Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Publications
  3. Publishing partners
  4. Boydell & Brewer
  5. Content listing

Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

73812 results in Boydell & Brewer

Page 1548 of 3691

  • Introduction Charlemagne in England: Owning the Legend

  • Phillipa Hardman, Marianne Ailes
  • Book:
    The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    16 May 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 1-31

  • Summary

    THE idealized figure of Charlemagne (742–814), ‘Christian Emperor, mighty conqueror and patron of learning’, has long been associated with a European sense of identity. A succession of recent scholarly and popular histories of Charlemagne stress this concern in their subtitles – ‘Father of a Continent’, ‘The Formation of a European Identity’ – or make it explicit in their introductory pages. Charlemagne's modern role as embodying the idea of European integration is seen in diverse invocations, from the name of the building that houses the European Commission (the Charlemagne building) to the prize awarded for ‘distinguished service in the cause of Europe and European unification’ (the International Charlemagne Prize), though behind this focus on Charlemagne as icon of Europeanness is a history of conflicting attempts to appropriate his founding status for both German and French national identities. Charlemagne's relation to England has seemed less obvious: indeed, on 9 July 1960, contemplating the reasons for a possible British application to join the Common Market, Harold Macmillan confided to his diary his fear of a future ‘caught between a hostile (or at least less and less friendly) America and a boastful, powerful “Empire of Charlemagne” – now under French but later bound to come under German control’. Here the exclusively continental identity of a political alliance imagined in terms of Charlemagne's empire seems logically opposed to British involvement. Half a millennium earlier, Caxton, though celebrating both as Christian Worthies, set the native Englishness of Arthur, ‘kyng and Emperour of the same [royame of Englond]’, against the alterity of Charlemagne's identity as ‘kyng of fraunce & emperour of Rome’; and one modern scholar has noted as an ‘amusing irony’ (in view of ‘the age-old and perennial animosity between France and its cross-Channel neighbours’) the fact that the most famous literary Charlemagne text, ‘the French national epic’, is known from its English provenance as ‘the Oxford Song of Roland’, while another ponders the ‘paradox’ inherent in ‘the production of the Middle English Charlemagne romances … during a period of prolonged Anglo-French hostility’. However, this sense of strangeness fluctuates according to historical distance and political perspective. Fifty-odd years earlier than Caxton, Lydgate, in his ‘Ballade to King Henry VI upon his Coronation’, addressed Henry as a descendant of both St Edward and St Louis, and immediately invoked the parallel paired kings, ‘knightly’ Arthur and ‘Charlles of gret prys’ (l. 13), as his twin secular patrons.

  • 15 - The Summer before the Dark: Yachting in Post-Modern Times, 1990–2007

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 350-364

  • Summary

    The Summer …

    This time period was characterised by the accelerating development of neo-liberal capitalism: the unfettering of restraints on big business, through laissez-faire policies, privatisation and deregulation. This policy was developed and carried out by Ronald Reagan, President of the United States from 1980 to1988, and Margaret Thatcher, British prime minister from 1979 to 1990.

    On the surface, the yachting scene of the 1980s and 1990s appeared healthy. Marinas were full. A small number of companies gained control of most of the marinas, the industry leader being Marina Development Limited (MDL), with eighteen marinas in the UK. Prices were increased regularly. The pricing was such that only those in good jobs could afford their berths, but there were enough people willing and able to pay marina prices to keep them full.

    Yachtspeople benefited, as competition was now international. They could get more boat for their money by buying French made boats. Jeanneau introduced the Sun-Fizz, a 44 foot Cruiser, in the early 1980s and Dufour introduced their Gib'Sea range in the mid-1980s, with aggressive marketing and promotion in the UK. Another successful French range was the Feelings, made by Kirie of Les Sables D'Olonne (later taken over by Kelt Yachts), coming onto the market in 1980. Beneteau, with its factory line production of Firsts, became the market leader.

    Internet shopping was coming online by the end of the 1980s, obviating the need to be overcharged by the local monopoly chandler. With the deregulation of industry, the first years of neo-liberal capitalism seemed liberating. People talked of the age being ‘ironic’, ‘fragmenting into minority interests’ and tolerant of experimentation in the arts and in gender behaviour. This chapter shows that yachting reflected this diversity and diversification.

    The Second Generation of Women Racers

    There were international races around the world, such as the three-yearly, crewed Whitbread, which started in 1973, and which Volvo took over in 2001, and the brutal, single-handed, non-stop Vendée Globe. The Vendée, founded by Philippe Jeantot, was first raced in 1989 and then four-yearly from 1992.

    With the much greater range of lighter materials, a new generation of successful women sailors emerged. Whereas the previous generation of women racers could not compete with the men's physical strength, this new generation could. The outstanding example was Ellen MacArthur.

  • Conclusion: The Reality of Fictional Suicides

  • Robert Blankenship
  • Book:
    Suicide in East German Literature
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    01 September 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 138-143

  • Summary

    Und käm es heraus übers Jahr Daß der Selbstmord kein Selbstmord war

    [And what if it comes out over the years That the suicide was no suicide]

    —Wolf Biermann

    SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK BEGINS HIS MONOGRAPH Welcome to the Desert of the Real by relating a joke from the GDR in which a person who is sent to Siberia promises to write to his friend and tells him that if the letter is written in blue ink everything in it is true. If the letter is written in red ink the statements made in the letter are false. The letter arrives in blue ink and explains how wonderful Siberia is and lists many nice things that are readily available in Siberia. In conclusion, the friend writes that the only thing not available in Siberia is red ink. Žižek asserts that the punchline of the joke indicates that the friend in Siberia found a way to communicate the incommunicable. The letter-writer, lacking the language needed to express his discomfort, finds an alternative way of communicating. While Žižek relates the joke in order to describe matters at work in twenty-first century, Western capitalism, it can be reapplied to the GDR to describe literary works from the GDR that make use of the theme of suicide. That is, fictional suicide in GDR narrative fiction is a literary theme that communicates ideas that are otherwise difficult to communicate. This study demonstrates that those suicides allude to suicides from canonical works of literature in the wrong color ink, as it were. Unlike the letter written in blue ink, however, these works are not merely tricks to fool the censors (suicide would likely not have been the best way to do that)—they are rich in interpretive potential. Above all, they are literary. Not only do they broach the taboo topic of suicide, but they perform transformative readings of GDR literary heritage, revealing the slippery power of literature, and leading the sclerotic literary heritage of the GDR to destroy itself.

    Read narratologically, the fictional suicides examined in this study together comprise a literary historical trajectory. The ways in which those fictional suicides transform earlier texts that deal with suicide become increasingly abstract. Before the 1970s they are richly literary, but not primarily transtextual.

  • 3 - Las Rimas de Tomé de Burguillos

  • Lindsay G. Kerr
  • Book:
    Luis de Góngora and Lope de Vega
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 87-128

  • Summary

    Lope de Vega's Parody

    In 1634, the year before his death, Lope de Vega published an anthology of poetry in the parodic mode, comprising 161 sonnets, 11 rimas sacras, various espinelas and canciones and the seven-silva, feline mock epic La Gatomaquia: the Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos. The pseudonym was not a new creation, and the true author of the text was a thinly veiled secret, which raises some interesting questions about authorial intent and subsequent textual interpretations. Why would a poet like Lope de Vega, who sought to be taken seriously as the principal lyric poet of his age, and to reach the pinnacle of Parnassus during his poetic career, turn to parody towards the end of his life? Is it the culminating step in a parodic trajectory as it appears to be in Góngora, or does it carry out some other function? Felipe Pedraza Jiménez highlights Lope's late parodic poetry as a product of his état d'esprit, as well as a reaction to the socio-political forces of seventeenth-century Spain: ‘La poesía que antes le ha servido para expresar entusiasmos (eróticos, patrióticos, etc.), le ha de servir en los últimos años de su vida para “templar tristezas”’. In this chapter I will examine how and why the disillusionment and melancholy so often associated with ‘late’ Lope is manifest in parody, focusing on the poet's use of various ideologies (imperial or religious, for example) and interactions with classical philosophy and mythology. I will also examine the apparent sliding scale of ‘reality’ in relation to Lope's use of a pseudonym or alter ego, particularly concerning a perception of the ‘low’ or vulgar as more realistic than a highly ornate or idealised style.

    The subjects of his parody are broad in spite of the uniform genre of Burguillos's Rimas (the sonnet is the dominant form), ranging from what Antonio Carreño calls ‘los ya vacíos referentes de la lírica renacentista’ to the obscure language of Góngora's ‘pájaros nuevos’, and including his own previous works, both dramatic and lyric. Of course, Lope's acerbic wit is not only unleashed against the moribund poetics of Petrarchism and the magniloquent obscurity of gongorine imitators, but frequently operates to propel his poetry firmly up the satirical spectrum.

  • 16 - After the Crash

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 365-379

  • Summary

    Billy Connolly, in his funeral oration for the shipbuilders’ union leader, Jimmy Reid, on 20 August, 2010, described walking through Govan, Glasgow, with him. Connolly recalled Reid's words:

    You look at these housing estates, and these high rise flats. Look at all these windows, he says, and behind every one of those windows, there's somebody who might be a horse-jumping champion, a Formula One racing champion, a yachtsman of great degree, but you'll never know because he'll never step on a yacht or in a Formula One car, or that. He'll never get the chance.

    In this chapter, I bring the narrative of British yachting into the present and look at pointers towards its future. While I am confident of the trends I suggest, I can be less precise about timing, and recognise that there will be some regional, and even local, variations.

    The 2008 Banking Crisis and financial crash were caused by reckless mortgage lending and other risky financial behaviours by British bankers. The taxpayers had to lend (give?) billions of pounds to the banks to bail them out, resulting in the longest economic slump in modern British history.

    The grounds for such an event had been created from the 1980s onwards, as successive governments believed that the economy could only flourish if they gave the multinationals all they demanded in terms of a docile workforce. This required that they provided a cheap workforce, and a fearful one, by removing the financial and legal safety nets for anyone who was not working – mothers who believe that bringing their children up is a full-time job, the poor, the ill, the old.

    The impact of political or social issues on yachting is not discussed in the yachting press. There are three large-selling magazines in the United Kingdom: Practical Boat Owner, catering for the smaller boat sailor who wishes to undertake his own maintenance; Yachting Monthly, aimed at the cruising, middle-size, yacht owner; and Yachting World, concerned with yacht racing and super yachts. All are owned by the same company, IPC (International Publishing Corporation, now part of Time Inc. UK), and editorial staff move freely between them. Given this near monopoly situation, there is a lack of alternative views or vision.

  • 5 - Last Laughs

  • Lindsay G. Kerr
  • Book:
    Luis de Góngora and Lope de Vega
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 167-192

  • Summary

    Hay que tener cuidado al elegir a los enemigos porque uno termina pareciéndose a ellos.

    Jorge Luis Borges

    The parodic poetry written by Luis de Góngora and Lope de Vega at the end of their professional careers and in the winter of their years unquestionably brings forth something new, built from the bricks of ancient and contemporary poetic monuments. These poets utilise parody as a process that, paradoxically, ends and begins simultaneously in order to engage with the literary past, question its legacy, and redirect future poetics. Góngora's mytho-parodic trajectory and comic culmination, and Lope's final theatrical extravaganza as Tomé de Burguillos, reveal a wealth of common practices. Primarily, against the traditional critical tendency to pit our authors against one another, this comparative study has evaluated the methodologies followed by Góngora and Lope, noting correspondences and assessing whether and how these are paradigmatic of a late style. With this in mind, I will discuss the metapoetics of the performed self, particularly in relation to the apparent presence or absence of a recognisable self in the poetry. One of the most pronounced differences between the poetry of Góngora and Lope is the perceived impersonality or fragmentation of the poetic voice in the work of Góngora, and in Lope, a body of work constructed from the pure, visceral, lived experience of its author. In my view, these competing methods of composition are in fact a false dichotomy. Isabel Torres points out that ‘the generic and rhetorical construction of lyric subjectivity in Góngora's poetry is now generally recognised, but without discounting a connection with history’. In Lope's case, the critical pursuit of biographical material in his poetry is perhaps proof positive of an ostensibly graspable, tangible self, one that is problematised by the ambiguity of Tomé de Burguillos. My interrogation, however, does not merely constitute an argument for the presence of Góngora, or for the absence of Lope, but that both poets work to conjure up a self or selves from a multitude of sources. Their late parodic works are created essentially as living monuments to poetry, buttressed by the self, in which disparate modes of being vie for supremacy, rendering it impossible to identify one single voice. Arguments for Góngora's emotional absence are undermined by assumptions of aesthetic coldness, for the poetic monument is designed to convert aesthetic energy into emotion in the reader.

  • 1 - Electricity, Infrastructure & Dams in Africa

  • Christopher D. Gore
  • Book:
    Electricity in Africa
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 12-26

  • Summary

    In 2002, only slightly more than 20% of sub-Saharan Africa's entire population had access to electricity, compared to 85% in North Africa, Latin America, East Asia and the Middle East, and 40% in South Asia (Saghir 2005, p. 9). By 2009, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that slightly more than 30% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa had access to electricity (IEA 2011). In many countries, such as Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo and Burkina Faso, less than 15% of populations had access to electricity; only four countries in sub-Saharan Africa of twenty-eight countries documented by the IEA in its 2011 World Energy Outlook – Ghana, Mauritius, Nigeria and South Africa – had access-to-electricity rates greater than 50% (IEA 2011). ‘There is a chronic shortage of electricity supply in at least 25 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. At 68,000 megawatts (MW), the entire generation capacity of the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa is no more than that of Spain’ (ICA 2010). In 2007, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) required $7 billion a year in investment solely for new power generation capacity; if financing for transmission and distribution systems are added, annual investment would need to increase by $30 billion per year (Vedavalli 2007, p. 348).

    The gulf between demand for electricity and supply in sub-Saharan Africa has reinvigorated the international community's focus on investments in large-scale electricity infrastructure. In light of the global financial situation that emerged in 2009, the Infrastructure Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and other bilateral agencies established new financing instruments for infrastructure that had a principal aim of facilitating private investment at a time when access to capital was becoming more challenging. Examples of financing instruments included the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA), the African Development Bank's Emergency Liquidity Facility, the World Bank's Infrastructure Recovery and Assets (INFRA) platform, and the IFC's Infrastructure Crisis Facility. In June 2013, US President Barack Obama also announced $7 billion in financial support and loan guarantees for mobilizing investments in and access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. Under ‘Power Africa’ the US Government aimed to work with the private sector, governments and international institutions to add upwards of 10,000 megawatts of electricity to the sub-continent by 2018.

  • 10 - The Golden Age of Yachting, 1880–1900 Part One: The Rich

  • Mike Bender
  • Book:
    A New History of Yachting
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 177-208

  • Summary

    … on one occasion when asked the Princes of Wales’ whereabouts, the Kaiser replied that his cousin was sailing with his grocer, a reference to Sir Thomas Lipton. The Prince is rumoured to have shown his feeling about this remark by kicking a silver cup he had just won, which had been presented by the Kaiser, off the side of his boat.

    During the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, yachting achieved a higher level of social and cultural – and even, to a limited extent, political – centrality than before or since. The next two chapters concern this centrality and examine it in six different areas:

  • • the sea, especially the English Channel, was central to the nation's anxieties and its imagery; and this importance extended to those who sailed on it, be they the Navy, merchant seamen or yachtsmen

  • • the leisure activity of the monarchy and the very rich

  • • the growth of yacht racing, as rich owners hired the best yacht designers, such as the Fifes of Fairlie and George Watson of Glasgow, to create winning yachts for them

  • • the attention paid to yachting in newspapers, magazines and in the cultural media – photography, art and novels

  • • the development of small boat racing. In this chapter, I discuss the development of keel-boat racing

  • • a final factor, which I discuss in the following chapter, was the arrival of the dinghy, which allowed much cheaper sailing and which, because of its lightness, made successful small boat racing feasible for women sailors.

    • Yachting, Patriotism and the Navy

    One major reason for the centrality of yachting was its links with the monarchy and the Navy. After the 1870s, national identity and the nautical became increasingly fused into a complex of public emotions concerning patriotism, the Navy and Englishness. For the empire to flourish, our seaborne trade required safe passage anywhere around the world. Naval supremacy was seen as the key to winning a major war, if not to the nation's very existence. British wealth, security and prestige depended on the effectiveness of our Navy.

  • 1 - Acculturating Charlemagne: The Insular Literary Context

  • Phillipa Hardman, Marianne Ailes
  • Book:
    The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    16 May 2018
    Print publication:
    31 August 2017, pp 32-109

  • Summary

    The Circulation of French-Language Charlemagne Material in England

    Reception of the Chanson de geste

    THE Matter of France entered insular literary consciousness largely through two genres: the chanson de geste and the chronicle, or rather the pseudo-chronicle in the text of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle. If the latter apparently brought a respectable clerical imprimatur, the former might be expected to have had more popular appeal. While only a restricted group of texts became fully appropriated into Middle English popular culture through translation into Middle English, there is evidence of much wider dissemination of the legends of Charlemagne in French-language texts.

    The chansons de geste are more distinct by form than any other French narrative genre. After some early experimentation in versification, by the middle of the twelfth century most French narratives were written in rhyming couplets. The chansons de geste, however, retained the verse form of the earliest surviving examples of the genre, namely the laisse, a strophe of variable length united by assonance or rhyme and with a line length of ten or twelve syllables. The basic unit of meaning is the hemistich. The narrative is related using an episodic structure. With these formal features we find a characteristic discourse related to the oral origins and dissemination of the chanson de geste. This discourse can be epitomised as using different forms of repetition: formulaic lines and half-lines, different patterns of repetition to link the laisses (including reprise, picking up some of the sense of one laisse in the following one), and different forms of parallelism.

    Some aspects of the reception of the chanson de geste in the insular context, and in particular in England, have long puzzled critics. All of the oldest chansons de geste survive only in Anglo-Norman manuscripts. The Chanson de Roland, the iconic text of French nationalism, and in particular of nineteenth-century French nationalism,3 survives in its oldest known form in an Anglo-Norman manuscript, as noted above; this version of the text is known as ‘the Oxford Roland’, because of its modern resting place, the Bodleian Library. Almost as venerable (but set in the reign of Charlemagne's son Louis), the only complete text of the non-cyclical version of the Chanson de Guillaume is an Anglo- Norman manuscript (BL MS Add. 38663); a further fragment discovered in St Andrews University is also Anglo-Norman.

Page 1548 of 3691