This is a rich and comprehensive study of beggars’ culture and the institution of mendicancy in China from late imperial times to the mid-twentieth century, with a glance at the resurgence of beggars in China today. Generously illustrated, the book brings to life the concepts and practices of mendicancy including organized begging, state and society relations as reflected in the issues of poverty, public opinions of beggars and various factors that contribute to almsgiving, the role of gender in begging, and street people and Communist politics. Panoramically, the reader will see that the culture and institution of Chinese mendicancy, which had its origins in earlier centuries, remained remarkably consistent through time and space and that there were perennial and lively interactions between the world of beggars and mainstream society.

Discussions of street culture exist in a variety of academic disciplines, yet a handbook that brings together the diversity of scholarship on this subject has yet to be produced. The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture integrates and reviews current scholarship regarding the history, types, and contexts of the concept of street culture. It is comprehensive and international in its treatment of the subject of street culture. Street culture includes many subtypes, situations, locations, and participants, and these are explored in the various chapters included in this book. Street culture varies based on numerous factors including capitalism, market societies, policing, ethnicity, and race but also advances in technology. The book is divided into four major sections: Actors and street culture, Activities connected to street culture, The centrality of crime to street culture, and Representations of street culture. Contributors are well respected and recognized international scholars in their fields. They draw upon contemporary scholarship produced in the social sciences, arts, and humanities in order to communicate their understanding of street culture. The book provides a comprehensive and accessible approach to the subject of street culture through the lens of an inter- and/or multidisciplinary perspective. It is also intersectional in its approach and consideration of the subject and phenomenon of street culture.

Dickensian London is brought to real and vivid life in this innovative, accessible social history, revealing the true character of this place and time through the stories of its street denizens—shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2023 London, 1857: A pair of teenage girls holding a sign that says “Fugitive Slaves” ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where national newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city’s dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London’s most compelling period (1780–1870). Piecing together contemporary sources such as newspaper articles, letters, and journal entries, historian Oskar Jensen follows the harrowing, hopeful journeys of the city’s poor: children, immigrants, street performers, thieves, and sex workers, all diverse in gender, ethnicity, ability, and origin. For the first time, their own voices give us a radical new perspective on this moment in history, with its deep inequality that bears an astonishing resemblance to our own era’s divides.

Topophilia and Topophobia' offers timely reflections on the human habitat in the 20th century. The expression of topophilia and topophobia belong to our time, an ambivalence between the love and aversion for a place has been a recurrant paradox in human history

This edited volume informs readers about changing norms and meanings of borders and underlines recent scenarios that shape these borders. It focuses mainly on the Mediterranean and Middle East regions through the following questions: What are the social, cultural, philosophical, political, economic and aesthetic reasons for spatial segregation within contemporary territories and cities? In the world of globalization and networks, what are the new limitations of space? What are the alienating differences between interior and exterior, private and public, urban and rural, local and global, and real and virtual? Are spatial definitions and divisions more likely to be weakened (if not totally erased) by effects of globalization and mobility, similar to the dissolution of borders between countries? Or are local practices and measures likely to become more apparent with emerging trends such as sustainability and identity? Authored by international scholars, all chapters are arranged under four main parts: Urban and Rural, Global and Local, Physical and Sensual, Real and Virtual. Hence, different concepts and definitions of borders along with varying methods and tools for questioning their essence in architectural and urban spaces will be introduced. For example, in the rural and urban context, environments, settlements-housing, landscape, transformation, conservation and development; in the global and local context, styles, identity, universal design, sustainability, globalization and networks, mobility and migration; in the physical and sensual context, design studies and methodologies, environmental psychology, aesthetic reasoning, sense of place and well-being, and in the real and virtual context, realities, tools and communities are the main themes of the chapters. This book will be an essential source for professionals, scholars, and students of architecture and urban design with a view to understanding multidisciplinary perspectives in designing borders as well as the dialectical relationship between borders and space.

Proposing a fresh approach to scholarship on the topic, this volume explores the cultural meanings, especially the gendered meanings, of material associated with oral traditions. The collection is divided into three sections. Part One investigates the evocations of the 'old nurse' as storyteller so prominent in early modern fictions. The essays in Part Two investigate women's fashioning of oral traditions to serve their own purposes. The third section disturbs the exclusive associations between the feminine and oral traditions to discover implications for masculinity, as well. Contributors explore the plays of Shakespeare and writings of Spenser, Sidney, Wroth and the Cavendishes, as well as works by less well known or even unknown authors. Framed by an introduction by Mary Ellen Lamb and an afterword by Pamela Allen Brown, these essays make several important interventions in scholarship in the field. They demonstrate the continuing cultural importance of an oral tradition of tales and ballads, even if sometimes circulated in manuscript and printed forms. Rather than in its mode of transmission, contributors posit that the continuing significance of this oral tradition lies instead in the mode of consumption (the immediacy of the interaction of the participants). Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts confirms the power of oral traditions to shape and also to unsettle concepts of the masculine as well as of the feminine. This collection usefully complicates any easy assumptions about associations of oral traditions with gender.