"Peter Nichols has crafted a terrifyingly relevant historical narrative...A terrific read."
-Nathaniel Philbrick, author of "In The Heart of the Sea"
In 1871, America's last fleet of whaling ships was destroyed in an arctic ice storm. Miraculously, 1,218 men, women and children survived, but the disaster was catastrophic at home.
"Oil and Ice" is the story of one fateful whaling season that illuminates the unprecedented rise and devastating fall of America's first oil economy, and the fate of today's petroleum industry.

Regarding the Popular charts the complex relationship between the avant-gardes and modernisms on the one hand and popular culture on the other. Covering (neo-)avant-gardists and modernists from various European countries, this second volume in the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies explores the nature of so-called "low" culture, dealing with aspects as diverse as the everyday and the folkloric. Regarding the Popular charts the many ways in which the allegedly "high" modernists and avant-gardists looked at and represented the "low". As such, this book will appeal to all those with an interest in the dynamic of modern experimental arts and literatures.

Peter Nicholls provides original analytic accounts of the main Modernist movements. Close readings of key texts monitor the histories of Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism. This new edition includes discussion of the recent research trends, examination of developments in the US, and a new chapter on African-American Modernisms.

Although John Ruskin's influence has long been acknowledged, his impact on the development of Anglo-American modernism has received little systematic attention. This is the first study on this relationship, with contributors examining Ruskin's connection to pre-modernist writers such as Worringer and Pater and the importance of Ruskin's thought to modernists such as Pound, Eliot, Lewis, and Lawrence and to intellectual history and architectural theory.

In 1968, nine sailors set off on the most daring race ever held: to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe nonstop. It was a feat that had never been accomplished and one that would forever change the face of sailing. Ten months later, only one of the nine men would cross the finish line and earn fame, wealth, and glory. For the others, the reward was madness, failure, and death.

In this extraordinary book, Peter Nichols chronicles a contest of the individual against the sea, waged at a time before cell phones, satellite dishes, and electronic positioning systems. A Voyage for Madmen is a tale of sailors driven by their own dreams and demons, of horrific storms in the Southern Ocean, and of those riveting moments when a split-second decision means the difference between life and death.

Published to coincide with the Golden Globe Race's 50th Anniversary It lay like a gauntlet thrown down; to sail around the world alone and non-stop. No one had ever done it, no one knew if it could be done. In 1968, nine men - six Englishmen, two Frenchmen and an Italian - set out to try, a race born of coincidence of their timing. One didn't even know how to sail. They had more in common with Captain Cook or Ferdinand Magellan than with the high-tech, extreme sailors of today, a mere forty years later. It was not the sea or the weather that determined the nature of their voyages but the men they were, and they were as different from one another as Scott from Amundsen. Only one of the nine crossed the finishing line after ten months at sea. The rest encountered despair, sublimity, madness and even death.

The first volume of the new series "European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies" focuses on the relation between the avant-garde, modernism and Europe. It combines interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics. The essays, written by experts from more than fifteen countries, seek to bring out the complexity of the European avant-garde and modernism by relating it to Europe's intricate history, multiculturalism and multilingualism. They aim to inquire into the divergent cultural views on Europe taking shape in avant-garde and modernist practices and to chart a composite image of the "other Europe(s)" that have emerged from the (contemporary) avant-garde and experimental modernism. How did the avant-garde and modernism in (and outside) Europe give shape to local, national and pan-European forms of identity and community? To what extent does the transnational exchange and cross-fertilisation of aesthetic tendencies illustrate the well-rehearsed claim that the avant-gardes form a typically European phenomenon? Dealing with canonised as well as lesser known exponents of modernism and the avant-garde throughout Europe, this book will appeal to all those interested in European cultural, literary and art history.

Since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, the notion that capitalism has become too abstract for all but the most rarefied specialists to understand has been widely presupposed. Yet even in academic circles, the question of abstraction itself - of what exactly abstraction is, and does, under financialisation - seems to have gone largely unexplored - or has it? By putting the question of abstraction centre stage, How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital Now offers an indispensable counterpoint to the 'economic turn' in the humanities, bringing together leading literary and cultural critics in order to propose that we may know far more about capital's myriad abstractions than we typically think we do. Through in-depth engagement with classic and cutting-edge theorists, agile analyses of recent Hollywood films, groundbreaking readings of David Foster Wallace's sprawling, unfinished novel, The Pale King, and even original poems, the contributors here suggest that the machinations and costs of finance - as well as alternatives to it - may already be hiding in plain sight. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

M3 F4. A classroom. Mid 1950s. Based around a leading character in Peter Nichols' acclaimed work, "Privates on Parade", and inspired by his own experiences, "Lingua Franca" is a fast-paced, sexually-charged story that plays with notions of xenophobia and cultural stereotypes to comic effect. It's the mid-1950s and 'innocent abroad' Steven Flowers has travelled to Florence to teach English in a chaotic language school, Lingua Franca. He is soon adopted by fellow Brit, Peggy, but is more interested in Heidi, a newcomer from Munich. Heidi's deep-seated prejudice against the Jews causes tension with the anti-fascist Italian manager, Gennaro, and Russian Jew Irena. Atheist and pacifist Jestin worships only the art that surrounds him, while Australian Madge struggles when her students start to speak better French than she does. As Steven tries to make sense of his own life and a Europe at peace after so many years of war, Peggy's unrequited obsession leads to highly dramatic consequences. "...richly enjoyable new play ...Nichols is back on top form with a play that offers a Florentine room with multiple points of view." (Michael Billington, "Guardian").

Poppy is a celebration of Victorian values and exposes the hypocrisy, racism, drug dealing, money worship and sexual repression of the time through its favourite entertainment form. Dick Whittington, his man Jack, Sally the Principal Girl, the Dame, two pantomime horses, a flying ballet, a transformation scene and even the traditional song-sheet are all brought on to tell the serious and finally devasting story of the single most profitable crop of the British East India Company.4 women, 6 men

Ted Forrest is a playwright with a problem -- writer's block. When we first meet him -- bitter, disillusioned and consumed with envy of Miles Whittier, a younger, more successful playwright -- he has retreated to the country in an attempt to stimulate his creative impotence by writing an autobiographical novel.2 women, 3 men

In a mock Tudor manor gone to seed lives 70 year old Maud and her younger son, forty five year old Mo. She speaks more to the soundless television than to him and he plays New Orleans jazz on his drums. An attempt to destroy this happy way of life is made on the occasion of the father's funeral by Hedley, the older son, and by Queenie, Mo's twin sister from California. But the cloistered pair prefer to remain in what is, in effect, a shed in the garden of Heartbreak House.2 women, 2 men

Music hall routines with clever and ribald lyrics highlight this British hit about an army entertainment unit in post World War II Malaya.1 woman, 10 men

This collection brings together some of the most prominent critics of contemporary poetry and some of the most significant poets working in the English language today, to offer a critical assessment of the nature and function of poetic thought. Working at once with questions of form, literary theory and philosophy, this volume gives an extraordinarily diverse, original and mobile account of the kind of 'thinking' that poetry can do. The conviction that moves through the collection as a whole is that poetry is not an addition to thought, nor a vehicle to express a given idea, nor an ornamental language in which thinking might find itself couched. Rather, all the essays suggest that poetry itself thinks, in ways that other forms of expression cannot, thus making new intellectual, political and cultural formulations possible. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Forget-me-not Lane' is a bittersweet play about fathers, families and nostalgia - about (in Nichol's words) a youth which was bitter to live through but sweet to remember. It was first performed in 1971 at the Greenwich Theatre, London.4 women, 5 men

Bri, a schoolteacher and his wife Sheila have a 10-year old spastic child named Josephine, who is completely helpless and utterly dependent. Bri hides behind irony and sarcasm. Sheila believes the child is her penance for a promiscuous past and soldiers on devotedly with their little "Joe Egg". Well-meaning family and friends offer sundry solutions, everything from adoption to euthanasia but ultimately Bri finds he cannot continue and leaves Sheila and Joe behind.4 women, 2 men

This essay collection reveals how bathos has become so central to literature, fine art, and music. While the sublime has garnered a great deal of critical attention over the past twenty years, its counterpart, bathos, has yet to receive any extended treatment. Generally understood as an inadvertent descent to the low, vulgar, and ludicrous in writing or art, the term 'bathos' was popularised by Pope, who used it to satirise his contemporaries. Ironically likening bathos to the depths of profundity, Pope lauded his peers for their influential writings whilst openly deriding their absurd misuses of figure and rhetorical device. Pope's method proved prophetic: today, artists regularly celebrate and incorporate bathetic practice. This essay collection considers how bathos has become so central to literature, fine art, and music. The innovative and diverse contributions assess the consequences of this endemic inversion of aesthetic standards, and consider where artistic production might go after hitting, and so comfortably inhabiting, rock bottom.

This new Cambridge History is the first major history of twentieth-century English literature to cover the full range of writing in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The volume also explores the impact of writing from the former colonies on English literature of the period and analyses the ways in which conventional literary genres were shaped and inflected by the new cultural technologies of radio, cinema and television. In providing an authoritative narrative of literary and cultural production across the century, this History acknowledges the claims for innovation and modernisation that characterise the beginning of the period. At the same time, it attends analytically to the more profound patterns of continuity and development which avant-garde tendencies characteristically underplay. Containing all the virtues of a Cambridge History, this new volume is a major event for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, its cultural context and its relation to the contemporary.

'This remarkable play is about a nightmare all women must have dreamed at some time, and most men...' Ronald Bryden, Observer (1967) 'Joe Egg is unlike any play I've seen; concerns about whether it's dated fade next to the claims that can now be made for it. It's in the collisions between pious and rogue thoughts that the play's energy lies. We don't know what to feel. Which is why, once seen, Joe Egg won't go away.' Robert Butler, Independent on Sunday (1993)

The extent of John Ruskin's influence has long been acknowledged, though his impact on the development of Anglo-American modernism has received little systematic attention. In this volume, published to mark the centenary of Ruskin's death, a group of international scholars consider what is often an awkward and conflicted relation. Ruskin's voluminous writings are seen to shelter an incipient modernism whose antipathy to a degraded modernity, powerfully predicts a major current within the work of the new century.

This brilliantly written, deeply moving play about the problems of a young couple with a spastic daughter-the "Joe Egg" of the title-was described by Ronald Bryden in The Observer (London) as a "remarkable play about a nightmare all women must have dreamed at some time, and most men: living with a child born so hopelessly crippled as to be, as the father in it says brutally, a human parsnip. For all that, it has to be described as a comedy, one of the funniest and most touching I've seen. The bridge between its form and content is a simple but brilliant stroke of theatre. Over the years, the author implies, explaining to others how one lives with such a situation becomes a kind of set party piece. This, savagely exaggerated, is what he has written-a recital, interspersed with jazz, imitations and tap-dances, about life with Joe Egg."

Since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, the notion that capitalism has become too abstract for all but the most rarefied specialists to understand has been widely presupposed. Yet even in academic circles, the question of abstraction itself - of what exactly abstraction is, and does, under financialisation - seems to have gone largely unexplored - or has it? By putting the question of abstraction centre stage, How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital Now offers an indispensable counterpoint to the 'economic turn' in the humanities, bringing together leading literary and cultural critics in order to propose that we may know far more about capital's myriad abstractions than we typically think we do. Through in-depth engagement with classic and cutting-edge theorists, agile analyses of recent Hollywood films, groundbreaking readings of David Foster Wallace's sprawling, unfinished novel, The Pale King, and even original poems, the contributors here suggest that the machinations and costs of finance - as well as alternatives to it - may already be hiding in plain sight. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

This Cambridge History is the first major history of twentieth-century English literature to cover the full range of writing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The volume also explores the impact of writing from the former colonies on English literature of the period and analyses the ways in which conventional literary genres were shaped and inflected by the new cultural technologies of radio, cinema, and television. In providing an authoritative narrative of literary and cultural production across the century, this History acknowledges the claims for innovation and modernization that chracterise the beginning of the period. At the same time, it attends analytically to the more profound patterns of continuity and development which avant-garde tendencies characteristically underplay. Containing all the virtues of a Cambridge History, this new volume is a major event for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, its cultural context, and its relation to the contemporary.