Simon Smith - Böcker

Post-communist transformation in the former Soviet bloc has had a profound effect, not just in the political and economic sphere, but on all aspects of life. Although a great deal has been written about transformation, much of it has been about transformation viewed from the top, and little has been written about how things have changed for ordinary people at the local level.This book, based on extensive original research, examines the changes resulting from transformation at the local level in the form Czechoslovakia. It considers especially local democracy, social movements, and work collectives, and paints a picture of people gradually growing in self-confidence and taking more control of their communities, having lived for decades in a framework where so much was directed from the top.

Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England. Examining canonical and less familiar literary works alongside early modern texts ranging from medical treatises to conduct manuals via puritan polemic and popular ballads, the collection offers a new view of the senses in early modern England.The volume offers dedicated essays on each of the five senses, each relating works of art to their cultural moments, whilst elsewhere the volume considers the senses collectively in particular cultural contexts. It also pursues the sensory experiences that early modern subjects encountered through the very acts of engaging with texts, performances and artworks. This book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, to those working in sensory studies, and to anyone interested in the art and life of early modern England.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

What is Counterculture?– It’s an alternative lifestyle...– The ideas that spark a revolution...– A movement that changes the world...This new collection of essays celebrates the incredible originality of British post-war culture. British art, film, theatre, dance, literature and music have attracted international recognition, from the Angry Young Men to the Sex Pistols to Grayson Perry. Now gaming, the internet and social media enable creative communities to flourish and either fight for social justice – or just be entertained. Can we find the creative inspiration to succeed in a postcapitalist future?

Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.

This edited collection of essays brings together leading scholars of early modern drama and playhouse culture to reflect upon the study of playing and playgoing in early modern England. With a particular focus on the player-playgoer exchange as a site of dramatic meaning-making, this book offers a timely and significant critical intervention in the field of Shakespeare and early modern drama. Working with and reflecting upon approaches drawn from literary scholarship, theatre history and performance studies, it seeks to advance the critical conversation on the interactions between: players; play-texts; performance spaces; the bodily, sensory and material experiences of the playhouse; and playgoers' responses to, and engagements with, the theatre. Through alternative methodological and theoretical approaches, previously unknown or overlooked evidence, and fresh questions asked of long-familiar materials, the volume offers a new account of early modern drama and performance that seeks to set the agenda for future research and scholarship.

This edited collection of essays brings together leading scholars of early modern drama and playhouse culture to reflect upon the study of playing and playgoing in early modern England. With a particular focus on the player-playgoer exchange as a site of dramatic meaning-making, this book offers a timely and significant critical intervention in the field of Shakespeare and early modern drama. Working with and reflecting upon approaches drawn from literary scholarship, theatre history and performance studies, it seeks to advance the critical conversation on the interactions between: players; play-texts; performance spaces; the bodily, sensory and material experiences of the playhouse; and playgoers' responses to, and engagements with, the theatre. Through alternative methodological and theoretical approaches, previously unknown or overlooked evidence, and fresh questions asked of long-familiar materials, the volume offers a new account of early modern drama and performance that seeks to set the agenda for future research and scholarship.

Rapid advances in computing have enabled the integration of corpora into language teaching and learning, yet in China corpus methods have not yet been widely adopted. Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts aims to advance the state of the art in the use of corpora in applied linguistics and contribute to the expertise in corpus use in China.

Post-communist transformation in the former Soviet bloc has had a profound effect, not just in the political and economic sphere, but on all aspects of life. Although a great deal has been written about transformation, much of it has been about transformation viewed from the top, and little has been written about how things have changed for ordinary people at the local level.This book, based on extensive original research, examines the changes resulting from transformation at the local level in the form Czechoslovakia. It considers especially local democracy, social movements, and work collectives, and paints a picture of people gradually growing in self-confidence and taking more control of their communities, having lived for decades in a framework where so much was directed from the top.

Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.

Shakespeare | Sense explores the intersection of Shakespeare and sensory studies, asking what sensation can tell us about early modern drama and poetry, and, conversely, how Shakespeare explores the senses in his literary craft, his fictional worlds, and his stagecraft.15 substantial new essays by leading Shakespeareans working in sensory studies and related disciplines interrogate every aspect of Shakespeare and sense, from the place of hearing, smell, sight, touch, and taste in early modern life, literature, and performance culture, through to the significance of sensation in 21st century engagements with Shakespeare on stage, screen and page.The volume explores and develops current methods for studying Shakespeare and sensation, reflecting upon the opportunities and challenges created by this emergent and influential area of scholarly enquiry. Many chapters develop fresh readings of particular plays and poems, from Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, and The Tempest to less-studied works such as The Comedy of Errors, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, and Cymbeline.

Shakespeare | Sense explores the intersection of Shakespeare and sensory studies, asking what sensation can tell us about early modern drama and poetry, and, conversely, how Shakespeare explores the senses in his literary craft, his fictional worlds, and his stagecraft.15 substantial new essays by leading Shakespeareans working in sensory studies and related disciplines interrogate every aspect of Shakespeare and sense, from the place of hearing, smell, sight, touch, and taste in early modern life, literature, and performance culture, through to the significance of sensation in 21st century engagements with Shakespeare on stage, screen and page.The volume explores and develops current methods for studying Shakespeare and sensation, reflecting upon the opportunities and challenges created by this emergent and influential area of scholarly enquiry. Many chapters develop fresh readings of particular plays and poems, from Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, and The Tempest to less-studied works such as The Comedy of Errors, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, and Cymbeline.

The 21 censuses that have been conducted in Britain since 1801, have provided an invaluable insight into Britain’s social, political and economic history over the past 200 years. From their original purpose to assess how many men were fit for military duty in the Napoleonic wars, to being a necessary tool for determining government policy, the 10-yearly census return is a fascinating snapshot of the state of the population on a particular moment in each decade. The growth of Britain’s cities; the movement of population away from the countryside; the variety of people’s occupations; their way of life; and what religious beliefs they hold are all contained within the census reports. With the imminent publication of the 1921 census results, this will prove a useful introduction, both for those interested in general trends in social history, and those researching family history.

The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, and reportage from around the world. Its aim, to break down barriers and introduce the essence of the place. Packed with essays and investigative journalism; original photography and illustrations; charts, and unusual facts and observations, each volume offers a unique insight into a different culture, and how history has shaped the place into what it is today. Brimming with intricate research and enduring wonder, The Passenger is a love-letter to global travel.IN THIS VOLUME, Peter Schneider, Cees Nooteboom, Vincenzo Latronico among other German writers tell of a youthful city that doesn’t cling to its “poor but sexy” past. “Berlin is too big for Berlin” is the curious title of a book by the flaneur Hanns Zischler, who joked about the low population density of a city so spread-out and polycentric—one of the reasons why it still inspires feelings of freedom and space. But the phrase also carries a symbolic, broader meaning: how can a single city encompass and sustain such a weighty mythology as that of contemporary Berlin, “the capital of cool”? In order to find out, it is necessary to go back to the origins of today’s Berlin, when time seemed to have stopped. The scars of a century of war were still visible everywhere: coal stoves, crumbling buildings, desolate minimarts, not a working buzzer or elevator. To visit the city then was a hallucinatory experience, a simultaneous journey into the past and into the future. The city’s youth seemed to have appropriated—and turned into a positive—the famous phrase pronounced by Karl Scheffler at the beginning of the 20th century: “Berlin is a place doomed to always become, never be.”

Pack your bags and grab your gas mask - you're heading to the countryside! War has been declared in Britain and as a young girl living in London, the government are sending you to live with a family far away from the chaos that's ensuing in the city. Prepare to enter a new world of rationed supplies, hard chores and some unfriendly locals - you really wouldn't want to be a Second World War evacuee! The ever-popular You Wouldn't Want to Be series transports readers to some of the grisliest times and places in history, perfect for reluctant readers! The humorous, first-person narrative approach places children directly in the shoes of some of history's most unfortunate people ever to have lived, great for engaging students with the history curriculum and encouraging further non-fiction reading.

'The Waste Land may have been smoothed to automatic for the iPad, but Simon Smith's Gravesend makes the South-East coast of Dickens and Conrad a place worth missing connections again. All the digital landfill of one London poet's life is here, not to mention a book-stopping tribute to Cy Twombly. Line by line, Smith is one of the most exciting poet writing in England: if it weren't for the sweet Thames and the Little Chefs, he might pass for an American.' - Jeremy Noel-Tod

This selection of Smith's work features generous selections from Fifteen Exits, Reverdy Road, Mercury and London Bridge, alongside unavailable early work, and previously unpublished poetry from the sequences, More Ammo and Content. On first receiving Reverdy Road Schwabsky recalls: 'It was a revelation: resembling nothing I was familiar with in American poetry despite name-checking Jack Spicer and clear affinities with the New York School's love of speed, wit, and variousness of tone, it had a music I could tune right into, something very much its own though it has also helped me, I think, hear my way into the work of some of Smith's British contemporaries'.

'Municipal Love Poems' is Simon Smith's third collection from Shearsman Books, and is a companion volume to 'Last Morning' (Parlor Press) which appeared in early 2022."Simon Smith's Municipal Love Poems navigates between the intimately personal, and the impersonally public. Everywhere the expression is musical, presented in tight lines, phrases, couplets and tercets - never longer - although several of these poems sustain their intensity over pages. The form is 'micrometer right / to the exact fit'. Smith's question in these poems centres around song - sound, music, voice, tongue - 'how do you make the ordinary language sing?'. The poems are characterised by word play and slippage, where one word suggests the next, where the link is as much anagrammatic as it is imagistic. For Smith the lyric may be 'lyre', but it is also 'liar'. These poems move from the celebratory to the more complex elegiac realm of hauntology. Often the subject matter is 'municipal', and these poems are as likely to name BBC News 24, email, 3G, Apple, Monsanto, Isis, space junk and algorithms, as they are likely to include the pastoral indicators of herons, nightingales and blackbirds, bluebells, clouds, rain and moonlight. This is a dynamic, exciting, and attuned collection of poetry." -Andy Brown"In these poems, even as they deny the transcendence of love, hope lies in the small details of everyday life. The isolated lines and short stanzas of a voice with a catch in the throat produce poems and songs where love lies somewhere between a Hallmark card and Baudelaire. Poetry may be the result of inspiration, of taking things in, but, as Simon Smith tells us we also sing when we breathe out into the world." -Ian Davidson