The author of this book attempts to reconcile academic research into aspects of labour history with the inherited knowledge of the patriotism and latent conservatism of many working class families. It addresses an issue which continues to puzzle researchers into working class life in the twentieth century: the contradiction of farmworkers who were active trade unionists volunteering to fight in World War I for a cause about which they knew little. The book also contends that the extraordinary growth of rural radicalism at the end of that war was diffused by popular conservatism. This "local...

This work analyzes Proust's reading of Victorian authors, and studies the ways in which they contributed to his monumental A la recherche du temps perdu. Eells illustrates how Proust made his fictitious painter, Elstir, into a master of ambiguity, by modeling his works on British art. As Proust aestheticized male and female homosexuality using references to British art and letters, Eells coins the term Anglosexuality to refer to intersexuality represented through intertextuality. Proust's Cup of Tea proves that Victorian culture and homoeroticism form one of the cornerstones of Proust's...

This title is an investigation into the concept of transubstantiation, using an approach which covers theoretical and philosophical treatments, questions of its ethical, political and aesthetic significance into the 20th century, and its use as a metaphor in the production and understanding of culture.

Feces, urine, flatus, phlegm, vomitus - unlike ourselves, our most educated forebears did not disdain these functions, and, further, they employed scatological references in all manner of works. This collection of essays was provoked by what its editors considered to be a curious lacuna: the relative academic neglect of the copious and ubiquitous scatological rhetoric of Early Modern Europe, here broadly defined as the representation of the process and product of elimination of the body's waste products. The contributors to this volume examine the many forms and functions of scatology as...

This study commences with a simple question: how did Russia matter to England in the age of William Shakespeare? In order to answer the question, the author studies stories of Lapland survival, diplomatic envoys, merchant transactions, and plays for the public theaters of London. At the heart of every chapter, Shakespeare and his contemporaries are seen questioning the status of writing in English, what it can and cannot accomplish under the influence of humanism, capitalism, and early modern science. The phrase 'Writing Russia' stands for the way these English writers attempted to advance...

This book presents a cross-disciplinary and methodologically innovative study, combining historical macro-sociology and a sociology of emotions with historical anthropology and cultural studies. Drawing on the concepts and theories of Norbert Elias on the Civilizing Process, it sets out to pin down and compare qualities that are simultaneously instantly recognisable and highly elusive, that is a kind of typical 'Englishness' and of 'Austrianness' that developed contemporaneously in the period up to the First World War. The authors chart the development of political authority structures in...

We Europeans is the first book-length study of the original mass observation project. It is also the first detailed historical study of the formation of ordinary people's 'racial' attitudes in Britain. Drawing upon historical, literary, cultural and anthropological approaches, this book examines the sources of cultural identity in Britain in the twentieth century, and how these were shaped through the influences of family, education, and everyday 'high' and 'low' culture. The examination focuses on the archives of the British social-anthropological organization Mass-Observation, and is the...