Bücher veröffentlicht von Manchester University Press

This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland's career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction

This book undertakes a unique, coherent and comprehensive consideration of the depiction of naval warfare in the cinema. The films under discussion encompass all areas of naval operations in war, and highlight varying institutional and aesthetic responses to navies and the sea in popular culture. The examination of these films centres on their similarities to and differences from the conventions of the war genre and seeks to determine whether the distinctive characteristics of naval film narratives justify their categorisation as a separate genre or sub-genre in popular cinema. The explicit factual bases and drama-documentary style of many key naval films, such as In Which We Serve, They Were Expendable and Das Boot, also requires the consideration of these films as texts for popular historical transmission. Their frequent reinforcement of establishment views of the past, which derives from their conservative ideological position towards national and naval culture, makes these films key texts for the consideration of national cinemas as purveyors of contemporary history as popularly conceived by filmmakers and received by audiences.

Don Randall's comprehensive study situates acclaimed author David Malouf within the field of contemporary international and psotcolonial writing, but without losing sight of the author's affiliation with Australian contexts. The book presents an original reading of Malouf, but also engages with the full body of preceding Malouf criticism.

This, the first book-length study of the Spanish-Basque filmmaker Julio Medem in English, contains profound analysis of his life and films in the context of contemporary Spain and World cinema and is based on original interviews with Medem and many of his collaborators by the author, an establish expert on Spanish cinema.

An interesting companion for students of cultural theory, concentrating on the four most influential thinkers - Adorno, Bourdieu, Foucault and Jameson

This book deals with a wide range of 'high-end', expensive and high concept, TV dramas from the UK and the USA and analyses the compositional principles of texts (technologies, institutions, economics, cultrual trends). Drama examined include Oz, Buried Carnivale, Blackpool, The Sopranos, Shameless, and Shooting the Past.

Amitav Ghosh is an authoritative critical introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of one of the most celebrated and significant literary voices to have emerged from India in recent decades. It is the first full-length study of Amitav Ghosh's work to be available outside India. Encompassing all of Ghosh's fictional and non-fictional writings to date, this book takes a thematic approach which enables in-depth analysis of the cluster of themes, ideas and issues that Ghosh has steadily built up into a substantial intellectual project. This project overlaps significantly with many of the key debates in postcolonial studies making this book both an introduction to Ghosh's writing and a contribution to the development of ideas on the 'postcolonial', in particular, its relation to postmodernism. Aimed at students and the general reader, this book is an ideal introduction to one of contemporary literature's most fascinating writers.

The secret vice: Masturbation in Victorian fiction and medical culture provides a unique consideration of writings on self-abuse in the long nineteenth century. The book examines the discourse on masturbation in medical works by English, Continental and American practitioners and demonstrates the influence and impact of these writings, not only on Victorian pornography but also in the creation of fictional characters by canonical authors such as Bram Stoker, J. S. Le Fanu, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. The book also features the first detailed and balanced study of the largely overlooked literature on masturbation as it pertains to women in clinical and popular medical works aimed at the female reader. Mason concludes with a consideration of the way the distinctly Victorian discourse on masturbation has persisted into the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries with particular reference to Willy Russell's tragic-comic novel, The Wrong Boy (2000) and to the construction of 'Victorian Dad', a character featured in the adult comic, Viz.

An innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature and its relation to visionary Romanticism through its examination of six late Victorian writers - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy.

Despite his controversial reputation and international notoriety as a film-maker, no full-length study of Clouzot has ever been published in English. This book offers a significant revaluation of Clouzot's achievement, situating his life and work in the wider context of French cinema and society, and providing detailed analysis of his major films.

James Kelman is Scotland's most influential contemporary prose artist. This is the first book-length study of his groundbreaking novels, and it analyses and contextualises each in detail. It argues that while Kelman offers a coherent and consistent vision of the world, each novel should be read as a distinct literary response to particular aspects of contemporary working-class language and culture. Richly historicised through diverse contexts such as Scottish socialism, public transport, emigration, 'Booker Prize' culture and Glasgow's controversial 'City of Culture' status in 1990, Simon Kovesi offers readings of Kelman's style, characterisation and linguistic innovations. This study resists the prevalent condemnations of Kelman as a miserable realist, and produces evidence that he is acutely aware of an unorthodox, politicised literary tradition which transgresses definitions of what literature can or should do. Kelman is cautious about the power relationship between the working-class worlds he represents in his fiction, and the latent preconceptions embedded in the language of academic and critical commentary. In response, this study is boldly self-critical, and questions the validity and values of its own methods. Kelman is shown to be deftly humorous, assiduously ethical, philosophically alert and politically necessary.

Innovative approach and study of Spenser's literature. Original ideas and perspectives methodolodgy when studying Spenser. Will appeal to wide market of Renaissance students.

Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular -- and controversial -- writers in the Asian American literary tradition. Grice traces Kingston's development as a writer and cultural activist to both ethnic and feminist discourses.

Beyond Representation poses the question as to whether over the last thirty years there have been signs of 'progress'/'progressiveness' in the representation of 'marginalised' or subaltern identity categories, within television drama in Britain and the US.

The most up-to-date survey of the leading British novelist of his generation, offering the fullest account to date of McEwan's sources, especially concerning his interest in popular science.

This book examines laughter in the Shakespearean theatre in the context of a cultural history of early modern laughter. It is the first study to focus specifically on laughter, not comedy. It argues that since the early modern period a paradigm shift has taken place in our attitudes to laughter and the role pivotal role of Shakespeare in this.

Playing for time explores connections between theatre time, the historical moment and fictional time. Geraldine Cousin persuasively argues that a crucial characteristic of contemporary British theatre is its preoccupation with instability and danger, and traces images of catastrophe and loss in a wide range of recent plays and productions.

The first book in English about Alex de la Iglesia, critically acclaimed former protege of Pedro Almodovar, and one of the highest grossing directors in Spain and Latin America. De la Iglesia's cinema is representative of a new generation of Spanish and European directors who combine avant-garde strategies with forms such as comedy and horror.

This is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer.

Explores the ways in which the unashamedly disturbing conventions of international horror cinema allow audiences to engage with the traumatic legacy of the recent past in a manner that has serious implications for the ways in which we conceive of ourselves both as gendered individuals and as members of a particular nation-state.

The Arc and the machine is an important and timely book. It insists on the centrality of narrative to informational culture, and forces a re-appraisal of how information technology, read as a material cultural form, is understood in relation to the questions of innovation and transformation.

Culture on drugs extends the discussion of drugs and drug culture beyond the boundaries of such disciplines as sociology, anthropology and criminology to cultural and literary studies and philosophy.

Produces an original empirical analysis of the discourse of safer sex, condom use and consent

A clearly written, comprehensive critical introduction to one of the most original contemporary British writers, providing an overview of all of Sinclair's major works and an analysis of his vision of modern London

This is the only general history of Britain's travelling communities in the twentieth century and covers state and legal developments affecting Travellers as well as their experiences of missions, education, warand welfare.

On Monday 19 September 1803, the most significant trial in the history of Ireland took place in Dublin. At the dock stood a twenty-five year old former Trinity College student and doctor's son. His name was Robert Emmet and he was standing trial for heading a rebellion on 23 July 1803. The iconic power of Robert Emmet in Irish history cannot be overstated. Emmet looms large in narratives of the past, yet the rebellion, which he led, remains to be fully contextualised. Patterson's book repairs this omission and explains the complex process of politicisation and revolutionary activity extending into the 1800s. He details the radicalisation of the grass roots, their para-militarism and engagement in secret societies. Drawing on an intriguing range of sources, Patterson offers a comprehensive insight into a relatively neglected period of history. This work is of particular significance to undergraduate and post-graduate students and lecturers of Irish history.

A comprehensive study of Lyndon Johnson's China policy based on a range of recently declassified government documents. This book explores the administration's relationship to both the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution and offers a new perspective on Johnson's capacity as a foreign policy leader and his role in the development of the Cold War

Looks at one of the most prolific and controversial polemical authors of the seventeenth century, whose writings lie at the heart of the rule of Charles I, the Civil War, and the restoration of Charles II. In the process, the author presents an important new interpretation of the origins and nature of Anglicanism and royalism.

This book examines the mid-Victorian Conservative Party's significant but overlooked role in British foreign policy and in contemporary debate about Britain's relations with Europe. It considers the Conservatives' response, in opposition and government, to the tumultuous era of Napoleon III, the Crimean war and Italian unification.

Religious themes have permeated Luce Irigary's thought from the beginning, but this book is the only major study of this dimension of her work -- both her rejection of traditional western religions, and her recent explorations of eastern religions.