New Releases

Northern Ireland has entered what is arguably the key phase in its troubled political history – truth recovery and dealing with the legacy of the past – yet the void in knowledge and the lack of academic literature with regard to victims’ rights is particularly striking. This book analyses truth recovery as a fundamental aspect of the transition from political violence to peace, democracy and stability in post-conflict Northern Ireland.

Kirk Simpson argues that it is essential for any process of truth recovery in Northern Ireland to provide the victims of political violence with the opportunity to express and articulate their narratives of suffering within the context of public dialogic processes. He outlines a unique and original model: that victims of political violence should be enabled to engage in meaningful truth recovery through a Habermasian process of public democratic deliberation and communication involving direct dialogue with the perpetrators of such violence.

This process of ‘communicative justice’ is framed within Habermas’ theory of communicative action and can help to ensure that legitimate truth recovery publicly acknowledges the trauma of victims and subjects perpetrator narratives of political violence to critical scrutiny and rational deconstruction. Crucially, the book aims to contribute to the empowerment of victims in Northern Ireland by stimulating constructive discussion and awareness of hitherto silenced narratives of the conflict. This difficult and unsettling interrogation and interpretation of the conflict from a comparatively ‘unknown perspective’ is central to the prospects for critically examining and mastering the past in Northern Ireland.

In British political discourse the idea that in the 1970s trade unions 'ran the country' has become a truism, a folk mythology invoked against the twin perils of socialism and strikes. But who exactly wielded power in Britain’s workplaces and on what terms?

Assembling cultures takes a fine-grained look at factory activism in the motor industry between 1945 and 1982, using car manufacturing as a key case for unpicking important narratives around affluence, declinism and class. It traces the development of the militant car worker stereotype and looks at the real social relations that lay behind car manufacturing’s reputation for conflict. In doing so, this book reveals a changing, complex world of social practices, cultural norms and shared values and expectations.

From relatively meagre interwar trade union traditions, during the post-war period car workers developed shop-floor organisations of considerable authority, enabling some to make new demands of their working lives, but constraining others in their more radical political aims. Assembling cultures documents in detail a historic process where, from the 1950s, groups and individuals set about creating and reproducing collective power and asks what that meant for their lives. This is a story of workers and their place in the power relations of post-war Britain.

This book will be invaluable to lecturers and students studying the history, sociology and politics of post-war Britain, particularly those with an interest in power, rationality, class, labour, gender and race. The detailed analysis of just how solidarity, organisation and collective action were generated will also prove useful to trade union activists.

This book offers new insight into the end of the British Empire in the Middle East. It takes a fresh look at the relationship between Britain and the Gulf rulers at the height of the British Empire, and how its effects are still felt internationally today.

Over the last four decades, the Persian Gulf region has gone through oil shocks, wars and political changes, and yet the basic entities of the southern Gulf states have remained largely in place. How did this resilient system come about for such seemingly contested societies? Drawing on extensive multi-archival research in the British, American and Gulf archives, this book illuminates a series of negotiations between British diplomats and the Gulf rulers that inadvertently led Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE to take their current shapes. The story addresses the crucial question of self-determination versus 'better together', a dilemma pertinent to anyone interested in the transformation of the modern world.

How do changing class relations contribute to processes of capitalist development?

Within development studies the importance of class relations is usually relegated to lesser status than the roles of states and markets in generating and allocating resources. This book argues that the changing class relations are central to different patterns of capitalist development and that processes and outcomes of class struggle co-determine the form that development takes.

Workers, State and Development in Brazil, nominated for the International Political Economy Group (IPGG) Book Prize 2013 and now available in paperback, illuminates these claims through a detailed empirical investigation of class dynamics and capitalist development in North East Brazil’s São Francisco valley. It details how workers in the valley’s export grape sector have won significant concessions from employers, contributing to a progressive pattern of regional capitalist development.

The book will appeal to students and researchers interested in processes of capitalist development, agrarian political economy and international political economy.

For over four decades, events in Palestine-Israel have provoked raging conflicts within British universities around issues of free speech, 'extremism', antisemitism and Islamophobia. But why is this conflict so significant for student activists living at such a geographical distance from the region itself? And what role do emotive, polarised communications around Palestine-Israel play in the life of British academic institutions committed to the ideal of free expression?

This book draws on original ethnographic research with student activists on different sides of this conflict to initiate a conversation with students, academics and members of the public who are concerned with the transnational politics of Palestine-Israel and with the changing role of the public university. It shows how, in an increasingly globalised world that is shaped by entangled histories of European antisemitism and colonial violence, ethnography can open up ethical responses to questions of justice

This book brings together studies of cultural institutions in Manchester from 1850 to the present day, giving an unprecedented account of the city’s cultural evolution. These bring to light the remarkable range of Manchester’s contribution to modern cultural life, including the role of art education, popular theatre, religion, pleasure gardens, clubs and societies. The chapters show the resilience and creativity of Manchester’s cultural institutions since 1850, challenging any simple narrative of urban decline following the erosion of Lancashire’s industrial base, at the same time illustrating the range of activities across the social classes.

This book will appeal to everyone interested in the cultural life of the city of Manchester, including cultural historians, sociologists and urban geographers, as well as general readers with interests in the city. It is written by leading international authorities, including Viv Gardner, Stephen Milner, Mike Savage, Bill Williams and Janet Wolff.

This book looks at the reception of the Spanish Civil War in British popular culture, and how supporters of both sides in Britain used the rhetoric and imagery of the conflict to bolster support for their respective causes in the arena of British public opinion. Brian Shelmerdine finds that traditional notions of Spain as a country of bullfighting, bandits and flamenco were pervasive and were significant in shaping wider UK government policy towards Spain. He carefully assesses the different political perceptions of the 1930s Spanish scene, the role of the Catholic Church, the depiction of the two sides in terms of class, race and ethnicity, humanitarian appeals, and the plight of the Basques.

The book is fluently written, and should make fascinating and entertaining reading for scholars of British society and culture in the twentieth century, as well as those investigating international impact of the Spanish Civil War.

Negotiating sovereignty and human rights takes the transatlantic conflict over the International Criminal Court as a lens for an enquiry into the normative foundations of international society. The author shows how the way in which actors refer to core norms of the international society such as sovereignty and human rights affect the process and outcome of international negotiations.

The book offers an innovative take on the long-standing debate over sovereignty and human rights in international relations. It goes beyond the simple and sometimes ideological duality of sovereignty versus human rights by showing that sovereignty and human rights are not competing principles in international relations, as is often argued, but complement each other. The way in which the two norms and their relationship are understood lies at the core of actors’ broader visions of world order. The author shows how competing interpretations of sovereignty and human rights and the different visions of world order that they imply fed into the transatlantic debate over the ICC and transformed this debate into a conflict over the normative foundations of international society.

Why did Bismarck's new German State Degenerate into Hitler's Third Reich? What happened to Europes leading industrial nation - cultural heirs to Kant, Goethe, Durer and Bach? How did East and West Germany diverge after 1945?

In this unique and controversial study the author - Prussian aristocrat, writer, scholar, historian and patriot - fearlessly explores German social mores, political structures and national psyche over several centuries. V. Krockow draws some sobering and novel conclusions about the unfolding drama in general and the Holocaust in particular.

First published in 1990 to coincide with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German edition sold widely. This first translation now makes it available to English-speaking readers worldwide.

Richard Lester is of the most significant yet misunderstood directors of the post-war era. Indelibly associated with the Beatles and the ‘swinging Sixties’ because of his direction of A Hard Day’s Night and Help and his joyous sex comedy The Knack, Lester has tended to be categorised as a modish director whose heyday passed when that decade’s optimism slid into disillusionment and violence.

This book offers a critical appreciation and reappraisal of his work, arguing that it had much greater depth and variety than he has been given credit for. His versatility encompasses the Brechtian anti-heroics of How I Won the War; the surreal nuclear comedy of The Bed-Sitting Room and the swashbuckling adventure of The Musketeers films. He has even, in his instinctively iconoclastic manner, cut Superman down to size.

The book should win new admirers for a director with a gift of making movies whose visual wit and imaginative imagery reveal an intelligent and enquiring scepticism about heroes and society. Including comments from Lester himself and illustrations from his own private collection, the book is a must for film scholars and enthusiasts alike.

Zygmunt Bauman has written more than seventy books over five decades, most taking a single subject and finding doors to open it in all directions. His work is an essential reference point in sociology, but it is time that everyone caught up with him. In this book Tony Blackshaw doesn't just tell us that Bauman is a massive star in sociology, he demonstrates why his light shines brighter than that of almost any other intellectual figure in the world today by offering his readers deep insights into the 'Bauman Effect'.

The new Bauman reader is two books in one. On the one hand, it is a critical introduction to a vital and inspiring sociologist who stands against the predictable in 'majority' sociology to draw out daring and new insights from which we can all learn. On the other, it is an anthology of his work chosen with the specific aim of guiding readers, whether undergraduates, postgraduates, academics or general readers to Bauman's original way of 'thinking sociologically', which is as irresistible as the 'liquid' metaphor that guides it.

European Erotic Romance examines the Renaissance publication and translation of the ancient Greek erotic romances, and English adaptations of the genre by Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth.
Providing fresh insight into the development of the novel, this study identifies the politicisation of erotic romance by the European philhellene (lovers of all things Greek) Protestant movement. To English translators and authors, the complex plots, well developed moralised characters (particularly female) and rhetorical styles of the ancient novels signify political and social reform.
Generous quotation and translations ensure that European Erotic Romance is accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. Its organisation lends itself to use as a course text. It is suitable for use by senior undergraduates and specialists in Renaissance literature, translation, rhetoric and history.

In this book, former Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis examines the European debt crisis with particular reference to the case of Greece. Greece was the first Eurozone country to face an enormous deficit, which reached 15% of GDP in 2009. As the Greek crisis unfolded, other Eurozone countries displayed identical symptoms, albeit in varying degrees of severity. From a strictly Greek predicament the debt crisis quickly turned into a problem for the European Union as a whole. This first English language translation investigates the causes of this spillover and chronicles the policy responses to combat it. It also discusses Greece’s troubled political economy, the country’s difficulties in adjusting to the demands of its creditors and the vehement social and political reactions to the policy of austerity.

Through his comprehensive and authoritative analysis, Simitis provides valuable insights into the crucial interconnection between Greece’s own economic troubles and the wider European search for macroeconomic stability and sustainable economic growth. As such, the book appeals well beyond those with a narrow academic interest in Greece. This is very much a discussion about the future of the Eurozone and the European Union as a whole.

Migrant architects of the NHS draws on forty-five oral history interviews and extensive archival research to offer a radical reappraisal of how the National Health Service was made. It tells the story of migrant South Asian doctors who became general practitioners in the NHS. Imperial legacies, professional discrimination and an exodus of UK-trained doctors combined to direct these doctors towards work as GPs in some of the most deprived parts of the UK. In some areas, they made up over half of the general practitioner workforce. The NHS was structurally dependent on them and they shaped British society and medicine through their agency.

Aimed at students and academics with interests in the history of immigration, immigration studies, the history of medicine, South Asian studies and oral history. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about how Empire and migration have contributed to making Britain what it is today.

Gas and oil are pivotal to the functioning of modern societies, yet the ownership, control, production and consumption of hydrocarbons often provokes intense disputes with serious ramifications. Gas, oil and the Irish state examines the dynamics and conflicts of state hydrocarbon management and provides the first comprehensive study of the Irish model.

Interpreting the Corrib gas conflict as a microcosm of the Irish state's approach to hydrocarbon management, the book articulates environmental, health and safety concerns underpinning community resistance to the project. It emphasises how the dispute exposed broader issues, such as the privatisation of Irish hydrocarbons in exchange for one of the lowest rates of government take in the world, and served to problematise how the state functions, its close relationship with capital and its deployment of coercive force to repress dissent.

Analysis of these issues occurs within an original account of decision-making and policy formation around Irish hydrocarbons from 1957 to 2014. The book traces the development of the state's approach in tandem with occurrences in Irish political economy and examines the impact of global trends on different approaches to hydrocarbon management. A comparative case study of Norway reveals ideological, political, social and economic forces which influence how states manage their hydrocarbons - factors which the book uses as the basis for a rigorous critique of the Irish model.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Developments Goal 7, 12 and 13, Affordable and clean energy, Responsible consumption and production and Climate action

This book analyses the work of Oliver Stone - arguably one of the foremost political filmmakers in Hollywood during the last thirty years. From early productions like Platoon (1986) and Wall Street (1987) to contemporary dramas and documentaries such as World Trade Center (2006), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) and The Untold History of the United States (2012) Stone has re-defined political filmmaking in an era when Hollywood and the United States in general has been experiencing rapid and radical change.

Drawing on previously unseen production files as well as hours of interviews with the director and his associates within the industry, this book is a thematic exploration of Stone's life and work, charting the development of political and aesthetic changes in his filmmaking. Those changes are mapped onto academic debates about the relationship between film and history as well as wider critiques about Hollywood and the film industry.

'A wonderful, bracing book, Scott and Thompson have brought exemplary clarity and thoroughness to the complex and multifaceted career of Oliver Stone. Dividing Stone's work into major themes such as War, Money and Love, the authors provide a focused exploration of the critical intelligence that permeates all of the filmmaker's work - and the political thinking that informs it. Full of insights, this beautifully written book is a major contribution to the literature of film.'
Robert Burgoyne, Chair in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, and author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History (2010)

'Oliver Stone has cast greater light on late-twentieth and early twenty-first century America than any other movie-maker. In this incisive, erudite, and very well conceived volume, Ian Scott and Henry Thompson offer a nuanced and accessible thematic analysis of Stone's cinematic importance and - with the benefit of their numerous interviews with him - his understanding of the United States and its place in the world. Well-written and deeply researched, this fine book is a major contribution to film studies and should also be read by anyone interested in America's recent past and current politics.'
Iwan Morgan, Commonwealth Fund Professor of American History, University College London, and author of Reagan: American Icon.

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

The first fully annotated, modern-spelling edition of Lyly’s Pap with an Hatchet, this volume in the Revels Plays Companion Library series opens a window on the most neglected item in the Lylian canon. A response to a series of late sixteenth-century anti-episcopalian pamphlets issued under the pseudonym ‘Martin Marprelate’, Pap with an Hatchet seeks to beat Martin at his own game, employing all the devices deployed in the tracts to deride and subvert the Martinist position.

Written in a racy, colloquial style, and at variance in its format with twenty-first century printing conventions, the pamphlet has remained difficult to access for the modern reader, and it is this barrier to a fuller understanding that the present edition has been designed to overcome. Re-edited from the earliest witnesses, brought into line with contemporary printing practice, richly annotated, and equipped with a substantial introduction, it enables a new insight into the witty interaction between the work and the Martinist tracts, the care underlying its composition, and the relish that Lyly brought to his task.

Cue & Cut is a ‘practical approach to working in television studios’ for anyone who might want to work in that medium. It’s full of useful information about kit, and how you would use it to create multi-camera content. Written by a multi-camera producer-director with years of drama and teaching experience, it presents both a way of handling studios and a source of information about how things have changed from the days of monochrome to HD tapeless modes - with some thoughts on 3D HDTV

The book is firmly based in first-hand teaching experience and experience of producing, direction, floor managing (and so on) and on working with top flight Actors, Writers, Musicians, Designers of all disciplines and Sound and Camera crews, both at the BBC and in ITV.

The book will certainly cover multi-camera aspects of Undergraduate, HND and B.Tech courses and should be useful to those on short courses, whether practical or post-graduate.

How and why did the United States get involved in nation-building overseas, and how have these policies evolved? How has Washington understood the relationship between development abroad and security at home, and how has this translated into policy? What is the relationship between security, order and development in nation-building and stabilisation efforts? This book explores the processes through which nation-building approaches originated and developed over the last seven decades as well as the concepts and motivations that shaped them.

Weaving together International Relations theory and a rich history drawing mainly on declassified documents, interviews and other primary sources, this book contributes to theoretical discussions of nation-building while offering a critique of Realist and Critical Security School analyses of US policy in the developing world. Ultimately, the book illuminates lessons relevant to today’s nation-building, crisis management, stability, 'good governance' and reconstruction missions.

This book examines the two main dimensions of the European Union’s enlargement to eight central and eastern European countries (CEECs) in 2004. Why did the EU agree to enlargement, despite the costs for some incumbents who have veto-power? How can we explain the (uneven) pattern of accommodation of the CEECs’ preferences in concrete policies?

Combining in-depth empirical analysis with an original theoretical framework, which draws on insights from constructivism and historical institutionalism, this book focuses on the EU's discursively constructed role-identity vis-à-vis the CEECs. This role-identity forged a group of policy advocates inside the European Commission, who promoted the CEECs' preferences inside the EU, and induced a path-dependence into the enlargement process.

The impact of EU identity on concrete policies was less direct. Case studies on trade liberalisation, regulatory alignment, and foreign policy consultations demonstrate that sectoral policy paradigms are a key factor that mediates the influence of the policy advocates on specific policy areas.

This book brings together leading historians of Catholicism and other notable historians of early modern English society in order to pull Catholicism back into the mainstream of English historiography, and to ask readers to suspend their assumptions and prejudices about the nature of Catholic history. Its primary assertion is that many of the fundamental issues of English history cannot be adequately understood without taking into account a Catholic perspective, while many of the fundamental issues of Catholic history cannot be understood in isolation from the rest of English society.

This is not a work of Catholic history, nor a history of English Catholics, at least as those terms are usually understood, but it is a work of significant importance to our understanding of early modern English society.

Debating civilisations offers an up-to-date evaluation of the re-emerging field of civilisational analysis, tracing its main currents and comparing it to rival paradigms such as Marxism, globalisation theory and postcolonial sociology. The book suggests that civilisational analysis offers an alternative approach to understanding globalisation, one that focuses on the dense engagement of societies, cultures, empires and civilisations in human history.

Building on Castoriadis’s theory of social imaginaries, it argues that civilisations are best understood as the products of routine contacts and connections carried out by anonymous actors over the course of long periods of time. It illustrates this argument through case studies of modern Japan, the Pacific and post-Conquest Latin America (including the revival of indigenous civilisations), exploring discourses of civilisation outside the West within the context of growing Western imperial power.

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

The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics: movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive.

The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display.

This book seeks to capture the complex experience of the white woman in colonial India through an exploration of gendered interactions over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines missionary and memsahibs' colonial writings, both literary and non-literary, probing their construction of Indian women of different classes and regions, such as zenana women, peasants, ayahs and wet-nurses.

Also examined are delineations of European female health issues in male authored colonial medical handbooks, which underline the misogyny undergirding this discourse. Giving voice to the Indian woman, this book also scrutinises the fiction of the first generation of western-educated Indian women who wrote in English, exploring their construction of white women and their negotiations with colonial modernities.

This fascinating book will be of interest to the general reader and to experts and students of gender studies, colonial history, literary and cultural studies as well as the social history of health and medicine.

By developing a new analytical method of narrative discourse analysis, this study introduces new insights from literary studies and narratology into International Relations. This method examines the romantic narratives of pirates in Somalia, rebels in Libya and private military and security companies in Iraq and argues that these best resonate with an audience if they are able to connect to culturally embedded narratives found in literature, media and pop-culture. Dominant romantic narratives marginalise other, less flattering, stories about these actors, in which they are constituted as terrorists and held responsible for human rights violations.

Focusing on the three narrative elements of setting, characterization and employment, the book argues that narratives are of fundamental importance for human cognition and identity construction. They help us understand the social and political world in which we live. The book emphasises the idea of intertextual narratability which holds that for narratives to become dominant they have to link themselves to previously existing stories.

Tony Richardson was a key figure in British cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Having established himself in the theatre with the first production of John Osborne’s landmark play Look Back in Anger, he became a central director in the New Wave, bringing greater realism to British cinema. He went on to make some of the most significant films of the 1960s including the multi Oscar-winning Tom Jones.

This detailed and authoritative account of Richardson’s career provides a reassessment of his achievements. As well as looking at his best known films, it considers neglected works such as Ned Kelly and Joseph Andrews, illustrating how Richardson remained a champion of the socially marginalised.

In mapping out his life and work, from the English Stage Company to his final films in America, Shail re-establishes Richardson’s at the front rank of British film directors, confirming his contribution to a period of dynamic change in British culture.

For ordinary people, the impact of the Reformation would have centred around local parish churches, rather than the theological debates of the Reformers. Focusing on the Calvinists, this volume explores how the architecture, appearance and arrangement of places of worship were transformed by new theology and religious practice.

Based on original research and site visits, this book charts the impact of the Reformed faith across Europe, concentrating in particular on France, the Netherlands and Scotland. While in some areas a Calvinist Reformation led to the adaptation of existing buildings, elsewhere it resulted in the construction of new places of worship to innovative new designs. Reformed places of worship also reflected local considerations, vested interests and civic aspirations, often employing the latest styles and forms of decoration, and here provide a lens through which to examine not only the impact of the Reformation at a local level but also the character of the different religious settlements across Europe during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Pauper policies examines how policies under the old and New Poor Laws were conceived, adopted, implemented, developed or abandoned. This fresh perspective reveals significant aspects of poor law history which have been overlooked by scholars. Important new research is presented on the adoption and implementation of ‘enabling acts’ at the end of the old poor laws; the exchange of knowledge about how best to provide poor relief in the final decades of the old poor law and formative decades of the New; and the impact of national scandals on policy-making in the new Victorian system. Pointing towards a new direction in the study of poor law administration, it examines how people, both those in positions of power and the poor, could shape pauper policies. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in welfare and poverty in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1, No poverty.

At a time when women were barred from clerical roles, middle-class women made use of the informal power structures of Victorian and Edwardian associationalism in order to actively participate as citizens.

This investigation of women's part in civic life provides a fresh approach to the 'public sphere', illuminates women as agents of a middle-class identity and develops the notion of a 'feminine public sphere', or the web of associations, institutions and discourses used by disenfranchised middle-class women to express their citizenship. The extent of middle-class women's contribution to civic life is examined through their involvement in reforming and philanthropic associations as well as local government.

Making use of a range of previously untapped sources, this fascinating book will appeal in particular to those with an interest in Gender History and Scottish History.

In this volume, eighteen experts from a variety of academic backgrounds explore the use of songs in films from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds. This volume illustrates how – rather than simply helping to tell the story of – songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema commonly upset the hierarchy of the visual over the aural, thereby rendering their hearing a complex and rich subject for analysis.

Screening songs... constitutes a ground-breaking, interdisciplinary collection. Of particular interest to scholars and academics in the areas of Film Studies, Hispanic Studies, Lusophone Studies and Musicology, this volume opens up the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cinema to vital, new, critical approaches. The soundtracks of films as varied as City of God, All About My Mother, Bad Education and Buena Vista Social Club are analysed alongside those of lesser-known works that range from the melodramas of Mexican cinema’s golden age to Brazilian and Portuguese musical comedies from the 1940s and 1950s. Fiction films are studied alongside documentaries, the work of established directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura and Nelson Pereira dos Santos alongside that of emerging filmmakers, and performances by iconic stars like Caetano Veloso and Chavela Vargas alongside the songs of Spanish Gypsy groups, Mexican folk songs and contemporary Brazilian rap.

Over thirty years later, the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–79 still resonates in British politics. On 22 January 1979, 1.5 million workers were on strike. Industrial unrest swept Britain in an Arctic winter. Militant shop stewards blocked medical supplies to hospitals; mountains of rubbish remained uncollected; striking road hauliers threatened to bring the country to a standstill; even the dead were left unburied. Within weeks, the beleaguered Callaghan Labour government fell from power. In the 1979 general election, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, beginning eighteen years of unbroken Conservative rule.

Based on a wide range of newly available historical sources and key interviews, this full-length account breaks new ground, analysing the origins, character and impact of a turbulent period of industrial unrest. This important study will appeal to all those interested in contemporary history and British politics.

This book is the first to explore three visual media in contemporary Spain: cinema, television and the internet. It also examines cultural products in each of these media in terms of three vital themes: emotion, location and nostalgia.

The first two chapters focus on emotion. They analyze the ‘emotional imperative’ in a recent Almodóvar feature film and in Spanish television’s top-rated period drama, and investigate the politics of affect in TV drama in the last decade. The next pair of chapters deal with location. They use cultural geography to re-read contradictory accounts of the movida (the post-Franco cultural boom) and examine an attempt to anchor a US-derived genre (the youth movie) in the urban landscape of Madrid. The fifth and sixth chapters introduce the theme of location into nostalgia. They treat the unique cases of a successful Spanish heritage movie and a contemporary Spanish thriller remade in Hollywood. The peunultimate chapter investigates electronic artists and the virtual universe, and the book ends with a look at the implications of Hispano-Mexican co-productions and the interconnectedness of economic and aesthetic cultural forms.

Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England. Examining canonical and less familiar literary works alongside early modern texts ranging from medical treatises to conduct manuals via puritan polemic and popular ballads, the collection offers a new view of the senses in early modern England.

The volume offers dedicated essays on each of the five senses, each relating works of art to their cultural moments, whilst elsewhere the volume considers the senses collectively in particular cultural contexts. It also pursues the sensory experiences that early modern subjects encountered through the very acts of engaging with texts, performances and artworks. This book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, to those working in sensory studies, and to anyone interested in the art and life of early modern England.

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

Written in 1991 to commemorate the bicentennial of Mozart’s death, Burgess’s novella-length piece is a compendium of themes, genres and even art-forms revolving around the one central preoccupation of the entire Burgess oeuvre: the reconcilability of life and art. This is a kaleidoscope of a book, which stretches even the bounds of even Anthony Burgess’s fiction in an attempt to understand Mozart through celestial dialogue, an opera libretto, and fragments of a film script.

As gracefully witty as it is daringly experimental, Mozart and the Wolf Gang is one of Burgess’s late, great works, often overlooked due to its experimental form, which nevertheless remains accessible, entertaining and yet refreshingly original to this day.

This new critical edition with analysis from noted musicologist and a first-class literary critic Alan Shockley enables this work’s significance to be assessed by a new generation of readers and scholars.

The end of Ulster loyalism? explores the dynamics and divisions within paramilitary groups since the mid-1970s. It details and explains the nature of Loyalist conflict transformation, a key model of transition that is relevant to arenas beyond Northern Ireland. It communicates a history of transition and, at times, regression within the Ulster Volunteer Force, Ulster Defence Association, Loyalist Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commando. It details the internal and external impediments and violence from within regressive elements, the wreckers and spoilers, who aimed to undermine positive peace-building. The book also discusses the nature and extent of loyalist violence and provides a rarely heard Loyalist voice regarding State-led collusion. Loyalist ideas and opinions are revealed that until now have been largely invisible, and the book highlights how an extensive element of positive Loyalist renewal has been purposefully suppressed and unmentioned.

In examining both positive and regressive Loyalism this book creates a holistic and honest analysis of groups that are emerging, sometimes awkwardly, out of violence. From violence to the location of Loyalist transition, through internal feuding and towards restorative justice, community leadership and mural re-imaging this book asserts a definite and robust examination of the future of Loyalism.

This will be a key text for any student of politics, criminology, human geography and conflict and conflict transformation and is particularly relevant to the scholarship of pro-State groups who are infrequently considered in academic deliberations.

Art since the 1980s reveals a striking proliferation of works exploring the complex cross-cultural identities that have resulted from a long history of exchange between France and the Maghreb. This adventurous study examines distinctively visual means of presenting ‘Franco-Maghrebi’ identities in performance, video, photography and installation art. Transcultural encounters investigates the ways in which such art spurs a re-thinking of both postcolonial and feminist issues and critical terms in an uneven globalised frame. It demonstrates how this corpus develops art historical debates concerning gender and representation, while also considering emerging visions of the Maghreb. Analysing a wide range of works presented in galleries, online or in the street, this study shows how they test the boundaries of established art genres, calling for the invention of new modalities of ‘reading’ transnational visual culture. The first book to explore postcolonial and feminist approaches to contemporary art from a ‘Francophone’ space, Transcultural encounters incorporates much material that has previously received little critical attention.

The book will be of interest to researchers in French studies, postcolonial studies, visual studies and gender studies, as well as curators and artists working across cultures and media.

This volume explores changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the nineteenth century. With case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China and the South Pacific, it demonstrates how popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were reframed by the social, cultural and political structures of ‘modern life’.

Chapters in the collection examine ways in which cancer, suicide and social degeneration were seen as products of the stresses and strains of ‘new’ ways of living. Others explore the legal, institutional and intellectual changes that contributed to modern medical practice. The volume traces how physiological and psychological problems were constituted in relation to each other and to their social contexts, offering new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century.

This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, 'Good health and well-being'.

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

This book shows that William Shakespeare was a more personal writer than any of his innumerable commentators have realised. It asserts that numerous characters and events were drawn from the author's life, and puts faces to the names of Jaques, Touchstone, Feste, Jessica, the 'Dark Lady' and others.

Steven Sohmer explores aspects of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets that have been hitherto overlooked or misinterpreted in an effort to better understand the man and his work. If you've ever wondered who Pigrogromitus was, or why Jaques spies on Touchstone and Audrey - or what the famous riddle M.O.A.I. stands for - this is the book for you.

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

Colonial policing and the imperial endgame is the first comprehensive study of the colonial police and their complex role within Britain’s long and turbulent process of decolonisation, a time characterised by political upheaval and colonial conflict.

The Colonial Police Service was created in 1936 in order to standardise all imperial police forces and mould colonial policing to the British model. From the British Caribbean to the Middle East, the Mediterranean to British Colonial Africa and on to Southeast Asia, colonial police forces struggled with the unrest and conflict that stemmed from Britain’s withdrawal from its empire. As the shadow of decolonisation grew ever longer, so colonial police forces reverted back to their traditional role as a colony’s first line of defence. At the same time, as tensions increased throughout the empire, so too did the power of the police through the development of police intelligence systems and counter-insurgency units. Colonial policing and the imperial endgame controversially asserts that it was coercion rather than consent which was more commonly associated with the work of police forces during this period of political dislocation.

Georgina Sinclair's focussed study of colonial policing during this period facilitates a greater understanding of the processes of decolonisation.

This volume considers how multinational corporations can be part of the solution to environmental problems, focusing on the climate strategies of ExxonMobil, Shell, and Statoil as case studies. The analysis generates policy-relevant knowledge about whether and how corporate resistance to climate policy can be overcome. The analytical approach developed by the authors is also applicable to other areas of environmental degradation where multinational corporations play a central role. Invaluable to students, researchers and practitioners interested in national and international environmental politics, and business environmental management. An important and timely volume given the challenges facing environmentalists and policy-makers following the breakdown of the Kyoto protocol.

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

Scientific governance in Britain, 1914-79 examines the connected histories of how science was governed, and used in governance, in twentieth-century Britain. During the middle portion of that century, British science grew dramatically in scale, reach and value. These changes were due in no small part to the two world wars and their associated effects, notably post-war reconstruction and the on-going Cold War. As the century went on, there were more scientists - requiring more money to fund their research - occupying ever more niches in industry, academia, military and civil institutions. Combining the latest research on twentieth-century British science with insightful discussion of what it meant to govern - and govern with - science, this volume provides both an invaluable introduction to science in twentieth-century Britain for students and a fresh thematic focus on science and government for researchers interested in the histories of science and governance.

This volume features a foreword from Sir John Beddington, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser 2008-13.

Volume one of the most authoritative and revealing account yet of how the Irish Government managed the Northern Ireland peace process and helped broker a political settlement to end the conflict there. Based on eight extended interviews with key officials and political leaders, this book provides a compelling picture of how the peace process was created and how it came to be successful. Covering areas such as informal negotiation, text and context, strategy, working with British and American Governments, and offering perceptions of other players involved in the dialogue and negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the power-sharing arrangements that followed, this dramatic account will become a major source for academics and interested readers alike for years to come.

Volume one deals with the Irish Government and Sunningdale (1973) and the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and Volume two on the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and beyond.

Naval forces from fifteen colonial territories fought for the British Empire during the Second World War, providing an important new lens for understanding imperial power and colonial relations on the eve of decolonisation.

With sources from Britain, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, this book examines the political, social and cultural impact of these forces; how they fortified British ‘prestige’ against rival imperialisms and colonial nationalisms; the importance of ‘men on the spot’, collaboration, ‘naval theatre’, and propaganda in mobilising colonial navalism; the role of naval training within the ‘civilising mission’ and colonial development; and how racial theory influenced naval recruitment, strategy and management, affecting imperial sentiment, ethnic relations, colonial identities, customs and order.

This book will appeal to imperial, maritime and regional historians, by broadening our understanding of navies as social and cultural institutions, where power was expressed through the ideas and relations they cultivated, as well as their guns.

Terror and terroir investigates the Comité Régional d'Action Viticole (CRAV), a loose affiliation of militant winegrowers in the sun-drenched, southern vineyards of the Languedoc. Since 1961, they have fought to protect their livelihood. They were responsible for sabotage, bombings, hijackings and even the shooting of a policeman. Against the backdrop of European integration and decolonisation they have rallied around banners of Resistance and their strong Republican heritage, whilst their peasant protests fed into Occitan and anti-globalisation movements.

At heart, however, the CRAV remain farmers championing the right of people to live and work the land. Between the romantic mythology of terroir, and the misguided, passionate violence of terror, this book unpicks the contentious issues of regionalism, protest and violence. It offers an insight into a neglected area of France's past that continues to impinge on its future, infused with one of the most potent symbols of French culture: wine.

Between two stools investigates the representation of scatology – humorous, carnivalesque, satirical, damning and otherwise – in English literature from the middle ages to the eighteenth century.

Smith contends that the ‘two stools’ stand for two broadly distinctive attitudes towards scatology. The first is a carnivalesque, merry, even hearty disposition, typified by the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The second is self-disgust, an attitude characterised by withering misanthropy and hypochondria. Smith demonstrates how the combination of high and low cultures manifests the capacity to run canonical and carnivalesque together so that sanctioned and civilised artefacts and scatological humour frequently co-exist in the works under discussion, evidence of an earlier culture’s aptitude (now lost) to occupy a position between two stools.

Of interest to cultural and literary historians, this ground-breaking study testifies to the arrival of scatology as an academic subject, at the same time recognising that it remains if not outside, then at least at the margins of conventional scholarship.

Alone of his contemporaries, J.M.W. Turner is commonly held to have prefigured modern painting, as signalled in the existence of The Turner Prize for contemporary art. Our celebration of his achievement is very different to what Victorian critics made of his art. This book shows how Turner was reinvented to become the artist we recognise today.

On Turner's death in 1851 he was already known as an adventurous, even baffling, painter. But when the Court of Chancery decreed that the contents of his studio should be given to the nation, another side of his art was revealed that effected a wholescale change in his reputation. This book acts as a guide to the reactions of art writers and curators from the 1850s to the 1960s as they attempted to come to terms with his work. It documents how Turner was interpreted and how his work was displayed in Britain, in Europe and in North America, concentrating on the ways in which his artistic identity was manipulated by art writers, by curators at the Tate and by designers of exhibitions for the British Council and other bodies.

Richard Brome was the leading comic playwright of 1630s London. Starting his career as a manservant to Ben Jonson, he wrote a string of highly successful comedies which were influential in British theatre long after Brome's own playwriting career was cut short by the closure of the theatres in 1642.
This book offers the first full-length chronological account of Brome's life and works, drawing on a wide range of recently rediscovered manuscript sources. It traces the early hostility to Brome from those who wrote him off as a mere servant; his continuing struggles with plague closures, contract disputes and theatrical takeover bids; and his literary relationships with Jonson, Shakespeare and others. Each of the surviving plays is discussed in relation to its social and political context, and its sense of place. A final chapter reviews Brome's enduring stageworthiness into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the most recent Brome revivals.

This fascinating work challenges many of the accepted facts about the concentration camps run by the British during the South African War. The author demonstrates that much of what we have traditionally understood about these camps originates the testimony which was solicited, selected and published by key women activists within Boer proto-nationalist circles. Using detailed archival evidence, she shows that much of the history of the camps results from a deliberate imposition of ‘post/memory’ - a process by which what was ‘remembered’ was shaped and reshaped to support the development of a racialised nationalist framework.

Many of the camps’ occupants died from successive epidemics of measles, typhoid, enteritis and pneumonia rather than deliberate ill-treatment, yet the book shows how mourning for those who died was overridden by state commemorative activities concerned with promoting pan-Boer nationalist aspirations. The innovative and groundbreaking approach of the author invites the reader to step into and explore with her the commemorative sites passed by nationalist land acts, which still powerfully mark the South African landscape.

Gothic death 1740-1914 explores the representations of death and dying in Gothic narratives published between the mid-eighteenth century and the beginning of the First World War. The book investigates how eighteenth century Graveyard Poetry and the tradition of the elegy produced a version of death that underpinned ideas about empathy and models of textual composition. Later accounts of melancholy, as in the work of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, emphasise the literary construction of death. The shift from writing death to interpreting the signs of death is explored in relation to the work of Poe, Emily Brontë and George Eliot. A chapter on Dickens examines the significance of graves and capital punishment during the period. A chapter on Haggard, Stoker and Wilde explores conjunctions between love and death and a final chapter on Machen and Stoker explores how scientific ideas of the period help to contextualise a specifically fin de siècle model of death.

This book will be of interest to academics and students working on literature on the Gothic and more generally on the literary culture of the period.

Focussing on professional politicians Klaus Stolz investigates the interrelationship between political career patterns and political institutions in two of the most widely discussed cases of regionalism: Catalonia and Scotland. The study deals with two different yet closely related sets of questions: Firstly, how do professional politicians pursue their careers in the regional context. And secondly, how do they shape and reshape the political institutions in which they pursue these careers.

The monograph is based on extensive empirical research including a comprehensive data set on the careers of Catalan and Scottish parliamentarians, systematic surveys of regional representatives as well as in-depth interviews of a wide range of politicians and experts in both regions. Exploring the effects of political professionalisation on regional democracy, Stolz goes way beyond traditional studies of regionalism and decentralization, while his focus on the regional career arena introduces a much needed territorial dimension to the study of political careers. Rich original data, innovative theoretical concepts and a strictly comparative approach are the basis for a study that considerably deepens and enhances our understanding of the tremendous political changes both Catalonia and Scotland are undergoing.

Thus, the book is of interest to the still growing number of scholars concerned with devolution in the UK, the Spanish autonomous communities as well as to those interested in regional politics and regionalisation in general. Furthermore, its theoretical focus makes it highly relevant for scholars working on political careers, political professionalisation and democratic theory.

This highly readable book is a unique, ethnographic study of devolution and Scottish politics as well as Party political activism more generally. It explores how Conservative Party activists who had opposed devolution and the movement for a Scottish Parliament during the 1990s attempted to mobilise politically following their annihilation at the 1997 General Election. It draws on fieldwork conducted in Dumfries and Galloway - a former stronghold for the Scottish Tories - to describe how senior Conservatives worked from the assumption that they had endured their own ‘crisis’ in representation. The material consequences of this crisis included losses of financial and other resources, legitimacy and local knowledge for the Scottish Conservatives.

This book ethnographically describes the processes, practices and relationships that Tory Party activists sought to enact during the 2003 Scottish and local Government elections. Its central argument is that, having asserted that the difficulties they faced constituted problems of knowledge, Conservative activists cast to the geographical and institutional margins of Scotland became ‘banal’ activists. Believing themselves to be lacking in the data and information necessary for successful mobilisation during Parliamentary elections, local Tory Party strategists attempted to address their knowledge ‘crisis’ by burying themselves in paperwork and petty bureaucracy. Such practices have often escaped scholarly attention because they appear everyday and mundane and are therefore less noticeable.

This thorough account of the life and films of the Spanish-Basque filmmaker Julio Medem is the first book in English on the internationally renowned writer-director of Vacas, La ardilla roja (Red Squirrel), Tierra, Los amantes del Círculo Polar (Lovers of the Arctic Circle), Lucía y el sexo (Sex and Lucía), La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra (Basque Ball) and Caótica Ana (Chaotic Ana),

Initial chapters explore Medem’s childhood, adolescence and education and examine his earliest short films and critical writings against a background of a dramatically changing Spain. Later chapters provide accounts of the genesis, production and release of Medem’s challenging and sensual films, which feed into complex but lucid analyses of their meanings, both political and personal, in which Stone draws on traditions and innovations in Basque art, Spanish cinema and European philosophy to create a complete and provocative portrait of Medem and his work.

In one of the first monographs of its kind to focus on the aesthetic and emotional impact of lighting in cinema, Lara Thompson looks at the way light informs the cinematic experience, from constructing star identities, sculpting natural light and creating imaginary worlds, to the seductive power of darkness, fading representations of the past and arresting twilight encounters.

This groundbreaking and accessible introductory study offers a unique insight into the way illumination has transcended its diffuse functional boundaries and been elevated to a position of narrative and emotional importance, transforming it from an unobtrusive element of film style to an expressive and essential component. It includes analyses of over fifty renowned international films, discussed in inventive and illuminating combinations, from cinema's earliest moments to its most recent digital manifestations, and is essential reading for all those who want to understand what film light means and how it makes us feel.

The book examines the power of nationalism to solder nation-states back together rather than break them apart. In this innovative, cross-continental comparison of nation-building in Germany and Vietnam, the focus is on their shared experience of division, communism and regional integration, offering original insights into how governments go about maintaining nation-state legitimacy in the twenty-first century.

Neither German nor Vietnamese governments have succeeded in effacing national division, for a host of historical, economic, psychological, sociological and even climatic reasons. Yet their efforts tell us a great deal about how national identity is negotiated today. The study offers a fresh perspective on nationalist ideology which will be of interest to specialists and students in comparative politics, European and Southeast Asian studies as well as nationalism studies. For the general reader, it provides a fascinating introduction to contemporary nation-building in a unique combination of cases across two continents.

This is an authoritative account of the career of Sydney Box, one of British cinema’s most successful and significant producers. Concentrating on the period 1940-65, it highlights the crucial but often misunderstood role that the producer plays in the film making process and, using largely unpublished material, affords an exceptional insight into the workings of the film industry

Box’s career was exceptionally varied and this study analyses the work of his company Verity Films which wartime produced over 100 short propaganda films during the Second World War, as well as Box’s work as a feature film producer and as managing director of Gainsborough Pictures (1946-49). It encompasses the difficulties he experienced as an independent producer in the 1950s and the formation of Sydney Box Associates, his role in early television history, and his imaginative if unsuccessful bids for British Lion and London Weekday Television in the early sixties.

This study will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in British cinema and television history, but its focus on the frequently misrepresented or misunderstood role of the producer will make it valuable for students of film generally.

Volumes of influence explores the work of a number of important books and key writers within the academic disciplines of politics and international relations. It revisits and re-evaluates some of the landmark or classic books in politics and international relations, and assesses the contribution of some of the most influential writers who have played a significant role in the development of these disciplines, who defined their subjects, set agendas and inspired. They remain significant and relevant, offering insights that help in understanding and analysing contemporary problems, issues and debates. The book’s chapters - written by specialists in their fields - discuss and evaluate: - 'Walter Bagehot, 'The English constitution' (1867)
- Maurice Duverger, 'Political parties' (1953)
- Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, 'Cleavage structures, party - systems and voter slignments' (1967)
- Gerald Curtis, 'Campaigning Japanese style' (1971)
- Steven Lukes, 'Power: A radical view' (1974)
- Richard Crossman, 'The diaries of a Cabinet Minister' (1975)
- Charles Lindblom, 'Politics and markets' (1977)
- George Kennan, 'American diplomacy' (1951)
- Graham Allison, 'Essence of decision' (1971)
- Charles Beitz, 'Political theory and international relations' (1979)
- Samuel Huntington, 'The clash of civilizations' (1993)

The book will appeal and be of interest to academics and to students of politics and international relations, highlighting the importance of going back and studying some of the foundation literature in their subjects - books and authors which stand the test of time.

Engines for empire examines the use of the railway by the British army from the 1830s to 1914, a period of domestic political strife and unprecedented imperial expansion. The book uses a wide array of sources and images to demonstrate how the Victorian army embraced this new technology, how it monitored foreign wars, and how it came to use the railway in both support and operational roles. The British army's innovation is also revealed, through its design and use of armoured trains, the restructuring of hospital trains, and in its capacity to build and repair railway track, bridges, and signals under field conditions.

This volume provides insights on the role of railways in imperial development, as a focus of social interaction between adversaries, and as a means of projecting imperial power. It will make fascinating reading for students, academics and enthusiasts in military and imperial history, Victorian studies, railway history and colonial warfare.

Written against a background of global economic and political turmoil, including crisis and uncertainty surrounding the European Union, European Regionalism and the Left offers new critical insights into a range of fundamental problems facing the project of European integration. Issues covered include: the limits and possibilities of European Monetary Union; the impact of European regionalism on the political organisations of the European left; European regionalism and the crisis of social democracy; Russia and the limits to EU regionalism; and the contradictions of Eurocentric politics in an age of globalisation.

The book brings together contributions from international scholars drawing on a rich diversity of critical approaches to international political economy, European integration studies, European politics and social theory. Unlike many earlier critical studies of this subject, European Regionalism and the Left consciously eschews any specific radical theoretical narrative or research programme in favour of an open-ended critical engagement with the political economy of contemporary Europe. As such it attempts to open up left analyses of Europe to broader traditions of critical inquiry.

R.K. Narayan’s reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of “authentic” Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan’s writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi.

Narayan’s imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan’s career.

As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan’s fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer.

American literature and Irish culture, 1910–55: The politics of enchantment discusses how and why American modernist writers turned to Ireland at various stages during their careers. By placing events such as the Celtic Revival and the Easter Rising at the centre of the discussion, it shows how Irishness became a cultural determinant in the work of American modernists. It is the first study to extend the analysis of Irish influence on American literature beyond racial, ethnic or national frameworks.

Through close readings and archival research, American literature and Irish culture, 1910–55 provides a balanced and structured approach to the study of the complexities of American modernist writers’ responses to Ireland. Offering new readings of familiar literary figures – including Fitzgerald, Moore, O’Neill, Steinbeck and Stevens – it makes for essential reading for students and academics working on twentieth-century American and Irish literature and culture, and transatlantic studies.

Michael Ondaatje is the first comprehensive and fully up-to-date study of Ondaatje’s entire oeuvre. Starting from Ondaatje’s beginnings as a poet, this volume offers an intensive account of each of his major publications, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, drawing attention to the various contexts and intertexts that have informed his work.

The book contains a broad overview of Ondaatje’s career for students and readers coming to his work for the first time. It also offers an original reading of his writing which significantly revises conventional accounts of Ondaatje as a postmodern or postcolonial writer.

As the fullest account of Ondaatje’s work to date, Spinks’s approach draws on a range of postcolonial theory and, as well as being a landmark in Ondaatje scholarship, makes a distinctive contribution to debates about postcolonial literature and the poetics of postmodernism.