New Books in British Studies

Persian Paradigms in Early Modern English Drama examines the concept of early modern globality and the development of European toleration discourse through English representations of Persian monarchs and Persianate conceptions of hospitality as paradigms of interreligious and intercultural hospitality for early modern and Shakespearean drama. English playwrights depict Persia and its legendary monarchs, such as Cyrus the Great, Xerxes, and Darius, as alternative figures of cosmopolitanism in the period. By focusing on an archive of plays of Persia staged between 1561 and 1696 in conversation with Shakespeare's works, European peace proposals, legislative acts of toleration, and global traditions of hospitality found in Zoroastrianism, Islam, and the Judeo-Christian traditions, this book pioneers an interdisciplinary methodology, introduces Persianate conceptual lenses for literary analysis of English literature, and constructs capacities to imagine multiple globalities existing in early modernity through a spectrum of imagined and lived experiences on stage and on the ground. Sheiba Kian Kaufman is an Assistant Professor of English at Saddleback College and Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of articles on Shakespeare, Persia, and early modern English drama. She has received fellowships from the UCLA Center for 17th-and 18th Century Studies, Clark Library, the UCI Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, the UCI Center in Law, Society, and Culture, Somerville College, Oxford, and the American Association of University Women. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Reconstruction explores the impact of the First World War on the built environment - examining the immediate effects and aftermath of the Great War on the architecture of Britain and the British empire during the interwar years. While much attention has been paid by historians to post-war architectural reconstruction after 1945, the earlier developments of the interwar period (1919-1939) have been comparatively overlooked. Sixteen essays written by leading and emerging scholars bring together new and diverse approaches to the period - a period of reconstruction, fraught with the challenges of modernity and democratisation. The collection considers the complex effects of reconstruction on design, discourse, practice, and professionalism, and deals with the full spectrum of architectural styles and approaches, privileging neither Modernism nor traditional styles. It brings to the fore social and political histories of the built environment, and makes important postcolonial interventions into the architectural history of British Imperialism at home and in its far reaches; in Egypt, South Africa, Australia, and India This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on cultural techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Stuart Carroll's Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence it engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or injustice. Through the examples of early modern Italy, Germany, France and England, we see when and why everyday animosities escalated and the attempts of the state to control and even exploit the violence that ensued. This book also examines the communal and religious pressures for peace, and how notions of good neighbourliness and civil order finally worked to underpin trust in the state. Ultimately, enmity is not a relic of the past; it remains one of the greatest challenges to contemporary liberal democracy.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Philip Stern places the corporation―more than the Crown―at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empire, raising questions about public and private power that were just as troubling four hundred years ago as they are today.Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan―a legal fiction with very real power.Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard UP, 2023) makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.Thomas Kingston is an early career scholar and a voracious reader (183 books in 2021). You can find his website at www.thomasekingston.com or reach him on twitter @thomasekingston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In this engaging discussion, D. J. Taylor, an esteemed literary critic and biographer, dives deep into George Orwell's life and legacy. He reveals new insights from recently available sources, shedding light on Orwell's family background and the significant impact of his time in Burma on his writing. Taylor also tackles Orwell's complex relationships, his evolution during the Spanish Civil War, and the political relevance of works like Animal Farm and 1984, which continue to resonate in today's world.

J. Barton Scott, an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and author of 'Slandering the Sacred,' delves into colonial India's blasphemy law, Section 295A, and its complex effects on free speech and religion. He examines the evolution of this law and its implications for contemporary debates on secularism and hate speech. Scott challenges the conventional view of 295A, framing it as a proto-hate speech statute rather than merely a blasphemy law. His insights reveal how colonial legal innovations influenced modern regulatory approaches to religious expression.

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived.It’s an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry’s book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Women on Philosophy of Art: Britain 1770-1900 (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first study of women's philosophies of art in long nineteenth-century Britain. It looks at seven women spanning the time from the Enlightenment to the beginning of modernism. They are Anna Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Frances Power Cobbe, Emilia Dilke, and Vernon Lee. The central issue that concerned them was how art related to morality and religion. Baillie and Martineau treated art as an agency of moral instruction, whereas Dilke and Lee argued that art must be made for beauty's sake. Barbauld, Jameson, and Cobbe thought that beauty and religion were linked, while other women believed that art and religion must be decoupled. Other topics explored are gender and genius, tragedy, literary realism, why we enjoy the sufferings of fictional characters, the hierarchy of the art-forms, whether art can transcend its historical circumstances, and critical issues around the artistic canon. Examining the print culture that made these women's interventions possible, this book shows that these women were doing a particular kind of philosophy of art, which was interdisciplinary and closely tied to artistic criticism and practice. The book traces how these seven women influenced one another, as well as engaging with their male contemporaries. But unlike their male interlocutors, these women have been unjustly left out of narratives about the history of aesthetics. By including these women, we can enrich and broaden our understanding of the history of philosophy of art.Alison Stone is a British philosopher. She is a Professor of European Philosophy in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In his new book B-Sides: A Flipsided History of Pop (Headpress, 2023), Andy Cowan explores a century of music b-sides. Pop music would be a different beast without the B-Side. Music history is riven with songs deemed throwaway that revolted against their lowly status and refused to be denied. Be it rock'n'roll's national anthem ('Rock Around The Clock'), disco's enduring game-changer ('I Feel Love') or hip-hop's most notorious dis track ('Hit 'Em Up'), all three started life as the so-called 'lesser' track on releases primed for maximum chart impact. But the B-side has done much more than make stars of Bill Haley, Donna Summer and 2Pac. Whether it was the Beatles, the Kinks and the Yardbirds in the 60s, Elton John, the Who and Queen in the 70s, Depeche Mode, the Cure and Prince in the 80s, or Oasis, Pulp and Radiohead in the 90s, the B-side allowed many of the world's greatest artists freedom to experiment with no commercial constraints in an age where physical product ruled the roost. A quickfire A-Z of 500+ flips, B-SIDE is the first serious examination of the format's covert role in pushing the musical envelope. Best read with one eye on YouTube and one ear on a streaming service, its revelations will prick up the ears of music fans of all persuasions.Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Stephanie Barczewski is an exploration of the evolution of the quintessentially English country house.Country houses have come to be regarded as quintessentially English, not only in terms of their architectural style but because they appear to embody national values of continuity and insularity. The histories of country houses and England, however, have featured episodes of violence and disruption, so how did country houses come to represent one version of English history, when in reality they reflect its full range of contradictions and complexities? This book explores the evolution of the country house, beginning with the violent impact of the Reformation and Civil War and showing how the political events of the eighteenth century, which culminated in the reaction against the French Revolution, led to country houses being recast as symbols of England’s political stability.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies