Hard Times in the Hometown tells the story of Kaminoseki, a small town on Japan’s Inland Sea. Once one of the most prosperous ports in the country, Kaminoseki fell into profound economic decline following Japan’s reengagement with the West in the late nineteenth century. Using a recently discovered archive and oral histories collected during his years of research in Kaminoseki, Martin Dusinberre reconstructs the lives of households and townspeople as they tried to make sense of their changing place in the world. In challenging the familiar story of modern Japanese growth, Dusinberre provides important new insights into how ordinary people shaped the development of the modern state. Chapters describe the role of local revolutionaries in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the ways townspeople grasped opportunities to work overseas in the late nineteenth century, and the impact this pan-Pacific diaspora community had on Kaminoseki during the prewar decades. These histories amplify Dusinberre’s analysis of postwar rural decline—a phenomenon found not only in Japan but throughout the industrialized Western world. His account comes to a climax when, in the 1980s, the town’s councillors request the construction of a nuclear power station, unleashing a storm of protests from within the community. This ongoing nuclear dispute has particular resonance in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis. Hard Times in the Hometown gives voice to personal histories otherwise lost in abandoned archives. By bringing to life the everyday landscape of Kaminoseki, this work offers readers a compelling story through which to better understand not only nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan but also modern transformations more generally.
Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. This compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it? This title is also available as Open Access.
To date there has been a significant gap in existing knowledge about the social history of music in Britain from 1950 to the present day. The three volumes of Live Music in Britain address this gap and do so through a unique prism—that of live music. The key theme of the books is the changing nature of the live music industry in the UK, focused upon popular music but including all musical genres. Via this focus, the books offer new insights into a number of other areas including the relationship between commercial and public funding of music; changing musical fashions and tastes; the impact of changing technologies; the changing balance of power within the music industries; the role of the state in regulating and promoting various musical activities within an increasingly globalised music economy; and the effects of demographic and other social changes on music culture. Drawing on new archival research, a wide range of academic and non- academic secondary sources, participant observation and a series of interviews with key personnel, the books have the potential to become landmark works within Popular Music Studies and broader cultural history. The third volume covers the period from Live Aid to Live Nation (1985– 2015).
The proem to Herodotus's history of the Greek-Persian wars relates the long-standing conflict between Europe and Asia from the points of view of the Greeks' chief antagonists, the Persians and Phoenicians. However humorous or fantastical these accounts may be, their stories, as voiced by a Greek, reveal a great deal about the perceived differences between Greeks and others. The conflict is framed in political, not absolute, terms correlative to historical events, not in terms of innate qualities of the participants. It is this perspective that informs the argument of The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. Becky Martin reconsiders works of art produced by, or thought to be produced by, Greeks and Phoenicians during the first millennium B.C., when they were in prolonged contact with one another. Although primordial narratives that emphasize an essential quality of Greek and Phoenician identities have been critiqued for decades, Martin contends that the study of ancient history has not yet effectively challenged the idea of the inevitability of the political and cultural triumph of Greece. She aims to show how the methods used to study ancient history shape perceptions of it and argues that art is especially positioned to revise conventional accountings of the history of Greek-Phoenician interaction. Examining Athenian and Tyrian coins, kouros statues and mosaics, as well as the familiar Alexander Sarcophagus and the sculpture known as the "Slipper Slapper," Martin questions what constituted "Greek" and "Phoenician" art and, by extension, Greek and Phoenician identity. Explicating the relationship between theory, method, and interpretation, The Art of Contact destabilizes categories such as orientalism and Hellenism and offers fresh perspectives on Greek and Phoenician art history.
This study aims to counter right-wing discourses of belonging. It discusses key theoretical concepts for the study of home, focusing in particular on Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic contributions. The book also maintains that postmodern celebrations of nomadism and exile tend to be incapable of providing an alternative to conservative, xenophobic appropriations of home. In detailed readings of one film and six novels, a view is developed according to which home, as a spatio-temporal imaginary, is rooted in our species being, and as such constitutes the inevitable starting point for any progressive politics.
The Renaissance and the Postmodern reconsiders postmodern readings of Renaissance texts by engaging in a dialectics the authors call comparative critical values. Rather than concede the contemporary hierarchy of theory over literature, the book takes the novel approach of consulting major Renaissance writers about the values at work in postmodern representations of early modern culture. As criticism seeks new directions and takes new forms, insufficient attention has been paid to the literary and philosophical values won and lost in the exchanges. One result is that the way we understand the logical connections, the literary textures, and the philosophical impulses that make up the literature of writers like Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton has fundamentally changed. Examining theoretical debates now in light of polemical controversies then, the book goes beyond earlier studies in that it systematically examines the effects of these newer critical approaches across their materialist, historicist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic manifestations. Bringing gravity and focus to this question of critical continuities and discontinuities, each chapter counterposes one major Renaissance voice with a postmodern one to probe these issues and with them the value of the cultural past. As voices on both sides of the historical divide illuminate key differences between the Renaissance and the Postmodern, a critical model emerges from the book to re-engage this period’s humane literature in a contemporary context with intellectual rigor and a renewed sense of cultural enrichment.
An utterly enjoyable voyage under Paris' - THE OLDIE 'Delightful and diverting... Martin is the most unpretentious and companionable of guides; the book is great fun' - LITERARY REVIEW 'An eclectic blend of engineering and travelogue, urban planning and anecdote... a sincere love letter' - THE ECONOMIST Andrew Martin has been described as 'the laureate of railways', having written many books with railway themes. Metropolitain: An Ode to the Paris Metro, is the first English history of the Metro for the general reader. Metropolitain is as stylish as the Metro itself and laced with cultural references. Andrew explains why Last Tango in Paris is a great Metro film, and what the Metro chase scene in the classic thriller, Le Samourai, says about Parisian culture. We also meet Andrew's half-English, half-French friend, Julian, who runs a society dedicated to Metro history. He tells Andrew, 'A Metro station is like the wine cellar of chateau, which is a very nice thing to be reminded of.' The book takes the reader on a constant tour of Paris, both underground and over. But Paris, and the Metro, is changing, undergoing a huge expansion. This, and the imminence of the Paris Olympics, make this a timely title.
Cape Towns public cultures can only be fully appreciated through recognition of its deep and diverse soundscape. We have to listen to what has made and makes a city. The ear is an integral part of the research tools one needs to get a sense of any city. We have to listen to the sounds that made and make the expansive mother city. Various of its constituent parts sound different from each other [T]here is the sound of the singing men and their choirs (teams they are called) in preparation for the longstanding annual Malay choral competitions. The lyrics from the various repertoires they perform are hardly ever written down. [] There are texts of the hallowed Dutch songs but these do not circulate easily and widely. Researchers dream of finding lyrics from decades ago, not to mention a few generations ago back to the early 19th century. This work by Denis Constant Martin and Armelle Gaulier provides us with a very useful selection of these songs. More than that, it is a critical sociological reflection of the place of these songs and their performers in the context that have given rise to them and sustains their relevance. It is a necessary work and is a very important scholarly intervention about a rather neglected aspect of the history and present production of music in the city.
Now appearing in its third edition, Martin Stephen's classic text and course companion to English literature has been thoroughly revised and updated, taking account of the changes which have occurred in the subject since publication of the second edition.
This book - for a decade the most highly regarded general introduction to Shakespeare - offers students a clear and practical method of approaching a Shakespeare play. This major new edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to include five new chapters that illustrate the nature and impact of the new approaches to Shakespeare that have swept through literary studies in recent years: structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, new historicism and cultural materialism.
History no longer belongs only to historians, but is woven into the fabric and discourse of daily life. This fresh and wide-ranging survey explores how new media and new historiographic approaches are dramatically expanding what we understand by “history” today. Controversy about the aims and limits of historical analysis has raged ever since the rise of postmodern history in the 1970s. But these debates have rarely affected the understanding of history in Central and Eastern Europe. The volume confirms the crucial importance of audiovisual and mass media, from film to television and radio to comics, but does not exclude literary scholars and art historians who are also rethinking their methods, taking note of their new consumers. If history formerly appeared to be a one-way transmission of expertise, it is increasingly a dynamic engagement between researchers and audiences.
UNRAVELLING AERIAL MYSTERIES OF THE PAST Charles Fort published his first and most influential book, The Book of the Damned, a century ago in 1919, collecting together many historical reports of strange aerial phenomena. Since the birth of the UFO controversy in 1947 Fort’s writings have been cited in countless books and web pages. Yet this is the first time in a hundred years that researchers have systematically verified the sources and content of every one of these oft-recycled stories, correcting many errors, placing each case in its historical context, and submitting it to a careful scientific investigation in an attempt to find a conventional answer. What were these reported phenomena? Is it possible to find non-exotic explanations? With the advantage of modern knowledge, methods, and resources, in most cases the answer proves to be yes. Some of the solutions found may shock the general reader and surprise even specialists. Yet in the end a few well-documented events remain unexplained.
Slavery's origins lie far back in the mists of prehistoric times and have spanned the globe, two facts that most history texts fail to address. This comprehensive volume provides a historical overview of slavery through the ages, from prehistoric times to the modern day, while detailing the different forms, the various sources, and the circumstances existing in different countries and regions. As a broad reference source, it provides a complete look at slavery by discussing the causes and cures, as well as the plight of those who fought for and against it. Every public, college, and high school library will want this available for students and other researchers.
Religion is at the heart of such ongoing political debates in Japan as the constitutionality of official government visits to Yasukuni Shrine, yet the very categories that frame these debates, namely religion and the secular, entered the Japanese language less than 150 years ago. To think of religion as a Western imposition, as something alien to Japanese reality, however, would be simplistic. As this in-depth study shows for the first time, religion and the secular were critically reconceived in Japan by Japanese who had their own interests and traditions as well as those received in their encounters with the West. It argues convincingly that by the mid-nineteenth century developments outside of Europe and North America were already part of a global process of rethinking religion. The Buddhist priest Shimaji Mokurai (1838–1911) was the first Japanese to discuss the modern concept of religion in some depth in the early 1870s. In his person, indigenous tradition, politics, and Western influence came together to set the course the reconception of religion would take in Japan. The volume begins by tracing the history of the modern Japanese term for religion, shūkyō, and its components and exploring the significance of Shimaji’s sectarian background as a True Pure Land Buddhist. Shimaji went on to shape the early Meiji government’s religious policy and was essential in redefining the locus of Buddhism in modernity and indirectly that of Shinto, which led to its definition as nonreligious and in time to the creation of State Shinto. Finally, the work offers an extensive account of Shimaji’s intellectual dealings with the West (he was one of the first Buddhists to travel to Europe) as well as clarifying the ramifications of these encounters for Shimaji’s own thinking. Concluding chapters historicize Japanese appropriations of secularization from medieval times to the twentieth century and discuss the meaning of the reconception of religion in modern Japan. Highly original and informed, Shimaji Mokurai and the Reconception of Religion and the Secular in Modern Japan not only emphasizes the agency of Asian actors in colonial and semicolonial situations, but also hints at the function of the concept of religion in modern society: a secularist conception of religion was the only way to ensure the survival of religion as we know it today. In this respect, the Japanese reconception of religion and the secular closely parallels similar developments in the West.
This is the fourth volume of a detailed play-by-play catalogue of drama written by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish authors during the 110 years between the English Reformation to the English Revolution, covering every known play, extant and lost, including some which have never before been identified. It is based on a complete, systematic survey of the whole of this body of work, presented in chronological order. Each entry contains comprehensive information about a single play: its various titles, authorship, and date; a summary of its plot, list of its roles, and details of the human and geographical world in which the fictional action takes place; a list of its sources, narrative and verbal, and a summary of its formal characteristics; details of its staging requirements; and an account of its early stage and textual history. Volume IV covers the period during which dramatic satire emerged, as well as the opening of the original Globe theatre in London.
Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,5, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: I want to start my thesis by briefly discussing one of the seminal works on historical gender studies, Thomas Laqueur’s "Making Sex". He argues that based on the publications of an old Greek physician named Galen, women and men were regarded as the same sex in Europe for about 2,000 years from the second century AD to circa 1800. He claims that male and female genitals were depicted and regarded as the same, with the only difference that the female genitalia were inside whereas the male genitalia were outside. Men and women were supposed to be different in degree but not in kind. Women were considered an imperfect version of men, since they were cooler, wetter, and more passive. Thus, the supposed sameness of the physical characteristics of men and women did by no means promise equality of the sexes; on the contrary, it underpinned the hierarchy and male superiority. Furthermore, women stood for fleshiness and desire. The connection of passiveness and desire as female traits seems controversial but is typical of the time. The idea of lustful, desirous, and uncontrollable women changed quite a lot later, especially in the 19th century, when women were usually supposed to have no or a very low sexual drive. Although we also find “the fallen woman” in 18th and 19th century literature, who is unable to control her sexual passion. The concept of a promiscuous female sexuality in Shakespeare’s time might seem a bit odd to us today, but if we look at the plays, we find exactly this idea of women being lustful and uncontrollable for men. Laqueur claims that “Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented”. This means that Shakespeare’s contemporaries would still have had an ancient understanding of sex (or gender) differences. Although the concept of gender was not yet developed in Shakespeare’s time, I believe it is useful and justifiable to talk about gender relations. It is inevitable to take a modern perspective, and the concept of gender is not restricted to men and women of the 20th and 21st centuries; it is definitely applicable to Shakespeare’s characters, too, as I will try to show in this thesis.
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