MUP

A popular and influential play from its first performance in 1611 until the early eighteenth century, 'A King and No King' helped establish tragicomedy as the seventeenth century's favoured dramatic genre, and Beaumont and Fletcher as leading playwrights of the day.

Accompanying this newly edited text, an introduction explores the play's sources, both literary and dramatic, and offers a thorough reconsideration of its relation to its social and political context, and contemporary issues of royal absolutism, good governance, and the political role of the aristocracy. In addition, the introduction provides the fullest available account of 'A King and No King''s stage history, tracing the shifts in cultural mores that eroded its popularity and ultimately consigned it to the study rather than the stage. This fully annotated edition encourages an appreciation of the play's very real virtues and will appeal to theatre professionals as well as to students of Renaissance drama.

This edition presents a thoroughly reconsidered text based on collation of all known copies of the 1608 quarto (including material unnoticed by earlier editors).

Textual analysis draws on detailed internal investigation and the printer’s wider practice to propose that relatively improvisational procedures and a paper quota governed A Trick’s printing operations. Discovery of an overlooked record revises the date of court performance to 1 January 1607, with implications for the play’s early history. Critical discussion freshly examines the play’s multi-layered ironic texture in relation to such issues as the status of women, marriage’s relation to prostitution and vice versa, and the contemporary marriage market. And the Courtesan receives special attention in the context of this overarching ironic scheme. An extensive stage history explores original staging and documents revivals to 2011. The commentary is the most wide-ranging and comprehensive of all modern editions.

Placing Robbe-Grillet’s filmic oeuvre in the related contexts of both his novelistic work and the different historical and cultural periods in which his films were made, from the early 1960s to the present, the book traces lines of influence and continuity throughout his work, which is shown to exhibit a consistent preoccupation with an identifiable body of themes, motifs and structures. Close readings of all the films are skilfully combined with a thematic approach, ranging across the entire filmic corpus. The book also contains chapters on cinematography and technique.

Now available in paperback, this lucid, comprehensive and fascinating study shows Robbe-Grillet’s contribution to the evolution of the cinematic art both in France and internationally to have been considerably more important than previously acknowledged.

Alan Bennett is one of the UK’s most well-known and successful writers. His oeuvre is one where populist art forms and intellectually complex arguments co-exist seamlessly, allowing the work to appeal to a wide audience. Bennett’s familiar voice combines both an appreciation for the past with a critical assessment of contemporary Britain, often through relentlessly detailed observation of himself and of others.

Bennett has acted, written, directed, presented or edited in almost every conceivable dramatic medium, including stage, television, radio, film and print media. This book is the first to focus on his often neglected work for television, from the mid-1960s right through to the present. It encompasses formats such as the single play (the rarely seen 1970s collaborations with Stephen Frears and Lindsay Anderson), the two Talking Heads series, perceived as a reinvention of the television monologue, and his autobiographical documentaries.

While providing a context of television drama in which Bennett’s output is embedded, this study also provides compact overviews of his work in other media. The book is intended for those interested in Alan Bennett, his many voices and the history of television drama.

The British television director Alan Clarke is primarily associated with the visceral social realism of such works as his banned borstal play Scum, and his study of football hooliganism, The Firm. This book uncovers the full range of his work from the mythic fantasy of Penda's Fen, to the radical short film on terrorism, Elephant.

Dave Rolinson uses original research to examine the development of Clarke's career from the theatre and the 'studio system' of provocative television play strands of the 1960s and 1970s, to the increasingly personal work of the 1980s, which established him as one of Britain's greatest directors.

Alan Clarke examines techniques of television direction, and proposes new methodologies as it questions the critical neglect of directors in what is traditionally seen as a writer's medium. It raises crucial issues in television studies, including aesthetics, authorship, censorship, the convergence of film and television, drama-documentary form, narrative and realism.

Since the release of his first feature in 1996, Alejandro Amenábar has become the ‘golden boy’ of Spanish filmmaking, a bankable star director whose brand virtually guarantees quality, big audiences and domestic box office success. He has directed three of the highest-grossing movies in Spanish film history and has enjoyed enormous international and critical acclaim, including an Oscar for Best Foreign Film for Mar Adentro/The Sea Inside, 2004.

This book is the first full-length study in English of Amenábar’s shorts and feature films. It provides detailed analysis of his engagement with popular film genres as the basis for an auteur cinema and incorporates a reappraisal of his auteurism as fundamentally decentred and shared. An essential resource for students, scholars and fans of Amenábar, the book will also appeal to a wider readership, including professionals in the film, media and culture industries as well as those who have a general interest in the best of Spanish, European and world cinema.

George Chapman is known today as a translator of Homer and as the author of dark tragedies such as Bussy D'Ambois. An Humorous Day's Mirth was one of the most popular plays of the Elizabethan era. Not only was it the Rose Theatre's greatest box-office success of 1597, it also presented an entirely new type of comedy, one that has profoundly influenced comic writing up to the present day.

This play is the English theatre's first 'comedy of humours', in which the attitudes, behaviour, and social pretensions of contemporary men and women are satirised. Charles Edelman's is the first fully annotated, modern spelling edition of this long-neglected play. In his extensive introduction and commentary, Edelman discusses the intellectual, philosophical and theatrical background, and shows that the play would delight the readers and audiences of today as much as those in 1597.

One of Britain's foremost TV practitioners, Andrew Davies is the creator of programmes such as 'A Very Peculiar Practice', 'To Serve Them All My Days', 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Othello' and 'The Way We Live Now'. Although best known for his adaptations of the work of writers such as Jane Austen and George Eliot, he has written numerous original drama series, single plays, films, stage plays and books. This volume offers a critical appraisal of Davies’s work, and assesses his contribution to British television.

Cardwell also explores the conventional notions of authorship and auteurism which are challenged by Davies’s work. Can we identify Davies as the author of the varied texts attributed to him? If so, does an awareness of his authorial role aid our interpretation and evaluation of those texts? How does the phenomenon of adaptation affect the issue of authorship? How important is ‘the author’ to television?

This book will appeal to both an academic readership, and to the many people who have taken pleasure in Davies’s work.

This is the first full-length monograph in English about one of France's most important contemporary filmmakers, perhaps best known in the English speaking world for his award winning Les Roseaux sauvages/Wild Reeds of 1994. This study locates André Téchiné within historical and cultural contexts that include the Algerian war, May 1968 and contemporary globalisation, and the influence of Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, William Faulkner and the cinematic French wave. The originality of Téchiné's sixteen feature films lies in his subtle exploration of sexuality and national identity, as he challenges expectations in his depictions of gay relations, the North African dimensions of contemporary French culture, and the centre-periphery relationship between Paris and his native southwest.

The book will be of interest to researchers and postgraduates working on French cinema, undergraduates studying Téchiné on their film courses, and all those with a general interest in cinema, contemporary France, and lesbian and gay issues.

This is the first comprehensive critical study of Anthony Asquith. Ryall sets the director's work in the context of British cinema from the silent period to the 1960s, examining the artistic and cultural influences which shaped his films.

Asquith's silent films were compared favourably to those of his eminent contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, but his career faltered during the 1930s. However, the success of Pygmalion (1938) and French Without Tears (1939), based on plays by George Bernard Shaw and Terence Rattigan, together with his significant contributions to wartime British cinema, re-established him as a leading British film maker. Asquith's post-war career includes several pictures in collaboration with Terence Rattigan, and the definitive adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1951), but his versatility is demonstrated in a number of modest genre films including The Woman in Question (1950), The Young Lovers (1954) and Orders to Kill (1958).

How did people learn their Bibles in the Middle Ages? Did church murals, biblical manuscripts, sermons or liturgical processions transmit the Bible in the same way?

This book unveils the dynamics of biblical knowledge and dissemination in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England. An extensive and interdisciplinary survey of biblical manuscripts and visual images, sermons and chants, reveals how the unique qualities of each medium became part of the way the Bible was known and recalled; how oral, textual, performative and visual means of transmission joined to present a surprisingly complex biblical worldview. This study of liturgy and preaching, manuscript culture and talismanic use introduces the concept of biblical mediation, a new way to explore Scriptures and society. It challenges the lay-clerical divide by demonstrating that biblical exegesis was presented to the laity in non-textual means, while the ‘naked text’ of the Bible remained elusive even for the educated clergy.

Bertrand Tavernier is widely recognised as the leading French filmmaker of his generation. Both a consummate artist and a controversial public figure, he is a passionate advocate for social causes and also a tireless defender of world cinema in general and the French cinematic heritage in particular.

Lynn Higgins’ book offers a guided tour through Tavernier’s oeuvre, taking into account both its prodigious diversity and its unifying themes. It explores his use of genre and adaptation, his work with actors and his affection for characters, his treatment of France’s colonial history, his explorations of the powers of art and the complexities of intergenerational relations, both among fictional characters and within French cinema history.

This is the most comprehensive scholarly book about Tavernier. Original and lively, sophisticated and engaging, the book will appeal to anyone interested in film studies, gender studies, and French cultural studies including academics, students, cinema enthusiasts, and Tavernier fans.

Between earth and heaven examines the teaching of the theology of Christ’s ascension in Anglo-Saxon literature, offering the only comprehensive examination of how patristic ascension theology is transmitted, adapted and taught to Anglo-Saxon audiences. This book argues that Anglo-Saxon authors recognise the Ascension as fundamentally liminal in nature, as concerned with crossing boundaries and inhabiting dual states. In their teaching, authors convert abstract theology into concrete motifs reflecting this liminality, such as the gates of heaven and Christ’s footprints.

By examining a range of liminal imagery, Between earth and heaven demonstrates the consistent sophistication and unity of Ascension theology in such diverse sources as Latin and Old English homilies, religious poetry, liturgical practices, and lay popular beliefs and rituals. This study not only refines our evaluation of Anglo-Saxon authors’ knowledge of patristic theology and their process of source adaptation, but also offers a new understanding of the methods of religious instruction and uses of religious texts in Anglo-Saxon England, capturing their lived significance to contemporary audiences.

Kyd is arguably Shakespeare's most important tragic predecessor. Brilliantly fusing the drama of the academic and popular traditions, Thomas Kyd's plays are of central importance for understanding how the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries came about. Called 'an extraordinary dramatic … genius' by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Kyd invented the revenge tragedy genre that culminated in Shakespeare's Hamlet some twelve years later.

In this study, The Spanish Tragedy – the most popular of all plays on the English Renaissance stage – receives the extensive scholarly and critical treatment it deserves, including a full reception and modern stage history. Yet as Erne shows, Thomas Kyd is much more than the author of a single masterpiece. Don Horatio (partly extant in The First Part of Hieronimo), the lost early Hamlet, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia all belong to what emerges in this work as a coherent dramatic oeuvre.

This groundbreaking study is now in paperback.

Carol Reed is one of the truly outstanding directors of British cinema, and one whose work is long overdue for reconsideration. This major study ranges over Reed’s entire career, combining observation of general trends and patterns with detailed analysis of twenty films, both acknowledged masterpieces and lesser-known works.
Evans avoids a simplistic auteurist approach, placing the films in their autobiographical, socio-political and cultural contexts and relating these to the analysis of Reed’s art. The critical approach combines psychoanalysis, gender theory, and the analysis of form. Archival research is also relied on to clarify Reed’s relations with his creative team, financial backers and others.
Films examined include Bank Holiday, A Girl Must Live, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, Night Train to Munich, The Way Ahead, Outcast of the Islands, Trapeze and Oliver!.

This is the first English-language book on controversial female director Catherine Breillat, whose films include Romance, A ma soeur! (Fat Girl), Anatomy of Hell and The Last Mistress.

This volume explores the director's complex relation to religion and to feminism, and it examines the differences between Breillat's films and patriarchal pornography, engaging in detailed analysis of her intimate scenes between men and women. Keesey also discusses the literature, films, paintings and photos that have influenced Breillat's work, and extends this to show how Breillat's films have influenced other filmmakers and artists in turn.

A lively and accessible introduction, this book will appeal to students and researchers, as well as all those with an interest in gender studies, French film and contemporary cinema.

The Reformation transformed English religion. For many, the spirituality of the preceding period remains largely unknown, or overburdened with Protestant mythology of decadence. These sources seek to explore the nature of religious belief and practice in pre-Reformation England, using original source material to make the debates accessible.

This consideration of the sources begins with an analytical chapter discussing the varieties of spirituality in later medieval England and the ways in which they received expression, through participation in church services, actions like pilgrimages, charitable foundations, devotional readings and instruction. Opposition to prevailing spirituality, expressed through 'Lollardy', is also considered. The sources demonstrate with immediacy and potency these diverse expressions of faith and observance. Many of the documents are translated for the first time from unpublished manuscript material.

This study demonstrates the vitality of the pre-Reformation religious practices, but also addresses the key methodological questions which arise from the sources about the nature of the material; its reliability as historical evidence, and the validity of external actions as testimony to intellectual and emotional experience.

Now available in paperback, this volume compares the position of Catholic minorities in England and the Dutch Republic. Looking beyond the tales of persecution that have dominated traditional historiography, the contributors focus on the realities of Catholic existence.

Thematically organised, the book explores Catholicism as a minority culture that resorted to unorthodox means, both to retain its own identity, and to survive in a hostile political environment. It examines ritual, material culture, international networks, and above all relations: between laity and clergy, men and women, Catholics and Protestants

By highlighting differences as well as similarities between the English and Dutch experiences, 'Catholic communities in Protestant states' will help both undergraduate readers and specialists to rethink the history of Catholicism and the consequences of minority status for religious communities.

Chantal Akerman is widely acclaimed as one of cinema’s boldest visionaries.

A towering figure in women’s and feminist film-making, she produced a diverse and intensely personal body of work ranging from minimalist portraits of the everyday to exuberant romantic comedies, and from documentaries and musicals to installation art. This book traces the director’s career at the crossroads between experimental and mainstream cinema, contextualising her work within the American avant-garde of the 1970s, European anti-naturalism, feminism and the post-modern aesthetics.

While offering an in-depth analysis of her multi-faceted film style, it also stresses the social and ethical dimension of her work, especially as regards her representation of marginal groups and her exploration of exilic and diasporic identities. Particular attention is given to the inscription of the Holocaust and of Jewish memory in her films.

Since the early 1950s, Chris Marker has embraced different filmmaking styles as readily as he has new technologies, and has broadened conceptions of the documentary in distinctly personal ways. He has travelled around the world, tracking political upheavals and historic events, as well as unearthing the stories buried under official reporting. This globetrotting filmmaker testifies to his six decades on the move through a passionate devotion to the moving image. Yet from the outset, his filmic images reveal a fascination with stillness. It is at this juncture of mobility and immobility that Sarah Cooper situates her comprehensive study of Marker’s films.

She pays attention to the central place that photographs occupy in his work, as well as to the emergence in his filming of statuary, painting and other static images, including the film still, and his interest in fixed frame shooting. She engages with key debates in photographic and film theory in order to argue that a different conception of time emerges from his filmic explorations of stasis.

In detailed readings of each of his films, including Le souvenir d'un avenir andLa Jetee, Sans soleil and Level 5, Cooper charts Marker’s concern with mortality in varied historical and geographical contexts, which embraces the fragility of the human race, along with that of the planet.

Claire Denis is one of France's most acclaimed and original filmmakers. Since her remarkable debut success with 'Chocolat' (1986), she has produced an impressive series of features which have been intriguing, visually striking, and often highly controversial (including 'Beau Travail' (2000) and 'Trouble Every Day' (2001)).
Beugnet provides a thematic and stylistic framework within which to consider Denis' work, as well as a comprehensive analysis of individual films. She highlights the resonance of Denis' films in relation to ongoing debates about French national identity and culture, and issues of postcolonial identity, alienation and transgression, as well as examining their exploration of the interface between sexuality, desire and sensuality. This is an essential introduction to Denis, and a sophisticated and illuminating study of her work to date.

This book is a study of twenty stage productions, adaptations and screen versions of Shakespeare’s final Roman play. It makes available for the first time sustained discussions of major productions of the play in four languages and five countries, and explores how Shakespeare’s most political drama has been shaped to circumstances radically different from its original early modern staging.

The book offers in-depth analyses of Coriolanus productions covering the post-war era to the twenty-first century, combining close readings of documents and historical contextualisation to productions by the BBC, the Berliner Ensemble, The Katona József Theatre in communist Hungary, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Britain’s National Theatre, The New York Shakespeare Festival, Robert Lepage, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and Ralph Fiennes’ major motion picture.

This volume is the first ever attempt to unite and translate some of the key texts which informed Johan Huizinga’s famous study of the Burgundian court, The Waning of the Middle Ages, a work which has never gone out of print. It combines these texts with sources that Huizinga did not consider, those that illuminate the wider civic world that the Burgundian court inhabited and the dynamic interaction between court and city. Through these sources, and an introduction offering new perspectives on recent historiography, the book tests whether Huizinga’s controversial vision of the period still stands.

Covering subjects including ceremonial events, such as the spectacles and gargantuan banquets that made the Burgundian dukes the talk of Europe, the workings of the court, and jousting, archery and rhetoric competitions, the book will appeal to students of late medieval and early modern Europe and to those with wider interests in court culture, ritual and ceremony.

This book provides an accessible collection of translated legal sources through which the exploits of criminals and developments in the English criminal justice system (c.1215–1485) can be studied.

Drawing on the wealth of archival material and an array of contemporary literary texts, it guides readers towards an understanding of prevailing notions of law and justice and expectations of the law and legal institutions. Tensions are shown emerging between theoretical ideals of justice and the practical realities of administering the law during an era profoundly affected by periodic bouts of war, political in-fighting, social dislocation and economic disaster. Introductions and notes provide both the specific and wider legal, social and political contexts in addition to offering an overview of the existing secondary literature and historiographical trends.

This collection affords a valuable insight into the character of medieval governance as well as revealing the complex nexus of interests, attitudes and relationships prevailing in society during the later Middle Ages.

‘A rule of mine is this’, said William Goldman in 1983, ‘there are always three hot directors and one of them is always David Lean.’ One of the best known and most admired of British film makers, David Lean had a directorial career that spanned five decades and encompassed everything from the intimate black-and-white romance of Brief Encounter (1945) to the spectacular Technicolor epic of Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

This book offers comprehensive coverage of every feature film directed by Lean, yielding new insights on the established classics of his career as well as its lesser-known treasures. Its analysis prioritises questions of gender and emphasises the often-overlooked but highly significant recurrence of female-centred narratives throughout Lean’s career. Drawing extensively on archival historical materials while also presenting nuanced close readings of individual films, David Lean offers a fascinating and original account of the work of a remarkable British film maker.

In November 1918 a revolution overthrew the old imperial system in Germany and inaugurated a republic. The revolution was formally completed in August 1919 when the social democrat Friedrich Ebert was sworn in as president. By this time, however, many of the revolution’s original aims and intentions had been swallowed up by new political concerns and lived experiences. For contemporaries the meaning of ‘9 November’ changed, becoming increasingly contested between rival parties, military experts and scholars.

This book examines how the debate on the revolution has evolved from August 1919 to the present day. It takes the reader through the ideological battles of the 1920s and 30s into the equally politicised historical writing of the cold war period. It ends with a consideration of the marginalisation of the revolution in academic research since the 1980s, and its revival from 2010.

Debates on the Holocaust is the first attempt to survey the development of Holocaust historiography for a generation. It analyses the development of history writing on the destruction of the European Jews from just before the end of the Second World War to the present day, and argues forcefully that history writing is as much about the present as it is the past. The book guides the reader through the major debates in Holocaust historiography and shows how all of these controversies are as much products of their own time as they are attempts to uncover the past.

Debates on the Holocaust will appeal to sixth form and undergraduate students and their teachers, Holocaust historians and anyone interested in either the destruction of the European Jews or in the process by which we access and understand the past.

This book gives detailed and original critical readings of all eleven of Derek Jarman's feature-length films, arguing that he occupies a major and influential place in European and world cinema rather than merely being a cult figure.

It places particular emphasis on the importance of Renaissance art and literature for Jarman, and emphasises his interest in Jungian psychology. Wymer shows how Jarman used his films to take his audience with him on an inner journey in search of the self, whilst remaining fully aware of the dangers of such a journey.

Making substantial use of Jarman's unpublished papers as well as all his published works, Wymer argues that the films are orientated towards a much wider audience than is often supposed. They are addressed to anyone, of whatever gender or sexuality, who is prepared to go on a journey in search of him or her self and to become Jarman's accomplice in 'the dream world of the soul'.

This study examines the writing career of the respected and prolific novelist Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

Whereas earlier assessments have focused on Lessing’s relationship with feminism and the impact of her 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, this book argues that Lessing's writing was formed by her experiences of the colonial encounter; it makes use of postcolonial theory and criticism to examine Lessing's interest in ideas of nation, empire, gender and race and the connections between them.

The book, now available in paperback, examines the entire range of her writing, including her most recent fiction and non-fiction, which have been comparatively neglected. The book is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students of Doris Lessing’s work as well as the general reader who enjoys her writing. This is the first significant book-length critical evaluation in ten years.

Dr. Faustus is one of the jewels of early modern English drama, and is still widely performed today. Interestingly, the play has come down to the contemporary audience in two distinct versions that have become known as the 'A' and the 'B' texts. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, who edited the original Revels edition over twenty years ago (and are two of the most eminent editors currently working), have hit upon the fascinating idea of presenting both texts on facing pages. This allows readers to compare the two ‘versions’, the ‘A’ text which is the one closest to Marlowe, and the longer ‘B’ text with additions by Samuel Rowley; in this unique edition, the reader is made aware of the changing tastes of audiences, the stage history of the play, and of just how intricate ‘editing’ a play can be.

With a concise and illuminating introduction, and relevant notes and images, this Revels Student Edition of the 'A' and 'B' texts of Dr. Faustus will prove to be an enthralling document, and an excellent edition for student and theatre-goer alike.

Three of the most important chronicles of eleventh-century Germany were composed in the south-western duchy of Swabia. The chronicles reveal how between 1049 and 1100 the centripetal attraction of the reform papacy became the dominant fact of intellectual life in German reformed monastic circles.

In the abbey of Reichenau Herman 'the Lame' composed a chronicle of the reign of Emperor Henry III (1039-56). His pupil, Berthold of Reichenau, continued his master's work, composing a detailed account of 1076-1079 in Germany. Bernold, a clergyman of Constance, continued the work of Herman and Berthold in a text containing the fullest extant account of 1080-1100. Herman’s waning enthusiasm for the monarchy and growing interest in the newly reformed papacy were intensified in Berthold’s chronicle, and writing in the new context of the reformed monasteries of south-western Germany, Bernold preached total obedience to the Gregorian papacy.

The Swabian chronicles are an indispensable resource to the student of the changing loyalties and conflicts of eleventh-century Germany.

Emilio Fernández: Pictures in the Margins is the first book-length English language account of Emilio Fernández (1904-1986) the most successful director of classical Mexican Cinema, famed with creating films that embody a loosely defined Mexican school of filmmaking. However, rather than offer an auteurist study this book interrogates the construction of Fernández as both a national and nationalist auteur (including racial and gender aspects e.g. as macho mexicano and indio). It also challenges auteurist readings of the films themselves in order to make new arguments about the significance of Fernández and his work.
The aim of this book is to question Mexico’s fetishisation of its own position on the peripheries of the global cultural economy and the similar fetishisation of Fernández’s marginalisation as a mixed race (part white and part indigenous) director. This book argues that, as pictures in the margins, classical Mexican cinema and specifically Fernández’s films are not transparent reflections of dominant post Revolutionary Mexican culture, but annotations and re-inscriptions of the particularities of Mexican society in the post-Revolutionary era.

Epicene is now one of the most widely-studied of Johnson’s plays. Brilliantly exploiting the Jacobean convention whereby boys played female roles, it satirises the newly fashionable and sexually ambiguous world of the West End of London, where courtly wit rubs shoulders with commercial values.

This authoritative new edition, now in paperback, is based on a thorough re-examination of the earliest texts. The introduction analyses the play as originally written for the newly formed Children of the Queen’s Revels, and performed at the little-known Whitefriars Theatre. Dutton discusses the composition of the play, which took place during a critical period in Jonson’s life and career, when he was established as the principal writer of entertainments at the court. His relationships at this time, with ambitious wits such as John Donne, Sir Edward Herbert and the actor Nathan Field, are examined as models for the principal characters. This challengingly historicised text of Epicene will be essential reading for all serious students of early modern drama.

This collection of new essays about the earl of Essex, one of the most important figures of the Elizabethan court, resituates his life and career within the richly diverse contours of his cultural and political milieu. It identifies the ways in which his biography has been variously interpreted both during his own lifetime and since his death in 1601. Collectively, the essays examine a wealth of diverse visual and textual manifestations of Essex: poems, portraits, films; texts produced by Essex himself, including private letters, prose tracts, poems and entertainments; and the transmission and circulation of these as a means of disseminating his political views.

As well as prising open long-held assumptions about the earl’s life, the authors provide a diachronic approach to the earl’s career, identifying crucial events such as the Irish campaign and the uprising, and re-evaluating their significance and critical reception. Collectively, the essays illuminate the reach and significance of the many roles played by the earl and the impact of his brief, dazzling life on his contemporaries and on those who came after, making this the first volume to offer a comprehensive critical overview of the Earl's life and influence.

Despite its popularity when it first appeared in print in 1600, Every Man out of His Humour has never appeared as a single modern critical edition until now. The volume's introduction and annotations convey early modern obsessions with wealth and self-display by providing historical contexts and pointing out the continuity of those obsessions into modern life. The play is of interest because of its influence on the course of city comedy and its wealth of information about social relationships and colloquial language at the end of Elizabeth's reign.

Jonson's experiments in generating theatrical meaning continued throughout his career, but Every Man out of His Humour – with its youthful vigour and extraordinary visualizations of the urban capacity for self-deceit – is a text that enriches the understanding of all the plays that come after it.

Fashion studies is a burgeoning field that often highlights the contributions of genius designers and high-profile brands with little reference to what goes on behind the scenes in the supply chain. This book pulls back the curtain on the global fashion system of the past 200 years to examine the relationship between the textile mills of Yorkshire – the firms that provided the entire Western world with warm wool fabrics – and their customers. It is a microhistory of a single firm, Abraham Moon and Sons Ltd, that sheds light on important macro questions about British industry, government policies on international trade, the role of multi-generational family firms and the place of design and innovation in business strategy. It is the first book to connect Yorkshire tweeds to the fashion system.

Written in lively, accessible prose, this book will appeal to anyone who works in fashion or who wears fashion. There is nothing like it – and it will raise the bar for historical studies of global fashion. Here you’ll find intriguing stories about a tweed theft from the Leeds Coloured Cloth Hall, debates on tariffs and global trade, the battle against synthetic fibres and the reinvention of British tweeds around heritage marketing. You won’t be bored.

Auteurism – the idea that a director of a film is its source of meaning and should retain creative control over the finished product – has been one of film studies’ most important paradigms ever since the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the adoption of the term 'auteur' by Andrew Sarris.

Through the popular, controversial and critically acclaimed films of Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke and François Ozon, this book looks into how the meaning of ‘auteur’ has changed over this half-century, and assesses the current state of Francophone auteur cinema. It combines French philosophical and sociological approaches with methodologies from the Anglo-American fields of gender studies, queer theory and postmodernism.

This volume will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, European cinema and French and Francophone studies, as well as to film enthusiasts.

Available in paperback for the first time, this is a full-length study of the films of François Ozon, director of such diverse films as 8 femmes, Swimming Pool, 5x2 and Les amants criminels. Andrew Asibong’s passionate and critical analysis focuses on the extent to which Ozon’s seemingly light touch never ceases to engage with the fundamentally weighty issue of existential transformation, a transformation that affects both his protagonists and his audiences.

A central question emerges: what is at stake, cinematically, ethically and politically, in Ozon’s alternatively utopian and cynical flirtation with the construction and deconstruction of contemporary social relations.

Revealing Ozon as a highly adept ‘fan’ of a whole range of thought, literature and cinema, Asibong places the precocious French auteur in an intellectual yet highly accessible critical framework, allowing Ozon’s importance for a thoroughly postmodern filmgoing generation to be given the attention it deserves.

Exempla are illustrative stories used by preachers to seize the attention of their congregations and to drive home a moral lesson. This book presents annotated translations from two collections of exempla, one Franciscan and one Dominican, put together in the British Isles around 1275.

The two collections used are amongst the earliest to survive from the British Isles. The 270 exempla translated cover a wide range of topics, both ecclesiastical and secular, and offer vivid insights into medieval life and attitudes in the broadest sense.

An introduction discusses the place of preaching in the medieval church, the development of preaching aids and the exemplum genre, the main topics covered by the exempla, the dating of the two collections translated and the use which the compilers made of their material, and how far exempla can be relied upon as historical evidence.

Devised as an entertainment for a Tudor monarch, Galatea might be seen, paradoxically, as a parable for our time. Inhabiting a world engaged in a process of change, the characters find themselves locked in a series of transgressive situations that speak directly to contemporary experience and twenty-first-century critical concerns. Same-sex relationships, shifts of authority, and the destabilization of meaning all lend the play a surprising modernity, making it at once the most accessible of Lyly’s plays and the one most frequently performed today.

Designed for the student reader, Leah Scragg’s edition offers a range of perspectives on the work. An extensive introduction locates the play in the context of the Elizabethan court, opening a window onto a kind of drama very different from that of more familiar sixteenth-century writers, such as Marlowe and Shakespeare. The latter’s indebtedness to the play is fully documented, while detailed critical and performance histories allow an insight into the work’s susceptibility to reinterpretation.

‘Georges Franju' is the fullest study to date of this little-known French director, the co-founder of the Cinémathèque française, and the first book on him in English since 1967.

Born in 1912, but only enjoying his real debut as a director in 1948 with his notorious documentary about Parisian abattoirs 'Le Sang des bêtes', Franju went on to make thirteen more courts métrages and eight longs métrages, including his horror classic 'Les Yeux sans visage'. Ince takes a new approach to Franju's films, investigating the areas of genre and gender, and grouping the films thematically rather than chronologically. A chapter on Franju's cinematic aesthetics offers a new synthesis of existing writings, combined with the author's responses to the films. A full introduction and conclusion set Franju's directorial career in the context of his lifelong commitment to France's cinema institutions.

'Georges Franju' will be essential reading on Franju, and of great interest to researchers, academics and students in film studies

Now available in paperback, this book offers a significant revaluation of Clouzot’s achievement, situating his career in the wider context of French cinema and society, and providing detailed and clear analysis of his major films (Le corbeau, Quai des Orfèvres, Le Salaire de la peur, Les diaboliques, Le mystère Picasso).

Clouzot’s films combine meticulous technical control with sardonic social commentary and the ability to engage and entertain a broad public. Although his films are characterised by an all-controlling perfectionism, allied to documentary veracity and a disturbing bleakness of vision, Clouzot is well aware that his is an art of illusion. His fondness for anatomising social pretence, the deception, violence and cruelty practised by individuals and institutions, drew him repeatedly to the thriller as a convenient and compelling model for plots and characters, but his source texts and the usual conventions of the genre receive distinctly unconventional treatment.

In this survey Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction.

McEwan’s novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan’s readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing.

Although McEwan’s later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, Dominic Head uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. Head makes the case for McEwan’s prominence - pre-eminence, even - in the canon of contemporary British novelists.

The 1641 rebellion is one of the seminal events in early modern Irish and British history. Its divisive legacy, based primarily on the sharply contested allegation that the rebellion began with a general massacre of Protestant settlers, is still evident in Ireland today. Indeed, the 1641 ‘massacres’, like the battles at the Boyne (1690) and Somme (1916), played a key role in creating and sustaining a collective Protestant/ British identity in Ulster, in much the same way that the subsequent Cromwellian conquest in the 1650s helped forge a new Irish Catholic national identity.

Following a successful hardback edition, Ó Siochrú and OIhlmeyer's popular title is now available in paperback. The original and wide-ranging themes chosen by leading international scholars for this volume will ensure that this edited collection becomes required reading for all those interested in the history of early modern Europe. It will also appeal to those engaged in early colonial studies in the Atlantic world and beyond, as the volume adopts a genuinely comparative approach throughout, examining developments in a broad global context.

First published on the fiftieth anniversary of his directorial debut, this book was the first to examine the work of a man once hailed as the finest film-maker to emerge from the British studio system after the Second World War. Before being recruited by Hollywood, J. Lee Thompson made a string of classic films including: Yield to the Night (1956), Ice Cold in Alex (1958), Tiger Bay (1959), North West Frontier (1959) and The Guns of Navarone (1961). He worked in the Hollywood industry into his late eighties, making nearly thirty films as a director and producer between 1960 and 1990. He remains best known, however, for his first: the immortal thriller Cape Fear (1962).

Drawing on extensive interview material, Steve Chibnall traces Lee Thompson's career in British cinema, and offers an analysis of his films which reveals remarkable, and previously unacknowledged, continuities of style and theme.

This is a book for anyone interested in the history of British cinema, and particularly those who enjoy the best of 1950s and 1960s film.

This book offers a comprehensive account of the work of J.G. Ballard, regarded by several critics as one of the most significant fiction writers of recent times.
Ballard's early science-fiction writing earned him plaudits as one of the most innovative and individual voices in the field, but his development as a writer has taken him far beyond the confines of any single genre. This book traces Ballard's career from his early science-fiction short stories and novels to his most recent work, particularly his timely reflections on the role of violence in contemporary social life. It argues that Ballard's writing is characterised by a distinctive vision of the post-war world and its possible futures, and suggests that his far-reaching analyses of the present age make him one of the indispensable commentators of our time.

In François Truffaut’s opinion The Innocents was ‘the best English film after Hitchcock goes to America’. Tennessee Williams said of The Great Gatsby: ‘a film whose artistry even surpassed the original novel’. The maker of both films was Jack Clayton, one of the finest English directors of the post-war era and perhaps best remembered for the trail-blazing Room at the Top which brought a new sexual frankness and social realism to the British screen.

This is the first full-length critical study of Clayton's work. The author has been able to consult and quote from the director's own private papers which illuminate Clayton’s creative practices and artistic intentions. In addition to fresh analyses of the individual films, the book contains new material on Clayton's many unrealised projects and valuably includes his previously unpublished short story ‘The Enchantment’ – as poignant and revealing as the films themselves.

This is a personal and fascinating account of the career and achievement of an important, much-loved director that should appeal to students and film enthusiasts.

This is the first-ever critical work on Jack Rosenthal, the award-winning British television dramatist. His career began with Coronation Street in the 1960s and he became famous for his popular sitcoms, including The Lovers and The Dustbinmen. During what is often known as the golden age' of British television drama, Rosenthal wrote such plays as The Knowledge, The Chain, Spend, Spend, Spend and P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang, as well as the pilot for the series London's Burning. This study offers a close analysis of all Rosenthal's best-known works, drawing on archival material as well as interviews with his collaborators and cast members.

It traces the events that informed his writing, ranging from his comic take on the permissive society' of the 1960s, through to recession in the 1970s and Thatcherism in the 1980s. Rosenthal's distinctive brand of humour and its everyday surrealism is contrasted throughout with the work of his contemporaries, including Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale and Johnny Speight, and his influence on contemporary television and film is analysed. Rosenthal is not usually placed in the canon of Anglo-Jewish writing but the book argues this case by focusing on his prize-winning Plays for Today The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy.

This book will appeal to students and researchers in Television, Film and Cultural Studies, as well as those interested in contemporary drama and Jewish Studies.

Saccharine for some, poignant for others, Jacques Demy’s ‘enchanted’ world is familiar to generations of French audiences accustomed to watching Christmas repeats of his fairytale Peau d’âne (1970) or seeing Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac prance and pirouette in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966). Demy achieved international recognition with Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1963), which was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes. However, beneath the apparently sugary coating of his films lie more philosophical reflections on some of the most pressing issues that preoccupy Western societies, including affect, subjectivity, self/other relations and free will.

This wide-ranging book addresses many of the key aspects of Demy's cinema, including his associations with the New Wave, his unique approach to musicals, his adaptations of fairytales, his representations of gender and sexuality and his legacy as an iconic director for generations of audiences and filmmakers.

Jacques Rivette is perhaps the best-kept secret of French cinema. A founding figure in the New Wave, and at the centre of the Cahiers du cinéma team, he developed into one of the most unusual and adventurous French directors of the last sixty years, yet his work remains little-known in comparison with his contemporaries, and this study is the first in English to look at the full span of his career. Starting with his decisively influential film criticism of the 1950s, it moves from the New Wave through the complex, experimental films of the 1970s to the challenging, playful dramas which ensured his visibility during the following two decades, and ends in the present, including Rivette’s most recent films, Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) and Ne touchez pas la hache (2007).

The book takes a thematic approach, offering detailed discussion of key elements of Rivette’s film world, including games, conspiracy and jealousy, as well as a study of what Rivette’s cinema adds to our understanding of key theoretical concepts in Film Studies such as narrative, space and adaptation.

This is a comprehensive, original and accessible account of all aspects of Jean Cocteau's work in the cinema. It is the first major study in English to appear for over forty years and casts new light on Cocteau's most celebrated films as well as those often neglected or little known.

Jean Cocteau is not only one of French cinema's greatest and most influential auteurs whose work covered all the major genres but also an experimenter, collaborator, theorist and all-round ambassador of film.

This lucid account provides a complete introduction to Cocteau's cinematic project in the context of his entire oeuvre, detailed analysis of individual films, and a thematic engagement with all his cinema from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives.

The Cocteau that emerges is at once a materialist filmmaker and visionary who is committed to realism in all its guises and reveals the wonder and mystery of what he called 'the cinematograph'.

Jean Vigo is one of the legendary figures of world cinema, whose films L'Atalante and Zéro de conduite still inspire young audiences today.

Film historian Michael Temple explores Vigo's intense career and asks why it has had such a long-lasting impact on film culture, not just in France, but also for generations of filmmakers, critics and moviegoers around the world.

Each film is examined under four headings:
- social and political context
- the making of the film, from conception to release
- detailed analysis of narrative structure, main stylistic features and dominant themes
- the reception of the film and its critical reputation

Accessibly written, this will be essential reading for students, teachers, film enthusiasts and researchers, indeed for anyone who is interested in the cinema as a living art form.

This volume is the first to examine, in either French or English, the films of Jean-Jacques Beineix, often seen as the best example of the 1980s cinéma du look, with cult films, such as Diva and Betty Blue (37º 2 le matin)

.. After an introduction which places Beineix in the context of the 1980s and the arguments centering on a postmodern cinema, the volume devotes a chapter to each of Beineix’s feature films, including the film which marked his return to feature film making after a break of a decade, Mortel Transfert (2001). Prefaced by an excellent foreword by the director himself, which includes a broad condemnation of French critics. Includes many illustrations direct from the director's own collection, complementing the interviews Powrie made with him and his collaborators.

Jews on trial concentrates on Inquisitorial activity during the period which historians have argued was the most active in the Inquisition's history: the first forty years of the tribunal in Modena, from 1598 to 1638, the year of the Jews' enclosure in the ghetto.

Scholars have in the past tended to group trials of Jews and conversos in Italy together. This book emphasises the fundamental disparity in Inquisitorial procedure, as well as the evidence examined, and argues that this was especially true in Modena where the secular authority did not have the power during the period in question to reject, or even significantly monitor, Inquisitorial trial procedure. It draws upon the detailed testimony to be found in trial transcripts to analyse Jewish interaction with Christian society in an early modern community.

This book will appeal to scholars of inquisitorial studies, social and cultural interaction in early modern Europe, Jewish Italian social history and anti-Semitism.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This book explores the collaborative sitcoms of two of British television’s most well-known comedy writers. Written over a period of twenty-five years, the four series ‘Dad’s Army’, ‘It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum’, ‘Hi-de-Hi!’ and ‘You Rang M’Lord?’ have endured as much-loved and often-repeated classics.

The book explores the themes of Perry and Croft’s writing in terms of their own biography, and as articulations of British cultural and televisual history. Focusing on issues central to the concept of identity in British culture, class, gender, sexuality and race and analysing individual episodes and scenes in the four series, ‘Jimmy Perry and David Croft’ evaluates the contributions made by these two writers to the genre of situation comedy, and locates the programmes in the immediate contexts of their production.

Including new interview material from David Croft, this book will be invaluable to students and lecturers of television studies and cultural studies.

This sourcebook collects together for the first time in English the major documents relating to the life and contemporary reputation of Joan of Arc. Also known as La Pucelle, she led a French Army against the English in 1429, arguably turning the course of the war in favour of the French king Charles VII. The fact that she achieved all of this when just a seventeen-year-old peasant girl highlights the magnitude of her achievements and also opens up other ways of looking at her story. For many, Joan represents the voice of ordinary people in the fifteenth century; the victims of high politics and warfare that devastated France. Her story ended tragically in 1431 when she was put on trial for heresy and sorcery by an ecclesiastical court and was burned at the stake. This book shows how the trial, which was organised by her enemies, provides an important window into late medieval attitudes towards religion and gender, as Joan was effectively persecuted by the established Church for her supposedly non-conformist views on spirituality and the role of women.

Presented within a contextual and critical framework, this book encourages scholars and students to rethink this remarkable story. It will be invaluable reading for those working in the fields of medieval society and heresy, as well as the Hundred Years’ War.