Antonio y Gabriel de Sancha, libreros de la Ilustración, y sus relaciones comerciales con Inglaterra

In this article we take as our point of departure the booksellers' catalogues printed by the Sanchas during the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV, as well as the catalogues issued by their London correspondents the booksellers Thomas Payne and Benjamin White. We contextualize the business relationship which developed between the Sanchas and the London booksellers as a direct result of Gabriel de Sancha's visit to London in the Summer of 1784. This study highlights the significance of a parallel offer of recently published books in English and Spanish in some of the most renowned bookshops in Madrid and London between the mid 1780s and the years immediately before the Peninsular War, a circumstance that no doubt stimulated curiosity on both sides and sped up the transfert culturel between both countries. Notwithstanding their business and private troubles, Antonio and Gabriel de Sancha, self-reliant entrepreneurs and cultural intermediaries, were able to establish a dynamic book trade flow which did not imply the subordination of Spain to England.

State power matters: power, the state and political struggle in the post-war American novel

This article is concerned with resituating the state at the centre of the analytical stage and, concomitantly, with drawing attention to the dangers of losing sight of the state as a locus of power. It seeks to uncover the relationship between two related lines of critical inquiry: Marxist and Foucauldian theories of the state; and the attempts by three postwar American novelist (Ken Kesey, William Burroughs and E.L. Doctorow) to determine the nature and extent of this power and to consider under what conditions political struggle might be possible. It argues that such a move is needed because recent critical analysis has been too preoccupied by corporeal micropolitics and global macropolitics, and that the postwar American novel can help us in this move because it is centrally concerned with the repressive potentiality of the US state. It maintains that the resuscitation of Marxist state theories in early 1970s and a debate between Poulantzas and Foucault is intriguingly foreshadowed and even critiqued by these novels. Consequently, it concludes that these novels constitute an unrecognized pre-history of what would become one of the key intellectual debates of the late twentieth century: an engagement between Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of the power and resistance.

A Triumph of Voluntarism? Industrial Relations and Strikes in Northern Ireland During World War Two

Flanders (1974) considered the Second World War to be the great social triumph and vindication of voluntarism in British industrial relations. This paper considers the experience of one region, Northern Ireland, functioning in a unique social and political context and considers the experience of its wartime industrial relations system. The political framework, trade union growth and representation, collective bargaining, strike activity including the major munitions strike of 1944 which may have provoked Defence Regulations Order 1AA, labour management and Joint Production Committees are all examined. The paper gives qualified support to Flanders’ conclusion.

Sublime Lessons: Education and Ambivalence in War Exhibitions

This paper examines how experiences of the sublime are regulated in the war exhibitions of modern museums. Ambivalence is a key feature of the sublime because subjects are forced to negotiate simultaneous feelings of terror and awe in the face of something unrepresentable like war. This paper analyses how war exhibitions dispel ambivalence by resuscitating a Kantian sublime full of resolution, catharsis and transcendence. In this context, potentially destabilising encounters with horrific objects (e.g. guns, bombs, shrapnel) are neutralised by didactic 'Lessons of War' and celebratory narratives of victory. Using examples from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Imperial War Museum in London and the Smithsonian Institution, this paper illustrates how conventional war exhibitions reproduce a politics of consensus by carefully managing the experience of the sublime.