Monthly Releases
Books to look out for in October 2018
Nasty Women and Bad Hombres
Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election
Gender and racial politics were at the center of the 2016 US presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This collection of essays looks at the often vitriolic rhetoric that characterized the election: “nasty women” vs. “deplorables”; “bad hombres” and “Crooked Hillary”; analyzing the struggle and its result through the lenses of gender, race, and their intersections, and with particular attention to the roles of memory, performance, narrative, and social media.
Material Enlightenment
Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770-1830
Women writers played a central, but hitherto under-recognised, role in the development of the philosophy of mind and its practical outworkings in Romantic era England, Scotland and Ireland. This book focuses on the writings and lives of five leading figures – Anna Barbauld, Honora Edgeworth, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton and Maria Edgeworth – a group of women who differed profoundly in their political, religious and social views but were nevertheless associated through correspondence, family ties and a shared belief in the importance of female education.
Birds in Medieval English Poetry
Metaphors, Realities, Transformations
Birds featured in many aspects of medieval people’s lives, not least in their poetry. But despite their familiar presence in literary culture, it is still often assumed that these representations have little to do with the real natural world. Warren presents the first full-length study of birds and their metamorphoses as treated in a wide range of medieval poetry, from the Anglo-Saxons to Chaucer and Gower.
Township Violence and the End of Apartheid
War on the Reef
A powerful re-reading of modern South African history following apartheid that examines the violent transformation during the transition era and how this was enacted in the African townships of the Witwatersrand. This book studies, for the first time, the conflicts between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party that took place in South Africa’s industrial heartland surrounding Johannesburg.
Stages of European Romanticism
Cultural Synchronicity across the Arts, 1798-1848
Romanticism was a truly European phenomenon, extending roughly from the French Revolution to the 1848 revolutions and embracing not only literature and drama but also music and visual arts. Because of Romanticism’s vast scope, most treatments have restricted themselves to single countries or to specific forms, notably literature, art, or music. This book employs an innovative approach by “stages” to offer a unified vision of European Romanticism over the half-century of its growth and decline.
The Music of Joseph Joachim
Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) was arguably the greatest violinist of the nineteenth century. But Joachim was also a composer of virtuoso pieces, violin concertos, orchestral overtures and chamber music works. Uhde’s book will be the standard work on the music of Joseph Joachim for many years to come, following Joachim’s compositional path through a changing cultural milieu.
Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts
The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth
After the renowned Prussian scientist and explorer Ludwig Leichhardt left the Australian frontier in 1848 on an expedition to cross the continent, he disappeared without a trace. Andrew Hurley’s book complicates that view by undertaking an afterlife biography of “the Humboldt of Australia.” A fascinating cultural studies account of the “afterlife” of Leichhardt, revealing both German entanglement in British colonialism in Australia, and in a broader sense, what happens when we maintain an open stance to the ghosts of the past.
Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives
Studies in Honor of Robert E. Lerner
From the Gregorian reforms to the Protestant Reformation, heresies and heretics helped shape the religious, political, and institutional structures of medieval Europe. This volume takes the history of heresy in late medieval Europe (1300-1500) on its own terms. From Paris to Prague and from northern Germany to Italy and even extending as far as Ethiopia, the essays shed new light on a vibrant world of audacious beguines, ardent Joachites, Spiritual Franciscans, innovative mystics, lay prophets, idiosyncratic alchemists, daring magicians, and even rebellious princes locked in battles with the papacy.
Art and Political Thought in Medieval England, c.1150-1350
Images and imagery played a major role in medieval political thought and culture, but their influence has rarely been explored. From the examination of the writings of late twelfth-century courtier-clerics to events such as the Thomas Becket conflict, the making of Magna Carta, the Barons’ War and the deposition of Edward II, Slater explores how power and political society were imagined, represented and reflected on in medieval English art.
Books to look out for in September 2018
Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany
One of the first books to extend the currently burgeoning scholarship on East Germany to the visual arts, revealing that painting, like literature and film, was a space of contestation. This book focuses on one of East Germany’s most successful artists as a point of entry into the vibrant art world of the “other” Germany. In the 1980s, Bernhard Heisig (1925-2011) was praised on both sides of the Berlin Wall for his neo-expressionist style and his commitment to German history and art. After unification, Heisig was a focal point in the Bilderstreit, a virulent debate over what role East German art should play in the new Germany.
English Medieval Church Towers
The Northern Province
Church towers are a prominent feature of the English landscape and stand as a testament to the skill and ingenuity of medieval masons. Every medieval church tower within the Northern Province is beautifully illustrated here by a watercolour painting and is accompanied by detailed information relating to its location and date and an architectural description. Provided with an index and a glossary of terms, this book can be used both as a visitor’s guide and as a reference work for the study of medieval church architecture.
Voices of Ghana
Literary Contributions to the Ghana Broadcasting System, 1955-57
Annotated, scholarly edition of the original landmark anthology, Voices of Ghana, containing poetry, plays, stories and essays first broadcast on radio in the years leading up to Ghana’s independence. The context of Ghana’s independence, the singularity of the anthology’s history, and the significance of many of the writers all contribute to the importance of this text. This second edition is a timely intervention into recent debates within postcolonial studies and world literature on the importance of broadcast culture in the dissemination of “new literatures” from the colonial world.
Composing History
National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860-1920
A study of the ways in which topics of English history were central to conceptions of English identity, musical and otherwise, during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Its focus is on the masque, an early modern English musico-dramatic genre that was reinvented during the Victorian period as a vehicle for nationalistic, historically inflected popular entertainments.
An American in Warsaw
Selected Writings of Hugh S. Gibson, US Minister to Poland, 1919-1924
This book presents the writings of Hugh S. Gibson, who served from 1919 to 1924 as the first US Minister to the new Second Polish Republic. Crucially involved with world-shaping events, Gibson faithfully recorded his eyewitness impressions and interactions with the nascent Polish state, bickering Allies, and increasingly isolationist Americans. With a flair for pertinent analysis, Gibson records the rocky first years of Polish statehood. His words are prophetic, accurately assessing the need for strong state structures to protect all citizens and predicting the danger posed especially to minority groups should such structures fail.
And the Shark, He Has Teeth
A Theater Producer’s Notes
First English translation of the memoirs of the great German-Jewish theater producer Ernst Josef Aufricht, providing an inside account of the late Weimar theater scene in Berlin. The title alludes to Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, the premiere of which was produced by Aufricht at his Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin in 1928, launching Brecht and Weill to worldwide fame.
Books to look out for in August 2018
18th Century shoplifting, a pillars of Russian pianism, and film and fashion in postwar Germany are just some of the topics bursting out of this August’s must-reads. Take a look through our highlights and see which book you could soak up in the sunshine. Until next time!
Gained Ground
Perspectives on Canadian and Comparative North American Studies
Since the elections of Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau, unprecedented international attention is being drawn to the differences between the United States and Canada. This timely volume takes a close comparative look at the national imaginaries of the two countries: literature, film, opera, and even theme parks – providing a reassessment of Canadian Studies within a comparative framework.
Remaking Mutirikwi
Landscape, Water and Belonging in Southern Zimbabwe
The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe’s second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Mutirikwi’s landscapes, which had begun with colonial land appropriations in the 1890s. Fontein offers a detailed ethnographic and historical study of the implications of fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe from the perspective of those involved in land occupations around Lake Mutirikwi, from the colonial period to the present day.
Shoplifting in Eighteenth-Century England
As a new consumer culture took root in England and shops proliferated, the crime of shoplifting leaped to public prominence. Regarded initially as exclusively a crime of the poor, the eighteenth century witnessed a transformation in the public perception and understanding of such customer theft, signalled by the shocking arrest of Jane Austen’s wealthy aunt for shoplifting in 1799.
Stuff
Catalogue of Archaeological Finds from Amsterdam’s North/South Metro Line
Stuff gathers the archaeological finds made during the 9 years of construction of a metro line from the riverbed into a material history of the city of Amsterdam. The book showcases 15,000 of the over 700,000 archaeological finds that were retrieved.
Heinrich Neuhaus
A Life beyond Music
Heinrich Neuhaus (1888-1964) was one of the most charismatic and sought after pianist-pedagogues of the twentieth century, earning a formidable reputation in the West as one of the pillars of Russian pianism. Razumovskaya’s text is the first critical study of this masterful artist exploring what went on in his teaching studio and the vibrant circumstances that underpinned Neuhaus’s unique outlook and approach.
Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin
From Nazism to the Cold War
This book steers attention toward two key aspects of German culture – film and fashion – that shared similar trajectories and multiple connections, looking at them not only in the immediate postwar years but as far back as 1939. They formed spectacular sites of the postwar recovery processes in both East and West Germany.
Books to look out for in July 2018
The fear of damnation, the modernist sensibility and the racial politics of twentieth-century America are just some of the topics bursting out of this July’s must-reads. Take a look through our highlights and see which book you could soak up in the sunshine. Until next time!
New Poems
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke, the most famous (and important) German language poet of the twentieth century – a master to be ranked with Goethe and Heine – wrote the New Poems of 1907 and 1908 in transition from his late-nineteenth-century style. They mark his appearance as a lyrical, metaphysical poet of the modernist sensibility, often using traditional forms like the sonnet to explore the inner essence, the deep heart, of things – often, quite literally, things.
Mark Twain Under Fire
Reception and Reputation, Criticism and Controversy, 1851-2015
Mark Twain under Fire tracks the genesis and evolution of Twain’s reputation as a writer: his reception as a humorist, his “return fire” on genteel critics, and the development of academic criticism. As a history of Twain criticism, the book draws on English and foreign-language scholarship, discussing the forces and ideas that have influenced criticism revealing how and why Mark Twain has been “under fire” from the advent of his career to the present day
Doctrina Pueril
Ramon Llull
An unforgettable introduction to the medieval world and its culture for the modern reader. Ramon Llull wrote the Doctrina Pueril between 1274 and 1276 to provide minimum knowledge to those people – children, but also adults – who did not have the opportunity to acquire a sufficient doctrinal and intellectual education. In the late thirteenth century this meant stressing the basics of Christian doctrine and also accessing some aspects of general culture.
Damnation and Salvation in Old Norse Literature
The hope of salvation and the fear of damnation were fundamental in the Middle Ages. This study examines how the twin themes of damnation and salvation interact with other more familiar and better explored topoi, such as the life-cycle, the moment of death, and the material world. A broad range of the literature is considered, including Sagas of Icelanders, Kings’ sagas, Contemporary Sagas, Legendary sagas and poems of Christian instruction.
The Blue Stain
A Novel of a Racial Outcast
Hugo Bettauer’s The Blue Stain, a novel of racial mixing and “passing,” starts and ends in Georgia but also takes the reader to Vienna and New York. First published in 1922, the novel tells the story of Carletto, son of a white European academic and an African American daughter of former slaves, who, having passed as white in Europe and fled to America after losing his fortune, resists being seen as “black” before ultimately accepting that identity and joining the early movement for civil rights. Never before translated into English, this is the first novel in which a German-speaking European author addresses early twentieth-century racial politics in the United States – not only in the South but also in the North.
The Politics of Work in a Post-Conflict State
Youth, Labour & Violence in Sierra Leone
High youth unemployment is seen as a major issue across Africa and globally, not solely as a source of concern for economic development, but as a threat to social stability and a challenge to fragile peace. But what do we really know about how lack of work shapes political identities and motivates youth violence? This book moves beyond reductive portrayals of unemployed youth as “ticking bombs” but instead argues that violence is not inherent to unemployment, but that the impact of joblessness on political activism is mediated by social factors and the specific nature of the post-war political economy.
