Newcastle, 1953. Two new mothers make a pact that will resonate for generations to come. Together Greta and Sylvia decide to flee their old lives, and abandon their newborn babies. Eventually, though, teenager Sylvia is drawn back to her estranged family – to her daughter and the boy she still loves. But then her baby vanishes, and a whole cast of characters, including Greta, comes under suspicion. The Great North Road is an epic literary voyage through the storied landscapes of northern England, through tragedy and comedy, to the darker reaches of human behaviour. Compassionate and unfailingly dramatic, it is a searing and addictive debut novel. ‘A gothic, surreal melodrama . . . perceptive and affectionate’ Ann Cleeves 'An absolute treat to read. I haven’t been so captivated by a writer’s voice since I read Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Annabel Doré’s going straight onto my list of favourite authors’ Kate Long, author of The Bad Mother’s Handbook
Newcastle, 1953. Two new mothers make a pact that will resonate for generations to come. Together Greta and Sylvia decide to flee their old lives, and abandon their newborn babies. Eventually, though, teenager Sylvia is drawn back to her estranged family – to her daughter and the boy she still loves. But then her baby vanishes, and a whole cast of characters, including Greta, comes under suspicion. The Great North Road is an epic literary voyage through the storied landscapes of northern England, through tragedy and comedy, to the darker reaches of human behaviour. Compassionate and unfailingly dramatic, it is a searing and addictive debut novel. ‘A gothic, surreal melodrama . . . perceptive and affectionate’ Ann Cleeves 'An absolute treat to read. I haven’t been so captivated by a writer’s voice since I read Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Annabel Doré’s going straight onto my list of favourite authors’ Kate Long, author of The Bad Mother’s Handbook
This collection of selected writings represents the best of recent critical work on Milton. The essays cover all stages of his career, from the early poems through to the later poems of the Restoration period, especially Paradise Lost. Professor Patterson includes British and American critics such as Michael Wilding, Victoria Kahn, James Grantham Turner and Mary Ann Radzinowicz and guides the reader through the varied ways Milton's achievement has been explored and debated by modern criticism.
In this imaginative and illuminating work, Annabel Patterson traces the origins and meanings of the Aesopian fable, as well as its function in Renaissance culture and subsequently. She shows how the fable worked as a medium of political analysis and communication, especially from or on behalf of the politically powerless. Patterson begins with an analysis of the legendary Life of Aesop, its cultural history and philosophical implications, a topic that involves such widely separated figures as La Fontaine, Hegel, and Vygotsky. The myth’s origin is recovered here in the saving myth of Aesop the Ethiopian, black, ugly, who began as a slave but become both free and influential, a source of political wisdom. She then traces the early modern history of the fable from Caxton, Lydgate, and Henryson through the eighteenth century, focusing on such figures as Spenser, Sidney, Lyly, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as the lesser-known John Ogilby, Sir Roger L’Estrange, and Samuel Croxall. Patterson discusses the famous fable of The Belly and the Members, which, because it articulated in symbolic terms some of the most intransigent problems in political philosophy and practice, was still going strong as a symbolic text in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was focused on industrial relations by Karl Marx and by George Eliot against electoral reform.
Written in modern English, Middle English and Anglo-Saxon, Wyf-King chronicles the queens consort of pre-and-post-Conquest England and their relationships with grief, motherhood and power. Through the use of poetry, textual notes and glosses, it seeks to build a picture, a portrait or an idea of these forgotten women and they lives they led. Each poem contains a translation, a biography and a linguistic gloss.
From climate change forecasts and pandemic maps to Lego sets and Ancestry algorithms, models encompass our world and our lives. In her thought-provoking new book, Annabel Wharton begins with a definition drawn from the quantitative sciences and the philosophy of science but holds that history and critical cultural theory are essential to a fuller understanding of modeling. Considering changes in the medical body model and the architectural model, from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, Wharton demonstrates the ways in which all models are historical and political. Examining how cadavers have been described, exhibited, and visually rendered, she highlights the historical dimension of the modified body and its depictions. Analyzing the varied reworkings of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—including by monumental commanderies of the Knights Templar, Alberti’s Rucellai Tomb in Florence, Franciscans’ olive wood replicas, and video game renderings—she foregrounds the political force of architectural representations. And considering black boxes—instruments whose inputs we control and whose outputs we interpret, but whose inner workings are beyond our comprehension—she surveys the threats posed by such opaque computational models, warning of the dangers that models pose when humans lose control of the means by which they are generated and understood. Engaging and wide-ranging, Models and World Making conjures new ways of seeing and critically evaluating how we make and remake the world in which we live.
Byzantium, that dark sphere on the periphery of medieval Europe, is commonly regarded as the immutable residue of Rome's decline. In this highly original and provocative work, Alexander Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein revise this traditional image by documenting the dynamic social changes that occurred during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
This is a book about the theory of the city or commonwealth, what would come to be called the state, in early modern natural law discourse. Annabel Brett takes a fresh approach by looking at this political entity from the perspective of its boundaries and those who crossed them. She begins with a classic debate from the Spanish sixteenth century over the political treatment of mendicants, showing how cosmopolitan ideals of porous boundaries could simultaneously justify the freedoms of itinerant beggars and the activities of European colonists in the Indies. She goes on to examine the boundaries of the state in multiple senses, including the fundamental barrier between human beings and animals and the limits of the state in the face of the natural lives of its subjects, as well as territorial frontiers. Drawing on a wide range of authors, Brett reveals how early modern political space was constructed from a complex dynamic of inclusion and exclusion. Throughout, she shows that early modern debates about political boundaries displayed unheralded creativity and virtuosity but were nevertheless vulnerable to innumerable paradoxes, contradictions, and loose ends. Changes of State is a major work of intellectual history that resonates with modern debates about globalization and the transformation of the nation-state.
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