Challenging the respectable image of Victorian society, this irreverent, revisionist collection explores the sinful side of middle-class Victorian leisure, highlighting the problematic relationship between public respectability and private pleasure.

Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

How Much is Enough? addresses this important question, looking at the reasons why therapy can go on for too long or can come to a destructively premature ending, and offering advice on how to avoid either, with a timely conclusion. Using vivid examples and practical guidelines, Lesley Murdin examines the theoretical, technical and ethical aspects of endings. She emphasises that it is not only the patient who needs to change if one is to achieve a satisfactory outcome. The therapist must discover the changes in him/herself which are needed to enable an ending in psychotherapy. How Much is Enough? is a unique contribution to therapeutic literature, and will prove invaluable to students and professionals alike.

This engaging introduction explores the meaning of social deviancein contemporary society, from criminal activity to alternativelifestyle choices. Stuart Henry traces the path by which we createdeviance: how we single out behavior and appearances that differfrom the ‘norm’, label them as offensive orunacceptable, and condemn them. It explains what kinds of behaviorsare banned and who bans them, as well as exposing the importantpolitical influences on the social codes that lead to somepeople’s behavior being sanctioned and others’ beingcelebrated. Ultimately Social Deviance reveals theunderlying process by which some people get sucked into deviantlifestyles from which there appears to be no escape, highlightingthe central role of social stigma on a person’s identity. At its core this book looks at who becomes deviant and why. Itdelves into the multiple motives that cause rule breakers to behavebadly, at least in the eyes of those they offend, and it revealsthe way deviants think about their actions, their moral identityand their fellow moral outcasts.

This book provides a lively study of the role that Australians and New Zealanders played in defining the British sporting concept of amateurism. In doing so, they contributed to understandings of wider British identity across the sporting world.

Tells the story of the changing relationship between sport and religion from 1800 to the present day Both religion and sport stir deep emotions, shape identities, and inspire powerful loyalties. They have sometimes been in competition for people's resources of time and money, but can also be mutually supportive. We live in a world where sport seems to be everywhere. Not only is there saturation media coverage but governments extol the benefits of sport for nation and individual, and in 2019 the Church of England appointed a Bishop for Sport. The religious world has not always looked so kindly on sport. In the early nineteenth century, Evangelical Christians led campaigns to ban sports deemed cruel, brutal or disorderly. But from the 1850s Christian and other religious leaders turned from attacking 'bad' sports to promoting 'good' ones. The pace of change accelerated in the 1960s, as commercialization of sport intensified and Sunday sport became established, while the world of religion was transformed by increasing secularization, a resurgent Evangelicalism, and the growth of a multi-faith society. This is the first book to tell this story, and while its principal focus is on Christianity, there is additional coverage of Judaism and Islam, as there is of those - from Victorian sporting gentry to present-day football fans and marathon runners - for whom sport is itself a religion.

This book throws new light on white-collar crime, criminals and criminality in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. It does so by considering the life of one man, Jesse Varley (1869–1929), who embezzled more than £80,000 from Wolverhampton Corporation, and for a decade and more enjoyed an ostentatiously extravagant lifestyle. He was discovered, and despite serving a period of penal servitude, he turned again to white-collar crime (this time in Sheffield). Sentenced again to penal servitude, he died a few years later in Liverpool in what were said to be 'very poor circumstances'.