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This volume is the first-ever collection devoted to teaching Beat literature in high school to graduate-level classes. Essays address teaching topics such as the history of the censorship of Beat writing, Beat spirituality, the small press revolution, Beat composition techniques and ELL, Beat multiculturalism/globalism and its legacies, techno-poetics, the road tale, Beat drug use, the Italian-American Beat heritage, Beats and the visual arts of the 1960s, the Beat and Black Mountain confluence, Beat comedy, Beat performance poetry, Beat creative non-fiction, West coast-East/coast Beat communities, and Beat representations of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. Individual essays focus on Gary Snyder’s ecopoetics, William S. Burroughs’s post- and transhumanism, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (teaching it in the U.S. and abroad) and his Quebecois novels, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, and Anne Waldman. Many additional Beat-associated writers, such as Amiri Baraka Gregory Corso, are featured in the other essays. The collection opens with a comprehensive essay by Nancy M. Grace on a history of Beat literature, its reception in and out of academia, and contemporary approaches to teaching Beat literature in multidisciplinary contexts. Many of the essays highlight online resources and other materials proven useful in the classroom. Critical methods range from feminism/gender theory, to critical race theory, formalism, historiography, religious studies, and transnational theory to reception theory. The volume concludes with selected scholarly resources, both primary and secondary, including films, music, and other art forms; and a set of Beat-related classroom assignments recommended by active Beat scholars and teachers.

Widely regarded as one of the foundational 'Unholy Trinity' of folk horror film, The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) has been comparatively over-shadowed, if not maligned, when compared to Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973). While those horror bedfellows are now accepted as classics of British cinema, Piers Haggard's film remains undervalued, ironically so, given that it was Haggard who coined the term 'folk horror' in relation to his film. In this Devil's Advocate - the first monograph dedicated solely to an analysis of the film, and released to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of the film’s release - David Evans-Powell explores the place of the film in the wider context of the folk horror sub-genre; its use of a seventeenth-century setting (which it shares with contemporaries such as Witchfinder General and Cry of the Banshee) in contrast to the generic nineteenth-century locales of Hammer; the influences of contemporary counter-culture and youth movement on the film; the importance of localism and landscape; the relationship between cultural notions of nature and civilisation; and the film as an expression of a wider contemporary crisis in English identity.

The presence and history of black people in Britain, going back centuries, has been obscured, forgotten and misunderstood. This book, which expands upon the Radio 4 series of the same name, uses new archival discoveries and fresh scholarly interpretations to recover the stories of some of the black individuals, groups and communities whose lives in England were shaped and restricted by slavery and racism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In eighteen chapters by different contributors, readers encounter black figures from the past who span the social and economic spectrum from domestic servants, actors, and mariners to those who enjoyed wealth, privilege and, in rare cases, power. In addition to investigating how black people of this era navigated the complex dynamics of white households and larger white British society, connections—economic and personal—to colonial slavery and the slave trade in America and the Caribbean are threaded throughout the book. In addition to scholarly work, many chapters examine how the lives of some of these black figures are being newly explored and interpreted in non-academic mediums such as television, film, fiction, art, and performance. Current events—including the Grenfell Towers fire and the Windrush immigration scandal—underscore the importance of recognizing Britain’s multiracial past and this book urges continued study of a historical black presence to better understand the past and affirm an expanded notion of Britishness.

Orthodox Jewish women are increasingly seeking new ways to express themselves religiously, and important changes have occurred in consequence in their self-definition and the part they play in the religious life of their communities. Drawing on surveys and interviews across different Orthodox groups in London, as well as on the author's own experience of active participation over many years, this is a study that analyses its findings in the context of related developments in Israel and the USA. Sympathetic attention is given to women's creativity and sophistication as they struggle to develop new modes of expression that will let their voices be heard; at the same time, the inevitable points of conflict with the male-dominated religious establishment are examined and explained. There is a focus, too, on the impact of innovations in ritual: these include not only the creation of women-only spaces and women's participation in public practices traditionally reserved for men, but also new personal practices often acquired on study visits to Israel which are replacing traditions learned from family members. The book is a study of how new norms of lived religion have emerged in London, influenced by both the rise of feminism and the backlash against it, and also by women's new understanding of their religious roles.

This edition presents and contextualizes an archive of letters -- belonging to the Wordsworth Trust -- that reveal the creative and personal significance of the friendship between William Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont. Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British Art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and the letters reveal that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth’s mature poetry) the letters chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship that included Lady Beaumont and Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that—in influence, creativity, and affection—rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended critical study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another’s work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize.

This book tells the story of Disaster Action, a small charity founded in 1991 by survivors and bereaved people from the disasters of the late 1980s, including Zeebrugge, King's Cross, Clapham, Lockerbie, Hillsborough and the Marchioness. The aims were to create a health and safety culture in which disasters were less likely to occur and to support others affected by similar events. The founders could not have anticipated the degree to which they would influence emergency planning and management and the way people are treated after disasters. Aware of the value of lessons learned over 22 years, the trustees felt that this corporate memory should be captured. The book encapsulates that memory, so that it can be called upon by survivors, the bereaved, governments and others for years to come. The book sets out the chronology of Disaster Action's history, with first-person accounts and case studies of disasters interweaved with chapters on the needs and rights of individuals, the treatment of bereaved and survivors, inquests and inquiries, the law, the media, memorials and commemorations, and the importance of corporate memory. Additionally, it contains guidance notes for survivors and bereaved on dealing with a disaster, and best practice guidance for responders and the media. This book is essential reading for those in a wide range of disciplines with an interest in planning for, responding to, reporting on and dealing with the aftermath of disaster. And importantly, people affected by disaster should find solace and support in the personal stories of others.

When William Friedkin’s psycho thriller Cruising was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival and hit cinemas worldwide in 1980 it was mainly misunderstood: the upcoming gay scene dismissed it as an offence to their efforts to open up to society and a distorted image of homosexuality, prompting the distributors to add a disclaimer that preceded the picture: Genre audiences were confused about the idea of a sexualized cop thriller with procedural drama that frequently turns into a horror film with the identity of the killer changing with each murder. Seen from today’s perspective, Friedkin’s film turned out to be an enduring cult classic documenting the gay leather scene of the late 1970s as well as providing a stunning image of identity crisis and an examination of male sexuality in general. In the fading years of the New Hollywood era (1967–1976), William Friedkin—the ‘New Hollywood Wunderkind’, with an Academy Award for his cop drama, The French Connection (1971), and following the tremendous success of his horror film, The Exorcist (1973)—proves once more the strength of his unique approach in combining genre and auteur cinema to create a fascinating film that turns 40 in 2020. This book dives into the phenomenon that is Cruising: it examines its creative context and its protagonists, as well as explaining its ongoing popularity.

Ex Machina (2014) impressed critics and audiences alike with its bold ideas and all-too-realistic depiction of the unexpected consequences of constructing a sentient being. In his feature directorial debut, Alex Garland uses efficient storytelling, a compelling narrative, and heady concepts to create a modern science fiction masterpiece that explores gender, scientific advancement, and the very concept of humanity, all in a compelling, suspenseful film. Artificial intelligence has long been a sci-fi staple, but here, Garland posits what would happen if, for once, humans, rather than AI, were the real villains. In exploring Ex Machina's ideas about consciousness, embodiment, and masculinity, all through the lens of a misogynist mad scientist, Joshua Grimm argues the result is a fascinating, truly unique film that immediately established Garland as a breakout voice in the landscape of science fiction film.

Jews have been active participants in shaping the healing practices of the communities of eastern Europe. Their approach largely combined the ideas of traditional Ashkenazi culture with the heritage of medieval and early modern medicine. Holy rabbis and faith healers, as well as Jewish barbers, innkeepers, and pedlars, all dispensed cures, purveyed folk remedies for different ailments, and gave hope to the sick and their families based on kabbalah, numerology, prayer, and magical Hebrew formulas. Nevertheless, as new sources of knowledge penetrated the traditional world, modern medical ideas gained widespread support. Jews became court physicians to the nobility, and when the universities were opened up to them many also qualified as doctors. At every stage, medicine proved an important field for cross-cultural contacts. Jewish historians and scholars of folk medicine alike will discover here fascinating sources never previously explored — manuscripts, printed publications, and memoirs in Yiddish and Hebrew but also in Polish, English, German, Russian, and Ukrainian. The author's careful study of these documents has teased out therapeutic advice, recipes, magical incantations, kabbalistic methods, and practical techniques, together with the ethical considerations that such approaches entailed. The research fills a gap in the study of folk medicine in eastern Europe, shedding light on little-known aspects of Ashkenazi culture, and on how the need to treat sickness brought Jews and their neighbours together.

In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France to become the world’s first ‘black’ nation state. Throughout the nineteenth century, Haiti maintained its independence, consolidating and expanding its national and, at times, imperial projects. In doing so, Haiti joined a host of other nation states and empires that were emerging and expanding across the Atlantic World. The largest and, in many ways, most powerful of these empires was that of Britain. Haiti in the British Imagination is the first book to focus on the diplomatic relations and cultural interactions between Haiti and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As well as a story of British imperial aggression and Haitian ‘resistance’, it is also one of a more complicated set of relations: of rivalry, cultural exchange and intellectual dialogue. At particular moments in the Victorian period, ideas about Haiti had wide-reaching relevancies for British anxieties over the quality of British imperial administration, over what should be the relations between ‘the British’ and people of African descent, and defining the limits of black sovereignty. Haitians were key in formulating, disseminating and correcting ideas about Haiti. Through acts of dialogue, Britons and Haitians impacted on the worldviews of one another, and with that changed the political and cultural landscapes of the Atlantic World.

Enriching the metropole-colony frame that has tended to dominate studies of European colonial empire, this book assumes a transnational approach to modern Italy and establishes how Italy’s national project and history of nationalism was intimately bound up with the fantasy—and then reality during the fascist period—of an empire in the Mediterranean. Although largely forgotten in both Italy and Greece, Italian imperial rule in the Dodecanese islands tells the story of the making of modern Europe at its margins. Unlike other studies of Italian colonialism, that emphasize Mussolini’s creation of a new ‘Roman’ empire, Italy’s Sea demonstrates that ambitions for colonization in the Mediterranean extend back to the Liberal unification of Italy. By retracing how ideas of the local, the regional and the global were united with the idea of the ‘national’ in Italy, the book offers of new perspective of postcolonial critique of both Italy and Europe, and sheds light on contemporary ideas of race, nation and belonging today.

‘Constellations: Jurassic Park’ explores how Steven Spielberg used the film to investigate several key themes that have been important to him across his career. These themes are: nature and humankind’s relationship with it, the importance of cinematic fantasy and how it shapes our view of the world, and the impact of toxic masculinity on both men and women. The book also looks at how Spielberg blends genres across his career as a whole and Jurassic Park specifically. This is particularly true of the science fiction and horror genres, which are used in Jurassic Park to create a film that is both cathartically scary and thematically satisfying. These points are contextualised within the wider scope of Spielberg’s life and career to understand how Jurassic Park acted as bridging point between the light entertainments he had been known for up to that point (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, for example) and the more serious filmmaking he focused on after its release (Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln).

Losing the Thread is the first full-length study of the effect of the American Civil War on Britain’s raw cotton trade and on the Liverpool cotton market. It details the worst crisis in the British cotton trade in the 19th century. Before the civil war, America supplied 80 per cent of Britain’s cotton. In August 1861, this fell to almost zero, where it remained for four years. Despite increased supplies from elsewhere, Britain’s largest industry received only 36 per cent of the raw material it needed from 1862 to 1864. This book establishes the facts of Britain’s raw cotton supply during the war: how much there was of it, in absolute terms and in relation to the demand, where it came from and why, how much it cost, and what effect the reduced supply had on Britain’s cotton manufacture. It includes an enquiry into the causes of the Lancashire cotton famine, which contradicts the historical consensus on the subject. Examining the impact of the civil war on Liverpool and its cotton market, the book disputes the historic portrayal of Liverpool as a solidly pro-Confederate town. It also demonstrates how reckless speculation infested and distorted the raw cotton market, and lays bare the shadowy world of the Liverpool cotton brokers, who profited hugely from the war while the rest of Lancashire starved.

What is the purpose of travel in an age when millions are displaced against their will or have no home to speak of in the first place? How can we travel without being tourists, without erasing the stories of those who live where we visit? These are some of the questions addressed in Cristian Aliaga’s compelling collection of prose poems, Music for Unknown Journeys. This collection contains Aliaga’s “travelling sketches,” in the tradition of Matsuo Bashō, John Berger, or W.G. Sebald. Each prose poem is geographically situated in his travels across Patagonia or his more recent journeys around the edge-lands of Europe. His work is politically acute, exploring struggles over territory, resources, and culture, in the places he visits. There is an intense emotional charge as he records the stories of those who globalization and contemporary capitalism have used and left behind. This volume brings together a generous selection of Aliaga’s prose poems, the majority previously unseen in English, as well as a substantial introduction to the author’s work and its context, both literary and political, by the editor and translator. Cristian Aliaga (b. 1962, Tres Cuervos, Province of Buenos Aires) is one of Argentina’s foremost contemporary poets. His work has been highly praised in the TLS and elsewhere. “No poet has been as intrepid as Aliaga in exploring that outer edge of modern consciousness at which the individual mind and the macroeconomic order meet,” Michael Kerrigan, TLS.

Reviled on it’s release, Peeping Tom all-but ended the career of celebrated director Michael Powell. The story of a murderous cameraman and his compulsion to record his killings, Powell’s film stunned the same critics who had acclaimed him for work he had made with Emeric Pressburger (as ‘The Archers’) in the years before. Luckily Peeping Tom was rediscovered and saved, largely due to the efforts of Martin Scorsese, and it is now considered a masterpiece of the Horror genre. In this Devil’s Advocate, published in the wake of the film’s 60^th Anniversary, Kiri Bloom Walden charts the origins, production, and devastating critical reception of Peeping Tom, comparing it to another key film released in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The author has interviewed people close to Powell to gain new insight into how he approached making the films and reacted to the way it was initially rejected.

Following tremendous advances in recent years in the study of religious belief, this volume adopts a fresh understanding of Jewish religious life in Poland. Approaches deriving from the anthropology, history, phenomenology, psychology, and sociology of religion have replaced the methodologies of social or political history that were applied in the past, offering fascinating new perspectives. The well-established interest in Hasidism continues, albeit from new angles, but topics that have barely been considered before are well represented here too. Women’s religious practice gains new prominence, and a focus on elites has given way to a consideration of the beliefs and practices of ordinary people. Reappraisals of religious responses to secularization and modernity, both liberal and Orthodox, offer more nuanced insights into this key issue. Other research areas represented here include the material history of Jewish religious life in eastern Europe and the shift of emphasis from theology to praxis in the search for the defining quality of religious experience. The contemporary reassessments in this volume, with their awareness of emerging techniques that have the potential to extract fresh insights from source materials both old and new, show how our understanding of what it means to be Jewish is continuing to expand.

Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance confronts how Palestinians have recently felt obliged to re-think memory and resistance in response to dynamic political and regional changes in the twenty-first century; prolonged spatial and temporal dispossession; and the continued deterioration of the peace process. Insofar as the articulation of memory in (post)colonial contexts can be viewed as an integral component of a continuing anti-colonial struggle for self-determination, in tracing the dynamics of conveying the memory of ongoing, chronic trauma, this collection negotiates the urgency for Palestinians to reclaim and retain their heritage in a continually unstable and fretful present. The collection offers a distinctive contribution to the field of existing scholarship on Palestine, charting new ways of thinking about the critical paradigms of memory and resistance as they are produced and represented in literary works published within the post-millennial period. Reflecting on the potential for the Palestinian narrative to recreate reality in ways that both document it and resist its brutality, the critical essays in this collection show how Palestinian writers in the twenty-first century critically and creatively consider the possible future(s) of their nation.

- Shame is one of the most frequent underlying emotions expressed throughout sub-Saharan African literature, yet studies of such literature almost universally ignore the topic in favour of a focus on the struggle for independence and the postcolonial situation, encompassing a search for individual, national, and ethnic identities and questions of corruption, changing gender roles, and conflicts between so-called tradition and modernity. Shame, however, is not antithetical to these investigations and, in fact, the persistent trope of shame undergirds many of them. This book locates these expressions of shame in sub-Saharan African literature and shows how its diverse literary representations underscore shame’s function as a fulcrum in the mutual constitution of subject and community on the continent. Though shame research is dominated by Western definitions and theories, this study emphasizes the centrality of African conceptions of shame in ways that notions of Western subjectivity dismiss or cannot capture.

The Secular Rabbi is an intellectual biography of Philip Rahv, co-founder of Partisan Review. It focuses on the ambivalent ties that Rahv, a Russian immigrant, retained to his Jewish cultural background. Drawing on letters Rahv wrote to her mother from 1928 to 1931, Doris Kadish delves into Rahv’s complex and enigmatic character, his experience teaching Hebrew in Savannah, GA and Portland, OR; his attitudes toward class, race, and gender. Kadish positions herself in relation to Rahv in attempting to understand her own Jewish identity and perspective as a 21st century woman. The book draws on historical accounts, genealogical records, memoirs by Rahv’s friends and associates, interviews, and secondary scholarship devoted to the New York intellectuals, the history of Partisan Review, and Jewish studies. Key components of Rahv’s Jewishness—appearance, voice, name, attitudes toward Yiddish and Zionism—are explored, as is his deep-seated faith in Marxism. Textual analyses of Rahv’s works are interwoven with analyses of writers whose works appeared in Partisan Review: Delmore Schwartz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow. Rahv’s relations with writers who figured prominently in his life—most notably T.S. Eliot, Mary McCarthy, and Irving Howe—are explored. Events relating to anti-Stalinism, responses to the Holocaust, and alleged ties with the CIA, are discussed. Kadish sheds light on modernism, proletarian literature, and Jewish writing as well as movements that defined American political history in the 20th century: immigration, socialism, Communism, fascism, the cold war, feminism, and the New Left.

Oedipus Tyrannus by the great tragedian Sophocles is one of the most famous works of ancient Greek literature. The play has always been admired for the unity of its plot; every bit of every scene counts towards the dramatic effect. The action is concentrated into a single day in Oedipus’ life; his heinous crimes of unwittingly committing patricide and incest by marrying his mother all lie long ago in the past, and now, in the action of this one day, there awaits for him only the discovery of the truth. Oedipus is portrayed as a noble king, deeply devoted to his people and they to him. Proud of his earlier defeat of the Sphinx, he is determined to save his city once again, and he unflinchingly pursues the truth of who he is and what he has done, unaware that it will bring him to disaster. The spectators, familiar with Oedipus’ story, wait in horrified suspense for that terrible moment of realisation to arrive. And when it does, Oedipus survives it: he takes full responsibility for what he has done, accepts the grief and the pain, and carries on, remaining indomitable to the end. Sophocles gives no answer as to why Oedipus is made to suffer his tragic fate. Jenny March’s new facing-page translation brings alive the power and complexities of Sophocles’ writing, with a substantial introduction and a detailed commentary which is keyed to important words in the translation and aims to be accessible to readers with little or no Greek.