Don Chapman - Böcker

In the 1850s a craze swept through the wardrobes of the women of British and American society. These 'bloomers', wearing their new loose-fitting 'Turkish dress', represented a turn against the painful and unhealthy fashions of the Victorian hey-day with its corsets and bindings. But it was more than that: with the newspapers everywhere decrying this new style of dress, bloomers became an overnight feminist firestorm. These early pioneers had set in motion a form of social protest in which everyday dress – in public and in the home – became a political act.Don Chapman traces the development of this new movement through the changing fashions. With every new style of dress, there came predictable outcries of disapproval and satire from the world's press. Slowly, inch by inch and stitch by stitch, the women made progress. At the turn of the century, campaigners such as Lady Harberton championed the new 'Rational Dress Movement', adroitly rebranding the movement as a rational cause – the buzzword of the day for all right-thinking individuals – and thereby giving the case for the divided skirt a new scientific justification. Her movement would scandalize and inspire many, from H. G. Wells to George Bernard Shaw. Merging with the early Suffragist cause in 1907, the story of women's fashion takes in issues as various as the working conditions of garment makers, female prostitution and the nineteenth-century slave trade. Wearing the Trousers charts the progression from the corseted lady at a remove from the Establishment to the liberated woman at work in a modern, more inclusive society.

This book is a detailed examination of social connections to language evaluation with a specific focus on the values associated with both prescriptivism and descriptivism. The chapters, written by authors from many different linguistic and national backgrounds, use a variety of approaches and methods to discuss values in linguistic prescriptivism. In particular, the chapters break down the traditional binary approaches that characterize prescriptive discourse to create a view of the complex phenomena associated with prescriptivism and the values of those who practice it. Most importantly, this volume continues serious academic conversations about prescriptivism and lays the foundation for continued exploration.

Don Chapman tells for the first time the story of the "Oxford Playhouse", to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of its present home in Beaumont Street, Oxford. He traces the history of this great theater back to its earliest roots in a production of Agamemnon in 1880 which led to the founding of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, the rebuilding of Oxford's New Theater and, eventually, the launch of the Playhouse itself. Jane Ellis was the 'young, obscure actress' from London who made it happen, motivated by a desire for a venue where she herself might play decent roles. She asked J.B. Fagan (who was to produce the first successful Chekhov play in England) to be the theater's first director. Subsequent directors who made their mark included Stanford Holme, Eric Dance (who rebuilt the theater in Beaumont Street in 1938), Frank Shelley, Peter Hall, Peter Wood, Frank Hauser, Minos Volanakis, Gordon McDougall, Nicolas Kent and Richard Williams.The book also celebrates a galaxy of actors including Flora Robson, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, Ronnie Barker, Judi Dench and Helena Bonham-Carter and records the first steps of countless students from Peter Brook to Maria Aitken, Diana Quick to Rowan Atkinson, including a few, like Edward Heath and Joanna Trollope, who gained distinction in other spheres.Most fascinating is the role of the University of Oxford. Using the legal powers invested in Vice Chancellors, Dr Lewis Farnell almost stifled the Playhouse at birth in 1923. And even from 1961 to 1987, when the Playhouse was the University Theater, Dr Chapman describes its relationship with the University as 'a shotgun marriage that ended in a messy divorce'.Since reopening in 1991 following a four-year closure, the theater has flourished as an independent trust with support from the University, Arts Council England and other donors, staging a varied program to delight audiences old and new and benefiting in the process from the sea change in academic attitudes to drama. Thea Shurrock, Rosamund Pike and Holly Kendrick are just three of more recent students who have followed in the footsteps of Michael Palin, Imogen Stubbs and Mel Smith and made names for themselves.