33 research outputs found
Where the new world is:Literature about the U.S. South at global scales
No full textReviewsStunning…a tour de force--Year’s Work in English StudiesOne of the most helpful academic books I have read in a long time--Modern Fiction StudiesThe book brilliantly dismantles enduring analytical tools, notably the black/white and North/South binaries. Bone also succeeds in demonstrating that the southern exceptionalism and regionalism have become irrelevant as a result of the transnational turn.while at the same time reaffirming the relevance of the South as a space of dialectical interaction between transnational, regional, and local scales.—Journal of Southern HistoryBone's elegant writing is exhaustively researched and well argued. . . . Where the New World Is is an important and necessary book.—American Literary History (Online Review)The southern question has never seemed so richly global as it does in Martyn Bone's powerful new book Where the New World Is. Moving from original readings of Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen to pioneering interpretations of Russell Banks and Monique Truong, Bone succeeds brilliantly in weaving together southern literary studies and post-national American studies. Americanists of all kinds will learn a great deal from this important work.—Harilaos Stecopoulos, author of Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898–1976Martyn Bone's Where the New World Is is the capstone of a generation's worth of scholarship on the American South, the Global South, and all points in between. More than that, it is a sharp-witted, gimlet-eyed exposé of a dazzling array of writers whose work pushes the South offshore. Bone does more than scramble your historic compass; he also leaves you with a sense of where we all need to go next. This book is the future of southern literary criticism.--Matthew Guterl, author of Seeing Race in Modern America----DescriptionMartyn Bone's Where The New World Is is the capstone of a generation's worth of scholarship on the American South, the Global South, and all points in between. More than that, it is a sharp-witted, gimlet-eyed exposé of a dazzling array of writers whose work pushes the South offshore. Bone does more than scramble your historic compass; he also leaves you with a sense of where we all need to go next. This book is the future of southern literary criticism.—Matthew Pratt Guterl, author of Seeing Race in Modern America---Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980 has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years, challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal migration) and economic globalization. The writers discussed by Bone emphasize how migration and labor have reconfigured the region's relation to the nation and a range of transnational scales: hemispheric (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti), transatlantic/Black Atlantic (Denmark, England, Mauritania), and transpacific/global southern (Australia, China, Vietnam). Writers under consideration include Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John Oliver Killens, Russell Banks, Erna Brodber, Cynthia Shearer, Ha Jin, Monique Truong, Lan Cao, Toni Morrison, Peter Matthiessen, Dave Eggers, and Laila Lalami. The book also seeks to resituate southern studies by drawing on theories of "scale" that originated in human geography. In this way, Bone also offers a new paradigm in which the U.S. South is thoroughly engaged with a range of other scales from the local to the global, making both literature about the region and southern studies itself truly transnational in scope.</p
Spectrums of investment in Doctor Who fandom
No full textThis thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Drawing upon a significant weight of empirical data, collected in the field, this thesis proposes a set of four spectrums of investment engaged in by cult media fans: the spectrum of financial investment; the spectrum of what is here termed 'participatory investment'; the spectrum of investment in the idea of textual authenticity; and the spectrum of multiple investments. The spectrum model allows the individual members of the research sample to be located within specific regions of each spectrum and correlations to be drawn between the distinct spectrums, in order for any patterns which emerge to be examined. The thesis also reviews a number of relevant theoretical concerns such as fan studies, ethnography and social psychology
Curiosity, Commerce, and Conversation in the Writing of London Horticulturists during the Early-Eighteenth Century
No full textPhDThis dissertation explores the social and literary worlds of horticulturists
who lived, worked, and wrote in early-eighteenth-century London. The period
witnessed not only a growing market for printed books and pamphlets about
gardening, but also the emergence of the nurseryman as a distinct commercial and
cultural identity. In many cases, trading nurserymen also published horticultural
writing, their texts exploiting the publicity of representation both in order to
persuade readers of the quality and reliability of their goods and services, and to
evidence a wide range of intellectual interests and social aspirations. At the same
time, increasing numbers of more gentlemanly authors had recourse to nursery
and physic (or botanical) gardens and their curators as authoritative sources for
their own manuals of horticulture and treatises of natural philosophy.
Part one addresses the publications produced by nursery-gardeners and
seedsmen during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Through
close-readings of texts by George London and Henry Wise, Thomas Fairchild, and
John Cowell, chapters one and two examine how such men sought to represent
themselves as polite and precise practitioners of gardening successful in their
businesses, sociable in their dispositions, and curious in their approaches to the
natural world. Chapter three embellishes these themes by describing the
genealogy and formation of the Society of Gardeners, a voluntary association of
horticultural tradesmen.
Part two (chapters four and five) locates these broad arguments more
specifically, by presenting a biographical account of Richard Bradley, the most
important and prolific horticultural writer of the 1710s and 1720s. Combining
published and manuscript resources these chapters interrogate pivotal moments in
Bradley's career, demonstrating how its undulating trajectory was shaped by the
opportunities and limitations afforded within the spaces of physic gardens (both
real and projected), and ultimately turned on his capacity for manipulating
contemporary practices and conventions of curiosity and sociability
Spear-carriers or speaking parts?: arts practitioners in the cultural policy process
No full textThis thesis investigates the role of arts practitioners in cultural policy activity, both as a general concern for cultural policy studies and in the specific arena of post-war cultural policy in Britain. In so doing it challenges a common perception that arts practitioners have no such involvement, and seeks to discover the extent and form of their activity. it explores the history of practitioners’ participation in cultural policy formation and implementation; what obstacles they have faced and how their involvement could be better facilitated; and, importantly, why it matters whether they are involved. These issues have remained largely unrecognised among cultural policy researchers.
Part II of the thesis examines the subject through a case study of new playwriting policy in England. Drawing on unpublished primary documents, interviews, and observation, it pays particular attention to playwrights’ organisations and their history of self-directed activity. These organisations and other agencies concerned with theatre writing are embedded in networks which cross the boundaries of policy and creative practice. The thesis argues that arts practitioners can enhance their place in the policy process through their own actions, and that participation in these networks increases their opportunity for policy input and influence.
Of key importance is the question as to why the involvement of practitioners in cultural policy activity is of any significance. The thesis puts forward the view that arts practitioners and their organisations can be seen as part of the fabric of civil society, and their participation in policy activity as contributing to the maintenance and enlargement of democratic life. It is, then, not a marginal issue, nor of concern to the arts alone, but integral to a wider debate about sustaining democratic engagement and the civic arena in the twenty-first century
(The) man, his body, and his society: masculinity and the male experience in English and Scottish medicine c.1640-c.1780.
No full textThis thesis examines the relationship(s) between medicine, the body and societal codes of masculinity in England and Scotland between c.1640 and c.1780. It responds to the way in which the men in histories of post-1660 masculinity are often disembodied, and to the comparative absence of men’s gendered experiences from the history of medicine. Its findings show that in both centuries the experience of being a man with a body that was the site of health and sickness was an open, candid, and often communal, one, inside and outside of the formal medical encounter. Thus, and on both sides of 1700, ill men had full freedom in the pursuit and acceptance of medical, familial and social assistance, while their physical suffering, and associated emotional distress, was met with sympathy. With their sick bodies the sites of honest self-examination and open discussion, it was in part this very public nature of their sicknesses that allowed men, as a gender and as individuals, independence and agency in their non-commercial health care. Indeed, later-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century men suffered no constraints in their ability to respond to the vulnerabilities of their bodies, even where this involved behaviours or attributes allegedly associated with women and femininity, or inconsistent with ideals of active, independent, masculinity.
These findings indicate, therefore, great continuity across the period 1640-1780, and not only in masculine ideals of and involving the male corporeality. There seems to have been significant consistency across time in men’s social and medical experiences of both sickness and their pre-emptive preparation for it, and in an apparent collective self-confidence concerning their corporeal masculinity, their sex, and, possibly, even their sexual potential. Indeed, these sources suggest that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century men had a resilient sense of self-identity (and personal masculinity), conceptually separable from the corporeal body and its known fragilities
Of good use or serious pleasure : Vitruvius Britannicus and early eighteenth century architectural discourse
No full textThe central thesis of this work is that Colen Campbell's
three volume Vitruvius Britannicus (1715-25) is not, as it has been frequently seen, a Palladian manifesto designed to change architectural practice in England (and in the process Campbell's own fortunes as an architect), but rather a publication celebrating architectural achievements, consumed by polite society.
The twentieth century view of Vitruvius Britannicus, stems from John Surnmerson's seminal work, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830. It posits Vitruvius Britannicus as a stylistic manifesto that served the particular interests of Colen Campbell and his associates as advocates of and builders in the Palladian style, and foregrounds the idea of the author. This view has been incorporated almost unquestioningly into subsequent interpretations not least
because it conforms to a powerful 'Whig' interpretation of history emphasising periodisation, style, revolution, development, and the search for origins. In contrast I argue that Vitruvius Britannicus met the demands of a market interested in architecture as a topic of polite
conversation. The subscription lists for Vitruvius Britannicus show that it was neither priced to be, nor received as, a builder's manual, nor was it a stylistic manifesto. Rather, it was a celebration of contemporary British architecture that gave pleasure and some instruction to polite society. Drawing on disciplines outside of art and architectural history, I consider
Vitruvius Britannicus as an object of consumption offering an alternative reading of the publication that highlights a number of important avenues for further research.
Chapter 1 positions the thesis within critiques of stylistic history. Chapter 2 briefly introduces
some historiographic issues, and then considers the contents and style of the publication, and
the nature of its subscribers. This highlights issues neglected in histories of Vilruvius Britannicus and challenges many of the commonly held conceptions of the publication. These conceptions are then examined in Chapter 3 in the light of evidence and issues raised in the
previous chapter. Chapter 4 considers other architectural and illustrated books and positions Campbell's work within wider publishing paradigms such as cartography and a literature of tourism. Chapter 5 outlines some of the intellectual ideas that influenced the way in which
publications such as Vitruvius Britannicus were understood. This is developed in Chapter 6 which considers the way in which Vitruvius Britannicus functioned within a contemporary
architectural discourse that codified the group identity of a polite elite
The sentiments of a Church-of-England man : a study of Swift's politics
No full textThis contextualist study re-examines the contested critical
question of Jonathan Swift's political character. It is
concerned with the historical meaning of Swift's texts
and attempts to recover their original political impact.
Politically-literate contemporaries claimed to read Jacobite
Tory politics in Swift's texts. Rather than dismiss the
judgement of Swift's contemporaries, this study asks whether
there is anything about Swift's political writing in polemical
context that could have led contemporaries to construe
the politics of his texts as Jacobite Tory. The conclusion
this study reaches is that aspects of Swift's political
rhetoric are consonant with Tory and Jacobite polemic.
While contesting current conceptions of Swift as a Whig,
this study offers a partial revision of that scholarship
which describes Swift as a non-Jacobite Tory.
The thesis is based on an analysis of Swift's prose, poetry
and correspondence and contemporary (mainly printed) sources
books, pamphlets, poems on affairs of state and newspapers.
Some new or neglected polemical contexts and analogues
for Swift's works are suggested. Chapter 1 considers some
of the problems and contested issues in interpretation
of Swift's political biography and writing. Chapter 2
witnesses Swift's combination of High Church attitudes
with a radical political critique of Whig establishment.
Swift is read in juxtaposition with Jacobite Tory authors
such as George Granville, Lord Lansdowne. Chapter 3 relocates
A Tale of a Tub in historical context to reveal the satire's
relation to High Church Tory polemical languages. Chapter
4 discusses the disaffected Tory aspect of Gulliver's
Travels. Chapter 5 attempts to register the complexity
of the textual evidence of Swift's attitude to Jacobitism.
Detailed attention is given to his politically-revealing
attitudes to the Dutch. A coda briefly describes Swift's
discontent with the Revolution settlement, examines this
Church-of-England Man's sentiments on the crucial ideological
issue of resistance, and suggests the importance of Hugo
Grotius in Swift's political thought
Red, white and blue highways: British travel writing and the American road trip in the late twentieth century
No full textThis study locates late-twentieth-century roadlogues (nonfiction, prose accounts of American road trips) by British writers within the tradition of the postwar American highway narrative in travel writing, novels, and film. It exposes the discursive structures and textual constraints underlying seven case studies published in the 1990s by comparing them to texts from various genres in diachronic and synchronic contexts. It contributes to scholarship on the American highway narrative, which largely overlooks British texts. It complements research on British travel writing, which tends to be biased towards pre-twentieth-century texts by travellers whose culture is in a dominant relation to that of travellees. It adds to postcolonial studies through analysis of representations of the other where otherness is reduced and complicated by a history of cultural exchange.
The methodology combines several approaches including discourse theory, discourse analysis, narrative theory, feminist criticism, and theories of tourism. Three main areas are considered: identity, in relation to nationality and gender; the road writer's gaze, with regard to vehicles and roads; and intertextuality, on the margins (in maps) and inside roadlogues (in direct and indirect allusions).
The study concludes that contemporary British roadlogues are in what is almost a subordinate relation to American highway narratives, evidenced by extensive influence of American texts. However, this subordination is qualified by joint ownership of western and New World myths, vestiges of imperial superiority, and selective deference by British writers. The latter is demonstrated through a consumer approach to American culture afforded by the episodic structure of the road trip and encouraged by the niche-oriented nature of the current market for travel writing. While American writers regard roadscapes with imperial eyes and experience the road trip as a rite of passage, contemporary Britons generally engage in superficial role play and remain untransformed by American highways
Literary representations of maternity in the eighteenth century
No full textThe primary concern of this thesis is the representation, in the eighteenth century, of mothers' bodies. It is also concerned with the treatment of domestic duties which were supposed a consequence of a woman's very nature. Throughout the first seven decades of the century, medical men and virtuosi demonstrated particular interest in the nature of physicality, and especially in women's bodies, pregnancy, and childbirth. 1 will be testing out a widely-held view that dissection and new anatomical findings regarding women's bodies produced a new idealisation of motherhood, and that this was immediately translated into lay-medical and related discourse, and was thus firmly established in middle-class culture by the end of the century. The relationship between primary medical and lay-medical literature raises several questions: my work asks whether lay-medical literature mirrored medical writing, and whether there was a direct translation of material from one to the other. Lay-medical texts for women are especially interesting. They offer an insight into precisely what examples of female nature and correspondingly 'natural' behaviour were intended for women readers. Representations of maternity in specific forms of writing which rely heavily upon women for subject matter are further extended in the second half of this study. 1 have focussed upon two genres, conduct literature and narrative fiction. Neither is conventionally associated with medical or lay-medical discourse, yet both have significant links with these. Conduct literature and narrative fiction have much to offer in this attempt to recover what women were being taught about their bodies and roles; both were concerned with what the body displays externally, and with corresponding ideas of 'naturalness'. Conduct literature for women was enjoying a period of growth and change, and has obvious, direct links with medical texts. Narrative fiction also had important links with medical writing, and 1 will describe these. The dissemination of medical representations of the maternal body was a process which contributed to a contradictory cultural sense of female identity
