Michael Ra-Shon Hall
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781949979701
- eISBN:
- 9781800852969
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781949979701.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination particularly of writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. ...
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Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination particularly of writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. Using the paradox of freedom and confinement to frame the ways travel represented both opportunity and restriction for African Americans, the book details the intimate connection between travel and imagination from post Reconstruction (ca. 1877) to the present. Analysing a range of sources from the black press and periodicals to literary fiction and nonfiction, the book charts the development of critical representation of travel from the foundational black press and periodicals which offered African Americans crucial information on travel precautions and possibilities (notably during the era of Jim Crow) to the woefully understudied literary fiction that would later provide some of the most compelling and lasting portrayals of the freedoms and constraints African Americans associated with travel. Travel experiences (often challenging and vexed) provided the raw data with which writers produced images and ideas meaningful as they learned to navigate, negotiate and even challenge racialized and gendered impediments to their mobility. In their writings African Americans worked to realize a vision and state of freedom informed by those often difficult experiences of mobility. In telling this story, the book hopes to center literary fiction in studies of travel where fiction has largely remained absent.Less
Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination particularly of writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. Using the paradox of freedom and confinement to frame the ways travel represented both opportunity and restriction for African Americans, the book details the intimate connection between travel and imagination from post Reconstruction (ca. 1877) to the present. Analysing a range of sources from the black press and periodicals to literary fiction and nonfiction, the book charts the development of critical representation of travel from the foundational black press and periodicals which offered African Americans crucial information on travel precautions and possibilities (notably during the era of Jim Crow) to the woefully understudied literary fiction that would later provide some of the most compelling and lasting portrayals of the freedoms and constraints African Americans associated with travel. Travel experiences (often challenging and vexed) provided the raw data with which writers produced images and ideas meaningful as they learned to navigate, negotiate and even challenge racialized and gendered impediments to their mobility. In their writings African Americans worked to realize a vision and state of freedom informed by those often difficult experiences of mobility. In telling this story, the book hopes to center literary fiction in studies of travel where fiction has largely remained absent.
Alison Taylor
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781800857056
- eISBN:
- 9781800853287
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781800857056.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Born in the shadow of marital turmoil and political rupture, it is almost inevitable that Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981) would be caught between two worlds. In Cannes, the film premiered in ...
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Born in the shadow of marital turmoil and political rupture, it is almost inevitable that Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981) would be caught between two worlds. In Cannes, the film premiered in competition for the illustrious Palme d’Or; in the UK it was put on trial for charges of obscenity as part of the infamous ‘video nasties’ campaign. Beginning with a marital breakdown and ending with an apocalypse, Possession is a fascinating and confounding artefact skirting the boundaries between art and exploitation, visceral horror and cerebral reverie. Shot against the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War and replete with tales of a disappearing producer, drunken stunt doubles, and Haitian voodoo trances, the film’s production history is almost as bizarre as the finished product. Possession’s mystique has not dissipated over time; its transgressive imagery, histrionic performances, and spiral staircase logic continue to mesmerise audiences 40 years after its original release. Including new interview material from Sam Neill, extracts from the original shooting script and the BBFC’s archival reports, this book takes a deep dive into Possession’s history, stylistic achievement, and legacy as an enduring and unique work of horror cinema.Less
Born in the shadow of marital turmoil and political rupture, it is almost inevitable that Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981) would be caught between two worlds. In Cannes, the film premiered in competition for the illustrious Palme d’Or; in the UK it was put on trial for charges of obscenity as part of the infamous ‘video nasties’ campaign. Beginning with a marital breakdown and ending with an apocalypse, Possession is a fascinating and confounding artefact skirting the boundaries between art and exploitation, visceral horror and cerebral reverie. Shot against the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War and replete with tales of a disappearing producer, drunken stunt doubles, and Haitian voodoo trances, the film’s production history is almost as bizarre as the finished product. Possession’s mystique has not dissipated over time; its transgressive imagery, histrionic performances, and spiral staircase logic continue to mesmerise audiences 40 years after its original release. Including new interview material from Sam Neill, extracts from the original shooting script and the BBFC’s archival reports, this book takes a deep dive into Possession’s history, stylistic achievement, and legacy as an enduring and unique work of horror cinema.
Rob Daniel
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781800857018
- eISBN:
- 9781800852990
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781800857018.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Can a film made in one genre be better understood by viewing it as another? This book investigates this question in relation to Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear. Scorsese approached the ...
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Can a film made in one genre be better understood by viewing it as another? This book investigates this question in relation to Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear. Scorsese approached the film as a thriller, but Cape Fear is thematically and formally more coherent when viewed as a horror film. Across an introduction and five chapters, this book explores why this is the case. How Scorsese’s Catholicism and passion for horror has informed artistic decisions throughout his career, and the ways in which it reached an apex when he directed Cape Fear. The ways in which conventions of Gothic literature and fairy tales influenced this richly metatextual film, plus the impact of historical trends in horror cinema. How Robert De Niro’s research into antagonist Max Cady created a character who is closer to cinematic bogeymen rather than the more earthbound villains expected in thrillers. Film theory models around genre are utilised, along with interviews with key personnel on the film. Including a primary source interview with screenwriter Wesley Strick, who relates his experiences. Scorsese’s hyper-stylised directorial technique in Cape Fear is analysed for the ways in which it works to creates sensations typically associated with horror cinema, and the film’s legacy is also reviewed. Sexual politics and the controversy that surrounded Cape Fear’s depiction of sexual threat is also analysed, within the context of Scorsese’s depiction of women and accusations of misogyny that have been levelled against him during his career.Less
Can a film made in one genre be better understood by viewing it as another? This book investigates this question in relation to Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear. Scorsese approached the film as a thriller, but Cape Fear is thematically and formally more coherent when viewed as a horror film. Across an introduction and five chapters, this book explores why this is the case. How Scorsese’s Catholicism and passion for horror has informed artistic decisions throughout his career, and the ways in which it reached an apex when he directed Cape Fear. The ways in which conventions of Gothic literature and fairy tales influenced this richly metatextual film, plus the impact of historical trends in horror cinema. How Robert De Niro’s research into antagonist Max Cady created a character who is closer to cinematic bogeymen rather than the more earthbound villains expected in thrillers. Film theory models around genre are utilised, along with interviews with key personnel on the film. Including a primary source interview with screenwriter Wesley Strick, who relates his experiences. Scorsese’s hyper-stylised directorial technique in Cape Fear is analysed for the ways in which it works to creates sensations typically associated with horror cinema, and the film’s legacy is also reviewed. Sexual politics and the controversy that surrounded Cape Fear’s depiction of sexual threat is also analysed, within the context of Scorsese’s depiction of women and accusations of misogyny that have been levelled against him during his career.
Ben Wilkinson
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781800855373
- eISBN:
- 9781800852891
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781800855373.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
The Scottish author Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain’s ...
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The Scottish author Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain’s major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, negotiating the postmodern demands of the age in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Alongside the poet’s insistence on poetry as a mode of knowledge, the study argues that Paterson’s originality as a poet is evidenced by his rejection of an idiosyncratic poetic voice, seeking instead to refine a stylistic adaptability. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.Less
The Scottish author Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain’s major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, negotiating the postmodern demands of the age in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Alongside the poet’s insistence on poetry as a mode of knowledge, the study argues that Paterson’s originality as a poet is evidenced by his rejection of an idiosyncratic poetic voice, seeking instead to refine a stylistic adaptability. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.
Edward Allen (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781789622423
- eISBN:
- 9781800852785
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789622423.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to ...
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What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to show that our oldest styles of poetic articulation have figured all too briefly in modern genealogies of lyric, and that they have proved especially seductive, curiously enough, to avant-garde practitioners in the Anglophone tradition. The poets in question have thickened the texture of lyric practice at a time when the growing tendency in critical circles has been to dissolve points of difference within the genre itself. The broader aim of this volume is to demonstrate that experimental poets since 1945 have not always been rebarbative and anti-traditional, but rather that their recourse to familiar forms and shapes of thought should prompt us to reconsider late modernism as a crucial dimension of the evolving history of lyric.Less
What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to show that our oldest styles of poetic articulation have figured all too briefly in modern genealogies of lyric, and that they have proved especially seductive, curiously enough, to avant-garde practitioners in the Anglophone tradition. The poets in question have thickened the texture of lyric practice at a time when the growing tendency in critical circles has been to dissolve points of difference within the genre itself. The broader aim of this volume is to demonstrate that experimental poets since 1945 have not always been rebarbative and anti-traditional, but rather that their recourse to familiar forms and shapes of thought should prompt us to reconsider late modernism as a crucial dimension of the evolving history of lyric.
Roxanna Curto and Rebecca Wines (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781800856899
- eISBN:
- 9781800853317
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781800856899.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Sport and Leisure
This edited volume gathers together studies examining various aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe and around the Francophone world. We define “physical culture” as ...
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This edited volume gathers together studies examining various aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe and around the Francophone world. We define “physical culture” as the systematic care for and development of the physique, and interpret it to include not only sport in the modern sense, but also all the athletic activities that preceded it or relate to it, such as bodily forms of exercise, leisure, and artistic creation. Our essays pursue diverse interpretive approaches and focus on texts from a wide variety of periods (medieval to the present) and genres (short stories, novels, essays, poetry) in order to consider the fundamental—yet highly neglected—place of physical activities in literature and culture from the French-speaking world. Some of the questions the essays explore include: Does the genre “sports literature” exist in French, and if so, what are its characteristics? How do governments or other political entities mobilize sports literature? What role do narratives about sports—especially the creation of teams—play in the construction of national, regional and/or local identities? How is physical culture used in literary works for pedagogical or ideological purposes? To what extent do sports performances provide a metaphorical and figurative discourse for discussing literature and culture?Less
This edited volume gathers together studies examining various aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe and around the Francophone world. We define “physical culture” as the systematic care for and development of the physique, and interpret it to include not only sport in the modern sense, but also all the athletic activities that preceded it or relate to it, such as bodily forms of exercise, leisure, and artistic creation. Our essays pursue diverse interpretive approaches and focus on texts from a wide variety of periods (medieval to the present) and genres (short stories, novels, essays, poetry) in order to consider the fundamental—yet highly neglected—place of physical activities in literature and culture from the French-speaking world. Some of the questions the essays explore include: Does the genre “sports literature” exist in French, and if so, what are its characteristics? How do governments or other political entities mobilize sports literature? What role do narratives about sports—especially the creation of teams—play in the construction of national, regional and/or local identities? How is physical culture used in literary works for pedagogical or ideological purposes? To what extent do sports performances provide a metaphorical and figurative discourse for discussing literature and culture?
yasser elhariry (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781800856882
- eISBN:
- 9781800853324
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781800856882.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Sounds Senses is about what happens to the francophone postcolonial condition when sound is taken as a point of departure for engaging cultural production. Offering a synthetic overview of sound ...
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Sounds Senses is about what happens to the francophone postcolonial condition when sound is taken as a point of departure for engaging cultural production. Offering a synthetic overview of sound studies, it dismantles the retinal paradigms and oculocentrism of francophone postcolonial studies. By shifting the sensory hermeneutics of perception from the visual, the textual, and the graphemic to the sonic, the auditory, and the phonemic, the book places cultural production that privileges or otherwise exaggerates æstheticized sensorial experiences at the forefront of francophone postcolonialism. In the process, it introduces two primary theoretical thrusts—the unheard and the unintegrated—to the project of analyzing, extending, and rejuvenating francophone postcolonial studies. The book reevaluates francophone culture in relation to sound and the experience of sound, situating it along the fluid axes of paralingual utterance, audio-vision, voice, and narrative speakers. Through a range of case studies focusing on parafrancophonics, poetry, world music, cinema, the graphic novel, popular speech phenomenæ, and the poetics and politics of transcolonial identification, Sounds Senses demonstrates how francophone postcolonial culture is satiated with a glut of unexplored sonic significance.Less
Sounds Senses is about what happens to the francophone postcolonial condition when sound is taken as a point of departure for engaging cultural production. Offering a synthetic overview of sound studies, it dismantles the retinal paradigms and oculocentrism of francophone postcolonial studies. By shifting the sensory hermeneutics of perception from the visual, the textual, and the graphemic to the sonic, the auditory, and the phonemic, the book places cultural production that privileges or otherwise exaggerates æstheticized sensorial experiences at the forefront of francophone postcolonialism. In the process, it introduces two primary theoretical thrusts—the unheard and the unintegrated—to the project of analyzing, extending, and rejuvenating francophone postcolonial studies. The book reevaluates francophone culture in relation to sound and the experience of sound, situating it along the fluid axes of paralingual utterance, audio-vision, voice, and narrative speakers. Through a range of case studies focusing on parafrancophonics, poetry, world music, cinema, the graphic novel, popular speech phenomenæ, and the poetics and politics of transcolonial identification, Sounds Senses demonstrates how francophone postcolonial culture is satiated with a glut of unexplored sonic significance.
Patrick Grattan
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781789622515
- eISBN:
- 9781800853300
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789622515.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
The book recounts for the first time the 400-year history of oasts and hop kilns, vernacular farm buildings uses for drying hops. They are found in three regions of England: Kent and Sussex, ...
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The book recounts for the first time the 400-year history of oasts and hop kilns, vernacular farm buildings uses for drying hops. They are found in three regions of England: Kent and Sussex, Hampshire and Farnham, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The evolution of the kilns, the drying methods and the machinery used is pieced together from surviving buildings, agricultural books, archives and local lore. 250 diagrams, sketches and photographs present a graphic picture of hop drying and the impact of oasts and kilns on the countryside. Hop growing expanded to meet the demands of Industrial Revolution Britain, its army and navy. The commercial and political drama of hop farming, drying and marketing is present in the book. Fortunes were made and lost. Gambling and dodgy dealing on hops and taxes was common. No crop was more volatile than hops. Political battles over tariffs and free trade are reported. The hop drying buildings in continental Europe – notably Flanders, Alsace, Bavaria and the Czech Republic- and in parts of the USA are described. They demonstrate that hop drying buildings in England were unmatched in the 17th-19th centuries, but that in the 20th century modern drying machinery in the USA and Germany left England behind.Less
The book recounts for the first time the 400-year history of oasts and hop kilns, vernacular farm buildings uses for drying hops. They are found in three regions of England: Kent and Sussex, Hampshire and Farnham, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The evolution of the kilns, the drying methods and the machinery used is pieced together from surviving buildings, agricultural books, archives and local lore. 250 diagrams, sketches and photographs present a graphic picture of hop drying and the impact of oasts and kilns on the countryside. Hop growing expanded to meet the demands of Industrial Revolution Britain, its army and navy. The commercial and political drama of hop farming, drying and marketing is present in the book. Fortunes were made and lost. Gambling and dodgy dealing on hops and taxes was common. No crop was more volatile than hops. Political battles over tariffs and free trade are reported. The hop drying buildings in continental Europe – notably Flanders, Alsace, Bavaria and the Czech Republic- and in parts of the USA are described. They demonstrate that hop drying buildings in England were unmatched in the 17th-19th centuries, but that in the 20th century modern drying machinery in the USA and Germany left England behind.
Adam Nemmers
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781949979664
- eISBN:
- 9781800852839
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781949979664.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
American Modern(ist) Epic argues that during the 1920s and ‘30s a cadre of minority novelists revitalized the classic epic form in an effort to recast the United States according to modern, diverse, ...
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American Modern(ist) Epic argues that during the 1920s and ‘30s a cadre of minority novelists revitalized the classic epic form in an effort to recast the United States according to modern, diverse, and pluralistic grounds. Rather than adhere to the reification of static culture (as did ancient verse epic), in their prose epics Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos utilized recursion, bricolage, and polyphony to represent the multifarious immediacy and movement of the modern world. Meanwhile, H. T. Tsiang and Richard Wright created absurd and insipid anti-heroes for their epics, contesting the hegemony of Anglo and capitalist dominance in the United States. In all, I posit, these modern(ist) epic novels undermined and revised the foundational ideology of the United States, contesting notions of individualism, progress, and racial hegemony while modernizing the epic form in an effort to refound the nation. The marriage of this classical form to modernist principles produced transcendent literature and offered a strenuous challenge to the interwar status quo, yet ultimately proved a failure: longstanding American ideology was simply too fixed and widespread to be entirely dislodged.Less
American Modern(ist) Epic argues that during the 1920s and ‘30s a cadre of minority novelists revitalized the classic epic form in an effort to recast the United States according to modern, diverse, and pluralistic grounds. Rather than adhere to the reification of static culture (as did ancient verse epic), in their prose epics Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos utilized recursion, bricolage, and polyphony to represent the multifarious immediacy and movement of the modern world. Meanwhile, H. T. Tsiang and Richard Wright created absurd and insipid anti-heroes for their epics, contesting the hegemony of Anglo and capitalist dominance in the United States. In all, I posit, these modern(ist) epic novels undermined and revised the foundational ideology of the United States, contesting notions of individualism, progress, and racial hegemony while modernizing the epic form in an effort to refound the nation. The marriage of this classical form to modernist principles produced transcendent literature and offered a strenuous challenge to the interwar status quo, yet ultimately proved a failure: longstanding American ideology was simply too fixed and widespread to be entirely dislodged.
Haym Soloveitchik
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781906764388
- eISBN:
- 9781800853041
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781906764388.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
The essay that forms the core of this book is an attempt to understand the developments that have occurred in Orthodox Jewry in America in the last seventy years, and to analyse their implications. ...
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The essay that forms the core of this book is an attempt to understand the developments that have occurred in Orthodox Jewry in America in the last seventy years, and to analyse their implications. The prime change is what is often described as ‘the swing to the right’, a marked increase in ritual stringency, a rupture in patterns of behaviour that has had major consequences not only for Jewish society but also for the nature of Jewish spirituality. For the book's author, the key feature at the root of this change is that, as a result of migration to the ‘New Worlds’ of England, the United States, and Israel and acculturation to its new surroundings, American Jewry—indeed, much of the Jewish world—had to reconstruct religious practice from normative texts: observance could no longer be transmitted mimetically, on the basis of practices observed in home and street. In consequence, behaviour once governed by habit is now governed by rule. This new edition allows the author to deal with criticisms raised since the essay, long established as a classic in the field, was originally published, and enables readers to gain a fuller perspective on a topic central to today's Jewish world and its development.Less
The essay that forms the core of this book is an attempt to understand the developments that have occurred in Orthodox Jewry in America in the last seventy years, and to analyse their implications. The prime change is what is often described as ‘the swing to the right’, a marked increase in ritual stringency, a rupture in patterns of behaviour that has had major consequences not only for Jewish society but also for the nature of Jewish spirituality. For the book's author, the key feature at the root of this change is that, as a result of migration to the ‘New Worlds’ of England, the United States, and Israel and acculturation to its new surroundings, American Jewry—indeed, much of the Jewish world—had to reconstruct religious practice from normative texts: observance could no longer be transmitted mimetically, on the basis of practices observed in home and street. In consequence, behaviour once governed by habit is now governed by rule. This new edition allows the author to deal with criticisms raised since the essay, long established as a classic in the field, was originally published, and enables readers to gain a fuller perspective on a topic central to today's Jewish world and its development.
Cromwell and Ireland
Daughters of Darkness
Wyndham Lewis's Cultural Criticism and the Infrastructures of Patronage
The Beats
Britain's Black Past
Challenge and Conformity
Collective Conviction
Cruising
Ex Machina
