The London Scene

'The London Scene' is a collection of essays written by one of London's most acclaimed writers. Virginia Woolf was born and lived much of her life in the city, using it as the backdrop for many of her works.

This collection of essays inspired by the celebrated writer's favorite walks is available in its entirety for the first time in North America. 96 p p.

The London Scene is a beautifully illustrated, gift-book-sized hardback that marks the launch of the Signature Collection, a series of neglected or forgotten works by major authors. Next in line are pieces by EM Forster, Edgar Allan Poe and Jerome K Jerome, which are to be published in the spring. --Observer

A groundbreaking and extensively researched account of the 1960s London art scene In the 1960s, London became a vibrant hub of artistic production. Postwar reconstruction, jet air travel, television arts programs, new color supplements, a generation of young artists, dealers, and curators, the influx of international film companies, the projection of “creative Britain” as a national brand—all nurtured and promoted the emergence of London as “a new capital of art.” Extensively illustrated and researched, this book offers an unprecedented, rich account of the social field that constituted the lively London scene of the 1960s. In clear, fluent prose, Tickner presents an innovative sequence of critical case studies, each of which explores a particular institution or event in the cultural life of London between 1962 and 1968. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of an exuberant decade in the history of British art.

This book explores the highly-valued, and often highly-charged, ideal of authenticity in hip-hop — what it is, why it is important, and how it affects the day-to-day life of rap artists. By analyzing the practices, identities, and struggles that shape the lives of rappers in the London scene, the study exposes the strategies and tactics that hip-hop practitioners engage in to negotiate authenticity on an everyday basis. In-depth interviews and fieldwork provide insight into the nature of authenticity in global hip-hop, and the dynamics of cultural appropriation, globalization, marketization, and digitization through a combined set of ethnographic, theoretical, and cultural analysis. Despite growing attention to authenticity in popular music, this book is the first to offer a comprehensive theoretical model explaining the reflexive approaches hip-hop artists adopt to ‘live out’ authenticity in everyday life. This model will act as a blueprint for new studies in global hip-hop and be generative in other authenticity research, and for other music genres such as punk, rock and roll, country, and blues that share similar issues surrounding contested artist authenticity.

With its three-part rubric of London, drama, and space, this study brings to the currently vigorous critical discussion of Jonsonian authorship the sense of how another sort of dramatic text—that of London’s spaces as interpreted through dramatic practice both in the streets of the city and on its stages—is also an integral factor in the emergence of the early modern author.

This book is a detailed and close examination of the rave club drugs market as it took place in nightclubs, dance parties, pubs and bars and among friendship networks in London, in the mid to late 1990s. It focuses on the organizational features of drugs purchasing and selling and differentiates anonymous drugs trading in public nightclub settings, from selling among extended networks of friends and others. The stories of different people and friendship groups illustrate the varied drug selling roles and highlight the enterprise and entrepreneurship supporting their involvement. Told from the perspective of author's own membership in this night-time leisure culture, and embracing the disciplines of urban sociology and cultural criminology, this book contributes to our knowledge of recreational drugs markets and night-time leisure cultures. It will be of interest to students and academics with interests in these fields, as well as the many other people whose lives became a part of this vibrant leisure scene.

These six essential essays capture Woolf at her best, exploring modern consciousness through the prism of 1930s London while simultaneously painting an intimate, touching portrait of this sprawling metropolis and its fascinating inhabitants. Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.