The French parlements and the crisis of the old regime

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Xu Guoqi

"During World War I, Britain and France imported workers from their colonies to labor behind the front lines. The single largest group of support labor came not from imperial colonies, however, but from China. Xu Guoqi tells the remarkable story of the 140,000 Chinese men recruited for the Allied war effort. These laborers, mostly illiterate peasants from north China, came voluntarily and worked in Europe longer than any other group. Xu explores China's reasons for sending its citizens to help the British and French (and later, the Americans), the backgrounds of the workers, their difficult transit to Europe -- across the Pacific, through Canada, and over the Atlantic -- and their experiences with the Allied armies. It was the first encounter with Westerners for most of these Chinese peasants, and Xu also considers the story from their perspective: how they understood this distant war, the racism and suspicion they faced, and their attempts to hold on to their culture so far from home. In recovering this fascinating lost story, Xu highlights the Chinese contribution to World War I and illuminates the essential role these unsung laborers played in modern China's search for a new national identity on the global stage"--Jacket.

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Bernadette Cunningham

"There was Something about the form and substance of the Annals of the Four Masters, compiled in the 1630s, that allowed them to become accepted as an authentic, reliable and comprehensive record of Gaelic society. Drawing on a rich heritage of manuscript sources on Irish history, these annals have long been regarded as an essential element of the cultural capital of a community that valued its Gaelic past. The Four Masters' approach to making their own annals conveys their regard for the older written records that had preserved for them, in manuscript, the history of their ancestors." "This study surveys the scholarly and political context, both Irish and European, that inspired the annalists, reconstructing the networks of professional expertise and patronage that contributed to the pursuit of scholarship about the Irish past. The original manuscripts of these annals are used to illuminate how the annalists collaborated in the production and revision of their magnum opus, while comparison with the extant source texts consulted by the annalists reveals their priorities and their understanding of the world in which they lived." "Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Eirinn was among the most popular and influential Irish histories ever written. It offered a sense of ireland, of Irishness, and of Carholicism that had wide appeal. The work has long been valued for its mastery of the Irish language and its attractive literary style, yet its significance as history has been ignored. This innovative book evluates Keating's role as both historian and theologian, providing an imaginative interdisciplinary analysis of the entire range of Keating's writing and of the social circumstances and intellectual influences that moulded his world." "The world of scribes, translators, publishers and readers of Keating's works are part of this historiographical assessment of how ideas were transmitted to later generations. Geoffrey Keating's intellectual legacy in influencing perceptions of Irishness has been profound, not least as the populariser of the idea of a s̀pecial relationship' between Carholicism and irishness. This is an important, original study of the cultural, social and intellectual world of Ireland's most influential seventeenth-century writer." "Àn important book which offers an ambitious and wide-ranging analysis of a vitally important figure and his writings'" "This volume examines all aspects of the Irish Franciscans and their impact in Ireland and on the Continent. It includes chronological accounts of their history from 1534 to 1990 and thematic studies on their legacy in historical writings, hagiography, philosophy, Irish literature, missionary work, art and architecture. The volume also covers the history of the Poor Clares and the Secular. Franciscan Order in Ireland. Particular attention is given to the history and legacy of St Anthony's College Louvain, founded by the Irish Franciscans in 1607"--Jacket.

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Sheila Burnford

When his owner is killed during the German invasion of France in the summer of 1940, a little performing dog changes the lives of successive caretakers as he journeys through the war-ravaged countryside looking for a permanent home

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David Collings

According to David Collings, Wordsworth interpreted the outbreak of war between England and France in 1793 as a cataclysmic event, one whose utterly disfiguring effect he would trace in his work over the next decade. Expanding upon this extravagant interpretation of events, Collings argues, Wordsworth constructed a poetics of cultural dismemberment - a way for culture to imagine that it survives in the midst of its own destruction. In Wordsworthian Errancies, Collings challenges prevailing critical approaches to Romantic poetry by describing and critiquing this deconstructive account of culture in Wordsworth's poetry. Drawing ideas from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and queer theory, Collings's reading reveals a radically new Wordsworth, one who is far more concerned with various "queer" modes of sexuality than previously suspected. In a provocative reading of The Prelude, for example, Collings argues that Wordsworth associated his poetic power with homoerotic masochistic fantasies and with his involuntary delight in traumatic events. He also redefines the debate concerning the politics of Wordsworth's poetry: disputing recent critics who claim that Wordsworth retreated from history into a poetry of the self, Collings argues instead that the very notion of the solitary, autobiographical subject derived from Wordsworth's sense of cultural trauma. The suspect dimension of Wordsworth's poetry, Collings concludes, is not its retreat from history but rather its claim that history is disaster.