A Glossary of UK Government and Politics is a handy reference guide to the events, personnel, policies and institutions relevant to the government and politics of the United Kingdom. It includes a series of authoritative definitions and explanations and sharp vignettes of some of the leading characters who have graced the political scene in recent years. It is ideal for students who come across references which are new to them and on which they want or need to know more. The entries are accessible and manageable, yet sufficiently informative, offering basic details and something more by way of interpretation and insight into basic arguments and current controversies.
Starting in 1979, the birth of the domestic video industry - and the first year of the Thatcher government - this critical study explains how the censorship of films both in cinemas and on video and DVD has developed in Britain. As well as presenting a detailed analysis of the workings of the British Board of Film Classification, Petley casts his gaze well beyond the BBFC to analyse the forces which the Board has to take into account when classifying and censoring. These range from laws such as the Video Recordings Act and Obscene Publications Act, and how these are enforced by the police and Crown Prosecution Service and interpreted by the courts, to government policy on matters such as pornography. In discussing a climate heavily coloured by 30 years of lurid 'video nasty' stories propagated by a press which is at once censorious and sensationalist and which has played a key role in bringing about and legitimating one of the strictest systems of film and video/DVD censorship in Europe, this book is notable for the breadth of its contextual analysis, its critical stance and its suggestions for reform of the present system.
Why are some controversial issues covered in TV soaps and dramas and not others? How are decisions really made 'behind the scenes'? How do programme makers push boundaries without losing viewers? What do audiences take away from their viewing experience? Does TV fiction have a greater impact on public understandings than TV news? This exciting new book draws on unique empirical data to examine the relationship between popular television fiction and wider society.The book gives lively and engaging insights into how and why socially sensitive story lines were taken up by different TV programmes from the late 1980s to the 2000s. Drawing on a series of case studies of medicine, health, illness and social problems including breast cancer, mental distress, sexual abuse and violence it comprehensively traces the path of storylines from initial conception through to audience reception and uses contemporary examples to link practice to theory. For the first time, this book addresses production and receptio
This book is a comprehensive but accessible description of English as it is spoken in New Zealand. New Zealand English is one of the youngest native speaker varieties of English, and is the only variety of English where there is recorded evidence of its entire history. It shares some features with other Southern Hemisphere varieties of English such as Australian English and South African English, but is also clearly distinct from these. For the past two decades extensive research has focused on the evolution and ongoing development of the variety. New Zealand English presents the results of this research in an accessible way.
Set against the background of post-revolution Scottish ecclesiastical politics, this book addresses the hitherto largely neglected religious dimension to the debates on Anglo-Scottish Union. Focusing predominantly on the period between April 1706 and January 1707, the book examines the attitudes and reactions of Presbyterians to the treaty and challenges many of the widely held assumptions about the role of the church and other groups during the debate. The focal point of the Kirk's response was the Commission of the General Assembly. Through the extensive use of church records and other primary sources the work of the commission in pursuit of church security through its debates, committees and addresses, is discussed at length. The book also examines the church and groups like the Cameronians and Hebronites in relation to the parliamentary debate, the pursuit of alternatives to incorporation, popular protest, addressing and armed resistance.
An incisive study of modern American literature, casting new light on its origins and themes.Exploring canonical American writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner alongside less familiar writers like Djuna Barnes and Susan Glaspell, the guide takes readers though a diverse literary landscape. It considers how the rise of the American metropolis contributed to the growth of American modernism; and also examines the ways in which regional writers responded to an accelerated American modernity. Taking in African American modernism, cultural and geographical exile, as well as developments in modern American drama, the guide introduces readers to current critical trends in modernist studies. Key FeaturesPresents American literary modernism as emerging from a broad intellectual and philosophical landscapeExtends the timeframe, definition and intellectual parameters of American modernismProvides close critical and contextual analysis of more than thirty American writers and key texts including Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
The political scene in Northern Ireland is constantly evolving. This book reflects the most recent changes and synthesises some of the best thinking on the subject. It provides an overview of the politics of Northern Ireland, including detailed coverage of the institutional structure under the Good Friday Agreement and an evaluation of how the institutions operated in practice. Opening with the historical context and discussion of the nature of the conflict, the standpoints of unionism, nationalism, loyalism and republicanism are explored. The evolution of political initiatives since the 1970s is traced, leading to the peace process of the 1990s and culminating in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The period of devolution in Northern Ireland (1999-2002) is evaluated, and the book concludes with coverage of political developments post-suspension, paying particular attention to the on-going debate on changes to the Agreement and the prospects for power-sharing.
This book offers a lively introduction to all of the plays of Christopher Marlowe and to the central concerns of his age, many of which are still important to us--religious uncertainty, the clash between Islam and Christianity, ideas of sexuality, and the role of the marginalised inidividual in society.Each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of Marlowe's work and its cultural contexts: Marlowe's life and death; the Marlowe canon; the theatrical contexts and stage history of the plays; Marlowe's interest in old and new branches of knowledge; the ways in which he transgresses against established norms and values; and the major issues which have been raised in critical discussions of his plays.
This book is a major historical and cultural overview of an increasingly popular genre. Starting with the cultural phenomenon of Godzilla, it explores the evolution of Japanese horror from the 1950s through to contemporary classics of Japanese horror cinema such as Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge. Divided thematically, the book explores key motifs such as the vengeful virgin, the demonic child, the doomed lovers and the supernatural serial killer, situating them within traditional Japanese mythology and folk-tales. The book also considers the aesthetics of the Japanese horror film, and the mechanisms through which horror is expressed at a visceral level through the use of setting, lighting, music and mise-en-scene. It concludes by considering the impact of Japanese horror on contemporary American cinema by examining the remakes of Ringu, Dark Water and Ju-On: The Grudge.The emphasis is on accessibility, and whilst the book is primarily marketed towards film and media students, it will also be of interest to anyone interested in Japanese horror film, cultural mythology and folk-tales, cinematic aesthetics and film theory.
On 14 May 1660, Charles II, restored to the throne of his father, was proclaimed king of Great Britain and Ireland at the market-cross of Edinburgh, bringing to an end over twenty years of internal upheaval. At the subsequent meeting of the Scottish parliament in January 1661, the ascendant royalist administration sought to abolish all constitutional innovations introduced during the revolutionary period in an attempt to secure the royal prerogative and prevent a repeat of rebellion from below. This book traces the background to the restoration of the monarchy in Scotland, explains why the Scottish political elite were so willing to relinquish power back to the king and assesses the impact of the restrictive Restoration constitutional settlement on subsequent parliamentary sessions in the reign of Charles II. It provides for the first time a detailed account of Charles II's Scottish parliament - who attended and why, what they did and parliament's role under an increasingly authoritarian crown. Tracing the path from the widespread popular royalism that marked the beginning of Charles II's reign to the increasing violence and resistance which the attempted reassertion of the royal prerogative provoked, each session of parliament is set within the political and historical context of the time in which it sat, to provide a fresh perspective on a previously neglected area of Scottish history.
Death and the Moving Image examines the representation of death and dying in mainstream cinema from its earliest to its latest renditions to reveal the ambivalent place of death in twentieth and twenty-first century culture: the ongoing split between its over- and under-statement, between its cold, bodily, realities and its fantastical, transcendental and, most importantly, strategic depictions. Our screens are steeped in death's dramatics: in spectacles of glorious sacrifice or bloody retribution, in the ecstasy of agony, but always in the promise of redemption. This book is about the staging of these dramatics in mainstream Western film and the discrepancies that fuel them and are, by return, fuelled by them. Exploring the impact of gender, race, nation or narration upon them, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives, and specific socio-cultural identities, in a hierarchical and partisan way. Dedicated to the popular, to the political and ethical implications of mass culture's themes and imperatives, Death and the Moving Image takes this culture to task for its mortal economies of expendability. Ultimately, it also disinters the capacity for film, and film criticism, to engage with life and vulnerability differently and even generatively.
David Webb reveals the extent to which Foucault's approach to language in The Archaeology of Knowledge was influenced by the mathematical sciences, adopting a mode of thought indebted to thinkers in the scientific and epistemological traditions such as Cavailles and Serres. By aligning his thought with the challenge to Kantian philosophy from mathematics and science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he shows how Foucault established his own perspective on the future of critical philosophy.
This critical guide introduces major novelists and themes in British fiction from 1975 to 2005. It engages with concepts such as postmodernism, feminism, gender and the postcolonial, and examines the place of fiction within broader debates in contemporary culture.A comprehensive Introduction provides a historical context for the study of contemporary British fiction by detailing significant social, political and cultural events. This is followed by five chapters organised around the core themes: (1) Narrative Forms, (2) Contemporary Ethnicities, (3) Gender and Sexuality, (4) History, Memory and Writing, and (5) Narratives of Cultural Space.
This book explores the major cultural forms of 1940s America - fiction and non-fiction; music and radio; film and theatre; serious and popular visual arts - and key texts, trends and figures, from Native Son to Citizen Kane, from Hiroshima to HUAC, and from Dr Seuss to Bob Hope. After discussing the dominant ideas that inform the 1940s the book culminates with a chapter on the 'culture of war'. Rather than splitting the decade at 1945, Jacqueline Foertsch argues persuasively that the 1940s should be taken as a whole, seeking out links between wartime and postwar American culture.
This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the subject of Britain and the European Union, paying equal attention to institutions and their relationship with one another. It examines the history and development of the EU, setting the framework for the current relationship; the institutions of the EU and how they affect Britain; and some of the common policies. Subjects covered include: * British Applications and the Referendum on Membership * Institutions of the EU * Common Policies of the EU * The Influence of the EU on Britain * Intergovernmentalism versus Supranationalism * Expansion versus Integration * Public Opinion on the EU * Political Parties and the EU Throughout, the impact of the powers of the EU, and of EU membership on Britain are evaluated from a range of perspectives.
This book, the first fully sustained reading of Henry James's and Oscar Wilde's relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between both authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism itself. The book also shows how these conflicting energies animated the late nineteenth century's most exciting transatlantic cultural enterprise. Richly illustrated and historically detailed, this study of James's and Wilde's intricate, decades-long relationship brings to light Aestheticism's truly transatlantic nature through close readings of both authors' works, as well as nineteenth-century art, periodicals and rare manuscripts. As Mendelssohn shows, both authors were deeply influenced by the visual and decorative arts, and by contemporary artists such as George Du Maurier and James McNeill Whistler. Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture offers a nuanced reading of a complex relationship that promises to transform the way in which we imagine late nineteenth-century British and American literary culture.
This book helps the reader make sense of the most commonly studied writer in the world. It starts with a brief explanation of how Shakespeare's writings have come down to us as a series of scripts for actors in the early modern theatre industry of London. The main chapters of the book approach the texts through a series of questions: 'what's changed since Shakespeare's time?', 'to what uses has Shakespeare been put?', and 'what value is there in Shakespeare?' These questions go to the heart of why we study Shakespeare at all, which question the book encourages the readers to answer for themselves in relation to their own critical writing.
Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities traces recurring debates about what constitutes film's political potential and argues that the relation between film and urban space has been crucial to these debates and their historical transformations. The book demonstrates that in the attempt to follow certain prescriptions - shooting on location, disrupting normalizing time, experimenting with memory, interlinking the spaces of screen and cinema - films invariably use the relation between film and urban space as a kind of laboratory, testing anew received prescriptions but invariably encountering new opportunities and new limits. A wide range of key films, from Dziga Vertov's 1928 Man with a Movie Camera to Jia Zhangke's 2008 24 City, are discussed in depth, each offering an argument for how the encounter between specific manifestations of modern urban space and politically engaged film strategies has served to challenge the status quo and stimulate critical thinking.
Covers the key concepts, arguments, problems and figures in aesthetics and the philosophy of artThis introduction to aesthetics provides a layered treatment of both the historical background and contemporary debates in aesthetics. Extensive cross-referencing shows how issues in aesthetics intersect with other branches of philosophy and other fields that study the arts. Aesthetics A-Z is an ideal guide for newcomers to the field of aesthetics and a useful reference for more advanced students of philosophy, art history, media studies and the performing arts.
For Britain the Second World War exists in popular memory as a time of heroic sacrifice, survival and ultimate victory over Fascism. In the Irish state the years 1939-1945 are still remembered simply as 'the Emergency'. Eire was one of many small states which in 1939 chose not to stay out of the war but one of the few able to maintain its non-belligerency as a policy.How much this owed to Britain's military resolve or to the political skills of Eamon de Valera is a key question which this new book will explore. It will also examine the tensions Eire's policy created in its relations with Winston Churchill and with the United States. The author also explores propaganda, censorship and Irish state security and the degree to which it involves secret co-operation with Britain. Disturbing issues are also raised like the IRA's relationship to Nazi Germany and ambivalent Irish attitudes to the Holocaust.Drawing upon both published and unpublished sources, this book illustrates the war's impact on people on both sides of the border and shows how it failed to resolve sectarian problems on Northern Ireland while raising higher the barriers of misunderstanding between it and the Irish state across its border.
Designed for beginning undergraduates studying for degrees in English, this textbook provides an introduction to a range of sociolinguistic theories and the insights they provide for a greater understanding of varieties of English, past and present. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to sociolinguistic variation, the book provides a systematic overview such topics as:*'English' as a social and as a linguistic concept*English speech communities*Social and regional dialectology in relation to varieties of English*English historical sociolinguistics, from Old English to late Modern English*Sociolinguistics and change in English*Outcomes of contact involving varieties of English*English and language planning*English, sociolinguistics and linguistic theory.The book contains data drawn from studies of English as it is used around the world. Throughout, there is an emphasis on facilitating a deeper understanding of linguistic variation in English and the social, political and cultural contexts in which speakers and writers of English operate.
This guide examines the production and reception of poetry by a range of women writers--predominantly although not exclusively writing in English--from Sappho through Anne Bradstreet and Emily Bronte to Sylvia Plath, Eavan Boland and Susan Howe.Women's Poetry offers a thoroughgoing thematic study of key texts, poets and issues, analysing commonalities and differences across diverse writers, periods, and forms. The book is alert, throughout, to the diversity of women's poetry. Close readings of selected texts are combined with a discussion of key theories and critical practices, and students are encouraged to think about women's poetry in the light of debates about race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and regional and national identity. The book opens with a chronology followed by a comprehensive Introduction which outlines various approaches to reading women's poetry. Seven chapters follow, and a Conclusion and section of useful resources close the book.
The Scots dialects of northern Scotland, Orkney and Shetland are among the most traditional varieties of 'English', exhibiting features not current elsewhere for centuries. Until recently, they were spoken in communities whose traditional occupations have encouraged the equation of speech with local identity. They have all also been affected by contact with Gaelic, or Norse, or both. In recent years, however, the decline of traditional industries has been matched by the discovery of oil off their coasts, encouraging in-migration of speakers of many varieties of English and other languages. How well have these varieties maintained their traditional natures at the start of the 21st century?
European Cinemas in the Television Age is a radical attempt to rethink the post-war history of European cinemas. The authors approach the subject from the perspective of television's impact on the culture of cinema's production, distribution, consumption and reception. Thus they indicate a new direction for the debate about the future of cinema in Europe. In every European country television has transformed economic, technological and aesthetic terms in which the process of cinema production had been conducted. Television's growing popularity has drastically reshaped cinema's audiences and forced governments to introduce policies to regulate the interaction between cinema and television in the changing and dynamic audio-visual environment. It is cinematic criticism, which was slowest in coming to terms with the presence of television and therefore most instrumental in perpetuating the view of cinema as an isolated object of aesthetic, critical and academic inquiry. The recognition of the impact of television upon European cinemas offers a more authentic and richer picture of cinemas in Europe, which are part of the complex audiovisual matrix including television and new media.
This new guide to the English renaissance's most erudite and yet most street-wise dramatist strongly asserts the theatrical brilliance of his greatest plays in performance, then and now.The book integrates all of Jonson's major plays into the milieu of the turbulent years which produced them, and analyses the way each work examines the issues and challenges of those years: money, power, sex, crime, identity, gender, the theatre itself. It offers a lucid guide to the competing critical views of a playwright who is far more than the obverse of his friend and rival William Shakespeare, and it explains in detail how the undoubted power and energy of these plays in modern performance should be the touchstone of their quality to both critic and reader. The plays discussed include the early Comedies, the Roman Tragedies (Sejanus and Catiline), Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an Ass.
This critical study of Asian American literature discusses work by internationally successful writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Bharati Mukherjee, Amy Tan and others in their historical, cultural and critical contexts. The focus of the book is on contemporary writing, from the 1970s onwards, although it also traces over a hundred years of Asian American literary production in prose, poetry, drama and criticism. The main body of the book comprises five periodized chapters that highlight important events in a nation-state that has historically rendered Asian Americans invisible. Of particular importance to the writers selected for case studies are questions of racial identity, cultural history and literary value with respect to dominant American ideologies.
This book provides an insightful overview of the major cultural forms of 1930s America: literature and drama, music and radio, film and photography, art and design, and a chapter on the role of the federal government in the development of the arts. The intellectual context of 1930s American culture is a strong feature, whilst case studies of influential texts and practitioners of the decade - from War of the Worlds to The Grapes of Wrath and from Edward Hopper to the Rockefeller Centre - help to explain the cultural impulses of radicalism, nationalism and escapism that characterize the United States in the 1930s.
Environmental issues in the USA are more important now than ever before. The devastation inflicted by Hurricane Katrina, growing evidence of global warming, and a struggling national energy supply highlight the unfolding crisis. Environmental fears translate into US automobile giants plying consumers with 'fuel efficient' cars in the 'MPG Lounge' of sales. Politicians talk of energy independence and getting tough on polluters. Fears gravitate around a fast-approaching doomsday scenario, an environmental endgame, of wholesale collapse, unless something is done.Yet fears of doomsday are nothing new. John Wills shows how the current environmental crisis is firmly rooted in the past. As well as explaining how today's problems are manifestations of older systems of economics, culture and politics, he also argues that America has already witnessed a range of 'doomsday scenarios,' both real and imagined. He identifies and explores a cast of 'doomsday landscapes' that includes the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia, the Santa Barbara Oil Spill, the 'Fable for Tomorrow' town featured in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), and Nevada's Doom Towns 1 and 2 blown apart by atomic testing in the 1950s. He reflects on contemporary ruminations over whether nature as a category endures given both the rising contamination of the US landscape and consumer proclivity for celebrating fake mementos of the outdoors (such as plastic lawn flamingos and artificial plants). And most significantly, he poses the question of whether Americans have been inviting doomsday through their long-term environmental actions.
The American West used to be a story of gunfights, glory, wagon trails, and linear progress. Historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Hollywood movies such as Stagecoach (1939) and Shane (1953) cast the trans-Mississippi region as a frontier of epic proportions where 'savagery' met 'civilization' and boys became men.During the late 1980s, this old way of seeing the West came under heavy fire. Scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White forged a fresh story of the region, a new vision of the West, based around the conquest of peoples and landscapes.This book explores the bipolar world of Turner's Old West and Limerick's New West and reveals the values and ambiguities associated with both historical traditions. Sections on Lewis and Clark, the frontier and the cowboy sit alongside work on Indian genocide and women's trail diaries. Images of the region as seen through the arcade Western, Hollywood film and Disney theme parks confirm the West as a symbolic and contested landscape.Tapping into popular fascination with the Cowboy, Hollywood movies, the Indian Wars, and Custer's Last Stand, the authors show the reader how to deconstruct the imagery and reality surrounding Western history.Key Features*Uses popular subjects (the Cowboy, Hollywood westerns, the Indian Wars, and Custer's Last Stand) to enliven the text*Includes 13 b+w illustrations*Interdisciplinary approach covers film, literature, art and historical artefacts
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