University of Chicago Press: New Titles from 'Liverpool University Press'

John Moores Painting Prize 2012

Ann Bukantas — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The John Moores Painting Prize is one of the United Kingdom’s best-known painting competitions, going back to the 1950s. Previous winners have included David Hockney, Peter Doig, and Lisa Milroy. This 2012 catalog highlights the best of the UK’s painters for the year, featuring all the exhibition works of 2012 in fifty full-color plates, with a detail of the winning artwork, Stevie Smith and the Willow, by Sarah Pickstone, on the cover. It includes biographies of the artists, essays by the jurors—including BBC creative director Alan Yentob, Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick, and artists Fiona Banner, Angela de la Cruz, and George Shaw—and images of works by all the previous John Moores main prizewinners. It also features the five winners of the 2012 John Moores Painting Prize in China.

Belfast 400

S. J. Connolly — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Belfast’s foundation, Belfast 400 offers a new history of one of the world’s most fascinating—and misunderstood—cities. Drawing on a wide range of research by several scholars, S. J. Connolly shows how Belfast grew to become a place of contested identity and economics and why it would become one of the main theaters of Irish independence and the many violent events that would define it.

Belfast and its history are full of contradictions. It was a significant part of Great Britain’s rise to industrial greatness, but it is located not on the island of Great Britain, but in Ireland. While it was central to the establishment of a unique Irish identity, its politics and industrial character set it wholly apart from other Irish cities. An important part of the history of Ireland and the United Kingdom both, Belfast has never fit neatly into the accepted narrative of either.

Belfast 400 gets beneath these complexities by raising crucial questions at every post along its history. Why, with its seemingly unfavorable position—a waterlogged river mouth—did it become one of the first human settlements in the area? How did it evolve from a minor outpost to a major city, and how did it expand into one of the world’s largest centers of shipbuilding and textile manufacturing? What did this industrial development and the eventual decline of manufacturing mean for the people who lived there? Finally, how can Belfast—still managing fraught political relationships between its own citizens—redefine its identity and face the new challenges of the twenty-first century? By raising these and many other questions, Belfast 400 sheds new light on one of the most complex cities in northern Europe.

'Natural Leaders' and their World

Jonathan Wright — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A richly detailed exploration of the complex urban culture of the Presbyterian elite in late-Georgian Belfast, The ‘Natural Leaders’ and their World offers a major reassessment of the political life of Belfast in the early nineteenth century. Examining the activities of a close-knit group of individuals who sought to reform British and European politics, Jonathan Wright addresses topics such as romanticism, evangelicalism, and altruism, with a look at writers such as Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Robert Owen, and Thomas Chalmers. In doing so, he tells the story of a Presbyterian middle class and the complex entanglement of their political, cultural, and intellectual lives.

News from Abroad

James T. Boulton; T. O. McLoughlin — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The Grand Tour was an educational rite of passage for much of Britain’s upper class during the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. In News from Abroad, James T. Boulton and T. O. McLoughlin assemble a fascinating diversity of letters from five different travelers as they embarked from Britain en route to Paris, across the Alps, and on to Rome, along the way exploring contemporary European life as well as nearly two millennia of history and art. The first comprehensive book to bring several letter-writers together into a single volume, News from Abroad is a rich collection of primary sources that offers exciting new comparisons of what the Grand Tour meant for the individuals who undertook it.

Pre-Raphaelite Journey

Pamela Gerrish Nunn — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale was an accomplished painter, illustrator, and designer during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But despite her huge popularity during her lifetime, her work has been neglected since her death in 1945. In A Pre-Raphaelite Journey, art historian and theorist Pamela Gerrish Nunn sets out to reestablish Fortescue-Brickdale as the important and fascinating figure in Western art that she was, offering the first dedicated book on her art and life in a biography peppered with fifty stunning color plates.

Living and working during the tremendous cultural changes in Britain and Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, Fortescue- Brickdale represents a powerful bridge between the Victorian and modern worlds. She was heavily influenced by the pre-Raphaelite artists, whose love of detail, color, symbolism, and nature set a hallmark aesthetic for Victorian British culture. Indeed, she became known as “the last pre-Raphaelite,” particularly as an artist who drew from major literary figures, from Shakespeare to Tennyson, retelling their stories through her paintings and illustrations.

Employing extensive research and the knowledge acquired over a long career studying Victorian art, Nunn takes readers and viewers on a journey through Fortescue-Brickdale’s development—her training, career, and the achievements that should leave a lasting mark on art history.

Iberian Modalities

Joan Ramon Resina — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The term “Iberian studies” has been gaining academic currency, but there is still disagreement about its exact meaning. For some it is a convenient way of combining the official cultures of Portugal and Spain, yet for others the term challenges conventional geographical attitudes. Iberian Modalities brings together contributions from leading international scholars to demonstrate the cultural and linguistic complexity of the field by reflecting on the institutional challenges to the practice of Iberian studies.

States of Emergency

Stephen Morton — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

States of Emergency examines how violent anticolonial struggles and the legal, military, and political techniques employed by colonial governments to contain them have been imagined in both literary and legal narratives. Through a series of case studies, Stephen Morton considers how colonial states of emergency have been defined and represented in the contexts of Ireland, India, South Africa, Algeria, Kenya, and Israel- Palestine, concluding with a compelling assessment of the continuities between colonial states of emergency and the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Roland Barthes at the Collège de France

Lucy O'Meara — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Roland Barthes at the Collège de France studies the four lecture courses given by Roland Barthes in Paris between 1977 and 1980, placing Barthes’s teaching within institutional, intellectual, and personal contexts. Theoretically wide-ranging, Lucy O’Meara’s account focuses on Barthes’s pedagogical style and the insights they provide into his written works, including his focus on essayism and fragmentation and the negotiation between singularity and universality. Linking Barthes’s strategies to broad intellectual influences, from Kant and Adorno to Zen and Taoist philosophies, O’Meara reassesses Barthes’s critical and ethical priorities in the decade before his death, highlighting the vitality of his late thought.

Contagion and Enclaves

Nandini Bhattacharya — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Contagion and Enclaves examines the social history of medicine across two intersecting British enclaves in the major tea-producing region of colonial India: the hill station of Darjeeling and the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal. Focusing on the establishment of hill sanatoria and other health care facilities and practices against the backdrop of the expansion of tea cultivation and labor migration, it tracks the demographic and environmental transformation of the region and the critical role race and medicine played in it, showing that the British enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of the articulation of colonial power and economy.

Africa in Europe

Eve Rosenhaft; Robbie Aitken — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Africa in Europe goes beyond the still-dominant American and transatlantic focus of disapora studies, examining the experiences of black and white Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African Americans in Western Europe, Britain, and the former Soviet Union from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. Exploring a huge range of border-crossing experiences across and within Africa and Europe, it examines topics such as ethnic and cultural boundaries, working across the color line, and the limits of solidarity. With contributions from scholars in social history, art history, anthropology, cultural studies, and literary studies, as well from a novelist and a filmmaker, it offers a broad look at the intersection of Africa and Europe at all levels, from family and community to culture and politics.

Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves

Doris Y. Kadish — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves explores the unique contribution by French women writers to Haitian politics and culture during the early nineteenth century, when Haiti was on the verge of reestablishing slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. It offers in-depth readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes- Valmore, as well as two lesserknown but important writers, Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin, all of whom were writers living in France commenting on Haiti from afar, and all of whom were staunch opponents of slavery. Exploring the similarities between the works of these French women and twentiethand twenty-first-century francophone texts, it offers a much-needed new voice to the exploration of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism, undercutting the neat distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies, as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing.

German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory

Tim Grady — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Nearly one hundred thousand German Jews fought in World War I, and some twelve thousand of these soldiers lost their lives in battle. This book focuses on the multifaceted ways in which these soldiers have been remembered, as well as forgotten, from 1914 to the late 1970s. By examining Germany’s complex and continually evolving memory culture, Tim Grady opens up a new approach to the study of German and German-Jewish history. In doing so, he draws out a narrative of entangled and overlapping relations between Jews and non-Jews, a story that extends past the Holocaust and into the Cold War.

Locating Science Fiction

Andrew Milner — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In Locating Science Fiction, Andrew Milner looks at science fiction within the context of a host of other genres—including fantasy, romance, and the thriller—and explores the historical and geographic contexts of science fiction’s emergence and development. Bringing in Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, and Franco Moretti’s application of world systems to literary studies, he offers a persuasive, synthetic, and ultimately new mode of science fiction analysis that will become essential reading.

Timber Castles

Robert Higham; Philip Barker — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Some of the greatest medieval castles survive only as earthworks and in pictures and written accounts because they were made of timber. Robert Higham and Philip Barker, who excavated in detail the timber castle at Hen Domen in Wales, have assembled the first comprehensive survey of this neglected and little-known type of fortification. This new edition includes a new preface from Robert Higham, to mark twenty years since the book’s original publication.

Thinking Barcelona

Edgar Illas — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Thinking Barcelona studies the ideologies that redefined Barcelona during the 1980s and helped the city adapt to a new economy of tourism, culture, and services. Looking specifically at the lead-up to the 1992 Olympic Games and the urban renewal geared toward establishing Barcelona as a happy combination of European cosmopolitanism and Mediterranean rootedness, Edgar Illas situates Barcelona as a key example of contemporary urban rebranding after the fall of communism and the establishment of the neoliberal “end of history.” Looking at a host of materials associated with the games as well as contemporary architectural and literary works, he offers a compelling look at postmodern globalization as it manifests itself through urban regeneration.

Scouse

Tony Crowley — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

No place in Britain is more closely associated with a distinct dialect than Liverpool, yet the complex and fascinating history of language in Liverpool has been obscured by misrepresentation and myth. Scouse presents a groundbreaking and iconoclastic account of language in Liverpool, offering a new alternative to currently accepted history. Drawing on a huge breadth of sources—from plays to newspaper accounts to reports to little-known essays—and informed by recent developments in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, Tony Crowley charts the complex relationship between language and place.