Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        2024

        My Italy with Berlusconi

        And what has become of it. Essays, conversations, reports

        by Michaela Namuth

        The political era of media entrepreneur and multi-billionaire Silvio Berlusconi began in 1994. German journalist Michaela Namuth also arrived in Rome at that time. He became prime minister, she became a freelance correspondent for various newspapers. She spent the long period of his government with him. During this time, the populist Berlusconi not only paved the way for a far-right government, he was also an ice-breaker for other right-wing populists in Europe and elsewhere. What else happened during and after Berlusconi's time in power is told in 20 chapters of articles, reports and interviews. The result is a colourful mosaic of contemporary Italy. It is about publishing, design, crime fiction, the mafia, a women's factory, the south and Nutella. Under Berlusconi, the country has changed. Many speak of “Berlusconisation”, by which they mean the gradual weakening of democracy. It is a critical book, but also a declaration of love to a contradictory country whose name still has a special ring to many ears.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2024

        Becoming couture

        The Italian fashion industry after the Second World War

        by Chiara Faggella

        Becoming couture is the first book to examine the history of the Italian fashion industry during the global transition brought about by the Second World War. It draws on a wide range of primary sources, some of them newly unearthed, to demonstrate that the Italian fashion industry in the Republican era continued to rely on business practices and professionals established during Fascism. Analysing changes in promotional discourses and press coverage, the book traces the shift that occurred when manufacturers were encouraged to expand their exports of accessories to include sportswear, knitwear and moda boutique. This ultimately led to the legitimisation of Italian dressmaking as creatively independent of French influences and therefore worthy of the label 'couture'.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Cinema - Italy

        by Stefania Parigi, Des O'Rawe

        A journey to the Italian cinema that overturns established views and opens up new perspectives and interpretations. Its itinerary is organized in four stages. The first is an analysis of the theories of Cesare Zavattini on neorealism which overturns widely accepted positions both on Zavattini and on neorealism. The second confronts a key film of the post-war Italian cinema, Roberto Rossellini's Paisà, by examining the nature of its realism. The third is dedicated to Luchino Visconti: to questions of the use of language exemplified in his La terra trema, the use of settings, costume and light as agents of meaning in his Il Gattopardo and Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa. The final voyage of the film is to the physical and symbolic construction of heaven and earth in the work of Pasolini. Particular attention is given to the representation of the body in his last four films: the grotesque and mythical bodies in popular tradition in his Trilogia di vita and the tortured bodies destroyed by the mass media in Salò.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2022

        Anglophobia in Fascist Italy

        by Jacopo Pili

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2015

        Crafting design in Italy

        From post-war to postmodernism

        by Catharine Rossi, Christopher Breward, Bill Sherman

        Crafting design in Italy is the first book to examine the role that craft played in post-war Italian design, one of the most celebrated design episodes in the twentieth century. Craft was vital to the development of Italian design, and it has been so far overlooked. This book examines the multiple ways craft shaped Italian design from 1945 to the 1980s in the context of bigger socio-economic, cultural and political change; from post-war reconstruction to the economic 'miracle' of the 1960s, to the rise of the countercultural Radical Design movement and advent of postmodernism. It consists of case studies on design areas including product, furniture, fashion, glass and ceramics to bring to light previously unknown makers and objects as well as re-examine design 'icons' such as Gio Ponti's Superleggera chair and Ettore Sottsass's Memphisware. It also offers a model for analysing design and craft's relationship in other contexts, including today. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        December 2018

        The Complete Collection of Modern Chinese Prints by Lu Xun

        by Editorial Board of the Complete Works of Modern Chinese Prints Collected by Lu Xun

        This series contains about 1,800 modern prints collected by Lu Xun at that time, which authored by nearly 200 domestic printmakers and currently in the Lu Xun Memorial Hall in Shanghai and the Lu Xun Museum in Beijing. It is showcasing the glorious history of modern Chinese woodcut art: In the 1920s and 1930s, in order to guide the artistic direction of Chinese literary youth, smashed the KMT’s counter-revolutionary cultural " encirclement and suppression", Mr. Lu Xun held a "woodcut workshop" in Shanghai, and cultivated a group of emerging woodcut backbone. These backbones led young artists in various regions of the country to create a large number of realistic works reflecting the suffering and tragic fate of the people at the bottom of the society at that time. They cruelly lashed the dark reality of society and called for national salvation and survival. These young woodcutters sent their woodcut works to Lu Xun, who not only guided their creation personally, but also spared no effort to collect, publicize and promote them to the public. With the active advocacy and support of Mr. Lu Xun, the emerging woodcut movement in China has developed vigorously, driving the modernization of Chinese art and leaving an indelible glorious footprint in the history of Chinese modern culture and art. This complete collection is a companion to the The Complete Collection of Foreign Prints by Lu Xun published in 2014.

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        June 2019

        China-Africa Economic and Trade Cooperation:

        Case Studies and Plans

        by Secretariat of the First China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo Organizing Committee

        China-Africa Economics and Trade Cooperation: Case Studies and Plans comes in 3 languages: Chinese(2 volumes), English(2 volumes), and French(2 volumes). This book series include 101 excellent case studies , which related to 21 Chinese provinces and cities and 31 countries in Africa, containing agriculture, manufacturing, commerce and trade, infrastructure, industrial parks, energy and mining, financing and other fields in China-Africa economic and trade cooperation. This set of books is practical and useful for all readers. In addition, the book gives the vivid interpretation on the concept of common prosperity, win-win cooperation, mutual negotiation and construction, shared innovation and progression of Belt and Road Initiative.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2023

        Pasts at play

        Childhood encounters with history in British culture, 1750–1914

        by Rachel Bryant Davies, Barbara Gribling

        This collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children's Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children's culture and the uses of the past. It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        The French empire at War, 1940–1945

        by Martin Thomas

        The French empire at war draws on original research in France and Britain to investigate the history of the divided French empire - the Vichy and the Free French empires - during the Second World War. What emerges is a fascinating story. While it is clear that both the Vichy and Free French colonial authorities were only rarely masters of their own destiny during the war, preservation of limited imperial control served them both in different ways. The Vichy government exploited the empire in an effort to withstand German-Italian pressure for concessions in metropolitan France and it was key to its claim to be more than the mouthpiece of a defeated nation. For Free France too, the empire acquired a political and symbolic importance which far outweighed its material significance to the Gaullist war effort. As the war progressed, the Vichy empire lost ground to that of the Free French, something which has often been attributed to the attraction of the Gaullist mystique and the spirit of resistance in the colonies. In this radical new interpretation, Thomas argues that it was neither of these. The course of the war itself, and the initiatives of the major combatant powers, played the greatest part in the rise of the Gaullist empire and the demise of Vichy colonial control.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2024

        Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition

        Words, ideas, interactions

        by Megan Cavell, Jennifer Neville

        Capitalising on developments in the field over the past decade, Riddles at work provides an up-to-date microcosm of research on the early medieval riddle tradition. The book presents a wide range of traditional and experimental methodologies. The contributors treat the riddles both as individual poems and as parts of a tradition, but, most importantly, they address Latin and Old English riddles side-by-side, bringing together texts that originally developed in conversation with each other but have often been separated by scholarship. Together, the chapters reveal that there is no single, right way to read these texts but rather a multitude of productive paths. This book will appeal to students and scholars of early medieval studies. It contains new as well as established voices, including Jonathan Wilcox, Mercedes Salvador-Bello and Jennifer Neville.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2022

        Chinese religion in contemporary Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan

        The cult of the Two Grand Elders

        by Fabian Graham

        In Singapore and Malaysia, the inversion of Chinese Underworld traditions has meant that Underworld demons are now amongst the most commonly venerated deities in statue form, channelled through their spirit mediums, tang-ki. The Chinese Underworld and its sub-hells are populated by a bureaucracy drawn from the Buddhist, Taoist and vernacular pantheons. Under the watchful eye of Hell's 'enforcers', the lower echelons of demon soldiers impose post-mortal punishments on the souls of the recently deceased for moral transgressions committed during their prior incarnations. Chinese religion in contemporary Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan offers an ethnography of contemporary Chinese Underworld traditions, where night-time cemetery rituals assist the souls of the dead, exorcised spirits are imprisoned in Guinness bottles, and malicious foetus ghosts are enlisted to strengthen a temple's spirit army. Understanding the religious divergences between Singapore and Malaysia (and their counterparts in Taiwan) through an analysis of socio-political and historical events, Fabian Graham challenges common assumptions about the nature and scope of Chinese vernacular religious beliefs and practices. Graham's innovative approach to alterity allows the reader to listen to first-person dialogues between the author and channelled Underworld deities. Through its alternative methodological and narrative stance, the book intervenes in debates on the interrelation between sociocultural and spiritual worlds, and promotes the destigmatisation of spirit possession and discarnate phenomena in the future study of mystical and religious traditions.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2000

        The towns of Italy in the later Middle Ages

        by Rosemary Horrox, Trevor Dean, Simon Maclean

        The towns of Italy in the later middle ages presents over one hundred fascinating documents, carefully selected and coordinated from the richest, most innovative and most documented society of the European Middle Ages. No other English language sourcebook has the same geographical or chronological range. This collection is carefully structured around the crisis of the fourteenth century and arranged in contrasting groups of texts. By connecting documents in translation to recent scholarship and debates, it addresses five key areas of medieval urban history: the physical environment, civic religion, economy, society and politics. Offers students well-translated and effectively contextualised documents along with some guidance to the secondary work of Italian scholars which is largely inaccessible to undergraduate students. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2020

        Pasts at play

        by Rachel Bryant Davies, Barbara Gribling, Anna Barton

      • Trusted Partner
        Science & Mathematics
        November 2020

        Techniques for Work with Plant and Soil Nematodes

        by Roland N Perry, David J Hunt, Sergei A Subbotin

        Techniques for Work with Plant and Soil Nematodes is an up-to-date, comprehensive book covering the practicalities of working with and studying soil and plant nematodes. Written by an international team of experts, this book is highly illustrated and provides thorough coverage of methods whilst allowing for relevant information to be located quickly. It includes the fundamental traditional techniques and new methodologies, covering: sampling; extraction; estimating numbers; handling, fixing, staining, mounting; culturing techniques; figure preparation, measurement and image processing; electron microscopy techniques; behavioural and physiological assays; and cytogenetic, biochemical and molecular biology techniques. This book is an essential resource for anyone involved in plant nematology needing to refer to a readily available methodology standard, including students of nematology and parasitology, university lecturers and researchers, diagnostic laboratories, and quarantine and advisory service personnel. It provides a much needed compendium of the spectrum of information needed to work with these microscopic organisms.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter