Matériel culture encompasses the material remains of conflict, from buildings and monuments to artefacts and militia, as well as human remains. This collection of essays, from an international range of contributors, illustrates the diversity in this material record, highlights the difficulties and challenges in preserving, presenting and interpreting it, and above all demonstrates the significant role matériel culture can play in contemporary society.
Among the many studies are:
* the 'culture of shells'
* the archaeology of nuclear testing grounds
* Cambodia's 'killing fields'
* the Berlin Wall
* and the biography of a medal
*the reappearance of Argentina's 'disappeared'
*World War II concentration camps.


eBook available with sample pages: 0203165748

Materiel culture encompasses the material remains of conflict, from buildings and monuments to artefacts and militia, as well as human remains. This collection of essays, from an international range of contributors, illustrates the diversity in this material record, highlights the difficulties and challenges in preserving, presenting and interpreting it, and above all demonstrates the significant role materiel culture can play in contemporary society. Among the many studies are: * the 'culture of shells' * the archaeology of nuclear testing grounds * Cambodia's 'killing fields' * the Berlin Wall * and the biography of a medal *the reappearance of Argentina's 'disappeared' *World War II concentration camps.

The works of C.S. Lewis have a wide appeal to a variety of audiences. Lewis is probably most famous for the best-selling The Chronicles of Narnia, although William Nicholson's Shadowlands will have led many readers to Lewis's own account of his tragic bereavement in A Grief Observed. However, Shadowlands represents only a small part of Lewis's controversial life, and omits much that is crucial to an understanding of this fascinating, and in some ways tormented, personality. Lewis enjoyed (to the chagrin of his academic colleagues) a tremendous success as a popular theologian. He was also a successful science fiction writer. And last, but by no means least, he was a brilliant and original academic in the field of English Studies. This book weaves together the very different elements in the complex phenomenon of C.S Lewis, and relates the central concerns of Lewis's life and work to current thinking about postmodernism, psychoanalysis and the idea of 'a new Humanism'.

More than most writers, Robert Louis Stevenson requires a Literary Life. Fascination with Stevenson's life (the 'Stevenson biography' is almost a minor genre) has tended to eclipse his literary achievement. This study focuses on Stevenson's writing practice within the different geographical, cultural and political contexts that shaped it, from Scotland to the South Seas. Following Stevenson's own views on biography, the book is not structured primarily in terms of chronology, but is more a kind of literary geography than traditional literary history.