An overview of 19th- and 20th-century writing from the British Isles shows a constant interplay between metropolitan centers and regional peripheries--an interplay that points to the basic importance of place and belonging in literary creation and evaluation. This volume examines the relationship between British literature--including poetry, fiction, biography, and drama--and regional consciousness in the Victorian and modern periods, introducing the reader to a range of responses to the profound feelings of belonging engendered by the sense of place. The works covered are a mixture of familiar classics and less well-known writings from working-class writers or forgotten writers who were successful in their era. After accounting for the emergence of regional writing in the early 19th century, the author analyzes the development of regional writing in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, focusing on issues such as the sociopolitical context of the regional novel, the print and literary cultures around regional presses, and the place of documentary in regional consciousness.

At the height of the blues revival, Marina Bokelman and David Evans, young graduate students from California, made two trips to Louisiana and Mississippi and short trips in their home state to do fieldwork for their studies at UCLA. While there, they made recordings and interviews and took extensive field notes and photographs of blues musicians and their families. Going Up the Country: Adventures in Blues Fieldwork in the 1960s presents their experiences in vivid detail through the field notes, the photographs, and the retrospective views of these two passionate researchers. The book includes historical material as well as contemporary reflections by Bokelman and Evans on the times and the people they met during their southern journeys. Their notes and photographs take the reader into the midst of memorable encounters with many obscure but no less important musicians, as well as blues legends, including Robert Pete Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Al Wilson (cofounder of Canned Heat), Babe Stovall, Reverend Ruben Lacy, and Jack Owens. This volume is not only an adventure story, but also a scholarly discussion of fieldwork in folklore and ethnomusicology. Including retrospective context and commentary, the field note chapters describe searches for musicians, recording situations, social and family dynamics of musicians, and race relations and the racial environment, as well as the practical, ethical, and logistical problems of doing fieldwork. The book features over one hundred documentary photographs that depict the field recording sessions and the activities, lives, and living conditions of the artists and their families. These photographs serve as a visual counterpart equivalent to the field notes. The remaining chapters explain the authors' methodology, planning, and motivations, as well as their personal backgrounds prior to going into the field, their careers afterwards, and their thoughts about fieldwork and folklore research in general. In this enlightening book, Bokelman and Evans provide an exciting and honest portrayal of blues field research in the 1960s.

Interest in Christopher Isherwood's work has grown since his death in 1986, and this interest has included a revisiting of his later work as well as his earlier writing from his time in 1930s Berlin, and the immense success of Mr Norris Changes Trains. His autobiographical writing has also found new readers for his work, as his diaries continue to be published. Traditionally study and explanation of Isherwood's work has always concentrated on the earlier work, and he has been seen largely as a writer of the 1930s, along with Auden, Spender and MacNeice. But Stephen Wade here introduces and explains aspects of Isherwood's later religious fiction as well as covering the Berlin writings. This study guide will expand the reader's knowledge of a writer who is increasingly being rated as one of the major novelists and memoirists of the last century.

Jewish American writing is an exciting and controversial genre within post-war literature. "Jewish American Literature since 1945" offers a student guide to the major writers, their key works, and their cultural and philosophical backgrounds. The theoretical underpinnings of the literature--including the postmodern, the masternarrative and metafiction--are also introduced in an accessible form. The themes, issues and philosophies of key writers such as Saul Bellow, Erica Jong, Arthur Miller, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are inter-related, and wider literary and historical topics are explained.

There have been a great many books written on military intelligence and the secret services rooted in the twentieth century, however there is very little covering the activities of the men involved in the establishment of this fascinating institution. There have been a great many books written on military intelligence and the secret services rooted in the twentieth century, however there is very little covering the activities of the men involved in the establishment of this fascinating institution.

The collected essays explore the lives of several writers in Georgian and Victorian Britain, in terms of their knowledge and experience of prison life. This book focuses on the lives of the writers themselves, or on the prison stretches endured by their relatives or acquaintances. Some of these writers were locked up for debt, while others were deprived of liberty for sedition or treason. Here the reader will find, amongst many other stories, accounts of Dickens's father in debtors' prison, of Leigh Hunt living with his whole family in The Surrey House of Correction and of Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol.

Some were industrialists and businessmen who stamped their name there. Others were writers and artists who made Leeds their source of inspiration. On the dark side we also love the villains: Most unusually, however, the book includes some forgotten names: quiet, steady 'heroes' who add that solid, dedicated work so necessary to civic urban community. It is a book about some of the men and women who made Leeds a powerful and fascinating City.

In 1941, Beryl Baxter, a dressmaker from Grimsby, signed up to do her bit in the Battle of Britain. She was to serve as a plotter as aircraftswoman in the WAAF and, upon discharge in 1949 she began life as a welfare worker for the Women's Voluntary Service. Her postings included the Korean War, Japan, Hong Kong and Iraq. Throughout these years of service she fulfilled the roles of mother, sister and girlfriend to thousands of servicemen, both conscripts and regulars. Presenting a dramatic narrative from several theatres of war, this book recalls Beryl's life, based on a large archive of letters and documents that she preserved, allowing the reader to go on these journeys to war alongside a brave and enterprising independent woman.

Sarah Jacob was the Carmarthenshire farm girl who dominated the national and regional press for almost all of 1869. In the popular imagination she was 'the Welsh fasting girl' and although she was not the first anorexic, she was arguably the first to cause a national furore, and become something of a celebrity. She died despite a team of nurses from Guy's Hospital stationed at her home in Lletherneuadd, and after the best minds in British medicine had set theorised about the cause of her apparently supernatural existence - living in spite of starvation, losing no weight yet clearly suffering in all kinds of ways. Sarah's was not the only story here. Her parents were charged with murder and eventually convicted of manslaughter. The Girl Who Lived on Air retells this human story of an anorexic made to be the centre of a lucrative and also media-hungry 'spin' on the nineteenth century nexus of knowledge between science and superstition, folk-belief and religious asceticism. Stephen Wade covers new ground in examining the medical issues surrounding the case, the legal complexities (including the use of Welsh in court) and the interpretation on a newly enacted law which reformulated serious crime, the prison life of Sarah's parents, and the significance of folklore and superstition in an unusual and yet all too familiar story.

The history of the British prison system only had systematic records from the middle of the nineteenth century. Before that, material on prisoners in local gaols and houses of correction was patchy and minimal. In more recent times, many prison records have been destroyed. In Tracing Your Prisoner Ancestors, crime historian Stephen Wade attempts to provide information and guidance to family and social history researchers in this difficult area of criminal records. His book covers the span of time from medieval to modern, and includes some Scottish and Irish sources. The sources explained range broadly from central calendars of prisoners, court records and gaol returns, through to memoirs and periodicals. The chapters also include case studies and short biographies of some individuals who experienced our prisons and left some records.