The first Bohemians

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Maurice Beresford

"Maurice Beresford is one of the pioneers of local history fieldwork, and his work includes studies of towns and villages as well as the more traditional landscape studies. In this classic book, he opens up the hidden world of urban, local and landscape history through the imaginative use of old maps and other documentary evidence." "In these six studies documentary evidence is brought to bear on particular fields, particular villages and particular towns. By examining the work of sixteenth and seventeenth century cartographers we can glimpse not only the landscape of the Tudors and Stuarts but also the far older landscape which had not then been completely effaced. From the limited number of surviving plans we can recognise the historical structure of certain landscapes and then apply this knowledge to the much greater numbers of towns and villages for which no such documentary evidence exists."--Jacket.

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Sharon O'Dair

Class, Critics, and Shakespeare is a provocative contribution to "the culture wars." It engages with an ongoing debate about literary canons, the democratization of literary study, and of higher education in general. For a generation at least, academic readings of literary works, including those of Shakespeare, have often challenged privilege based on race, gender, and sexuality. Sharon O'Dair observes that in these same readings, class privilege has remained effectively unchallenged, despite repeated invocations of it within multiculturalism. She identifies what she sees as a structurally necessary class bias in academic literary and cultural criticism, specifically in the contemporary reception of William Shakespeare's plays. The author builds her argument by offering readings of Shakespeare that put class at the center of the analysis—not just in Shakespeare's plays or in early modern England, but in the academy and in American society today. Individual chapters focus on The Tempest and education, Timon of Athens and capitalism, Coriolanus and political representation. Other chapters treat the politics of cultural tourism and land-use in the Pacific northwest, and analyze the politics of the academic left in the U.S. today, focusing on the debate between what has been called a "social" left and a "cultural" left. The author's quest is to understand why an intellectual culture that values diversity and pluralism can so easily disdain and ignore the working-class people she grew up with. Her provocative and heartfelt critique of academic culture will challenge and enlighten a broad range of audiences, including those in cultural studies, American studies, literary criticism, and early modern literature. Sharon O'Dair is Associate Professor of English, University of Alabama. (Provided by publisher's site:

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Simon Thurley

"Whitehall Palace was the principal residence of the British monarchy from 1529 to 1698, when fire destroyed most of the complex. As such, it holds a key place in the architectural, political and social history of England. This book is the first to discuss the architecture and archaeology of this influential building.". "Simon Thurley traces the development of the Palace from its origins, using previously unpublished archaeological evidence to establish that York Place, as it was then called, was already one of the largest and most important residences in London before it became a royal palace. Thurley reconstructs the various phases of the Palace's development, showing how successive kings and queens altered the vast, sprawling mass of Whitehall to meet their individual needs. He also charts the plans of monarchs to replace the Tudor building with one that might have rivalled the great Baroque palaces of Europe, and he reveals the reasons they failed to achieve this."--BOOK JACKET.

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James Fenton

"James Fenton, one of England's most gifted poets, has in recent years been looking closely at works of art and writing incisively and inventively about them and their creators. Leonardo's Nephew collects fifteen pieces, most originally published in The New York Review of Books, in which he discusses a wide range of painting and sculpture, from the mummy portraits of ancient Egypt and the few surviving works of the fifteenth-century sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio to Seurat's bathers in the Seine, the boxes of Joseph Cornell, and the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns."--BOOK JACKET.