In
recognition of today's anniversary, this week
Manchester University Press releases the
first book on the 1926 British General Strike volunteers.
A path-breaking title it tells the stories of
the upper and middle-class ‘volunteers’ in the strike.
With behaviour derived from their play traditions - the larks, rags, fancy
dress parties, and treasure hunts that prevailed at universities and country
houses - the volunteers transformed a potential workers’ revolution into a
festive public display of Englishness.
Saltzman recreates the cultural context
for the volunteers’ actions to explore how volunteers, strikers, and the
Government used the strike to define national identity; it also considers how
and why scholars, novelists, playwrights, diarists, museum curators, local
examine historians, and even a theme restaurant have continued to recycle the event.
Using the methodology and theory of folklore, social
anthropology, literary criticism, and social history, this study presents a
cultural ethnography of one of modern British history’s most significant
events. From 1985-87, the author conducted correspondence and interviews with
nearly 300 volunteers, strikers, and contemporary observers, research that is
now impossible to replicate. Those materials, combined with archival documents
and a survey of contemporary media along with novels, diaries, plays, memoirs,
histories, and exhibitions, provided the basis for exploring the traditional
expressive culture of the British upper classes.
This book will appeal to aficionados of British social and
cultural history, folklore, and popular culture as well as to undergraduate and
graduate classes in British studies, modern labour history, and social
anthropology as well as those on collective memory, history making and
identity.
Author Rachelle Hope (Riki) Saltzman says,
‘This book tells
the story of the volunteers of 1926. It pays particular attention to the ways
in which the traditional play behavior of middle, upper-middle, and upper-class
men and women influenced their actions—and how others interpreted those
actions. While dismissed at the time and since as a joke, the volunteers’
efforts represented serious attempts to assert their right to define
Englishness’.
Yilin Press to publish Chinese translation of Marxism and History
The writer and polemicist Carlos Fuentes has died in hospital in Mexico City. Fuentes published more than 60 works, including novels, short stories, essays and plays, in a career that spanned six decades. El Gringo Viejo (The Old Gringo), written in 1985, was the first Mexican book to feature in the New York Times bestseller list, and was evetually made into a Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda. His fictionalised account of his love affair with the movie star Jean Seberg inspired Diana, O la Cazadora Solitaria (Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, 1994).
