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This book traces the intimate connections between Britain and China throughout the nineteenth century and argues for China's central impact on the modern British visual imagination through a study of gardens, blue and white willow plates, the opium den, and the photograph, and literary texts.

This volume re-examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society. In doing so, it challenges long-standing teleological narratives that emphasize disinterestedness and the separation of aesthetics from moral, cognitive, and political interests.The chapters are divided into three thematic parts. The chapters in Part I demonstrate the heteronomy of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. They chart the evolution of aesthetic concepts and discuss the ethical and political significance of the aesthetic theories of several key figures: namely, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Part II explores the ways in which eighteenth-century German, and German-oriented, thinkers examine aesthetic experience and moral concerns, and relate to the work of their British counterparts. The chapters here cover the work of Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Madame de Staël. Finally, Part III explores the interrelation of science, aesthetics, and a new model of society in the work of Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Friedrich Hölderlin, and William Hazlitt, among others.This volume develops unique discussions of the rise of aesthetic autonomy in the eighteenth century. In bringing together well-known scholars working on British and German eighteenth-century aesthetics, philosophy, and literature, it will appeal to scholars and advanced students in a range of disciplines who are interested in this topic.

International audience ; This book visits vulnerability in contemporary British fiction, considering vulnerability in its relation to poetics, politics, ethics, and trauma. Vulnerability and risk have become central issues in contemporary culture, and artistic productions have increasingly made it their responsibility to evoke various types of vulnerabilities, from individual fragilities to economic and political forms of precariousness and dispossession. Informed by trauma studies and the ethics of literature, this book addresses such issues by focusing on the literary evocations of vulnerability and analyzing various aspects of vulnerable form as represented and performed in British narratives, from contemporary classics by Peter Ackroyd, Pat Barker, Anne Enright, Ian McEwan, and Jeanette Winterson, to less canonical texts by Nina Allan, Jon McGregor, and N. Royle. Chapters on romance, elegy, the ghost story, and the state-of-the-nation novel draw on a variety of theoretical approaches from the fields of trauma studies, affect theory, the ethics of alterity, the ethics of care, and the ethics of vulnerability, among others. Showcasing how the contemporary novel is the privileged site of the expression and performance of vulnerability and vulnerable form, the volume broaches a poetics of vulnerability based on categories such as testimony, loss, unknowing, temporal disarray, and performance. On top of providing a book-length evocation of contemporary fictions of vulnerability and vulnerable form, this volume contributes significantly to considerations of the importance of Trauma Studies to Contemporary Literature.

International audience ; This book visits vulnerability in contemporary British fiction, considering vulnerability in its relation to poetics, politics, ethics, and trauma. Vulnerability and risk have become central issues in contemporary culture, and artistic productions have increasingly made it their responsibility to evoke various types of vulnerabilities, from individual fragilities to economic and political forms of precariousness and dispossession. Informed by trauma studies and the ethics of literature, this book addresses such issues by focusing on the literary evocations of vulnerability and analyzing various aspects of vulnerable form as represented and performed in British narratives, from contemporary classics by Peter Ackroyd, Pat Barker, Anne Enright, Ian McEwan, and Jeanette Winterson, to less canonical texts by Nina Allan, Jon McGregor, and N. Royle. Chapters on romance, elegy, the ghost story, and the state-of-the-nation novel draw on a variety of theoretical approaches from the fields of trauma studies, affect theory, the ethics of alterity, the ethics of care, and the ethics of vulnerability, among others. Showcasing how the contemporary novel is the privileged site of the expression and performance of vulnerability and vulnerable form, the volume broaches a poetics of vulnerability based on categories such as testimony, loss, unknowing, temporal disarray, and performance. On top of providing a book-length evocation of contemporary fictions of vulnerability and vulnerable form, this volume contributes significantly to considerations of the importance of Trauma Studies to Contemporary Literature.

Between 1960 and 2010, a new generation of British avant-garde theatre companies, directors, designers, and performers emerged. Some of these companies and individuals have endured to become part of theatre history while others have disappeared from the scene, mutated into new forms, or become part of the establishment. Reverberations across Small-Scale British Theatre at long last puts these small-scale British theatre companies and personalities in the scholarly spotlight. By questioning what 'Britishness' meant in relation to the small-scale work of these practitioners, contributors articulate how it is reflected in the goals, manifestos, and aesthetics of these companies. ; University of Northampton Arts & Humanities Research funds or interview transcriptions

A study of how artists and photographers shaped imperial visions of war and peace in the Victorian period. In an era that saw the birth of photography (c. 1839) and the rise of the illustrated press (c. 1842), the British experience of their empire became increasingly defined by the processes and products of image-making. Examining moments of military and diplomatic crisis, this book considers how artists and photographers operating "in the field" helped to define British visions of war and peace. The Victorians increasingly turned to visual spectacle to help them compose imperial sovereignty. The British Empire was thus rendered into a spectacle of "peace," from world's fairs to staged diplomatic rituals. Yet this occurred against a backdrop of incessant colonial war-campaigns which, far from being ignored, were in fact unprecedentedly visible within the cultural forms of Victorian society. Visual media thus shaped the contours of imperial statecraft and established many of the aesthetic and ethical frames within which the colonial violence was confronted

The post Second World War welfare state in Britain was based on three pillars: housing, health and education. This paper focuses on education and critically reviews the post-war school building programme in Britain during the first decade following a publication by the Royal Institute of British Architects entitled New Schools, a milestone in school design in the British Isles. Introducing prefabrication in the design of public schools was the way forward to cater for the significantly large number of school spaces required within a short timeframe. As an effective solution to meet the government's programme, a new aesthetic emerged associated with this mode of construction. These themes are investigated in this study, successes and limitations are identified, criticism levied and final comments put forth. Post-war public schools are a further development of the typology of educational buildings in Britain, a typology which although already present in Northern Europe, left its mark on British architectural history of the twentieth century. This development is an evolution resulting from an awareness of the revolution which industrialization had brought about on war machine production coupled with the emerging political ethic. ; peer-reviewed

This article considers the significance of artist Philip Gurrey's 2008 series of portraits of members of multicultural working-class communities in Beeston, Leeds, in the social, political, and cultural context of the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings. Reflecting on the impetus for making these works, Gurrey has observed that "the predominant rhetoric [in 2007] was almost as if this place was generating extremism" (2014a: n.p.). In his opinion, "the artist's prerogative is to look at the aesthetic generated; the feel and mood of the place as portrayed by the media was completely wrong" (2014b). This essay focuses on The Beeston Series (2008–2009) of paintings, which Gurrey composed by merging and splicing together the features and skin-tones of the suburb's community members, and subsequently exhibited to local audiences at the BasementArtsProject in south Leeds, a space removed from the metropolitan centres that appeared either to dismiss or to demonize them. Drawing on Jill Bennett's explorations of art as the "critical, self-conscious manipulation of media" (2012: 6), this article goes on to explore how such mundane and unsensational, though striking, portraits presented an aesthetic that ran counter to contemporaneous representations of such communities as the breeding grounds of Islamic terrorism. It argues that through such critical, aesthetic approaches, artists in twenty-first-century Britain contest still-dominant discourses around the failure of multiculturalist policies and supposed alienness to indigenous British culture of Muslim identities, and fears about the harbouring of an "enemy within". In doing so, it draws comparisons between Gurrey's regionally-specific paintings and other more metropolitan attempts to depict the aesthetic realities of 7/7, the perpetrators of such attacks, and the multicultural, working-class identities scrutinized in their wake. Works discussed in relation to The Beeston Series include Mark Sinckler's controversial drawing Age of Shiva (2008), and Faiza Butt's Is This the Man (2010) portrait series.

This chapter reflects on the myriad of cultural, sociopolitical, educational and performance traditions in the United Kingdom from the end of WW2 and the rationale for the types and contexts of practitioners and works researched and interrogated in the volume. From this vast topography the authors debate changes in UK's post-WW2 theatre scene, why some concepts and practices have survived and why some have gone out of business. such a landscape calls for a different reading strategy that is designed to both make sense of the selected pieces of works and companies but which more importantly, extends to how researchers and practitioners might read other works. ; University of Northampton Arts & Humanities Research fund