Böcker utgivna av Manchester University Press

Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete is a much-needed volume that brings together established and early career scholars to provide new critical approaches to the relationship between Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. By reading one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages alongside one of the greatest poets of the English Renaissance, this collection addresses questions of poetic authority, influence, and the nature of intertextual relations in a more wide-ranging manner than ever before.The chapters respond to the concern that we have not fully understood what Chaucer meant to Spenser. The contributors analyse the values that Chaucer represented for Spenser and, more literally, the meanings that were made available to Spenser by Chaucer's works via the forms in which Spenser encountered them. By addressing the ways in which previous critics have read the relationship between these writers, this book offers rereadings and new insights that are in dialogue with current and emerging preoccupations in contemporary scholarship: renewed interests in literary form, book history, garden history, and animal studies. With its dual focus on authors from periods often conceived as radically separate, the collection also intervenes in current debates about periodisation. This approach will engage researchers, academics, and students of Medieval and Early Modern culture.

At the heart of the book is a departure from the obsession with "modernity" that has been so prominent in nineteenth-century cultural studies. -- .

'In this major contribution to the burgeoning canon of interdisciplinary critical work in surrealism studies, Noheden and Susik have gathered together exciting new essays by leading scholars in the field, offering analyses of key films and directors which will recalibrate our understanding of post-war developments in surrealism and its cinematic expressions.'> 'Surrealism and film after 1945 makes a compelling case for post-1945 as truly the movement's "age of cinema" and a golden one at that. Sharpening our understanding of surrealist engagements with cinema and cinematic engagements with surrealism, the essays in this collection provide a wondrous set of "enchanted wanderings" through postwar cinema, film culture, and aesthetics.'>Interest in the surrealist movement is stronger than ever, but surrealist film is still little studied compared to art and literature. Looking beyond the canonical period of the 1920s and 1930s, this volume breaks new ground by situating surrealism as a major force in postwar cinema. The book presents new analyses of renowned figures such as Leonora Carrington, Maya Deren, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Jan Svankmajer, showing how these artists helped to shape a vibrant and distinctive surrealist film culture. In doing so, it expands the scope of both surrealism and film studies, while demonstrating the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach that looks to art, literature, and ideas. Challenging predominant narratives about the attributes of surrealist film, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of art history and film, as well as a broader audience of curators, film programmers, and art aficionados.

Printing Terror argues that horror comics of the Cold War primarily concern white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. -- .

EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers draws together expert scholarship from across the fields of ecocriticism, Gothic, garden history, Romantic and Victorian studies and environmental humanities to explore how the garden in nineteenth-century Europe could be a place of disturbance, malevolence and haunting. Fresh approaches to contemporary ecocritical and environmental debates synthesise ecoGothic ideas and entities to provide compelling insights into material relationships between vegetal and human beings. Through eleven radically diverse essays, the collection demonstrates how unseen but vital relationships among plants and their life systems can reflect and inform human behaviours and actions, for good or ill. Gardens represent key areas for research into biodiversity loss and anthropogenic damage; this collection offers unique perceptions of nineteenth-century anxieties about rapid environmental and social change and how they could be reflected in ecoGothic vegetal-human interaction. In these entertaining essays, human and vegetal agency is interpreted through ecocritical and ecoGothic investigation of uncanny manifestations in gardens - hauntings, psychic encounters, monstrous hybrids, fairies and ghosts - with plants, greenhouses, granges, mansions, lakes, lawns, flowerbeds and trees as agents and sites of uncanny developments, leading to disaster and death, radical life-changes, wisdom and sorrow. The essays contain important ecocritical research by distinguished scholars in Romantic and nineteenth-century environmental studies, including Paul Evans, Heather I. Sullivan and Jonathan Smith. The collection represents the forefront of ecoGothic critical debate and will be welcomed by specialists in environmental humanities at every level, as a timely, innovative inclusion in ecoGothic studies.

There should no longer be any doubt: drones are here to stay. In civil society, they are used for rescue, surveillance, transport and leisure. And on the battlefield, their promises of remote protection and surgical precision have radically changed the way wars are fought. But what impact are drones having on our identity, and how are they affecting the communities around us? This book addresses these questions by investigating the representation of civilian and military drones in visual arts, literature and architecture. What emerges, the contributors argue, is a compelling new aesthetic: 'drone imaginary', a prism of cultural and critical knowledge, through which the complex interplay between drone technology and human communities is explored, and from which its historical, cultural and political dimensions can be assessed. The contributors offer diverse approaches to this interdisciplinary field of aesthetic drone imaginaries. With essays on the aesthetic configurations of drone swarming, historical perspectives on early unmanned aviation, as well as current debates on how drone technology alters the human body and creates new political imaginaries, this book provides new insights to the rapidly evolving field of drone studies. Working across art history, literature, photography, feminism, postcolonialism and cultural studies, Drone imaginaries offers a unique insight into how drones are changing our societies.

Beckett's afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to posthumous reworkings of Samuel Beckett's oeuvre. Contextualised against the backdrop of the author's developing views on adaptation and media specificity, it challenges the long-held belief that he opposed any form of genre crossing. Featuring contemporary engagements with Beckett's work from the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America, the volume does not approach adaptation as a form of (in)fidelity or (ir)reverence. Instead, it argues that exposing the 'Beckett canon' to new environments and artistic practices enables fresh perspectives and enhances the texts' significance for contemporary artists and audiences alike. The chapters explore a wide variety of forms - from prose and theatre to radio, television, film and webseries - focusing on the period from the early 1990s to the late 2010s. The concept of adaptation is broadly interpreted, including changes within the same performative context, spatial relocations or transpositions across genres and media, and even creative rewritings of Beckett's biography. The collection offers a range of innovative ways to approach the author's work in a constantly changing world and analyses its remarkable susceptibility to creative responses. Beckett's afterlives suggests that adaptation, remediation and appropriation are forms of cultural negotiation that are essential for the survival and continuing urgency and vibrancy of Beckett's work in the twenty-first century.

History beyond apartheid explores post-apartheid developments in history writing on South Africa, offering a corrective to charges that South African historiography has seen little in terms of innovation in the years since apartheid. With contributions from scholars involved at the cutting edge of research, the book highlights innovative approaches that have re-shaped the field, situating them in the context of the extant literature. In addition to offering fresh perspectives on the traditional themes of race, class and nation, the book covers histories of the environment, women, creative literature and the fine arts, and of South Africa's global connections and transnational entanglements. The book offers critical reflections on the theoretical and methodological aspects that guide the contributors' work, looking simultaneously backwards at the intellectual traditions on which their scholarship builds, and forward to potential future areas of inquiry informed by unresolved questions. The resulting collection offers an essential resource for emerging and established scholars involved in the practice of South African historiography.

With the military seizing overt power in Egypt, Cairo's grand and dramatic urban reshaping during and after 2011 is reflected upon under the lens of a smaller story narrating everyday interactions of a middle-class building in the neighbourhood of Doqi. -- .

Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval 1847-1890), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century, focusing on new types of cultural work by women and establishing Duval as a unique but exemplary figure in a transformational period of the nineteenth century. -- .

Every Siddal poem is close read alongside works by Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin, Tennyson and Keats and with reference to prevailing cultural, political and religious contexts to give the most comprehensive analysis yet of this enigmatic, previously undervalued poetic voice. -- .

Birth controlled analyses the world of selective reproduction - the politics of who gets to legitimately reproduce the future - through a cross-cultural analysis of three modes of 'controlling' birth: contraception, reproductive violence and repro-genetic technologies. It argues that as fertility rates decline worldwide, the fervour to control fertility, and fertile bodies, does not dissipate; what evolves is the preferred mode of control. Although new technologies like those that assist conception or allow genetic selection may appear to be an antithesis of other violent versions of population control, this book demonstrates that both are part of the same continuum. All population control policies target and vilify women (Black women in particular), and coerce them into subjecting their bodies to state and medical surveillance; Birth controlled argues that assisted reproductive technologies and repro-genetic technologies employ a similar and stratified burden of blame and responsibility based on gender, race, class and caste. To empirically and historically ground the analysis, the book includes contributions from two postcolonial nations, South Africa and India, examining interactions between the history of colonialism and the economics of neoliberal markets and their influence on the technologies and politics of selective reproduction. The book provides a critical, interdisciplinary and cutting-edge dialogue around the interconnected issues that shape reproductive politics in an ostensibly 'post-population control' era. The contributions draw on a breadth of disciplines ranging from gender studies, sociology, medical anthropology, politics and science and technology studies to theology, public health and epidemiology, facilitating an interdisciplinary dialogue around the interconnected modes of controlling birth and practices of neo-eugenics.

This volume sheds fresh light on Irish courts and court culture in the age of the European Renaissance. It contains chapters written by historians and literary scholars working with English, Irish and Latin sources. It is divided into three thematic and roughly chronological sections. The first, 'Indigenous court society in Ireland', considers the European aspects of Gaelic and Gaelicized aristocratic courts prior to the revolutionary religious and political changes instituted by Henry VIII. Looking back as far as the mid-fifteenth century, it demonstrates how Irish elite society was developing in ways similar to those found in England and on the continent. Part II, 'Made in Whitehall: Irish policy and a regnal court', argues that London, rather than viceregal Dublin, must be seen as the center for policy making in the new kingdom of Ireland. How that policy was created, debated, and implemented - or not - is surveyed from both English and Irish viewpoints. The third and concluding section, 'Positioning Ireland in the Renaissance court world', sets Irish élite culture within the broader dynamics of the late Renaissance. Its chapters reveal some of the ways in which Irish people, both at home and abroad, participated in an emergent, multi-lingual republic of letters and transnational intellectual community. Ireland and the Renaissance court is an essential guide to the European aspects of Irish high politics and society and, conversely, the Irish and Gaelic elements of the Renaissance world.

This book examines how modern Catholic contemplative nuns in the Netherlands envisioned their spirituality, offering a contextualised exploration of the discourses they adopted to shape their identity as a female spiritual elite in a male-dominated church and society.

Conceiving bodies examines the Old English medical, prognostic, and penitential traditions in order to find the reproductive bodies of women in a corpus of literature that frequently participates in the occlusion of such bodies, and indeed such lives.The early medieval medical tradition is refreshingly free of judgment for women's bodies. Much of the social distaste for bodily processes was laid upon existing texts centuries after their composition, although patriarchal structures underpin the needs and treatments for early reproductive medicine. The language in these texts is far more nuanced than we might expect. Where previous translators and dictionaries have been content to collapse all remedies into general categories like 'women's medicine' or 'childbirth charms', the remedies themselves offer treatments that are precise and specific. Because of the lack of close attention to language, translators often have misidentified the functions of these remedies. By differentiating language and treatments for menstruation, fertility, childbirth, stillbirth, and abortion, this book reveals the distinct medical concerns of medieval women.While its central content is medieval, this book places early women's medicine in conversation with the contemporary medical and political treatment of women's reproductive bodies. Experiences like childbirth, menstrual woes, and infertility create a through line by which bodies now may connect in visceral and emotional ways to bodies then.Rather than assuming early medicine consists only of repressive and uninformed superstitions, this book recognizes and advocates for the ways in which the medieval tradition makes space for people to determine their own medical reproductive destinies.

Readers and mistresses: Kept women in Victorian literature addresses the question of what to do when someone is invisible in both official documents and literature. Readers and mistresses studies the women who cannot be found in marriage registries, censuses, or much of mainstream, nineteenth-century British literature. Instead of considering kept mistresses as embodying one stage on the way to certain sex work and death, Peel uses the term 'kept woman' to unite women in a variety of kinds of keeping relationships, including some perceived as quite positive. In doing so, she offers a way to read that removes the stigma of the sexual, and appreciates the decisions of kept women as survival choices in a time and culture that actively disprivileges them. Using recent scholarship in empathy and carework, Peel takes a queer approach to Victorian narrative and encourages an active readership. Ultimately, this queer reading offers a path of reader engagement that centers the often illegible experience of kept women, and renders readers themselves the keepers of these women's narratives. Authors included in this study are, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Gissing. This book offers a way to read old material with new eyes and a social justice ethic.

Passages: On geo-analysis and the aesthetics of precarity provides an image-text montage that reveals the shadow-worlds intensifying precarity for many vulnerable populations as well as the complex event and discursive spaces that offer alternative approaches to knowledge, politics, relationality and encounters. The book addresses themes such as colonialism, nuclear zones of abandonment, migration control regimes, transnational domestic work, the biocolonial hostilities of the hospitality industry, legal precarities behind the international criminal justice regime, the shadow-worlds of the African soccerscape, and immunity regimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. It invites inquiry into today's apocalyptic narratives, humanitarian reason, and international criminal justice regimes, as well as the precarity generated by citizen time and 'consulate time'. The aesthetic breaks in the book draw attention to the ethics of encounter and passage that challenges colonial, domestic, and nation-statist sovereignty regimes of inattention.

Is Antarctica the only continent in the world where colonialism never left a footprint? The question is deceptively complex, because despite lacking an indigenous population, Antarctica has not existed in isolation from the economic and political structures of the modern world. Being labelled a continent for science and peace has never prevented Antarctica from being a space where the rivalries of the Cold War and the inequalities between the developed and the developing world played out. Colonialism and Antarctica asks two questions: what analytic value can the concept of colonialism hold to explain the past and present of Antarctica? And can thinking about colonialism in Antarctica help reveal the limits to the analytic value of colonialism as a concept more generally? The book aims both to define a particular field of inquiry and to help stimulate further debate. Truly multidisciplinary, it includes contributions from history, philosophy, archaeology, political geography, and political science. Colonialism and Antarctica also foregrounds perspectives from outside the Anglophone world and invites reflection on how knowing Antarctica is connected to power and justice.

In an era of mass extinction, climate emergency, and biodiversity collapse, what role do digital media have in securing liveable futures? To what extent are digital media mitigating or intensifying environmental crises? And what theoretical, empirical, and methodological frameworks are needed to make sense of emerging digital ecologies? In a context where digital media are reshaping the futures of conservation, environmentalism, and ecological politics--for better and for worse---Digital ecologies confronts the political and ethical stakes of these developments. The collection draws together leading social science and humanities scholars, in order to examine the growing entanglement of animals, plants, and ecosystems, with digital media technologies. The book's original empirical chapters explore novel mediated encounters between humans and other animals: from exercise apps where users race wild animals, to livestreams of chickens and lobsters, and digital sound recordings of extinct species. Authors interrogate new forms of governance and surveillance arising with digital media - as satellite-tagged birds monitor the high seas, or digital smart forests and seed data bases reconfigure life in new ways. More broadly, the book explores the political and ethical potentials new assemblages of human, animals, technologies, and environments: as social media creates complex opportunities for environmental activism and new ecologies of software emerge. Beginning with the editors' own agenda-setting introduction, and closing with three chapter-length provocations for the future of research in the field, the book offers both an overview and intervention into the rapidly expanding field of digital ecologies.

How robust are children's rights in a highly interdependent world? How have these cherished rights fared in the face of adversity, and what has driven these pressing challenges?In 1989, the United Nations General Assembly unveiled the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), receiving endorsement from 196 states worldwide--every UN member except the United States. This pivotal moment raised expectations of an era where children's rights would hold sway. The lofty ideals of human rights and the sanctity of children's dignity resound in policy documents, but on the ground, a complex range of challenges unfolds. The interplay of global governance structures, national strategies, and local factors creates a landscape where children's rights often teeter on the precipice. Considering more than three decades since the CRC's inception, this book comprehensively explores a wide range of contemporary crises, raising crucial questions about the effectiveness of international commitments in children's rights. Unlike conventional human rights scholarship, this book spotlights often-neglected crises, unveiling the blind spots in scholarly and policy dialogues. It champions a global perspective, recognizing the profound influence of global and transnational forces. The book's accomplished contributors, hailing from various academic disciplines including international relations, law, education, political science, and public policy, collectively enrich this examination with diverse perspectives. Their multidisciplinary expertise enables the readers to gain deeper insights into complex global issues, transcending conventional boundaries and fostering a holistic understanding.

The mid-century (1930s-60s) was an era of seismic shifts for British women, including those living under British rule in the colonies, in both the public and private spheres. The traditional narrative of these years is that of a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the front. But as the burgeoning field of interwar and mid-century women's writing has demonstrated, this narrative is in desperate need of re-examination. This book aims to revivify studies of female writers, journalists, broadcasters, and public intellectuals living or working in Britain, or under British rule, during the mid-century while also complicating extant narratives about the divisions between domesticity and politics. The essays in this collection explore how women represented the transformation of the quotidian -- including the home, employment, family life, and religious participation -- during the mid-century.

An important interdisciplinary collaboration that contextualises how Brexit has changed citizens' rights and presents the experiences of Brexit in the UK, EU and beyond. The authors contributing to the project come from different disciplines, including sociology, law, anthropology and political sciences. The book analyses citizenship and migration policies and how Brexit has changed the rights of British, EU and third-country nationals. Further, it locates such policy changes within the longer histories of British and EU migration policies. This highlights how Brexit was not an isolated event, but rather has found place within wider trends of restriction of citizenship rights on both sides of the Channel. Through different ethnographic and cultural studies, the book presents the experiences of British and EU nationals in the UK, Belgium and Spain. It discusses issues of citizenship and naturalisation, belonging, conviviality and hostility, families, risk and political mobilisation, to show the wide-ranging consequences of Brexit. By triangulating different experiences and perspectives, it shows how Brexit involves a loss of formal rights (and attempts to contain them). At the same time, it shows how Brexit involves wider issues of transformation of British and EU societies, and questions of who and how is accepted in such societies. Taken together, the analyses of the book aim to put at the centre the citizens impact by Brexit and to show the long-term consequences of the Brexit process. A wide-ranging analysis that allows to understand the ramifications of Brexit in the future of the UK and the EU.

John Polidori is the least regarded figure in the history of literary vampirism and yet his novella The Vampyre (1819) is perhaps 'the most influential horror story of all time' (Frayling). Polidori's story transformed the shambling, mindless monster of folklore into a sophisticated, seductive aristocrat that stalked London society rather than being confined to the hinterlands of Eastern Europe. Polidori's Lord Ruthven was thus the ancestor of the vampire as we know it. This collection is a first book-length critical study that explores the genesis of Polidori's vampire. It tracks his bloodsucking progeny across the centuries and maps his disquieting legacy from the melodramatic vampire theatricals in the 1820s, through further Gothic fictions and horror films, to twenty-first-century paranormal romance. It includes a critique of the fascinating and little-known The Black Vampyre (1819) - a text inspired by Polidori and the first Black vampire in fiction. Leading and emerging scholars of the vampire and Gothic provide innovative analyses of the variations on monstrosity and deadly allure spawned by Polidori's revenant. The collection advances from the ground-breaking research of Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day and the first special issue of Gothic Studies devoted to vampires. Appended is an annotated edition of the text of The Vampyre and supplementary material.Polidori died a suspected suicide aged 25; he has been sorely neglected. This stimulating collection makes a coherent case for the importance of John Polidori's tale and redeeming 'poor Polidori'.

Based on the findings of a 15-month research project led by the Centre for Cultural Value, this significant new book offers a comprehensive overview of the impacts of Covid-19 on the UK's cultural sector and highlights implications for its future direction.The book provides a summary of the local, regional and national policy responses to the crisis. It offers a rigorous statistical analysis of the impacts of these policy responses and of the pandemic itself on the cultural workforce across the UK and a mixed-methods analysis of audiences' responses to the pandemic. These insights are nuanced and illustrated via detailed case studies of a number of key sub-sectors of the cultural industries (theatre, museums and galleries, screen industries, libraries and festivals) and via an ecosystem analysis of the Greater Manchester city-region. The book identifies and critically reflects on the core, recurrent themes that have emerged from the research and highlights the implications for cultural practitioners, organisations, funders and policymakers as we move into the endemic stage of Covid-19. It advocates for a more equitable and regenerative cultural sector, where freelancers and marginalised cultural workers and audiences are valued and included, and for a more engaged and collaborative approach to cultural sector research to enable to sector to know itself better and adapt to rapid change.

Graveyard Gothic examines the crucial role played by graveyards and other burial sites in Gothic literature, film, television and video games. This book includes seventeen specially commissioned chapters from key international scholars that explore the graveyard's Gothic significance from the eighteenth century to the present day, and ranges far beyond British culture to consider representations from the US, Mexico, Japan, Australia, India and Eastern Europe. It offers unparalleled historical and geographical scope and engages a number of theoretical frameworks, including the historical, material, colonial, political and religious. Chapters on key texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frame the graveyard as a site of solace and metaphysical speculation that nevertheless exemplified the emerging Gothic mode by offering both supernatural potential and a reminder of the links between past and present. The book then traces the journey of the graveyard trope as it became more complex and spread across cultures, languages and continents throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors focus on its role in war Gothic, YA novels, weird fiction, poetry and non-fiction prose, as well as a vast array of novels and audiovisual texts. Important chapters demonstrate how film and TV in particular were responsible for enduring visual tropes that still shape our sense of the graveyard's Gothic identity. With its vast geographical scope, the book is also able to reveal the graveyard as a space of both oppression and resistance in texts that depict colonial conquest and exploitation. With a critical introduction offering a platform for further scholarship and a coda mapping possible future critical and cultural developments, Graveyard Gothic establishes the graveyard as a quintessential Gothic chronotope and, in the process, defines a new area of Gothic Studies.