The timeless appeal of rustic living, with its emphasis on comfort, function, and simplicity, gets a crisp, contemporary interpretation--in classic Laura Ashley style--now available in trade paperback. An exquisite sourcebook for decorating with the distinctive Laura Ashley touch. 300 full-color illustrations.
Colour-illustrated interior design book which is a sequel to the 'Laura Ashley Guide to Home Decorating'. Includes design schemes for room-by -room country decorating; step-by-step projects on simple country crafts; instructions for decorative paint finishes, flooring, tiling, patchwork quilting and applique, festive decorations and wreaths. Includes an index.
Lucinda Cole’s Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of “vermin” as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Cole’s argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts—William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Abraham Cowley’s The Plagues of Egypt, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, the Earl of Rochester’s “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year—alongside other nonliterary primary sources and under-examined archival materials from the period, including treatises on animal trials, grain shortages, rabies, and comparative neuroanatomy. As Cole illustrates, human health and demographic problems—notably those of feeding populations periodically stricken by hunger, disease, and famine—were tied to larger questions about food supplies, property laws, national identity, and the theological imperatives that underwrote humankind’s claim to dominion over the animal kingdom. In this context, Cole’s study indicates, so-called “vermin” occupied liminal spaces between subject and object, nature and animal, animal and the devil, the devil and disease—even reason and madness. This verminous discourse formed a foundational category used to carve out humankind’s relationship to an unpredictable, irrational natural world, but it evolved into a form for thinking about not merely animals but anything that threatened the health of the body politic—humans, animals, and even thoughts.
Bringing together the latest empirical evidence with a discussion of sociological debates surrounding inequality, this book explores a broad range of inequalities in people's lives. As well as treating the core sociological topics of class, ethnicity and gender, it examines how inequalities are experienced across a variety of settings, including education, health, geography and housing, income and wealth, and how they cumulate across the life course. Richly illustrated with graphs and figures showing the extent of inequalities and the differences between social groups, the book demonstrates how people's lives are structured by inequalities across multiple dimensions of their lives. Throughout, the text pays attention to how we know what we know about inequality: what is measured and how, what is left out of the picture, and what implications this has for our understanding of specific inequalities. Importantly, the book also highlights the intersections between different sources or forms of inequality, and the ways that bringing an intersectional lens to bear on topics can highlight and challenge the assumptions about how they operate. Designed for second-year undergraduates and above, this book provides an engaging overview of social stratification and challenges readers to think about how inequalities are embedded across society.
This study explores the female experience of death in early modern England. By tracing attitudes towards gender through the occasion of death, it advances our understanding of the construction of femininity in the period. Becker illustrates how dying could be a positive event for a woman, and for her mourners, in terms of how it allowed her to be defined, enabled and elevated. The first part of the book gives a cultural and historical overview of death in early modern England, examining the means by which human mortality was confronted, and how the fear of death and dying could be used to uphold the mores of society. Becker explores particularly the female experience of death, and how women used the deathbed as a place of power from which to bestow dying maternal blessings, or leave instructions and advice for their survivors. The second part of the study looks at 'good' and 'bad' female deaths. The author discusses the motivation behind the reporting of the deaths and the veracity of such accounts, and highlights the ways in which they could be used for religious, political and patriarchal purposes. The third section of the book considers how death could, paradoxically, liberate a woman. In this section Becker evaluates the opportunity for female involvement in dying and posthumous rituals, including funeral rites and sermons, commemorative and autobiographical writing and literary legacies. While accounts of dying women largely underpinned the existing patriarchy, the experience of dying allowed some women to express themselves by allowing them to utilise an established male discourse. This opportunity for expression, along with the power of the deathbed, are the focus for this study.
This innovative book takes a practical, no-nonsense approach to all areas of undergraduate life, from getting started and maximizing learning opportunities to making choices, mastering time management and succeeding in exams. It also covers the wider aspects of the university experience including peer pressure, finances and grasping the opportunities available to undergraduates throughout their degree course. The book concludes with guidance on how to break into a career as a graduate.
Lucinda McCray Beier’s remarkable book, first published in 1987, enters the world of illness in seventeenth-century England, exploring what it was like to be either a sufferer or a healer. A wide spectrum of healers existed, ranging between the housewife, with her simple herbal preparations, local cunning-folk and bonestters, travelling healers, and formally accredited surgeons and physicians. Basing her study upon personal accounts written by sufferers and healers, Beier examines the range of healers and therapies available, describes the disorders people suffered from, and indicates the various ways sufferers dealt with their ailments. She includes several case-studies of healers and sufferers, and looks in detail at the ways in which women’s identities and duties were associated with childbirth, illness and healing. This title will be of interest to students of history.
Reviews the literature on income poverty, deprivation and social exclusion among the largest ethno-religious groups during the years 2001-2005. Considers employment outcomes, family structure and kinship, and eligibility and take-up of social security benefits.
A direct descendant of Charles Dickens delves into the many merry ways in which the author of A Christmas Carol celebrated & influenced the holiday. Dickens and Christmas is an exploration of the 19th-century phenomenon that became the Christmas we know and love today—and of the writer who changed, forever, the ways in which it is celebrated. Charles Dickens was born in an age of great social change. He survived childhood poverty to become the most adored and influential man of his time. Throughout his life, he campaigned tirelessly for better social conditions, including by his most famous work, A Christmas Carol. He wrote this novella specifically “to strike a sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor man’s child,” and it began the Victorian’s obsession with Christmas. This new book, written by one of his direct descendants, explores not only Dickens’s most famous work, but also his all-too-often overlooked other Christmas novellas. It takes the readers through the seasonal short stories he wrote, for both adults and children, includes much-loved festive excerpts from his novels, uses contemporary newspaper clippings, and looks at Christmas writings by Dickens’s contemporaries. To give an even more personal insight, readers can discover how the Dickens family itself celebrated Christmas, through the eyes of Dickens’s unfinished autobiography, family letters, and his children’s memoirs. Dickens and Christmas also explores the ways in which his works have gone on to influence how the festive season is celebrated around the globe. “Brilliant . . . a very readable book, a slice of social history involving a man who, more than anyone, encapsulates Christmas in literature.”—Books Monthly
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