Browse

What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds. Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.

In the rapidly growing study of amateur film, this groundbreaking book addresses the development of British women's amateur visual practice. Drawing upon social and visual anthropology, imperial and postcolonial studies and British, Commonwealth and gender history, the authors explore how women in Britain and overseas, used the evolving technologies of moving imagery to create visual stories about their lives and times. Locating the making, watching and sharing of women's recreational film-making against wider societal, technological and ideological changes, British Women AmateurFilmmakers discloses how women from varied backgrounds negotiated changing lifestyles, attitudes and opportunities as they created first personal visual narratives about themselves and the world around them. Using non-fictional films and animations, the authors invite readers to view films through different interpretative lens and provide detailed contexts for their case-studies and survey of over forty women amateur filmmakers. Whether in remote communities, suburban homes, castles, missionary or diplomatic enclaves, or simply travelling as intrepid sightseers, women filmed their companions, other people and their surroundings, not only as observers but often displaying agency, autonomy and aesthetic judgment during decades when careers, particularly after marriage, were often denied in film and other professions. Research across Britain on films in private hands and specialist archives, interviews and extensive study of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC's) collections enable the authors to reposition an activity once thought of as overwhelmingly male and middle class.

Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century examines the importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The years between the naval blockade of 1775, which began the American War, and the start of the First World War in 1914 witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast on both sides of the Atlantic. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, coasts were often thought of as unhealthy, dangerous places. Developments in both medicine and aesthetics changed this. Increasingly, the coast could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation – a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. Spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and including interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography, these essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies speak across traditional period and disciplinary boundaries.

This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.

Katherine Mansfield’s ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry, and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their 'curious & thrilling' literary relationship – absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in ‘quicksands’ – and its profound impact on their creative imaginations. Critical essays include Katherine Mansfield Essay Prizewinner Karina Jakubowicz on Woolf’s Kew Gardens, Maud Ellmann on disgust, Maria DiBattista on these artists’ distinctive takes on ‘reality’, Sydney Janet Kaplan on the Conrad Aiken connection, and Christine Froula on Mansfield’s secrets. Creative artists include Vanessa Bell in painterly dialogue with her sister’s classic manifesto A Room of One’s Own, the celebrated novelist Ali Smith -- ‘Scotland’s Nobel-laureate-in-waiting’, says Irish playwright Sebastian Barry – whose ‘Getting Virginia Woolf’s Goat’ leads the creative section, ['and' deleted] Barbara Egel’s dramatic adaptation of Woolf’s story ‘Moments of Being: "Slater’s Pins Have No Points"’ and [deleted:original; add:] new poems by Jackie Jones and Maggie Rainey-Smith.

Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most important scientists of the nineteenth century. He transformed understandings of the earth and space by rethinking nature as the interconnection of global forces. His vibrant, lyrical prose captivated British readers. This book offers the first extensive analysis of the translation, publication and critical reception of his works in Britain. It argues that style was key to the success of these translations and shows how Humboldt’s British translators, now largely forgotten figures, were pivotal in moulding his prose and his public persona as they reconfigured his works for readers in Britain and beyond.

The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is. This book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.

This book seeks to explain how the Corporation of Glasgow, in its large-scale council house-building programme in the inter- and post-war years, came to reproduce a hierarchical Victorian class structure. The three tiers of housing scheme which it constructed – Ordinary, Intermediate, and Slum-Clearance – effectively signified First, Second and Third Class. This came about because the Corporation uncritically reproduced the offensive and patriarchal attitudes of the Victorian bourgeoisie towards the working-class. The book shows how this worked out on the ground in Glasgow, and describes the attitudes of both authoritarian housing officials, and council tenants. This is the first time the voice of Glasgow’s council tenants has been heard. The conclusion is that local council housing policy was driven by unapologetic considerations of social class.

This ground-breaking study fearlessly combines latest research in evolutionary psychology, historical scholarship and philosophy to answer a question that has eluded critics for centuries: what is Shakespeare’s moral vision? At a political and cultural moment in which many of us are taking stock and looking for meaning, and in which moral outrage and polarisation seem endemic, this book radically reimagines how we might approach great works of literature to find some answers.

Originally published in Arabic in 1983, this book remains a timely and important read today. Both the resurgence of Islamist politics and the political, social and intellectual upheaval which accompanied the Arab Spring challenge us to re-examine the interaction between the pre-modern Islamic tradition and modern supporters of continuity, reform and change in Muslim communities. This book does exactly that, raising questions regarding issues about which other Muslim intellectuals and thinkers have been silent. These include – among others – current religious practice vs the Islamic ideal; the many additions to the original revelation; the veracity of the Prophet’s biography and his sayings; the development of Sufism; and historical and ideological influences on Islamic thought.