Rich connections between gaming and theater stretch back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when England's first commercial theaters appeared right next door to gaming houses and blood-sport arenas. In ...the first book-length exploration of gaming in the early modern period, Gina Bloom shows that theaters succeeded in London's new entertainment marketplace largely because watching a play and playing a game were similar experiences. Audiences did not just see a play; they were encouraged to play the play, and knowledge of gaming helped them become better theatergoers. Examining dramas written for these theaters alongside evidence of analog games popular then and today, Bloom argues for games as theatrical media and theater as an interactive gaming technology. Gaming the Stage also introduces a new archive for game studies: scenes of onstage gaming, which appear at climactic moments in dramatic literature. Bloom reveals plays to be systems of information for theater spectators: games of withholding, divulging, speculating, and wagering on knowledge. Her book breaks new ground through examinations of plays such as The Tempest, Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and A Game at Chess; the histories of familiar games such as cards, backgammon, and chess; less familiar ones, like Game of the Goose; and even a mixed-reality theater videogame.
The "forgotten majority" of German merchants in London between the end of the Hanseatic League and the end of the Napoleonic Wars became the largest mercantile Christian immigrant group in the ...eighteenth century. Using previously neglected and little used evidence, this book assesses the causes of their migration, the establishment of their businesses in the capital, and the global reach of the enterprises. As the acquisition of British nationality was the admission ticket to Britain's commercial empire, it investigates the commercial function of British naturalization policy in the early modern period, while also considering the risks of failure and chance for a new beginning in a foreign environment. As more German merchants integrated into British commercial society, they contributed to London becoming the leading place of exchange between the European continent, Russia, and the New World.
This book provides concrete examples of the ways in which shifting academic debates, policy and political approaches have impacted on a specific place over the past 30 years. It offers a critical ...analysis of the history, politics and social geography of the high profile London Borough of Haringey, in the decades prior to the 2011 Tottenham riots. The Haringey case study acts as a lens through which to explore the evolution of theoretical and policy debates about the relationship between local institutions and the communities they serve. Focusing on the policy areas of planning and regeneration, it considers the local implementation and outcome of central government strategies that have sought to achieve such accountability and responsiveness through community participation strategies. It examines how the local authority responded to central government aspirations for greater community involvement in planning, in the 1970s, and regeneration, from the late 1980s onwards, before looking in detail at the implementation of New Labour neighbourhood renewal and local governance policy in the borough. In doing so, the book provides a longitudinal case study on how various central government community empowerment agendas have played out at a local level. It offers important lessons and indicates how they might work more effectively in future.
The Japanese artist Yoshio Markino enjoyed a successful career in early twentieth century London as an artist and author. This book examines his uniquely Asian perspective on British society and ...culture at a time when Japan eagerly sought engagement with the West.
After two decades of evolution and transformation,London had become one of the most open and cosmopolitan cities in the world. The success of the 2012 Olympics set a high water-mark in the visible ...success of thecity, whileits influence and soft power increased inthe global systems of trade, capital, culture, knowledge, and communications. The Making of a World City: London 1991 - 2021sets out in clear detail both the catalysts that have enabled London to succeed and also the qualities and underlying values that are at play: London's openness and self-confidence, its inventiveness, influence, and its entrepreneurial zeal. London's organic, unplanned, incremental character, without a ruling design code or guiding master plan, proves to be more flexible than any planned city can be. Cities are high on national and regional agendas as we all try to understand the impact of global urbanisation and the re-urbanisation of the developed world. Ifwe can explain London's successes and her remaining challenges, we can unlock a better understanding of how cities succeed.
The Virago story Riley, Catherine; Fahlenbrach, Kathrin; Klimke, Martin ...
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The 1970s witnessed a renaissance in women’s print culture, as feminist presses and bookshops sprang up in the wake of the second-wave women’s movement. At four decades’ remove from that heady era, ...however, the landscape looks dramatically different, with only one press from the period still active in contemporary publishing: Virago. This engaging history explains how, from modest beginnings, Virago managed to weather epochal transformations in gender politics, literary culture, and the book publishing business. Drawing on original interviews with many of the press's principal figures, it gives a compelling account of Virago’s place in recent women's history while also reflecting on the fraught relationship between activism and commerce.
Taking as her focus a body of writings in poetic, didactic, and legal modes that circulated in England's capital between the 1380sjust a generation after the Black Deathand the first decade of the ...English reformation in the 1530s, Amy Appleford offers the first full-length study of the Middle English "art of dying" (ars moriendi). An educated awareness of death and mortality was a vital aspect of medieval civic culture, she contends, critical not only to the shaping of single lives and the management of families and households but also to the practices of cultural memory, the building of institutions, and the good government of the city itself.
In fifteenth-century London in particular, where an increasingly laicized reformist religiosity coexisted with an ambitious program of urban renewal, cultivating a sophisticated attitude toward death was understood as essential to good living in the widest sense. The virtuous ordering of self, household, and city rested on a proper attitude toward mortality on the part both of the ruled and of their secular and religious rulers. The intricacies of keeping death constantly in mind informed not only the religious prose of the period, but also literary and visual arts. In London's version of the famous image-text known as the Dance of Death, Thomas Hoccleve's poetic collectionThe Series, and the early sixteenth-century prose treatises of Tudor writers Richard Whitford, Thomas Lupset, and Thomas More, death is understood as an explicitly generative force, one capable (if properly managed) of providing vital personal, social, and literary opportunities.
This book is a study of political exile and transnational activism in the late-Victorian period. It explores the history of about 500 French-speaking anarchists who lived in exile in London between ...1880 and 1914, with a close focus on the 1890s, when their presence peaked. These individuals sought to escape intense repression in France, at a time when anarchist-inspired terrorism swept over the Western world. Until the 1905 Aliens Act, Britain was the exception in maintaining a liberal approach to the containment of anarchism and terrorism; it was therefore the choice destination of international exiled anarchists, just as it had been for previous generations of revolutionary exiles throughout the nineteenth century. These French groups in London played a strategic role in the reinvention of anarchism at a time of crisis, but also triggered intense moral panic in France, Britain and beyond. This study retraces the lives of these largely unknown individuals – how they struggled to get by in the great late-Victorian metropolis, their social and political interactions among themselves, with other exiled groups and their host society. The myths surrounding their rumoured terrorist activities are examined, as well as the constant overt and covert surveillance which French and British intelligence services kept over them. The debates surrounding the controversial asylum granted to international anarchists, and especially the French, are presented, showing their role in the redefinition of British liberalism. The political legacy of these ‘London years’ is also analysed, since exile contributed to the formation of small but efficient transnational networks, which were pivotal to the development and international dissemination of syndicalism and, less successfully, to anti-war propaganda in the run up to 1914.
Exploring the dynamics that drive the processes of immigrant settlement and assimilation, this fascinating book looks at whether these are solely the outcome of the temporal setting, cultural ...background, and the contemporaneous socio-economic and political conditions, or whether there are factors which, irrespective of the prevailing environment, are constant features in the symbiosis between the outsider and the insider.
Focusing on the area of Spitalfields in East London, this volume compares and contrasts the settlement, integration and assimilation processes undergone by three different immigrant groups over a period of almost three hundred and fifty years, and assesses their relative successes and failures. The three groups examined are the Huguenots who arrived from France in the 1670s, the Eastern European Jews coming from the Russian Empire in the last third of the nineteenth century, and the Bangladeshis who began settling in Spitalfields in the early 1960s.
For centuries Spitalfields in East London has been a first point of settlement for new immigrants to Britain, and its proximity to both the affluence of the City of London and the poverty of what is now the London Borough of Tower Hamlets means that it has been, and still is, an area 'on the edge'. Concentrating on this district, this book examines at grass roots level the migrant experience and the processes by which the outsider may become the insider.