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Modern society has operated under the assumption that technological developments and the production of material goods intrinsically lead to improvement in the overall welfare of individuals and nations. However, Walter G. Moss provides a more analytical reading of the main trends of the twentieth century, and offers a gripping introduction to the defining themes of the recent past. His history is an accomplished review, dealing with the complexities and subtleties of this beguiling epoch with the adeptness that has made his previous historical works such resounding successes.

‘An Age of Progress?’ is an advanced examination of major twentieth-century global developments regarding violence; capitalism, socialism and communism; imperialism, racism, nationalism, westernization, globalization, and international finance; freedom and human rights; physical and mental environmental changes; and culture, science, education, religion, and social criticism. Moss then concludes his momentous study by exploring the ways in which the twentieth century made significant progress -- and the ways in which it had not.

This is an exemplary text for advanced students of twentieth-century global history, particularly within a seminar setting, and for general readers seeking to increase their basic knowledge of the subject. It can also be used as background reading for courses in International Relations and for those interested in international business and international cooperation.

How did the US financial crisis snowball into USD 15 trillion global losses? This book offers a clear synthesis and original analysis of the various factors that led to the financial crisis of 2007-2010 - namely, an asset price bubble and excessive leverage. The focus is on the ingredients of and dynamics within the international financial system, and as such is the most comprehensive publication in scope to date in terms of market, country and instrument coverage. In addition to its thorough dissection of the causes and consequences of the most calamitous financial crisis in the past seventy years, the author also debates 'the way forward', including regulatory challenges, proposed changes and critique, and early warning systems.

The objective of this reader is to provide a holistic summary of the financial crisis, and bring to light a new perspective on each of the issues, while simultaneously providing a thorough platform for those wishing to research any of the sub-topics independently. It ultimately discusses the lessons to be learned from the recent crisis, and questions whether the global financial system is capable of learning them. Written in a clear explanatory prose and featuring a wealth of quantitative data and qualitative analysis, this reader is accessible to the beginner, intermediate and advanced student.

This volume is a brief anthology of the most influential writing by American scientists between 1800 and 1900. Arranged thematically and chronologically to highlight the movement of American science throughout the nineteenth century, from its beginnings in self-taught classification and exploration to the movement towards university education and specialization, this anthology is the first of its kind. Biographies front each section, putting human faces to each time period, and the anthology includes such notable names as Thomas Jefferson and Louis Agassiz. 

This volume is a brief anthology of the most influential writing by American scientists between 1800 and 1900. Arranged thematically and chronologically to highlight the movement of American science throughout the nineteenth century, from its beginnings in self-taught classification and exploration to the movement towards university education and specialization, this anthology is the first of its kind. Biographies front each section, putting human faces to each time period, and the anthology includes such notable names as Thomas Jefferson and Louis Agassiz. 

Toyin Falola’s astounding intellectual production must be one of the mysteries in the intellectual world. It has transcended the confined world of historical research into broader horizons that include the role of the public intellectual. The present study would undertake a rigorous analysis of the origins, continuities and discontinuities of this transformation. This means we have to recast the debates regarding who is a public intellectual from a multiplicity of discursive situations and historical and cultural contexts. We have to employ methodological parallels from North Atlantic intellectual traditions. How did the role of the public intellectual emerge in the first place in world intellectual history? Addressing this question would enrich this research endeavour immensely.
In interrogating comparative discursive formations, we shall re-evaluate the roles, functions and achievements of continental intellectuals such as Betrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Wole Soyinka and Pierre Bourdieu. Again, this discursive element will give this study a global appeal and range.

‘An Immigrant Nation Seeks Cohesion’ is based on current events and developments in Australia and seeks to illuminate them using historical and contemporary issues. It is not a formal or chronological ‘history book’. Its sources are soundly based on the scholarship of existing history books. The transformation of Australia into a complex multicultural society comparable to the United States or Canada has not been fully dealt with by most conventional historians or taught extensively in schools and universities. Many conservative scholars either ignore this or even deplore the changes which have become so noticeable since the 1950s.

The most important of these changes has been the decline and virtual disappearance of the British Empire from the Asian regions and the growth of dozens of political powers and systems previously only subject to European control. These changes have created an international environment for Australia which is increasingly focussed on Asia and on powers as large and strong as China and India or as threatening as North Korea or some of the Islamic world. These may have been exaggerated, as was Communism in the past, but recently public policy is being reshaped to cope with them. This has normally exchanged British for United States protection, which may not be acceptable to some of Australia’s neighbours. In particular the newly discovered ‘Anglosphere’ may look just like the old British connection on a broader scale.

The Australian population reflects these changes in its quite recent nature by accepting and even welcoming immigration from the same Asian regions despite some official attempts to control and limit it after the end of the White Australia policy in the 1970s. Refugee pressures have even extended the intake to cover some parts of Africa. While some official policies have welcomed these changes, others have sought to limit them or to seek cohesion in what might seem like a dissolving society. There have been a series of public debates surrounding ethnicity, values, dangers and tensions, even though these are much less obvious than elsewhere. The book tracks backwards through history to show that dislike and even fear of non-British, non-white and undemocratic elements have existed since the earliest days of British settlement. These were first motivated by contact with the indigenous population, which was drastically reduced in size and driven from their lands within the first generation. This created lasting problems with which Australians have grappled with limited success right into the present, two centuries later. Others followed, including ‘enemy aliens’ such as Germans who were originally welcomed as civilized and Christian. Other potential enemies of British Protestantism and authority were soon included – the Irish, socialists, radicals and, eventually by 1920, Communists.

Most potential disturbers of stability were seen as foreigners in one sense or another, extending to Jews, Catholics, Chinese, Asians, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Displaced Persons after 1945, Japanese and, most recently, Arabs and Muslims, including Muslims who were not Arabs and Arabs who were not Muslims. These latter were the victims of the only mass race riot of recent history at Cronulla (NSW) in 2005. The reality of Middle Eastern conflicts which were largely religious were distorted into claims that some such elements could never be accepted in Australia, despite the fact that the Arabic language by then was the fourth most widely used in Australia because of permitted immigrations. Fear of political disruptors is traced back to the Industrial Workers of the World in 1918, who were made illegal by the Hughes wartime government. At the same time Hughes was trying to recruit Australians into the massacres of the World War by urging support for King and Country.

‘An Immigrant Nation Seeks Cohesion’ traces many of the fears, real or imaginary, which characterized Australians in the past. As most citizens had become literate by 1900 they were subjected to a mass press which fanned these fears right through to the present. As adult Australians (and all British migrants until recently) could vote, political parties had an interest in maintaining the myths surrounding these enemies of progress and safety, whoever they were. The fear of Communists and other radicals was often combined with fear of the power of trade unions, although these were controlled by laws from the early years. Racist and fascist organizations did not arouse so much fear during the unstable 1930s or even post-war more recently. The fear of Communism was strong enough to rend the Australian Labor Party for two decades. Yet the Communists only won one parliamentary seat at the Commonwealth level in the whole of their half-century of existence. They were an agent of the Soviet Communist state but that was the cause of their eventual collapse and demise in the 1960s. It also ignores the fact that the World War II was turned against the enemy of Australia, Britain and the United States largely by the efforts of the Soviet Red Army. As in many other respects, history becomes very malleable in the hands of those with an interest in rehearsing it. The outstanding example in Australia has been the legend of Gallipoli, where the disastrous defeat of Australian volunteers invading Turkey was soon turned into a glorious victory and national legend.

‘An Immigrant Nation Seeks Cohesion’ presents Australian traditions, myths and legends in an understanding but often critical light in the belief that such devices have often been used by interested parties and even governments to maintain social solidarity and to mould a very complex people into a coherent and obedient whole. In the process Australians have often been misled about their failures and problems in the interest of consolidating their belief in their superiority. Australia is not and never has been an equal society. It has not always been a peaceful and tolerant society but it is more so than most other states and especially many of those sending immigrants. It is not a perfect democracy. Many have been mistreated and even persecuted but not as severely as in many other still-functioning societies. That most of those suffering at present are either indigenous or refugees should not be a cause of indifference. But at least some protest and assistance has been present since the passing of the original convict state in the 1860s. Australians may be suspicious of foreigners and social and political deviants. But they have passed a whole series of reforming laws since the Federation in 1901, not all of which have been as racist as the White Australia policy. In general, Australia has been a successful society, which does not mean that problems and mistakes need to be wiped off the slate. This book seeks to get a little bit closer to the truth of two hundred years of creating a liveable society in what was a remote and unknown part of the world. Nothing is perfect. Australia might have been served by better politicians and journalists or even by academics and intellectuals. But of how many societies in the modern world could that not also be true? The point is to record and contemplate specific faults and triumphs and act accordingly.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Wildlife Corridors charts some best practices and makes some new theoretical contributions related to the design and creation of wildlife corridors in Anthropocene times. The book not only provides much of the knowledge necessary for a general and credible understanding of connectivity projects, but also makes a unique theoretical contribution to current knowledge about wildlife corridors by arguing that theories about compassion, empathy, and traditional ecological knowledge should inform wildlife corridor projects.

Wildlife corridors, or connectivity projects, are necessary, because when land is set aside or used for human activities, habitats that were once contiguous become fragmented. If species are unable to move between these fragmented areas, they become at risk for inbreeding or extinction. Wildlife corridors attempt to remediate such fragmentation by restoring connectivity and creating expanses of habitat that can provide species with important bridges and points of connection between other habitats. Providing such linkages between habitats reduces these risks and helps maintain genetic diversity and a population’s health.

The book argues for a holistic approach to wildlife corridors that attempts to account for a broad and varied range of stakeholder voices, including those of the vulnerable nonhuman species that underpin the need for corridor projects in the first place. This book should appeal to general audiences and practitioners alike.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Wildlife Corridors charts some best practices and makes some new theoretical contributions related to the design and creation of wildlife corridors in Anthropocene times. The book not only provides much of the knowledge necessary for a general and credible understanding of connectivity projects, but also makes a unique theoretical contribution to current knowledge about wildlife corridors by arguing that theories about compassion, empathy, and traditional ecological knowledge should inform wildlife corridor projects.

Wildlife corridors, or connectivity projects, are necessary, because when land is set aside or used for human activities, habitats that were once contiguous become fragmented. If species are unable to move between these fragmented areas, they become at risk for inbreeding or extinction. Wildlife corridors attempt to remediate such fragmentation by restoring connectivity and creating expanses of habitat that can provide species with important bridges and points of connection between other habitats. Providing such linkages between habitats reduces these risks and helps maintain genetic diversity and a population’s health.

The book argues for a holistic approach to wildlife corridors that attempts to account for a broad and varied range of stakeholder voices, including those of the vulnerable nonhuman species that underpin the need for corridor projects in the first place. This book should appeal to general audiences and practitioners alike.

“An Introduction to Changing India: Culture, Politics and Development” provides a comprehensive view of today’s rapidly changing India in a way that is both reader-friendly and scholarly, without requiring prior knowledge on the subject from its readers. It investigates Indian culture, politics, economics and technology, as well as population and environmental issues. Gender issues are also discussed throughout the book. The authors provide a balanced picture of the emerging India’s many triumphs, as well as its lingering problems and the ongoing battle for more inclusive growth. By drawing on anthropological fieldwork in rural and urban India, the authors give ordinary Indians a voice by exploring their aspirations for change, while also describing macro-level changes.

The study draws from extensive reading of research reports and fieldwork by the authors, who have carried out anthropological research on kinship, gender issues, politics, class and caste, population issues and the appropriation of information technology in India since the 1990s.

“An Outline of Financial Economics” presents a systematic treatment of theory and methodology of finance and economics. It begins by discussing financial instruments, which form the basis of the theory of finance and are defined as legal documents recording monetary transactions. The text then goes on to analyze bonds – which are regarded as fixed income securities – in a simple framework, and to discuss the valuation of stocks and cash flows in detail.

The text follows an analytical and geometric methodology, explaining technical terms and mathematical operations in nontechnical language. It also provides intuitive explanations of the mathematical results of questions concerning important issues such as risk aversion, uncertainty, prospect theory and the theory of stochastic dominance.

The text also covers two alternative approaches to portfolio analysis – namely the mean-variance and mean-Gini approaches – and features an analysis of the Modigliani–Miller theorem, which has played a major role in the development of business finance. It discusses the capital asset pricing model and the intricacies of the methods for determining prices of different types of options, which give the right to buy or sell an asset. Conditions for non-arbitrage that do not allow advantage of price discrimination between markets are also developed.

Because of its wide coverage and analytical, articulate and authoritative presentation, “An Outline of Financial Economics” will be an indispensable book for finance researchers and undergraduate and graduate students in fields such as economics, finance, econometrics, statistics and mathematics.

“An Outline of Financial Economics” presents a systematic treatment of theory and methodology of finance and economics. It begins by discussing financial instruments, which form the basis of the theory of finance and are defined as legal documents recording monetary transactions. The text then goes on to analyze bonds – which are regarded as fixed income securities – in a simple framework, and to discuss the valuation of stocks and cash flows in detail.

The text follows an analytical and geometric methodology, explaining technical terms and mathematical operations in nontechnical language. It also provides intuitive explanations of the mathematical results of questions concerning important issues such as risk aversion, uncertainty, prospect theory and the theory of stochastic dominance.

The text also covers two alternative approaches to portfolio analysis – namely the mean-variance and mean-Gini approaches – and features an analysis of the Modigliani–Miller theorem, which has played a major role in the development of business finance. It discusses the capital asset pricing model and the intricacies of the methods for determining prices of different types of options, which give the right to buy or sell an asset. Conditions for non-arbitrage that do not allow advantage of price discrimination between markets are also developed.

Because of its wide coverage and analytical, articulate and authoritative presentation, “An Outline of Financial Economics” will be an indispensable book for finance researchers and undergraduate and graduate students in fields such as economics, finance, econometrics, statistics and mathematics.

Although single fathers as primary carers are on the rise, most single-parent households in the United States are headed by women. These women are a lucrative market for parenting books and most of such books are aimed at single mothers raising sons. This intersectional study analyses a broad range of material: books written by female and male authors, African-American and white, health professionals as well as lay people, outspokenly feminist or traditionally conservative, addressing a middle-class or a working-class readership. This allows for a comprehensive analysis of normative attitudes towards parenting, showing how class and ethnicity interact with traditional assumptions of gender and biology to produce a genre of literature that is quite restrictive, perpetuating ideas of ‘intensive mothering’.

Situating these advice books within the context of parenting experts, the US fatherhood movement, the so-called ‘boy crisis’, cultural prejudice towards single mothers and what has been termed ‘neurosexism’ and ‘neuroparenting’, this study analyses the way in which the books draw on mother-blame language, misconceptions of neuropsychological research and traditional conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity to convince the mother readers that they are unable to raise a son to be a man. Using prescriptive and often alarmist language, the authors privilege traditional assumptions of gender, hegemonic masculinity and heteronormative family structures over single parent families, same-sex parenting and single mothers by choice (via adoption or ART). In doing so, the books afford very narrow parenting roles, for fathers as well as mothers, as well as a very limited range of masculine identities for young boys. Presented as common sense advice, these books are widely read by women seeking support and it is thus vital that they be interrogated for the way they continue to construct, shape and influence expectations on parenting, as well as the identities of young boys.

Although single fathers as primary carers are on the rise, most single-parent households in the United States are headed by women. These women are a lucrative market for parenting books and most of such books are aimed at single mothers raising sons. This intersectional study analyses a broad range of material: books written by female and male authors, African-American and white, health professionals as well as lay people, outspokenly feminist or traditionally conservative, addressing a middle-class or a working-class readership. This allows for a comprehensive analysis of normative attitudes towards parenting, showing how class and ethnicity interact with traditional assumptions of gender and biology to produce a genre of literature that is quite restrictive, perpetuating ideas of ‘intensive mothering’.

Situating these advice books within the context of parenting experts, the US fatherhood movement, the so-called ‘boy crisis’, cultural prejudice towards single mothers and what has been termed ‘neurosexism’ and ‘neuroparenting’, this study analyses the way in which the books draw on mother-blame language, misconceptions of neuropsychological research and traditional conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity to convince the mother readers that they are unable to raise a son to be a man. Using prescriptive and often alarmist language, the authors privilege traditional assumptions of gender, hegemonic masculinity and heteronormative family structures over single parent families, same-sex parenting and single mothers by choice (via adoption or ART). In doing so, the books afford very narrow parenting roles, for fathers as well as mothers, as well as a very limited range of masculine identities for young boys. Presented as common sense advice, these books are widely read by women seeking support and it is thus vital that they be interrogated for the way they continue to construct, shape and influence expectations on parenting, as well as the identities of young boys.

Stephen Condit begins ‘Anarchism in Local Governance’ arguing that anarchism and anarchists must engage with the ruling order in a more inclusive manner than radical opposition, at least in the environment of a stable and cautious welfare society like Finland. This encounter may enlarge the purposes and values of municipal governance towards some of the fundamental values of anarchism, primarily individual and communal self-governance, and as well develop anarchist thought and praxis, not to renounce radical and non-conventional action, but to enlarge its scope and opportunities by strengthening the legitimacy of anarchist values and praxis, and their practical relevance to the social order.

The discussion entails three intertwined discourses: anarchist thought in philosophical and theoretical terms with an emphasis on the possibilities of its praxis; a descriptive examination of municipal governance through its organisations, strategies and policies; and a rather anecdotal account of Condit’s 30-year career in attempting to combine these dimensions of anarchism, municipal governance and citizen participation in civil society. The counterfactual ideal of Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is a significant measure of evaluation.

Condit’s self-assessment is equivocal. He failed to instil much practical anarchism into the municipality and possibly diluted his own demonstration of anarchism beyond what most anarchists would accept. Nevertheless he considers his project justified because it has clarified potentialities for the municipality, citizen associations and anarchism, and because it may express in more coherent conceptual and ethical form significant emerging trends in Western society.

Despite upheavals in ownership over the past three decades, the name Angus & Robertson remains to date the most recognised book-retailing brand in Australia. However, it is little known that through the incredible efforts of everyone involved in the operations of its London agency, Angus & Robertson was, for a time, also the most recognised Australian bookselling and book publishing brand in the commonwealth.

This book documents a distinctive chapter in the history of Australian book publishing as it addresses how the company dealt with the tension between aspirational literary nationalism and the requirements of turning a profit while attempting to get inside the UK literary market. As well as detailing Angus & Robertson’s complete international relations, the book argues that the company’s international business was a much larger, more successful and complicated business than has been acknowledged by previous scholars. It questions the ways in which Angus & Robertson replicated, challenged or transformed the often highly criticised commercial practices of British publishers in order to develop an export trade for Australian books in the United Kingdom.

‘Angus & Robertson and the British Trade in Australian Books, 1930–1970’ is the first of its kind; no other book in the present literary market records a substantial history of Australia’s largest publisher and its role in the development of Australia’s export book trade. Although a unique piece, this volume also complements existing studies on Angus & Robertson, Australian literature and Australian publishing.

Despite upheavals in ownership over the past three decades, the name Angus & Robertson remains to date the most recognised book-retailing brand in Australia. However, it is little known that through the incredible efforts of everyone involved in the operations of its London agency, Angus & Robertson was, for a time, also the most recognised Australian bookselling and book publishing brand in the commonwealth.

This book documents a distinctive chapter in the history of Australian book publishing as it addresses how the company dealt with the tension between aspirational literary nationalism and the requirements of turning a profit while attempting to get inside the UK literary market. As well as detailing Angus & Robertson’s complete international relations, the book argues that the company’s international business was a much larger, more successful and complicated business than has been acknowledged by previous scholars. It questions the ways in which Angus & Robertson replicated, challenged or transformed the often highly criticised commercial practices of British publishers in order to develop an export trade for Australian books in the United Kingdom.

‘Angus & Robertson and the British Trade in Australian Books, 1930–1970’ is the first of its kind; no other book in the present literary market records a substantial history of Australia’s largest publisher and its role in the development of Australia’s export book trade. Although a unique piece, this volume also complements existing studies on Angus & Robertson, Australian literature and Australian publishing.

Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature explores literary representations of the human-animal encounter in modernity that press human “being” to its limits. This project arises within the question, “Can an animal die?,” formulated in response to Martin Heidegger’s famous assertion that, properly speaking, animals cannot “die” but can only “perish,” an assertion that sharply summarizes western “humanist” philosophical discourse – particularly as etched in the “modern turn” initiated by Descartes – in which the “human” emerges precisely as that (non)animal which enjoys a distinctive relation to both the inner essence and outer edge of existence. Recently – most notably in the late works of Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Emmanuel Levinas – philosophers have interrogated the grounds of Heidegger’s formulation, putting into question its assumption of unnavigable distance and un-negotiable difference between humans and (other) animals, drawing partly on Darwinian conceptions of a biologistic continuum among creatures, partly on ethological revelations of animal “capacities,” and partly on ideas intrinsic to philosophy itself, such as a demystification of binarism as an instrument of philosophical structure and analysis. 

The book’s overarching thesis is that, taken together, texts – including Shakespeare’s King Lear; Eliot’s Middlemarch; Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau; Atwood’s Surfacing; and Desai’s Clear Light of Day – are both distinctive in their figurations of the human-animal relation and representative of a wide spectrum of literary instantiations of the “question of the animal” for post-Enlightenment western culture.

In ancient China, the tradition of observing nature is combined with Yin-Yang and the Five-Phase theories, which were later incorporated into the ancient arts of divination, including the technique of predicting weather changes by observing the behavior and health of animals. The observation of the close connection between animals and weather developed into the worship of animals, that is, what can be called the cult of animals. Plant science and technology in medieval China cannot be separated from the developments in agriculture, economics, and medicine, as well as cultural practice. The Chinese empire ruled most of East Asia in the medieval period. Numerous species of plants were observed, cultivated, harvested, and used in the vast land of China that spanned a wide range of biomes from boreal through to temperate and tropical, with most regions classed as subtropical. Besides indigenous plants, many plants from West, Central, South, and Southeast Asia were introduced into China and East Asia in general. Numerous zoomantic practices appeared in two sets of textual documents in the premodern Chinese bibliographical system, namely official documents and popular documents. Official documents were often compiled by government officials and served political governance objectives. These documents included official histories, annals, and institutional documents, as well as Confucian classics. The authorship or editorship of these documents was often explicit. Popular documents included strange writings, tales, legends, and religious documents from Buddhism and Daoism, which were often not compiled under the sponsorship and support of the court or government. They might be compiled by literati but lost original authorship. They did not serve political motivations and objectives, reflecting how people understood and interpreted correlative cosmology by observing animal behaviors at the local or non-bureaucratic level.

‘Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions’ in English traces the development of Indian English literary and textual practice over a period of seven decades, focussing on classic texts which have fallen beyond the scope of the established canon. Central to this volume is an inquiry into the nature of Indian modernity. Through careful and path-breaking readings of such important writers as Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, M. Ananthanarayanan, Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, U. R. Anantha Murthy, Kiran Nagarkar, Vikram Seth, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, the author constructs what may be called ‘another canon,’ shedding new light on literary and critical practice in post-colonial India.

Useful both to specialists and general readers, these engaging and insightful interpretations of key Indian texts enhance our understanding of the making of modern Indian consciousness and culture. In addition, the book also offers crucial theoretical insights into the distinguishing features of the novel in India, especially of the fiction of the 1980s and 1990s.

‘Anthem Critical Thinking and Writing Skills: An Introductory Guide’ helps readers in the process of critical thinking and persuasive speaking and writing. The text discusses informal thinking, the formal processes of induction, deduction, and syllogistic reasoning, in a clear format that makes it easy for the 'beginning logician' to process. Students learn how to form a proposition, identify issues, gather evidence, and process an argument.

To get started, logic games, puzzles, and real life examples ask students to consider how we evaluate, analyze, and decide. What happens if Janie says, 'Mom, can I go to the party? All of my friends are going!' And Mom responds, 'What if all of your friends jumped off the empire State building?' Is 'all of my friends are going' a good reason? Does mom have a point? Language and logic will help students evaluate these everyday decisions. Then a more formal look at induction and deduction challenges students to practice higher-level thinking skills, such as using analogies for evaluation, and working through syllogisms to process ideas. After a review of the Greek Fallacies, readers can have some literary logic fun by analyzing old standards like 'Love is a Fallacy' and the persuasive love poem 'The Passionate Shepherd'.

This guide is a unique resource for art lovers and tourists alike. Selected on the basis of international reputation, architectural appeal, historical and cultural significance and the quality of the collections, Europe’s foremost art galleries and museums are presented here in a comprehensive, accessible and attractive collection.

Beautifully illustrated throughout, offering concise venue descriptions, directions and historical information, ‘Anthem Guide to the Art Galleries and Museums of Europe’ is essential reading for holidaymakers with a passion for culture. The Guide also features up-to-date information on everything from ticket prices to special events and from dining opportunities to disabled access, this helpful guide caters for a variety of enthusiasts – from serious collectors to students on a budget.

Explore the musical wonders of Europe! This guide is a unique resource for music lovers with a passion for travel. Selected on the basis of international reputation, architectural appeal, historical and cultural significance and performance quality, Europe’s foremost concert halls and opera houses are presented here in a comprehensive, accessible and attractive collection.

Beautifully illustrated throughout, offering concise venue descriptions, directions and historical information, 'Anthem Guide to the Opera, Concert Halls and Classical Music Venues of Europe' is essential reading for holidaymakers with a desire to experience the European classical music scene. The Guide also includes up-to-date information on everything from ticket prices to dining opportunities and from special exhibitions to disabled access, this helpful guide caters for a variety of music enthusiasts – from box patrons at La Scala to students on a budget.

This Guide features a foreword by Steven Isserlis, an acclaimed cellist whose passion for music transcends conventional divisions. Acclaimed worldwide for his musicality and technique alike, he is equally at home drawing the audience into his circle of friends for chamber music or in recital; delving into the historical archives to emerge with a forgotten gem; or on the concert platform with some of the world's most prestigious orchestras and conductors.

Women poets of the late Victorian period created much fascinating verse from the standpoint of the independent and advanced New Woman, a profoundly important figure with her iconoclastic perceptions of public and private matters. The New Woman sought to improve women’s lives on a variety of fronts, bringing this individual both approbation and disdain. This anthology features a broad range of crucial subjects addressed by these poets, including marriage, motherhood, female desire, and social problems.
Although the iconoclastic New Women have garnered much interest in recent decades, relatively little attention has been devoted to the valuable poetry these authors produced. Many of the New Woman poets are barely known today, if at all, but their writings offer an exceptional lens onto contemporary conditions that provide inestimable value for Victorian studies. Although much of the work has languished in obscurity, this expansive anthology brings the fascinating poetry to the fore.
This volume provides an invaluable aid by uncovering poetry that has been long neglected or infrequently explored. Several of the poets developed extensive oeuvres investigating matters of special interest at the fin de siècle. It is not an easy task in the twenty-first century to identify, obtain, and review the nineteenth-century books containing these poems. This anthology provides a ready resource to access the poetry, which has had limited exposure in other modern collections.

The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world.  Each essay analyses an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three prominent Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. This volume is particularly valuable in that its main focus is placed on the perception of Chekhov's art by those who existed on the border between literary criticism and philosophy. This is complemented by a literary critique of their accounts, and therefore remains faithful to Chekhov's poetics.

The collection thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that we now refer to as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections between Chekhov's legacy and the Russian culture of that period. Through its stress on the philosophical perception of Chekhov, this book offers a thematically consistent and systematic revelation of new dimensions to Chekhov's creative heritage. The essays are supplemented by biographical accounts of Rozanov, Merezhkovskii and Shestov.

The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world.  Each essay analyses an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three prominent Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. This volume is particularly valuable in that its main focus is placed on the perception of Chekhov's art by those who existed on the border between literary criticism and philosophy. This is complemented by a literary critique of their accounts, and therefore remains faithful to Chekhov's poetics.

The collection thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that we now refer to as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections between Chekhov's legacy and the Russian culture of that period. Through its stress on the philosophical perception of Chekhov, this book offers a thematically consistent and systematic revelation of new dimensions to Chekhov's creative heritage. The essays are supplemented by biographical accounts of Rozanov, Merezhkovskii and Shestov.

Antonio Pietrangeli once stated that “women are the protagonists” of his time, the postwar period in Italy. In a society in upheaval, on the cusp on the sexual revolution which brought both legislative and lifestyle changes for both genders, he posed the question to himself and his collaborators, how do we represent the reality of women in Italy today?

Pietrangeli’s commitment to realism should not come as a surprise since his roots in cinema formed at the Centro Sperimentale, working alongside directors and screenwriters such as Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Sergio Amidei, to name only a few. In the choral atmosphere of the postwar period in Italian cinema, Pietrangeli’s voice was uniquely feminine.

This volume begs the question, to what degree can we call Pietrangeli a feminist? Is it enough to represent women or should the spectators expect more from a feminist representation of women? Through this examination of his career as a film critic as well as his ten feature films and two shorts, in Antonio Pietrangeli, The Director of Women we will dissect the tension between the male director and the female protagonist to investigate the claim that Pietrangeli was, in fact, a feminist. With varying degrees of success, Pietrangeli shows himself to be an ally to the women he represents on screen.

This book is an annotated edition of The Correspondents: An Original Novel (1775), a work, as the introduction argues, derived from A Sentimental Journey, and one of the best of the many later efforts to capture Sterne’s unique blend of sensibility and sensuality. The introduction will make the case for its authorship being an actual exchange of love letters between George Lord Lyttelton (1709–1773) and Apphia Peach Lyttelton (1743–1840), his daughter-in-law, 30 years younger than her father-in-law at the time of the exchange. In our inability to understand precisely what happened between the two is the genius of their imitation of Sterne. It is an ambiguity that results from the conscious reshaping of original letters into a narrative, probably by Apphia Peach in the 2 years between Lyttelton’s death and its publication. The correspondents exchange some 80 letters in all, many with references and quotations to writers in the literary tradition; these allusions will be annotated when at all possible. Particularly important are the allusions to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which was the origin of the design of The Correspondents, and to Shakespeare, Apphia Peach joining Lyttelton’s good friend Elizabeth Montagu in this early indication that the eighteenth-century elevation of Shakespeare was often the direct result of his women readers.

The core concern underlying the various problems in applied ethics is that of human rights. While most writings on human rights deal with its legal, political and socio-economic aspects, this collection instead addresses the philosophical aspect which has hitherto been neglected. Furthermore, the book explores the Indian counterpart of the idea of human rights which can be found in the notion of 'dharma'.

The text addresses issues of conceptual analysis as well as contextual applications of the idea of human rights and its fine nuances. It also contains papers which analyze the concept of 'dharma', raising questions on whether this concept can do 'double duty' for the notions of human rights as well as the notion of human duties. The collection offers papers on human rights issues of different categories of people, including ethnic minorities, homosexuals, women, mentally ill people and prisoners. The papers in this volume also afford grounds for comparative study.

The core concern underlying the various problems in applied ethics is that of human rights. While most writings on human rights deal with its legal, political and socio-economic aspects, this collection instead addresses the philosophical aspect which has hitherto been neglected. Furthermore, the book explores the Indian counterpart of the idea of human rights which can be found in the notion of 'dharma'.

The text addresses issues of conceptual analysis as well as contextual applications of the idea of human rights and its fine nuances. It also contains papers which analyze the concept of 'dharma', raising questions on whether this concept can do 'double duty' for the notions of human rights as well as the notion of human duties. The collection offers papers on human rights issues of different categories of people, including ethnic minorities, homosexuals, women, mentally ill people and prisoners. The papers in this volume also afford grounds for comparative study.

“Approaches to the Study of Intercultural Transfer” presents a collection of compelling case studies in the area of social reform, museums, philanthropy, football, nonviolent resistance and holiday rituals such as Christmas that demonstrate key mechanisms of intercultural transfers. Each chapter provides the application of the intercultural transfer studies paradigm to a specific and distinct historical phenomenon. These chapters not only illustrate the presence or even the depth and frequency of intercultural transfer, but they also reveal specific aspects of the intercultural transfer of phenomena, the role of agents of intercultural transfer and the transformations of ideas transferred between cultures thereby, contributing to our understanding of the mechanisms of intercultural transfers.

The transfers explored in this volume provide for a narrative of an interconnected world in which societies and cultures exchanged ideas and objects over long distances connecting places and spaces across the globe and contributing to the creation of distinct local cultures and societies. Ideas about social reform and customs such as the Christmas tree were transferred across political and geographic borders. In the process, they were modified to fit into the receiving society. They lost some of their meaning and received new meaning. The Pagan symbol of the Christmas tree was Christianized through its transfer from cities such as Dresden to cities such as Boston.

Concepts such as Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance appealed to many Western observers who considered peaceful and rational conflict solution in the aftermath of World War I as essential to the survival of humankind. The appeal of nonviolent resistance did not result in a full grasp of such phenomena. Western observers misunderstood and mistranslated Satyagraha with passive resistance. Such modifications reveal the nature of intercultural transfer. In this process, the power of adopting a new idea rests with the receiving society. The giving society has little influence over the transfer process and loses control over the transfer fairly early. This contributed to the conundrum of the modern world which, in spite of the multitude of such transfers, became not only more similar but also more dissimilar.

“Approaches to the Study of Intercultural Transfer” presents a collection of compelling case studies in the area of social reform, museums, philanthropy, football, nonviolent resistance and holiday rituals such as Christmas that demonstrate key mechanisms of intercultural transfers. Each chapter provides the application of the intercultural transfer studies paradigm to a specific and distinct historical phenomenon. These chapters not only illustrate the presence or even the depth and frequency of intercultural transfer, but they also reveal specific aspects of the intercultural transfer of phenomena, the role of agents of intercultural transfer and the transformations of ideas transferred between cultures thereby, contributing to our understanding of the mechanisms of intercultural transfers.

The transfers explored in this volume provide for a narrative of an interconnected world in which societies and cultures exchanged ideas and objects over long distances connecting places and spaces across the globe and contributing to the creation of distinct local cultures and societies. Ideas about social reform and customs such as the Christmas tree were transferred across political and geographic borders. In the process, they were modified to fit into the receiving society. They lost some of their meaning and received new meaning. The Pagan symbol of the Christmas tree was Christianized through its transfer from cities such as Dresden to cities such as Boston.

Concepts such as Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance appealed to many Western observers who considered peaceful and rational conflict solution in the aftermath of World War I as essential to the survival of humankind. The appeal of nonviolent resistance did not result in a full grasp of such phenomena. Western observers misunderstood and mistranslated Satyagraha with passive resistance. Such modifications reveal the nature of intercultural transfer. In this process, the power of adopting a new idea rests with the receiving society. The giving society has little influence over the transfer process and loses control over the transfer fairly early. This contributed to the conundrum of the modern world which, in spite of the multitude of such transfers, became not only more similar but also more dissimilar.

Ali Kadri examines how over the last three decades the Arab world has undergone a process of developmental descent, or de-development. He defines de-development as the purposeful deconstruction of developing entities. The Arab world has lost its wars and its society restructured to absorb the terms of defeat masquerading as development policies under neoliberalism. Foremost in this process of de-development are the policies of de-industrialisation that have laid to waste the production of knowledge, created a fully compradorial ruling class that relies on commerce and international finance for its reproduction, as opposed to nationally based production, and halted the primary engine of job creation. The Arab mode of accumulation has come to be based on commerce in a manner similar to that of the pre-capitalist age along with its cultural decay. Kadri attributes the Arab world’s developmental failure not only to imperialist hegemony over oil, but also to the rising role of financialisation, which goes hand in hand with the wars of encroachment that were already stripping the Arab world of its resources. War for war’s sake has become a tributary to the world economy, argues Kadri, and like oil, there is neither a shortage of war nor a shortage of the conditions to make new war in the Arab world.

Ali Kadri examines how over the last three decades the Arab world has undergone a process of developmental descent, or de-development. He defines de-development as the purposeful deconstruction of developing entities. The Arab world has lost its wars and its society restructured to absorb the terms of defeat masquerading as development policies under neoliberalism. Foremost in this process of de-development are the policies of de-industrialisation that have laid to waste the production of knowledge, created a fully compradorial ruling class that relies on commerce and international finance for its reproduction, as opposed to nationally based production, and halted the primary engine of job creation. The Arab mode of accumulation has come to be based on commerce in a manner similar to that of the pre-capitalist age along with its cultural decay. Kadri attributes the Arab world’s developmental failure not only to imperialist hegemony over oil, but also to the rising role of financialisation, which goes hand in hand with the wars of encroachment that were already stripping the Arab world of its resources. War for war’s sake has become a tributary to the world economy, argues Kadri, and like oil, there is neither a shortage of war nor a shortage of the conditions to make new war in the Arab world.

The practice of architecture as a learned profession is a fairly recent invention in the history of architecture, one that was an uneasy fit with professional ideals from its inception in the nineteenth century, and the value of which is under assault today from globalizing economic forces. Unfortunately, the profession’s longstanding internal tensions have prevented it from articulating a durable ethical rationale for its protections that would help it stand up to those assaults. This book proposes crafting just such a durable ethical rationale through the public good the architecture profession serves. 

But the concept of the public is itself a recent historic phenomenon, one also experiencing both tremendous pressures and instability from many of the same sources destabilizing the architecture profession—globalization, neo-liberal economics, the rise of individualism, and the destruction of privacy. Therefore, to bring architecture and the public good together in any sustained way, both architecture’s instabilities and the public’s must be better understood. The book accomplishes this task by addressing the profession’s long-standing internal struggles that prevent it from articulating a strong ethical defense, the recent economic forces which are dispersing the profession’s center much as they have the world’s middle classes, the Enlightenment-derived concept of the bourgeois public and its more recent decline and reinvention, the importance of dissecting the shifting boundaries between the public and private realms, and finally a new approach to reassert the many ways in which architecture can not only serve the public good, but also become a protagonist in its renewal as a guiding ideal for our times.

The practice of architecture as a learned profession is a fairly recent invention in the history of architecture, one that was an uneasy fit with professional ideals from its inception in the nineteenth century, and the value of which is under assault today from globalizing economic forces. Unfortunately, the profession’s longstanding internal tensions have prevented it from articulating a durable ethical rationale for its protections that would help it stand up to those assaults. This book proposes crafting just such a durable ethical rationale through the public good the architecture profession serves. 

But the concept of the public is itself a recent historic phenomenon, one also experiencing both tremendous pressures and instability from many of the same sources destabilizing the architecture profession—globalization, neo-liberal economics, the rise of individualism, and the destruction of privacy. Therefore, to bring architecture and the public good together in any sustained way, both architecture’s instabilities and the public’s must be better understood. The book accomplishes this task by addressing the profession’s long-standing internal struggles that prevent it from articulating a strong ethical defense, the recent economic forces which are dispersing the profession’s center much as they have the world’s middle classes, the Enlightenment-derived concept of the bourgeois public and its more recent decline and reinvention, the importance of dissecting the shifting boundaries between the public and private realms, and finally a new approach to reassert the many ways in which architecture can not only serve the public good, but also become a protagonist in its renewal as a guiding ideal for our times.

Examines Gothic realism in documentary and horror cinema, highlighting how films evoke archival anxiety and unsettling realities, from gothumentaries exploring ineffable subjects to mockumentaries and found-footage films addressing modernity’s overwhelming and mediated nature.

This study concerns Gothic realism in the dark, sensorial epistemologies emerging from intersections of documentary and horror cinema. From the ineffable subjects of horror documentaries and pseudo-documentaries, to the obsessive chroniclers of mockumentary, fake found-footage, and screenlife horror cinema, the films examined here express a generalized millennial and 21st-century archival anxiety around an unsettled and unsettling hypermediated reality. Part I focuses on gothumentaries, nonfiction works evoking the Gothic unreadable subjects and undetected realities. Case studies show key documentary films such as Capturing the Friedmans, Cropsey, and The Hellstrom Chronicle bring Gothic-horror tropes and conventions to bear upon documentary subject matter to produce skepticism of American environmental, social, and national stability from the 1970s onward. Part II explores mockumentary, fake found-footage, and screenlife horror cinema that turns to strategies of documentary and factual discourse to express an archival anxiety around human interaction with recording technologies. Case studies of pivotal films such as The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, Lake Mungo, Unfriended, Sickhouse, and We Are All Going to the World’s Fair turn to Gothic reflexivity as a way of expressing the subject’s relationship to, and experience of, a modernity that overwhelms in terms of its immensity, speed, and recordability.
These fiction and nonfiction moving-image manifestations of archival anxiety adopt the mood, themes, and rhetorical strategies of horror and documentary to form a critical discourse that troubles the real—focusing spectatorial attention on the limits of representation and teleological forms, shifting viewers to questions of embodiment and sensation. The primary focus is on Anglophone cinema from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, with reference to other works produced in Spain, Germany, and France.

In making love, one is elevated beyond the carnal desires it satisfies. For the religious, it is Divine; for those who are not religiously inclined, it is still a spiritual experience, one of seamless solidarity, a unity of two as one that defies mere orgasmic stimulation. You don’t have to make love to have sex. Even strangers can be sexually attracted and have an orgasmic escapade. But in the act of making love, there is symbolic meaning that is felt through-and-through the sex act. Two in love are joined, in life, and the sexual expression of this unison is deeply felt in the sex act itself. This is sexual intimacy, the making of love, the likes of which is rarely, if ever, seen outside a loving relationship. There is no escape from the philosophical dimensions of such a loving relationship. It is as abstract as it is concrete in the ideals that ground it. There is a mystery about it, a kind of transcendent experience that defies translation into words. Making and being in love are thus joined at the hip. Loving relationships make the bed in which true lovers sleep.
Unfortunately, many relationships flounder or never get off the ground. Just having sex may ease the tension, but it then becomes a means, not truly an end-in-itself. The moment the sex act ends, the couple may retreat and fall into discord. It is an oasis in a barren desert that provides temporary relief, a titillating, temporary escape from reality. This book can help you to overcome the obstacles, the unlovable habits that encumber your relationship, both inside and outside the bedroom. It can help to create the harmonic balance between your sex life and other aspects of your personal and interpersonal relationships, which are preludes to making and being in love.
To accomplish this, it applies a five-step method based on Logic-Based Therapy & Consultation (LBTC), a popular form of evidence-based, philosophical counseling modality. First, it introduces you to six types of unlovable ways of thinking and acting and helps you to identify the ones that may be sabotaging your own relationship. Second, it shows you how to counter these self-defeating habits with certain lovable goals (“virtues of love”). Third, it helps you to identify and embrace a personal “love philosophy” that empowers you to reach for your lovable goals. Fourth, it provides core philosophical ideas that are key to any successful quest for romantic love. Fifth, it helps you construct a behavioral plan that applies your philosophies to making constructive changes in your relationship. The latter may require making changes both inside and outside your relationship. Thus, this book also shows you how the problems you are having in one area of your life (at work, in your social life, etc.) can affect the quality of your relationship, inside and outside the bedroom, and it offers guidance, including self-improvement exercises, to overcome these impediments and attain enduring love and sexual intimacy.

In making love, one is elevated beyond the carnal desires it satisfies. For the religious, it is Divine; for those who are not religiously inclined, it is still a spiritual experience, one of seamless solidarity, a unity of two as one that defies mere orgasmic stimulation. You don’t have to make love to have sex. Even strangers can be sexually attracted and have an orgasmic escapade. But in the act of making love, there is symbolic meaning that is felt through-and-through the sex act. Two in love are joined, in life, and the sexual expression of this unison is deeply felt in the sex act itself. This is sexual intimacy, the making of love, the likes of which is rarely, if ever, seen outside a loving relationship. There is no escape from the philosophical dimensions of such a loving relationship. It is as abstract as it is concrete in the ideals that ground it. There is a mystery about it, a kind of transcendent experience that defies translation into words. Making and being in love are thus joined at the hip. Loving relationships make the bed in which true lovers sleep.
Unfortunately, many relationships flounder or never get off the ground. Just having sex may ease the tension, but it then becomes a means, not truly an end-in-itself. The moment the sex act ends, the couple may retreat and fall into discord. It is an oasis in a barren desert that provides temporary relief, a titillating, temporary escape from reality. This book can help you to overcome the obstacles, the unlovable habits that encumber your relationship, both inside and outside the bedroom. It can help to create the harmonic balance between your sex life and other aspects of your personal and interpersonal relationships, which are preludes to making and being in love.
To accomplish this, it applies a five-step method based on Logic-Based Therapy & Consultation (LBTC), a popular form of evidence-based, philosophical counseling modality. First, it introduces you to six types of unlovable ways of thinking and acting and helps you to identify the ones that may be sabotaging your own relationship. Second, it shows you how to counter these self-defeating habits with certain lovable goals (“virtues of love”). Third, it helps you to identify and embrace a personal “love philosophy” that empowers you to reach for your lovable goals. Fourth, it provides core philosophical ideas that are key to any successful quest for romantic love. Fifth, it helps you construct a behavioral plan that applies your philosophies to making constructive changes in your relationship. The latter may require making changes both inside and outside your relationship. Thus, this book also shows you how the problems you are having in one area of your life (at work, in your social life, etc.) can affect the quality of your relationship, inside and outside the bedroom, and it offers guidance, including self-improvement exercises, to overcome these impediments and attain enduring love and sexual intimacy.

When Robert Rauschenberg reminisced about Josef Albers teaching students that their art had to do with “the entire visual world,” he was suggesting an inclusive realm of visual expression from which Albers intended his students to draw. Beyond finding inspiration only in fine art objects, Albers pushed them to look outside the confines of their studios and classrooms and onto the streets where they would be confronted with the visuality of mass culture; Albers therefore developed assignments using examples of typographic design and printed imagery drawn from popular publications of the day. In looking closely at these printed images, though, artists like Rauschenberg learned not only that visual inspiration could be found in quotidian objects, but that those objects were also the products of aesthetic decision making, that they were designed. Although the visual workings of mass imagery have sometimes been met with discomfort by art historians and critics, culture’s simultaneous engagement with design and art objects has a long and significant history. My book would be among the first to examine a moment of that history through an exploration of the critical intersection between art and graphic design in New York in the years between 1959 and 1972.

It may seem most expedient to discuss the connection between art and design through formal congruences, but this strategy can limit the deeper investigation of the mutual influence shared by these two areas of production. Indeed, the presumption that there exists simply – and only – a visual connection between design and art has driven most of the art history that has taken up the subject. This methodology, however, assumes that the influence of popular imagery on fine art works only in one direction, and that movements such as Pop art borrow motifs from mass culture and then “elevate” them into high art. This ignores any influence that art might have on design and designers, an influence that has considerable impact on our visual world. In addition, it serves to place mass imagery consistently in the lesser, negative position because it always presupposes design’s complicity in the culture industry. Yet I show that not all design is made for commercial purposes. Design with civic intentions – that developed for signage, street furniture, and subway maps – has had no place in such a formulation, and therefore has never been seriously included in art historical discussions, even those that take design into account.

Given the limitations of a formalist approach, I go beyond the visual similarities of art and design to uncover the logic systems shared between artists and designers as well as their processes. I assume a family resemblance between design

and art and therefore use such resemblances to expose the syntax they hold in common. I employ, therefore, a more inclusive look at the “visual world” of 1960s New York and examine design and art side-by-side to explore how their relationship manifested itself in deeper ways than have been previously realized. The isolated, frontal, mechanically-reproduced image, for example, is shared by both Doyle Dane Bernbach’s late-1950s advertising campaign for Volkswagen as well as Andy Warhol’s screen print imagery. The mid-century anti-billboard movement provides an opportunity to investigate Robert Rauschenberg’s awareness of the visual culture that existed outside his downtown New York studio by way of his use of street signs in his urban combines, but also opens a path to exploring designers such as Peter Chermayeff and Milton Glaser’s own discomfort with outdoor advertising. The logic behind the placement of signage – in which designers follow unwitting pedestrians to see where signs fail them – is echoed in Vito Acconci’s performance Following Piece, in which the artist followed his targets until they entered a private place. The design firm Unimark International carried out such following in the New York City subway system at the very same moment that Acconci’s performance occurred. In each of these examples, I reveal the correspondence between artists and designers to be their practices and their decision making; the objects that result permit us to examine these relationships in fresh ways.

When Robert Rauschenberg reminisced about Josef Albers teaching students that their art had to do with “the entire visual world,” he was suggesting an inclusive realm of visual expression from which Albers intended his students to draw. Beyond finding inspiration only in fine art objects, Albers pushed them to look outside the confines of their studios and classrooms and onto the streets where they would be confronted with the visuality of mass culture; Albers therefore developed assignments using examples of typographic design and printed imagery drawn from popular publications of the day. In looking closely at these printed images, though, artists like Rauschenberg learned not only that visual inspiration could be found in quotidian objects, but that those objects were also the products of aesthetic decision making, that they were designed. Although the visual workings of mass imagery have sometimes been met with discomfort by art historians and critics, culture’s simultaneous engagement with design and art objects has a long and significant history. My book would be among the first to examine a moment of that history through an exploration of the critical intersection between art and graphic design in New York in the years between 1959 and 1972.

It may seem most expedient to discuss the connection between art and design through formal congruences, but this strategy can limit the deeper investigation of the mutual influence shared by these two areas of production. Indeed, the presumption that there exists simply – and only – a visual connection between design and art has driven most of the art history that has taken up the subject. This methodology, however, assumes that the influence of popular imagery on fine art works only in one direction, and that movements such as Pop art borrow motifs from mass culture and then “elevate” them into high art. This ignores any influence that art might have on design and designers, an influence that has considerable impact on our visual world. In addition, it serves to place mass imagery consistently in the lesser, negative position because it always presupposes design’s complicity in the culture industry. Yet I show that not all design is made for commercial purposes. Design with civic intentions – that developed for signage, street furniture, and subway maps – has had no place in such a formulation, and therefore has never been seriously included in art historical discussions, even those that take design into account.

Given the limitations of a formalist approach, I go beyond the visual similarities of art and design to uncover the logic systems shared between artists and designers as well as their processes. I assume a family resemblance between design

and art and therefore use such resemblances to expose the syntax they hold in common. I employ, therefore, a more inclusive look at the “visual world” of 1960s New York and examine design and art side-by-side to explore how their relationship manifested itself in deeper ways than have been previously realized. The isolated, frontal, mechanically-reproduced image, for example, is shared by both Doyle Dane Bernbach’s late-1950s advertising campaign for Volkswagen as well as Andy Warhol’s screen print imagery. The mid-century anti-billboard movement provides an opportunity to investigate Robert Rauschenberg’s awareness of the visual culture that existed outside his downtown New York studio by way of his use of street signs in his urban combines, but also opens a path to exploring designers such as Peter Chermayeff and Milton Glaser’s own discomfort with outdoor advertising. The logic behind the placement of signage – in which designers follow unwitting pedestrians to see where signs fail them – is echoed in Vito Acconci’s performance Following Piece, in which the artist followed his targets until they entered a private place. The design firm Unimark International carried out such following in the New York City subway system at the very same moment that Acconci’s performance occurred. In each of these examples, I reveal the correspondence between artists and designers to be their practices and their decision making; the objects that result permit us to examine these relationships in fresh ways.

The collection Art’s Visionary Moment: Personal Encounters with Works That Last a Lifetime was inspired by T. S. Eliot’s observation in his Dante (1929): “The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. … There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, … which can never be forgotten, but … is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience.” In this collection, scholars, and artists from a variety of fields speak in personal terms, but with what one has called “intellectual passion,” of a work of art (poem, play, novel, film, visual art, among others) that, as Dante suggest, has had an immediate effect on them (the “Visionary Moment” from the title) yet survives “in a larger whole of experience” (that “Last a Lifetime” in the collection’s sub-title). Some of the titles of essays already submitted show the range of this inquiry: “Conversations with the Dead”; “Playing Richard III: The Experience of a Moment and a Lifetime”; “Picasso’s ‘Three Musicians’”; “Poetry Meets Power: Tamburlaine the Great”; “Pleasant Dreaming with ‘Thanatopsis’”; “From Madness to Miracle: An Encounter with Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale”; “Fight the Power” Spike Lee’s Visionary Moment”; and “Plastic Art Moment.”

Artists often talk of a sense of community, of being in a place that engages their creativity in a cultural history that is deeply tied to and inseparable from their local environment. The phrase ‘community art’ emphasizes a collaboration between the artist and community; it is practised where the artist and the neighbourhood intersect. Projects most often take place as a means of revitalizing a community or providing an opportunity for community members to engage in a creative process. Increasingly, this has become a national and international movement in which sustainability of the identity of the community, the individuals within it and the environment are at the core of the project. This project engages the conception of art evolved in the ethos of community as its basic framework but considers it from a situationally historic perspective against the backdrop of the diverse landscape of Oregon. As such it considers the role of nature, individual and community identity in the development of arts projects that ultimately become associated with a community’s cultural and social milieu. 

Oregon is known for its unique landscape that moves from the high deserts of eastern Oregon through the former volcanoes of the Cascade Range, the breadth of the Willamette River Valley, Coast Range and finally the Pacific coast from Astoria to Brookings. Oregon has a long history of environmental planning. In 1899, the Oregon legislature declared 30 miles of Oregon beach as a public highway from the Columbia River to the south line of Clatsop County. In 1913, they declared the entire coast a public highway. Throughout the 20th century, the Oregon legislature and communities throughout Oregon have placed an emphasis on land use from the role of the timber, fishing and mining industries to the planning necessary for cities and towns. This manuscript considers the combination of people and social cultural ethos that were influential in the development of specific literary, visual and performing arts groups across Oregon’s diverse landscape. Artists Activating Sustainability: The Oregon Story examines the way in which the arts within specific communities, against the background of landscape and history, reveal concepts of sustainability that help us broaden our knowledge of what is needed to create a sustainable world. As such, each chapter considers the themes of participation, agency and empowerment through the lens of land, history and individual initiative.

This volume brings together a variety of Patrick Olivelle’s papers on Indian ascetical institutions and ideologies that have been published over the past thirty or so years. Asceticism represents a major strand in the religious and cultural history of India, providing some of the most creative elements within Indian religions and philosophies. Most of the major religions, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and the religious philosophies both within these new religions and in the Brahmanical tradition, were created by world-renouncing ascetics. Ascetical institutions and ideologies developed in a creative tension with other religious institutions that stressed the centrality of family, procreation and society, and it is this tension that has articulated many of the central features of Indian religion and culture. The papers collected in this volume seek to locate Indian ascetical traditions within their historical, political and ideological contexts.

In the past four or so decades, a significant amount of research efforts has been made to examine the rapid and constant social changes taking place in China and the dynamics behind the process, resulting in a rich research literature on a wide range of issues and aspects of China’s recent social transformations. However, most of the literature has largely focused on either the political, ideological and policy issues at the macro level or the various forms of spontaneous resistance and protest at the micro level. What has not been adequately analysed is how the majority of ordinary Chinese people has reacted to and influenced the many changes in society over a long time period. This analytical partiality has given an impression that China consists of only two opposing types of people: the oppressing ruling class and the angry oppressed adversaries, restricting our thinking and understanding of Chinese society, its dynamics and its changing trends to the perspectives of elites and their adversaries.

Drawing upon a new perspective of competitive social repositioning, and based on the evidence recorded in numerous recently published personal memories and other published accounts, as well as the evidence collected through in-depth interviews, this book seeks to re-analyse the ever-changing, but still under-researched, societal dynamics driving social transformations in China from 1964, when Mao Zedong publicly put forward and propagated his ‘Five-Requirements’ for selecting heirs to the Chinese communist cause, to 2000 when Jiang Zemin formulated his ‘Three-Represents’ theory to modify the ideological political thinking and practices of China’s ruling elites. Of course, Chinese society has not been evolving exactly in the way that Mao and Jiang anticipated. Instead, China has been driven by a high proportion of its aspirational citizens who have kept repositioning themselves in China’s shifting distribution patterns of social resources and changing social structure. This book analyses what had been driving the changes in the attitudes and behaviours of many everyday Chinese over time in recent decades, what characteristics of their preferences and choices were at different stages, and how their choices had resulted in the zig-zag patterns of China’s recent social change.

In the past four or so decades, a significant amount of research efforts has been made to examine the rapid and constant social changes taking place in China and the dynamics behind the process, resulting in a rich research literature on a wide range of issues and aspects of China’s recent social transformations. However, most of the literature has largely focused on either the political, ideological and policy issues at the macro level or the various forms of spontaneous resistance and protest at the micro level. What has not been adequately analysed is how the majority of ordinary Chinese people has reacted to and influenced the many changes in society over a long time period. This analytical partiality has given an impression that China consists of only two opposing types of people: the oppressing ruling class and the angry oppressed adversaries, restricting our thinking and understanding of Chinese society, its dynamics and its changing trends to the perspectives of elites and their adversaries.

Drawing upon a new perspective of competitive social repositioning, and based on the evidence recorded in numerous recently published personal memories and other published accounts, as well as the evidence collected through in-depth interviews, this book seeks to re-analyse the ever-changing, but still under-researched, societal dynamics driving social transformations in China from 1964, when Mao Zedong publicly put forward and propagated his ‘Five-Requirements’ for selecting heirs to the Chinese communist cause, to 2000 when Jiang Zemin formulated his ‘Three-Represents’ theory to modify the ideological political thinking and practices of China’s ruling elites. Of course, Chinese society has not been evolving exactly in the way that Mao and Jiang anticipated. Instead, China has been driven by a high proportion of its aspirational citizens who have kept repositioning themselves in China’s shifting distribution patterns of social resources and changing social structure. This book analyses what had been driving the changes in the attitudes and behaviours of many everyday Chinese over time in recent decades, what characteristics of their preferences and choices were at different stages, and how their choices had resulted in the zig-zag patterns of China’s recent social change.

After a long and hard day at work, which had taken him to Larnaca, Antonios Triantafyllides, a leading lawyer recently appointed to the Cypriot government’s Advisory Council, arrived at his Nicosia home in the cool evening of 12 January 1934, only to be shot by an unknown assailant. He died the next morning. Twelve months later, Stavros Christodoulou was charged, but acquitted of the murder. Considered political, the murder has been a taboo subject for Cypriot society and historians alike, and a cold case that nobody has seemingly taken any interest in solving let alone in exploring (at least publicly), that is, until now.

This book offers a theory on who was behind the assassination of Antonios Triantafyllides, the FIRST attempt to break open and explain an 87-year-old cold case.In doing so, it explores both the relationship between the British colonial authorities and the Cypriot political elites, and the various divisions within the latter. Triantafyllides supported enosis, the union of Cyprus with Greece, but after over a decade of involvement in nationalist politics without results, he decided that the only way to achieve it was to cooperate with the British. This change occurred by the 1931 crisis, which culminated in the burning of the government house in Nicosia in October and led to a British crackdown, including the suspension of the constitution, abolition of the Legislative Council and the deporting of leading nationalists. In October 1933, the British decided to establish an Advisory Council of leading Cypriots. Triantafyllides, who had, albeit briefly, served in the elected Legislative Council and the nominated Executive Council, accepted the invitation. He attended one meeting before being shot. The British initially suspected the extreme nationalists and banished five of them, then blamed a communist conspiracy, but the man charged was acquitted. 

This book creates and analyses a ‘community of records’ to show that by reading both with and especially against the grain, it is probable that those responsible were radical right-wing nationalist extremists. Thus, for historical criminologists and crime investigators, the exploration of the sources examined could serve as a model of forensic analysis of cold cases. For those interested in the British Empire, the book shows how the British authorities had no real control over extremist nationalist politics and political violence in the 1930s no more than they did in the 1950s, and they were unable to protect those individuals willing to work with them to better the country. In fact, as numerous historians have attested, during the campaign by EOKA between April 1955 and March 1959, more Greek Cypriot civilians were murdered than any other target group.  For those with an interest in Cypriot history, this book will make startling and uncomfortable revelations about the so-called National Liberation Movement in Cyprus and suggest that the violence that gripped the island from the 1950s and led to partition could have been avoided had not for the assassination of arguably the most capable and astute politician produced, at least until that time, in the island.

‘Athletic CEOs: Leadership in Turbulent Times’ is about leaders who do not lead by the book: people who score low on emotional intelligence, do not praise their subordinates, and rarely provide constructive feedback or celebrate small wins. Yet it is also a book about high-performing transformational leaders – Alexander Dyukov (Gazprom Neft), German Gref (Sberbank), Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab) and Vitaly Saveliev (Aeroflot). Each of them has created a formidable enterprise that is delivering sustainable growth in profits and shareholder value; setting new standards for the industry; leaving a positive impact on its employees and on the country and the regions it operates in; and – most remarkably – continuing to reinvent itself.

Stanislav Shekshnia, Alexey Ulanovsky and Veronika Zagieva have studied the work of these leaders for a decade and developed a model of leadership that delivers superior results in a specific context, that is, one of fast obsolescence, high turbulence, intense government interference, mediocre levels of human capital development and traditionally high levels of managerial control. The model is called Athletic Leadership because of the strong parallels between the protagonists’ attitudes and behaviors and those of top sportspeople. Athletic Leaders share a formative experience of practising competitive sports in their youth, facing early adversity as leaders of important projects, and changing companies and industries along the way. They possess two traits that define their leadership personality: mental toughness and adaptability. Athletic CEOs also use specific iterative behavioral and mental strategies at work – ‘meta-practices’ of Athletic Leadership. They deliver superior operational and financial results (leadership outputs) and transform their followers, companies, industries and communities (leadership outcomes).

Written for people who are interested in the subject of leadership in business, ‘Athletic CEOs: Leadership in Turbulent Times’ offers interesting ideas and practical insights for people from other walks of life such as politics, government and education.

Athletic CEOs: Leadership in Turbulent Times is about leaders who do not lead by the book: people who score low on emotional intelligence, do not praise their subordinates and rarely provide constructive feedback or celebrate small wins. Yet it is also a book about high-performing transformational leaders – Alexander Dyukov (Gazprom Neft), German Gref (Sberbank), Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab), and Vitaly Saveliev (Aeroflot). Each of them has created a formidable enterprise that is delivering sustainable growth in profits and shareholder value, setting new standards for the industry to leave a positive impact on its employees and on the country and the regions it operates in, and – most remarkably – continuing to reinvent themselves.

Stanislav Shekshnia, Alexey Ulanovsky, and Veronika Zagieva have studied the work of these leaders for a decade and developed a model of leadership that delivers superior results in a specific context, that is, one of fast obsolescence, high turbulence, intense government interference, mediocre levels of human capital development, and traditionally high levels of managerial control. The model is called athletic leadership because of the strong parallels between the protagonists’ attitudes and behaviors and those of top sports people. Athletic leaders share a formative experience of practising competitive sports in their youth, facing early adversity as leaders of important projects and changing companies and industries along the way. They possess two traits that define their leadership personality: mental toughness and adaptability. Athletic CEOs also use specific iterative behavioral and mental strategies at work – “meta-practices” of athletic leadership. They deliver superior operational and financial results (leadership outputs) and transform their followers, companies, industries, and communities (leadership outcomes).

Written for people who are interested in the subject of leadership in business, Athletic CEOs: Leadership in Turbulent Times offers interesting ideas and practical insights for people from other walks of life such as politics, government, and education.

Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the antipode to Europe, the continent has provided a radically different and uniquely fertile ground for envisioning places, spaces and societies. ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ evaluates this complex intellectual history by mapping out how Western visions of Australia evolved from antiquity to the modern period, with particular focus on the long nineteenth century. The book is underpinned by the provocative argument that due to its unique ‘antipodality’ (its antipodal relationship with Europe), Australia is imagined as a particular form of utopia – but since one person’s utopia is, more often than not, another’s dystopia, Australia’s utopian quality is both complex and highly ambiguous. Drawing on the rich field of utopian studies, ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ provides an original and insightful study of Australia’s place in the Western imagination and makes meaningful conceptual and analytical contributions to the fields of utopian theory, Australian studies and intellectual history.

Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this is a multi-faceted, collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic. An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct, even uniquely opposed reading contexts, this study has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War.

Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic is an investigative exposé of Australian literature’s revealing career in East Germany. Working from the extraordinary records of the East German publishing and censorship regime, the authors materially track the production and reception of one country’s corpus as envisioned by another. The 90 Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, revealing a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain. Cast as a geo-political conundrum – beautiful and exotic, yet politically retrograde – Australia was presented to East German readers as an impossible, failed utopia, its literature framed through a critique of Antipodean capitalism that yet reveals multiple ironies for that heavily censored, walled-in community.

This book brings together leading German and Australian scholars in the fields of book history, German and Australian cultural history, Australian and postcolonial literatures, and postcolonial and cross-cultural theory, with emerging writers currently navigating between the two cultures.

Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this is a multi-faceted, collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic. An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct, even uniquely opposed reading contexts, this study has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War.

Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic is an investigative exposé of Australian literature’s revealing career in East Germany. Working from the extraordinary records of the East German publishing and censorship regime, the authors materially track the production and reception of one country’s corpus as envisioned by another. The 90 Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, revealing a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain. Cast as a geo-political conundrum – beautiful and exotic, yet politically retrograde – Australia was presented to East German readers as an impossible, failed utopia, its literature framed through a critique of Antipodean capitalism that yet reveals multiple ironies for that heavily censored, walled-in community.

This book brings together leading German and Australian scholars in the fields of book history, German and Australian cultural history, Australian and postcolonial literatures, and postcolonial and cross-cultural theory, with emerging writers currently navigating between the two cultures.

‘Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging’ explores mediated debates about belonging in contemporary Australia by combining research that proposes conceptual and historical frameworks for understanding the concept in the Australian context. A range of themes and case studies make the book a significant conceptual resource as well as a much-needed update on work in this area. ‘Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging’ also provides an intervention that engages with key contemporary issues, questions and problems around the politics of belonging that are relevant not only to academic debate, but also to contemporary policy development and media and popular discussion.

The chapters address a variety of key issues and questions regarding the ethics of media practice and actual media practices – consideration of ethical obligations, media treatment of different populations and the degree to which media serve not only as sites through which a range of voices contribute to definitions of Australian belonging but also, significantly, as a means through which such voices can be heard. An engagement with the problem of ethical practice also asks how a greater understanding of the impact of media representations can contribute to new ethical frameworks and new forms of media practice in areas of key sensitivity such as the reporting of Islam. [NP] In addressing such issues ‘Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging’ provides an important resource for understanding, and makes a vital contribution to, debates surrounding belonging in Australia.

This book looks at Australian newspapers over the half century following the introduction of television in 1956. Through a quantitative study, it illuminates how the nature of news has changed and how central journalistic practices have developed. It examines newspapers’ changing size and structure, their story priorities, their use of visual aids and interpretive frames, their changing range and treatment of sources, and how these changes affected their political and international coverage.
The content analysis shows a dominant theme of growth and improvement. Newspapers offered their readers much more at the end of the half century than at the beginning. The much larger volume of news was presented in more visually attractive and reader-friendly ways than before. News agendas expanded in response both to changing reader interests and a changing political environment. Newspapers had a more active orientation towards using a wider range of sources. All papers shared in the major trends but to varying degrees so that by the end of the period there were sharper differences between the papers than at the beginning.
Mapping the multi-dimensional nature of change in this pivotal period lays a groundwork for analysing the changing nature of journalism during the existential crisis that news organisations are now facing during the digital age.

This study discusses modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on their fathers. Termed patriography (by Couser) or The Son’s Book of the Father (by Freadman), this rich field of relational autobiography offers insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and heritage and the ethics of representation. The current proliferation of ‘father memoirs’ in the marketplace demonstrates that such writing is fulfilling and being fuelled by the need to better understand the traditionally lesser-known parent.

Beginning with an analysis of the paradigmatic case of the sub-genre, Edmund Gosse’s Victorian masterpiece ‘Father and Son’, the study moves quickly on to embrace its Australian literary frame, demonstrating Gosse’s influence on a range of classic Australian autobiographies, including Hal Porter’s ‘The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony’. Mansfield then offers five ‘case studies’ on the seminal works of the current era: Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’; Richard Freadman’s ‘Shadow of Doubt’; Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’; John Hughes’s ‘The Idea of Home’; and Robert Gray’s ‘The Land I Came Through Last’.

How do these authors ‘perform’ their masculinity in the act of writing the father? What are some of the ethical complexities that must be negotiated when representing the reticent-laconic in autobiography? And, ultimately, how does one decide what an ethical representation of the father is? These are some of the questions Mansfield addresses in ‘Australian Patriography’, the first study of its kind in Australian literature.

This study discusses modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on their fathers. Termed patriography (by Couser) or The Son’s Book of the Father (by Freadman), this rich field of relational autobiography offers insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and heritage and the ethics of representation. The current proliferation of ‘father memoirs’ in the marketplace demonstrates that such writing is fulfilling and being fuelled by the need to better understand the traditionally lesser-known parent.

Beginning with an analysis of the paradigmatic case of the sub-genre, Edmund Gosse’s Victorian masterpiece ‘Father and Son’, the study moves quickly on to embrace its Australian literary frame, demonstrating Gosse’s influence on a range of classic Australian autobiographies, including Hal Porter’s ‘The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony’. Mansfield then offers five ‘case studies’ on the seminal works of the current era: Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’; Richard Freadman’s ‘Shadow of Doubt’; Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’; John Hughes’s ‘The Idea of Home’; and Robert Gray’s ‘The Land I Came Through Last’.

How do these authors ‘perform’ their masculinity in the act of writing the father? What are some of the ethical complexities that must be negotiated when representing the reticent-laconic in autobiography? And, ultimately, how does one decide what an ethical representation of the father is? These are some of the questions Mansfield addresses in ‘Australian Patriography’, the first study of its kind in Australian literature.

‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ details the rejection of two Patrick White plays by the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia in the early 1960s. In 1961 the board of governors rejected a proposal to include the world premiere of White’s first major play ‘The Ham Funeral’ for the 1962 festival. In 1963 it rejected a proposal to premiere a subsequent play ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ for the 1964 festival. These two rejections were taken up in the press where the former was referred to as the ‘affaire “Ham Funeral”’ and the latter was greeted as ‘here we go again’. ‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ documents the scandal that followed the board’s rejections of White’s plays, especially as it acted against the advice of its own drama committee and artistic director on both occasions.

Denise Varney and Sandra D’Urso analyze the two events by drawing on the performative behaviour of the board of governors to focus on the question of governance. They shed new light on the cultural politics that surrounded the rejections, arguing that it represents an instance of executive governance of cultural production, in this case theatre and performance. The governing body was a self-appointed private board comprising wealthy men, who were representative of an Adelaide establishment made up of business, farming, newspaper and military interests.

The central argument of ‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ is that aesthetic modernism in theatre and drama struggled to achieve visibility and acceptability, and was perceived as a threat to the norms and values of early to mid-twentieth-century Australia. The authors argue that when modern drama entered the stage, its preference for aesthetic experimentation over commercial considerations challenged regimes of value based on the popular appeal of musicals, touring productions and overseas imports. The resistance to that prevailing theatre culture and the provocation of Patrick White’s plays provide a prime example of Australia in transition between its colonial heritage and modern future. The 1960s set the scene for the confrontation between modernist experimentation and arts governance, and between aesthetic and commercial values.

Australian Women’s Historical Photography: Other Times, Other Views examines the photographs produced by six talented women photographers against the historical backdrop of settler violence towards Indigenous Australians, the First Women’s Movement, the Great War of 1914–1918, Australia’s imperial occupation of New Guinea, the final years of Chinese Nationalist Party rule in China and debates about photography’s status as an art form. Women’s works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been down-played or even ignored in existing accounts of Australia’s cultural history, and this study is aimed at rectifying this situation. At the same time, the book demonstrates why amateur works are just as important as commercial works to our understanding of the past.
● Methodologically, the book draws on scholarship from history, art history, anthropology, sociology, gender studies and cultural studies to create an interdisciplinary critical framework that will be of interest to a broad range of academic and archival researchers. It is also a framework that is critically sensible of its own groundings in the postcolonial and feminist present thereby reflecting what is meaningful at any given historical moment.
● Finally, this book responds to the pronounced lack of visibility of Australian realist, documentary and commercial women’s works. The few histories of Australian women’s photography that exist pay more attention to modernist and contemporary works, and when they do mention earlier women photographer’s works, they seldom go into much detail. They also ignore the works of the earliest Indigenous women photographers, women who traveled and made photographs abroad. By presenting a carefully contextualized and detailed study of works by six Australian women photographers who worked in the late colonial era and whose works in all sorts of small and surprising ways chronicled the impacts of some of the periods more disturbing as well as enlightened events, we will not only add to knowledge of Australian women’s photography, we will also broaden and enrich the frames of women’s photography and Australian history more generally.

Between its first date of publication in 1684 and 1784 classic ‘Oesterreich über Alles Wann es Nur Will’ went through more than twenty known editions which makes it, arguably, Europe’s most successful ‘economics textbook’ prior to Adam Smith’s ‘Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ (1776). Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk laid in this book the foundations of what has become known as the ‘mercantilist’ political economy – a strategy for achieving national wealth and political strength simultaneously by building up a competitive domestic manufacturing industry with the help of the state. Hörnigk advocated standard recipes known from modern development economics, such as import substitution, protective tariffs on select goods as well as bounties and other financial as also logistic support by a proactive interventionist state in order to safeguard and nurture domestic industries that were in a state of infancy but which would be promising candidates for future growth and economies of scale. As new work by Erik Reinert and Lars Magnusson has shown, contrary to a sort of mainstream view in modern economics and economic history, it was such policies that tended to make European countries rich in the pre-industrial age, also laying the basic foundations for subsequent industrialization – even the ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe and Asia post 1800. Most European states were interventionist during the nineteenth century. They obviously drew upon a menu of recipes and political economy schedules that had circulated widely in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and which would subsequently also influence the major works by Friedrich List, Daniel Raymond and other nineteenth-century development theorists.

Based on Hörnigk’s popularity and the publication pattern for the book, the ‘Hörnigk’ strategy stood at the core of many a treatise and book written on economic matters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe; in fact Hörnigk may be called the forefather of modern development economics. He certainly was a towering figure in the ‘Germanic’ economic discourses of the early modern period. ‘Austria Supreme, if It So Wishes (1684)’ will be the first-ever English translation of a work the importance of which for European economic development and the ‘European Miracle’ cannot be overestimated.

The book discusses so-called real socialism and offers an alternative conceptualization of it as authoritarian collectivism, making use of an analytical and developmental methodology, that is, presenting it in categorical terms as well dwelling on its genesis, development and demise. The political dimension stands out in the conceptual articulation, with ‘democratic centralism’ and the prominence of the Communist Party, working from the top down. The book concentrates on the principles of ‘real socialism’, particularly in the Soviet Union but also globally, analysing also its present embrace of capitalism, particularly in China, but also elsewhere, taking account of how those political principles remain however in place today. A new civilization was intended, which was supposed to be the first step in the journey towards communism, leading however to an oppressive sort of state/society articulation and to new forms of hierarchy and appropriation of material benefits by the political upper layers.

The historical genesis of Soviet ‘socialism’, through Stalinism and to post-Stalinism, furnished the model to be analysed, but its global spread in China, Vietnam, Africa, Cuba and elsewhere enriched the original experience, but at its core the political system and the state structure that allowed for the prominence of a powerful and exclusivist political bureaucracy was always reinstated. The failure of the system – economically and politically – to withstand the competition which the liberal and capitalist world sustained led to its disappearance in the Soviet Union and other countries or to a transformation that brought back capitalism, which is now combined with the former political structure. China is the foremost example of this new reality, which is however reproduced elsewhere.

The book closes with a discussion of the motivation of revolutionary actors, including communism, anti-colonialism and nationalism, the role of unintended consequences in history and what emancipation and socialism might mean today.

‘Bakhtin and his Others’ aims to develop an understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas through a contextual approach, particularly with a focus on Bakhtin studies from the 1990s onward. The volume offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin’s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality – including his concepts of chronotope and literary polyphony – by reconsidering his ideas in relation to the sources he employs, and taking into account later research on similar topics. The case studies show how Bakhtin's ideas, when seen in light of this approach, can be constructively employed in contemporary literary research.

‘Bakhtin and his Others’ aims to develop an understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas through a contextual approach, particularly with a focus on Bakhtin studies from the 1990s onward. The volume offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin’s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality – including his concepts of chronotope and literary polyphony – by reconsidering his ideas in relation to the sources he employs, and taking into account later research on similar topics. The case studies show how Bakhtin's ideas, when seen in light of this approach, can be constructively employed in contemporary literary research.

This book provides a critical examination of paid parental leave policies in Australia and compares them with those of similar member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). While all OECD member countries, except the United States, guarantee some form of paid parental leave to mothers, the duration, benefits, job protection, and eligibility vary greatly. The substantial disparity in parental leave policies between Australia and other OECD countries raises questions about the effect of Australian policies on gender inequality in the workforce, women's workforce participation, and child and parental health.

The book presents two key recommendations for Australia's paid parental leave policies. The first recommendation is to extend the current paid parental leave to a total of 52 weeks for optimal child and maternal health, in line with the World Health Organization's recommendation. The second recommendation is to introduce an individual 15-week 'maternity leave' provision exclusive to mothers, bringing the overall duration of leave available to mothers to 52 weeks, which is approximately 70% of the provisions offered by the featured OECD countries. These reforms may be introduced in stages.

The book discusses the parental leave schemes of Germany, Canada and Sweden as points of reference for Australia because of their similar funding of paid parental leave through general taxation and their clear and succinct legislation regarding paid parental leave rights. The recommendations, if enacted, will foster Australian mothers' rights through a reconstructive feminist lens by celebrating women's differences with men and removing any disadvantage women may have in meeting masculinized social norms.

While the Australian government's 2021 announcement of an additional $1.7 billion investment in childcare will help mothers to return to work, it does little with regard to the government's parental leave scheme that places the onus for the care of the newborn or newly adopted child entirely on the mother, while failing to also provide paid parental leave for fathers. Moreover, while increased funding for childcare may help mothers return to work after the 18-week paid parental leave is over, such policy does not address the importance of raising the child at home with a parent for at least the first year of the child's life. The support of parents is instrumental in countries with an aging population and Australia is one such country. Overall, this book calls for urgent attention to be paid to parental leave policies in Australia to address issues of gender inequality, workforce participation, and child and parental health.

Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change – but it is also a country that is capable of coping. Far from being a victim, Bangladesh has lessons for activists, scientists, government and donor officials and concerned citizens who want to know what climate change looks like and how to respond to it.

This densely populated country feeds itself because it is in a rich delta. But that comes at the price of a volatile environment – three huge rivers bring floodwaters from the Himalayas and massive cyclones sweep up the Bay of Bengal. Once accurately described as a ‘basket case’ of hunger and disaster, its scientists and engineers, working with local communities, have transformed the country. Strong cyclone shelters and early warning systems now protect at-risk coastal people. Improved rice varieties and irrigation feed the nation and rapidly cut child malnutrition. Women's education has curbed population growth. Along with these changes have come measures to cope with the volatile environment.

Climate change makes the problems worse, with higher temperatures and rising sea levels, heavier rain and bigger floods and stronger cyclones. Bangladeshis know what the damaged climate change will bring. The government, researchers and communities are already adapting, raising land levels to match the rise in sea level, strengthening dykes to protect against floods, producing more adaptable rice varieties and improving disaster preparation. Bangladesh is a model of climate change adaptation and a lesson for those who continue to ignore global warming.

Bangladeshis have taken a leading role in international campaigning and negotiating, helping to convince industrialized countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Because it cannot wait for help from rich countries, Bangladesh has shouldered most of its adaptation costs. Will industrialized countries make the task harder – or will they help Bangladesh by reducing emissions and paying for the damage already done?

Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change – but it is also a country that is capable of coping. Far from being a victim, Bangladesh has lessons for activists, scientists, government and donor officials and concerned citizens who want to know what climate change looks like and how to respond to it.

This densely populated country feeds itself because it is in a rich delta. But that comes at the price of a volatile environment – three huge rivers bring floodwaters from the Himalayas and massive cyclones sweep up the Bay of Bengal. Once accurately described as a ‘basket case’ of hunger and disaster, its scientists and engineers, working with local communities, have transformed the country. Strong cyclone shelters and early warning systems now protect at-risk coastal people. Improved rice varieties and irrigation feed the nation and rapidly cut child malnutrition. Women's education has curbed population growth. Along with these changes have come measures to cope with the volatile environment.

Climate change makes the problems worse, with higher temperatures and rising sea levels, heavier rain and bigger floods and stronger cyclones. Bangladeshis know what the damaged climate change will bring. The government, researchers and communities are already adapting, raising land levels to match the rise in sea level, strengthening dykes to protect against floods, producing more adaptable rice varieties and improving disaster preparation. Bangladesh is a model of climate change adaptation and a lesson for those who continue to ignore global warming.

Bangladeshis have taken a leading role in international campaigning and negotiating, helping to convince industrialized countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Because it cannot wait for help from rich countries, Bangladesh has shouldered most of its adaptation costs. Will industrialized countries make the task harder – or will they help Bangladesh by reducing emissions and paying for the damage already done?

Banned Books and Counterfeit Notes examines how convicts sent to France’s overseas penal colony in French Guiana used the colonial postal system together with other, unofficial means of communication, to document and challenge lived experiences of transportation and forced labour. Identifying a series of ‘counterfeit notes’, the forensic aim of the book is to refocus attention on different forms of writing, and reading (including the ‘banned books’ indicated in the title), which occur inside the penal colony (commonly referred to as the bagne) itself. In doing so, the book deconstructs many of the stories, anecdotes, myths and legends which have come to define and legitimise the bagne in French Guiana. The book’s theoretical framework is indebted to the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida and his extended commentary on writing, reading, paper, postal systems, archives, the death penalty, friendship and hospitality. The anticolonial critique found in the work of Ariella Azoulay (in relation to images and archives) and Ann Laura Stoler (in relation to colonial ruins) are also brought to bear on the visual material and material heritage of the penal colony. Patrick Chamoiseau’s writing on the penal colony as ‘trace-mémoire’ and Françoise Vergès’s concept of the postcolonial museum will offer further engagements with the present-day interpretation of what remains of the bagne today. Connecting histories of reading and writing within the penal colony to contemporary heritage practices and the repurposing of former sites, the book offers wider reflections on decarceration, abolition, education and community.
The book is the result of several years of research funded by both the British Academy and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. This funding enabled multiple visits to French Guiana and New Caledonia to explore present-day interpretation of penal heritage. Ethnographies of visits and tours to museums and other sites linked to the bagne are interwoven into the book’s narrative. Funding also allowed for archival work to be undertaken at the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer in Aix-en-Provence and the Archives Territoriales in Cayenne as well as further research at the Musée de la Poste in Paris.
The material presented offers new readings of well-known figures such as the forger-artist Francis Lagrange, the anarchist Paul Roussenq and the convict-executioner Isidore Hespel as well as unknown convicts involved in campaigns for reading material and libraries. The book is part of the growing field of scholarship on France’s overseas penal colonies which began in the late 1990s. However, it moves beyond existing historiographical approaches which provide chronological overviews of life in the penal colony. Instead, the book focuses on specific writing and reading practices and the preservation of these within official archives. Such readings develop a closer analysis of forms of writing which include rhetorical strategies alongside the material conditions in which such writing occurs (e.g., access to paper and ink). Alongside this close analysis which draws on literary and cultural theoretical approaches to reading archival material, another key contribution is to show the cumulative and debilitating effect of life in the penal colony via the letters of figures like Roussenq and Hespel. The huge corpus of complaint letters produced and sent to the penal administration (as well as organisations such as the League of Human Rights) demonstrate the mental and physical impact of a decades-long struggle against the penal administration. While there have been a few studies on the history of prison libraries in France (e.g., Collectif, Lectures de prison (Paris: Le Lampadaire, 2018)), these have not included the sustained discussion of penal colonies that this book will provide. Where much scholarship focuses predominantly on archival material, the book will also create links with the built heritage of the penal colony and its contemporary interpretation.

The book argues that these plays show us a society haunted by the unquiet burials of Anglo-Saxon saints and kings and the destruction of shrines and churches during the English Reformation, and peopled by crossover figures who inhabit both the spiritual and the secular realms. [Author Query: The sentence beginning ‘The book argues that unquiet burials, particularly . . . ’ seems incomplete. Please check and edit as needed.]It begins with an introduction which sets out the distinction between spiritual and temporal overlordship of lands, glances at the ways in which sacred and secular spheres of influence could be brought into conflict in plays from the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and explains that the book is interested not only in the extent to which those spheres of influence map onto actual territory but also in the ways in which land is perceived as retaining memories of uses to which it has been previously put. This was particularly the case when royal or saintly bodies had been buried in it, even if the actual burials had been disturbed or lost completely, but other kinds of spaces and places could also carry with them a sense of an ineradicable past (often a specifically pre-Reformation past). When plays claim to represent such richly suggestive sites as holy wells, abbeys built before the Norman Conquest, or places where martyrdoms or miracles have occurred, they simultaneously suggest the power and appeal of such memories and yet also acknowledge their loss and inaccessibility, not least because what the audience sees is not the place represented but bare boards of the stage standing in for it.
Four chapters then follow. The first is on the anonymous Thorney Abbey, which offers an origin story for the Anglo-Saxon foundation which preceded the Norman Westminster Abbey during the reign of an unnamed king of England who has a brother (and heir) called Edmund. The Anglo-Saxon St Edmund was well remembered in the early modern period and was particularly important to English Catholic exiles; the unnamed brother can be identified as Athelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great, who was king of England from 925 to 939 but never married (probably because he was illegitimate), making Thorney Abbey part of a group of early modern plays which found Athelstan a flexible, suggestive and culturally resonant figure who could be used to discuss a range of important issues, including succession, the status of the monarch, and the benefits and logic of celibacy. Thorney Abbey presents the foundation of the abbey as a neat and simple process, but the subsequent history of Westminster Abbey was not in fact quite so trouble-free and that leaches into the play, which also has strong similarities to Macbeth in ways which put pressure on Shakespeare’s play, particularly on its use of Edward the Confessor, helping us to see that Macbeth treads a nervous line between implying the superiority of a king who collapses the distinction between spiritual and temporal and refusing to actually show him. The second chapter is on another anonymous play, A Knack to Know a Knave, which features Edgar, king of Mercia and Northumbria (c. 944–975), and Saint Dunstan, two figures who carried considerable cultural heft. Dunstan was a complex and controversial figure whose association with miracles that savoured of trickery meant that to early Reformers, he was even more suspect than most saints. Edgar’s main achievement was the revival of Benedictine monasticism, which he funded by large grants of land and by enforcing the payment of the ecclesiastical tax known as Peter’s Pence, making him almost the perfect test case for considering the relationship between temporal and spiritual power. The third chapter focuses on William Rowley’s A Shoemaker a Gentleman, which tells the story of the shoemaker saint Crispin and his brother Crispian and the early English and Welsh martyrs St Hugh, St Winifred, St Alban and St Amphiabel in ways which evoke the long and difficult history of debates about the extent of British Catholics’ allegiance to the Pope. Last comes a chapter on Anthony Brewer’s The Lovesick King, which uses the memory of a local benefactor to comment on the relationship between civic and ecclesiastical constructions.
The final section of the book is a coda which argues that if some of these plays engage with Hamlet and Macbeth, then King Lear in turn engages with some of them. Although the supposedly historical figure of King Lear belonged to a time before the Romans, the play points at the Anglo-Saxon past in a number of respects: its use of the names Edmund, Oswald and Edgar (who apparently succeeds as King Edgar); its representation of an England being divided into different constituent realms; and its interest in female succession and in the question of whether illegitimacy was a bar to inheriting the throne. The blinding of Gloucester might recall the use of mutilation to disqualify possible successors, as when Edward the Confessor’s elder brother Alfred Aetheling was blinded by Earl Godwin, and Lear’s discovery that he cannot stop rain perhaps recalls Canute’s supposed failure to turn back the tide. Lost battles too were a feature of Anglo-Saxon England, both Essendon and Hastings being perceived as disastrous and era-ending. Above all, the play seems to show us a world which is both pre-Christian yet at the same time post-Catholic, being troubled by the memory of Rome in something of the same way as the great Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin; but although there may be ruins, there are no sacred spaces in King Lear. The play can thus be read as a warning of what happens if there are no abbeys; on its desolate heath, we find the ultimate expression of the nightmare landscape feared in all these plays.

What remains of the idea of liquid modernity? Is Bauman’s thought still relevant? This volume aims to answer these questions, without forgetting the vastness and complexity of his work, where the idea of liquidity remains fundamental, before and after the central turning point of the year 2000, when he published Liquid Modernity.
Bauman’s legacy is multiform and complex, subdivided into partial legacies, not all of which are homogeneous and acceptable without benefit of inventory. The first difficulty consists in its complete lack of systematicity: Bauman-thought is by no means a single whole, nor can it be used as a key instrument to be applied to every condition, given that it explicitly concerns a precise fraction of our present. This is not to be understood as an oversight, but a conscious, strongly intended choice to eschew any systematic, systematising formulation of society. He prefers to understand the sociologist’s task as an acute observer, capable of enabling social agents – that is, all human beings – to make the right choices with awareness of its risks, as well as its effects.
Bauman’s legacy leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, because in its very concluding phase it reveals pessimistic implications that seem to contradict his previous positions, so full of hope and confidence in the opportunities for improvement of the humans. The very theorisation of liquidity itself seemed to suggest, in the peaceful understanding of a phase of disorientation, the possibility of rediscovering momentarily forgotten human values, first and foremost social solidarity.

‘Bauman, Elias and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives’ provides a synopsis of and comparison between the conceptions of modernity and its alternatives, as found in the works of Bauman, Elias and Latour. Bauman and Elias share a few relevant features bearing on their conceptions of modernity and its possible alternatives; Latour, on the other hand, when compared to these sociologists, is a maverick thinker. The set of alternatives is as follows: modernity vs. post-modernity (Bauman); civilization vs. barbarity (Elias) and successful vs. unsuccessful hybrids (Latour). Bauman’s and Elias’s conceptions of modernity differ in some important respects. The constitutive elements of modernity are, according to Bauman, cognitive order, regulation, stability of relations and identities, and the role of intellectuals as legislators. In Elias’s view, pacification and civilization are the hallmarks of modernity. Both Bauman and Elias maintain, despite their differences, that a condition of barbarity indicates the absence of civilization, but not of modernity.

According to Latour, the scientific usefulness of the concepts of modernity and, by implication, of non-modernity is questionable. If hybrids are defined as heterogeneous associations between humans and non-humans such as instruments and machines, by virtue of their great number they produce a variety of ways in which distinct and incompatible modes of knowledge may be interpreted, defined, and linked. This occurs by means of mediators.

A hybrid condition characterizes the modern world; hence, non-humans are relevant for investigating the modern world as they mediate between nature and society. The latter is a contraposition which Latour rejects, along with those between actor vs. system, science vs. society, nature vs. culture, and humans vs. non-humans. As for this last contraposition, Latour argues that this very distinction results from a process of purification, since humans and non-humans may be actors that form an integrated whole. Modernity therefore results from the two related but opposed processes of hybridization and purification. Much as the very concept of modernity is of questionable usefulness, the concept of non-modernity should also be relinquished. The existence of hybrids makes modernity and non-modernity impossible. In this sense, Latour has contended that we have never been modern. The joint product of human and non-human activities, as resulting in hybrids, may be a failure due, according to Latour, to the mismatch between the human and non-human actors.

Beckett and Broadcasting pioneered the study of Beckett and the media in 1976. Originally a doctoral dissertation defended at Åbo Akademi University (Finland), it has long been out of print. It is here republished with a sizable new introduction focusing on the role of radio in Beckett’s œuvre.

‘Becoming – An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’ falls within the long-standing tradition of anthropological theorising regarding the person, and takes inspiration from the philosophical writings of G. Deleuze. It comprises a critical intervention in the said literatures, develops new conceptual tools and reconfigures ‘old’ methodological strategies. As a thought experiment, it foregrounds and advances the concept of the ‘diaphoron’ person – a person who constantly differs from him/herself and who is always already involved in an unlimited process of becoming – as a new figure for considering the problem of the subject in anthropology. In addition, the book breathes new life into one of the most distinctive methodological strategies to be found in anthropology since its inception, re-invigorating the approach of ‘total ethnography’ in such a way that it is able to meet the challenges posed by living in a postmodern world.

The volume is also an ethnographic monograph based upon qualitative research undertaken in the town of Probolinggo in East Java, Indonesia. It is the first book-length ethnographic study of this part of Java and its peoples, who identify themselves as ‘mixed persons’. The volume not only serves as a source of new ethnographic data about a place and a situation we know very little about, but it also re-thinks key categories of Javanese ethnography from a new and unanticipated perspective.

‘Becoming – An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’ falls within the long-standing tradition of anthropological theorising regarding the person, and takes inspiration from the philosophical writings of G. Deleuze. It comprises a critical intervention in the said literatures, develops new conceptual tools and reconfigures ‘old’ methodological strategies. As a thought experiment, it foregrounds and advances the concept of the ‘diaphoron’ person – a person who constantly differs from him/herself and who is always already involved in an unlimited process of becoming – as a new figure for considering the problem of the subject in anthropology. In addition, the book breathes new life into one of the most distinctive methodological strategies to be found in anthropology since its inception, re-invigorating the approach of ‘total ethnography’ in such a way that it is able to meet the challenges posed by living in a postmodern world.

The volume is also an ethnographic monograph based upon qualitative research undertaken in the town of Probolinggo in East Java, Indonesia. It is the first book-length ethnographic study of this part of Java and its peoples, who identify themselves as ‘mixed persons’. The volume not only serves as a source of new ethnographic data about a place and a situation we know very little about, but it also re-thinks key categories of Javanese ethnography from a new and unanticipated perspective.

‘Before Einstein’ examines the discourse of hyperspace philosophy and its position within the network of ‘new’ ideas at the end of the nineteenth century. Hyperspace philosophy grew out of the concept of a fourth spatial dimension, an idea that became increasingly debated amongst mathematicians, physicists and philosophers during the 1870s and 80s. English mathematician and hyperspace philosopher Charles Howard Hinton was the chief populariser of the fourth dimension in Europe and North America. The influence of his writings, many of which were published as a series under the title of ‘Scientific Romances’, ranged surprisingly wide.

‘Before Einstein’ offers, for the first time, an extended examination of Hinton’s work and – crucially – the influence of his ideas on contemporary writers and thinkers. Increasingly over the past three decades, critical attention has been given to the relevance of pre-Einsteinian theories of the fourth dimension within the shifting aesthetic and cultural values at the turn of the twentieth century. For the first time in a full-length literary study, ‘Before Einstein’ addresses the cultural life of the fourth dimension at the turn of the century. ‘Before Einstein’ begins by tracing the development of spatial theories of the fourth dimension out of the ‘new’, non-Euclidean geometries of the mid-nineteenth century, and proceeds to analyse Hinton’s role as four-dimensional theorist and populariser of hyperspace philosophy. Hinton's ‘Scientific Romances’ are examined in detail, not simply as documents of interest for historians of science and ideas, but for their intrinsic literary value as well. Additionally, ‘Before Einstein’ captures the work of H. G. Wells, Henry James and William James through the lens of Hinton’s writing, identifying what can be described as a four-dimensional literary aesthetic. The book addresses the existing gap in literary studies of the fourth dimension, while also providing scholars of the James brothers and Wells with new ways of approaching their subject matter.

‘Before Einstein’ examines the discourse of hyperspace philosophy and its position within the network of ‘new’ ideas at the end of the nineteenth century. Hyperspace philosophy grew out of the concept of a fourth spatial dimension, an idea that became increasingly debated amongst mathematicians, physicists and philosophers during the 1870s and 80s. English mathematician and hyperspace philosopher Charles Howard Hinton was the chief populariser of the fourth dimension in Europe and North America. The influence of his writings, many of which were published as a series under the title of ‘Scientific Romances’, ranged surprisingly wide.

‘Before Einstein’ offers, for the first time, an extended examination of Hinton’s work and – crucially – the influence of his ideas on contemporary writers and thinkers. Increasingly over the past three decades, critical attention has been given to the relevance of pre-Einsteinian theories of the fourth dimension within the shifting aesthetic and cultural values at the turn of the twentieth century. For the first time in a full-length literary study, ‘Before Einstein’ addresses the cultural life of the fourth dimension at the turn of the century. ‘Before Einstein’ begins by tracing the development of spatial theories of the fourth dimension out of the ‘new’, non-Euclidean geometries of the mid-nineteenth century, and proceeds to analyse Hinton’s role as four-dimensional theorist and populariser of hyperspace philosophy. Hinton's ‘Scientific Romances’ are examined in detail, not simply as documents of interest for historians of science and ideas, but for their intrinsic literary value as well. Additionally, ‘Before Einstein’ captures the work of H. G. Wells, Henry James and William James through the lens of Hinton’s writing, identifying what can be described as a four-dimensional literary aesthetic. The book addresses the existing gap in literary studies of the fourth dimension, while also providing scholars of the James brothers and Wells with new ways of approaching their subject matter.

This book is designed to be a short, critical introduction to the controversies in tax policy. The main thesis of the book is that there is a deeper substructure to debates about tax policy that underlie many of the controversies. By understanding the nature of this substructure one can place the debates about tax policy into a broader perspective. The chapters in the book elucidate this underlying architecture, drawing on ideas from economics, law, philosophy, psychology, and political science.

Economic principles shape some of the foundations for the debates, particularly with regard to the question of whether income taxes should be structured with a broad base and low rates, and whether the appropriate base of taxation should be consumption or income. Legal and administrative issues provide another foundation for tax policy, as certain structural features of the tax system—the separate existence of corporations and the realization principle for income—constrain the set of feasible tax policies. To understand tax fairness, one must delve into philosophy and psychology. A key debate is whether we view taxation just through a purely distributional lens (who gets what) or must we think about notions of process and deservingness to make sense of debates on tax fairness.

The book uses these tools to shed light on these issues as well as on the most current debates. These include the appropriate goals for tax reform, the most judicious way to tax multinational corporations, our ability to tax the very wealthy, and whether the tax system has a racial subtext. 

This book is designed to be a short, critical introduction to the controversies in tax policy. The main thesis of the book is that there is a deeper substructure to debates about tax policy that underlie many of the controversies. By understanding the nature of this substructure one can place the debates about tax policy into a broader perspective. The chapters in the book elucidate this underlying architecture, drawing on ideas from economics, law, philosophy, psychology, and political science.

Economic principles shape some of the foundations for the debates, particularly with regard to the question of whether income taxes should be structured with a broad base and low rates, and whether the appropriate base of taxation should be consumption or income. Legal and administrative issues provide another foundation for tax policy, as certain structural features of the tax system—the separate existence of corporations and the realization principle for income—constrain the set of feasible tax policies. To understand tax fairness, one must delve into philosophy and psychology. A key debate is whether we view taxation just through a purely distributional lens (who gets what) or must we think about notions of process and deservingness to make sense of debates on tax fairness.

The book uses these tools to shed light on these issues as well as on the most current debates. These include the appropriate goals for tax reform, the most judicious way to tax multinational corporations, our ability to tax the very wealthy, and whether the tax system has a racial subtext. 

Overthrowing communism in 1989 and joining the European Union in 2004, the Polish people hold loyalties to region, country and now continent – even as the definition of what it means to be ‘European’ remains unclear. This book uses the life-story narratives of rural and urban southern Poles to reveal how ‘being European’ is considered a fundamental component of ‘being Polish’ while participants are simultaneously ‘becoming European’.

Close attention to the individual lives of Poles allows the author to identify cultural patterns and grasp the impact of the EU on its member states, paying particular attention to how the EU has affected the life experiences of Poles who came of age in the earliest years of the neoliberal and democratic transformations. In exploring what it means to be Polish by tracking these parallel processes of change, the author traces Poland’s path from state socialism to European integration and Polish identities as they are reinscribed, revised and reinvented in the face of historic, political and economic processes.

Ultimately, this study demonstrates how the EU is regarded as both an idea and an instrument, and how ordinary citizens make choices that influence the shape of European identity and the legitimacy of its institutions.

Overthrowing communism in 1989 and joining the European Union in 2004, the Polish people hold loyalties to region, country and now continent – even as the definition of what it means to be ‘European’ remains unclear. This book uses the life-story narratives of rural and urban southern Poles to reveal how ‘being European’ is considered a fundamental component of ‘being Polish’ while participants are simultaneously ‘becoming European’.

Close attention to the individual lives of Poles allows the author to identify cultural patterns and grasp the impact of the EU on its member states, paying particular attention to how the EU has affected the life experiences of Poles who came of age in the earliest years of the neoliberal and democratic transformations. In exploring what it means to be Polish by tracking these parallel processes of change, the author traces Poland’s path from state socialism to European integration and Polish identities as they are reinscribed, revised and reinvented in the face of historic, political and economic processes.

Ultimately, this study demonstrates how the EU is regarded as both an idea and an instrument, and how ordinary citizens make choices that influence the shape of European identity and the legitimacy of its institutions.

This book explores and documents the performances of resistance and memory in key works by the Belarus Free Theatre and film director Aliaksei Paluyan, the Belarusian playwright Andrei Kureichik, and the Kupalautsy theatre in the aftermath of the protests against Belarusian dictator Aliaksandr Lukashenka and the fraudulent presidential elections of 2020. The book examines the work of these artists to document the events in Belarus in order to bring international attention to the 2020 crisis in Belarus, to build community among Belarusians and global supporters of the Pro-democracy movement, and to collectively mourn the traumatic experience of participants, political prisoners, and those who lost their lives in the struggle.
The analysis builds on digital and film performances along with personal interviews, published interviews and reviews, manifestoes, and hundreds of scholarly and newspaper articles. The introduction to the book provides the historical context for understanding these critical performances and the political and cultural events in Belarus before, during, and after the contested election of 2020. Each chapter centers on a few key works by Belarusian theatre artists, primarily in exile, that demonstrate the impulse to document the events and sustain community affectively through theatre after the fraudulent 2020 presidential election. These performances demonstrate the resolve to verify their experiences of those “who spoke out against the lawlessness and violence of the authorities” before disinformation campaigns and emerging events in the region threaten to misrepresent this important historical moment.

This book throws new light on post-colonial evaluations of the Partition and its effect on eastern India. Until very recently, a striking state of 'near silence' has existed concerning the violence encountered by those who fled across the Bengal border. 'Bengal Partition Stories' addresses this silence through the retelling of stories inspired by the division of Bengal, the mass exodus that followed and their repercussions on the cultural, social and economic character of the region, modern India as a whole and the newly-formed nation of Bangladesh.

Despite numerous critical enquiries into the history, politics and social dynamics that contributed to the partition of Bengal, there remains a distinct lack of in-depth exploration into the personal experiences of those directly affected. Through oral histories, interviews and fictional retellings of the event and its aftermath, 'Bengal Partition Stories' seeks to fill this gap by unearthing and articulating the collective memories of a people traumatised by the brutal division of their homeland.

This book throws new light on post-colonial evaluations of the Partition and its effect on eastern India. Until very recently, a striking state of 'near silence' has existed concerning the violence encountered by those who fled across the Bengal border. 'Bengal Partition Stories' addresses this silence through the retelling of stories inspired by the division of Bengal, the mass exodus that followed and their repercussions on the cultural, social and economic character of the region, modern India as a whole and the newly-formed nation of Bangladesh.

Despite numerous critical enquiries into the history, politics and social dynamics that contributed to the partition of Bengal, there remains a distinct lack of in-depth exploration into the personal experiences of those directly affected. Through oral histories, interviews and fictional retellings of the event and its aftermath, 'Bengal Partition Stories' seeks to fill this gap by unearthing and articulating the collective memories of a people traumatised by the brutal division of their homeland.

Bestsellers in Nineteenth Century America seeks to produce for students novels, poems and other printed material that sold extremely well when they first appeared in the United States. Many of the most famous American works of the nineteenth century that we know today — such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick — were not widely read when they first appeared. This collection seeks to offer its readers a glimpse at the literature that lit up the literary horizon when the works were first published, leading to insights on key cultural aspects of the nineteenth-century United States and its literary culture.

Bestsellers in Nineteenth Century America seeks to produce for students novels, poems and other printed material that sold extremely well when they first appeared in the United States. Many of the most famous American works of the nineteenth century that we know today — such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick — were not widely read when they first appeared. This collection seeks to offer its readers a glimpse at the literature that lit up the literary horizon when the works were first published, leading to insights on key cultural aspects of the nineteenth-century United States and its literary culture.

When biographers write about a person’s life, they prioritize what is important to themselves: What interests them, what resonates with them, what helps them, what teaches them, what makes sense to them, and, most significantly, what advances their own political agendas. Their research is filtered through these lenses. Even if their biographical goal is to learn and present enough about their writers to better analyze a certain canon, literary critics usually construct life stories through their own theoretical positions. Certainly, readers should be aware that biographies bend according to their authors’ psychological makeup, cultural encoding, historical agency, and political penchants. Furthermore, biographies often reflect the age in which they are written, more so than the age in which their subject lived. This is not always a negative outcome, but it always imbues the portrait of the “biographee” with its own qualities so that the facsimile is never unadulterated. [NP] Betwixt and Between is an investigation of the biographical corpus of Mary Wollstonecraft, starting with Godwin’s Memoirs (1798) and ending with Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (2015). It identifies the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, and gaps that have run rampant, many of them incomprehensively left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. The myriad, often contradictory renditions of her life and thoughts have given us such a distorted view of Wollstonecraft that she has evolved into varying degrees of heroine and villain, an everywoman for every cause.

When biographers write about a person’s life, they prioritize what is important to themselves: What interests them, what resonates with them, what helps them, what teaches them, what makes sense to them, and, most significantly, what advances their own political agendas. Their research is filtered through these lenses. Even if their biographical goal is to learn and present enough about their writers to better analyze a certain canon, literary critics usually construct life stories through their own theoretical positions. Certainly, readers should be aware that biographies bend according to their authors’ psychological makeup, cultural encoding, historical agency, and political penchants. Furthermore, biographies often reflect the age in which they are written, more so than the age in which their subject lived. This is not always a negative outcome, but it always imbues the portrait of the “biographee” with its own qualities so that the facsimile is never unadulterated. [NP] Betwixt and Between is an investigation of the biographical corpus of Mary Wollstonecraft, starting with Godwin’s Memoirs (1798) and ending with Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (2015). It identifies the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, and gaps that have run rampant, many of them incomprehensively left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. The myriad, often contradictory renditions of her life and thoughts have given us such a distorted view of Wollstonecraft that she has evolved into varying degrees of heroine and villain, an everywoman for every cause.

This interdisciplinary book explores how fitness technology impacts self-image, anxiety, and social identity, connecting sports science, psychology, and digital culture.

My basic message can be put in a straightforward way: humanities scholars should improve their way of asking questions. Their questions about the human condition need to be as clear and simple as possible in order to enable unambiguous answers. Simple without being simplistic, nuanced without being embroiled – that is the ideal. Unambiguous answers (not to be confused with irrefutable answers) are much wanted, although not always possible to attain. Moreover, if one wants the questions to be highly significant for the understanding of the human condition, there should not be too many questions. Even in this respect, there is much to be wanted in today’s humanities research. Instead of gathering around a limited set of profound questions and holding on to them until the answers begin to appear, generally the humanist guild scatters its scientific energy on too many disparate things – replacing them far too often with hundreds of new questions, ‘perspectives’ and ‘problematisations’. In its turn, such a research culture may hamper a cumulative growth of knowledge, the possibility of which, moreover, is regrettably often denied or even viewed with suspicion.

In this book, I am doing two things to redress the current problems in the humanities world-wide. Firstly, I present and discuss a set of big but still insufficiently addressed topics that humanities researchers should focus over a sustained period of time, such as what explains that some kinds of knowledge are widely accepted whereas other kinds of knowledge are rejected, or what explains the widespread diffusion of inequality paralleled by a gradual emergence of egalitarianism over the centuries, et cetera. Secondly, I discuss in general terms what the humanities are or should be, as well as what they are not or should not be. Basically, humanities researchers should consider their field as an integral part of science, although uniquely dealing with humans a decision making, meaning seeking and self-reflecting agents.

My basic message can be put in a straightforward way: humanities scholars should improve their way of asking questions. Their questions about the human condition need to be as clear and simple as possible in order to enable unambiguous answers. Simple without being simplistic, nuanced without being embroiled – that is the ideal. Unambiguous answers (not to be confused with irrefutable answers) are much wanted, although not always possible to attain. Moreover, if one wants the questions to be highly significant for the understanding of the human condition, there should not be too many questions. Even in this respect, there is much to be wanted in today’s humanities research. Instead of gathering around a limited set of profound questions and holding on to them until the answers begin to appear, generally the humanist guild scatters its scientific energy on too many disparate things – replacing them far too often with hundreds of new questions, ‘perspectives’ and ‘problematisations’. In its turn, such a research culture may hamper a cumulative growth of knowledge, the possibility of which, moreover, is regrettably often denied or even viewed with suspicion.

In this book, I am doing two things to redress the current problems in the humanities world-wide. Firstly, I present and discuss a set of big but still insufficiently addressed topics that humanities researchers should focus over a sustained period of time, such as what explains that some kinds of knowledge are widely accepted whereas other kinds of knowledge are rejected, or what explains the widespread diffusion of inequality paralleled by a gradual emergence of egalitarianism over the centuries, et cetera. Secondly, I discuss in general terms what the humanities are or should be, as well as what they are not or should not be. Basically, humanities researchers should consider their field as an integral part of science, although uniquely dealing with humans a decision making, meaning seeking and self-reflecting agents.

This book will explore several critical connections between Black African objects and white Western aesthetics and artwork in the United States from the late 1800s until 1939. Drawing from primary source materials and various scholarship in the field (philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, museum studied, art history, cultural studies), it provides an analysis of the threads of white supremacy which run through early scholarship and understandings of Black African object within the United States and how scholars use the objects to reinforce narratives of “primitive” Black Africa and civilized, advanced white Europe and the United States.

To do this, the book (1) explores white Western aesthetic ideas and contrasts them with Black African aesthetic ideas, (2) explores the history of the use of Black African objects by white Western collectors, artists in and around the Harlem Renaissance, (3) explores the history of the influence of white Western aesthetics on Black collectors, artists, and groups in and around the Harlem Renaissance, and (4) explores how Black African aesthetics as white mythology impacts aesthetics beyond the art world through advertising, commercial popularization with Black Power moment, and today with films like Black Panther and videos starring Beyonce.

This book seeks to bring together previous scholarship, white Western and Black African aesthetic theory, historical documents, and archival research for primary documents that highlight how white supremacy runs through Western scholarship and ideology and how this presents a distorted, degraded view of Black Africa and its people not only for white people but for Black people as well.

Black Hauntologies is the second volume of a three-volume study that offers a fresh reading of African-American literary history by locating within the literature itself the terms for a revisionary account of black writing, terms pursued along three distinct but interlocking pathways (each to be pursued in the Impact Series format): by charting figurations of tradition among six of the most innovative practitioners of black literary expression from Sterling Brown to Toni Morrison (Volume 1); by following the haunting pathways of spectral dialogues between slavery and African-American modernism (Volume 2); and by interrogating interlocking topoi of critique and assertion (naming; facing; voicing) across the history of African-American literary expression (Volume 3). The critical trilogy presents thereby a narrative of African-American literature as a continual, dialectical process, blending confrontation with traumatic origins and the quest for expressive transformation.

This project arises from the question: how does one construe and narrate the story of a tradition for which the conventional structure of literary history—that is, the relation between discourse and its referents—is itself such a politically and thematically charged issue? On one hand, the ideological exclusion of the African-American subject from authorized spheres of meaning and signification gives value to narrating black literary tradition as the progressive emergence of a fully articulate presence, and seems to find warrant in black writing’s persistent thematization of literacy, public performance, and self-definition. On the other hand, such a narrative of fully realized agency and consciousness risks replicating the dominant ideology’s own reductive vision of identity as a predetermined totality, thus imagining some singular and final form for African-American being. The study asserts instead that African-American literature is fueled by the simultaneous workings of a desire for a totally realized subject and the constant displacement of that desire by a willingness—in contrast to the oppressive system that would deny its agency—to put its own mode of being into question. 

Black Configurations is the first volume of a three-volume study that offers a fresh reading of African-American literary history by locating within the literature itself the terms for a revisionary account of black writing, terms pursued along three distinct but interlocking pathways (each to be pursued in the Impact Series format): by charting figurations of tradition among six of the most innovative practitioners of black literary expression from Sterling Brown to Toni Morrison (Volume 1); by following the haunting pathways of spectral dialogues between slavery and African-American modernism (Volume 2); and by interrogating interlocking topoi of critique and assertion (naming; facing; voicing) across the history of African-American literary expression (Volume 3). The critical trilogy presents thereby a narrative of African-American literature as a continual, dialectical process, blending confrontation with traumatic origins and the quest for expressive transformation.

This project arises from the question: how does one construe and narrate the story of a tradition for which the conventional structure of literary history—that is, the relation between discourse and its referents—is itself such a politically and thematically charged issue? On one hand, the ideological exclusion of the African-American subject from authorized spheres of meaning and signification gives value to narrating black literary tradition as the progressive emergence of a fully articulate presence, and seems to find warrant in black writing’s persistent thematization of literacy, public performance, and self-definition. On the other hand, such a narrative of fully realized agency and consciousness risks replicating the dominant ideology’s own reductive vision of identity as a predetermined totality, thus imagining some singular and final form for African-American being. The study asserts instead that African-American literature is fueled by the simultaneous workings of a desire for a totally realized subject and the constant displacement of that desire by a willingness—in contrast to the oppressive system that would deny its agency—to put its own mode of being into question. 

This book examines the conundrum that has haunted the Black and White ancestry for ages on what supremacy actually means. Is it Black or White supremacy? Granted, the term White supremacy has occupied the sociopolitical, cultural and economic discourse for ages, but what does that really imply? All other ancestries on planet earth have been coerced to believe that conformity to Euro-American lifestyle is the way to become ‘civilized’ on planet earth. But the term civilization owes its genesis to the African cultural and educational achievements in Egypt. Consequently, Black ancestry, the first human specie on planet earth, should lead mankind to cultural and epistemological supremacy but that has always been met with skepticism.This book examines this debate, especially between the Black and the White ancestry.

There appears to be a pejorative connotation associated with the term Black. It has been ‘inferiorized’ because of the stain of slavery, servitude and brutal murders suffered by those from the continent of Africa that are overwhelmingly Black. The European slave trade, Arab slave trade, colonization and neo-colonization dealt irreparable blow to the people of Africa and have subordinated, and worse of all relegated, the Black person to the lowliest rung of all races on planet earth. But other races like the Jews suffered slavery from Nazi Germany. According to the Global slavery index in 2018, Asian regions of North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Cambodiaand so onhave experienced different forms of modern as well as non-modern slavery. European invaders of North America slaughtered millions of Native Indian tribes who were the original inhabitants and relegated them to the periphery. Between 1530 and 1780, Davis (2003) confirms that Europeans were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa. So why has that of the Black person been so pronounced? Cheikh Anta Diop simplifies the reason for this attitude towards the Black ancestry in his book The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality by ascribing it to ignorance of these group of people and their African continent:

Africa's diamond wars took four million lives. They destroyed the lives of millions more and they crippled the economies of Angola, the Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The biggest UN peacekeeping forces in the world—in Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo and Côte d’Ivoire―are the legacy of 'conflict' or 'blood diamonds'.

'Blood on the Stone' tells the story of how diamonds came to be so dangerous. It describes the history of the great diamond cartel and how it gradually lost control of the precious mineral, as country after country descended into anarchy and wars fuelled by diamonds. The book describes the diamond pipeline, from war-torn Africa to the glittering showrooms of Paris, London and New York. It describes the campaign that began in 1999 and which eventually forced the industry and more than 50 governments to create a global certification system known as the Kimberley Process, aimed at wringing blood diamonds out of the retail trade. This gripping account concludes with a sobering assessment of the certification system, which soon became hostage to political chicanery, mismanagement and vested interests. Too important to fail, the Kimberley Process has been hailed as a regulatory model for Africa's extractive minerals. Behind the scenes, however, it runs the risk of becoming an ineffectual talk shop, standing aside as criminals re-infest the diamond world.

Africa's diamond wars took four million lives. They destroyed the lives of millions more and they crippled the economies of Angola, the Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The biggest UN peacekeeping forces in the world—in Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo and Côte d’Ivoire―are the legacy of 'conflict' or 'blood diamonds'.

'Blood on the Stone' tells the story of how diamonds came to be so dangerous. It describes the history of the great diamond cartel and how it gradually lost control of the precious mineral, as country after country descended into anarchy and wars fuelled by diamonds. The book describes the diamond pipeline, from war-torn Africa to the glittering showrooms of Paris, London and New York. It describes the campaign that began in 1999 and which eventually forced the industry and more than 50 governments to create a global certification system known as the Kimberley Process, aimed at wringing blood diamonds out of the retail trade. This gripping account concludes with a sobering assessment of the certification system, which soon became hostage to political chicanery, mismanagement and vested interests. Too important to fail, the Kimberley Process has been hailed as a regulatory model for Africa's extractive minerals. Behind the scenes, however, it runs the risk of becoming an ineffectual talk shop, standing aside as criminals re-infest the diamond world.

There is growing interest in urbanization as currently a third of the world’s urban population live in slums, and by 2030 there may be two billion slum dwellers across the globe (Davies 2004, 17). During economic crises, slum dwellers are involved in increasing feats of self-exploitation. The literature on slums and informal settlements tends to focus on economic survival strategies, particularly those of men. But how do women, as the most marginalized and excluded slum-dwellers, survive in the face of poverty and gender oppression? What are the emotional rather than material costs of poverty? This book conveys the rich fabric of life in the slum.

‘Body Parts on Planet Slum’ discusses the importance of Christianity and telenovelas, and explores what it is about women’s lives in particular that makes these stories so central. Yet it is also increasingly clear that for the poorest women, church attendance has become a rare luxury – whereas telenovelas are piped into their homes on a daily basis. The unemployed women watch up to six hours of telenovelas a day in the midst of arduous physical labour in the home. The women suffer in relation to their bodies, but invest in a masochistic glorification of suffering. It is this glorification of suffering that links the women’s lives to the telenovelas in crucial ways. It reveals disturbing valuations of women’s bodies that traverse reality and fiction, and connect to a central feminist question, ‘What is a woman?’

Commercial cinema has always been one of the biggest indigenous industries in India, and remains so in the post-globalization era, when Indian economy has entered a new phase of global participation, liberalization and expansion. Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are nowhere more explored in the Indian cultural mainstream than in commercial cinema. As Indian economy and policy have gone through a sea-change after the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the Global Capital, the largest cultural industry has followed suit. For example, the global Indian community (known in Indian official terms as the Non-Resident Indian or the NRI) has become an integral part of the cultural representation of India.

The politics and ideology of Indian commercial cinema have become extremely complex, offering a fascinating case-study to scholars of Global Culture. Of particular interest is the re-positioning of individual identity vis-à-vis nation, religion, class, and gender. On one hand, the definition of 'nationhood' and/or community has become much more fluid, keeping in tune with the sweeping universal claims of globalization; the films have consequently revised the scope of their narratives to match India’s emerging global business ambitions. On the other hand, the political realities of India's long-standig enmity with Pakistan and the international rise of 'Hindutva' has also contributed to a new strain of jingoism in Indian cinema. ‘Bollywood and Globalization’ is a significant scholarly contribution to the current debate on Indian cinema, nationhood and Global Culture. The articles represent a variety of theoretical and pedagogical approaches, and the collection will be appreciated by students and scholars alike.

Commercial cinema has always been one of the biggest indigenous industries in India, and remains so in the post-globalization era, when Indian economy has entered a new phase of global participation, liberalization and expansion. Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are nowhere more explored in the Indian cultural mainstream than in commercial cinema. As Indian economy and policy have gone through a sea-change after the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the Global Capital, the largest cultural industry has followed suit. For example, the global Indian community (known in Indian official terms as the Non-Resident Indian or the NRI) has become an integral part of the cultural representation of India.

The politics and ideology of Indian commercial cinema have become extremely complex, offering a fascinating case-study to scholars of Global Culture. Of particular interest is the re-positioning of individual identity vis-à-vis nation, religion, class, and gender. On one hand, the definition of 'nationhood' and/or community has become much more fluid, keeping in tune with the sweeping universal claims of globalization; the films have consequently revised the scope of their narratives to match India’s emerging global business ambitions. On the other hand, the political realities of India's long-standig enmity with Pakistan and the international rise of 'Hindutva' has also contributed to a new strain of jingoism in Indian cinema. ‘Bollywood and Globalization’ is a significant scholarly contribution to the current debate on Indian cinema, nationhood and Global Culture. The articles represent a variety of theoretical and pedagogical approaches, and the collection will be appreciated by students and scholars alike.

How could American social solidarity have so collapsed that we cannot even cooperate in fighting a pandemic? One problem lies in how our values mutate and intersect in an era of runaway high-end inequality and evaporating upward mobility. Under such conditions, tensions rise between our egalitarian and democratic traditions on the one hand, and what we often call the “American Dream” of self-advancement and due reward on the other.

In our current Second Gilded Age, as in the first one from the late nineteenth century, the results of economic competition appear to suggest, falsely, that some of us are “winners” who deserve everything they have, while others are contemptible “losers.” The rich ostensibly owe the poor nothing – not even compassion or respect, and certainly not material aid through government.

In Bonfires of the American Dream, Daniel Shaviro develops these themes through close studies, in social context, of such classic novels and films as Atlas Shrugged, The Great Gatsby, It’s a Wonderful Life, and The Wolf of Wall Street. He thereby helps to provide a better understanding of what, apart from racism, has in recent years caused things to go so wrong culturally in America.

‘Boundaries, Dynamics and Construction of Traditions in South Asia’ explores the dynamic constructions and applications of the concept of ‘tradition’ within the South Asian context during the ancient and precolonial periods. This collection of essays covers a significant selection of the specialized fields of knowledge that have shaped classical South Asian intellectual history, offering a stimulating array of papers on the different and complex processes employed during the ‘invention’, construction, preservation and renewal of a given tradition.

To that end, the contributors have expertly analysed various key aspects of the development of ‘tradition’, namely: the textual and practical transmission of traditional canons; the dynamisms and strategies chosen for the renewal of a tradition; its internal and external dialectics; the procedures of its legitimation; the theoretical and pragmatic mechanisms of its survival; and the tensions and criticisms of traditional knowledge systems. Attention has also been paid to problems related to the primacy exercised by highly specialized traditional experts, to monopolies in the transmission of knowledge, to its means of cultural and political justification, and to the connections between a specific traditional field of knowledge and the surrounding social arena.

Brazil and Transnational Human Rights Movement, 1964–1985 explores how solidarity for Brazil contributed to the global human rights movement of the 1970s. Through protests, petitions, posters, and numerous other cultural, artistic, and media-based campaigns, solidarity for Brazil popularised the language of human rights and prompted the international community to join the fight against the country’s military regime. But solidarity for Brazil also reframed the debate on human rights itself, stretching the concept beyond mainstream interpretations that emphasised the violation of ‘basic’ individual rights, such as the use of torture and political imprisonment, to also incorporate social and economic rights, inequality, indigenous minorities, and the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies and development projects. Crucial to this process were multiple networks of exiles, catholic activists, journalists, and academics between Brazil and Western Europe, who drew from the Latin American experience to challenge mainstream narratives of human rights from below.

Drawing from extensive archival research across Latin America and Europe, Grimaldi sheds new light on the transnational dimensions of political resistance to the Brazilian dictatorship of 1964–1985. The book demonstrates how, contrary to dominant narratives, human rights solidarity for Brazil was not limited to ensuring the freedom of political prisoners and putting an end to torture and disappearances. Finding themselves at odds with the liberal framework and justification for human rights advocacy popular at the time, Brazilians and their advocates took a distinctive approach by drawing from local experiences and critiquing global political and economic structures and transnational actors alike in violating human rights in Brazil. By bringing these debates to global audiences and to the doorstep of organisations like Amnesty International, the Vatican, and the United Nations, solidarity for Brazil did not simply remain on the fringes of debates about human rights; they actively shaped them.

Brazil, the world’s largest sugar producer, supplies 16 per cent of its energy consumption and approximately three quarters of its transport fuels with sugarcane-based ethanol. From ca. 2003 until 2014, the country under the Workers’ Party government aimed at creating a global market for ethanol. The time seemed right to steer foreign policy towards this goal due to a benevolent structural environment with global discussions about energy security, climate change, and South-South cooperation. 

Within a neoclassical realist framework, this study examines why Brazil did not fully succeed in its ethanol diplomacy to create a global market for ethanol. The analysis covers three analytical levels: the bilateral with Brazil in power deficit, the bilateral with Brazil in power surplus, and the multilateral, represented in three empirical chapters, Brazil-US, Brazil-Mozambique, and Brazil’s multilateral ethanol diplomacy, respectively. Each chapter finishes with a set of recommendations for political consideration.

This study also demonstrates how the theoretical approach of neoclassical realism can combine foreign policy output with international politics outcome research and is useful to analyse policy outside the hard security realm. It offers a basis for further research towards an understanding of Brazil’s overall foreign policy and the foreign policies of other emerging powers.