Böcker av Helen Carr

A groundbreaking collection from a diverse mix of historians, both bestselling names and emerging voices, addressing the burning issue of what history means today. Featuring Peter Frankopan, Simon Schama, Bettany Hughes and more.

American mainstream culture has always been fascinated with the notion of the primitive, particularly as embodied by Native Americans. In Inventing the American Primitive, Helen Carr illustrates how responses to the existence of Native American traditions have shaped ideas of American identity and American literature. Inventing the American Primitive examines a body of work, both literary and anthropological, that describes, inscribes, translates and transforms Native American myths and poetry. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, as well as ethnography's recent textual turn, Carr reveals the conflicts and ambivalence in these texts. Through their writings, the writers and anthropologists studied were attempting to preserve a culture which their country, with their help or connivance, sought to destroy. The contradictions and tensions of this position run throughout their work. Although there is no simple narrative of progress in this story, as it moves from the eighteenth-century primitivism to twentieth-century modernism, the book shows the process by which the richness and complexity of Native American traditions came to be acknowledged. Inventing the American Primitive offers a radical new reading of American literary history, as well as fresh insights into the powerful pull of primitivism in United States culture, and into the interactions of gender and race ideologies.

War, revolution and love - dazzling medieval history from a rising star

This book uses a case study of a low-cost home ownership initiative at the margins of renting and owning provided by social landlords - known as shared ownership - to challenge everyday assumptions held about the 'social' and the 'legal' in property.

Helen Carr's account draws on both recent feminism and postcolonial theory, and places Jean Rhys's work in relation to modernist and postmodernist writing.