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British Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow Novel
British Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow Novel offers the first detailed discussion of middlebrow fiction by women writers who personally witnessed the dismantling of the British Empire, the intensification of the Cold War, and the domestic tensions following the arrival of thousands of migrants from Britain’s former colonies. Studying selected novels by Cecilie Leslie, Elspeth Huxley, Mary McMinnies, Han Suyin and Kamala Markandaya, this study demonstrates that women’s middlebrow writing reveals a much deeper engagement with the politics and economics of decolonisation than is usually ascribed to the genre. As Anne Wetherilt argues, by transcending the politics of domesticity, the female middlebrow registers a critique of both Britain’s colonial history and mainstream conceptions of decolonisation as a well-managed transition from empire to commonwealth. As such, the middlebrow novel of the immediate post-war decades takes us back to a place where the end of empire was imagined rather than denied, and the ambiguities of British colonial politics exposed, rather than repressed.
The Business of Emotions in Modern History
The Business of Emotions in Modern History shows how businesses, from individual entrepreneurs to family firms and massive corporations, have relied on, leveraged, generated and been shaped by emotions for centuries. With a broad temporal and global coverage, ranging from the early modern era to the present day in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, the essays in this volume highlight the rich potential for studying emotions and business in tandem. In exploring how emotions and emotional situations affect business, and in turn how businesses affect the emotional lives of individuals and communities, this book allows us to recognise the emotional structures behind business decisions and relationships, and how to question them. From emotional labour in family firms, to affective corporate paternalism and the role of specific emotions such as trust, fear, anxiety love and nostalgia in creating economic connections, this book opens a rich new avenue of research for both the history of emotions and business history.
Literary Neo-Orientalism and the Arab Uprisings
This book presents an analysis of English, French and German language fiction about the so-called Arab Spring. Through a transnational comparison of texts by a wide range of authors, both non-diasporic and diasporic, Julia Wurr investigates the commercialisation of Neo-Orientalist and securitised elements in short fiction and novels aimed at the Western literary market, and examines the role which the literary market plays in constructing, aestheticising and marketing mental boundaries between the Islamicate world and the West. By bringing together approaches from the social sciences with literary close readings, this study does not only carve out recurring tropes, frames and figurations which are complicit in diffusing a Neo-Orientalist and anti-Muslim imagery into mainstream society, but it also shows how influential frames of insecurity - precarity, affective masculinity and terror - refract the adverse psychosocial consequences of the neoliberal project into a securitisation of the Other.
Screening American Nostalgia
This book examines American screen culture and its power to create and sustain values. Looking specifically at the ways in which nostalgia colors the visions of American life, essays explore contemporary American ideology as it is created and sustained by the screen. Nostalgia is omnipresent, selling a version of America that arguably never existed. Current socio-cultural challenges are played out onscreen and placed within the historical milieu through a nostalgic lens which is tempered by contemporary conservatism. Essays reveal not only the visual catalog of recognizable motifs but also how these are used to temper the uncertainty of contemporary crises. Media covered spans from 1939's Gone with the Wind, to Stranger Things, The Americans, Twin Peaks, the Fallout franchise and more.
Shakespeare's Golden Ages
Diverging from critical paths that have focused on nostalgia as a memorializing practice or on Stuart nostalgia for Elizabeth, this book argues that Shakespeare's Elizabethan history plays stage nostalgia as a future-focused political rhetoric. In doing so, the book suggests new directions for studying nostalgia. Case studies including Richard II and Julius Caesar demonstrate how Shakespeare creates a dramatic argument for nostalgia's power and possibility, even as he represents the fruitlessness of trying to reclaim the past and the fiction of that past's ideal nature. In his dramaturgy, nostalgia functions as a persuasive call for (short-lived) political change. The book provides new interpretations of Shakespeare's contemporaries to illustrate how his use of nostalgia depends on, innovates from and influences his fellow playwrights. By reading literary, religious and political texts alongside Shakespeare's histories, this book attends additionally to the extra-dramatic valences nostalgic rhetoric obtains in Elizabethan England.
Reading Postcolonial Literature
An Open Access edition is available thanks to the kind sponsorship of the libraries participating in the Jisc Open Access Community Framework OpenUP initiative. Debates about reading in postcolonial studies rarely discuss non-professional readers, except to secure the authority of professional reading practices. In Reading Postcolonial Literature, Hayley G. Toth places non-professional reading practices in dialogue with received academic wisdom to debunk common-sense assumptions about non-professional readers as ‘Western’ or ‘neocolonial’ consumers. Drawing on reading practices recorded in academic books, journal articles and on online book-reviewing platforms like Amazon and Goodrea...
Landscapes and Voices of the Great War
This volume aims to provide a wider view of First World War experience through focusing on landscapes less commonly considered in historiography, and on voices that have remained on the margins of popular understanding of the war. The landscape of the western front was captured during the conflict in many different ways: in photographs, paintings and print. The most commonly replicated voicing of contemporary attitudes towards the war is that of initial enthusiasm giving way to disillusionment and a sense of overwhelming futility. Investigations of the many components of war experience drawn from social and cultural history have looked to landscapes and voices beyond the frontline as a means of foregrounding different perspectives on the war. Not all of the voices presented here opposed the war, and not all of the landscapes were comprised of trenches or flanked by barbed wire. Collectively, they combine to offer further fresh insights into the multiplicity of war experience, an alternate space to the familiar tropes of mud and mayhem.
Southern Studies
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World War I in Mesopotamia
The Mesopotamian campaign during World War I was a critical moment in Britain's position in the Middle East. With British and British Indian troops fighting in places which have become well-known in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, such as Basra, the campaign led to the establishment of the British Mandate in Iraq in 1921. Nadia Atia believes that in order to fully understand Britain's policies in creating the nascent state of Iraq, we must first look at how the war shaped Britons' conceptions of the region. Atia does this through a cultural and military history of the changing British perceptions of Mesopotamia since the period before World War I when it was under Ottoman rule. Drawing on a wide variety of historical and literary sources, including the writing of key figures such as Gertrude Bell, Mark Sykes and Arnold Wilson, but focusing mainly on the views and experiences of ordinary men and women whose stories and experiences of the war have less frequently been told, Atia examines the cultural and social legacy of World War I in the Middle East and how this affected British attempts to exert influence in the region.
Dublin 1916
Taken over by the Irish Volunteers on Easter Monday 1916 and held for nearly a week, the rebels finally surrendered the GPO to the Crown forces after heavy gun bombardment, and the ensuing conflagration reduced it to an empty shell and destroyed much of the centre of the city.Clair Wills' fascinating book also explores the twists and turns that the myth of the GPO has undergone in the last century. It has stood for sacrifice and treachery, national unity and divisive violence, for the future and the past.
