Religion and life cycles in early modern England

British culture after empire is the first collection of its kind to explore the intertwined social, cultural and political aftermath of empire in Britain from 1945 up to and beyond the Brexit referendum of 2016, combining approaches from experts in history, literature, anthropology, cultural studies and theatre studies. Against those who would deny, downplay or attempt to forget Britain's imperial legacy, these contributions expose and explore how the British Empire and the consequences of its end continue to shape Britain at the local, national and international level. As an important and urgent intervention in a field of increasing relevance within and beyond the academy, the book offers fresh perspectives on the colonial hangovers in postcolonial Britain from up-and-coming as well as established scholars.

This book explores how Muslims, Christians and Jews interacted in frontier zones of the early modern Mediterranean (primarily 1530–1670), and how they developed a frontier consciousness that took into account how their interlocutors thought and acted. Sources used include the gamut of genres ranging from factual to fictive, from inquisitional records and different sorts of treatises to plays, novels and (auto)biographies, in numerous languages of the Mediterranean. The Muslim-Christian divide in the Mediterranean produced an unusual kind of slavery, fostered a surge in conversion to Islam, offered an ideal setting for Catholic martyrdom in its rivalry with Protestantism, and provided a haven of sorts for Spanish Muslims (Moriscos) as well as Jews. The book argues that identities and alterities were multiple and versatile, that there was no war between Christianity and Islam during the early modern period, that ‘popular religion’ prevailed over theological principles, that women experienced slavery and religious conversion differently from men, that commerce prevailed over ideology and dogma, and that ‘positive’ human relations among people of different categories were not only possible but inevitable despite prevailing hostile conditions. In the spirit of Braudel, who asserts that ‘the Mediterranean speaks with many voices; it is a sum of individual histories’, this book endeavours to allow the people of the early modern Mediterranean to be heard more than one can find in any other study till now, and strives to cast all its major themes in a new light.

This volume is an extensive edited collection devoted to the work of the 2017 Nobel Literature Laureate, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, featuring contributions from the most established Ishiguro scholars. It contains major new chapters on each of his novels, including the first published essay on Klara and the Sun as well as his short-story collection Nocturnes and his screenplays. Situating Ishiguro’s work within current debates regarding modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism, the chapters examine his engagement with the defining concerns of the contemporary novel, including national identity, Britishness, cosmopolitanism, memory, biotechnology, terrorism, Brexit, immigration and populist politics. Discussing Ishiguro as both a British and a global author, the collection contributes to debates regarding the politics of publishing of ethnic writers, examining how Ishiguro has managed to shape a career in resistance to narrow labelling where many other writers have struggled to achieve long-term recognition. The collection opens with an extensive introduction by the co-editors which examines Ishiguro’s body of work as a whole and Ishiguro’s evolving literary reputation in light of his recent personal and commercial success. The book then offers individual chapters on each of Ishiguro’s novels, his short-story collection and his television and film work, as well as his recent journalistic interventions. Each chapter aims to extend and update existing criticism on Ishiguro via engagement with the most up-to-date critical frameworks, while at the same time staying true to each text’s most prominent thematic concerns. Given the prominence of its contributors and its comprehensive coverage, Kazuo Ishiguro: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives will be the definitive volume of Ishiguro scholarship for years to come.