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International student migration makes a significant contribution to higher education in the United Kingdom, with Southern Africa, and Nigeria in particular, positioned joint sixth in the top ten of sending countries. Many of these student-migrants, in supplementing their finances to fund their studies in the United Kingdom, undertake employment. Temporary and/or part-time employment is integral to the student-migrant experience, despite the express purpose of their admission into the United Kingdom designated for study purposes and not work. This explicit object is reflected in restrictions affixed to international students’ employment rights whilst studying; they are generally restricted to a maximum of 20 hours of work per week during term time and proscribed from working full time or as independent contractors. Given the scant regard this topic has received in the existing literature, this study offers an examination of students’ lived employment experiences under these rules. Adopting a qualitative methodology through interviews and ethnographic observations with cohorts of international student workers from sub-Saharan Africa, the study presents a holistic picture of the lived experiences, through employment practices, of this group of student-migrant-workers. The study aims to offer contributions to the existing body of literature in two principal ways. First, it accounts for the employment experiences of student-migrants through the analytical framework of ‘precarity’ by examining the various manifestations of insecurity in the students’ lived realities, nuanced by structures of migration control and labour market temporalities. The study highlights that these students are forced to contend with intersecting forms of insecurities in their labour market encounters. This reifies their dependence on certain forms of employment and relationships, and renders them increasingly susceptible to unfavourable work conditions including low pay, exploitation, discrimination and abuse. This aspect of the study is concluded by advancing an argument that higher education institutions, as the primary sponsors of these students, must do more to forearm them with candid insights on what to expect of the temporary employment market and furnish them with a comprehensive knowledge of their accruable employment rights. 

For the second contribution, adopting the socio-legal schema of legal consciousness, the study considers the student-migrants’ relationship with the law by way of the legal restrictions on their employment and interrogates their agency in their efforts to derogate from these rules. These derogations are conceptualised as ‘semi-legality’, an analytical construct that marks an indeterminate halfway point between utter illegality and compliance, as it applies to labour. The study highlights that there are two discernible plots towards enabling semi-legal employment and evading detection thereof. The first involves the students undertaking work with different employers simultaneously; meanwhile, the second entails students contracting for work through the use of private limited companies as a trading structure. The study argues that the specifics of the student’s violation of visa rules has profound distinctive implications for their legal consciousness’ disposition and more so the manner in which they simultaneously resist and make recourse to the law and its institutions towards resolving workplace grievances. 

International student migration makes a significant contribution to higher education in the United Kingdom, with Southern Africa, and Nigeria in particular, positioned joint sixth in the top ten of sending countries. Many of these student-migrants, in supplementing their finances to fund their studies in the United Kingdom, undertake employment. Temporary and/or part-time employment is integral to the student-migrant experience, despite the express purpose of their admission into the United Kingdom designated for study purposes and not work. This explicit object is reflected in restrictions affixed to international students’ employment rights whilst studying; they are generally restricted to a maximum of 20 hours of work per week during term time and proscribed from working full time or as independent contractors. Given the scant regard this topic has received in the existing literature, this study offers an examination of students’ lived employment experiences under these rules. Adopting a qualitative methodology through interviews and ethnographic observations with cohorts of international student workers from sub-Saharan Africa, the study presents a holistic picture of the lived experiences, through employment practices, of this group of student-migrant-workers. The study aims to offer contributions to the existing body of literature in two principal ways. First, it accounts for the employment experiences of student-migrants through the analytical framework of ‘precarity’ by examining the various manifestations of insecurity in the students’ lived realities, nuanced by structures of migration control and labour market temporalities. The study highlights that these students are forced to contend with intersecting forms of insecurities in their labour market encounters. This reifies their dependence on certain forms of employment and relationships, and renders them increasingly susceptible to unfavourable work conditions including low pay, exploitation, discrimination and abuse. This aspect of the study is concluded by advancing an argument that higher education institutions, as the primary sponsors of these students, must do more to forearm them with candid insights on what to expect of the temporary employment market and furnish them with a comprehensive knowledge of their accruable employment rights. 

For the second contribution, adopting the socio-legal schema of legal consciousness, the study considers the student-migrants’ relationship with the law by way of the legal restrictions on their employment and interrogates their agency in their efforts to derogate from these rules. These derogations are conceptualised as ‘semi-legality’, an analytical construct that marks an indeterminate halfway point between utter illegality and compliance, as it applies to labour. The study highlights that there are two discernible plots towards enabling semi-legal employment and evading detection thereof. The first involves the students undertaking work with different employers simultaneously; meanwhile, the second entails students contracting for work through the use of private limited companies as a trading structure. The study argues that the specifics of the student’s violation of visa rules has profound distinctive implications for their legal consciousness’ disposition and more so the manner in which they simultaneously resist and make recourse to the law and its institutions towards resolving workplace grievances. 

This major work in Ruskin studies offers a timely re-evaluation of the origins, formation and workings of John Ruskin’s Guild of St George. Drawing on both significant and recently discovered archive material and existing research, this work looks afresh at the genesis of Ruskin’s ideas and their translation into practice.

Since Ruskin criticism began, attention has been drawn to the Guild of St George, Ruskin’s attempt in the 1870s and 1880s to foster a series of self-sufficient, co-operative agrarian communities founded on principles of artisanal (non-mechanised) labour, and creativity and environmental sustainability. While endorsing previous accounts which point to the positive impact of Ruskin’s Guild, this book tempers such readings by considering the often destructive effect of Guild life on the Companions who worked in the communities. An astonishing wealth of previously unpublished correspondence reveals the extent to which Ruskin’s ideological position caused a failure to translate well-meaning idealism into effective social action, and often devastating consequences for those who worked St George’s land. By drawing on entirely new material, it is possible to reveal in detail for the first time the realities of Guild life over an extended period of time. This monograph provides an authoritative work on Ruskin’s utopian experiment, enriching ongoing discussions on sustainable community and bringing Ruskin’s work to a wider audience.

The Lure of Economic Nationalism addresses an important topic, namely, the continued appeal of economic nationalism. It places economic nationalism in both historical and contemporary contexts. It begins with a historical consideration of mercantilism and the writings of Friedrich List, considering both from multiple perspectives in economic history and policy and international relations. It then turns to the political psychology of zero-sum thinking, its role as a heuristic device but also its significant limitations.

The book considers both the aggressive trade policy of the Trump Administration in the United States and the Brexit process in the United Kingdom. It also advocates for the alternative to economic nationalism in the form of a rules-based, multilateral trading system and the World Trade Organization. It argues that going beyond zero-sum outcomes is better suited to address current problems. It considers the rising tides of ethnonationalism and the alternative of civic nationalism. It even addresses economic nationalism in the recent COVID-19 pandemic and multilateral approaches to pandemic preparedness. 

The Lure of Economic Nationalism is written in an accessible manner and draws deeply from research in economics and political science. It will be of interest to policymakers, economists, political scientists and to the informed public.

The Lure of Economic Nationalism addresses an important topic, namely, the continued appeal of economic nationalism. It places economic nationalism in both historical and contemporary contexts. It begins with a historical consideration of mercantilism and the writings of Friedrich List, considering both from multiple perspectives in economic history and policy and international relations. It then turns to the political psychology of zero-sum thinking, its role as a heuristic device but also its significant limitations.

The book considers both the aggressive trade policy of the Trump Administration in the United States and the Brexit process in the United Kingdom. It also advocates for the alternative to economic nationalism in the form of a rules-based, multilateral trading system and the World Trade Organization. It argues that going beyond zero-sum outcomes is better suited to address current problems. It considers the rising tides of ethnonationalism and the alternative of civic nationalism. It even addresses economic nationalism in the recent COVID-19 pandemic and multilateral approaches to pandemic preparedness. 

The Lure of Economic Nationalism is written in an accessible manner and draws deeply from research in economics and political science. It will be of interest to policymakers, economists, political scientists and to the informed public.

The ascetic, devotional sect known as the Mahanubhavs – ‘Those of the Great Experience’ – arose in 13th century Maharashtra. The Mahanubhavs initially experienced a fairly rapid expansion, particularly across the northern and eastern regions of Maharashtra. However, by the end of the 14th century their movement went underground as they sought a defensive isolation from the larger Hindu context, and they withdrew to remote areas and villages. Although the prominent leaders of the early Mahanubhavs were Brahmans (often converts from the prevailing advaita vaisnavism), their followers were and are mostly non-Brahmans, i.e. low caste people and even untouchables. Thus the Mahanubhavs were met with prejudice and distrust outside their own closed circles, and this isolation continued until the beginning of the 20th century. This volume offers an overview of the origins and main religious and doctrinal characteristics of the Mahanubhavs, with a particular focus on the aspects that reveal their difference and nonconformity.

“The Mahatma Misunderstood” studies the relationship between the production of novels in late-colonial India and nationalist agitation promoted by the Indian National Congress. The volume examines the process by which novelists who were critically engaged with Gandhian nationalism, and who saw both the potentials and the pitfalls of Gandhian political strategies, came to be seen as the Mahatma’s standard-bearers rather than his loyal opposition.

In doing so, the volume challenges the orthodoxy in postcolonial and subaltern studies which contends that nationalists and nationalisms use independence to bring to power a bourgeois elite, who produce a story about the nation that erases the unevenness of minority experiences and demands in favor of simplified, majoritarian citizenship. Instead ‘The Mahatma Misunderstood’ demonstrates that nationalist fiction (and by extension the nationalist political movement) was marked from the beginning by a deep ambivalence about the relevance of nationalist agitation and mainstream nationalist politics for minorities in colonial India, and sought to recast anticolonial politics through novelistic debates with the spokesman for Indian nationalism, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

The volume thus articulates a recuperative theory of nationalism in the Indian case, in order to move thinking about nationalism beyond the current impasse produced by postcolonial theory in an era of transnational capitalism that too frequently forgets, underestimates or represses the national in the transnational.

“The Mahatma Misunderstood” studies the relationship between the production of novels in late-colonial India and nationalist agitation promoted by the Indian National Congress. The volume examines the process by which novelists who were critically engaged with Gandhian nationalism, and who saw both the potentials and the pitfalls of Gandhian political strategies, came to be seen as the Mahatma’s standard-bearers rather than his loyal opposition.

In doing so, the volume challenges the orthodoxy in postcolonial and subaltern studies which contends that nationalists and nationalisms use independence to bring to power a bourgeois elite, who produce a story about the nation that erases the unevenness of minority experiences and demands in favor of simplified, majoritarian citizenship. Instead ‘The Mahatma Misunderstood’ demonstrates that nationalist fiction (and by extension the nationalist political movement) was marked from the beginning by a deep ambivalence about the relevance of nationalist agitation and mainstream nationalist politics for minorities in colonial India, and sought to recast anticolonial politics through novelistic debates with the spokesman for Indian nationalism, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

The volume thus articulates a recuperative theory of nationalism in the Indian case, in order to move thinking about nationalism beyond the current impasse produced by postcolonial theory in an era of transnational capitalism that too frequently forgets, underestimates or represses the national in the transnational.

'The Making of Christian Communities' sheds light on one of the most crucial periods in the development of the Christian faith. It considers the development and spread of Christianity between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and includes analysis of the formation and development of Christian communities in a variety of arenas, ranging from Late Roman Cappadocia and Constantinople to the court of Charlemagne and the twelfth-century province of Rheims, France during the twelfth century. The rise and development of Christianity in the Roman and Post-Roman world has been exhaustively studied on many different levels, political, legal, social, literary and religious. However, the basic question of how Christians of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages formed themselves into communities of believers has sometimes been lost from sight. This volume explores the idea that survival of the Christian faith depended upon the making of these communities, of which the Christians of this period were themselves acutely – and sometimes acrimoniously – aware.

A Marxist scholar and historian, Irfan Habib has been a towering presence in the Indian intellectual scene for over four decades. His formidable intellectual reputation, established in the sixties with the publication of 'The Agrarian System of Mughal India', broadened as he became an authority in the entire area of Indian history from ancient to modern. Professor Habib's undiminished commitment to the cause of socialism is reflected in these highly original and bold analyses of Marxist historiography and theories of socialist construction.

This volume comprises essays from scholars around the world representing the wide variety of Habib's interests and contributions. Ranging from history to politics and economics, the essays cover both the medieval period and modern India, as well as theories for the future of this emerging superpower. This special edition also features an essay by Irfan Habib, originally published as 'The Economic History of Medieval India: A Survey', covering the Delhi Sultanate, the Vijayanagara economy and the economy of Mughal India.

A Marxist scholar and historian, Irfan Habib has been a towering presence in the Indian intellectual scene for over four decades. His formidable intellectual reputation, established in the sixties with the publication of 'The Agrarian System of Mughal India', broadened as he became an authority in the entire area of Indian history from ancient to modern. Professor Habib's undiminished commitment to the cause of socialism is reflected in these highly original and bold analyses of Marxist historiography and theories of socialist construction.

This volume comprises essays from scholars around the world representing the wide variety of Habib's interests and contributions. Ranging from history to politics and economics, the essays cover both the medieval period and modern India, as well as theories for the future of this emerging superpower. This special edition also features an essay by Irfan Habib, originally published as 'The Economic History of Medieval India: A Survey', covering the Delhi Sultanate, the Vijayanagara economy and the economy of Mughal India.

‘The Making of the Modern Chinese Navy’ includes 14 historical case studies that help to illuminate a number of special characteristics of the modern-day Chinese navy. The Chinese Navy embodies a number of special features that modern-day Chinese naval officers perhaps take for granted, including a belief in the Mandate of Heaven, tributary system, and the fear of ‘losing face’ either in a diplomatic setting or by risking valuable equipment in battle. Ethnic and language differences, regional loyalties, and political mistrust potentially exacerbate these problems. Special peculiarities include the Mongol dual-officer diarchy that led to the political commissar system utilized by the People’s Liberation Army. Outside influences, such as blockade, sanctions, and embargoes, can exert a profound impact on China, just as foreign intervention or, equally important, a decision not to intervene, can often determine the outcome of major maritime events.

The 14 case studies discuss many of these characteristics, while the Conclusion examines all case studies together and places them in a historical perspective. Do Chinese still worry about ‘face’, and in particular about ‘losing face’? What impact does the Mandate of Heaven have on modern Chinese? Will Han Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait go to war to determine which dynasty should rule all of China? Does the PLAN worry as much about mutiny as earlier dynasties? What is the impact of foreign intervention, foreign decisions not to intervene and secret diplomacy? ‘The Making of the Modern Chinese Navy’assesses which of these historical characteristics and peculiarities are still present in full force in China and which ones may no longer have as great an impact on the contemporary Chinese navy.

‘The Materiality of Politics’ uses a series of historical illustrations to reveal the physicality and underlying ‘materiality’ of political processes. The political subject of the study is the collective political actor poised against governmental rules for stabilizing order. Samaddar’s tour de force propels readers through an account of blood, violence, bodies, controls, laws and conflicts. Politics is examined not as an abstraction, but as a ‘real’ field of dynamic factors rooted in everyday life.

Volume 1, subtitled ‘The Technologies of Rule’ discusses the techniques of modern rule which form the basis of the post-colonial Indian state. Beginning with the rule of law, the volume analyses the nature and manifestations of constitutional rule, the relation between law and terror and the construction of ‘extraordinary’ sovereign power. The author also investigates the methods of care, protection, segregation and stabilization by which rule proceeds. In the processes, the material core of the ‘cultural’ and the ‘aesthetic’ is exposed.

‘The Materiality of Politics’ uses a series of historical illustrations to reveal the physicality and underlying ‘materiality’ of political processes. The political subject of the study is the collective political actor poised against governmental rules for stabilizing order. Samaddar’s tour de force propels readers through an account of blood, violence, bodies, controls, laws and conflicts. Politics is examined not as an abstraction, but as a ‘real’ field of dynamic factors rooted in everyday life.

Volume 2, subtitled ‘Subject Positions in Politics’ focuses on the political subject emerging from post-colonial politics. The 1940s are closely examined in order to trace the genesis of the modern Indian political subject, his/her dreams of liberty and recognition of freedom’s qualifications. Contentious politics illuminates the dual tendency of the political subject to demand justice in court, and engage in rebellious street politics, clamouring for justice and equality. As the author demonstrates, the subject’s desire for the autonomy of politics manifests itself in various ways.

‘The Meetings Handbook: Formal Rules and Informal Processes’ is a comprehensive manual to the rules and issues of meetings, as well as a useful guide to understanding the informal processes that underlie the successful conduct of the business of meetings. The handbook gives the formal issues of meeting processes, including setting agendas and putting forward formal motions. It also canvasses informal aspects of meetings work, such as preparation, reading the non-verbal messages of participants, and insights into how to chair meetings and deal with those who seek to subvert the formal rules.

This handbook is a unique accompaniment to the more conventional legal books that are good formal guides. ‘The Meetings Handbook’ also includes examples of an ethical code, constitutions, agendas, and minutes. It features a reference list as well as the usual scholarly references. In order to make the work readily useable by the busy professional, the book is divided into sections that may act as ‘stand-alone’ guides to specific meetings issues and strategies.

‘The Meetings Handbook: Formal Rules and Informal Processes’ is a comprehensive manual to the rules and issues of meetings, as well as a useful guide to understanding the informal processes that underlie the successful conduct of the business of meetings. The handbook gives the formal issues of meeting processes, including setting agendas and putting forward formal motions. It also canvasses informal aspects of meetings work, such as preparation, reading the non-verbal messages of participants, and insights into how to chair meetings and deal with those who seek to subvert the formal rules.

This handbook is a unique accompaniment to the more conventional legal books that are good formal guides. ‘The Meetings Handbook’ also includes examples of an ethical code, constitutions, agendas, and minutes. It features a reference list as well as the usual scholarly references. In order to make the work readily useable by the busy professional, the book is divided into sections that may act as ‘stand-alone’ guides to specific meetings issues and strategies.

When one organizes events over periods of years and gives them an appellation such as “Modernism,” the organization of facts is guided by concepts and values discerned throughout these periods, comparable facts sufficient to call it an “era,” or an “epoch,” or other terms that insist on the shared aspects of those years, regardless of differences seen as well over the span considered. One can call such an effort a “metahistory,” in that what is tracked is not merely human events that are political, economic, ideological, sociological, or other disciplinary descriptors, but an overview that critically links all the years under consideration. Even more, to have a “metahistory” is to discern how the people of eras, epochs, or the other organizational labels, thought. Human history is generated by choices, choices informed by intuitions and more intentional understandings. One of the aspects the book dwells upon in this “metahistory” of Modernism is the presence of “perspective,” how one sees in a time what is there to be addressed and dealt with. Perspectives can be poorly informed or in their very nature not adequate for a sufficient knowledge of what is addressed, even as one must as a human judge what faces one. To discern from evidence how one’s perspective configures an event is the “meta” of “metahistory”. Modernism, the epoch from 1648 to the Present, can be described among its tenets as a period where the notion of “objectivity” has been developed. This has occurred in every field of the emergent arts and sciences in these years. Post-modernism, as will be addressed, is a more critical modernism that has brought to light the idea of multiple perspectives of objectivity as a univocal perspective of ‘objectivity’. Other modernist ideas have expanded in all fields and the ideas of what is human consciousness, epistemologies of both a reflective and a pre-reflective consciousness (called by some the ‘unconscious’) have emerged in art, aesthetics, psychology, philosophy, the social sciences, as well as the neurosciences To have “meta” knowledge is this comprehension of the scope and benefits, yet limitations, of one’s “perspective” and that of others of a time. Only a historian interested in such perspectives can be called a “metahistorian.”

The book uses the concept of the “metaparadigm,” taken from Thomas Kuhn, to track the evolution of how in a period of time the problems of the existing disciplines of knowledge are articulated, and how inquiry methods are used to flesh out a solvable problem and effectively resolve it. The book details four phases that constitute the period of time in which a metaparadigm develops. The first phase is a new set of concepts that challenge the existing approach to knowledge in each discipline. The second phase is a systematic theory that will guide inquiry. The third phase is the actual practice of the discipline in solving problems, a phase that can conflict with the older approach or be congruent with it. The fourth phase integrates the older approaches in the new one, and thus expands in an augmented manner the discipline.

The four phases of each metaparadigm have certain durations. The initial three phases usually endure for about 30–40 years, and the fourth phase for over 50 years. These phases each recur in the next period of time; that is the next metaparadigmatic period. Four evolving metaparadigms are shown in Western thought in this book, tracking one or more disciplines in the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences through each of the four phases of a metaparadigm, and the four metaparadigms that occur between 1648 and the present. 

When one organizes events over periods of years and gives them an appellation such as “Modernism,” the organization of facts is guided by concepts and values discerned throughout these periods, comparable facts sufficient to call it an “era,” or an “epoch,” or other terms that insist on the shared aspects of those years, regardless of differences seen as well over the span considered. One can call such an effort a “metahistory,” in that what is tracked is not merely human events that are political, economic, ideological, sociological, or other disciplinary descriptors, but an overview that critically links all the years under consideration. Even more, to have a “metahistory” is to discern how the people of eras, epochs, or the other organizational labels, thought. Human history is generated by choices, choices informed by intuitions and more intentional understandings. One of the aspects the book dwells upon in this “metahistory” of Modernism is the presence of “perspective,” how one sees in a time what is there to be addressed and dealt with. Perspectives can be poorly informed or in their very nature not adequate for a sufficient knowledge of what is addressed, even as one must as a human judge what faces one. To discern from evidence how one’s perspective configures an event is the “meta” of “metahistory”. Modernism, the epoch from 1648 to the Present, can be described among its tenets as a period where the notion of “objectivity” has been developed. This has occurred in every field of the emergent arts and sciences in these years. Post-modernism, as will be addressed, is a more critical modernism that has brought to light the idea of multiple perspectives of objectivity as a univocal perspective of ‘objectivity’. Other modernist ideas have expanded in all fields and the ideas of what is human consciousness, epistemologies of both a reflective and a pre-reflective consciousness (called by some the ‘unconscious’) have emerged in art, aesthetics, psychology, philosophy, the social sciences, as well as the neurosciences To have “meta” knowledge is this comprehension of the scope and benefits, yet limitations, of one’s “perspective” and that of others of a time. Only a historian interested in such perspectives can be called a “metahistorian.”

The book uses the concept of the “metaparadigm,” taken from Thomas Kuhn, to track the evolution of how in a period of time the problems of the existing disciplines of knowledge are articulated, and how inquiry methods are used to flesh out a solvable problem and effectively resolve it. The book details four phases that constitute the period of time in which a metaparadigm develops. The first phase is a new set of concepts that challenge the existing approach to knowledge in each discipline. The second phase is a systematic theory that will guide inquiry. The third phase is the actual practice of the discipline in solving problems, a phase that can conflict with the older approach or be congruent with it. The fourth phase integrates the older approaches in the new one, and thus expands in an augmented manner the discipline.

The four phases of each metaparadigm have certain durations. The initial three phases usually endure for about 30–40 years, and the fourth phase for over 50 years. These phases each recur in the next period of time; that is the next metaparadigmatic period. Four evolving metaparadigms are shown in Western thought in this book, tracking one or more disciplines in the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences through each of the four phases of a metaparadigm, and the four metaparadigms that occur between 1648 and the present. 

Military power has long been a serious obstacle to a sustained democracy in Pakistan. The authors investigate the Pakistani military’s retrogressive agrarian interventions in the Punjab, and outlines a change, as recognised by society, in the military’s rightful function within the economy.

Set against the social resentment instigated by the military’s agricultural land grabbing, and a burgeoning resistance to the military’s overbearing and socially unjust role in Pakistan’s economy, this book supplements a larger body of work detailing the military’s hand in industrial, commercial, financial and real estate sectors. Any gain in economic autonomy wielded by the military makes it less answerable to civilian oversight, and makes it more likely to act to protect its economic interests.

The survival of civilian rule in Pakistan, which is critically important for the foreseeable future, requires a fundamental reordering of the balance of power between state institutions, and between state and society. Pakistan, long encumbered by the military yoke, has witnessed its first peaceful transition from one political administration to another; and in a move congenial to the consolidation of this democratic process, ‘The Military and Denied Development in the Pakistani Punjab’ exposes the nefarious nature of the military’s predation, and signals a move for the military to be contained to its constitutionally mandated role – defence.

The Mind Economy is a bold and visionary exploration of the human psyche as a structured, dynamic economy. In this groundbreaking work, Professor Oliver Hoffmann proposes that memory is not simply a repository of past events but the foundational currency of our inner world—shaping identity, driving cognition, and fueling our emotional and mental processes.
Rooted in psychological theory, enriched by philosophical reflection, and sharpened through economic reasoning, this book introduces the concept of the “spirit system”—an integrated model that explains how narration, imagination, and memory will function as key exchange processes within the mental economy. Hoffmann reveals how memories are continuously reconstructed, assigned value, and traded in the form of thoughts, beliefs, and self-concepts. These processes define how individuals perceive themselves, relate to others, and make decisions in daily life.
The book also provides an in-depth introduction to “economic cognitive therapy,” a method that uses the principles of inner economization to increase mental efficiency, emotional resilience, and therapeutic effectiveness. Practical exercises and transformative techniques—such as imagination reconstruction and transcendental narration—offer powerful tools for personal development and healing. The inclusion of supportive practices like yoga, meditation, and aesthetic experience adds a deeply holistic dimension.
Rather than relying on mystical or esoteric language, The Mind Economy provides a clear, structured, and intellectually rich approach to understanding the self. It challenges conventional dualisms between inner and outer worlds and proposes that our economic systems may be reflections of internal mental structures, not the other way around.
This book is for readers who seek more than self-help—it is for thinkers, practitioners, and explorers of the human condition who want to understand how we constitute value, identity, and meaning from within. With depth, clarity, and vision, Hoffmann invites us to become better stewards of our inner resources—and to unlock the power of memory as the gateway to transformation.

Discusses the decline of U.S. education and proposes reforms to address inconsistent standards, weakened teaching, and ineffective federal policies

In recent years, the United States has experienced a decline in education, a trend that contradicts the incline of advancements seen in other countries around the world. This decline presents substantial threats to the future of the United States that affect academic performance along with economic growth and social structure. This book examines the various and intricate reasons behind this trend of rapid decline while providing knowledge for educators (teachers and administrators), policymakers, and other stakeholder groups committed to improving the American education system and explaining the impact of the Department of Education and why it is no longer needed in its current state.
One of the main reasons for the educational decline is the inconsistency in educational standards across states and school districts created by the Department of Education that began in 1980. Different countries that maintain consistent national standards, the United States operates under an uneven system that often prioritizes local governance over uniformed results. This inconsistency leads to large differences in the quality of educational quality as some students receive a below-average education based on geographic location rather than what their potential allows. This book explains how this lack of standardization has contributed to significant gaps in knowledge and performance, especially related to the disadvantaged student populations.
The quality of teaching has been another crucial factor that plays a role in the disintegrating educational standards created by the Department of Education and their initiatives. In many circumstances, teachers and administrators face tremendous challenges that include high student-to-teacher ratios, limited resources, and inadequate professional development opportunities. These factors restrict their ability to effectively engage and educate students. This book investigates the systemic issues affecting teacher recruitment and retention, discusses how low pay, a lack of support, and high burnout rates contribute to a teaching workforce that often fails to meet the needs of its students. By addressing these critical gaps, we can begin to understand how to attract and retain quality educators who can drive student success within the United States.
Administrative practices and policies within school systems also have an undeniable impact on educational outcomes. Bureaucratic barriers often dampen innovation and limit the autonomy that schools need to adapt to their unique challenges. This book analyzes the complicated relationship between local administrations and broader educational policies set forth by the U.S. Department of Education. Next, it discusses how strict compliance-focused environments can prevent creativity and responsiveness in classrooms that ultimately undermine the very goal of education that is to prepare students for success in an ever-changing world.
The role of the U.S. Department of Education cannot be overlooked. While focused on improving education nationwide, federal policies have at times implemented unrealistic expectations and mandates without adequately considering the diverse environment of American education. This book analyzes these policies and offers a plan for reform, emphasizing the need for flexibility and local context in educational standards and assessments. As a result, this perspective is necessary for creating an environment that encourages schools to thrive rather than just survive.

This book explores the transformative role of open-source technologies and digital commons in fostering a cooperative and sustainable economy. Built upon the research project “Techno-Social Innovation in the Collaborative Economy,” the study investigates innovative, grassroots economic models that leverage digital technologies for community-driven governance and decentralized value creation.
The book presents a multi-case study approach, featuring organizations such as Tzoumakers, Open Food Network, CoopCycle, and Circles UBI. These cases exemplify how platform cooperativism, cosmolocalism, and open cooperativism redefine traditional business structures, emphasizing sustainability, fairness, and democratic ownership. The discussion extends to blockchain-enabled DAOs and their impact on labor, governance, and wealth distribution.
Through theoretical and empirical insights, The Model of Open Cooperativism bridges political economy and digital innovation, providing practical strategies for policymakers, activists, and scholars. It highlights the success and challenges of grassroots-driven initiatives, offering a roadmap for transitioning toward a commons-based, post-capitalist economy.

The Modern State and Its Enemies considers the historical intellectual developments that provided the fundaments of the modern state, informed the key theoretical questions arising in the democratic context, and shaped the relationship between (state) sovereignty and (individual) liberty. The modern state as a nation-state is thus based on the relationship between its territory, its people and its sovereign authority. As a result, nationalism and minorities policy are issues that are key to the state’s self-conception. But historically, these have also been repeatedly used as weapons against the state, manifesting in separatism, irredentism and antidemocratic agitation. Both antisemitism and right-wing extremism have always stood in opposition to the democratic state and continue to do so. Antisemitism in particular is antithetical to modernity as it fundamentally rejects equality and individual liberty. This book presents its arguments in theoretical, historical and sociological terms, with a particular focus on examples from the German context.

This book explores the moral essence of states in domestic as well as international politics, thinking beyond national interests.

This book deals with the morality, identity, self-conception and prestige of states, all of which goes well beyond the narrow, rationalist defence of national interests, which dominates most IR studies. The honour of states – which is most clearly seen in situations of war – rests on the ideal conception of ‘all of us’, which includes all citizens, all classes and all generations, set against their opposite numbers outside of ‘our’ immediate sphere of domination. This state-based image of itself and its existential teleology constitutes its very essence, notwithstanding that it is often seen as a deviation (‘exception’) from the normal state of affairs, where the state is ‘just’ there to serve and support the economy and its principal actors.

The volume, which is particularly topical given the current belligerent state of Europe and the global struggle for hegemony, pursues this line of thinking along three different but interconnected routes. The first chapter delves into the morality question itself, tackling the complex relationship between politics, law and morals, and between states and citizens. The universe of moral judgements feeds off rigid distinctions between good and bad, I/we and the Other, restraint and self-restraint, liberty and puritanism. Political actors support it, law legitimates it, and citizens enact it. The second chapter deals with the question of the honour and prestige of states, historically and conceptually; this is a question that has been either ignored or misconceived by recent international relations theories, but which has now shown its renewed relevance and cries out for an explanation. Finally, the third article tackles the question of war and peace head-on. Its basic theorem is that the two are not contradictory but complementary: reasons for war are produced in times of peace. Both Kant’s thesis on ‘perpetual peace’ and its modern corollary, that is, that democracies do not go to war against each other, are seen as fallacious. The chapter ends by addressing the question of the background and rationale of the war in Ukraine, in the process critiquing the moral stance characterising the Western understanding of the situation.

Thus, all three chapters revolve around issues that relate to the interaction of war and democracy and the underlying morality that both legitimates and underpins the actions of politicians as well as citizens.

'The Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain' addresses one of the most heated policy debates of our day: access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits. Seven scholars – an anthropologist, an economist, a sociologist, and four lawyers – discuss how a museum can flesh out the relevant ethical issues that frustrate any purely technical solution. The visitors to the proposed museum become a source of considered judgments. Commercial movies are screened and discussion follows about some aspect of bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain, suggested in the films. Both the screenings and discussions occur in small amphitheatres named according to the uneven chronology in the management of information: 100,00 BC to 16 September 1787 (public domain); 17 September  1787 to today’s date (intellectual property); and today’s date to (?) (legislation sui generis). The three amphitheatres surround a courtyard café which is a metaphor for the mission of the museum: conversation. The scholars vet the blueprint before an imaginary octogenarian who is not at all impressed and will "say the damnedest things." As this 21st century Don Quixote moseys across the chapters and pokes fun at the scholarly ruminations, the reader begins to understand how the proposed museum is indeed a forum for the nuanced ethics over bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain. The dialogue-within-a-dialogue is highly original and entertaining.

'The Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain' addresses one of the most heated policy debates of our day: access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits. Seven scholars – an anthropologist, an economist, a sociologist, and four lawyers – discuss how a museum can flesh out the relevant ethical issues that frustrate any purely technical solution. The visitors to the proposed museum become a source of considered judgments. Commercial movies are screened and discussion follows about some aspect of bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain, suggested in the films. Both the screenings and discussions occur in small amphitheatres named according to the uneven chronology in the management of information: 100,00 BC to 16 September 1787 (public domain); 17 September  1787 to today’s date (intellectual property); and today’s date to (?) (legislation sui generis). The three amphitheatres surround a courtyard café which is a metaphor for the mission of the museum: conversation. The scholars vet the blueprint before an imaginary octogenarian who is not at all impressed and will "say the damnedest things." As this 21st century Don Quixote moseys across the chapters and pokes fun at the scholarly ruminations, the reader begins to understand how the proposed museum is indeed a forum for the nuanced ethics over bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain. The dialogue-within-a-dialogue is highly original and entertaining.

Since the new leadership came to power in 2012, China's domestic governance and public diplomacy have experienced some profound changes. At home, a far-reaching anti-corruption campaign significantly restored the government's credibility and reinforced public trust in the party-state's governance model, leading to a surge of nationalist pride. Internationally, the previous diplomatic principle, "hide our capacities and bide our time", gradually faded away with the emerging ideas like "China's ideas" and "China's wisdom". Good governance and anti-corruption efforts were expected to enhance soft power overseas. The party-state successfully governed the state for decades relying on its controversial governance approaches. The country also has visibly demonstrated economic and social development. However, China's growing influence has failed to be recognised as soft power, being viewed rather as sharp power most times. The monograph investigates whether China is mindful of exporting its political ideas and whether it considers its governance model to be the pillar of its soft power portfolio. The monograph also analyses how Australia, a western country with close economic ties with China, interprets China's intended narrative regarding its governance model and development. The questions are addressed through framing analysis of media coverage and in-depth interviews with Australian public diplomacy experts. Most studies in this field focus on externally directed soft power initiatives and the monograph fills the void by drawing attention to domestic affairs. The monograph sheds a new light on the relationship between domestic governance, soft power, and sharp power by examining the congruity between China's projection and Australia's mediation and also draws implications about China's public diplomacy and the future global order by sketching out Beijing’s ambitions and attempts.

Mathew Carey’s long-neglected “The New Olive Branch” offers new insight into political economy as it really happened. This is the first-ever scholarly edition of Carey’s most important economic work. Like other volumes in Anthem’s “Economic Ideas that Built America” series, it gives the reader easy access to historical works that have been dropped from the modern economic canon because of their uncomfortable fit with contemporary conceptions of classical economics rooted in the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus.

In “The New Olive Branch,” Carey derided those so-called classical economists as visionary theorists with little grasp of real-world problems. Rejecting grand theories, Carey instead looked to historical examples and statistics to argue that government policy, and particularly the protection of manufacturers, was crucial to the development of a strong, independent American economy. In this volume, “The New Olive Branch” is accompanied by portions of Carey’s “Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry” (1822), which offer further insight into his rejection of classical economics.

While such views have long been out of fashion, overtaken by the popularity of classical economics, they were extremely influential in early America. Carey’s arguments illuminate how a large proportion of Americans thought about their economy while providing a corrective to the anachronistic overemphasis of the role of laissez-faire economics in early America.

The key questions about today’s elites are easy to ask. How did a few spectacularly wealthy bankers and fund managers, whose magic money-tree crumbled to sawdust in 2008, get themselves bailed out with public funds that no health service or infrastructure commission could dream of? Why did democratically elected governments allow the ‘1%’, and those at even more exquisite decimal places, to flee further enriched from a market meltdown that would traditionally have culled their ‘capital’? Why, when voters in America, Europe and Asia turned against governments that had made them pay twice for corporate excess, did they rally behind dissenting members of the elite, rather than traditional anti-elitist parties? What enables the domination of politics and business by an unchosen few – skewing the distributions of power, wealth and status even further skywards – when such pyramids were meant to be flattened long ago by democratization, meritocratic selection and social mobility?

‘Greedy Elites’ derives answers from the latest empirical evidence on rising concentrations of economic and political power, allied to new theories of how elites maintain, apply and justify their ascent over the rest of the society. It traces contemporary turbulence to the membership and internal dynamics of elites – economic, political and social – and the way they manage their connections to the rest of society. The composition and conduct of decision-making ‘higher circles’ remains central to explaining how national and multilateral political arrangements remain stable for long periods, interspersed with phases of abrupt change. ‘Greedy Elites’ also sheds light on why the patterns of change are often common across countries that differ in strength of democracy and civil society, and why they typically raise fractions of the previous elite to greater prominence, despite mass protest aimed at bringing the whole elite down to earth. Sixty years after C. Wright Mills’s pioneering probe of the Power Elite in the US, ‘Greedy Elites’ offers new and internationally applicable ideas on the importance of frictions within the elite in sparking and steering wider social change; the shifting relationship between power and money within elites; the alternative ways in which elite fractions enrol ‘middle’ and ‘working’ class elements in their power struggles, and the typical developmental consequences of elites alternately forming and breaking up distributional class coalitions.

This collection of eleven essays deals with Lenin’s life in western European emigration in the years before the First World War. The first five essays explore Lenin’s efforts to build a purely Bolshevik Party through the creation of a unique school for underground workers outside of Paris, his schismatic machinations in calling the 1912 Prague Conference, his problematic relations with the new Bolshevik daily ‘Pravda’, his unsuccessful attempt to call a party congress in 1914, and his defeat at the Brussels ‘Unity’ Conference summoned by the International Socialist Bureau on the eve of the war. These essays are based on a detailed reading of Western and Soviet sources, and they question the common assumption that Lenin was unquestioned inside his own faction and that pre-war Bolshevism was a monolithic entity well-prepared to seize power.

The latter essays discuss Lenin’s curious friendship during the pre-war period with Roman Malinovsky, who turned out to be a police spy, and Inessa Armand, a Bolshevik feminist with whom he had a romantic relationship. They also investigate such mundane but little-studied topics as what he liked to eat in emigration, his annual habit of taking bourgeois vacations and his obsession with athletic pursuits. The picture which emerges from these studies is not of a single-minded, perfect leader solely devoted to carrying out revolution, but rather of a ‘non-geometric’ Lenin with very human foibles and weaknesses.

This book proposes to examine the nature of religion by seeking its origin within the context of the theory of evolution and the development of the human brain. It is argued that religion is the way the mechanism of natural selection in the theory of evolution operates to help humans survive in the context of a dangerous and hostile world. Survival is accomplished when profound experiences like trance cause a rewiring of the brain, giving birth to what later is identified as religious attitudes and ways of behaving. It is possible to speculate that without the development of religion, humans might not have survived to create cultures and civilizations. Therefore, the development of religion makes it possible for early humans to thrive. This evolutionary process involved adaptation to one’s environment, creation of social groups, and development of the body and the brain.
There are also other neglected aspects of evolution not discussed by previous theorists. The implications of the embodied nature of human beings are not always stressed by cognitive theorists. What they more specifically tend to neglect is that human bodies are chemical factories. It is numerous chemicals created within the body that contribute to the development of religious experiences. Another neglected aspect of those influenced by the theory of evolution is that early humans exerted a will to power to survive. This so-called will to power is a process of empowerment with the goal of enabling humans to become strong and powerful enough to survive. This will to power is not something metaphysical but is rather part of the dynamic of natural selection. It is possible to think of the proposed will to power within the operation of evolution as a thought experiment with the goal of enriching the theory of evolution.
With a review of the so-called Big Bang theory about the beginning of the universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the quest for the birth of religion, and the cognitive contribution to this quest, the initial chapter commences a major theme of this book, namely the importance of origins. It includes an examination of the problematic nature of religion from a comparative perspective. Pre-historical times witnessed early Homo sapiens surrounded by danger as they attempted to survive. For our human ancestors, religion was not a way to get rich or to distinguish oneself from others, it was a means of survival. This was a perfectly natural development and response to one’s hostile environment.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic “The Secret Garden,” but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist, and writer of children’s stories. Born in 1849 in Manchester, England, Burnett settled in Tennessee with her mother and siblings at sixteen after her father’s death. She began writing stories to supplement her family’s income. With the acceptance of the story “Surly Tim’s Trouble” by “Scribner’s Magazine” in New York and the subsequent publication of her first novel “That Lass O’Lowries” in 1877, the critics hailed Burnett as a new voice in American fiction comparing her favorably to Charles Dickens.

Burnett’s early novels were written in the years prior to and immediately after the death of George Eliot in 1880, their form very much in the Victorian tradition of realism. Her first two novels were social problem novels set in a mining and manufacturing district in Lancashire and they deployed the local dialect to great effect. Even in those early traditional novels, the contours of Burnett’s unique conception of her later female characters can be discerned. After her industrial novels, she published a short American regional novel about rural life in North Carolina and an English village novel modelled on Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford” with this difference: Burnett’s heroine in that tale is a young, vibrant American woman. With the publication of her Washington novel “Through One Administration,” which critics compared to Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” as fine examples of the “new fiction,” Burnett’s career as a novelist was firmly established. Thus, the early chapters of this book read Burnett’s novels alongside those of Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry James as a way to demonstrate her place is the changing literary field of the time.

After her Washington novel, she turned away from realism and the psychological minuteness of the new fiction to experiment with both traditional and popular novel forms. She next published two historical novels “A Lady of Quality” and “His Grace of Osmonde,” the first a tale of her most challenging heroine Clorinda Wildairs and the second a tale of the man Clorinda ultimately marries. Taken together the two novels tell the same tale from a woman’s and a man’s point of view. “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett” places those novels in the context of theories of the Victorian historical novel and in relation with Victorian narrative deployment of multiple points of view.

She next published a pair of transatlantic novels roughly modelled on a pattern she sketched out in her children’s classic, “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” The novels engage with issues related to the “new woman” novel of the period, especially in relation to fears of cultural degeneration and the responsibility of women to redress those fears. Her last two novels appeared after the Great War in which she wrestled with the crisis of meaning for Anglo-American culture in the wake of the war. The final chapter of this book, then, places those last novels in relation to Great War novels written by women and frames a reading of Burnett’s engagement with the Great War through T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Read as a body of literary fiction, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic “The Secret Garden,” but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist, and writer of children’s stories. Born in 1849 in Manchester, England, Burnett settled in Tennessee with her mother and siblings at sixteen after her father’s death. She began writing stories to supplement her family’s income. With the acceptance of the story “Surly Tim’s Trouble” by “Scribner’s Magazine” in New York and the subsequent publication of her first novel “That Lass O’Lowries” in 1877, the critics hailed Burnett as a new voice in American fiction comparing her favorably to Charles Dickens.

Burnett’s early novels were written in the years prior to and immediately after the death of George Eliot in 1880, their form very much in the Victorian tradition of realism. Her first two novels were social problem novels set in a mining and manufacturing district in Lancashire and they deployed the local dialect to great effect. Even in those early traditional novels, the contours of Burnett’s unique conception of her later female characters can be discerned. After her industrial novels, she published a short American regional novel about rural life in North Carolina and an English village novel modelled on Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford” with this difference: Burnett’s heroine in that tale is a young, vibrant American woman. With the publication of her Washington novel “Through One Administration,” which critics compared to Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” as fine examples of the “new fiction,” Burnett’s career as a novelist was firmly established. Thus, the early chapters of this book read Burnett’s novels alongside those of Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry James as a way to demonstrate her place is the changing literary field of the time.

After her Washington novel, she turned away from realism and the psychological minuteness of the new fiction to experiment with both traditional and popular novel forms. She next published two historical novels “A Lady of Quality” and “His Grace of Osmonde,” the first a tale of her most challenging heroine Clorinda Wildairs and the second a tale of the man Clorinda ultimately marries. Taken together the two novels tell the same tale from a woman’s and a man’s point of view. “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett” places those novels in the context of theories of the Victorian historical novel and in relation with Victorian narrative deployment of multiple points of view.

She next published a pair of transatlantic novels roughly modelled on a pattern she sketched out in her children’s classic, “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” The novels engage with issues related to the “new woman” novel of the period, especially in relation to fears of cultural degeneration and the responsibility of women to redress those fears. Her last two novels appeared after the Great War in which she wrestled with the crisis of meaning for Anglo-American culture in the wake of the war. The final chapter of this book, then, places those last novels in relation to Great War novels written by women and frames a reading of Burnett’s engagement with the Great War through T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Read as a body of literary fiction, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

‘The Ocean of God’conveys the proposition that the future of religions, if they will not want to contribute to the destruction of humanity, will become transreligious. Based on the assumption that the spiritual impulse of humanity cannot simply be eradicated, religiosity will persist in transreligious forms, as secularizations, naturalizations and transhumanist dreams only envision such transformations, but fall short in their ability to replace the force of spirituality to further civilized peace of human existence on Earth and its future in evolutionary, ecological and cosmological dimensions. In relating the contributions of religious pluralism to the concept of the unity of religions, which have arisen in this “new axial age” forovercoming the checkered history of religions in furthering peace, the program of a transreligious discourse, based on the insight of the fundamental relativity of (religious) truth and the special contributions of process philosophy and theology as well as the Bahá'í universe of thought, analyses and projects a new religiosity or spirit enabling religions to overcome their deepest motives of strife and warfare.

‘The Ocean of God’is the presentation of the power to envision and prepare for meaningful prospects regarding the future of religions, neither succumbing to their mere reduction to prophecies of disappearance, nor binding us to past appearances that have contributed to the current predicaments of humanity. With new instruments of analysis of the aporias of the plurality and unity of religions, namely, negotiations of the concept of “multiplicity” and its application to a pluralism of pluralisms and the differentiation between a horizontal (synchronic) and vertical (diachronic) pluralism as well as multiple world theories, it wants to demonstrate the potential to cope with the complex incommensurabilities of plurality of worldviews and their peaceful coinherence in temporal and spatial differentiation.

‘The Ocean of God’ expands the philosophical and religious discussion on multiplicity and unity to the ecological embeddedness, evolutionary relativity and the cosmological magnitude of the human story. With the less known minority voices such as process philosophy and theology as well as the new axial perspective of the Bahá'í religion, it situates humanity in cosmological patterns of becoming instead of fixed formations, of mutuality instead of external plurality, of relationality instead of reductionisms, of processuality instead of fixations on either past sedimentations or apocalyptic fatalisms. In the end stands the thesis that the future of religion will be transreligious, or there will not be either a humanity entertaining religion or a humanity entertained by the universe.

‘The Ocean of God’conveys the proposition that the future of religions, if they will not want to contribute to the destruction of humanity, will become transreligious. Based on the assumption that the spiritual impulse of humanity cannot simply be eradicated, religiosity will persist in transreligious forms, as secularizations, naturalizations and transhumanist dreams only envision such transformations, but fall short in their ability to replace the force of spirituality to further civilized peace of human existence on Earth and its future in evolutionary, ecological and cosmological dimensions. In relating the contributions of religious pluralism to the concept of the unity of religions, which have arisen in this “new axial age” forovercoming the checkered history of religions in furthering peace, the program of a transreligious discourse, based on the insight of the fundamental relativity of (religious) truth and the special contributions of process philosophy and theology as well as the Bahá'í universe of thought, analyses and projects a new religiosity or spirit enabling religions to overcome their deepest motives of strife and warfare.

‘The Ocean of God’is the presentation of the power to envision and prepare for meaningful prospects regarding the future of religions, neither succumbing to their mere reduction to prophecies of disappearance, nor binding us to past appearances that have contributed to the current predicaments of humanity. With new instruments of analysis of the aporias of the plurality and unity of religions, namely, negotiations of the concept of “multiplicity” and its application to a pluralism of pluralisms and the differentiation between a horizontal (synchronic) and vertical (diachronic) pluralism as well as multiple world theories, it wants to demonstrate the potential to cope with the complex incommensurabilities of plurality of worldviews and their peaceful coinherence in temporal and spatial differentiation.

‘The Ocean of God’ expands the philosophical and religious discussion on multiplicity and unity to the ecological embeddedness, evolutionary relativity and the cosmological magnitude of the human story. With the less known minority voices such as process philosophy and theology as well as the new axial perspective of the Bahá'í religion, it situates humanity in cosmological patterns of becoming instead of fixed formations, of mutuality instead of external plurality, of relationality instead of reductionisms, of processuality instead of fixations on either past sedimentations or apocalyptic fatalisms. In the end stands the thesis that the future of religion will be transreligious, or there will not be either a humanity entertaining religion or a humanity entertained by the universe.

“The Old World, the New World, and the Creation of the Modern World, 1400–1650: An Interpretive History” provides a unique look at the early years of discovery and colonization of the Americas, and at the impact of this period on the historical development of both the New and Old Worlds. Through innovative use of visual evidence and original source material, Aaron M. Shatzman examines both the physical (economic and social) and the psychological impact of voyages of discovery and exploration on Europeans, discussing the ways in which Europeans “used” the New World both as a place to get rich and as a place to create ideal societies and expand God’s kingdom on Earth.

Providing the essential facts in conjunction with expert analysis, the volume invites readers to tackle a number of important questions so as to construct their own analysis of the evidence presented. A number of important historical issues are broached, including: the origins of slavery and racial prejudice; the significance of the wilderness (frontier) in shaping the future of the Americas; and the importance of the discovery and settlement of the Americas in the transition from a pre-modern to a modern world. Uniquely, the volume goes beyond the standard textbook formula of “what, when and where” to delve more deeply into the specific (as well as the wider) significance of historical developments, thereby providing the platform for a textured, interpretive understanding of the history of the Atlantic world.

“The Old World, the New World, and the Creation of the Modern World, 1400–1650: An Interpretive History” provides a unique look at the early years of discovery and colonization of the Americas, and at the impact of this period on the historical development of both the New and Old Worlds. Through innovative use of visual evidence and original source material, Aaron M. Shatzman examines both the physical (economic and social) and the psychological impact of voyages of discovery and exploration on Europeans, discussing the ways in which Europeans “used” the New World both as a place to get rich and as a place to create ideal societies and expand God’s kingdom on Earth.

Providing the essential facts in conjunction with expert analysis, the volume invites readers to tackle a number of important questions so as to construct their own analysis of the evidence presented. A number of important historical issues are broached, including: the origins of slavery and racial prejudice; the significance of the wilderness (frontier) in shaping the future of the Americas; and the importance of the discovery and settlement of the Americas in the transition from a pre-modern to a modern world. Uniquely, the volume goes beyond the standard textbook formula of “what, when and where” to delve more deeply into the specific (as well as the wider) significance of historical developments, thereby providing the platform for a textured, interpretive understanding of the history of the Atlantic world.

This book focuses on two significant architectural elements in traditional Chinese buildings, that is, Dougong and Zaojing. Dougong is a bracket set often sitting above columns and beams as a key component in the great buildings and tombs of imperial China. Zaojing is a special structure sunken into the ceiling, often profusely decorated with carvings and colorful paintings in various motifs. As sumptuary laws from imperial China stipulated, Dougong (in its multiple forms) and Zaojing used to be constructed only in the great halls of royal palaces and major religious temples. 

There is ceaseless research on Dougong and Zaojing by modern architectural scholars. This is also facilitated by the heated architectural heritage conservation movement in contemporary China. As unique features that define the characteristics of traditional Chinese architecture, Dougong, and Zaojing not only widely appear in numerous counterfeit historic structures, but are also creatively revived in many cultural and commercial buildings. 

This book inquires about the origin of Dougong and Zaojing in the Chinese Bronze Age, and their heavenly interpretation in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220). Compared to their later technically oriented development during the Tang to the Qing dynasties (c. 618–1912), and their modern preservation and innovative reinterpretation, the rich cultural meanings originally embodied in Dougong and Zaojing have almost disappeared. If the important architectural elements dougong and zaojing are taken for granted as a defining identity of Chinese traditional architecture, then they are feebly reflected in modern architecture practice as a mere visual element. Considering the transcendental quality that dougong and zaojing had in the Han dynasty in effectively expressing a mystical and magical worldview, there is a tangible loss of Chinese architectural heritage today. 

What if a conservative girl falls in love with a secular young woman?

The novel discloses the codes of cultural differentiation in 21st century Turkey as it focuses on the details of the two young women’s lives, their families, and their emotional and sexual lives.

Esin is an attractive, happily married Turkish woman with a modern, Western-oriented outlook and a successful career hosting business meetings in Istanbul. She would normally have nothing in common with Kubra, a conservative religious girl she met at college in the States. Kubra wears the Islamist headscarf and lives with her parents.

As Esin and Kübra form an intimate friendship, the chapters of the novel open out onto each woman’s emotional and sexual experience in turn. The cultural divisions of contemporary Turkey are dramatized through their personal lives and the dynamics within their families.

Each woman’s curiosity about the other’s mysterious world gradually takes on a boldly erotic character. At first interested in the external trappings of each other’s lives, they embark on a journey of spiritual and sensual discovery whereby each woman comes to know 'The Other.'

Other Canon Economics: Essays in the Theory and History of Uneven Economic Development brings together key essays on development economics from one of the most prolific and important development economists and historians of economic policy today. Erik S Reinert argues through essays ranging from 1994 to 2020 that neo-classical economics damages developing countries: the theory of comparative advantage leaves out a number of factors which make economic activities qualitatively different as carriers of economic growth. Based on a long intellectual tradition – started by the Italian economists Giovanni Botero (1589) and Antonio Serra (1613) and later used in virtually all presently industrialised countries – Reinert shows that the country which exports increasing returns goods – e.g. high-end manufacture – has advantages over the country which exports diminishing returns goods – e.g. commodities. This has important implications for today’s development strategies that, Reinert argues, should be seen as industrial strategies.

Other Canon Economics: Essays in the Theory and History of Uneven Economic Development brings together key essays on development economics from one of the most prolific and important development economists and historians of economic policy today. Erik S Reinert argues through essays ranging from 1994 to 2020 that neo-classical economics damages developing countries: the theory of comparative advantage leaves out a number of factors which make economic activities qualitatively different as carriers of economic growth. Based on a long intellectual tradition – started by the Italian economists Giovanni Botero (1589) and Antonio Serra (1613) and later used in virtually all presently industrialised countries – Reinert shows that the country which exports increasing returns goods – e.g. high-end manufacture – has advantages over the country which exports diminishing returns goods – e.g. commodities. This has important implications for today’s development strategies that, Reinert argues, should be seen as industrial strategies.

Much has been written about political polarisation in the United States, but no one has examined it through the lens of recent U.S. history. There is nothing deterministic about how we became polarised, and it happened more recently than many think. To fully understand the problem, we must take the long view, the perspective provided by history, with its attention to change over time and the role of contingency. That’s what The Path to Paralysis does.

The book illuminates the broad forces that have shaped and reshaped American society and politics since the mid-1960s: the shift from an industrial to an information economy that produced economic inequality not seen since the 1920s; dramatic, unsettling changes in gender and sexuality; sharp conflict between those who embrace the culture of personal freedom that was a legacy of the 1960s and politically mobilised White evangelicals; persistent racial discord that transformed Southern politics and shattered the New Deal coalition; and dramatic changes in communication that transformed broadcasting into narrowcasting, creating alternate news and truths.

These developments had their origin in the late 1960s and have generated sharp political conflict for six decades. But they didn’t overwhelm the system until the 21st century. Ronald Reagan moved American politics to the right, but Republicans and Democrats forged compromise on issues as diverse as economic policy, civil rights, and immigration. After the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tacked to the centre and sought bipartisan solutions to issues like welfare, education and immigration. Sharp conflict and governance were compatible.

The tipping point was the election of the nation’s first Black president and the economic collapse he inherited. Fault lines of religion, region, gender, sexual orientation, class, education and, especially, race widened. People chose sides and identified enemies, the number of true swing voters shrunk, fewer states and congressional districts were competitive, the two major parties became more monolithic, and appeals to the base drove strategy and what passed for policy. It was an atmosphere that provided fertile ground for a demagogue whose norm-busting appeals to White grievance and Christian Nationalism, as well as to regional and class resentment strengthened his appeal to an angry base and threatened the peaceful transition of power, the bedrock of American democracy for more than two centuries.

The purpose of this book is to shed light on American politics and power that have disadvantaged African Americans through the implementation of public policies, causing them to remain poor and underprivileged in the United States. History demonstrates that African Americans have inherited gateless poverty: exacerbated by living without training and skills; living in slums without decent medical care; having the devastating heritage of the long years of slavery; and a century of oppression, hatred, and injustice. African Americans in the United States started off at a disadvantage; they were hobbled by chains for years and then abruptly liberated, and brought to the starting line expecting to compete with everyone else.
This book will scrutinize persistent poverty using a model of institutional policies that have been implemented to keep African Americans as a permanent underclass thus withholding any measure of true equality, which I foundationally understand as racial and economically unjust. This book produces evidence that public policies, programs, and institutional practices have impacted African Americans. Therefore, it is important to challenge the long-standing misdirected paradigm, which blames the individual for being poor instead of holding the government accountable for the structural failures within the governmental system.
The persistent poverty that exists among African Americans is a result of the unanticipated consequence of a flawed policy system that was intended to alleviate problems but has, in fact, caused them to worsen. There has been considerable debate in both academic and policy arenas over the extent of long-term poverty. Some scholars argue that there is no long-term poverty problem and that most poverty is temporary and reflect short-run adjustment problems or life-cycle changes. Other scholars argue that some individuals and families remain poor for longer periods, perhaps over generations. One view blames poverty persistence on poor labor market opportunities, segregation, discrimination, inadequate under-funded schools, and the lack of community resources in disadvantaged neighborhoods. An additional group points to the work and marriage disincentives in the welfare system, the increasing number of female-headed households, the increases in teen-pregnancy and illegitimacy, deviant subcultures, and the personal deficiencies of the poor.
According to the Institute for Research on Poverty, African Americans and Latinos have poverty rates that greatly exceed the national average. Poverty levels differ depending on where people live; the metropolitan poverty rate differs greatly between suburbs and the central city, it also varies by region and within regions. According to Scott Allard, African Americans are impacted by federal housing policies, public housing practices, discriminatory mortgage lending, and racial steering, which all played a major role in the creation of poor Black neighborhoods. Douglas S. Massey argues that residential segregation is the primary structural cause of the geographical concentration of poverty in the U.S. urban areas. Research indicates that residential segregation is the principal structural feature of American society that is responsible for the perpetuation of poverty, which represents the primary cause of racial inequality in the United States. According to Wilson, Massey, and Denton, racially segregated urban poverty is one of the most recognizable products of housing discrimination and housing policy in America.

The present volume addresses the long-felt need for a full critical edition, with translation and commentary on The Peterborough Chronicle, together with an overview of critical writings published up until 2021. It is also the first edition to include a detailed examination and transcription of the early-modern annotations in E and on its interleaves, as well as a systematic analysis of the manuscript's complicated structure. The book consists of three parts: I. Introduction, including the history of research, detailed paleographical and codicological analysis, and discussion of the other Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscripts, and their textual relations; II. The Critical Edition, presenting the text in its immediate seventeenth-century manuscript context, with notes; III. The Modern English Translation, including detailed historical and philological notes. A bibliography, indices, and extensive comparanda complete the book. This edition, translation, and commentary greatly enhance the accessibility and research potential of one of the most important primary sources for the history, language, and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. No one to date has given attention to the 'seventeenth-century manuscript context' of The Peterborough Chronicle. William L'Isle, the manuscript's owner at that time, had the manuscript disbound and interleaved throughout with larger watermarked paper sheets on which he transcribed variant passages from other witnesses to the Chronicle, primarily from witness A, now in the Parker Library, Cambridge. He and other readers also made annotations on the manuscript itself, including Archbishop Parker (†1575), who did so in red chalk. Each of these interventions has been recorded and analyzed in the commentary on the Text presented in this edition. Extensive historical annotations accompany the Translation and bring current scholarship to bear on it. This edition also provides for the first time a set of ninety-five comparanda so that readers can review the evidence for the paleographical analysis found in the Introduction. 

The present volume addresses the long-felt need for a full critical edition, with translation and commentary on The Peterborough Chronicle, together with an overview of critical writings published up until 2021. It is also the first edition to include a detailed examination and transcription of the early-modern annotations in E and on its interleaves, as well as a systematic analysis of the manuscript's complicated structure. The book consists of three parts: I. Introduction, including the history of research, detailed paleographical and codicological analysis, and discussion of the other Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscripts, and their textual relations; II. The Critical Edition, presenting the text in its immediate seventeenth-century manuscript context, with notes; III. The Modern English Translation, including detailed historical and philological notes. A bibliography, indices, and extensive comparanda complete the book. This edition, translation, and commentary greatly enhance the accessibility and research potential of one of the most important primary sources for the history, language, and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. No one to date has given attention to the 'seventeenth-century manuscript context' of The Peterborough Chronicle. William L'Isle, the manuscript's owner at that time, had the manuscript disbound and interleaved throughout with larger watermarked paper sheets on which he transcribed variant passages from other witnesses to the Chronicle, primarily from witness A, now in the Parker Library, Cambridge. He and other readers also made annotations on the manuscript itself, including Archbishop Parker (†1575), who did so in red chalk. Each of these interventions has been recorded and analyzed in the commentary on the Text presented in this edition. Extensive historical annotations accompany the Translation and bring current scholarship to bear on it. This edition also provides for the first time a set of ninety-five comparanda so that readers can review the evidence for the paleographical analysis found in the Introduction.

The Petersburg Noverre accounts for Marius Petipa’s ballets produced on the Russian stage between 1847 and 1910. It is organized by year starting from the early 1860s, records details of his life and the action and reception of his ballets, obscure and famous.

The Petersburg Noverre accounts for Marius Petipa’s ballets produced on the Russian stage between 1847 and 1910. It is organized by year starting from the early 1860s, records details of his life and the action and reception of his ballets, obscure and famous.

The book presents 18 games and develops the concepts of game analysis and winning strategies. Students are encouraged to play these mathematical games together, collect data developed through their play, and analyze the data to develop a winning strategy. The book provides the basis for a six- to eight-week unit on mathematical games. Each chapter also functions as a self-contained and independent exploration so that selected chapters may be used as supplementary classroom investigations or as independent projects. The book includes both familiar games (such as Quadrangles and Nim) and many others that will be new and exciting to most readers. Through the exploration of mathematical games, ‘The Play’s the Thing’ introduces teachers and students to the fun of play and to the mathematics behind the fun.

Immersed in a hyperconnected world, millennials are pressured by a lingering feeling that no matter their achievements, they can always do more. Conventional wisdom suggests that millennials must create and maintain personal brands while striving to achieve their potential. But this mentality, while initially appealing for many, breeds anxiety and insecurity. In "The Plight of Potential", Emerson Csorba shows how millennials can live deeper and more enriching lives by reflecting on the self, placing value on solitude and resisting the feeling that they must constantly connect and share. Drawing on case studies of millennials from networks such as the Global Shapers Community, Csorba offers suggestions on how millennials can thrive in a world that favours immediacy and superficiality.

Millennials live in a world of opportunity, characterized by the constant pursuit of personal growth and a belief that to hit the pause button would be catastrophic to a career. Within this context, Csorba explores ideas such as the ruthlessness of comparison amongst millennials and outlines guidelines for overcoming these pressures. Advocating for a long view of work and life, Csorba builds on hundreds of interviews with millennials across the world as well as research at the University of Cambridge.

The themes that Csorba explores in "The Plight of Potential" are not unique – they have existed for centuries, and do not pertain exclusively to millennials – but in a society that glamourizes the individual while paradoxically discouraging solitude and self-reflection, they are radical. Both practical and critical, this book is timely and refreshing for millennials looking to overcome the social pressures around them and advance their work and lives, while also cultivating the skills and qualities required to better know themselves in the process.

Byron’s and Shelley’s experimentation with the possibilities and pitfalls of poetic heroism unites their work. ‘The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley’ traces the evolution of the poet-hero in the work of both poets, revealing that the struggle to find words adequate to the poet’s imaginative vision and historical circumstance is their central poetic preoccupation. This area has never received monograph-length treatment. It has only been hinted at in scholarly work, with recent publications choosing to focus on genre, or instead, emphasize the collective, anti-individualist context of Romantic writing. But such attention to the collaborative realities of Romantic poetic production has overshadowed the poetry’s own claims for its status as made by a unique individual and, most significantly, by an individual distinguished by his power over language. This study performs a close analysis of two major poets who have never been linked together in this context.

‘The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley’ uncovers Byron’s and Shelley’s shift from presenting the hero as a supernaturally gifted individual to a poet-hero, whose language becomes the key locus and site of anxiety of his authority, viewing this as the vital innovation of their work. More than wanting a hero, Byron’s and Shelley’s attempts to create and critique a version of the poet-hero distinguishes their poetry. Though they share a preoccupation with the poet-hero, this volume dwells on the distinctive differences between the poets, dividing the study into two parts so as to spotlight their separate though corresponding artistic concerns and achievements. For Byron, poetic heroism is both an aspiration and an apprehension, where the poet longs to be the answer to the agonised question of ‘The Giaour’, ‘When shall such Hero live again?’ even as he fears and ironizes its potentially illusory quality. Shelley requires the poet-hero to turn prophet and legislator, and the demand to balance both roles tips the poet-hero into defeat after defeat rather than guaranteeing his success. The tensions and desires inherent in their different though complementary versions of the poet-hero gain prominence in their powerfully ambiguous poetry and drama.

‘The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley’ explores the different types of poetic heroism that evolve in Byron’s and Shelley’s poetry and drama. Both poets experiment with, challenge and embrace a variety of poetic forms and genres, and this book discusses such generic exploration in the light of their changing versions of the poet-hero. The heroism of the poet, as an idea, an ideal and an illusion, undergoes many different incarnations and definitions as each poet shapes distinctive and changing conceptions of the hero throughout their careers.

This book arose from several years of research on Akhmatova. Anna Akhmatova is one of the most acclaimed poets of the twentieth century. Her career falls into two distinct periods, an 'earlier' and a 'later', the dividing line being her period of relative silence between 1925 and 1940.  As is often observed, her return to poetry brings with it a sudden and dramatic shift away from a relatively homogenous body of early lyric miniatures to a more diverse and complex style. One of the major unresolved problems in Akhmatova scholarship is that of how the poetics of the two phases are related. Previous attempts to plot her creative trajectory contain internal inconsistencies and are in conflict with one another, often serving to confuse rather than clarify the debate. This book seeks to explore these themes, bringing reconciliation to seemingly disparate views. This book outlines a fresh and coherent framework for the apprehension of Akhmatova's oeuvre in its totality, seeing her as a poet who moves beyond modernism in her later period. The appeal to postmodernism, which is in itself innovatory with regard to Akhmatova studies, also allows exploration of a second problematic issue: how to account for the shift in self-presentation in the later verse, and the different concept of poetic self which it advances. This new account of Akhmatova's path to maturity challenges the conventional view of the early Akhmatova as poet in the classical Russian tradition, and of the later Akhmatova as paradigmatically modernist.

This monograph examines how far-right political parties in Europe instrumentalize gender to shape voter mobilization and reinforce exclusionary national identities, with comparative case studies of Italy and the Netherlands highlighting strategies targeting women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and migrants.

Written by one of Italy’s leading historians, this book analyses the context and legacy of Gaetano Filangieri’s seven-volume Science of Legislation. The study engages with the unique history of Enlightenment Naples, the intellectual traditions upon which Filangieri drew, and the powerful repercussions of the American Revolution in eighteenth-century Italy to re-draw the map of Enlightenment republicanism and the early history of human rights and their political economy.

Particularly, the book elucidates Montesquieu’s polyvalent influence on the development of Enlightenment political philosophy, the intricate relationship between natural law and natural rights (later human rights), the emergence of an idiom and a theory of constitutionalism as the only safeguard against absolutist abuses and democratic excesses (whether due to communitarian zeal or the influence of charismatic leaders), and the importance of Freemasonry as a school of political theory and a locus of political action and re-action at the time. This brings the book to a lengthy discussion of the tensions between liberalism and poverty as well as patriotism and cosmopolitanism in the Italian republican tradition – themes all too relevant in today’s historiographical landscape – and Filangieri’s eventual contribution to these debates and to the institutionalization of the rights of man as a political category and an influence on political economy in Enlightenment Europe.

The second part of the book deals with Filangieri’s legacy, engaging both with his immediate acolytes, such as Francesco Mario Pagano, drafter of the Neapolitan constitution of 1799, and his detractors, such as the conservative Vincenzo Cuoco. The book ends with groundbreaking chapters on Filangieri’s reception in France and in Europe at large, focusing on Benjamin Constant’s little-understood critique of Filangieri and the tensions between the constitutional republicanism of the late Italian Enlightenment on the one hand and the nascent tradition of liberalism on the other. In doing so, this book not only explains the common roots of these two traditions, but also why they diverged and what consequences this had for Italian and European history.

Written by one of Italy’s leading historians, this book analyses the context and legacy of Gaetano Filangieri’s seven-volume Science of Legislation. The study engages with the unique history of Enlightenment Naples, the intellectual traditions upon which Filangieri drew, and the powerful repercussions of the American Revolution in eighteenth-century Italy to re-draw the map of Enlightenment republicanism and the early history of human rights and their political economy.

Particularly, the book elucidates Montesquieu’s polyvalent influence on the development of Enlightenment political philosophy, the intricate relationship between natural law and natural rights (later human rights), the emergence of an idiom and a theory of constitutionalism as the only safeguard against absolutist abuses and democratic excesses (whether due to communitarian zeal or the influence of charismatic leaders), and the importance of Freemasonry as a school of political theory and a locus of political action and re-action at the time. This brings the book to a lengthy discussion of the tensions between liberalism and poverty as well as patriotism and cosmopolitanism in the Italian republican tradition – themes all too relevant in today’s historiographical landscape – and Filangieri’s eventual contribution to these debates and to the institutionalization of the rights of man as a political category and an influence on political economy in Enlightenment Europe.

The second part of the book deals with Filangieri’s legacy, engaging both with his immediate acolytes, such as Francesco Mario Pagano, drafter of the Neapolitan constitution of 1799, and his detractors, such as the conservative Vincenzo Cuoco. The book ends with groundbreaking chapters on Filangieri’s reception in France and in Europe at large, focusing on Benjamin Constant’s little-understood critique of Filangieri and the tensions between the constitutional republicanism of the late Italian Enlightenment on the one hand and the nascent tradition of liberalism on the other. In doing so, this book not only explains the common roots of these two traditions, but also why they diverged and what consequences this had for Italian and European history.

  The figurative “body” of public opinion presents challenges to readers of the nineteenth-century British fiction insofar as it lacks the markers of an autonomous subject. It replaces direct address with intimations of surveillance and interpellation, reading characters and their actions as we read it for our situationally within it. In the novels of Anthony Trollope who continually refers to a vox populi, public opinion has an economy, as a kind of “currency” in which reputation is priced and marketed while itself seeming inconclusive and undeveloped, even among its self-appointed spokesmen.

It takes its place among a number of institutions that knit the country together as a network of conveyances with different points of entry: roads, railroads, ports and canals and the post office in which Trollope served as a civil servant for over 30 years. One such institution is the expanding bureaucracy which mediates between the people and those who regulate human activity and its exposure to government regulation. The ex-posure (literally to be placed outside oneself) is one of the ways in which public opinion, lacking a responsible subjectivity that can be held to account, removes individual subjectivity, threatening (or enabling) a rebirth in accountability. Yet, for all of its potentially subversive qualities, public opinion is a collective narrative—disguising itself as a unitary voice—that often misreads character and, in the Parliamentary Novels, ideology. As it is vulnerable to being misread by politicians, public opinion also misreads, especially the arrivistes attempting to enter the social and economic life of the country. Because of its resistance to inscriptive genres, the vox populi may well represent the lost orality of the epic to which critics like Georg Lukaks have called our attention. 

  The figurative “body” of public opinion presents challenges to readers of the nineteenth-century British fiction insofar as it lacks the markers of an autonomous subject. It replaces direct address with intimations of surveillance and interpellation, reading characters and their actions as we read it for our situationally within it. In the novels of Anthony Trollope who continually refers to a vox populi, public opinion has an economy, as a kind of “currency” in which reputation is priced and marketed while itself seeming inconclusive and undeveloped, even among its self-appointed spokesmen.

It takes its place among a number of institutions that knit the country together as a network of conveyances with different points of entry: roads, railroads, ports and canals and the post office in which Trollope served as a civil servant for over 30 years. One such institution is the expanding bureaucracy which mediates between the people and those who regulate human activity and its exposure to government regulation. The ex-posure (literally to be placed outside oneself) is one of the ways in which public opinion, lacking a responsible subjectivity that can be held to account, removes individual subjectivity, threatening (or enabling) a rebirth in accountability. Yet, for all of its potentially subversive qualities, public opinion is a collective narrative—disguising itself as a unitary voice—that often misreads character and, in the Parliamentary Novels, ideology. As it is vulnerable to being misread by politicians, public opinion also misreads, especially the arrivistes attempting to enter the social and economic life of the country. Because of its resistance to inscriptive genres, the vox populi may well represent the lost orality of the epic to which critics like Georg Lukaks have called our attention. 

‘The Politics of Swidden farming’ offers a new explanation for the changes taking place in slash-and-burn (jhum or swidden) farming in the highlands of eastern India through an ethnographic case study. Today market-led agriculture is transforming land and labour relations. Jhum cultivators are beneficiaries of state schemes, including internationally funded, community-driven development or biodiversity conservation programmes.

The book traces the story of agroecological change and state intervention to colonial times (including post Indian independence) when Nagaland was seen as the frontier of state and civilization. Contemporary agrarian change can be understood by contextualizing farming not just in terms of the science and technology of agriculture or conservation/biodiversity but also in terms of technologies of rule. For the colonial administrators of the Naga Hills – who saw their role partially in terms of rescue and record ethnography – jhum practices were part of backward Naga customs and traditions. Improving farming practices was bound up with indirect rule as a distinct process of governance involving forms of knowledge and intervention. It was political expediency rather than imperial science that changed local agroecologies and pressurized shifting cultivation. Crucially, neighbouring Naga terrace rice cultivators were promoted as offering a more civilized – yet local – alternative.

‘The Politics of Swidden farming’ demonstrates how contemporary agrarian development reflects this complex colonial heritage, including linkages between the state and village elites. Evangelical missionaries in the post-Independence period also contributed by appropriating local institutions to a Protestant (Baptist) ethic of work. Reinforcing the colonial state’s privileging of rice as the crop of civilization, the missionaries’ moral discourse installed new time disciplines geared to settled agriculture. To this end, the book adds a new dimension to the underdeveloped literature on shifting cultivation in South Asia by focusing on the social ecology of farming and agrarian change in the hills. It provides a comparative viewpoint to state-centred and donor-driven development in the frontier region by bringing in different actors and institutions that become the actants and agents of social change.

Methodologically, the author engages with the many voices that shaped his fieldwork, providing evidence from in-depth household-based participant observation and life histories, and a household survey, while also drawing extensively on original archival research and colonial photography to provide documentation of colonial representations of the swidden landscape. The research was undertaken in a milieu of fear and violence, which raises further methodological and ethical issues.

Has India’s shift to neoliberalism since the 1990s led to a heightened awareness of time and its passing, an intense preoccupation with youth, and anxieties over the relations between generations? ‘The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India’ discusses the politics of time that have emerged in popular discourses across cinema, television, print and consumer culture, arguing that contests over conceptions of time are, in fact, sites of battle between labour and capital.

Kapur shows how the recent political-economic shift in India is accompanied by a new emphasis on youth and a preoccupation with change, novelty and the acceleration of time. This perception of time is examined through an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on critical theory and cinema and media studies, as well as two concepts from Marxist-feminist theory. The first focuses on the notion of capitalist development as a systemic form of underdevelopment, which perpetuates a radicalised individualism while simultaneously erasing selfhood, as each life-time is reduced to homogenous, commodified units of time, each with a varying price dependent upon one’s position in the market. The second is the critique of the time-orientation of capitalism and its promise of freedom through novelty where, in fact, its reliance upon a system of private accumulation based on exploitation favours calculations of profits in the present over investing in the future. Together, these approaches shed light on India’s contemporary cultural politics, explaining how the country’s shift to neoliberalism is deeply intertwined with profound conflicts over conceptions of time, youth and the relations between generations. 

Has India’s shift to neoliberalism since the 1990s led to a heightened awareness of time and its passing, an intense preoccupation with youth, and anxieties over the relations between generations? ‘The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India’ discusses the politics of time that have emerged in popular discourses across cinema, television, print and consumer culture, arguing that contests over conceptions of time are, in fact, sites of battle between labour and capital.

Kapur shows how the recent political-economic shift in India is accompanied by a new emphasis on youth and a preoccupation with change, novelty and the acceleration of time. This perception of time is examined through an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on critical theory and cinema and media studies, as well as two concepts from Marxist-feminist theory. The first focuses on the notion of capitalist development as a systemic form of underdevelopment, which perpetuates a radicalised individualism while simultaneously erasing selfhood, as each life-time is reduced to homogenous, commodified units of time, each with a varying price dependent upon one’s position in the market. The second is the critique of the time-orientation of capitalism and its promise of freedom through novelty where, in fact, its reliance upon a system of private accumulation based on exploitation favours calculations of profits in the present over investing in the future. Together, these approaches shed light on India’s contemporary cultural politics, explaining how the country’s shift to neoliberalism is deeply intertwined with profound conflicts over conceptions of time, youth and the relations between generations. 

How are breasts and breastfeeding shown in literature? Why does the depiction of breastfeeding in literature matter? What messages do we get from literature about the feeding of infants and children and about women’s bodies? Is this different in different cultures? What causes cultural and historical differences and what can we learn from them?

This cross-cultural study analyses images and descriptions of breasts and breastfeeding in children’s books and literature for adults, in both English and Swedish. It explores how breastfeeding is depicted in literature in the two languages and discusses why there are differences in the cultures. Literary, feminist, anthropological, sociological, historical, and cultural research is used to support this analysis and to suggest explanations for the differing depictions. For example, the book discusses the concepts of women being nude versus women being naked; nakedness, the book argues, is more acceptable in Swedish literature and society, whereas a naked female is immediately perceived as nude in English-speaking cultures, and nudity is always sexualised. It discusses the male gaze and challenges ways of seeing women’s bodies in literature; a question here is whether women can see their bodies without being influenced by the pervasiveness of the male gaze. Another example of a difference between the two cultures is the rise of formula-feeding and supposedly scientific ways of understanding and managing bodies in many Western countries, including English-speaking ones, and this in turn influences decreasing familiarity and comfort with seeing breasts and breastfeeding in literature, whereas rates of breastfeeding are still high in Scandinavia, which suggests more understanding, acceptance and support of natural bodily functions. In addition, issues such as whether a more feminist political approach might affect how breastfeeding is depicted and how it is treated in society are considered.

While this intercultural exploration of breasts and breastfeeding in literature is academic and relies on extensive research, the book also suggests that this reflects popular culture today. Given the rise of the #MeToo movement and our new awareness of people’s rights to their own bodies and to consent, it is important that we explore depictions in the media of women’s bodies and encourage positive representations. Avoiding naked females in literature or primarily showing them in sexualised contexts suggests a sense of shame and fear about female bodies, or emphasises the idea that women are to be objectified.

In short, this book will focus on a topic not yet seen in any depth in academic research and will raise fresh awareness of the power of literature to influence how readers see their own and other people’s bodies, and will also illuminate cultural and historical differences that affect what writers describe and illustrators depict in literature when it comes to breasts and breastfeeding. The book challenges the currently prevailing ways of depicting female bodies in literature and discusses the way societal norms influence the writing and illustrating of literature.

How are breasts and breastfeeding shown in literature? Why does the depiction of breastfeeding in literature matter? What messages do we get from literature about the feeding of infants and children and about women’s bodies? Is this different in different cultures? What causes cultural and historical differences and what can we learn from them?

This cross-cultural study analyses images and descriptions of breasts and breastfeeding in children’s books and literature for adults, in both English and Swedish. It explores how breastfeeding is depicted in literature in the two languages and discusses why there are differences in the cultures. Literary, feminist, anthropological, sociological, historical, and cultural research is used to support this analysis and to suggest explanations for the differing depictions. For example, the book discusses the concepts of women being nude versus women being naked; nakedness, the book argues, is more acceptable in Swedish literature and society, whereas a naked female is immediately perceived as nude in English-speaking cultures, and nudity is always sexualised. It discusses the male gaze and challenges ways of seeing women’s bodies in literature; a question here is whether women can see their bodies without being influenced by the pervasiveness of the male gaze. Another example of a difference between the two cultures is the rise of formula-feeding and supposedly scientific ways of understanding and managing bodies in many Western countries, including English-speaking ones, and this in turn influences decreasing familiarity and comfort with seeing breasts and breastfeeding in literature, whereas rates of breastfeeding are still high in Scandinavia, which suggests more understanding, acceptance and support of natural bodily functions. In addition, issues such as whether a more feminist political approach might affect how breastfeeding is depicted and how it is treated in society are considered.

While this intercultural exploration of breasts and breastfeeding in literature is academic and relies on extensive research, the book also suggests that this reflects popular culture today. Given the rise of the #MeToo movement and our new awareness of people’s rights to their own bodies and to consent, it is important that we explore depictions in the media of women’s bodies and encourage positive representations. Avoiding naked females in literature or primarily showing them in sexualised contexts suggests a sense of shame and fear about female bodies, or emphasises the idea that women are to be objectified.

In short, this book will focus on a topic not yet seen in any depth in academic research and will raise fresh awareness of the power of literature to influence how readers see their own and other people’s bodies, and will also illuminate cultural and historical differences that affect what writers describe and illustrators depict in literature when it comes to breasts and breastfeeding. The book challenges the currently prevailing ways of depicting female bodies in literature and discusses the way societal norms influence the writing and illustrating of literature.

Despite its international influence, Polish theatre remains a mystery to many Westerners. This volume attempts to fill in various gaps in English-language scholarship by offering a historical and critical analysis of two of the most influential works of Polish theatre: Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Akropolis’ and Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘Dead Class’. By examining each director’s representation of Auschwitz, this study provides a new understanding of how translating national trauma through the prism of performance can alter and deflect the meaning and reception of theatrical works, both inside and outside their cultural and historical context.

Although theatre scholars have now gained familiarity with ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’, there remains little understanding of the complex web of cultural meanings and significations that went into their making – they remain broadly but not deeply known. Grotowski and Kantor both sought to respond to the trauma of the Holocaust, albeit through drastically different aesthetics, and this study develops a comparative critical language through which one can simultaneously engage Grotowski and Kantor in a way that makes their differences evocative of a broader conversation about theatre and meaning. Ultimately, this volume invites and engages with many questions: how is theatrical meaning codified outside its cultural context? How is it codified within its cultural context? What affects the reception of a theatrical work? And, above all, how does theatre ‘make meaning’?

Despite its international influence, Polish theatre remains a mystery to many Westerners. This volume attempts to fill in various gaps in English-language scholarship by offering a historical and critical analysis of two of the most influential works of Polish theatre: Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Akropolis’ and Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘Dead Class’. By examining each director’s representation of Auschwitz, this study provides a new understanding of how translating national trauma through the prism of performance can alter and deflect the meaning and reception of theatrical works, both inside and outside their cultural and historical context.

Although theatre scholars have now gained familiarity with ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’, there remains little understanding of the complex web of cultural meanings and significations that went into their making – they remain broadly but not deeply known. Grotowski and Kantor both sought to respond to the trauma of the Holocaust, albeit through drastically different aesthetics, and this study develops a comparative critical language through which one can simultaneously engage Grotowski and Kantor in a way that makes their differences evocative of a broader conversation about theatre and meaning. Ultimately, this volume invites and engages with many questions: how is theatrical meaning codified outside its cultural context? How is it codified within its cultural context? What affects the reception of a theatrical work? And, above all, how does theatre ‘make meaning’?

Based on an extensive ethnographic study of television and audiences in class-divided Philippines, this is the first book to take a bottom-up approach in considering how people respond to images and narratives of suffering and poverty on television. Arguing for an anthropological ethics of media, this book challenges existing work in media studies and sociology that focuses solely on textual analysis and philosophical approaches to the question of representing vulnerable others. Current questions in media ethics, such as whether to portray sufferers as humane and empowered individuals or show them ‘at their worst’ have so far used textual and visual analyses to convey the researcher’s own moral position on the matter. In contrast, this book, inspired by the anthropology of moralities, accounts for the different interpretations and moral positions of audiences, who are positioned in various degrees of social and moral proximity to those they see and hear on television. Winner of the 2016 Philippine Social Science Council Excellence in Research Award.

Based on an extensive ethnographic study of television and audiences in class-divided Philippines, this is the first book to take a bottom-up approach in considering how people respond to images and narratives of suffering and poverty on television. Arguing for an anthropological ethics of media, this book challenges existing work in media studies and sociology that focuses solely on textual analysis and philosophical approaches to the question of representing vulnerable others. Current questions in media ethics, such as whether to portray sufferers as humane and empowered individuals or show them ‘at their worst’ have so far used textual and visual analyses to convey the researcher’s own moral position on the matter. In contrast, this book, inspired by the anthropology of moralities, accounts for the different interpretations and moral positions of audiences, who are positioned in various degrees of social and moral proximity to those they see and hear on television. Winner of the 2016 Philippine Social Science Council Excellence in Research Award.

Water is essential to all life and yet never has anthropogenic activity posed a greater risk to our water resources. This book explores legal mechanisms utilized by communities to protect water resources within the context of protracted mining conflicts, focusing on oil sands development in the Canadian boreal forest and gold mining in ecologically sensitive, glacier-rich areas of Argentina. This book highlights constitutional approaches to environmental rights protection in such conflicts. Despite the incorporation of substantive environmental rights into many domestic constitutions, questions remain about the efficacy and functioning of constitutional methods and how constitutional entrenchment may contribute directly to better environmental outcomes within specific contexts. In addition, though a considerable body of ground-breaking work on constitutional environmental rights has emerged in recent years, there has been very little examination of the implications for natural resource projects, which generate some of the greatest environmental impacts. The book seeks to contribute to the literature on constitutional environmentalism by exploring the value of constitutional environmental rights against the backdrop of controversial mining disputes over water impacts.
Because they engage a broad cross-section of public and private actors and institutions, mining projects offer a unique opportunity to investigate a range of sociolegal phenomena and lend well to more holistic research of human rights issues. An examination of mining conflicts can demonstrate the interplay between underlying contextual realities and the legal mechanisms that are utilized by individuals seeking to assert their environmental rights. Mining projects are often tied heavily to economic interests, job and infrastructure creation, and national development policies, and yet they are also associated with serious environmental impacts, conflict with local populations, and power imbalances with marginalized, rural communities and Indigenous peoples. These projects are frequently plagued with human rights complaints, comprising some of the most difficult conflicts of our time. Domestic constitutions are well-situated to address precisely these concerns because of their role in limiting the exercise of government power and binding governments to a set of normative values.

This book offers a novel perspective on environmental rights, engaging in a comparative constitutional analysis informed by ethnographic and contextual approaches from other disciplines. It builds upon existing literature by exploring the complex ways in which the laws and institutions that interact with environmental rights are formed and embedded within wider social processes. Case studies drawn from oil sands development in Alberta, Canada and gold mining in San Juan, Argentina, provide insight into how community stakeholders pursue environmental rights claims in jurisdictions that differ in their treatment of environmental rights. A qualitative assessment of these case studies yields a deeper understanding of the strategies that promote the best outcomes for communities seeking to protect their water resources, and allows for some generalizations to be formulated about the value of incorporating environmental rights into domestic constitutions. These case studies demonstrate how constitutional rights can address inadequate participatory processes and increase accountability and transparency in environmental decision-making, thereby significantly improving access to justice and providing a more equitable means of resolving resource conflicts. By taking a contextual approach, this book contributes to the development of theory relating to environmental constitutionalism and its practical implications for the protection of water resources in contentious mining conflicts.

The Puritan Ideology of Mobility: Corporatism, the Politics of Place, and the Founding of New England Towns before 1650 examines the ideology that English Puritans developed to justify migration: their migration from England to New England, migrations from one town to another within New England, and, often, their repatriation to the mother country. Guided by the Protestant scholasticism of Cambridge University, Puritan leaders accepted the ancient corporatist image of society as a living, organic body politic, a model which they applied to nations, colonies, business corporations like the Massachusetts Bay Company, and towns.

But if a town, a colony, or a nation were a living body, how could Puritans justify withdrawing from one body to form a new social body, as they so often did? Drawing on the prevailing humoral theory of health, Puritans leaders believed that if a social body became “distempered” because of insufficient resources or political or religious disagreements, it might become necessary to bring about a new body politic in order to restore balance and harmony to the existing one. This theory gave rise to a robust “politics of place” in colonial New England, where one’s choice of residence could make a strong political statement.

In order to facilitate the founding of new town bodies, colonial elites were endowed with unique privileges of mobility. But these entrepreneurs also needed ordinary inhabitants to make a successful migration, so that the various “members” of the new social body all benefited from the opportunities conferred through the privilege of migration. The body of a new town was articulated through the social ritual of land distribution, carried out in proportion to rank according to Aristotelian “distributive justice.” The book will trace this process at work in the founding of Ipswich and its satellite towns in Massachusetts.

The Puritan Ideology of Mobility: Corporatism, the Politics of Place, and the Founding of New England Towns before 1650 examines the ideology that English Puritans developed to justify migration: their migration from England to New England, migrations from one town to another within New England, and, often, their repatriation to the mother country. Guided by the Protestant scholasticism of Cambridge University, Puritan leaders accepted the ancient corporatist image of society as a living, organic body politic, a model which they applied to nations, colonies, business corporations like the Massachusetts Bay Company, and towns.

But if a town, a colony, or a nation were a living body, how could Puritans justify withdrawing from one body to form a new social body, as they so often did? Drawing on the prevailing humoral theory of health, Puritans leaders believed that if a social body became “distempered” because of insufficient resources or political or religious disagreements, it might become necessary to bring about a new body politic in order to restore balance and harmony to the existing one. This theory gave rise to a robust “politics of place” in colonial New England, where one’s choice of residence could make a strong political statement.

In order to facilitate the founding of new town bodies, colonial elites were endowed with unique privileges of mobility. But these entrepreneurs also needed ordinary inhabitants to make a successful migration, so that the various “members” of the new social body all benefited from the opportunities conferred through the privilege of migration. The body of a new town was articulated through the social ritual of land distribution, carried out in proportion to rank according to Aristotelian “distributive justice.” The book will trace this process at work in the founding of Ipswich and its satellite towns in Massachusetts.

The reading figure has been a recurrent theme in Western art but especially from the nineteenth century. This book examines Irish portraits during the long nineteenth century in which people are shown reading or holding a book. It explores the different assumptions and values that were ascribed to reading and contemporary constructions of the reader. The selected pictures are by artists born, trained, or practising in Ireland. 'Irish art' is, therefore, used broadly to include work framed in some way by experience of Ireland and its history, culture, and politics. This was a time of large social and cultural shifts for Ireland, including the Great Famine and its aftermath, the growth of Irish nationalism, and the slow erosion of Anglo-Irish landlord power. It was a period of growing mass literacy, and also a time when books and other reading, including Irish novels, were often published in London. Many of the artists and sitters discussed were Anglo-Irish Protestants, a number of whom had Irish nationalist sympathies.

Reading, especially the reading of fiction, was not valued as a manly occupation. Both imperial and nationalist ideologues fostered dominant notions of manliness that depended on the assumption of an aggressive masculine nature checked by self-management. Portraits of male subjects with a book usually follow the tradition of accessories functioning as professional or status symbols. Nonetheless, some men are depicted reading and failing to embody a manly attitude. 

A prevalent patriarchal ideology framed women as inferior to men in both physical and intellectual power. Yet this book argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin was a space of special creativity for women, at least among those from the privileged classes. The introduction of ‘silent reading’, alongside the spread of the novel, allowed such women to engage privately with a new range of imaginative and intellectual reading materials, while silent reading also offered seclusion from patriarchal surveillance. Visual images of women as serious readers contradicted common constructions of women as consumers of lightweight romances, or as an object for the male gaze. It is contended that such images drew on and contributed to the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ in Ireland.

The reading figure has been a recurrent theme in Western art but especially from the nineteenth century. This book examines Irish portraits during the long nineteenth century in which people are shown reading or holding a book. It explores the different assumptions and values that were ascribed to reading and contemporary constructions of the reader. The selected pictures are by artists born, trained, or practising in Ireland. 'Irish art' is, therefore, used broadly to include work framed in some way by experience of Ireland and its history, culture, and politics. This was a time of large social and cultural shifts for Ireland, including the Great Famine and its aftermath, the growth of Irish nationalism, and the slow erosion of Anglo-Irish landlord power. It was a period of growing mass literacy, and also a time when books and other reading, including Irish novels, were often published in London. Many of the artists and sitters discussed were Anglo-Irish Protestants, a number of whom had Irish nationalist sympathies.

Reading, especially the reading of fiction, was not valued as a manly occupation. Both imperial and nationalist ideologues fostered dominant notions of manliness that depended on the assumption of an aggressive masculine nature checked by self-management. Portraits of male subjects with a book usually follow the tradition of accessories functioning as professional or status symbols. Nonetheless, some men are depicted reading and failing to embody a manly attitude. 

A prevalent patriarchal ideology framed women as inferior to men in both physical and intellectual power. Yet this book argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin was a space of special creativity for women, at least among those from the privileged classes. The introduction of ‘silent reading’, alongside the spread of the novel, allowed such women to engage privately with a new range of imaginative and intellectual reading materials, while silent reading also offered seclusion from patriarchal surveillance. Visual images of women as serious readers contradicted common constructions of women as consumers of lightweight romances, or as an object for the male gaze. It is contended that such images drew on and contributed to the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ in Ireland.

 This book is the first collection of unified interviews with the great figures of the golden age of American celebrity literary and cultural critics. While many of these celebrity critics have been interviewed elsewhere, this collection is different. The 18 critics interviewed here are all asked the same questions, whereas usually interviews are one-offs, each one unique and incomparable. By contrast this collection shows that theorists, when commenting on the same issues, actually range widely and express a remarkable diversity of opinions.

The book also presents a vivid portrayal of the ways in which literary theory affected the lives of these individuals. All 18 people interviewed lived what might be called, without exaggeration, a life of theory. Their work and lives were jostled by seismic dislocations. New criticism was overwhelmed by postmodernism, deconstruction reigned and then succumbed to new historicism and the politics and criticism of identity. Race and gender burgeoned as fundamental topics. Critics and scholars experiences these ruptures differently and reacted in different ways. This book of interviews offers 18 exemplary instances. Instead of the unity they are often assumed to have, these figures reveal how incredibly diverse they actually were.

Finally, the collection offers a coherent summation of this richly turbulent and intellectually powerful era. The introduction to the volume and the brilliant afterword by Professor Heather Love offer cogent assessment of this remarkably varied era of American intellectual life. They make sense of a disruptive and puzzling past. The book includes 23 illustrations highlighting some of the key points and themes.

 This book is the first collection of unified interviews with the great figures of the golden age of American celebrity literary and cultural critics. While many of these celebrity critics have been interviewed elsewhere, this collection is different. The 18 critics interviewed here are all asked the same questions, whereas usually interviews are one-offs, each one unique and incomparable. By contrast this collection shows that theorists, when commenting on the same issues, actually range widely and express a remarkable diversity of opinions.

The book also presents a vivid portrayal of the ways in which literary theory affected the lives of these individuals. All 18 people interviewed lived what might be called, without exaggeration, a life of theory. Their work and lives were jostled by seismic dislocations. New criticism was overwhelmed by postmodernism, deconstruction reigned and then succumbed to new historicism and the politics and criticism of identity. Race and gender burgeoned as fundamental topics. Critics and scholars experiences these ruptures differently and reacted in different ways. This book of interviews offers 18 exemplary instances. Instead of the unity they are often assumed to have, these figures reveal how incredibly diverse they actually were.

Finally, the collection offers a coherent summation of this richly turbulent and intellectually powerful era. The introduction to the volume and the brilliant afterword by Professor Heather Love offer cogent assessment of this remarkably varied era of American intellectual life. They make sense of a disruptive and puzzling past. The book includes 23 illustrations highlighting some of the key points and themes.

This book is about the Cannes Medical Conference of April 1919 and its long-lasting impacts in the humanitarian space. In the aftermath of the First World War, as the world order was being redesigned, this conference served to shift the Red Cross movement towards peacetime and public health work. The book examines the origins, course and consequences of the Cannes Medical Conference, and its wider legacy within the Red Cross movement: a legacy which is very significant yet almost completely undocumented.

The book demonstrates that this medical conference was a watershed moment that served to pivot the Red Cross movement across the world, from war and conflict-related activities to peacetime programs such as relief, disease and disaster management. The Red Cross movement is one of the largest humanitarian organisations in the world, and initially, its aim was to alleviate the suffering of people on the battlefield. In 1919, however, a new Red Cross organisation was created in Paris: the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS) to considerably expand Red Cross work around the world.

The Cannes Medical Conference was the catalyst for the creation of the LRCS. Understanding this conference is therefore paramount to understanding why and how the LRCS was created, how it was imagined, and what its functions were. The LRCS still exists today, known as the International Federation of the Red Cross: it is the largest humanitarian organisation in the world, with 191 national Red Cross societies as its members, and it is based in Geneva. Much has been written on the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), but there has been very little research on the International Federation of the Red Cross, or its ancestor, the LRCS. Aside from a few pages in less than a handful of publications, the way in which the Cannes Medical Conference established the LRCS’s mission remains unknown. This book therefore proposes something that is innovative and that advances the historiography of the Red Cross movement, of humanitarianism and of public health.

Many have wondered why the works of Shakespeare and other early modern writers are so filled with violence, with murder and mayhem. This work explains how and why, putting the literature of the European Renaissance in the context of the history of violence. Personal violence was on the decline in Europe beginning in the fifteenth century, but warfare became much deadlier and the stakes of war became much higher as the new nation-states vied for hegemony and the New World became a target of a shattering invasion. The development of firearms caused a great change in the conduct of war and in the codes of militancy that warriors adopted. (By the early sixteenth century, it became apparent that the purpose of warfare was not to obtain a ritual advantage over one’s opponents, but to kill as many people as possible.) Meanwhile, writers became much more sensitive to the realities of violence and developed new genres to cope with them, including the novella, the epic romance, vernacular tragedy and even the utopia, whose first example, by Thomas More, was written as a critique of violence. There are times when Renaissance writers seem to celebrate violence, but more commonly they anatomized it, and were inclined to focus on victims as well as warriors on the horrors of violence as well as the need for force to protect national security and justice. In Renaissance writing, violence has lost its innocence.

This study, the first of its kind, looks at key Renaissance texts in the novelle collection, the humanist satire, epic-romance, and vernacular tragedy. Literature in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin is considered. The emphasis is, on the one hand, on the performative aspects of the genres and modes considered, and, on the other, the performative aspects of violence itself. The study places both violence and its representations in the context of major historical events, like the Sack of Rome, and developments in the history of violence per se. Authors considered include Giovanni Boccaccio, Matteo Bandello, Marguerite de Navarre, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Thomas More, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Edmund Spenser, Giovanni Batista Giraldi Cinthio, Robert Garnier, Thomas Kyd and William Shakespeare.

Does this sound familiar? You go to work like any other day. This time when you arrive at work, you are told to go to a meeting. During the meeting, you are given new guidelines sent down from the organization. You are told that while you are doing your job like every other routine day, you are now asked to do some new task or business process/function. The request does not make sense to you. You decide to ask the all-important question “why?” The response you receive is the common one: “It has come down from the top that this is the new course of action and must get done.” There is no more explanation. There is no justification. There is no discussion. There is no responsibility of reason.

Too often, decisions are made within all levels of an organization and are then blindly communicated out to the masses. While the organization allows people to have a voice and share what will be done, there is a lack of responsibility of reason for what is being asked that will directly impact the person and the entire organization. While having communication and shared voice is a critical component within organizational behavior, it is equally important to understand the importance of what is being said, how it is being said, and the impact the words you say will have on the individual and the company.

To be successful, there must be a value of voice and a responsibility of reason to create and sustain shared leadership and an effective organizational behavior model for all companies. Leaders rely on past philosophies based on their leadership styles to guide them to success. However, all leadership types will face the same universal issue of being responsible for their actions and decisions while ensuring that others are also responsible for their reasons in sharing their voice or performing a function in the organization. History has demonstrated that most businesses, specifically small businesses that make up most of the market, fail within the first five years. In most cases, this situation is due to a lack of resources, understanding, and a value of voice and no responsibility of reason. Through the course of this book, the reader will learn how to successfully structure their business to combine management skills that will affect their business and a shared voice to effectively answer the “why” and to develop a responsibility of reason.

'The Retreat of Democracy' presents an expanded and reworked selection of Basu's best journalistic and academic writings on political and economic themes since the late 1990s. In addition to Basu’s critical essays on globalization and democracy, the book also moves onto wider terrain – to ideas in economics, anthropological observations on social norms, the role of culture, and travel in India and abroad.

While the essays range from studies on major economists such as Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to humorous encounters with Indian bureaucracy, two recurring themes run thoughout: first, that the ultimate objective of policy-making must be the progress of the disadvantaged, and ignoring market laws and individual incentives courts failure; second, that for the successful crafting of economic policy it is important to recognize markets as embedded in specific cultures and social norms. This volume is a clear, intelligible and highly engaging showcase of Basu’s global and humanistic views on politics, economics and democracy.

'The Retreat of Democracy' presents an expanded and reworked selection of Basu's best journalistic and academic writings on political and economic themes since the late 1990s. In addition to Basu’s critical essays on globalization and democracy, the book also moves onto wider terrain – to ideas in economics, anthropological observations on social norms, the role of culture, and travel in India and abroad.

While the essays range from studies on major economists such as Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to humorous encounters with Indian bureaucracy, two recurring themes run thoughout: first, that the ultimate objective of policy-making must be the progress of the disadvantaged, and ignoring market laws and individual incentives courts failure; second, that for the successful crafting of economic policy it is important to recognize markets as embedded in specific cultures and social norms. This volume is a clear, intelligible and highly engaging showcase of Basu’s global and humanistic views on politics, economics and democracy.

The Rights Track: Sound Evidence on Human Rights and Modern Slavery uses rich content from The Rights Track podcast [www.rightstrack.org] in an innovative book that enhances and enriches our understanding of the human rights challenges facing the world today. This book showcases the important role of evidence in tackling those challenges and explores the medium of podcasting as a tool for discussing how research evidence is used to protect and promote human rights. 

The book is situated in the context of the post-9/11 era and the many geo-political changes that have taken place over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Its motivation is to (1) demonstrate the healthy and inspiring work being carried out on multiple dimensions of human rights, (2) capture the different kinds of insights and knowledge about human rights through the dialogic and conversational format of podcasts, and (3) illustrate the enduring importance of human rights, particularly during increasingly challenging times. Each series of the podcast has been structured around big questions in the field of human rights, which have evolved thematically over six years (2015-2021). 

The book also groups these big questions thematically, where the text is written for a general audience and in a user-friendly style. Part I provides the background and context for the content. Part II addresses significant human rights themes ranging from human rights mobilisation to human rights in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part III addresses the global challenge of modern slavery, a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal aimed to help more than 40 million enslaved people in the world today. Part IV provides a stock take and projection for the future of human rights. The dialogic and conversational format of the podcasts provide a rich source of human rights content that stays close to the voice of the very people seeking to advance human rights.

The Rights Track: Sound Evidence on Human Rights and Modern Slavery uses rich content from The Rights Track podcast [www.rightstrack.org] in an innovative book that enhances and enriches our understanding of the human rights challenges facing the world today. This book showcases the important role of evidence in tackling those challenges and explores the medium of podcasting as a tool for discussing how research evidence is used to protect and promote human rights. 

The book is situated in the context of the post-9/11 era and the many geo-political changes that have taken place over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Its motivation is to (1) demonstrate the healthy and inspiring work being carried out on multiple dimensions of human rights, (2) capture the different kinds of insights and knowledge about human rights through the dialogic and conversational format of podcasts, and (3) illustrate the enduring importance of human rights, particularly during increasingly challenging times. Each series of the podcast has been structured around big questions in the field of human rights, which have evolved thematically over six years (2015-2021). 

The book also groups these big questions thematically, where the text is written for a general audience and in a user-friendly style. Part I provides the background and context for the content. Part II addresses significant human rights themes ranging from human rights mobilisation to human rights in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part III addresses the global challenge of modern slavery, a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal aimed to help more than 40 million enslaved people in the world today. Part IV provides a stock take and projection for the future of human rights. The dialogic and conversational format of the podcasts provide a rich source of human rights content that stays close to the voice of the very people seeking to advance human rights.

The publication of the National Atlas of Finland in 1899 marks the beginning of the era of the modern national atlas. It is a period that coincides neatly with the twentieth century. The modern national atlas mirrors and embodies some of the important themes of this turbulent century, including the complex connections between nation, state and territory, the rise of state-sponsored science; the growth of nation-states; the geography of biopolitics. 

Between 1900 and 2000, more than seventy countries produced a national atlas, an official or quasi-official rendering of the nation-state in maps and accompanying text. A useful working definition of a national atlas is “a generally comprehensive, officially sanctioned single-country atlas.” This book considers the reasons behind and characteristics of this state-sponsored cartographic explosion. The changing form of the national atlas provides an intriguing window into the connections between science, state, territory and power.

The primary material for this study is a close reading of thirty-seven of these national atlases from countries across the world. They represent a wide range of countries from rich to poor, progressive to regressive, and capitalist to communist. In total, these atlases provide a range of different state arrangements and national experiences. 

The publication of the National Atlas of Finland in 1899 marks the beginning of the era of the modern national atlas. It is a period that coincides neatly with the twentieth century. The modern national atlas mirrors and embodies some of the important themes of this turbulent century, including the complex connections between nation, state and territory, the rise of state-sponsored science; the growth of nation-states; the geography of biopolitics. 

Between 1900 and 2000, more than seventy countries produced a national atlas, an official or quasi-official rendering of the nation-state in maps and accompanying text. A useful working definition of a national atlas is “a generally comprehensive, officially sanctioned single-country atlas.” This book considers the reasons behind and characteristics of this state-sponsored cartographic explosion. The changing form of the national atlas provides an intriguing window into the connections between science, state, territory and power.

The primary material for this study is a close reading of thirty-seven of these national atlases from countries across the world. They represent a wide range of countries from rich to poor, progressive to regressive, and capitalist to communist. In total, these atlases provide a range of different state arrangements and national experiences. 

‘The Rise and Fall of the Privatized Pension System in Chile’ presents the rationale for the existence of social security systems and provides a historical discussion of its origins and evolution before turning to the four-decade-old Chilean experience with a privatised pension system. This experience is examined in historical and comparative perspective from the twentieth century up to the present.

The book presents various hypotheses on the resilience of the privatised system in spite of the low level of pensions delivered to the population at large, underscoring the ability of the powerful fund managing companies lobby to veto reform proposals geared towards a return to a public-private system. The book also underscores the fiscal costs of the system, the high earnings of private pension managing companies and the macroeconomic role of the system in providing financial resources for investment and growth in a pattern driven by the large corporate sector.

The book discusses the experience of Chile as a counter-current to the reversal of pension privatisation in Latin America and Central-Eastern Europe as also the scope for de-privatisation of social security in the country.

‘The Rise and Fall of the Privatized Pension System in Chile’ presents the rationale for the existence of social security systems and provides a historical discussion of its origins and evolution before turning to the four-decade-old Chilean experience with a privatised pension system. This experience is examined in historical and comparative perspective from the twentieth century up to the present.

The book presents various hypotheses on the resilience of the privatised system in spite of the low level of pensions delivered to the population at large, underscoring the ability of the powerful fund managing companies lobby to veto reform proposals geared towards a return to a public-private system. The book also underscores the fiscal costs of the system, the high earnings of private pension managing companies and the macroeconomic role of the system in providing financial resources for investment and growth in a pattern driven by the large corporate sector.

The book discusses the experience of Chile as a counter-current to the reversal of pension privatisation in Latin America and Central-Eastern Europe as also the scope for de-privatisation of social security in the country.

“The Rise of Little Big Norway” delivers a wide-ranging topical exploration of the remarkable rise of Norway from poverty and Nordic peripherality to the global steward and Arctic frontliner of today. Drawing on an unusual range of scholarly and popular source material, it chronicles the developmental emergence of Norway while setting it variously in its Nordic, Arctic, European, transatlantic and global contexts. It astutely blends historical analysis and contemporary insight into a finely crafted study of a long-overlooked country that is now a quietly influential global force and an exemplar in areas as diverse as work-life balance, diplomacy and ethical investing.

Written by an experienced Scandinavianist, “The Rise of Little Big Norway” offers a textual mosaic befitting a geographically and historically fragmented land. It elaborates a connecting theme of mobility, which took Vikings across the Atlantic in open boats, created a worldwide diaspora, fueled an exploratory age, and makes today’s Norwegians the royalty of the skiing world and the most traveled people on the planet. It gives special attention to the overlooked northern dimension that makes Norway, with its front-row seat on the Arctic, an increasing touchstone for twenty-first-century debates over global warming and transitioning to a post-oil age. It posits Norwegians as grounded globalists and Norway as a country of unique elements, from its societal peculiarities to its polar identity and the Nobel Peace Prize, which contribute to its unique global profile.

“The Rise of Little Big Norway” is written in a lively, trenchant, essay-based style which can be appreciated by non-specialists, while its coverage of less familiar sides to the national story will be helpful to scholars seeking to extend their knowledge of Norway, Scandinavia and northern Europe. For all readers it delivers a wealth of specialized information, astute observation and comparative insight into the qualities that enabled Norway’s rise to prominence and which distinguish it from its Nordic neighbors. This book offers the kind of thoughtful, well-crafted, single-volume coverage that has long been missing and which fills an important gap in the English-language literature on Norway and northern Europe.

Aiming to contribute to the literature of what works to make peace, this volume examines the roles of land, water and mineral resources in conflict and peacemaking. The analysis focuses on six cases of prolonged, ethno-national, asymmetric conflict and six cases of special interest.

The data show that land, water and mineral resources have consistently been either a cause of war, a source of funding for war or a weapon of war. Yet, the goal of using natural resources in security, free from armed conflict or kidnappings, has been a reason for local or international communities to incentivise and/or facilitate peacemaking processes.

Nine of the cases ended in a negotiated, written peace accord which lasted more than 5 years. While some of the conflict areas saw a resurgence of armed conflict, other cases are exemplars of lasting peace agreements. The analysis shows what was successfully addressed in peace accords, as related to land and natural resources; what was addressed in aspirational terms that were never fully implemented; and what decisions were left to political processes that were agreed to, ending extensive armed conflict.

Arthur Bullard’s The Russian Pendulum (1919) is a personal and political analysis of the Russian Revolution, from the Revolution of 1905 through the beginning of the Civil War in 1918. It reflects Bullard’s own perspective, as an advocate for change in Russia with American help. Bullard’s experience as an advisor to Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson as a key staffer for the Committee for Public Information in Russia strongly colors his analysis. In this provocative study, Bullard analyzes the February Revolution, Lenin’s success with “land and peace” proposals, and then ends with Bullard’s own proposals, entitled “What IS To Be Done?” Here he argues that those concerned with Russia should seek information on all sides of the problem and should accept that an “agrarian revolution” has occurred and that any regeneration of Russia must involve public education and commerce. If the United States is to help, it must provide education cooperation, and avoid military intervention.

Arthur Bullard’s The Russian Pendulum (1919) is a personal and political analysis of the Russian Revolution, from the Revolution of 1905 through the beginning of the Civil War in 1918. It reflects Bullard’s own perspective, as an advocate for change in Russia with American help. Bullard’s experience as an advisor to Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson as a key staffer for the Committee for Public Information in Russia strongly colors his analysis. In this provocative study, Bullard analyzes the February Revolution, Lenin’s success with “land and peace” proposals, and then ends with Bullard’s own proposals, entitled “What IS To Be Done?” Here he argues that those concerned with Russia should seek information on all sides of the problem and should accept that an “agrarian revolution” has occurred and that any regeneration of Russia must involve public education and commerce. If the United States is to help, it must provide education cooperation, and avoid military intervention.

Current knowledge societies tend to be based on an understanding of science as an all-purpose problem-solver and include the expansion of scientific methods and frameworks of thought to ever more areas of life. Such development is less pragmatic and down-to- earth than it may appear at first glance. It is accompanied by a relentless expansion of the domain of a logic of universal truth and its technical equivalent: correct solutions, and is tied to a general understanding of science communication as a didactic enterprise aimed at disseminating scientific ways of thinking and responses to problems to a lay public of non-knowers.

Potentially, it seems, science can provide answers to all questions. Disagreement appears as no more than a symptom of immature science and has no place within the didactic science communication paradigm. As a consequence, democratic knowledge societies are challenged as political entities in the classical, pluralist sense, characterized by continuous discussion among different points of view and ways of reasoning on societal issues and using disagreement as a vehicle for discussions, negotiations and compromises.

Against such a background, ‘The Science Communication Challenge’ suggests that the didactic approaches to science communication be supplemented with a political category of science communication, suited to practical-political issues and featuring citizens on an equal footing – some of them scientists – who represent different points of view and ways of reasoning and share responsibility for public affairs. The possible gain, it is argued, may be the maintenance of knowledge societies as political entities with room for a civil society of multiple positions and perspectives that has served as a fertile ground for the development of science as an intellectual endeavour and as a body of knowledge and rational methodology.

Drawing on insights from an array of academic fields and disciplines, ‘The Science Communication Challenge’ explores the possible origins of the didactic paradigm, connecting it to particular understandings of knowledge, politics and the public and to the seemingly widespread assumption of a science-versus-politics dichotomy, taking science and politics to be competing activities that are concerned with similar questions in different ways. Inspired by classical political thought it is argued that science and politics be seen as substantially different activities, suited to dealing with different kinds of questions – and to different varieties of science communication.

This book is the only scientific biography of the Nobel Prize–winning Indian American chemist, Har Gobind Khorana. It begins with the story of Khorana’s origins in poverty in rural India and how he manages to emerge from that to be trained in chemistry in Britain and Switzerland before immigrating to Canada and the United States. Science was the dominant focus of Khorana’s life, and his biography is treated chronologically in conjunction with his scientific career.
The book explains in detail Khorana’s most important scientific achievements, his role in deciphering the genetic code (the reason for his Nobel Prize), the first synthesis of a functional gene in the laboratory, the elucidation of the idea behind the PCR technology that has since become ubiquitous in biotech, and his seminal studies of how structure determines the function of biological macromolecules in membranes. Finally, it focuses on his scientific legacy, and what his career means for future generations of scientists.

This book examines the literary author Ulla Isaksson’s work as a writer for the screen, with particular focus on her collaboration with director Ingmar Bergman from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Attention to the ‘security-development nexus’ has become commonplace in national and global policy-making, and yet the exact nature of the term remains undefined. This study approaches the subjects of development and security from a variety of different perspectives, offering an array of interpretations of the nexus along with an analysis of its potentially related issues. Particular attention is paid to studies of conflict and peace, with a focus upon the linkage between these subjects and the topic of the nexus itself.

Specific areas of investigation include the role of diasporas in peace building, the relationship between the nexus and challenges to liberal state-building, and the part played by external parties in the peace processes of the Aceh and Sri Lankan conflicts. The inclusion of case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe provides the text with a strong geographical focus, and constructs a panoramic view of the nexus that encompasses the globe. Further country-based chapters – focusing on China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa – underline this worldwide perspective.

The volume’s collected essays thus provide a detailed and comprehensive view of this fluid, contemporaneous topic, both theoretically and empirically. ‘The Security-Development Nexus’ is a vital appraisal of both the present issues and current thought concerning conflict, security and development.

Attention to the ‘security-development nexus’ has become commonplace in national and global policy-making, and yet the exact nature of the term remains undefined. This study approaches the subjects of development and security from a variety of different perspectives, offering an array of interpretations of the nexus along with an analysis of its potentially related issues. Particular attention is paid to studies of conflict and peace, with a focus upon the linkage between these subjects and the topic of the nexus itself.

Specific areas of investigation include the role of diasporas in peace building, the relationship between the nexus and challenges to liberal state-building, and the part played by external parties in the peace processes of the Aceh and Sri Lankan conflicts. The inclusion of case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe provides the text with a strong geographical focus, and constructs a panoramic view of the nexus that encompasses the globe. Further country-based chapters – focusing on China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa – underline this worldwide perspective.

The volume’s collected essays thus provide a detailed and comprehensive view of this fluid, contemporaneous topic, both theoretically and empirically. ‘The Security-Development Nexus’ is a vital appraisal of both the present issues and current thought concerning conflict, security and development.

The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry is the first book-length study of the contemporary poetry industry. By documenting radical changes over the past decade in the way poems are published, sold, and consumed, it connects the seemingly small world of poetry with the other, wider creative industries. In reassessing an art form that has been traditionally seen as free from or even resistant to material concerns, the book confronts the real pressures – and real opportunities – faced by poets and publishers in the wake of economic and cultural shifts since 2008. The changing role of anthologies, prizes, and publishers are considered alongside new technologies, new arts policy, and re-conceptions of poetic labour.

The historical frame helps to understand the legacy of increased funding in the UK in the previous decade, which Tony Blair described as a ‘golden age’ for the arts two months before his resignation, and a year before the global financial crisis which succeeding governments used to justify major funding cuts. With this economic emphasis, the book challenges the historical perception of poetry’s market autonomy, for a period in which it has moved beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s view of it as ‘the disinterested activity par excellence’. Drawing on an emerging body of research into the newly defined creative economy, alongside materialist and sociological approaches, the book is structured around a range of case studies – from new publishing formats, new degree programmes and mentorship schemes, plagiarism scandals, to poems going ‘viral’ – emphasizing an underlying shift towards professionalisation and entrepreneurial rhetoric associated with new poetry. Ultimately, it argues that poetry’s continued growth and diversification also leaves individuals with more responsibility than ever for sustaining its communities.

The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry is the first book-length study of the contemporary poetry industry. By documenting radical changes over the past decade in the way poems are published, sold, and consumed, it connects the seemingly small world of poetry with the other, wider creative industries. In reassessing an art form that has been traditionally seen as free from or even resistant to material concerns, the book confronts the real pressures – and real opportunities – faced by poets and publishers in the wake of economic and cultural shifts since 2008. The changing role of anthologies, prizes, and publishers are considered alongside new technologies, new arts policy, and re-conceptions of poetic labour.

The historical frame helps to understand the legacy of increased funding in the UK in the previous decade, which Tony Blair described as a ‘golden age’ for the arts two months before his resignation, and a year before the global financial crisis which succeeding governments used to justify major funding cuts. With this economic emphasis, the book challenges the historical perception of poetry’s market autonomy, for a period in which it has moved beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s view of it as ‘the disinterested activity par excellence’. Drawing on an emerging body of research into the newly defined creative economy, alongside materialist and sociological approaches, the book is structured around a range of case studies – from new publishing formats, new degree programmes and mentorship schemes, plagiarism scandals, to poems going ‘viral’ – emphasizing an underlying shift towards professionalisation and entrepreneurial rhetoric associated with new poetry. Ultimately, it argues that poetry’s continued growth and diversification also leaves individuals with more responsibility than ever for sustaining its communities.

Series are everywhere, unfolding before our eyes like unseen, self-writing lines in all external and internal directions. Or as Clarice Lispector says, “What I’m writing to you is a ‘this’. It won’t stop: it goes on . . .” (Agua Viva). From the vast manifest universe to the invisible center of oneself and beyond, there is nothing that is not, in a whole series of senses, the series of itself. As every number is expressible as a series of numbers, so one sees that seriality, once defined by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as “simultaneous unity and multiplicity,” belongs at every scale to the essence of everything.

Following this idea of the series as a fundamental feature of reality, The Seriality of the One investigates its metaphysical, ontological, and existential significance in dialogue with an open constellation of modern and premodern authors, giving special attention to the way seriality mediates and measures the relation between the individual and the universal, bridging by ellipsis the unbounded interpenetrating unities of the one and the One. Seen through the ongoing perspective of the series, beings, events, and facts are never discrete and definable identities that can ever be counted or discounted as having greater or lesser importance or status than others. Nothing is merely itself or a part of something else. In the infinity mirror of seriality, all are simultaneously equivalent to all or the totality itself.

The implications and parameters of this insight are here explored in five chapters focused on the categories of quality and quantity. First, through a counter-reading of a passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics in which the primacy of substance is established in relation to the specter of a universe of mere succession, seriality is identified as the overflowing unity of one and many. Second, in light of the serial basis of counting and Nietzsche’s critique of enumeration, the nature of quantification is examined as a pervasive limitation of our times, the instrument of a “transparency” that works to obfuscate actuality. Third, paralleling Hegel’s prioritization of quality over quantity, the nature of quality is interrogated as the spiritual core of life’s spontaneous and infinitely evolving question of itself. Fourth, elaborating upon Meher Baba’s figuration of seriality as the interface of reality and illusion, the concept of seriality is examined in its simplicity as the way of moving beyond the opposition or dialectical oscillation between quality and quantity. Last, drawing on the geometric metaphor of divine vision in Dante’s Paradiso, the principle of measure is explicated in order to articulate the poetic and creative nature of seriality as process or activity, this immeasurable reality’s never-ending reckoning of its own indivisibility.

The main focus of 'The Sexual Imperative in the Novels of Sir Henry Rider Haggard' is Haggard's preoccupation in his fiction with the theme of the sexual imperative and the relationship between his fictional representations and his personal emotional geography and experiences. It illuminates and explores aspects of this theme primarily by detailed examination of ten of his novels but it also demonstrates that identically evolving considerations of the theme are apparent in his contemporary romances. The book fills an important gap in Haggard scholarship which has traditionally tended to focus on his early romances and to centre on their political and psychological resonances. It also contributes to wider current debates on Victorian and turn of the century literature.

The book adopts a chronological framework which spans the entirety of Haggard’s writing career and considers the novels and corresponding romances which he wrote at each stage in his literary development. It considers Haggard’s literary representations in the context of contemporary sexual behaviours and attitudes, and of other contemporary literary representations of sexuality. It notes Haggard’s deployment in his novels of contemporary literary genres, notably those of the Sensation Novel, the New Woman, and later Modernism, and it examines what he contributed to these genres and how his interpretation of them compared to that of his literary contemporaries.

This book traces Haggard's emotional investment in his evolving depictions of the destructive potential for the male of female sexuality and demonstrates that his focus develops, as his writing career progresses, from deeply personal renditions of sexual betrayal towards a proposal that the seeds of moral destruction are an integral part of the sexual imperative. It examines his sustained consideration in his novels of the issues of the position of women and of the marriage question and documents his exploration of whether an unsatisfactory marriage legitimises extra-marital sexual relations. It notes, as a measure of Haggard’s moral progressiveness, that despite his formal need to criticise this behaviour, he is in fact clear that it is both natural and morally irreproachable. The book also examines Haggard’s exploration of the merits of a love which is predominantly spiritual rather than sexual and his consideration of the virtues of sexual renunciation. It relates his treatment of these themes to that of contemporary novelists and spiritualist writers. It documents his final fiction which depicts the inescapable imperatives of the human situation and celebrates the overwhelming validity of sexual passion in a committed relationship. It considers the extent of Haggard’s modernity and proposes that although he remains careful and caveated in his moral statements, and conservative by contemporary literary standards, he does unquestionably endorse self-fulfilment over social duty. The book’s conclusion argues that Haggard’s novels and many of his romances represent a consideration of issues which he saw as at the root of being and that the consistency, balance and open-mindedness with which he pursued them suggest a generally uncredited integrity and weight to his fiction.

The main focus of 'The Sexual Imperative in the Novels of Sir Henry Rider Haggard' is Haggard's preoccupation in his fiction with the theme of the sexual imperative and the relationship between his fictional representations and his personal emotional geography and experiences. It illuminates and explores aspects of this theme primarily by detailed examination of ten of his novels but it also demonstrates that identically evolving considerations of the theme are apparent in his contemporary romances. The book fills an important gap in Haggard scholarship which has traditionally tended to focus on his early romances and to centre on their political and psychological resonances. It also contributes to wider current debates on Victorian and turn of the century literature.

The book adopts a chronological framework which spans the entirety of Haggard’s writing career and considers the novels and corresponding romances which he wrote at each stage in his literary development. It considers Haggard’s literary representations in the context of contemporary sexual behaviours and attitudes, and of other contemporary literary representations of sexuality. It notes Haggard’s deployment in his novels of contemporary literary genres, notably those of the Sensation Novel, the New Woman, and later Modernism, and it examines what he contributed to these genres and how his interpretation of them compared to that of his literary contemporaries.

This book traces Haggard's emotional investment in his evolving depictions of the destructive potential for the male of female sexuality and demonstrates that his focus develops, as his writing career progresses, from deeply personal renditions of sexual betrayal towards a proposal that the seeds of moral destruction are an integral part of the sexual imperative. It examines his sustained consideration in his novels of the issues of the position of women and of the marriage question and documents his exploration of whether an unsatisfactory marriage legitimises extra-marital sexual relations. It notes, as a measure of Haggard’s moral progressiveness, that despite his formal need to criticise this behaviour, he is in fact clear that it is both natural and morally irreproachable. The book also examines Haggard’s exploration of the merits of a love which is predominantly spiritual rather than sexual and his consideration of the virtues of sexual renunciation. It relates his treatment of these themes to that of contemporary novelists and spiritualist writers. It documents his final fiction which depicts the inescapable imperatives of the human situation and celebrates the overwhelming validity of sexual passion in a committed relationship. It considers the extent of Haggard’s modernity and proposes that although he remains careful and caveated in his moral statements, and conservative by contemporary literary standards, he does unquestionably endorse self-fulfilment over social duty. The book’s conclusion argues that Haggard’s novels and many of his romances represent a consideration of issues which he saw as at the root of being and that the consistency, balance and open-mindedness with which he pursued them suggest a generally uncredited integrity and weight to his fiction.

• Joint winner of The Literary Encyclopedia book prize 2024, category ‘Literatures written in languages other than English'
• Winner of the Nancy Staub Publications Award 2024
• Winner of the AATI Book Award 2024 for Literary, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies

- Sicilian puppet theater is a unique nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular theatrical tradition based on the masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature. It flourished not only in southern Italy and Sicily, but also in the diasporic Italian urban communities of North and South America and North Africa, bringing immigrants together for nightly performances of the same deeply cherished chivalric stories. Even though this art form was designated by UNESCO as an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” in 2001, it remains largely unknown today because by the late 1950s Sicilian puppet theater companies had ceased to perform the full Paladins of France cycle that used to extend nightly for well over a year. Thus, the only means we have left to explore the substance of this once widely enjoyed cultural phenomenon are the scripts dating from opera dei pupi’s heyday. Most of these invaluable documents, however, have been lost, while the few sets still in existence are either privately owned by the remaining puppeteer families and collectors or tucked away in the archives of Italian institutions. Thanks to the newly accessible scripts of the preeminent Catanese-American puppeteer Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947), whose career stretched from Sicily to Argentina to New York, students, scholars, and the general public can now explore the cycle of chivalric narratives staged during the golden age of Sicilian puppet theater.

- The many delicate hand-written notebooks containing Agrippino Manteo’s dramatic repertory are not only of interest for their historical and aesthetic value. These masterfully executed theatrical adaptations invite readers into a chivalric world featuring knights and damsels from across the globe – from Europe to Africa to East Asia – who share the stage with a host of wizards, fairies, giants, and monsters, in alternating episodes of love, enchantment, adventure, and warfare. The concerns with which they engage, such as justice, identity, duty, love, freedom, and virtue, transcend the categories of elite and folk, local and global, medieval and modern, interrogating what it means to be human.

- This book provides the most comprehensive history to date of the Manteo Family's Sicilian Marionette Theater across three generations and brings to light for the first time the contents of Agrippino Manteo’s extensive Sicilian puppet theater scripts, including translations of 8 selected plays and 270 extant play summaries of the famous Paladins of France cycle. Accompanying comparative analyses uncover the creative process of adaptation from Italian Renaissance masterpieces of chivalric poetry to nineteenth-century prose compilations to Agrippino’s opera dei pupi scripts.

• Joint winner of The Literary Encyclopedia book prize 2024, category ‘Literatures written in languages other than English'
• Winner of the Nancy Staub Publications Award 2024
• Winner of the AATI Book Award 2024 for Literary, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies

- Sicilian puppet theater is a unique nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular theatrical tradition based on the masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature. It flourished not only in southern Italy and Sicily, but also in the diasporic Italian urban communities of North and South America and North Africa, bringing immigrants together for nightly performances of the same deeply cherished chivalric stories. Even though this art form was designated by UNESCO as an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” in 2001, it remains largely unknown today because by the late 1950s Sicilian puppet theater companies had ceased to perform the full Paladins of France cycle that used to extend nightly for well over a year. Thus, the only means we have left to explore the substance of this once widely enjoyed cultural phenomenon are the scripts dating from opera dei pupi’s heyday. Most of these invaluable documents, however, have been lost, while the few sets still in existence are either privately owned by the remaining puppeteer families and collectors or tucked away in the archives of Italian institutions. Thanks to the newly accessible scripts of the preeminent Catanese-American puppeteer Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947), whose career stretched from Sicily to Argentina to New York, students, scholars, and the general public can now explore the cycle of chivalric narratives staged during the golden age of Sicilian puppet theater.

- The many delicate hand-written notebooks containing Agrippino Manteo’s dramatic repertory are not only of interest for their historical and aesthetic value. These masterfully executed theatrical adaptations invite readers into a chivalric world featuring knights and damsels from across the globe – from Europe to Africa to East Asia – who share the stage with a host of wizards, fairies, giants, and monsters, in alternating episodes of love, enchantment, adventure, and warfare. The concerns with which they engage, such as justice, identity, duty, love, freedom, and virtue, transcend the categories of elite and folk, local and global, medieval and modern, interrogating what it means to be human.

- This book provides the most comprehensive history to date of the Manteo Family's Sicilian Marionette Theater across three generations and brings to light for the first time the contents of Agrippino Manteo’s extensive Sicilian puppet theater scripts, including translations of 8 selected plays and 270 extant play summaries of the famous Paladins of France cycle. Accompanying comparative analyses uncover the creative process of adaptation from Italian Renaissance masterpieces of chivalric poetry to nineteenth-century prose compilations to Agrippino’s opera dei pupi scripts.

This scholarly monograph is an original philosophical reflection on poetics, elucidating the metaphysical and mystical potential of poetic language as quasi-religious revelation. It develops a theory of the symbol based on French Symbolist Poetry as culminating in Stéphane Mallarmé.