Böcker utgivna av Bloomsbury Academic

What is the legacy of Martha Graham and why does it endure?How and why did the philosophy and subsequent canon of Martha Graham flood out into an artistic diaspora that is still a wellspring of inspiration for contemporary artists?How do dancers that have never studied with, or worked under, Martha Graham maintain her vision?All of these questions, and many more, are considered in this fascinating book, authored by one of the Martha Graham Company's ex-principal dancers, which illuminates the ongoing significance of the Martha Graham Dance Company almost 100 years after it was founded. Through doing so, we are offered a study of the history of the Martha Graham Dance Company - the longest-standing modern dance company in America, its international diaspora and the current generation of dancers taking up the mantel. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted for the book, the company's story is told through the experiences, inspirations, motivations and words of performers from Graham's iconic artistic lineage.

This non-technical introduction to modern European intellectual history traces the evolution of ideas in Europe from the turn of the 19th century to the modern day. Placing particular emphasis on the huge technological and scientific change that has taken place over the last two centuries, David Galaty shows how intellectual life has been driven by the conditions and problems posed by this world of technology. In everything from theories of beauty to studies in metaphysics, the technologically-based modern world has stimulated a host of competing theories and intellectual systems, often built around the opposing notions of 'the power of the individual' versus collectivist ideals like community, nation, tradition and transcendent experience. In an accessible, jargon-free style, Modern European Intellectual History unpicks these debates and historically analyses how thought has developed in Europe since the time of the French Revolution. Among other topics, the book explores: * The Kantian Revolution* Feminism and the Suffrage Movement* Socialism and Marxism* Nationalism* Structuralism* Quantum theory* Developments in the Arts* Postmodernism* Big Data and the Cyber Century Highly illustrated with 80 images and 10 tables, and further supported by an online Instructor's Guidet, this is the most important student resource on modern European intellectual history available today.

Blackstar Theory takes a close look at David Bowie's ambitious last works: his surprise 'comeback' project The Next Day (2013), the off-Broadway musical Lazarus (2015) and the album that preceded the artist's death in 2016 by two days, Blackstar. The book explores the swirl of themes that orbit and entangle these projects from a starting point in musical analysis and features new interviews with key collaborators from the period: producer Tony Visconti, graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, musical director Henry Hey, saxophonist Donny McCaslin and assistant sound engineer Erin Tonkon.These works tackle the biggest of ideas: identity, creativity, chaos, transience and immortality. They enact a process of individuation for the Bowie meta-persona and invite us to consider what happens when a star dies. In our universe, dying stars do not disappear - they transform into new stellar objects, remnants and gravitational forces. The radical potential of the Blackstar is demonstrated in the rock star supernova that creates a singularity resulting in cultural iconicity. It is how a man approaching his own death can create art that illuminates the immortal potential of all matter in the known universe.

How can we use digital media to understand reading, editing, and writing as literary processes? How can we design the digital medium in a way that goes beyond the printed codex? This book is an attempt to answer those fundamental questions by bringing together a new theory of literary studies with a highly dynamic digital environment. Using the digital archive of the modernist masterpiece Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), as case study and site for simulation and practical experiment, Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities demonstrates how computational approaches to texts can fully engage with the complexities of contemporary literary theory. Manuel Portela marshals a unique combination of theoretical speculation, literary analysis, and human imagination in what amounts to a significant critical intervention and a key advance in the use of digital methods to rethink the processes of reading and writing literature. The foregrounding of the foundational practices of reading, editing, and writing will be relevant for several fields, including literary studies, scholarly editing, software studies, and digital humanities.

This book is one English professor's assessment of university life in the early 21st century. From rising mental health concerns and trigger warnings to learning management systems and the COVID pandemic, Christopher Schaberg reflects on the rapidly evolving landscape of higher education. Adopting an interdisciplinary public humanities approach, Schaberg considers the frequently exhausting and depressing realities of college today. Yet in these meditations he also finds hope: collaboration, mentoring, less grading, surface reading, and other pedagogical strategies open up opportunities to reinvigorate teaching and learning in the current turbulent decade.

In a radical reflection, John Young contends that the US model of democracy have failed the Global South because its emphasis on the supremacy of market capitalism entails a loss of national sovereignty and a truncated notion of human rights that leaves little room for citizens' engagement or socioeconomic justice. The Global South needs democracy, but the US model does not address issues of national oppression or economic injustices by raising living standards and ensuring national sovereignty. However, the US international liberal order is increasing being challenged, and a multipolar world is emerging that provides opportunities for people in the Global South to construct systems of democracy that meet their needs rather than those of the US.

Matthew Wright brings Menander's Samia to life by explaining how it achieves its comic effects and how it fits within the broader context of fourth-century Greek drama and society. He offers a scene-by-scene reading of the play, combining close attention to detail with broader consideration of major themes, in an approach designed to bring out the humour and nuance of each individual moment on stage, while also illuminating Menander's comic art. The play dramatizes a tangled story of mistakes, mishaps and misapprehensions leading up to the marriage of Moschion and Plangon. For most of the action the characters are at odds with one another owing to accidental delusions or deliberate deceptions, and it seems as if the marriage will be cancelled or indefinitely postponed; but ultimately everyone's problems are solved and the play ends happily. Samia is one of the best-preserved examples of fourth-century Greek comedy: celebrated within antiquity but subsequently lost for many years, it miraculously came back to light, in almost complete form, as a result of Egyptian papyrus finds during the 20th century.

This Reader brings together nearly 80 extracts from major works by Christians and Muslims that reflect their reciprocal knowledge and attitudes. It spans the period from the early 7th century, when Islam originated, to 1500. The general introduction provides a historical and geographical summary of Christian-Muslim encounters in the period and a short account of the religious, intellectual and social circumstances in which encounters took place and works were written. Topics from the Christian perspective include: condemnations of the Qur'an as a fake and Muhammad as a fraud, depictions of Islam as a sign of the final judgement, and proofs that it was a Christian heresy. On the Muslim side they include: demonstrations of the Bible as corrupt, proofs that Christian doctrines were illogical, comments on the inferior status of Christians, and accounts of Christian and Muslim scholars in collaboration together. Each of the six parts contains the following pedagogical features: -A short introduction -An introduction to each passage and author -Notes explaining terms that readers might not have previously encountered

"Why do the Brexiteers want to leave?" "Why do the Remainers want to stay?" "What exactly would a post-Brexit Europe look like?"These questions have dominated the post- Brexit socio-political landscape. In this timely and engaging book Bernard Porter responds to these questions. Each chapter presents different historical episodes contributing to an overall understanding of what Porter calls Britain's "most important move in her national life since she risked her whole being to go to war with Germany in 1939." The book comprises a collection of well-researched and considered chapters ranging from Britain's 'asylum' policy for European refugees in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to 'terrorism' in mainland Britain, and governments responses to it. Porter draws from a range of sources and personal experiences to investigate the cultural and social history that led us (or which specifically didn't lead us) to the decision to leave the European Union. The result is an engaging and personal analysis of Britain's distinctive 'identity', and on its former relations with Europe

Re-Making Sound is concise and flexible primer to sound studies. It takes students through six ways of conceptualizing sound and its links to other social phenomena: soundscapes; noise; sound and semiotics of the voice; sound and/through/in text; background sound/sound design; and sound art. Each chapter summarizes the history and scholarly theoretical underpinnings of these areas and concludes with a student activity that concretizes the historical and theoretical discussion via sound-making projects. With chapters designed to be flexible and non-sequential, the text fits within various course designs, and includes an introduction to key concepts in sound and sound studies, a cumulative concluding chapter with sound accompanying podcast exercise, and an extensive bibliography for students to pursue sound studies beyond the book itself.

This book examines and corrects the most common, enduring and pernicious historical misconceptions about Jews and the practice and history of their faith. Taking on many of the most widely held forms of anti-Semitic thinking, the author addresses false beliefs about Jews and Judaism, among them that Jews in ancient Israel practiced Judaism, that Judaism opposes Christianity, that Jews are a race, and that Judaism thrived under Islam. Each chapter explores how a particular misconception arose and spread, as well as what we now believe to be the truth and why we believe it.

The training of elite dancers has not changed in the last 60 years; it is often only those that have survived the training that go on to have a career, not necessarily the most talented. It is time to challenge and change how we train tomorrow's professional dancers. This book brings you the reasons why and all tools to implement change.10 years ago, Matthew Wyon and Gaby Allard introduced a new pedagogical approach to training vocational dancers: Periodization. This ground-breaking new methodology provides an adaptable framework to optimise training - it's goal-focused, fits to performance schedules, and is highly sustainable for the dancer. It is the future.For the first time, Wyon and Allard have put their discoveries to paper. Periodization provides clear context to why change is needed, and explores the theoretical underpinnings of this new approach and how it can be effectively applied to a dance environment.

Callimachus was one of the most important Greek poets, and can also be one of the most rewarding to read. He was a pivotal figure in the history of ancient literature and an influential presence in later ancient poetry, including Catullus and Vergil. Yet his work is not read and enjoyed as much as it could be. This new volume in the popular Ancients in Action series seeks to bring Callimachus to a wide audience, addressing the problems with currently available scholarship, which assumes a professional level of expertise, including full knowledge of Greek. Rawles presents a much-needed introduction to Callimachus' poetry and is intended for the non-specialist reader and student, assuming no knowledge of Greek. The book is organised in thematic chapters, rich in quotation (in translation), with selective annotations and guidance for further study and reading.

Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature provides an overview of the main themes, issues and critical perspectives that have had the greatest effect on postcolonial literatures. Discussing historical, cultural and contextual background, it contains selected work of some of the major writers from this period.

For decades, the state-run music industry in Hungary has artificially isolated musical worlds. The 2010 album I'll Be Your Plaything is a concept album comprising at times drastically re-imagined cover versions of Hungary's most popular hits from the socialist era. As such it is a testament to music as a medium's aptness to reflect on public and personal pasts. The album moreover exemplifies how rich and appealing synthesis of sounds and traditions can be concocted when folk, classically trained, rock, and jazz musical artists collaborate. Along with this freedom to blend and synthesize, the album opens up some long overdue space for women; playing with personas, voices, and singing styles, Palya reflects on issues of femininity, maternity, sexuality, and coupledom across generations.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art explores and delineates what Sound Art is in the 21st century. Sound artworks today embody the contemporary and transcultural trends towards the post-apocalyptic, a wide sensorial spectrum of sonic imaginaries as well as the decolonization and deinstitutionalization around the making of sound. Within the areas of musicology, art history, and, later, sound studies, Sound Art has evolved at least since the 1980s into a turbulant field of academic critique and aesthetic analysis. Summoning artists, researchers, curators, and critics, this volume takes note of and reflects the most recent shifts and drifts in Sound Art--rooted in sonic histories and implying future trajectories.

Covering the major social and political events of British history from the late Victorian era through to the present day, the 6th edition of this landmark textbook helps students critically examine the relationship between the British state and its citizens. With accessible and engaging prose, the book guides students through a mix of chronological and thematic coverage connecting key political, economic and social changes, helping them examine the main themes and trends in British political history.Newly featuring definitions of key terms, and with 20 additional illustrations, the 6th edition has also been updated to cover events since the 2015 general election, including: - The 2017 and 2019 general elections- The Brexit vote and negotiations- The COVID-19 pandemic- The resignation of David Cameron, the fall of Theresa May, and the rise of Boris Johnson- The rise of cultural politics, including feminism, Black Lives Matter, the centralisation of government and identity politics This book is essential for anyone looking to for an introduction to modern British social and political history.

Music videos promote popular artists in cultural forms that circulate widely across social media networks. With the advent of YouTube in 2005 and the proliferation of handheld technologies and social networking sites, the music video has become available to millions worldwide, and continues to serve as a fertile platform for the debate of issues and themes in popular culture. This volume of essays serves as a foundational handbook for the study and interpretation of the popular music video, with the specific aim of examining the industry contexts, cultural concepts, and aesthetic materials that videos rely upon in order to be both intelligible and meaningful. Easily accessible to viewers in everyday life, music videos offer profound cultural interventions and negotiations while traversing a range of media forms. From a variety of unique perspectives, the contributors to this volume undertake discussions that open up new avenues for exploring the creative changes and developments in music video production. With chapters that address music video authorship, distribution, cultural representations, mediations, aesthetics, and discourses, this study signals a major initiative to provide a deeper understanding of the intersecting and interdisciplinary approaches that are invoked in the analysis of this popular and influential musical form.

Charles H. Long is one of the most influential and pioneering scholars in the study of religion from the past 50 years. This is the first comprehensive collection of his writings, edited by Long himself, and contains 38 pieces, including both published and previously unpublished articles, lectures, an interview, and two book reviews. The foreword is provided by Jennifer Reid, a former student of Long. The collection is divided into four thematic parts: America and the Study of Religion; Theory and Method in the Study of Religion; African American Religion in the United States; Kindling, Embers and Sparks. Long's introduction provides much-awaited insight into his reflections on his work, expanding on questions that remained unanswered in his classic and influential text, Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Images (1986). In particular, the new introductory essay explores the significance of "ellipses", that which is omitted, the projected spaces of the Other in the study of religion. Considered the preeminent founder and advocate of the study of Black Religion, Long was exploring religion and colonialism and the importance of Afro-American religion as early as the 1960s and early 1970s, and this collection of his thinking - which moves across the formations of religious studies, African diasporic studies, and social and cultural theory - is a must-have addition for any institutional or personal library.

Literature has never looked weirder--full of images, colors, gadgets, and footnotes, and violating established norms of character, plot, and narrative structure. Yet over the last 30 years, critics have coined more than 20 new "realisms" in their attempts to describe it. What makes this decidedly unorthodox literature "realistic"? And if it is, then what does "realism" mean anymore? Examining literature by dozens of writers, and over a century of theory and criticism about realism, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism sorts through the current critical confusion to illustrate how our ideas about what is real and how best to depict it have changed dramatically, especially in recent years. Along the way, Mary K. Holland guides the reader on a lively tour through the landscape of contemporary literary studies--taking in metafiction, ideology, posthumanism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism--with forays into quantum mechanics, new materialism, and Buddhism as well, to give us entirely new ways of viewing how humans use language to make sense of--and to make--the world.

Divided into four parts-Earth, Air, Fire, and Water-this book takes an elemental approach to the study of religion and ecology. It reflects recent theoretical and methodological developments in this field which seek to understand the ways that ideas and matter, minds and bodies exist together within an immanent frame of reference. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Nature focuses on how these matters materialize in the world around us, thereby addressing key topics in this area of study. The editors provide an extensive introduction to the book, as well as useful introductions to each of its parts. The volume's international contributors are drawn from the USA, South Africa, Netherlands, Norway, Indonesia, and South Korea, and offer a variety of perspectives, voices, cultural settings, and geographical locales. This handbook shows that human concern and engagement with material existence is present in all sectors of the global community, regardless of religious tradition. It challenges the traditional methodological approach of comparative religion, and argues that globalization renders a comparative religious approach to the environment insufficient.

This new volume in the Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions series is perfect for students coming to one of Plautus' most whimsical, provocative, and influential plays for the first time, and a useful first point of reference for scholars less familiar with Roman comedy. Menaechmi is a tale of identical twin brothers who are separated as young children and reconnect as adults following a series of misadventures due to mistaken identity. A gluttonous parasite, manipulative courtesan, shrewish wife, crotchety father-in-law, bumbling cook, saucy handmaid, quack doctor, and band of thugs comprise the colourful cast of characters. Each encounter with a misidentified twin destabilizes the status quo and provides valuable insight into Roman domestic and social relationships. The book analyzes the power dynamics at play in the various relationships, especially between master and slave and husband and wife, in order to explore the meaning of freedom and the status of slaves and women in Roman culture and Roman comedy. These fundamental societal concerns gave Plautus' Menaechmi an enduring role in the classical tradition, which is also examined here, including notable adaptations by William Shakespeare, Jean François Regnard, Carlo Goldoni and Rodgers and Hart.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class is the first extensive analysis of the most important themes and concepts in this field. Encompassing contemporary research in ethnomusicology, sociology, cultural studies, history, and race studies, the volume explores the intersections between music and class, and how the meanings of class are asserted and denied, confused and clarified, through music. With chapters on key genres, traditions, and subcultures, as well as fresh and engaging directions for future scholarship, the volume considers how music has thought about and articulated social class. It consists entirely of original contributions written by internationally renowned scholars, and provides an essential reference point for scholars interested in the relationship between popular music and social class.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production provides a detailed overview of current research on the production of mono and stereo recorded music. The handbook consists of 33 chapters, each written by leaders in the field of music production. Examining the technologies and places of music production as well the broad range of practices - organization, recording, desktop production, post-production and distribution - this edited collection looks at production as it has developed around the world. In addition, rather than isolating issues such as gender, race and sexuality in separate chapters, these points are threaded throughout the entire text.

Canada has not always had the role of 'friendly neighbor to the north.' In fact, the seemingly peaceful history of relations between the United States and Canada is punctuated with instances of border disputes, annexation manifestos and trade disagreements. David R. Spencer reveals the complexity of this relationship through a fascinating examination of political cartoons that appeared both in the U.S. and Canada from 1849 through the 1990s. By first examining both the cultural and political differences and similarities between the two nations, Spencer lays the groundwork for the main focus of his study - deeper analysis of the political perspectives of the editorial cartoons. Including 141 actual cartoons of the time, Spencer provides meaningful references to the historical material covered. An intriguing study by a leading Canadian-American scholar, this work is sure to interest many across the disciplines of journalism history, cartoons, media studies, communication and international relations.

Don DeLillo, American Original is a startlingly original and provocative reinterpretation of one of the most important novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Adopting a direct approach that steers clear of debates with secondary literature and covering the full arc of Don DeLillo's career from A to Z - Americana (1971) to Zero K (2016) - Michael Naas shows that the extraordinary power, authority, insight, and inventiveness of DeLillo's fiction are the result of the way it traffics everywhere in contraband goods and narratives, in doubleness or duplicity of every kind, in multiple voices, story lines, times, places, and media that at once interrupt and complement one another. This is a book that invites skimming and dipping, structured into easily digestible sections on everything from weapons and drugs to erotica, nuclear waste, and secret societies, each preceded by humorous and incisive epigraphs from DeLillo's novels. Michael Naas reads DeLillo's fiction as a way of life or as equipment for living, rather than as a critical puzzle to be solved - and thereby opens up new horizons for thinking about why literature matters in the 21st century.

Drawing on a range of methodologies, editors George D. Chryssides and Stephen E. Gregg shift attention from normative textual and doctrinal matters to issues of materiality and everyday life in Christianity. This handbook is structured in four parts, which include coverage of the following aspects of Christianity: sacred space and objects, cyber-Christianity, food, prayer, education, family life, fundamentalism and sexuality. In addition, issues of gender, race and ethnicity are treated throughout. The international team of contributors provide in-depth analysis that highlight the current state of academic study in the field and explores areas in which future research might develop. Clearly organised to help users quickly locate key information and analysis, the book includes an A to Z of key terms, extensive guides to further resources, a comprehensive bibliography and a chronology of landmark events, making it a unique resource to upper-level students and researchers.

Bridging the gap between cognition and culture, this handbook explores both social scientific and humanities approaches to understanding the physical processes of religious life, tradition, practice, and belief. It reflects the cultural turn within the study of religion and puts theory to the fore, moving beyond traditional theological, philosophical, and ethnographic understandings of the aesthetics of religion. Editors Anne Koch and Katharina Wilkens bring together research in cultural studies, cognitive studies, material religion, religion and the arts, and epistemology. Questions of identity, gender, ethnicity, and postcolonialism are discussed throughout. Key topics include materiality, embodiment, performance, popular/vernacular art and space to move beyond a sensory understanding of aesthetics. Emerging areas of research are covered, including secular aesthetics and the aesthetic of spirits. This is an important contribution to theory and method in the study of religion, and is grounded in research that has been taking place in Europe over the past 20 years. Case studies are drawn from around the world with contributions from scholars based in Europe, the USA, and Australia. The book is illustrated with over 40 color images and features a foreword from Birgit Meyer.

"This textbook is the first to consider world history from below, providing an alternative to the privilege of Western powers and elite political structures found in conventional global history narratives"--

What is it to practice history in an age in which photographs exist? What is the impact of photographs on the core historiographical practices which define the discipline and shape its enquiry and methods? In Photographs and the Practice of History, Elizabeth Edwards proposes a new approach to historical thinking which explores these questions and redefines the practices at the heart of this discipline. Structured around key concepts in historical methodology which are recognisable to all undergraduates, the book shows that from the mid-19th century onward, photographs have influenced historical enquiry. Exposure to these mass-distributed cultural artefacts is enough to change our historical frameworks even when research is textually-based. Conceptualised as a series of 'sensibilities' rather than a methodology as such, it is intended as a companion to 'how to' approaches to visual research and visual sources. Photographs and the Practice of History not only builds on existing literature by leading scholars: it also offers a highly original approach to historiographical thinking that gives readers a foundation on which to build their own historical practices.