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Military memoirs, their covers and the reproduction of public narratives of war abstRactThis article explores the role of the covers of military memoirs in articulating and reproducing ideas about men at war. Drawing on the range of published military memoirs about service with the British armed forces from 1980 onwards, the article looks at the covers of these texts as paratextual features that provide a threshold for the reader. The article explores how these covers contribute to public narratives of war, which include discourses that prioritize a specific model of military masculinity. It does this by examining features such as specific design features, dominant conventions and changes in covers over time. The article concludes with a discussion of the ways in which memoir covers correspond with the stylistic conventions and discourses about men and war evident in other media entertainment formats. It also considers the disparity often evident between the messages promoted by a cover's design and that of the text itself.Military memoirs, the personal narratives about experiences of military participation, have long been a source of social ideas about men and war. These are books written overwhelmingly by men, about a specific aspect of experiences in war that remain predominantly those of men. From the emergence of the genre in the mid-nineteenth century to the present, of the many readings KeyWoRds military memoir armed forces masculinity book covers paratext

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This paper reports on research undertaken into the aesthetics of the everyday. As well as the subject matter of aesthetic philosophy, art criticism and of the sociology of art, beauty and beautiful are of course very ordinary matters too. To shed light on the meanings of beauty as used in everyday settings and in natural language, we use the data collected in a study conducted with a group of low-income residents of the city of Milan. In this study we were interested in analysing their lifestyle in terms of their relationship with aesthetics, i.e. with 'beautiful' objects and/or experiences. Participants' self-reported aesthetic appreciations suggest that conceptions of 'beauty' are used as devices to narrate pieces of identity, memories, experiences, etc. Their aesthetic judgements take on an anthropological function, creating a framework of meanings that help the participants make sense of the world of objects and of their own lives with/through them.Keywords: beauty, poverty, aesthetics, art, objects, life-world, phenomenology.We contend that there is a broad distance separating ordinary perceptions of beauty and disciplinary discourses around the 'truly beautiful'. By disciplinary discourses we mean conceptualizations of beauty principally found in aesthetic philosophy and in art history, where scholars seek to establish a definition of beauty (and therefore supply a measuring gauge to discern beautiful from non-beautiful things) and then provide examples of these definitions mainly in works of art. Assumptions about beauty are also incorporated in sociological investigations of a range of cultural areas, such as art, fashion, design and the human body; these assumptions remain mostly implicit, while sociologists concentrate on explaining how