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Gilberto Freyre was arguably the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Latin America. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalist, a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, a novelist, poet and artist. He was a cultural critic, with a good deal to say about architecture, past and present, and a public intellectual, whose pronouncements on race, region and empire – not to mention sex – made him famous in some quarters and notorious in others. The Masters and the Slaves, his most famous work, went through forty editions and has been translated into nine languages, made into a comic book and a television miniseries, while two directors (one of them Robert Rossellini) planned to turn it into a film. Yet he is not well known outside Brazil. Freyre was a major social thinker, one of the few who have not come from Western Europe or the USA, and this book argues that we should take account of the pioneering work of this gifted intellectual. His ideas are of particular relevance today for both political and academic reasons. His interest in gender, ethnicity, hybridity, identity, globalization, and capitalism ensures that his ideas are still provocative and topical, and ready to be introduced to a wider audience.

Modernism on Sea brings together writing by some of today's most exciting seaside critics, curators, filmmakers and scholars, and takes the reader on a journey around the coast of Britain to explore the rich artistic and cultural heritage that can be found there, from St Ives to Scarborough. The authors consider avant-garde art, architecture, film, literature and music, from the early twentieth century to the present, setting the arrival of modernism against the background of seaside tradition. From the cheeky postcards marvelled at by George Orwell to austere modernist buildings such as the De La Warr Pavilion; from the Camden Town Group's sojourn in Brighton to John Piper's 'Nautical Style'; from Paul Nash's surrealist benches on the promenade in Swanage to the influence of bunting and deckchairs on the Festival of Britain - Modernism on Sea is a sweeping tour de force which pays tribute to the role of the seaside in shaping British modernism. The essays in this book were inspired by the 'Modernism on Sea' conference that was held at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea in July 2007.

In this highly influential book, Ruth Levitas provides an excellent introduction to the meaning and importance of the concept of utopia, and explores a wealth of material drawn from literature and social theory to illustrate its rich history and analytical versatility. Situating utopia within the dynamics of the modern imagination, she examines the ways in which it has been used by some of the leading thinkers of modernity: Marx, Engels, Karl Mannheim, Robert Owen, Georges Sorel, Ernst Bloch, William Morris, and Herbert Marcuse. Utopia remains the most potent secular concept for imagining and producing a ‘better world’, and this classic text will be invaluable to students across a wide range of disciplines.

In 2011, New Zealand rugby fans erupted in celebration as the All Blacks narrowly defeated France to win the Rugby World Cup – the team’s first title since New Zealand hosted the inaugural tournament in 1987. In the years between these victories, the sport of rugby has been radically transformed from its amateur roots to a professional, global entertainment ‘product’. This book explores these developments and focuses initially on the New Zealand Rugby Union’s key deals with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas in the 1990s. The new pay-per-view era has curtailed the traditional ‘viewing rights’ of rugby fans to have live, free-to-air access to All Blacks test matches on public television. Adidas, meanwhile, has relentlessly commodified aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity in pursuit of local and global markets while exploiting labour in developing countries. Escalating merchandise costs and ticket prices have, at the same time, pushed the sport further out of the reach of ordinary New Zealanders. All of these issues, however, have not gone uncontested, and the authors argue that rugby remains a contested terrain in the face of a new set of limits and pressures in the global economy.

In the essays assembled in Clearing a Space, Chaudhuri draws on his own experiences to offer an acute exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to history. Often beginning with the personal, he inquires into the nature of the secular in India, into the history of such categories as the West, the foreign, the global and the exotic, and into the frequently torn and self-divided nature of modern Indian identity. With the same elegance and intelligence for which he has become known, Chaudhuri writes in these essays about Indian popular culture and high culture, travel and location in Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta and New York, empire and nationalism, Indian and Western cinema, the place of the everyday in Indian creativity, music, art and literature, politics, race, cosmopolitanism, urban landscapes, Hollywood and Bollywood, Anglophone India, internationalism, globalisation, the Indian English tradition that predates Rushdie, post-colonialism and much more.

When educated men in the seventeenth century thought about the Earth on which they stood, they might ask themselves the following questions. When was the world created? Why? How? Out of what? Where did people come from? Do we all share the same origin? How were other living things generated? Can species vary at all? What are fossils? The common answers to these questions were rooted in the Bible. The world was made around the year 4000 BC by the direct command of God; people all come from Adam and Eve; species do not vary and fossils are inorganic in origin. Most people assumed that the teachings of theology and of natural philosophy (what we would later term ‘science’) were both continuous and harmonious. But there were radical new answers to these questions of origin too. This is the story of how the emerging discipline of experimental philosophy reacted to the opening chapters of the book of Genesis to interpret the physical origin, present status, and final destination of the Earth. The Royal Society of London, created in 1660 ‘for the improving of natural knowledge’, was where these bold new answers to old questions were formulated, discussed, contested, and modified, by men such as Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley, and Thomas Burnet.

In this study of space and place, Sally Bayley examines the meaning of ‘home’ in American literature and culture. Moving from the nineteenth-century homestead of Emily Dickinson to the present-day reality of Bob Dylan, Bayley investigates the relationship of the domestic frontier to the wide-open spaces of the American outdoors. In contemporary America, she argues, the experience of home is increasingly isolated, leading to unsettling moments of domestic fallout. At the centre of the book is the exposed and often shifting domain of the domestic threshold: Emily Dickinson’s doorstep, Edward Hopper’s doors and windows, and Harper Lee’s front porch. Bayley tracks these historically fragile territories through contemporary literature and film, including Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford – works that explore local, domestic territories as emblems of nation. The culturally potent sites of the american home – the hearth, porch, backyard, front lawn, bathroom, and basement – are positioned in relation to the more conflicted sites of the American motel and hotel.

We know a great deal of what Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), Shakespeare’s near-contemporary and fellow literary mastermind, thinks. We know, because he tells us on page after page of his Essais, which have marked literature and thought since the European Renaissance and remain to this day compelling reading. It might seem surprising, with this wealth of evidence at hand, that Montaigne could prove so elusive in his thinking. Yet elusive he proves, as volatile as he is voluble. What, we are left wondering, does all that thinking amount to? How is it to be understood? And what value might it have for us? Montaigne has too often seen his thinking reduced to the expression of an ‘-ism’. Richard Scholar investigates the nature – and detail – of Montaigne’s evolving attempts to seek out that elusive thing called truth. Examining at close quarters passages from across the Essais, Scholar provides twenty-first-century readers with a companion guide to a text that is rooted in the time and place of its composition and yet continues to speak to the present, to haunt its readers, to ask them the questions that matter.

Modernism on Sea brings together writing by some of today’s most exciting seaside critics, curators, filmmakers and scholars, and takes the reader on a journey around the coast of Britain to explore the rich artistic and cultural heritage that can be found there, from St Ives to Scarborough. The authors consider avant-garde art, architecture, film, literature and music, from the early twentieth century to the present, setting the arrival of modernism against the background of seaside tradition. From the cheeky postcards marvelled at by George Orwell to austere modernist buildings such as the De La Warr Pavilion; from the Camden Town Group’s sojourn in Brighton to John Piper’s ‘Nautical Style’; from Paul Nash’s surrealist benches on the promenade in Swanage to the influence of bunting and deckchairs on the Festival of Britain – Modernism on Sea is a sweeping tour de force which pays tribute to the role of the seaside in shaping British modernism.

Everything you ever wanted to know about modern political theory, but never dared to ask … This book offers a concise introduction to the main ideas and arguments of the major political thinkers of modernity. It considers the following key thinkers: Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, J. S. Mill, Rousseau, Burke, Hegel and Marx. Perhaps the best way to understand the ideas of a thinker is to read from their work. This book devotes each chapter to the main writings of a single thinker, providing excerpts from their work and explaining their views in detail. Readers are not expected to have any previous knowledge of the writings of these eight political philosophers, but by the end they should have a solid grasp of their central ideas. This book serves as an essential guide to some of the most important writings on political philosophy of modern times.