Duden asserts that the most basic biological and medical terms that we use to describe our own bodies--male and female, healthy or sick--are cultural constructions. To illustrate this, she delves into records of an 18th-century German physician who documented the medical histories of 1,800 women of all ages and backgrounds, often in their own words.
A NEW COMPANION TO VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE The Victorian period was a time of rapid cultural change, which resulted in a huge and varied literary output. A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture offers experienced guidance to the literature of nineteenth-century Britain and its social and historical context. This revised and expanded edition comprises contributions from over 30 leading scholars who, approaching the Victorian epoch from different positions and traditions, delve into the unruly complexities of the Victorian imagination. Divided into five parts, this new Companion surveys seven decades of history before examining the key phases in a Victorian life, the leading professions and walks of life, the major literary genres, the way Victorians defined their persons, homes, and national identity, and how recent “neo-Victorian” developments in contemporary culture reconfigure the sense we make of the past today. Important topics such as sexuality, denominational faith, social class, and global empire inform each chapter’s approach. Each chapter provides a comprehensive bibliography of established and emerging scholarship.
An abandoned English village holds generations of dark secrets that are about to be uncovered in this gothic thriller by the author of A Dark Dividing. Some fifty years ago, Priors Bramley was emptied of its residents—all for the sake of a Cold War experiment with chemical weapons that went wrong. Since then, the cordoned off town has been known at The Poisoned village. But the locals don’t know the half of it. Now, as The Poisoned Village is set to be reopened, its secrets are set to be unleashed. Tracing the contagion leads inexorably to the long-abandoned Cadence Manor, once home to generations of secretive, powerful bankers and their elegant wives. What happened there in the years before the World War I? What murderous madness infected the family? And what is the source of the eerie music that, even now, can be heard drifting down the crumbling village streets?
250 images from inside the human body, produced using the very latest photographic technology, with captions explaining how the images have been taken and what they represent.
Winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize Winner of the 2012 Costa Book of the Year Award The sequel to Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice. At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne's head? Bring Up the Bodies is one of The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2012, one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012 and one of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2012
Our bodies all have stories to tell - and who better to tell them than fifteen of the world's finest writers? Buried beneath layers of flesh, our hearts pump, our lungs inflate, our kidneys filter. These organs, and others, are essential to our survival but remain largely unknown to us. In Beneath the Skin, fifteen writers each explore a different body part: Naomi Alderman unravels the intestines and our obsession with food; Thomas Lynch celebrates the womb as a miracle; AL Kennedy explores the nose's striking ability to conjure memories; and Philip Kerr traces the remarkable history of brain surgery. The human stomach, we discover, contains as many brain cells as a cat has in its head. The lungs weigh about the same as a loaf of bread. A traumatic memory can show itself on the skin. Moving, comical and often unexpected, this is an awe-inspiring voyage through the mysterious landscape of our bodies. Based on the BBC Radio 3 series 'A Body of Essays'.
From occult rites in soft porn discos to Sooty the TV puppet's amphetamine problem, a feast of curiosities from British film and TV. The past, they say, is another country, but as seen through the lens of British film and television, it is a deeply strange and unfamiliar land. From occult rites in soft porn discos to Sooty the TV puppet's amphetamine problem, from Old Mother Riley, and Vampire Hunter to Vincent Price's heart-attack-inducing cookery program, in this book veteran curators William Fowler and Vic Pratt have delved deep into the archives of the British Film Institute to serve up a feast of curiosities that will tempt the palate of even the most jaded cinephile. Each chapter considers a key aspect of British life as seen through the psychotronic lens of pop culture. Do All the Right Noises and Under the Doctor tell us more about attitudes to marriage and sexuality than a sociological survey? Can American musicologist Alan Lomax capture a truer image of the weird rites of Cornish folk culture than a native Cornishman? Why was Peter Watkins's The War Game banned from TV screens? These crucial questions, and many more, will be answered, and awkward truths told, by our highly informed, erudite and amusing guides to this cultural hinterland.
Focusing on the liberating promise of public space, The Beach Beneath the Streets examines the activist struggles of communities in New York City—queer youth of color, gardeners, cyclists, and anti-gentrification activists—as they transform streets, piers, and vacant lots into everyday sites for autonomy, imagination, identity formation, creativity, problem solving, and even democratic renewal. Through ethnographic accounts of contests over New York City's public spaces that highlight the tension between resistance and repression, Shepard and Smithsimon identify how changes in the control of public spaces—parks, street corners, and plazas—have reliably foreshadowed elites' shifting designs on the city at large. With an innovative taxonomy of public space, the authors frame the ways spaces as diverse as gated enclaves, luxury shopping malls, collapsing piers and street protests can be understood in relation to one another. Synthesizing the fifty-year history of New York's neoliberal transformation and the social movements which have opposed the process, The Beach Beneath the Streets captures the dynamics at work in the ongoing shaping of urban spaces into places of repression, expression, control, and creativity.
A CURSED PLACE. A COLD CASE. A KILLER WHO LEFT NO TRACE. The huge International bestseller. Gripping, unputdownable and packed with twists, The Mountain is a thriller that you will never forget. "Can be compared (with no fear of hyperbole) to Stephen King and Jo Nesbø" - Massimo Vincenz, La Repubblica. Jeremiah Salinger blames himself. The crash was his fault. He was the only survivor. Now the depression and the nightmares are closing in. Only his daughter Clara can put a smile on his face. But when he takes Clara to the Bletterbach - a canyon in the Dolomites rich in fossil remains - he overhears by chance a conversation that gives his life renewed focus. In 1985 three students were murdered there, their bodies savaged, limbs severed and strewn by a killer who was never found. Salinger, a New Yorker, is far from home, and these Italian mountains, where his wife was born, harbour a close-knit, tight-lipped community whose mistrust of outsiders can turn ugly. All the same, solving this mystery might be the only thing that can keep him sane. Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis
'Remarkable' Robert Macfarlane 'Gorgeous' Amy Liptrot 'Urgent and nourishing' Jessica J. Lee Nina Mingya Powles first learned to swim in Borneo – where her mother was born and her grandfather studied freshwater fish. There, the local swimming pool became her first body of water. Through her life there have been others that have meant different things, but have still been, in their own way, home: from the wild coastline of New Zealand to a pond in northwest London. In lyrical, powerful prose, Small Bodies of Water weaves together memories, dreams and nature writing. Exploring everything from migration, food, family, earthquakes and the ancient lunisolar calendar, Nina reflects on a girlhood spent growing up between two cultures, and what it means to belong.
