Author: Peter Maw File Type: pdf This book presents the first scholarly study of the contribution of canals to Britains industrial revolution. Although the achievements of canal engineers remain central to popular understandings of industrialisation, historians have been surprisingly reticent to analyse the full scope of the connections between canals, transport and the first industrial revolution. Focusing on Manchester, Britains major centre of both industrial and transport innovation, it shows that canals were at the heart of the self-styled Cottonopolis. Not only did canals move the key commodities of Manchesters industrial revolution -coal, corn, and cotton - but canal banks also provided the key sites for the factories that made Manchester the shock city of the early Victorian age. This book will become essential reading for historians and students interested in the industrial revolution, transport, and the unique history of Manchester, the worlds first industrial city. **

Author: Raymond Williams File Type: epub Acknowledged as a masterpiece of materialist criticism in the English language, this collection cover topics from British literary history to George Eliot and George Orwell to inquire about the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination. **

Author: David Ownby File Type: pdf Sainthood has been, and remains, a contested category in China, given the commitment of Chinas modern leadership to secularization, modernization, and revolution, and the discomfort of Chinas elite with matters concerning religion. However, sainted religious leaders have succeeded in rebuilding old institutions and creating new ones despite the Chinese governments censure. This book offers a new perspective on the history of religion in modern and contemporary China by focusing on the profiles of these religious leaders from the early 20th century through the present. Edited by noted authorities in the field of Chinese religion, Making Saints in Modern China offers biographies of prominent Daoists and Buddhists, as well as of the charismatic leaders of redemptive societies and state managers of religious associations in the Peoples Republic. The focus of the volume is largely on figures in China proper, although some attention is accorded to those in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other areas of the Chinese diaspora. Each chapter offers a biography of a religious leader and a detailed discussion of the way in which he or she became a saint. The biographies illustrate how these leaders deployed and sometimes retooled traditional themes in hagiography and charismatic communication to attract followers and compete in the religious marketplace. Negotiation with often hostile authorities was also an important aspect of religious leadership, and many of the saints stories reveal unexpected reserves of creativity and determination. The volumes contributors, from the United States, Canada, France, Italy, China, and Taiwan, provide cutting-edge scholarship. Taken together, these essays make the case that vital religious leadership and practice has existed and continues to exist in China despite the states commitment to wholesale secularization.

Author: Jennifer L. Biddle File Type: pdf In Remote Avant-Garde Jennifer Loureide Biddle models new and emergent desert Aboriginal aesthetics as an art of survival. Since 2007, Australian government policy has targeted remote Australian Aboriginal communities as at crisis level of delinquency and dysfunction. Biddle asks how emergent art responds to national emergency, from the creation of locally hunted grass sculptures to biliterary acrylic witness paintings to stop-motion animation. Following directly from the unprecedented success of the Western Desert art movement, contemporary Aboriginal artists harness traditions of experimentation to revivify at-risk vernacular languages, maintain cultural heritage, and ensure place-based practice of community initiative. Biddle shows how these new art forms demand serious and sustained attention to the dense complexities of sentient perception and the radical inseparability of art from life. Taking shape on frontier boundaries and in zones of intercultural imperative, Remote Avant-Garde presents Aboriginal art under occupation in Australia today. In Remote Avant-Garde Jennifer Loureide Biddle models new and emergent desert Aboriginal aesthetics as an art of survival. Since 2007, Australian government policy has targeted remote Australian Aboriginal communities as at crisis level of delinquency and dysfunction. Biddle asks how emergent art responds to national emergency, from the creation of locally hunted grass sculptures to biliterary acrylic witness paintings to stop-motion animation. Following directly from the unprecedented success of the Western Desert art movement, contemporary Aboriginal artists harness traditions of experimentation to revivify at-risk vernacular languages, maintain cultural heritage, and ensure place-based practice of community initiative. Biddle shows how these new art forms demand serious and sustained attention to the dense complexities of sentient perception and the radical inseparability of art from life. Taking shape on frontier boundaries and in zones of intercultural imperative, Remote Avant-Garde presents Aboriginal art under occupation in Australia today. **Review The extraordinary variety of mixed-media arts in outback Australia has not found its scholarly champion. Until now. Drawing on years of immersion in these embattled communities, a complete grasp of relevant theory, and a sympathetic eye, Jennifer Loureide Biddle highlights the painted evocations of everyday life in the town camps around Alice Springs, the animated hybrids of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, and the Yarrenyty Arltere artists, as well as three exceptional curatorial interventions. In so doing, she demonstrates how Australian Indigenous artists are fighting back, through their ingenious aesthetic, against the degradations that continue to be visited upon them by uncomprehending governments. (Terry Smith, author of Contemporary Art World Currents) Introducing an entire complex array of art, film, and digital forms, Jennifer Loureide Biddle destabilizes standard divisions between urban and remote Indigenous arts and politics, and between art as representation and art as performative social intervention. She does this all while simultaneously moving readers into the social complexity of Western Desert Indigenous art and outward into contemporary Australias broader social politics of culture and arts. Remote Avant-Garde is a tour de force of aesthetic life under settler occupation that moves approaches to art, politics, and aesthetic theory in new and exciting directions. (Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of Economies of Abandonment Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism) About the Author Jennifer Loureide Biddle is Director of Visual Anthropology & Visual Culture and Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Breasts, Bodies, Canvas Central Desert Art as Experience.