian modernist movement.You can read more about the Pushkin House event on 22 November 2012 on the Russian Art and Culture website by following this link http:// www.russianartandculture.com/victory-over-sun-book-launch-pushkin-house/ (will open in a new window).And you can see and hear more in Alexander Kan's report on the BBC Russian site by following this link http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/multimedia/2012/11/121127_futuristic_dinner.shtml (will open in a new window).In 1913, the year in which the Romanovs celebrated their tercentenary, the premieres of two revolutionary theatrical events brought Russian artists to the forefront of the European avant-garde. With its nonsensical ';trans-sense' libretto by Aleksei Kruchenykh andVelimirKhlebnikov, experimental score by Mikhail Matiushin and pioneering abstract sets and costumes by Kazimir Malevich, the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun may be compared in terms of its radical assault on artistic convention to Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring.This interdisciplinary volume brings together a distinguished team of international scholars to discuss the artistic significance of this epoch-making ';anti-opera', which is now recognised as a key event of avant-garde cultural production, and a turning point in stage history.The book offers new insight into the theatre practice and history of Russian Futurist performance, which, to date, has received little attention from theatre scholars despite its influence on the development of European drama in the twentieth century.As well as an annotated translation of the libretto, the book includes reproductions of the score and contemporary newspaper reviews.Illustrated throughout, and with a colour plate section containing twenty-seven colour images of costume designs, posters and other work by the abstract artist Kazimir Malevich

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.

Drawing on archive material and a series of personal interviews, this exciting new book reverses the neglect of this vital element in the history of contemporary theatre - the vibrant presence of South Asians in theatre in Britain.

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

This is the third volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson's comprehensive four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives in the British Library and the Royal Archives at Windsor. Focusing on plays we know, plays we have forgotten, and plays which were silenced for ever, Censorship of British Drama demonstrates the extent to which censorship shaped the theatre voices of this decade. The book charts the early struggles with Royal Court writers such as John Osborne and with Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop; the stand-offs with Samuel Beckett and with leading American dramatists; the Lord Chamberlain's determination to keep homosexuality off the stage, which turned him into a laughing stock when he was unable to prevent a private theatre club in London's West End from staging a series of American plays he had banned, including Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and the Lord Chamberlain's attempts to persuade the government to give him new powers and to rewrite the law.This new edition includes a contextualising timeline for those readers who are unfamiliar with the period, and a new preface.

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.

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.

This is the first new biography in English for nearly eighty years of Italy's foremost writer and thinker, and weaves into a single thread the whole of Dante's life and works. The aim is to make an account of Dante's life accessible to students and to the curious and intelligent but non-specialist reader. All quotations are fully translated.

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.

A companion to UEP's Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (now in its third reprint). London's Grand Guignol was established in the early 1920s at the Little Theatre in the West End. It was a high-profile venture that enjoyed popular success as much as critical controversy.

';In Comes I' explores performance and land, biography and locality, memory and place. The book reflects on performances past and present, taking the form of a series of excursions into the agricultural landscape of eastern England, and drawing from archaeology, geomorphology, folklore, and local and family history.Mike Pearson, a leading theatre artist and solo-performer, returns to the landscape of his childhood off the beaten track in Lincolnshire and uses it as a mnemonic to reflect widely upon performance theory and practice. Rather than focusing on author, period and genre as is conventional in the study of drama, the book takes region as its optic, acknowledging the affective ties between people and place.Offering new approaches to the study of performance, he integrates intensely personal narrative with analytical reflection, juxtaposing anecdote with theoretical insight, dramatic text with interdisciplinary perception. The performances, ranging from folk drama to contemporary site-specific work, are seen in the light of their relationship to their cultural and physical environment.

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.

Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre is the first in-depth study of perhaps Britain's most influential twentieth-century theatre company. The book sets the company's aims and achievements in their social, political and theatrical contexts, and explores the elements which made its success so important.

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.