New Books in British Studies Marshall Poe

Shakespeare's Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Victoria Sparey examines the varied representation of adolescent characters in Shakespeare's plays. Using early modern medical knowledge and an understanding of contemporary theatrical practices, the book unpacks complexities that surrounded the cultural and theatrical representations of 'signs' associated with an individual's physical maturation. Each chapter explores the implications of different 'signs' of puberty, in verbal cues, facial adornments, vocal traits and body sizes, to illuminate how Shakespeare presents vibrant adolescent selves and stories.
By analysing female and male puberty together in its discussion of adolescence, Shakespeare's adolescents provides fresh insight into the age-based symmetry of early modern adolescent identities. The book uses the adolescent's state of transformation to illuminate how the unfixed nature of adolescence was valued in early modern culture and through Shakespeare's celebrated characters and actors.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain (Princeton University Press, 2019), it only emerged after decades of different legislative responses to the problems of poverty that reflected shifting societal attitudes on the subject. As Boyer explains, welfare policy in the early 19th century primarily consisted of cash or in-kind payments provided for people living in their homes. This changed with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which replaced it with the infamous workhouse system. Though this brought down expenditures on the poor, the expectation that poverty was being reduced was belied by a series of reports at the end of the century which exposed the extent of urban poverty to a shocked nation. In response, the Liberal governments of the early 20th century passed a series of laws that established unemployment insurance and pensions for the elderly. While these expanded considerably the role of the state in providing for the poor, Boyer demonstrates that they fell well short of a comprehensive system, one which William Beveridge detailed in a famous 1942 report that served as the blueprint for the legislation passed by the Labour government after the Second World War.
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As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished.
Yet - perhaps surprisingly - many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants' balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers. From the Rolling Stones rocking Longleat to Christine Keeler rocking Cliveden, Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House (Basic Books, 2021) by Dr. Adrian Tinniswood takes us on a lively tour of these crumbling halls of power.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments called bodies and farthingales, existed in various extremes in Western Europe and beyond, in the form of stays, corsets, hoop petticoats and crinolines, right up until the twentieth century. 
With a nuanced approach that incorporates a stunning array of visual and written sources and drawing on transdisciplinary methodologies, Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Dr. Sarah Bendall explores the relationship between material culture and femininity by examining the lives of a wide range of women, from queens to courtiers, farmer's wives and servants, uncovering their lost voices and experiences. It reorients discussions about female foundation garments in English and wider European history, arguing that these objects of material culture began to shape and define changing notions of the feminine bodily ideal, social status, sexuality and modesty in the early modern period, influencing enduring Western notions of femininity.
Beautifully illustrated in full colour throughout, Shaping Femininity is the first large-scale exploration of the materiality, production, consumption and meanings of women's foundation garments in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. It offers a fascinating insight into dress and fashion in the early modern period, and offers much of value to all those interested in the history of early modern women and gender, material culture and consumption, and the history of the body, as well as curators and reconstructors.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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What is the future of higher education? In The Liberal Arts Paradox in Higher Education: Negotiating Inclusion and Prestige (Policy Press, 2023), Dr Kathryn Telling, a lecturer in education at the University of Manchester, explores the rise of liberal arts degrees in England to examine the broader contours of the contemporary university. The book tells the story of student and staff perspectives on liberal arts, as well as examining the institutional motivations and narratives underpinning the dilemmas and paradoxes of this subject area. Offering a rich and detailed engagement with key issues such as interdisciplinarity, institutional status, employability, and inequality in higher education, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences.
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Imagining Musical Pasts: the Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press, 2023) by Kristin M. Franseen explores the complicated archive of sources, interpretations, and people present in queer writings on opera and symphonic music from ca. 1880 to 1935. It focuses primarily on the work of three turn-of-the-twentieth-century music scholars--philosopher and horror writer Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget), biographer and program note annotator Rosa Newmarch, and critic and amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson. All three were queer, all discussed music both as part of fiction and nonfiction writing, and all worked outside of the academy. Rather than finding a grand unifying theory of early queer musicology, Franseen has closely examined three idiosyncratic writers who struggled to stay true to their ideas of intellectual honesty while also writing about music, musical figures, and musical listening in quite different ways. By studying each scholar's individual approach to constructing and interpreting musical and sexual knowledge, the book draws attention to aspects of their work previously neglected or considered only in isolation. Franseen meditates on questions of what constitutes historical evidence, what role should gossip and rumor have in nonfiction writing, and what should count as musicology, as she discusses each person's work.
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