Results by title

Examines how India’s cattle underwent profound changes during the years of British colonial rule.

Drawing on extensive, untapped archives, Modern Cowsand Bovine Transformations illustrates the radical remaking of India’s cattle against the backdrop of colonial policies, environmental change, and anticolonial politics. Historian David Arnold examines the history of cows in India from 1790 to 1950, focusing on science, technology, and medicine to provide a secular account of imperial animal husbandry.

Doing justice to the wide variety of Indian cattle breeds, Arnold unpacks “bovine technology” and its subaltern linkages, covering topics such as the role of cattle in agriculture and the military; haulage and transport; breeding strategies; bacteriology and nutrition science, and India’s milk revolution. He also examines the dispersal of Indian cattle around the globe and the role that colonial policies played in spreading knowledge of Indian cattle breeds and facilitating their export. Finally, he addresses the “cattle crisis” brought on by famines, droughts, and disease, and disputes between colonial rulers and Hindu nationalists. He concludes with the impact of World War II and Partition on bovine populations, illustrating the consequences for independent India’s attempts to restore the milk supply and rebuild cattle breeds while also respecting the Hindu cow protection agenda. In the end, Arnold argues, the history of cattle in India provides us with a new way of understanding the power of the colonial state, its ambitions to transform India, its appropriation of the Indian subcontinent’s resources, and the myriad contradictions of its policies.

The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity.

Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.

This book examines the entwined and simultaneous rise of graphic satire and cultures of paper money in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Asking how Britons learned to value both graphic art and money, the book makes surprising connections between two types of engraved images that grew in popularity and influence during this time. Graphic satire grew in visual risk-taking, while paper money became a more standard carrier of financial value, courting controversy as a medium, moral problem, and factor in inflation. Through analysis of satirical prints, as well as case studies of monetary satires beyond London, this book demonstrates several key ways that cultures attach value to printed paper, accepting it as social reality and institutional fact. Thus, satirical banknotes were objects that broke down the distinction between paper money and graphic satire ​altogether.

A surprising evaluation of the role of the physical body in the construction of British identity

Eighteenth-century medicine used the word “monstrosities” to describe physically deformed bodies—those irreducible to the “proper body” in their singular, sometimes startling difference. Considering British society in confrontation with such monstrosities, Paul Youngquist reveals the cultural politics of embodiment in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the histories of medicine, economics, liberalism, and nationalism, his work shows that bodies are not simply born but rather built by cultural practices directed toward particular social ends.

Collecting the interpretations of outstanding writers on the literature and history of modern Britain, this book deals with a rich variety of themes, some familiar, many unexpected, taking the reader on a highly engaging excursion through British life and intellectual biography. The scope includes not only the personalities, politics, and culture of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but also the interaction of British and other societies throughout the world.

Illuminating and astute, Movie Workers is a first-of-its-kind examination of the unsung women whose invisible work brought British filmmaking to the screen.