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A selection of ruminative nature writing on walking and the beauty of New England, here Thoreau’s characteristically wide-ranging and philosophical style offers a multitude of fascinating observations. Excursions presents Thoreau’s most studied and expansive collection of writing on the natural world. An early advocate of conservationism, he discusses here, in mesmerising prose, the complex but essential relationship between man and nature. This edition includes a remarkable Biographical Sketch by Thoreau’s great contemporary and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This choice collection of Thoreau’s nature writing includes the essays ‘The Succession of Forest Trees’, ‘Walking’, and ‘Autumnal Tints’ – each one an explorative reach into the heart of the natural world. Thoreau’s travels through the woods of New England are not only physical journeys through some of the most awe-inspiring landscapes in America but also spiritual excursions of the mind.

This book evaluates exotic alternative investment opportunities such as life settlements, litigation funding, farmlands, royalties, weather derivatives, collectables and other unique asset classes. It provides an in-depth analysis of the returns, risks, opportunities and portfolio effects for anyone who wants to expand their investment horizons. This book is for individual investors, financial advisors and academics who desire knowledge about investment products beyond just stocks and bonds or vanilla hedge funds, private equity and real estate investments. It provides a critical link to industry data and original research to support the case for adding exotic alternative investments to traditional portfolios. 

The book includes an analysis of returns and risk from a wide range of direct investments in individual exotic asset classes as well as from investing in public shares and ETFs. It also includes a section on how these exotic investments performed relative to both traditional and alternative investments like hedge funds both before and after the Spring 2020 market crash.

The book is an excellent tool for practitioners wishing to understand the rationale and impact of allocating capital to these exotic and less-understood investment opportunities.

Today, in an age of globalization, religion represents a potent force in the lives of billions of people worldwide. Yet when social theorists examine the impact of globalization on contemporary religious movements, they tend to focus on issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and threats to US or global security. This collection of essays takes a different approach, analyzing – with special reference to Asia – religion through lived experience. The key issues covered in the volume include: how religious impulses contribute to globalization; how religious groups and organizations repackage traditional beliefs for transcultural appeal; how religious adherents cope with external threats to identity; how new technologies are reshaping the nature of religious beliefs and images; and how local and global religious influences blend and/or clash. Far from religion being a subject of peripheral concern to globalization, the contributors demonstrate that from the most basic level of our interactions with the natural environment to the socio-political behavior of the “great religions” – and even to the profusion of folk and pop culture phenomena – the influence of religion upon globalization, and vice versa, is apparent at all levels.

Today, in an age of globalization, religion represents a potent force in the lives of billions of people worldwide. Yet when social theorists examine the impact of globalization on contemporary religious movements, they tend to focus on issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and threats to US or global security. This collection of essays takes a different approach, analyzing – with special reference to Asia – religion through lived experience. The key issues covered in the volume include: how religious impulses contribute to globalization; how religious groups and organizations repackage traditional beliefs for transcultural appeal; how religious adherents cope with external threats to identity; how new technologies are reshaping the nature of religious beliefs and images; and how local and global religious influences blend and/or clash. Far from religion being a subject of peripheral concern to globalization, the contributors demonstrate that from the most basic level of our interactions with the natural environment to the socio-political behavior of the “great religions” – and even to the profusion of folk and pop culture phenomena – the influence of religion upon globalization, and vice versa, is apparent at all levels.

Ann Loades has been instrumental in bringing forward for the attention of readers in later generations “voices from the past,” notably highlighting the work of pioneering women such as Evelyn Underhill and Dorothy L. Sayers as well as advancing the study of better-known Anglican forebears C. S. Lewis and Austin Farrer—always with her own distinctive concerns. A key interpreter of the Anglican tradition and with a keen eye to ensure the full recognition of women, these studies by Ann Loades are essential reading in Anglican, feminist, and twentieth-century theology.

When the author’s aging body and the post-polio symptoms it was manifesting made it impossible for her to undertake the physically strenuous ethnographic research in the array of American, European, African and Asian settings that underlay her book Doctors Without Borders and characterized her research throughout her career, she began writing ethnographic essays, drawing from a range of things she was seeing, experiencing, thinking and feeling at this juncture in her life.

Among the leitmotifs that pervade and interconnect these topically varied essays are lived experiences of physicians and patients, including patients who are physically handicapped, elderly, mortally ill or beyond the reach of medical care; the origins and consequences of epidemic outbreaks of old and new plague-like infectious diseases that occur and recur, despite the impressive advances of medicine; the concomitants and challenges of aging; the wellsprings, dynamics and significance of medical humanitarian action; engagement with a “beyond borders” world view; the occurrence of national and international events of major moral as well as political and legal import and repercussions, such as the travel ban on persons from certain countries with a predominantly Muslim population initiated by Donald Trump and the terrorist bombing in Brussels’s Zaventem airport; and the meaning and meaningfulness of teaching, exploring, questing and writing. Latently associated with these themes are the author’s social values and social conscience.

Composing these essays from a participant observer outlook heightens and enriches the author’s observations over the course of her daily life, enabling her to engage in “mind travel” to places and people she has intimately known in the past and to places she has yearningly hoped to visit but never has.

When the author’s aging body and the post-polio symptoms it was manifesting made it impossible for her to undertake the physically strenuous ethnographic research in the array of American, European, African and Asian settings that underlay her book Doctors Without Borders and characterized her research throughout her career, she began writing ethnographic essays, drawing from a range of things she was seeing, experiencing, thinking and feeling at this juncture in her life.

Among the leitmotifs that pervade and interconnect these topically varied essays are lived experiences of physicians and patients, including patients who are physically handicapped, elderly, mortally ill or beyond the reach of medical care; the origins and consequences of epidemic outbreaks of old and new plague-like infectious diseases that occur and recur, despite the impressive advances of medicine; the concomitants and challenges of aging; the wellsprings, dynamics and significance of medical humanitarian action; engagement with a “beyond borders” world view; the occurrence of national and international events of major moral as well as political and legal import and repercussions, such as the travel ban on persons from certain countries with a predominantly Muslim population initiated by Donald Trump and the terrorist bombing in Brussels’s Zaventem airport; and the meaning and meaningfulness of teaching, exploring, questing and writing. Latently associated with these themes are the author’s social values and social conscience.

Composing these essays from a participant observer outlook heightens and enriches the author’s observations over the course of her daily life, enabling her to engage in “mind travel” to places and people she has intimately known in the past and to places she has yearningly hoped to visit but never has.

The Animal Crossing virtual world is one of Japan’s most successful but unrecognised cultural exports, gaining a global audience during the COVID-19 pandemic among people who traditionally have not been attracted to networked computer games but are enchanted by the world’s emphasis of sociability and curation rather than violence. The book is the first major study of Animal Crossing, written in an incisive and engaging style for students, academics, non-specialist members of the public and businesspeople interested in the potential of an unconventional online global space that has diverse demographics.

The book has three strengths. It contextualises Animal Crossing within the history of computer games and global acceptance of Japanese aesthetics within popular culture alongside the Walkman, Hello Kitty, Anime, Manga and Godzilla. It brings together scholarly and popular literature without jargon, providing an accessible authoritative resource for people interested in different aspects of Animal Crossing in particular or consumer engagement with virtual worlds in general. It offers incisive comments about Animal Crossing as a legal, technological, social, cultural and commercial phenomenon. 

Those comments consider laws such as copyright, contract and marketing. They answer questions about who uses the virtual world, why and why not – drawing on research regarding online sociability and the pleasures of world-making. They discuss innovative aspects of Animal Crossing such as scope for users to incorporate art from a range of museums in personalised spaces curated by those users, visited by their friends and gamified by marketers, politicians and civil society advocates. Readers thus receive a rich interdisciplinary exploration covering things with which they are familiar and making links or providing an introduction to aspects that were previously unrecognised.

Hinge Epistemology is a new branch of philosophy inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view in On Certainty, that 'the questions that we raise, and our doubts, depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn' (OC 341). Hinge Epistemology is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting areas of epistemology and Wittgenstein studies. In connecting these two fields it brings a revived energy to both, opening them up to fresh developments. The essays in this volume extend the subject in terms of both depth and breadth in the following ways: 

(i) Fastening the hinges: In the opening essays of the book, proponents of the three major perspectives on the nature of hinge certainties strengthen their views, often by virtue of response to one another. These are followed by essays presenting new voices and challenges within hinge epistemology.

(ii) Opening the door: The second half of the book explores new applications and directions of hinge epistemology, particularly as it relates to the philosophy of mind, society, ethics, and the history of ideas. 

Hinge Epistemology is a new branch of philosophy inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view in On Certainty, that 'the questions that we raise, and our doubts, depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn' (OC 341). Hinge Epistemology is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting areas of epistemology and Wittgenstein studies. In connecting these two fields it brings a revived energy to both, opening them up to fresh developments. The essays in this volume extend the subject in terms of both depth and breadth in the following ways: 

(i) Fastening the hinges: In the opening essays of the book, proponents of the three major perspectives on the nature of hinge certainties strengthen their views, often by virtue of response to one another. These are followed by essays presenting new voices and challenges within hinge epistemology.

(ii) Opening the door: The second half of the book explores new applications and directions of hinge epistemology, particularly as it relates to the philosophy of mind, society, ethics, and the history of ideas. 

How do you make abstract historical interpretations authentic? This question troubled communist party leaders and propaganda historians in Hungary following the restoration of dictatorship after 1956. Accordingly, this book investigates the crooked history of the retrospective state revisions of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic between the years of its 30th and 40th anniversary, 1949 and 1959.

In recent decades the study of memory has become central to the historical discipline as a powerful conceptual tool to assess both the political-ideological implications of social constructions of the past and the writing of history itself. Yet, most of these investigations focus on postdictatorial situations, and suggest ways to understand how these societies confront their controversial and often traumatic pasts. In this volume, Péter Apor takes an in-depth look at a particular phenomenon – the First Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 – to illustrate how a dictatorship and a communist state remembers. Unlike other works analysing social memory, this book concentrates on authenticity as the crucial concept in establishing the success or failure of memory constructions, integrating the broad range of processes – political, scholarly, artistic – through which history is sought to be rendered authentic.

How do you make abstract historical interpretations authentic? This question troubled communist party leaders and propaganda historians in Hungary following the restoration of dictatorship after 1956. Accordingly, this book investigates the crooked history of the retrospective state revisions of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic between the years of its 30th and 40th anniversary, 1949 and 1959.

In recent decades the study of memory has become central to the historical discipline as a powerful conceptual tool to assess both the political-ideological implications of social constructions of the past and the writing of history itself. Yet, most of these investigations focus on postdictatorial situations, and suggest ways to understand how these societies confront their controversial and often traumatic pasts. In this volume, Péter Apor takes an in-depth look at a particular phenomenon – the First Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 – to illustrate how a dictatorship and a communist state remembers. Unlike other works analysing social memory, this book concentrates on authenticity as the crucial concept in establishing the success or failure of memory constructions, integrating the broad range of processes – political, scholarly, artistic – through which history is sought to be rendered authentic.

Fair Value Accounting: From Theory to Practice is a comprehensive guide to fair value measurement – one of the foundations of modern-day accounting. Fair value measurement is extremely important since it touches upon both accounting and finance. Many items in the financial statements are measured at fair value, e.g. financial instruments, items acquired in business combinations and, under IFRS, investment property. In addition, fair value is used extensively as a valuation base by corporate finance and valuation specialists. The book gradually unfolds the full theoretical framework for measuring fair value for accounting purposes, while providing clear, hands-on implementation guidelines. It includes concise and informative explanations, focusing on the theoretical and practical issues arising from the relevant accounting standards and using illustrative examples and further analysis.

The book covers fair value in accordance with the two most prevalent accounting systems used worldwide: International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP). Although they take very similar approaches to the topic, there are some slight, albeit significant, differences between them that are thoroughly discussed in the book.

The book combines professional accounting literature, standards and practice into a single well-rounded and user-friendly resource. The book is intended as an essential tool not only for professionals involved in preparing or auditing financial statements – such as accountants and financial managers – but also for practitioners in related domains, such as appraisers and preparers of valuations for legal proceedings based on fair value. The book includes many practical examples for students (specifically, accounting students as well as individuals preparing to take the CPA exams) and accounting and finance researchers as well as for other academic purposes. 

Dedicated to his father, Mevlüt, who made and sold his own brand of flavored soda or “Peri Gazozu” in a village in Anatolia, “Fairy Chimney Soda” is a collection of short stories by Turkish author, screenplay writer and actor Ercan Kesal. Written with a light, fairy-tale touch, Kesal is clear-eyed as he mines his memories of childhood and his early years as a doctor fulfilling his mandatory civil service in the remote villages of Anatolia. He explores the wonder and terror of childhood, the hardship of living through the turbulent years in the lead-up to the 1980 military coup and the anguish, insight and resolution that comes with death and dying. The stories are artfully layered cuts out of time, vignettes woven together by a common thread that brings the past into a vibrant, startling present. Each story is a little like a delicate patchwork, condensing an entire lifetime: now he is the proverbial country doctor; a zealous revolutionary; a young boy coming of age; an older man paying tribute to a father about to die. Although a collection of individual stories, “Fairy Chimney Soda” reads like a novella in that we come to know intimately Kesal’s mother and father and lasting childhood friends. It is a celebration of both his country and these people whom he dearly loved.

The stories capture the cultural, political and social landscape in the late twentieth century, casting light on some of the harsh realities that have plagued the Turkish Republic since its establishment in 1923. In many of them Kesal challenges the status quo, tackling the hard issues: state violence, terror, a patriarchal society and prejudice; they are stories in which the notion of fate still triumphs over the strength of individual free will. In them we see echoes of the Turkish storyteller Sait Faik and the stark clarity, precision and insight of Lydia Davis.

In crystal-clear prose, the stories are cinematic, bursting with color. In few words we see a young boy in the many trying stages of his life coming to grips with his relationship to his family, country and the world around him. He recalls that precise moment when he decides his mother should no longer bathe him, and later, when he is studying to become a doctor, he marvels at his near-mythical mother’s primal understanding of the world, and how this lies in stark and loving contrast with his commitment to science and his desire to positively effect change in his country.

These are cautionary tales unveiling hard truths, unsettling in their quick, dramatic shifts in mood, at times bleak and buckling under a philosophical pressure, at other times warm and uplifting, always rich with human wisdom. Matching with his presence on the silver screen, Kesal is a brave and bighearted writer: radical, self-questioning and perceptive. In its entirety “Fairy Chimney Soda” is a unique glimpse of life in Turkey in the late twentieth century, whimsical, poignant, at times radical, but always heartfelt, timeless, deeply personal sketches connected by common themes of love, death, faith, compassion and reconciliation.

It is the period just before the First World War. The multilingual, multifaith and multicultural Ottoman Empire is facing ruin and annihilation. Şehsuvar Sami is a young man from the city of Salonika whose dream is to move to Paris with his lover Ester and become a writer. However, the uprisings that begin in July 1908 in the Balkans are set to change his destiny, just as they will change the destiny of the entire country. A bit part in an assassination eventually turns him into one of the uprising’s most feared hitmen. Caught between his love of literature and the dark world of politics and struggling to find the strength to resist the pull of history, Şehsuvar ends up becoming a key figure in the new government’s intelligence network. His aim now is not to write novels that will draw people into a world of decency and beauty but to carry out his duties as a servant of the nation and defend his country, even if that means committing murder, mass murder. The reasoning is simple: in order to create a strong and independent country, one must be ready to commit atrocities.

Taking place in Istanbul, Salonika, Paris and Macedonia between 1908 and 1926, ‘Farewell, My Beautiful Homeland’ is the story of lives that have been turned upside down by rebellion, revolution and war. It is the story of the Greek declaration of independence, of the Jews of Salonika being forced into exile, of the Bulgarians fighting for their independence and of the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the struggle to create a new nation out of its crumbling ruins. It is also the story of one man’s search for his true calling amidst the chaos of a turbulent historical era, the story of a man caught between his love for his country and his love for his woman. ‘Farewell, My Beautiful Homeland’ is a story of unfulfilled dreams and the call of history. And underpinning it all is one fundamental question, one fundamental struggle: which takes precedence – the state or the people?

The book seeks to provide the general reader, student, and academic specialist a detailed examination of the Fascist and broader extreme right-wing community in Great Britain during the interwar years. Fascist groups began to form and grow during the 1920s, but became a more visible component of Britain’s political turmoil during the 1930s. The largest and most visible group was the British Union of Fascists (BUF; 1932–1940) led by Sir Oswald Mosley, called by some the “British Hitler.” The extreme right wing in Britain was, however, a larger political tendency than merely Mosley’s BUF. It included several explicitly Fascist groups, racial purity groups, a group of large press outlets, numerous high-profile individuals, and several sitting Conservative politicians. The BUF did not seriously run candidates in the 1935 elections and hence did not see any of its members elected to Parliament. But it was far from irrelevant. Members of the British far right led vocal campaigns in support of the continental dictatorships, for the extermination of Marxism, for the massive rearmament of the country, and for the modernizing and re-building of Britain as a Great Power. As such, the extreme right was a vocal and visible part of Britain’s political discourse of the time.

The book will operate on two levels, making it meaningful to multiple audiences. First, the book will provide a basic narrative description of the British Fascist movement and its various offshoots. This will include the principal organizations, key individuals, the essential components of its political ideology, and the events which saw the movement grow, decline, and then virtually disappear under government suppression and public outrage. Any interested general reader of modern history will be able to gain a basic understanding of the movement, its ideology, and its trajectory. It should thus be able to stand alone as a useful basic survey.

Second, the book puts forward an academic thesis and is based upon original, archival research. The chapters dissect the various components of the extreme right political program, and in each case identifies problematic contradictions. The far right routinely insisted that it alone had the modern, rational, and realistic answers for the new problems of the modern world. However, as will be explained in each case, the far-right program was riven with cross-purposes and ideological contradictions. Zander’s approach is to examine the extreme right by organizing its program into their three most urgent policy pre-occupations: Modernization, Empire, and War. By dissecting the extreme right agenda this way, each area of their political agenda reveals itself to have been seriously flawed with contradictory policies, means that did not match objectives, simple irrationality, and blatant immorality. In the final analysis, the principal academic thesis of the book concern the far right’s dream to return Britain to its earlier position of global economic, political, and cultural leadership, while employing a set of policies and means that would accomplish much the opposite – to, in fact, disengage it from the world and make Britain an insulated national fortress.

The last few years have seen a renewal of the extreme right wing as a political force, particularly in Europe and the United States. Several of the ideological components and policy priorities of Britain’s far right in the interwar years are quite similar to the extreme right movements of today. By examining the historical development of the far right of the time, perhaps some light may be shed on the resurgence of the far right today.

The book highlights how the signs of fashion showcase stories, hybridations, forms of feeling, from the classics of fashion in cinema, to fashion as cultural tradition in the global world, to digital media. Based on a strong socio-semiotic method (Barthes, The Language of Fashion is the main reference), the book crosses some of the main aspects of the contemporary culture of the clothed body: from time and space, to gender, to fashion as cultural translation, to the narratives included in the media convergence of our age. According to Jurji Lotman, fashion introduces the dynamic principle into seemingly inert spheres of the everyday. Fashion’s unexpected function of overturning received meaning is conveyed through its collocation within the dynamic storehouse of what Lotman calls the “sphere of the unpredictable.”. In this horizon, the concept of fashion as a worldly system of sense (Benjamin), generates different “worlds” through its signs.

Founding on Walter Benjamin’s conception of time and history, the book first focuses on time as a main category of fashion. Space is the other main category this book considers in relation to fashion.The book next focuses on the body to show how fashion is a system of images that communicates through stereotyped signs, cultural models and archetypes of imagination that produce and define sexual identities in society. Finally, the book focuses on fashion as a means of communication in the age of social networks.

Today as in times past, the figure of the dandy evokes the image of a fashionable male who achieves social influence by distinctive elegance in dress and sophisticated self-presentation. The book explores the history of Dandy as a cultural type across Europe and Russia from the eighteenth century through the present day, analysing different manifestations of dandyism from sparse minimalism to opulent richness. Olga Vainshtein offers a unique view on dandyism as a cultural tradition, based not merely on fashionable attire, but also as a particular lifestyle with specific standards of behaviour, bodily practices and conceptual approaches to dress. The dandy is described as the prototypical hero of the modern cult of celebrities. From clubbing manners, the techniques of virtual aristocratism, urban flâneurs and the correct way to examine people, Vainshtein walks us through the optical duels and the techniques of visual assessment at social gatherings. Readers will learn about strategies of subversive behaviour found in practical jokes, the fine art of noble scandal, dry wit, bare-faced impudence and mocking politeness. Vainshtein outlines the principles of dandyism through an examination of strategies of self-fashioning among famous dandies such as George Brummell, Count D’Orsay, Oscar Wilde and Robert de Montesquiou. Looking at dandyism as a nineteenth-century literary movement, Vainshtein examines representation of dandies in fiction. Along the way, the author offers the English-language reader something entirely new: a history of Russian and Soviet dandyism. Finally, a large section is devoted to the dandies of today, including the discussion of African sapeurs.

Today as in times past, the figure of the dandy evokes the image of a fashionable male who achieves social influence by distinctive elegance in dress and sophisticated self-presentation. The book explores the history of Dandy as a cultural type across Europe and Russia from the eighteenth century through the present day, analysing different manifestations of dandyism from sparse minimalism to opulent richness. Olga Vainshtein offers a unique view on dandyism as a cultural tradition, based not merely on fashionable attire, but also as a particular lifestyle with specific standards of behaviour, bodily practices and conceptual approaches to dress. The dandy is described as the prototypical hero of the modern cult of celebrities. From clubbing manners, the techniques of virtual aristocratism, urban flâneurs and the correct way to examine people, Vainshtein walks us through the optical duels and the techniques of visual assessment at social gatherings. Readers will learn about strategies of subversive behaviour found in practical jokes, the fine art of noble scandal, dry wit, bare-faced impudence and mocking politeness. Vainshtein outlines the principles of dandyism through an examination of strategies of self-fashioning among famous dandies such as George Brummell, Count D’Orsay, Oscar Wilde and Robert de Montesquiou. Looking at dandyism as a nineteenth-century literary movement, Vainshtein examines representation of dandies in fiction. Along the way, the author offers the English-language reader something entirely new: a history of Russian and Soviet dandyism. Finally, a large section is devoted to the dandies of today, including the discussion of African sapeurs.

China's economy has boomed, but a potentially disastrous side effect - along with pollution and a growing income gap between urban and rural regions - is the effects obesity will have on the country's fragile healthcare system. Today's overweight in China can look to a mixed future of bright economic hopes for their country, and poor and deteriorating health for themselves. From a situation 20 years ago when diets were limited by food availability, and famine was still a recent memory, China's urban centres have seen alarmingly rising rates of obesity. Throughout the country an estimated 200 million people out of a total population of around 1.3 billion were overweight (over 15%).

Why is this issue so important? Taking into account that the recent period of stable world economic growth has in large part been driven by the availability of cheap labour in China, which produces much of the goods that keep the retail tills ringing elsewhere in the world, the issue of China's rising obesity is an issue of potentially global economic significance. Consider a scenario just a few years down the line, where there are so many overweight urban Chinese, suffering from obesity-related illness, that the government, in order to pay for increased healthcare treatments, has to raise the levels of income and other tax to pay for this huge and continual expense.

For more information please see the book website: http://fatchina.anthempressblog.com

China's economy has boomed, but a potentially disastrous side effect - along with pollution and a growing income gap between urban and rural regions - is the effects obesity will have on the country's fragile healthcare system. Today's overweight in China can look to a mixed future of bright economic hopes for their country, and poor and deteriorating health for themselves. From a situation 20 years ago when diets were limited by food availability, and famine was still a recent memory, China's urban centres have seen alarmingly rising rates of obesity. Throughout the country an estimated 200 million people out of a total population of around 1.3 billion were overweight (over 15%).

Why is this issue so important? Taking into account that the recent period of stable world economic growth has in large part been driven by the availability of cheap labour in China, which produces much of the goods that keep the retail tills ringing elsewhere in the world, the issue of China's rising obesity is an issue of potentially global economic significance. Consider a scenario just a few years down the line, where there are so many overweight urban Chinese, suffering from obesity-related illness, that the government, in order to pay for increased healthcare treatments, has to raise the levels of income and other tax to pay for this huge and continual expense.

For more information please see the book website: http://fatchina.anthempressblog.com

'Feeding The World in the 21st Century: A Historical Analysis of Agriculture and Society' provides a historical understanding of agricultural development over the last two centuries. Characteristics of the period have included the opening of the prairies in the late 18th century, the invention of industrial fertilizer and the tractor's displacement of the horse. Such profound developments have led to an abundance of food and peace and prosperity within the world market. This situation began at the end of the American Civil War and continued until 2005, when prices rose in spite of increased production. Smedshaug gives a historical background of the current situation, while discussing the ultimate challenge of how to feed a world of 10 billion people. This challenge has to be met in the light of climate change, water shortage, and not least the declining availability of fossil fuel.

Smedshaug's analysis and recommendations underline the need for every country to have the freedom to establish an agricultural policy adapted to the given national natural conditions, as well as the need to put the producer at the heart of the policy in such a way that all countries can utilize their potential to produce food, and hence to feed the world.

‘Festivals, Affect and Identity’ offers an outline of areas of continental philosophy and critical theory, which involve high levels of abstractions, yet become more accessible when related to specific events and their detailed analysis. The case study material enables theories to become more understandable in relation to application, triangulation and comparison with different theoretical frameworks. It puts flesh on the ‘hard to get hold of’ nature of continental philosophy.

Maintaining continuity in the face of problems and ruptures and the interplay of fluidity and structure are central aspects explored and illustrated by ethnography focused on the affective dynamics of four festivals: the Palio in Siena and the Bravio in Montepulciano, both based on competitive territorial divisions; the Bruscello in Montepulciano and the Teatro Povero in Monticchiello, both theatres with links to sharecropping, a long established agrarian practice vanquished by modernity.  The detailed analysis applied to this selection of case studies offers a grounding of theoretical concepts and an example of how these may be applied to analyse different phenomena. This approach sees the imprint of environmental and historical conditions as generative of a dynamic process of ever evolving community identities for which festivals provide expression, while also providing a way of living with them.

‘Fighting Scholars’ brings to the fore the ethnographic study of combat sports and martial arts as a means of exploring embodied human existence. The book’s main claim is that such activities represent privileged grounds to access different social dimensions, such as emotion, violence, pain, gender, ethnicity and religion. In order to explore these dimensions, the concept of ‘habitus’ is presented prominently as an epistemic remedy for the academic distant gaze of the effaced academic body. The different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to crystallize in Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Body and Soul’: the construction of a ‘carnal sociology’ that constitutes an exploration of the social world ‘from’ the body.

The book is divided into three sections. In the first section, the editors introduce the field, providing a typology of existing literature. The second section contains the contributions of the authors, discussing their respective approaches to embodied ethnography, their use of the concept of ‘habitus’, and ethnographic findings. The third section contains a conclusion by the editors – reflecting on existing conceptions of ‘habitus’ and interdisciplinary possibilities for rethinking the concept – and an epilogue by Loïc Wacquant critically assessing the whole volume.

‘Fighting Scholars’ brings to the fore the ethnographic study of combat sports and martial arts as a means of exploring embodied human existence. The book’s main claim is that such activities represent privileged grounds to access different social dimensions, such as emotion, violence, pain, gender, ethnicity and religion. In order to explore these dimensions, the concept of ‘habitus’ is presented prominently as an epistemic remedy for the academic distant gaze of the effaced academic body. The different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to crystallize in Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Body and Soul’: the construction of a ‘carnal sociology’ that constitutes an exploration of the social world ‘from’ the body.

The book is divided into three sections. In the first section, the editors introduce the field, providing a typology of existing literature. The second section contains the contributions of the authors, discussing their respective approaches to embodied ethnography, their use of the concept of ‘habitus’, and ethnographic findings. The third section contains a conclusion by the editors – reflecting on existing conceptions of ‘habitus’ and interdisciplinary possibilities for rethinking the concept – and an epilogue by Loïc Wacquant critically assessing the whole volume.

This book gives the first no-nonsense, hands-on account of the financing principles and perspectives for Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs), the new kid on the block in the battle against climate change. NAMAs are finding their own identity, and most importantly, finding a new financial basis without relying on a carbon market and carbon credit. While the NAMA model may be the right instrument at the right time, it is spawned from the climate change negotiation sphere that continues to suffer from its lack of interaction with the other spheres involved in its actual deployment. Despite 20 years of negotiations, a barrier remains between concept and action. The disconnect is first and foremost between the political sphere and the private-sector sphere, and is particularly rooted in the understanding – or misunderstanding – of finance. This book bridges the gap by addressing policymaking and private sector financing in one volume. It disarms myths, hides nothing behind political correctness and applies a good measure of common sense to advance guidance for the financing of actions that will allow developing countries, having become the prime source of greenhouse gas emissions, to contribute to the global battle against climate change.

This book gives the first no-nonsense, hands-on account of the financing principles and perspectives for Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs), the new kid on the block in the battle against climate change. NAMAs are finding their own identity, and most importantly, finding a new financial basis without relying on a carbon market and carbon credit. While the NAMA model may be the right instrument at the right time, it is spawned from the climate change negotiation sphere that continues to suffer from its lack of interaction with the other spheres involved in its actual deployment. Despite 20 years of negotiations, a barrier remains between concept and action. The disconnect is first and foremost between the political sphere and the private-sector sphere, and is particularly rooted in the understanding – or misunderstanding – of finance. This book bridges the gap by addressing policymaking and private sector financing in one volume. It disarms myths, hides nothing behind political correctness and applies a good measure of common sense to advance guidance for the financing of actions that will allow developing countries, having become the prime source of greenhouse gas emissions, to contribute to the global battle against climate change.

The title of this book may seem to confuse two separate disciplines – finance and macroeconomics. However, it is based on the fact that finance and macroeconomics were integrated, at least in their formative years. It is a natural extension of a line of research that dominated monetary theory in the early part of the 20th century. Economists such as Keynes, Robertson, Hawtrey, Fisher, Hayek and Schumpeter sought to blend the analysis of business cycles with their (often first-hand) experience of money and financial markets. The result was a monetary theory that provided the fertile background to what came to be called macroeconomics. However, in the post-war period, the monetary aspects of this theory dropped out of sight in the neo-classical synthesis and hydraulic Keynesianism. Post-Keynesians such as Davidson and Minsky have done much to try to restore the monetary aspects of the theory, but the other – more technical– aspects of financial analysis have been ignored. Paradoxically, these aspects now form an integral part of the curriculum of finance and business departments and are the tools of the trade in financial analysis. This book aims to show how these tools of financial analysis were initially part of the early investigations of macroeconomics and how they maybe used to provide a realistic analysis of the behavior of modern financial economies.

Financing the Entrepreneurial Venture focuses on financial management within entrepreneurial firms. Most of these are young firms, although some are more established. The book examines these firms at all phases of their life cycle, from the initial idea generation to the ultimate harvesting of the venture. The book covers firms in a diverse set of industries including high technology, low technology, and services. A significant fraction of the cases focus on non-U.S. ventures. Additionally, the issues of gender and diversity are addressed in a number of settings.

Financing the Entrepreneurial Venture entails understanding both sides of the balance sheet. Consequently, the book looks at issues related to both sides as well. The first section of the book explores how to evaluate entrepreneurial business opportunities, that is, the asset side of the balance sheet. The skills necessary to make good investment decisions include developing a framework of analysis for business opportunities. The process also entails reinforcing and enhancing valuation skills. With these tools, one will be able to qualitatively and quantitatively assess markets and opportunities.

The second section of the book examines how entrepreneurial investments are financed. An emphasis is placed on understanding financial institutions and deal terms. It then examines how entrepreneurial firms which have succeeded need to continually finance the scaling of their operations. What are the financial issues that affect these types of firms? How do the sources and terms of financing change? This transition to the second product or opportunity is often the most difficult time for the entrepreneurial enterprise. The book then concludes with an examination of harvesting. Unless an entrepreneur plans for the future realization on investment, he or she could get left holding the bag with little value having been created.

‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ explores aspects of gender, race and region in films and television produced in the northern Australian state of Queensland. Drawing on a range of scholarly sources and an extensive filmography, the essays in the book investigate poetics and production histories from the 'period' films of the Australian cinema revival of the 1970s to contemporary 'Queensland-genre' films, highlighting the resonances of regional locations amid the energetic growth of the film industry, and promotion of Queensland as a production destination.

‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ comprises eight essays, an introduction and conclusion, and the analysis of poetics and cultural geographies is focused on landmark films and television. The first section of the book, ‘Backtracks: Landscape and Identity’, refers to films from and before the revival, beginning with the 1978 film 'The Irishman' as an example of heritage cinema in which performances of gender and race, like the setting, suggest a romanticised and uncritical image of colonial Australia. It is compared to Baz Luhrmann’s 'Australia' (2008) and several other films. In the second chapter, ‘Heritage Enigmatic’, 'The Irishman' is also drawn into comparison with Charles Chauvel’s ‘Jedda’ (1955), as films that incorporate Indigenous performances in this heritage discourse through the role of voice and sound. In Part 2, ‘Silences in Paradise’, the first essay, ‘Tropical Gothic’, focuses on Rachel Perkins’s 'Radiance' (1998) as a landmark post-colonial film that questions the connotations of icons of paradise in Queensland. The discussion leads to films, in the next chapter, ‘Island Girls Friday’, that figure women on Queensland islands, spanning the pre-revival and contemporary era: ‘Age of Consent’ (1969), ‘Nim’s Island’ (2008) and ‘Uninhabited’ (2010). Part 3, ‘Masculine Dramas of the Coast’ moves to the Gold Coast, in films dating from before and since the current spike in transnational production at the Warner Roadshow film studios there, namely, 'The Coolangatta Gold' (1984), 'Peter Pan' (2003), and 'Sanctum' (2011). The final section, ‘Regional Backtracks’, turns, first, to two television series, ‘Remote Area Nurse’ (2006), and ‘The Straits’ (2012), that share unique provenance of production in the Torres Strait and far north regions of Queensland, while, in the final chapter, the iconic outback districts of western Queensland figure the convergence of land, landscape and location in films with potent perspectives on Indigenous histories in ‘The Proposition’ (2005) and ‘Mystery Road’ (2013). ‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ presents the various regions as syncretic spaces subject to transitions of social and industry practices over time.

‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ explores aspects of gender, race and region in films and television produced in the northern Australian state of Queensland. Drawing on a range of scholarly sources and an extensive filmography, the essays in the book investigate poetics and production histories from the 'period' films of the Australian cinema revival of the 1970s to contemporary 'Queensland-genre' films, highlighting the resonances of regional locations amid the energetic growth of the film industry, and promotion of Queensland as a production destination.

‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ comprises eight essays, an introduction and conclusion, and the analysis of poetics and cultural geographies is focused on landmark films and television. The first section of the book, ‘Backtracks: Landscape and Identity’, refers to films from and before the revival, beginning with the 1978 film 'The Irishman' as an example of heritage cinema in which performances of gender and race, like the setting, suggest a romanticised and uncritical image of colonial Australia. It is compared to Baz Luhrmann’s 'Australia' (2008) and several other films. In the second chapter, ‘Heritage Enigmatic’, 'The Irishman' is also drawn into comparison with Charles Chauvel’s ‘Jedda’ (1955), as films that incorporate Indigenous performances in this heritage discourse through the role of voice and sound. In Part 2, ‘Silences in Paradise’, the first essay, ‘Tropical Gothic’, focuses on Rachel Perkins’s 'Radiance' (1998) as a landmark post-colonial film that questions the connotations of icons of paradise in Queensland. The discussion leads to films, in the next chapter, ‘Island Girls Friday’, that figure women on Queensland islands, spanning the pre-revival and contemporary era: ‘Age of Consent’ (1969), ‘Nim’s Island’ (2008) and ‘Uninhabited’ (2010). Part 3, ‘Masculine Dramas of the Coast’ moves to the Gold Coast, in films dating from before and since the current spike in transnational production at the Warner Roadshow film studios there, namely, 'The Coolangatta Gold' (1984), 'Peter Pan' (2003), and 'Sanctum' (2011). The final section, ‘Regional Backtracks’, turns, first, to two television series, ‘Remote Area Nurse’ (2006), and ‘The Straits’ (2012), that share unique provenance of production in the Torres Strait and far north regions of Queensland, while, in the final chapter, the iconic outback districts of western Queensland figure the convergence of land, landscape and location in films with potent perspectives on Indigenous histories in ‘The Proposition’ (2005) and ‘Mystery Road’ (2013). ‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ presents the various regions as syncretic spaces subject to transitions of social and industry practices over time.

Eugene O’Neill wrote his most enduring and important plays after he won international acclaim as the first and only American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936. In the midst of the Great Depression, with his health failing and spirits sunk, he and his third wife, former actress Carlotta Monterey, moved to California to escape the materialism and commercialism of a declining “West,” and they built a new home called Tao House. A reasonably good translation of tao is “the way,” and in this house, which was largely the creation of Carlotta, he found the way to his most famous play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

As an unusually explicit autobiographical drama, this play returns to 1912, the outset of O’Neill’s writing career, when he confronted tragedy in his family story and found a way to dramatize his mother, father, brother, and himself in a way that has resonated with audiences since its publication and production in 1956. But this book argues that the play originates as much in the moment of its creation, 1939–1941—in the family relationships, the historical circumstances, and the fact that this work would represent a moment of closure of his great career.

Key to this heroic story of creation is the intervention of his wife, Carlotta, whose diaries enable a day-to-day observation of how the play was written. She was the driving force behind the design of Tao House, and she managed the rhythms and patterns of life within its architecture. It was her masterpiece, just as Long Day’s Journey was his. This book develops a close reading of their house and marriage and also uses many of O’Neill’s previous plays to illuminate the breakthrough of Long Day’s Journey.

This book is the most granular and at the same time the most far-reaching inquiry into how this quintessential play was written (and almost not written) and how it came into the world.

In the twelve studies collected in this book, the collaborators take their points of departure from the thesis that the initial exchanges of post-war letters between exiles from Nazi Germany and former colleagues and friends who remained in Germany provide unique insights into the aspirations, hopes, and fears of both sets of writers, as well as the costs of both types of experiences, varied as they are. The best-known of such exchanges, subjected to two quite distinct studies in the book, is the public correspondence between Thomas Mann and Walter von Molo, in the course of which Mann sets forth his bitter reasons for failing to return to Germany at the end of the war. Another familiar correspondence examined anew in the book is of a radically different kind, consisting mainly of letters by Hannah Arendt to Martin Heidegger, where the confluence of personal, emotional currents with questions of academic weight define a distinctive, troubling connection, indicative of quite distinct costs of exile. Included in the collection are also fresh studies of figures who may be less well-known but whose distinctive responses to the challenges posed by first letters provide matter for fresh insights into exile and its liquidation. The first essay in the book and the last focus on questions of method and interpretation in studies of this valuable kind of evidence. Apart from the rewarding historiographical findings of these inquiries, they also offer a demanding contrast in methods and theoretical claims.

This volume of essays is based on a conference held in July 2009 at Trinity College, Cambridge to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Edward FitzGerald (1809) and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of his ‘Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ (1859). The ‘Rubáiyát’, loosely based on the verses attributed to the eleventh-century Persian writer, Omar Khayyám, has become one of the most widely known poems in the world, republished virtually every year from 1879 (the year of FitzGerald’s fourth edition) to the present day, and translated into over eighty different languages. And yet, with a few exceptions, it has been systematically ignored or at best patronized by the academic establishment. This volume sets out to explore the reasons for both the popularity and the neglect. Broadly speaking, the essays are divided into two main blocks. The first six chapters focus primarily on the poem’s literary qualities (including consideration of its place in the tradition of verse translation into English, the idea of ‘nothingness’, and ‘syntax and sexuality’), the last five on aspects of its reception (including essays on the late-Victorian Omar Khayyám Club, on American parodies, and on the many illustrated editions). They are linked by three essays that address key ‘facilitators’ in the poem’s transmission (including the significant but neglected issue of cheap reprints).

This volume of essays is based on a conference held in July 2009 at Trinity College, Cambridge to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Edward FitzGerald (1809) and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of his ‘Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ (1859). The ‘Rubáiyát’, loosely based on the verses attributed to the eleventh-century Persian writer, Omar Khayyám, has become one of the most widely known poems in the world, republished virtually every year from 1879 (the year of FitzGerald’s fourth edition) to the present day, and translated into over eighty different languages. And yet, with a few exceptions, it has been systematically ignored or at best patronized by the academic establishment. This volume sets out to explore the reasons for both the popularity and the neglect. Broadly speaking, the essays are divided into two main blocks. The first six chapters focus primarily on the poem’s literary qualities (including consideration of its place in the tradition of verse translation into English, the idea of ‘nothingness’, and ‘syntax and sexuality’), the last five on aspects of its reception (including essays on the late-Victorian Omar Khayyám Club, on American parodies, and on the many illustrated editions). They are linked by three essays that address key ‘facilitators’ in the poem’s transmission (including the significant but neglected issue of cheap reprints).

‘Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa’ studies the political economy of agrarian transformation in the Middle East and North Africa. Examining Egypt and Tunisia in detail as case studies, it critiques the dominant tropes of food security offered by the international financial institutions and promotes the importance of small-scale family farming in developing sustainable food sovereignty. Egypt and Tunisia are located in the context of the broader Middle East and broader processes of war, environmental transformation and economic reform.

The book contributes to uncovering the historical backdrop and contemporary pressures in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for the uprisings of 2010 and 2011. It also explores the continued failure of post-uprising counter-revolutionary governments to directly address issues of rural development that put the position and role of small farmers centre stage.

‘Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa’ uniquely presents a political economy of agrarian transformation in the MENA region by problematising the persistent politicisation of food and rural (under)development exemplified in the case studies of Egypt and Tunisia. These cases highlight the ways in which de-development has led to the persistent impoverishment of the countryside and its uneven consequences for the ways it reproduced power, politics and inequality. The political economy of food in the region is played out in the broader complex of global food regimes and their contestation by counter-hegemonic initiatives for food sovereignty.

‘Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa’ studies the political economy of agrarian transformation in the Middle East and North Africa. Examining Egypt and Tunisia in detail as case studies, it critiques the dominant tropes of food security offered by the international financial institutions and promotes the importance of small-scale family farming in developing sustainable food sovereignty. Egypt and Tunisia are located in the context of the broader Middle East and broader processes of war, environmental transformation and economic reform.

The book contributes to uncovering the historical backdrop and contemporary pressures in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for the uprisings of 2010 and 2011. It also explores the continued failure of post-uprising counter-revolutionary governments to directly address issues of rural development that put the position and role of small farmers centre stage.

‘Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa’ uniquely presents a political economy of agrarian transformation in the MENA region by problematising the persistent politicisation of food and rural (under)development exemplified in the case studies of Egypt and Tunisia. These cases highlight the ways in which de-development has led to the persistent impoverishment of the countryside and its uneven consequences for the ways it reproduced power, politics and inequality. The political economy of food in the region is played out in the broader complex of global food regimes and their contestation by counter-hegemonic initiatives for food sovereignty.

Did you know that the uranium used to bomb the citizens of Hiroshima was mined at a forbidden site known as ‘the money place’ by First Nation people in northern Canada? Or have you heard about the environmental damage and social upheavals at the Atomic City of Oak Ridge? And how about the bikini swimwear? Did you know that the gaze on a woman’s belly button was that of military men carrying out atomic bombardments of the Bikini Atoll while fetishising ‘sex bombs’ and (an)atomic ‘bombshells’? And how about the poor Pacific Islanders who got their atolls blown to pieces? Have you heard about the colonial history of violence and oppression of those whose only aspiration was to live in peace with their coconut islands? And everyone is talking about climate change these days. Did you know that the debate emerged as a reaction to the fear of ordinary citizens wondering if atomic bombs would blow up the entire sky?

If some of this was news to you, it might have to do with how the story of atomic bombs has been told. The truism that history is written by its winners is very much the case in the literature about how the bomb came about, with numerous apologetic books most often written by U.S. scholars. These are usually cast as stories of the tormented souls of scientists who made a ‘Faustian bargain’ with the military in pursuit of atomic knowledge. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the nuke’s ‘father’, is repeatedly centre stage, as in the case of the recent film about him. These are elitist stories that more often than not ignore the suffering and violence of the bomb to laypeople in general, and to marginalised groups in particular. This book offers alternative perspectives.

The book examines the impact of aid to the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip from the 1993 Oslo Agreement up to 2013. It attempts to go beyond the general notion that the Israeli occupation is the main instrument of control and de-development and rather tries to investigate these aspects and the dynamics that have surrounded foreign aid delivery in the Territory. At the socio-economic level, the book explores how donors’ definition of partner for peace has exacerbated socio-economic inequalities within the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. The book also looks at how foreign aid has been used as an instrument for particular groups to advance politically, and through this socially and economically. Hence, the book attempts to investigate the resultant socio-economic imbalances within Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.

The book employs the concept of trusteeship. According to this concept, the book argues how aid agencies use development assistance to impose forms of control and governance over underdeveloped people. The book also investigates how trusteeship works under the general assumption that development intervention is designed to a) assist underdeveloped people overcome their socio-economic problem; b) protect developed people from the surplus people (underdeveloped) who are perceived as a threat to the developed world, thus required development intervention. 

The book also explores the extension of control over the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip by examining foreign aid delivery through the Palestinian Authority, the NGO sector, and UNRWA. It proposes that the ‘partner for peace’ paradigm essentially used to govern the relationship between Western doors and the Palestinian Authority demonstrates that the Palestinian Authority had to fulfil security interests that best serve the interests of Israel rather than the Palestinians.

The book examines the impact of aid to the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip from the 1993 Oslo Agreement up to 2013. It attempts to go beyond the general notion that the Israeli occupation is the main instrument of control and de-development and rather tries to investigate these aspects and the dynamics that have surrounded foreign aid delivery in the Territory. At the socio-economic level, the book explores how donors’ definition of partner for peace has exacerbated socio-economic inequalities within the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. The book also looks at how foreign aid has been used as an instrument for particular groups to advance politically, and through this socially and economically. Hence, the book attempts to investigate the resultant socio-economic imbalances within Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.

The book employs the concept of trusteeship. According to this concept, the book argues how aid agencies use development assistance to impose forms of control and governance over underdeveloped people. The book also investigates how trusteeship works under the general assumption that development intervention is designed to a) assist underdeveloped people overcome their socio-economic problem; b) protect developed people from the surplus people (underdeveloped) who are perceived as a threat to the developed world, thus required development intervention. 

The book also explores the extension of control over the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip by examining foreign aid delivery through the Palestinian Authority, the NGO sector, and UNRWA. It proposes that the ‘partner for peace’ paradigm essentially used to govern the relationship between Western doors and the Palestinian Authority demonstrates that the Palestinian Authority had to fulfil security interests that best serve the interests of Israel rather than the Palestinians.

Christine Jacobs, a law professor with a passion for Russian poetry and film she owes to her mom, teaches the law of AI at a law school in the US Midwest. Her former boyfriend, Paul Gantt, and his Dutch college buddy Bart are cofounders of Eidya, a technology company named after a Greek goddess of knowledge that aims to reach true transhumanism: allowing humans to transfer into humanoid robots that look like them using personal data, including data obtained via a subcutaneous chip Eidya invented,to transfer the personality of humans. The US military is interested in doing the same with its best soldiers just as the UN begins to work on a new international treaty on the use of robots in war. Dr. Jacobs is called upon to provide advice both to Eidya and to the military while teaching her classes, in which she discussed what it means to be human in the age of AI, humanoid robots, and cyborgs as her boyfriend prepares the world for what’s next. Are the Transfers persons? Will they behave like the humans they are replacing? How will they relate to humans, and to each other? How will governments react to their presence? What legal responses will their arrival trigger? The situation develops in unexpected ways on several continents.

Another distinguishing feature of the book is its use of poetry to build a triangular relationship between humans, robots, and death. The story ends with a nod to climate change activism and the recent trend in publishing dubbed “doomer lit.”

The main character is Christine Jacobs, a law professor who teaches Robot Law and loves Russian poetry and movies. The other main characters are Paul Gantt, founder and chief of Transhuman Technologist at Eidya and wine connoisseur, and his boss, Bart Van Dijk, a Dutch multibillionaire. The supporting cast includes Koharu Tanaka, Chief Biologist; Jeremy Sigall, Chief Engineer; Jane Armstrong, a US Army General in charge of robot warfare; and a number of law students.

Christine Jacobs, a law professor with a passion for Russian poetry and film she owes to her mom, teaches the law of AI at a law school in the US Midwest. Her former boyfriend, Paul Gantt, and his Dutch college buddy Bart are cofounders of Eidya, a technology company named after a Greek goddess of knowledge that aims to reach true transhumanism: allowing humans to transfer into humanoid robots that look like them using personal data, including data obtained via a subcutaneous chip Eidya invented,to transfer the personality of humans. The US military is interested in doing the same with its best soldiers just as the UN begins to work on a new international treaty on the use of robots in war. Dr. Jacobs is called upon to provide advice both to Eidya and to the military while teaching her classes, in which she discussed what it means to be human in the age of AI, humanoid robots, and cyborgs as her boyfriend prepares the world for what’s next. Are the Transfers persons? Will they behave like the humans they are replacing? How will they relate to humans, and to each other? How will governments react to their presence? What legal responses will their arrival trigger? The situation develops in unexpected ways on several continents.

Another distinguishing feature of the book is its use of poetry to build a triangular relationship between humans, robots, and death. The story ends with a nod to climate change activism and the recent trend in publishing dubbed “doomer lit.”

The main character is Christine Jacobs, a law professor who teaches Robot Law and loves Russian poetry and movies. The other main characters are Paul Gantt, founder and chief of Transhuman Technologist at Eidya and wine connoisseur, and his boss, Bart Van Dijk, a Dutch multibillionaire. The supporting cast includes Koharu Tanaka, Chief Biologist; Jeremy Sigall, Chief Engineer; Jane Armstrong, a US Army General in charge of robot warfare; and a number of law students.

Authored by one of the leading scholars of German Indology, “Fortified Cities in Ancient India” offers a comparative exploration of the development of towns and cities in ancient India. Based on in-depth textual and archeological research, Professor Dieter Schlingloff’s work presents for the first time the striking outcomes of intertwining data garnered from a wide range of sources. This volume scrutinizes much of the established knowledge on urban fortifications in South Asia, advancing new conceptions based on an authoritative, far-reaching study.

Authored by one of the leading scholars of German Indology, “Fortified Cities in Ancient India” offers a comparative exploration of the development of towns and cities in ancient India. Based on in-depth textual and archeological research, Professor Dieter Schlingloff’s work presents for the first time the striking outcomes of intertwining data garnered from a wide range of sources. This volume scrutinizes much of the established knowledge on urban fortifications in South Asia, advancing new conceptions based on an authoritative, far-reaching study.

‘Foundations of Natural Gas Price Formation’ examines the fundamentals of natural gas price formation and the five principal features that make it unique in the world of commodities. It presents a model of hybrid gas pricing developed by Sergei Komlev from his detailed analysis of the interlinked impact of these features that is presented as a corrective to potential market failure.

Using mainstream economic theory, the book presents hybrid-pricing mechanisms not previously analyzed. Through a failure to understand the role of hybrid-pricing, boosters of spot pricing mechanisms through gas hubs are promoting an incorrect understanding of gas markets that will lead to market failure and to potential critical supply shortages in the near-term future. ‘Foundations of Natural Gas Price Formation’ defends the system of oil-indexed pricing as an accurate, market-based mechanism that has stood the test of time.

‘Foundations of Natural Gas Price Formation’ examines the fundamentals of natural gas price formation and the five principal features that make it unique in the world of commodities. It presents a model of hybrid gas pricing developed by Sergei Komlev from his detailed analysis of the interlinked impact of these features that is presented as a corrective to potential market failure.

Using mainstream economic theory, the book presents hybrid-pricing mechanisms not previously analyzed. Through a failure to understand the role of hybrid-pricing, boosters of spot pricing mechanisms through gas hubs are promoting an incorrect understanding of gas markets that will lead to market failure and to potential critical supply shortages in the near-term future. ‘Foundations of Natural Gas Price Formation’ defends the system of oil-indexed pricing as an accurate, market-based mechanism that has stood the test of time.

Focusing on four poets who because of their distinctive profiles illustrate especially well the opportunities and pitfalls of writing science poetry during the long eighteenth century “Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin” offers numerous close readings that shed light not only on standard versions of the sublime but also on these idiosyncratic variants: the apologetic (Abraham Cowley), the illicit (James Thomson), the perverse (Henry Brooke) and the atheistic (Erasmus Darwin).

Recurrent concerns include the similarities and differences among the languages of poetry, science and religion. Of the poets analyzed all but Thomson wrote extensive notes to accompany their lines, permitting further comparison of languages, in this case between the same authors’ poetry and prose.

Topics covered include the Royal Society, the scientific revolution, astronomy, botany, chemistry, telescopy, microscopy, the anthropic principle, the clockwork universe, evolution, intelligent design, comets, meteors, light, the aurora borealis, the sun, the moon, the milky way, analogies, mimetic prosody, poetic diction and the value to poetry or science of fable and myth.

This book examines the question of aesthetic experience in the novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Marcel Proust, Tom McCarthy and Rachel Cusk in order to propose a reconsideration of aesthetic experience informed by literature and philosophy in equal measure. The introduction suggests an alternative four moments (of aesthetic experience) to Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgement, derived in part from my four literary authors respectively: curation, quietness, violence and disconnection. Taken collectively, the four moments show the danger of becoming too invested or interested in aesthetic experience, as well as patience and openness toward the creative act of writing. While these four moments are not meant as determinations, taken together, they offer a picture of aesthetic experience as involuntary, subject to chance and resistant to calculation on the part of the aesthetic subject. Besides contributing to the scholarship on each of the four novelists, this book advances a theory of the aesthetic that shifts away from the framework of judging objects to focus instead on experience and how it is articulated both within and beyond literature. It is here that the theory of aesthetic experience benefits from literature’s singularity: no one text or passage can serve as an example that would adequately circumscribe the field of aesthetic experience, just as no one philosophical example could, and yet the reflective nature of the literary text demands a rigorous look at aesthetic experience without the restrictions of a totalising philosophical system.
The two ‘negative’ moments – represented by Huysmans’s À rebours and McCarthy’s Remainder – besides ending poorly for the protagonists, wind up with a foreclosure of aesthetic experience. For Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, who attempts to sustain aesthetic experience at will via curation, the fantasy falls apart, leaving him ill and necessitating his dreaded return to society. For McCarthy’s unnamed narrator who is engaged throughout the novel with various projects of re-enactments, the story ends violently, with bloodshed and a plane hijacking. Theoretically, these novels provide a cautionary tale about the impulse to seek out and even domesticate the aesthetic object.
On the contrary, the two ‘positive’ moments – represented by Proust’s Recherche and Cusk’s Outline trilogy – each involve narrators and characters who are invested in the creative act of writing. Two particular critically underrepresented passages from Proust can help articulate the ‘quiet’ moment of aesthetic experience: without relying on works of art, they are theoretically compelling in their refusal to theorise themselves, unlike the more popular passages from the novel. Cusk’s novels present the moment of disconnection – that is, the sense of an experience being dislodged from any particular narrative or plot. And yet, each of the characters in question are creative writers, meaning that this everyday feeling of alienation tends to factor into a productive, artistic impulse.
In conclusion, these four moments are tied together as they pertain to the nature (and boundaries) of aesthetic experience in general. Just as Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgement seem to be grouped in pairs – disinterest and purposiveness without purpose on one hand, and universality and necessity on the other hand – these four moments can be grouped and set apart to help reconsider what we mean when we talk about aesthetic experience.

This book presents the Framework Knowledge Acquisition Design, indicated for the development of scientific and technological research that demand the dialogue of academic and non-academic researchers for the configuration of the unit of knowledge, established in a transdisciplinary methodology of co-production in a diachronic study of the main theoretical frameworks, methodological and contextual, and with the presentation of selected frameworks of transdisciplinary co-production.

The work can be classified both as a reference work in Transdisciplinary Research Methodology and as a textbook to guide the Transdisciplinary Coproduction in the context of innovation and organizational and social development. The constituent elements of the work that make it a reference work in Research Methodology are the theoretical foundations on the unity of knowledge, on the issue of transdisciplinary and on co-production, in a trajectory that begins with the first thinkers of the renaissance (and its basis in the philosophy of classical antiquity) addressing contemporaneity, supported by the main thinkers of transdisciplinary and integrative research. 

The constituent elements of the work that make it a textbook is the presentation of the main conceptual frameworks on the partnership between academic and non-academic actors (public and private) for the co-production of scientific knowledge, which will be the basis for the presentation of a new method that is sufficiently robust to accommodate from scientific initiation to complex, deep and substantial doctoral studies.

Genuine transdisciplinary research aims to coordinate different bodies of knowledge, after identifying gaps in the science, technology and society tripod filling these gaps with appropriate scientific methodology and theoretical references. It is the recognition that specialized knowledge bases are dispersed in the very heterogeneity of reality and that, therefore, only an integrative approach will be able to capture essential features of the context in which the problem is inserted. It is to bring to the scientific framework relevant social problems that need a solution and lead to the relevant problems that need a solution, wherever they are, science.

In this context, the involvement of non-academic actors in the disciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary continuum advances towards transdisciplinary research, intensifying the cooperation and integration of various fields of knowledge in solving the research problem. Transdisciplinary, in a broad sense, can be described like a movement as the shift from fragmentation to relationality, from unity to the integrative process, from situated homogeneity to heterogeneity, from linearity to non-linearity, from simplicity to complexity, from universality to practices , from isolation to collaboration and cooperation. The appreciation and increase of these forms of interaction in search of the unity of knowledge beckon a new form of articulation between society and academia, especially for conducting scientific research, fostering new partnerships between university and society.

This book brings the fundamentals of the changes that have become necessary to transcend and integrate disciplinary paradigms and the theoretical and methodological references for the realization of scientific researches that consider this scenario, including the presentation of a robust new conceptual framework for academic research in the field the integration engineering and knowledge governance.

‘Frank Norris and American Naturalism’ brings together in one volume Donald Pizer’s lifelong exploration of Frank Norris’s work, ranging from his 1955 discussion of point of view in ‘The Octopus’ to his 2010 essay on the thematic unity of that novel. The essays as a whole seek to demonstrate both the coherence of Norris’s thought and his contribution toward the establishment of a specific form of naturalism in America. The collection’s principal focus is Norris’s most enduring works, the novels ‘McTeague’ and ‘The Octopus’, though his other fiction and literary criticism are also discussed.

Although Norris died at 32, his literary output during his brief career has played an important role in efforts to interpret the nature of American naturalism. He was one of the few naturalists to write literary criticism, a body of writing which casts much light on his self-conception as a naturalist, and his novels ‘McTeague’ and ‘The Octopus’ rely on two of the most distinctive forms of naturalistic fiction—the sensationalistic novel of violence and the panoramic novel of social protest. Furthermore, though he was deeply indebted to Zola’s fiction, he broke free of Zolaesque themes in ways which are significant for most later American naturalists. Thus, despite the brevity of his career, Norris is a seminal figure in the history of American literary naturalism.

Freedom Isn’t Free takes an analytical look at political, economic, social and moral trade-offs in a world in flux. Highly readable and very accessible, the volume’s collected foreign affairs essays are wide-ranging and engaging—from manageable regional issues to dramatic geopolitical tensions—presented not as distant complexities, but as relatable events. Freedom Isn’t Free provides a strategic guide to some of the most important—sometimes intractable—issues of the day. It pays special attention to superpower America's role in contemporary geopolitics and her shifting policy options given leadership, competition, domestic governing challenges and self-inflicted nativism. Unlike most International Relations texts, Freedom Isn’t Free investigates actual, contemporary themes that nest political theory within the arguments and analyses of the collected essays, privileging liberal state systems and citizens’ individual liberties.

Understanding foreign policy and how it affects international politics, economics, diplomacy, and security can be complicated. This collection of coherent and cogently analytical and prescriptive essays provides a larger context for strategic insight. Freedom Isn’t Free is a curated collection of essays and columns that are accessible and, at times, entertaining. The book’s lessons break through barriers to geopolitical understanding to achieve deep learning while providing frameworks for both study and practice. 

Freedom Isn’t Free also operates as a resource and guide for journalism and communications students interested in deeply researched foreign affairs opinion writing. This volume provides examples of how columnists shape and form their topics. Thematically organized around principles of freedom within a geopolitical context, this work exemplifies creative processes; wide-and-varied topic selection; and the ability to combine deeply researched, fair and fact-based analysis while developing a writing style with a strong advocate’s voice and clear perspective. 

Freedom Isn’t Free takes an analytical look at political, economic, social and moral trade-offs in a world in flux. Highly readable and very accessible, the volume’s collected foreign affairs essays are wide-ranging and engaging—from manageable regional issues to dramatic geopolitical tensions—presented not as distant complexities, but as relatable events. Freedom Isn’t Free provides a strategic guide to some of the most important—sometimes intractable—issues of the day. It pays special attention to superpower America's role in contemporary geopolitics and her shifting policy options given leadership, competition, domestic governing challenges and self-inflicted nativism. Unlike most International Relations texts, Freedom Isn’t Free investigates actual, contemporary themes that nest political theory within the arguments and analyses of the collected essays, privileging liberal state systems and citizens’ individual liberties.

Understanding foreign policy and how it affects international politics, economics, diplomacy, and security can be complicated. This collection of coherent and cogently analytical and prescriptive essays provides a larger context for strategic insight. Freedom Isn’t Free is a curated collection of essays and columns that are accessible and, at times, entertaining. The book’s lessons break through barriers to geopolitical understanding to achieve deep learning while providing frameworks for both study and practice. 

Freedom Isn’t Free also operates as a resource and guide for journalism and communications students interested in deeply researched foreign affairs opinion writing. This volume provides examples of how columnists shape and form their topics. Thematically organized around principles of freedom within a geopolitical context, this work exemplifies creative processes; wide-and-varied topic selection; and the ability to combine deeply researched, fair and fact-based analysis while developing a writing style with a strong advocate’s voice and clear perspective. 

Over the past two decades, many welfare states have experienced a combination of low economic growth and rising unemployment, concurrent with increasing pension and health care obligations, which has exacerbated government budget deficits. Some analysts forecast that for a number of welfare states these problems will worsen in the future. Their fiscal problems, in particular, present welfare state policy makers with the dilemma of attempting to fund redistribution schemes consistent with the ideal of a secure egalitarian society while at the same time remaining competitive in a ‘new economy’ that places a premium on competition, innovation, and flexible labour and product markets.

Thus, an important issue has emerged: what types of reforms are required to enable welfare states to preserve sustainability? For the purpose of this study, a sustainable welfare state is one that can remain the guarantor against social risks and adverse economic trends for all segments of their respective societies and satisfy sound fiscal criteria (such as the Maastricht requirement for all members of the EMU that their fiscal budget deficit does not exceed 3% of the GDP), without imposing considerable financial burdens on future generations.

Over the past two decades, many welfare states have experienced a combination of low economic growth and rising unemployment, concurrent with increasing pension and health care obligations, which has exacerbated government budget deficits. Some analysts forecast that for a number of welfare states these problems will worsen in the future. Their fiscal problems, in particular, present welfare state policy makers with the dilemma of attempting to fund redistribution schemes consistent with the ideal of a secure egalitarian society while at the same time remaining competitive in a ‘new economy’ that places a premium on competition, innovation, and flexible labour and product markets.

Thus, an important issue has emerged: what types of reforms are required to enable welfare states to preserve sustainability? For the purpose of this study, a sustainable welfare state is one that can remain the guarantor against social risks and adverse economic trends for all segments of their respective societies and satisfy sound fiscal criteria (such as the Maastricht requirement for all members of the EMU that their fiscal budget deficit does not exceed 3% of the GDP), without imposing considerable financial burdens on future generations.

‘Friends and Enemies’ delivers a lucid and provocative history of one of the world’s largest and most successful political organizations, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Grounding his account in the origins of the CCP, Brown charts its early struggles and the emergence of the leadership of Mao Zedong in the 1930s, before unravelling the role of the Party during the Second World War and the vicious internecine struggle that culminated in the CCP’s ascent to power in 1949.

The narrative tackles the successes and failures of the CCP in the post-war era, analysing this chequered period with a close eye to the internal machinations of the Party, and then boldly considers the prospects of the CCP in the future. Brown produces a forthright analysis of where the Party stands in the 21st century, and assesses its three greatest challenges – energy, the environment and the economy – before culminating in a discussion of the potential for democratic reform and the risks the Party faces while it attempts to become a modern party in charge of a globally important economy.

‘Friends and Enemies’ is based on a combination of research and Brown’s own experiences as a business person and diplomat in China, where he lived for seven years. It has also benefited from the input of analysts of the Party from the UK and US, and from talks with Party officials at senior and working level in China.

‘From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood and Popular Television’ is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to key debates concerning the representations of motherhood, motherwork and the maternal role in contemporary television programming. The volume looks at the construction of motherhood in the ostensibly female genre of soap opera; the mother as housewife in the domestic situation comedy; deviant, desiring and delinquent motherwork in the teen drama; the single working mother in the contemporary dramedy; the fragile and failing mother of reality parenting television; the serene and selfless celebrity motherhood profile; and the new mother in reality pregnancy and childbirth television. ‘Motherhood and Popular Television’ examines the depiction of motherhood in this wide range of popular television genres in order to illustrate how the maternal role is being constructed, circulated and interrogated in contemporary factual and fictional programming, paying particular attention to the ways in which such images can be seen to challenge or conform to the ideal image of the ‘good’ mother that dominates the contemporary cultural landscape.

Transduction is beyond translation: both retranslation and auto translation move beyond the transferal of one language to another to signify the speculative attempts to examine and execute the belief, concepts, and meaning of the level of different arts. The art of translating means the analytical exercise of transferring, rotating, and twisting one language into another art, but to retranslate (or auto translate) literary translation, the objective of retranslation or self-translation is to create from translation the poetic and lyrical terms of transduction. In the translation of literary language, the translator can monopolize his situation to break up language to give a different art with or without music or another tool of the critic. The new transduction gives the audience a piece of another linguistic and/or non-linguistic art in a drawing, novel, or opera.

The semiotic scholar of literature Roman Jakobson gave a literary translation of the double words and concepts of poetical hyper translation. Language can transmit verbal translation to explore new ways of inventing and thinking about writing novels, musical theater, and the other arts. Thomas A. Sebeok deconstructed the energy of translation into the duplicated genres of artistic transduction. In semiotics, transduction is a technical expression of language and non-language, involving music, theater, and other arts. Jakobson used Saussure’s theory to give a single meaning connecting the thought and sound of words, but later he followed Charles S. Peirce’s symbolic logic with a floating sensation of the double meaning of words and concepts to give different symbols to the signs. For Peirce, literary translation becomes the graphical visions of ellipsis, parabole, and hyperbole.

Language and non-language play a role in transforming translation into transduction. Ellipsis is illustrated by Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves to give a political transformation to change Wagner’s opera, Das Rheingold. Parabole is illustrated by the two lines of thought of Hector Berlioz. He neglected his own translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, when he retranslated the vocal text to accompany the musical lyrics of his opera The Trojans. Hyperbole is demonstrated by Bertold Brecht’s auto-translation of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. In the cabaret theater of The Threepenny Opera, Brecht recreated his epic hyper-translation by retranslating the language of the folk speech of the German working classes with the jargon of criminal slang. 

This book examines Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and most populous country, and Asia in comparative development and sectoral perspectives. We traced the divergent growth in wealth between the two regions. It takes a novel approach of matching key growth sectors across five selected Asian countries and Nigeria in a cross-regional context. We found that state and institutional capabilities underlying the generation and diffusion of industrial and technological knowledge in Asia distinguished it from Africa. We employ quantitative and qualitative methods, including case studies and statistical/econometric methods, to analyze factors that separate the sample countries that made rapid economic progress in “catching up” and those that tend to be stagnating and “falling behind.”
Progress made by Asian countries over the last five decades was due in large part to their pursuit of industrialization, technological acquisition underpinned by leadership, good governance, and policies in the right institutional contexts. The four Asian countries compared with Nigeria are Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. There was not one grand development formula; however, the strategy broadly consisted of industrial (vertical) diversification as well as (horizontal) diversification in agriculture. Building industrial capabilities that enable export competitiveness was critical. Again, while leadership is not usually included in factors of growth, the book devotes a chapter to Leadership and Industrialization and another to State Capacity Industrialization and Economic Growth.
African countries on the contrary took the low road in exporting minerals and raw agricultural commodities with little value addition; in the process, Africa experienced a reversal of fortune. The African condition is manifestly a Reversal of Fortune because in the 1950s, they were ahead of, or equal to, Asia in per capita income as well as in other development metrics.
We carried out empirical measurement of Reversal of Fortune manifested in economic, social, technological, and industrial conditions by analyzing the disparities in development metrics, particularly the levels and rates of growth of national incomes, industrialization rates, and Human Development Index (HDI). The differences are stark.

This book examines Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and most populous country, and Asia in comparative development and sectoral perspectives. We traced the divergent growth in wealth between the two regions. It takes a novel approach of matching key growth sectors across five selected Asian countries and Nigeria in a cross-regional context. We found that state and institutional capabilities underlying the generation and diffusion of industrial and technological knowledge in Asia distinguished it from Africa. We employ quantitative and qualitative methods, including case studies and statistical/econometric methods, to analyze factors that separate the sample countries that made rapid economic progress in “catching up” and those that tend to be stagnating and “falling behind.”
Progress made by Asian countries over the last five decades was due in large part to their pursuit of industrialization, technological acquisition underpinned by leadership, good governance, and policies in the right institutional contexts. The four Asian countries compared with Nigeria are Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. There was not one grand development formula; however, the strategy broadly consisted of industrial (vertical) diversification as well as (horizontal) diversification in agriculture. Building industrial capabilities that enable export competitiveness was critical. Again, while leadership is not usually included in factors of growth, the book devotes a chapter to Leadership and Industrialization and another to State Capacity Industrialization and Economic Growth.
African countries on the contrary took the low road in exporting minerals and raw agricultural commodities with little value addition; in the process, Africa experienced a reversal of fortune. The African condition is manifestly a Reversal of Fortune because in the 1950s, they were ahead of, or equal to, Asia in per capita income as well as in other development metrics.
We carried out empirical measurement of Reversal of Fortune manifested in economic, social, technological, and industrial conditions by analyzing the disparities in development metrics, particularly the levels and rates of growth of national incomes, industrialization rates, and Human Development Index (HDI). The differences are stark.

The essays in this book attempt to follow Jan Kott’s counsel by combining historical investigation with cultural criticism to illuminate the present moment, particularly the present American moment. In this regard, the dates 1960 and 1923 in the book’s  subtitle are by no means accidental. The first three chapters concern the history of America’s relationship with Ireland during the administrations of the presidents whose terms spanned the immediate pre-history and history of the Troubles. After a glance backward at American and Irish relations in the nineteenth century, the first chapter focuses on the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president in America’s history and the first to visit Ireland during his term of office. It also juxtaposes Kennedy’s jubilant 1963 trip to Ireland with Ronald Reagan’s more complicated homecoming in 1984. The next two chapters examine relationships between Ireland, Northern Ireland and the United States from the time of the Kennedy assassination through the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, who in 1995 became the first American president to visit Northern Ireland during his presidency. The fourth chapter begins by juxtaposing the literacy and urbanity of presidents like Joe Biden and Michael D. Higgins of Ireland with the aversion to reading of President Biden’s predecessor, suggesting the advisability of electing readers as national leaders. This discussion includes the Democratic party primary before Biden’s 2020 election, the implications of his allusions to Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy during his campaign and his trip to Ireland in 2023 to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

Between these chapters,  shorter editorials or ‘provocations’  appear that consider analogies between a Northern Irish past and an uncertain American future, the latter of which is reprised in the book’s conclusion. This structural device, commonly called the ‘interchapter’, is hardly original as both creative and scholarly writers have employed it to offer supplements to matters relevant to their larger projects. In his short story collection Walking the Dog (1994), for example, Bernard MacLaverty combines nine stories with ten vignettes, one as short as four lines. In Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995), Declan Kiberd uses interchapters to introduce or add texture to more substantial discussions, as does Richard Rankin Russell for the second edition of Modernity, Place, and Community in Brian Friel’s Drama (2022).

Unlike the book’s chapters, these provocations are not so much scholarly exercises as ‘op-eds’ inflected by the insights not only of Irish writers but also, in the context of Trumpism’s endangerment of American democracy, those conveyed by  influential journalists, newspapers and news outlets. There is, admittedly, a certain irony in this undertaking, as Carlos Lozada observes in What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (2021): ‘One of the ironies of our time is that a man who rarely reads, preferring the rage of cable news and Twitter for hours each day, has propelled an onslaught of book-length writing about his presidency’. As the title’s allusion to ‘Trumpism’, not Trump, is meant to indicate, the argument of this book is less concerned with prosecuting an argument ad hominem than with assessing the consequences of his cultivation of societal division as discussed by, among many others, Stephen Marche in The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (2022) and  Jonathan Greenblatt in It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable – And How We Can Stop It (2022). Yet,  when juxtaposing threats of violence in contemporary America with those that ravaged Northern Ireland and, however ameliorated, still do, at least one commonality is apparent: in addition to widening socio-economic inequality, to voter suppression, and to racism and misogyny, both civil wars and Troubles require belligerent public figures skilled at stoking hatred in their followers. Thus, From the ‘Troubles’ to Trumpism is a kind of historical retrofitting that reads an increasingly dangerous moment in contemporary America through the lens of recent Irish and Northern Irish history.

This volume introduces two unique and hitherto largely unknown contributions published in the 1500s to the making of modern economic knowledge, making them available internationally for the first time in full English translation.
- Written in 1597, Barthélemy de Laffemas’ General regulation for the establishment of manufactures (written originally in French: Reiglement général pour dresser les manufactures) represents one of the earliest voices in the history of political economy – together with Italian economists Giovanni Botero (1589) and Antonio Serra (1613) – arguing that manufacturing and industry are the true sources of the wealth of nations and that states
should pursue an active industrial policy. Located at the crossroads between medieval Scholasticism and early mercantilism, it presents a political program that would lead to French economic development, providing the foundations for the French industrialization program during the 1660s-1680s. Laffemas presents a simplified version of an infant industry argument and European standard model of economic development known from thoughts of Enlightenment thinkers such as Colbert, Sir James Steuart, Friedrich List’s National System of Political Economy (1841), nineteenth and twentieth-century theories for catching up with England and later the US, and the ‘industrial policy’ or recently ‘mission-driven’ policies (Mariana Mazzucato).
- Leonhard Fronsperger’s On the praise of self-interest (German original: Von dem Lob deß Eigen Nutzen, 1564) is the first documented instance of the ‘Mandeville paradox’, one of the key axioms of neoliberalism. Commonly associated with much later writings, including Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705/14), and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), German military surgeon and polymath Fronsperger argued in 1564 that self-interest is an important driver in economic development. In his text, however, Fronsperger is much more pragmatic and less ideological than Mandeville or post-Mandevillean modern neoliberals. Vested in Renaissance Humanism and directly associated with the master of his time – Erasmus of Rotterdam – Fronsperger develops Renaissance theory about homo faber (creative, driven humans) as the center of the world to perfection, deriving from it the logical conclusion that possessive individualism and self-interest are important forces moving the human economy forward. Without letting go of the state, this work argues for self-interest facilitating virtuous cycles of enrichment and positive economic development.

‘Because at the heart of the apparent conflict between public health concerns and capitalistic interests, market access for pharmaceuticals is largely driven by political considerations, the difference with usual consumer goods being that pharmaceuticals are saving lives or years of life in good health’. Pharmaceuticals are mainly sourced by companies investing in costly R&D and production at their own risks to make them globally available. However, access for patients in need can be restricted due to insufficient medical resources and/or unaffordability. The dilemma between rewarding innovation with prices in line with value and risks for companies and ensuring affordability for patients or health insurances has become critical for all stakeholders, with political and economic implications. The development of universal health coverage puts pressure on governments to control directly or indirectly reimbursement and prices of pharmaceuticals, whereas the flow of innovations addressing infectious, chronic, and life-threatening diseases, thanks to accelerated scientific progress, is growing constantly.

Management of pharmaceutical health care expenditure approach varies according to the historical, cultural, and economic backgrounds that contribute to building each health care system, and companies are confronted with a very complex environment to launch their new drugs and manage their lifecycle until loss of patent. This book explores the different models of health care systems (e.g., Europe, United States, Japan, China) and the criteria and processes for decision making in coverage and pricing of pharmaceuticals. It also provides the analytic tools that are used to inform the decisions, and how market access strategy can be integrated in the product life cycle. Short case studies related to specific disease areas or methods are supporting exposed concepts and methods.

This book targets primarily students, but may prove useful to industry or insurance executives and eventually public decision makers with interest in the field: all will find relevant insights and sources to dig deeper into the topic. The content has been developed partially through a well received teaching program at CEIBS MBA since 2020.

Current planning and design modes of dwellings and neighbourhoods are facing challenges of both philosophy and form. Past approaches no longer sustain new demands and require innovative thinking. The need for a new outlook is propelled by fundamental changes that touch upon environmental, economic and social aspects.

The depletion of non-renewable natural resources, elevated levels of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change are a few of the environmental challenges that force designers to reconsider conceptual approaches in favour of ones that promote a better suitability between communities and nature. Consideration of overall planning concepts that minimize the development’s carbon footprint, district heating, passive solar gain, net-zero residences and preserving the site’s natural assets are some of the contemporary strategies that architects, planners and builders are integrating into their thought process and residential design practice.

Increasing costs of material, labour, land and infrastructure have posed economic challenges with affordability being paramount among them. The need to do with less brings about concepts that include denser places, adaptable and expandable dwellings, and smaller-sized yet quality designed housing. Also, the need to reduce utility costs gave rise to better insulation, which benefits both the environment and the occupant.

Social challenges are also drawing the attention of designers, builders and homeowners. As the “baby-boom” generation plans for retirement, housing an elderly population will take priority. Walkable communities, ageing in place and multigenerational living are some of the concepts considered. In addition, live-work environments have become part of the economic reality for those who wish to work from home – which has become possible through digital advances. 

The need to think innovatively about neighbourhoods led to the idea to write this book. The intention is to offer information on contemporary community design concepts and illustrate them with outstanding international examples.

Current planning and design modes of dwellings and neighbourhoods are facing challenges of both philosophy and form. Past approaches no longer sustain new demands and require innovative thinking. The need for a new outlook is propelled by fundamental changes that touch upon environmental, economic and social aspects.

The depletion of non-renewable natural resources, elevated levels of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change are a few of the environmental challenges that force designers to reconsider conceptual approaches in favour of ones that promote a better suitability between communities and nature. Consideration of overall planning concepts that minimize the development’s carbon footprint, district heating, passive solar gain, net-zero residences and preserving the site’s natural assets are some of the contemporary strategies that architects, planners and builders are integrating into their thought process and residential design practice.

Increasing costs of material, labour, land and infrastructure have posed economic challenges with affordability being paramount among them. The need to do with less brings about concepts that include denser places, adaptable and expandable dwellings, and smaller-sized yet quality designed housing. Also, the need to reduce utility costs gave rise to better insulation, which benefits both the environment and the occupant.

Social challenges are also drawing the attention of designers, builders and homeowners. As the “baby-boom” generation plans for retirement, housing an elderly population will take priority. Walkable communities, ageing in place and multigenerational living are some of the concepts considered. In addition, live-work environments have become part of the economic reality for those who wish to work from home – which has become possible through digital advances. 

The need to think innovatively about neighbourhoods led to the idea to write this book. The intention is to offer information on contemporary community design concepts and illustrate them with outstanding international examples.

‘Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers in Norway’ provides the first overview of the contribution of women writers to the significant body of nineteenth-century British writing about Norway. At once discursive and descriptive, and often containing practical advice specific to female travellers, the travelogue was the principal form of travel writing used by women during this period. Walchester reviews the ways in which female writers adapted this form, as well as fictional representations, to describe their experiences and to challenge their male precursors by offering new perspectives on the region and its history.

The nature of travel to and writing about Norway changed considerably during the nineteenth century, with both cultural and material consequences. Norway was a challenging destination before the introduction of reliable steam ship connections, better accommodation and improved railway lines enabled female tourists to travel in large groups. Tracing the journeys and motivations of various groups of women travellers such as sportswomen, tourists and aristocrats, this book argues that in their writing, Norway forms a counterpoint to Victorian Britain: a place of freedom and possibility.

Saladeros were the 17th–19th–century Pampa beef industry businesses where the beef was sun-dried or “jerked.” Alfredo Behrens suggests that in such lifeless routine work there was little glory to be found, at least as capable of enthusing workers to perform to their highest potential. The trouble, Behrens argues in “Gaucho Dialogues on Leadership and Management,” is that most subsidiaries in developing countries are managed as modern saladeros. Latin Americans are brought up in the medieval Catholic tradition of detachment from worldly material gain. Profit is disdained, largesse and martyrdom are praised.

Behrens illustrates the Latin American organizational how-to through a dialogue attributed to two famed nineteenth-century iconic literary characters, Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra. Fierro is construed to espouse the passionate, nonpragmatic, xenophobic attitude popular among many Latin American leaders of the twentieth century. Sombra, on the other hand, espouses a more nuanced affection toward old ways, suggesting that they may be responsible for some of the economic and technological backwardness of Latin Americans. “Gaucho Dialogues on Leadership and Management” carries the reader through militia-led insurrections from Argentina and Uruguay through Brazil, Venezuela, Central America, and Mexico. Fierro and Sombra comment on the insurrections and draw lessons about leadership, strategy and people management in Latin America. While the book’s argument covers the ethos prevailing in the Americas, both North and South, Behrens believes it may be relevant elsewhere among similar societies where people prefer to act as members of clans than as autonomous individuals. If so, the book’s argument may be relevant for the vast majority of humankind at work.

This book chronicles the history of early spaceflight and asks how American gender culture shaped the public image of the American astronaut and spaceflight technology during some of the tensest years of the Cold War era. While historians have pieced together the story of American women’s fight for spaceflight, this work adds to the narrative by analyzing masculinity and the astronaut image by focusing on how that image came to terms with a perceived Cold War masculinity crisis. The astronaut image was informed by Cold War ideals of fixed gender binaries, specifically, the masculine ideal of control over technology. The American astronaut performed masculinity in space through his control of the space capsule. This emphasis on astronaut control helped mold a distinctly American (anti-communist) masculinity that appeared—on the surface anyway—to resolve not only an American masculinity crisis but helped win the Cold War on an ideological and popular level. 

The book begins by establishing a post–World War II masculinity crisis dialogue. For instance, Americans saw communism, conformity, feminism, homosexuality, automation, minority rights, and the dreaded “organization man” as threats to masculinity. Drawing upon this scholarship, this book explores how this dialogue played out within the spaceflight public discourse from 1957 through 1983—a time when cosmic conquest was integral to America’s success in maintaining domestic security and morale while securing victory in the international conflict with the Soviets. Using primary sources from the public record, such as newspapers, magazines, media, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Congress, speeches, the astronaut’s stories, and intellectual works, the book states that the American public discourse constructed the astronaut as an archetype of American masculinity through the spaceman’s ability to control spaceflight technology. The assumption that the astronaut could “fly” the capsule insinuated an American masculinity of individualism apart from Soviet conformity. The American accentuation of pilot control continued from Project Mercury through Project Apollo, but it often clashed with computer control, space accidents, the scientist-astronaut, and mission control. These conflicts led the astronaut image to be refashioned into that of Michael Kimmel’s “democratic manhood”—a masculinity that encompassed the self-made man and the team player. Democratic manhood still centered on masculine control, either men as individuals or men working in teams. The moon landing symbolized that through astronaut control of technology, Americans had conquered space. Women and people of color were left out of this dialogue of technological control but played important roles as passive actors with technology. Control meant a white masculine performance with spaceflight technology. Running parallel to this need to create a fixed masculinity, women fought for their chance for spaceflight, while African Americans and Hispanics were largely feminized as non-technological users. With the 1969 moon conquest, the domestication of spaceflight quickly followed with the space shuttle taxis that—for a short period anyway—demonstrated the safety of spaceflight. The book concludes that within this domesticated spaceflight framework, diverse women at NASA—both astronauts and staff—challenged fixed gender roles by proving themselves courageous, individual professionals in what by 1986 became the dangerous business of spaceflight. 

As the first study of its kind, this book offers a new understanding of progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu’s linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform, and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form. It argues that canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jan Ada need to be looked at alongside women’s diaries and autobiographies so that we have an overall picture of gendered lives from imaginative fiction, memoirs and biographies.

In the late nineteenth century, ideas of the cosmopolitan and local were in conversation with the secular and sacred across different Indian literatures. Emerging poets from the zenana can be traced back to Zahida Khatun Sherwania from Aligarh and Haya Lakhnavi from Lucknow who had very unique trajectories as sharif women. With the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the Indian women’s movement gathered force and those who had previously been confined to the private sphere took their place in public as speaking subjects. The influence of the Left, Marxist thought and resistance against colonial rule fired the Progressive Writers Movement in the 1930s. The pioneering writer and activist Rashid Jahan was at the helm of the movement mediating women’s voices through a scientific and rational lens. She was succeeded by Ismat Chughtai, who like her contemporary Saadat Hasan Manto courted controversy by writing openly about sexualities and class. With the onset of partition, as the progressive writers were split across two nations, they carried with them the vision of a secular borderless world. In Pakistan, Urdu became an ideological ground for state formation, and Urdu writers came under state surveillance in the Cold War era. The study picks up the story of progressive women poets in Pakistan to try and understand their response to emerging dominant narratives of nation, community and gender. How did national politics and an ideological Islamisation that was at odds with a secular separation of church and state affect their writing? 

Despite the disintegration of the Progressive Writers Movement and the official closure of the Left in Pakistan, the author argues that an exceptional legacy can be found in the voices of distinctive women poets including Ada Jafri, Zehra Nigah, Sara Shagufta, Parvin Shakir, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Their poems offer new metaphors and symbols borrowing from feminist thought and a hybrid Islamicate culture. Riaz and Naheed joined forces with the women’s movement in Pakistan in the 1980s and caused some discomfort amongst Urdu literary circles with their writing. Celebrated across both sides of the border, their poetry and politics is less well known than the verse of the progressive poet par excellence Faiz Ahmed Faiz or the hard hitting lyrics of Habib Jalib. The book demonstrates how they manipulate and appropriate a national language as mother tongue speakers to enunciate a middle ground between the sacred and secular. In doing so they offer a new aesthetic that is inspired by activism and influenced by feminist philosophy. 

As the first study of its kind, this book offers a new understanding of progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu’s linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform, and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form. It argues that canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jan Ada need to be looked at alongside women’s diaries and autobiographies so that we have an overall picture of gendered lives from imaginative fiction, memoirs and biographies.

In the late nineteenth century, ideas of the cosmopolitan and local were in conversation with the secular and sacred across different Indian literatures. Emerging poets from the zenana can be traced back to Zahida Khatun Sherwania from Aligarh and Haya Lakhnavi from Lucknow who had very unique trajectories as sharif women. With the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the Indian women’s movement gathered force and those who had previously been confined to the private sphere took their place in public as speaking subjects. The influence of the Left, Marxist thought and resistance against colonial rule fired the Progressive Writers Movement in the 1930s. The pioneering writer and activist Rashid Jahan was at the helm of the movement mediating women’s voices through a scientific and rational lens. She was succeeded by Ismat Chughtai, who like her contemporary Saadat Hasan Manto courted controversy by writing openly about sexualities and class. With the onset of partition, as the progressive writers were split across two nations, they carried with them the vision of a secular borderless world. In Pakistan, Urdu became an ideological ground for state formation, and Urdu writers came under state surveillance in the Cold War era. The study picks up the story of progressive women poets in Pakistan to try and understand their response to emerging dominant narratives of nation, community and gender. How did national politics and an ideological Islamisation that was at odds with a secular separation of church and state affect their writing? 

Despite the disintegration of the Progressive Writers Movement and the official closure of the Left in Pakistan, the author argues that an exceptional legacy can be found in the voices of distinctive women poets including Ada Jafri, Zehra Nigah, Sara Shagufta, Parvin Shakir, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Their poems offer new metaphors and symbols borrowing from feminist thought and a hybrid Islamicate culture. Riaz and Naheed joined forces with the women’s movement in Pakistan in the 1980s and caused some discomfort amongst Urdu literary circles with their writing. Celebrated across both sides of the border, their poetry and politics is less well known than the verse of the progressive poet par excellence Faiz Ahmed Faiz or the hard hitting lyrics of Habib Jalib. The book demonstrates how they manipulate and appropriate a national language as mother tongue speakers to enunciate a middle ground between the sacred and secular. In doing so they offer a new aesthetic that is inspired by activism and influenced by feminist philosophy. 

Genealogies of the West presents a new look at the West by tracing the still-recognizable footprints of the past and reflecting on what the present challenges are facing. It attempts to decipher traces of the places, characters, events, and intellectual trends that the West recognizes as its own. It tries to shape something like a genealogy(es) of the West, starting from the conviction that the knowledge of the past is essential to our enrichment as citizens and, ultimately, for improving our society. The book presents summaries and arguments about a vast array of issues raised by the history of Western civilization, especially about cultural points, intellectual attainments, religious beliefs, and historical transformations. It proposes to embark on a journey that reaches back to the foundations of Western civilization such as Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and the early Christianity. It explores the painful split between Rome, Constantinople and Mecca. It connects the great values of the Middle Ages – from the chivalrous spirit to the scholastic rationality – to the present. It shows the faces of the modernity and its most relevant achievements – the state in politics, the capitalism in economics, the science in knowledge – and how they are being revised nowadays by postmodernity. It examines the twentieth- and twenty-first-century self-inflicted criticism of the West, which has revised its previous tradition and heritage, and threatens the entire civilization to disappear. The book also recalls the genealogies of the plural processes, ideas, and events that shape the West’s tradition and identity, and their contemporary presence. It inspires the reader not only to brush up on the knowledge of the past but also to reflect on the present and consider the political, social, economic, cultural, intellectual, moral, artistic and spiritual elements of past cultures that have left an indelible mark on contemporary values. Such an effort aids in our understanding of who we are, where we come from, how we are wired, what we owe to each period of the past and, based on this rich experience, how we can face the future with guarantees. The book will help readers gain perspective, understand the complexities of the past, pinpoint historical inaccuracies, recognize Western values and traditions, and accept challenges for the future.

Jean Lescure’s two-volume General and Periodic Crises of Overproduction is a pioneering study of the causes and consequences of industrial crises in capitalist economies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author, who held doctorates in political economy and law, is most remembered as a founder of the French historical school and a staunch advocate of empiricism in the economic sciences. Lescure called his approach the ’complex historical method’, by which he sought to revise classical and quantitative economic theory through the historical analysis and statistical observation of cyclical phenomena. Ever the controversialist, Lescure wrote in an engaging style, accessible to non-specialists and economists alike, and critiqued the leading monetary theorists of the period, insisting that observation of the movements in production costs, industrial orders and profits be given priority over circulation and credit in understanding the periodic crises of capitalist economies. In Lescure’s view, crises were inevitable in both market and command economies and their onset and consequences were predictable with the help of the more detailed production statistics newly available to economists and entrepreneurs at the time. Observation of corporate profits, the margin between cost price and selling price, provided the means to predict crises and measure their impact, not only on industry and trade but also on the working classes who would endure unemployment and the many social ills that accompany it. Lescure, unlike many of the liberal economists of the time, was always careful to include in his historical account statistical analysis of unemployment figures, as well as those on crime, marriage and birth rates, homelessness and suicide. Although he remained sceptical of government intervention in the form of monetary policies adjusting the money supply, and lauded the success of industrial concentration and trusts in reducing costs and prices, Lescure admitted the state’s role in the recovery of the 1930s, when social insurance schemes and investment in public works mitigated the worst effects of unemployment for industrial labour.
This treatise, which grew out of his doctoral work, was a lifetime project for Lescure, who updated it periodically over five editions, to include each new cycle of growth, crisis, depression and recovery. Volume one provides a historical study of economic crises from the post-Napoleonic period through the Great Depression and the recovery of the late 1930s.
Volume two offers a critique of the theories of crises, their causes and potential remedies, in which Lescure outlines his preference for ‘organic’ theories that focus on the production process and qualitative statistical observation of the movements in costs, selling prices, industrial orders and profits.
The text of the fifth edition appears here in English for the first time, unabridged and complete with editorial materials designed to help the English reader understand the work on its own terms and situate its author’s prominent place in the history of economic thought.

The purpose of this volume is not simply to compile yet another wearying chronicle of the horrors that have been committed by our fellow human beings. Most students who register for a course on Genocide assume that it will focus, perhaps exclusively, on the Holocaust—the only case with which they are familiar. Many of them have read Elie Wiesel’s eloquent masterpiece Night in secondary school, and some may have read The Diary of Anne Frank. A few students might even know that a genocide occurred in Rwanda or Darfur. Like most people, however, they equate genocide simply with mass killing, and assume that genocide must by definition entail millions of deaths. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”—meaning “to kill a people”— originally defined it “a colonial crime of destroying the national patterns of the oppressed and imposing the national patterns of the oppressors.” This was a process, Lemkin said, that was intended to destroy a people’s culture thatcould sometimes but not necessarily always result in mass murder. Students need to know that after World War II the great powers undermined and co-opted the process of writing the1948 Genocide Convention at the UN. It was written very carefully to remove from the definition of genocide the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada; racial lynching and Jim Crowism in the US; the “elimination of backwards people to protect human progress” in pre-apartheid South Africa, New Zealand and Australia; the mass murder of colonial subjects and repression of racial minorities at the hands of European security forces the world over; the mass murder of political opponents in Latin America; the mass murder of “economic” or social groups in the Soviet Union; and the blanket removal of any mention of famine and sexual violence as acts that could constitute genocide. Instead, they simply used the Holocaust as a template and succeeded in distorting what Lemkin originally meant by “genocide”—the murder of a people by destroying their social and cultural connections.

Students should also know that Lemkin’s ideas were most strongly supported at the UN by member states that were former colonies—namely Egypt, India, Pakistan, China and the Philippines—and by women within many of the delegations that were working to prevent the UN from succeeding in outlawing genocide, such as those from the US and the UK. When students learn this history can begin to think critically about what international law is and which systems of power international law serves. However, they also need a textbook that guides them to think critically and imaginatively about genocide and the 1948 UN Convention without reducing genocide and the UN Genocide Convention to a crude and cynical analysis of global power struggles. In other words, they need a book that is honest and that resists the temptation to spin ahistorical morality tales.

The purpose of this volume is not simply to compile yet another wearying chronicle of the horrors that have been committed by our fellow human beings. Most students who register for a course on Genocide assume that it will focus, perhaps exclusively, on the Holocaust—the only case with which they are familiar. Many of them have read Elie Wiesel’s eloquent masterpiece Night in secondary school, and some may have read The Diary of Anne Frank. A few students might even know that a genocide occurred in Rwanda or Darfur. Like most people, however, they equate genocide simply with mass killing, and assume that genocide must by definition entail millions of deaths. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”—meaning “to kill a people”— originally defined it “a colonial crime of destroying the national patterns of the oppressed and imposing the national patterns of the oppressors.” This was a process, Lemkin said, that was intended to destroy a people’s culture thatcould sometimes but not necessarily always result in mass murder. Students need to know that after World War II the great powers undermined and co-opted the process of writing the1948 Genocide Convention at the UN. It was written very carefully to remove from the definition of genocide the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada; racial lynching and Jim Crowism in the US; the “elimination of backwards people to protect human progress” in pre-apartheid South Africa, New Zealand and Australia; the mass murder of colonial subjects and repression of racial minorities at the hands of European security forces the world over; the mass murder of political opponents in Latin America; the mass murder of “economic” or social groups in the Soviet Union; and the blanket removal of any mention of famine and sexual violence as acts that could constitute genocide. Instead, they simply used the Holocaust as a template and succeeded in distorting what Lemkin originally meant by “genocide”—the murder of a people by destroying their social and cultural connections.

Students should also know that Lemkin’s ideas were most strongly supported at the UN by member states that were former colonies—namely Egypt, India, Pakistan, China and the Philippines—and by women within many of the delegations that were working to prevent the UN from succeeding in outlawing genocide, such as those from the US and the UK. When students learn this history can begin to think critically about what international law is and which systems of power international law serves. However, they also need a textbook that guides them to think critically and imaginatively about genocide and the 1948 UN Convention without reducing genocide and the UN Genocide Convention to a crude and cynical analysis of global power struggles. In other words, they need a book that is honest and that resists the temptation to spin ahistorical morality tales.

In the opening chapter of her 1866 novel 'Felix Holt', George Eliot tells her readers that the 'vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence'. 'George Eliot's Grammar of Being' is developed from the idea that George Eliot wanted to produce these vibrations within her novels, not just at the level of story and character, but also at the level of language. She was a novelist who wanted the public to read her sentences almost as carefully as she wrote them—to make her readers find and subconsciously respond to those places in the prose where the syntax itself delivers subtle shocks to the system 'beneath' context. Relying heavily on examination of original manuscripts and page proofs, this book shows how George Eliot’s is a carefully evolved grammar where the vibrations are purposefully created and then enhanced through active revision. Drawing on the influence of Victorian psychological and neuro-physiological theory, as well as study of the manuscripts and writing processes of other Victorian novelists, the book shows how the sentences within a novel can become a kind of nervous system to the narrative, thus highlighting the integral role that language plays in the inspiration of our sympathy as readers.

In the opening chapter of her 1866 novel 'Felix Holt', George Eliot tells her readers that the 'vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence'. 'George Eliot's Grammar of Being' is developed from the idea that George Eliot wanted to produce these vibrations within her novels, not just at the level of story and character, but also at the level of language. She was a novelist who wanted the public to read her sentences almost as carefully as she wrote them—to make her readers find and subconsciously respond to those places in the prose where the syntax itself delivers subtle shocks to the system 'beneath' context. Relying heavily on examination of original manuscripts and page proofs, this book shows how George Eliot’s is a carefully evolved grammar where the vibrations are purposefully created and then enhanced through active revision. Drawing on the influence of Victorian psychological and neuro-physiological theory, as well as study of the manuscripts and writing processes of other Victorian novelists, the book shows how the sentences within a novel can become a kind of nervous system to the narrative, thus highlighting the integral role that language plays in the inspiration of our sympathy as readers.

“Taste, guts and money” are the founding pillars of an art dealer’s life. Regis Krampf has been following his passion from an early age and gradually built a collection following his taste and intuition. One of the artists most represented in his collection is Georges Braque. Although Krampf owns artworks outside the mentioned period and by other artists, this book is only about Georges Braque’s body of work made after cubism until his time of death in 1963.

Georges Braque was a genius of the 20th-century art scene. He pioneered the fauve movement and invented cubism with Picasso. The period this book focuses on is roughly situated between 1920 and 1960. After a near death experience on the battlefields of WWI, Braque focused on his techniques and inspirations away from affiliations or artist groups. Somehow, he was one of the first artists to kill the idea of an artistic movement following his scientific and artistic discoveries.

Georges Braque was an artisan, following the hands-on approach of his father and grandfather who were house painters. The texture – the surfaces he created – echoed the intricacies found in nature’s own handiwork. He would often take his paintings on his usual, interminable bicycle rides and place them directly in nature to observe how they would hold against it.

Braque is one of the innovators of Modern painting. The body of work in this important period has long been overlooked. Krampf aims to correct this mistake and give a broader understanding of his work.

The story of German gothic literature is that of the meteoric rise of a popular literary style that critics nonetheless considered an unwelcome intruder, often dismissing it as the pulpy mimicry of British forerunners and as a “plague ship of German letters” (Charles Maturin), from its beginnings with the German art ballad or Kunst ballade of Herder, Goethe, Bürger, and Hölty in the 1770s and 1780s to the gothic prose works of Schiller, Goethe and Kleist, et al. In particular, the German novella was the object of some suspicion, and, as Schiller complained of his gothic bestseller Der Geisterseher in 1788, the prose author was considered the unloved, “half-brother of the poet.” Kleist was ashamed to be associated with the disreputable genre, deriding the tendency of late-eighteenth-century literature toward stories about “knights with ghosts.” Focusing on its gothic character, no less an authority than Coleridge dismissed German Sturm und Drang and Romantic literature as merely derivative of the gloomy works of Young, Hervey, Richardson and Walpole. In her novel Northanger Abbey (1818), Austen characterizes the 1790s as a decade of “horrid” novels so stereotypically gothic and German that its most popular works constitute self-parodies on both counts. Despite the English roots of gothic literature touched on above and its increased prominence in England from 1790–1820, by the 1820s, gothic tales were so clearly established as “German Stories”—thus the title of a three-volume British collection of 1826—that Poe felt the need to reclaim the genre for all humanity in 1839: “I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul […].” The rest is literary history: gothic literature, and in particular German gothic short prose literature, has proven to be among the most resonant hypotexts, adapted and re-adapted in Anglo-American and European literature and film to the present day. This volume seeks to reevaluate German gothic literature after the wave of publications on the subject that renewed scholarly interest in these texts in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

This book provides a thorough analysis of the political career of William Gladstone, one of the most intriguing and controversial figures in modern British history. 'Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics' captures the incredible richness and range of Gladstone's political journey, tracing his evolution from idealistic Tory defender of a theocratic Anglican state, through his transformation into Peelite financial administrator, reforming Liberal Prime Minister, populist champion of the 'masses against the classes', and culminating in his strenuous yet schismatic attempt to bring Home Rule to Ireland.  Each stage in Gladstone's development is fully assessed in the light both of recent historiographical debates and Gladstone's own complex reflections upon his own actions.

Throughout, serious attention is devoted to the intellectual processes that shaped Gladstone's political practice. Gladstone was unique, not merely in the longevity of his career, but in his determination to reason through his responses to problems in the light of his extensive reading, his study of ancient literature, and his profoundly held religious convictions.  As such this book provides an ideal entry point into the Victorian world and Gladstone's thinking about such questions as financial policy, the relevance of morality to foreign policy, the claims of national sentiment, Britain's responsibility as an imperial power, and the role of public opinion in policy making.  The conclusions he arrived at cannot be ignored by anyone interested in nineteenth century history – or, indeed, the political challenges confronting Britain and the world in the twenty-first century.

The book explores connections between poverty and migration in the context of the expansion of neoliberalism in Europe, examining these global concerns from a local perspective. The last decade has witnessed a massive, perhaps unprecedented, movement of people across Europe. Some of the dislocated are victims of war, but even greater numbers are casualties of the economic reforms which were implemented after the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe, and some 10-15 years earlier in western Europe. As this volume shows, people do not move in only one direction, from economically weaker to stronger regions; rather, movement takes place both into and out of recently created 'backwaters'. Such movements reflect the dynamic and shifting form of an ever-changing Europe, where people are responding to new opportunities for mobility, and to local inequalities resulting from political changes and economic reforms. As people seek new opportunities, movement itself becomes part of the process of generating new inequalities between regions and nations.  Symbolically and objectively the map of Europe is being redrawn. The chapters in this collection give vivid examples of not only the process of re-mapping, but also of people’s strong sense of local 'place' and their participation in global movements.

Western industrialism has achieved miracles, promoting unprecedented levels of prosperity and raising millions around the world out of poverty. Industrial capitalism is now diffusing throughout the East. Japan, the four Tigers (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong) and China are all incorporating themselves into the global industrial world. India, Brazil and many others are expected to follow the same course. But as China, India and other industrializing giants grow, they confront an inconvenient truth: they cannot rely on the Western industrial development model of fossil-fueled energy systems (resource throughput rather than circularity and generic finance) because these methods cause extreme spoliation of the environment and raise energy security, resource security and global warming concerns.

By necessity, a new approach to environmentally conscious development is already emerging in the East, with China leading the way in building a green industry at scale. As opposed to Western zero-growth advocates and free-market environmentalists, it can be argued that a more sustainable capitalism is being developed in China – to counter black developmental model based on coal. This new ‘green growth’ model of development, being perfected in China and now being emulated in India, Brazil, South Africa (and eventually by industrializing countries elsewhere), as well as by advanced industrial countries such as Germany, looks to become the new norm in the twenty-first century. Its core advantages are the energy security and resource security that are generated.

The British scientist James Lovelock has done the world an enormous service by formulating the theory of a ‘living earth’ named Gaia, where life self-regulates itself and the planet by keeping the atmospheric environment more or less constant, and likewise the environment of the oceans. In China’s Green Shift, Global Green Shift, Mathews proposes a way in which Gaia (a product of the processes of the earth) can be complemented by Ceres (our own creation of a renewable energy and circular economy system). Can these two concepts of how the earth works, represented by two powerful deities, be reconciled? While Lovelock is pessimistic, asserting that Gaia will look after herself and that if we survive at all it is likely to be as a greatly diminished industrial civilization, numbering no more than one billion people, Mathews argues in this book why he believes this prognosis to be mistaken. Mathews maintains that the changes that ‘we’ are driving, as a species, represent a viable way forward. They give us a chance of reconciling economy with ecology – or Ceres with Gaia.

Western industrialism has achieved miracles, promoting unprecedented levels of prosperity and raising millions around the world out of poverty. Industrial capitalism is now diffusing throughout the East. Japan, the four Tigers (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong) and China are all incorporating themselves into the global industrial world. India, Brazil and many others are expected to follow the same course. But as China, India and other industrializing giants grow, they confront an inconvenient truth: they cannot rely on the Western industrial development model of fossil-fueled energy systems (resource throughput rather than circularity and generic finance) because these methods cause extreme spoliation of the environment and raise energy security, resource security and global warming concerns.

By necessity, a new approach to environmentally conscious development is already emerging in the East, with China leading the way in building a green industry at scale. As opposed to Western zero-growth advocates and free-market environmentalists, it can be argued that a more sustainable capitalism is being developed in China – to counter black developmental model based on coal. This new ‘green growth’ model of development, being perfected in China and now being emulated in India, Brazil, South Africa (and eventually by industrializing countries elsewhere), as well as by advanced industrial countries such as Germany, looks to become the new norm in the twenty-first century. Its core advantages are the energy security and resource security that are generated.

The British scientist James Lovelock has done the world an enormous service by formulating the theory of a ‘living earth’ named Gaia, where life self-regulates itself and the planet by keeping the atmospheric environment more or less constant, and likewise the environment of the oceans. In China’s Green Shift, Global Green Shift, Mathews proposes a way in which Gaia (a product of the processes of the earth) can be complemented by Ceres (our own creation of a renewable energy and circular economy system). Can these two concepts of how the earth works, represented by two powerful deities, be reconciled? While Lovelock is pessimistic, asserting that Gaia will look after herself and that if we survive at all it is likely to be as a greatly diminished industrial civilization, numbering no more than one billion people, Mathews argues in this book why he believes this prognosis to be mistaken. Mathews maintains that the changes that ‘we’ are driving, as a species, represent a viable way forward. They give us a chance of reconciling economy with ecology – or Ceres with Gaia.

This book explores the multiple effects of globalization on urban and rural communities, providing anthropological case studies from postsocialist Bulgaria. As globalization has been studied largely in urban contexts, the aim of this volume is to shift attention to the under-examined countryside and analyse how transnational links are transforming relations between cities, towns and villages in Bulgaria.

Since the opening of borders after the end of socialism (1989) and Bulgaria’s EU accession (2007), rural communities have been drawn into new transnational connections and global ‘shortcuts’ that transcend the framework of the (formerly socialist) nation-state. The case studies of this volume demonstrate that apart from cities, villages and towns are also increasingly exposed to global flows and economic inequalities, resulting in the remaking of rural places. As a result of increased mobility and growing transnational and global connections, boundaries are fading between cities and the countryside and between Bulgaria and Europe. Some Bulgarian villages are winners while others are losers as a result of this development, leading to a situation of extreme rural diversity.

This book aims to challenge undifferentiated notions of ‘the countryside’, calling for a greater awareness of rural economic and social disparities which are often only associated with urban environments. It also focuses on how the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ have been reconfigured in Bulgaria following the end of socialism and the advent of globalization, in socioeconomic as well as political, ideological and cultural terms. The volume is based on a collection of papers presented at a workshop that took place at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies on 29 and 30 May 2008. 

This book explores the multiple effects of globalization on urban and rural communities, providing anthropological case studies from postsocialist Bulgaria. As globalization has been studied largely in urban contexts, the aim of this volume is to shift attention to the under-examined countryside and analyse how transnational links are transforming relations between cities, towns and villages in Bulgaria.

Since the opening of borders after the end of socialism (1989) and Bulgaria’s EU accession (2007), rural communities have been drawn into new transnational connections and global ‘shortcuts’ that transcend the framework of the (formerly socialist) nation-state. The case studies of this volume demonstrate that apart from cities, villages and towns are also increasingly exposed to global flows and economic inequalities, resulting in the remaking of rural places. As a result of increased mobility and growing transnational and global connections, boundaries are fading between cities and the countryside and between Bulgaria and Europe. Some Bulgarian villages are winners while others are losers as a result of this development, leading to a situation of extreme rural diversity.

This book aims to challenge undifferentiated notions of ‘the countryside’, calling for a greater awareness of rural economic and social disparities which are often only associated with urban environments. It also focuses on how the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ have been reconfigured in Bulgaria following the end of socialism and the advent of globalization, in socioeconomic as well as political, ideological and cultural terms. The volume is based on a collection of papers presented at a workshop that took place at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies on 29 and 30 May 2008. 

The world has gone through a major transformation in the last two decades. The end of the Cold War in Europe has led to a massive increase in private capital flow and has also brought an information and telecommunication revolution. In this new interdependent and interconnected world, international trade and investment has overtaken the importance of national economies. Globalization has created new opportunities as well as many risks and challenges. While globalization creates new wealth and encourages technological innovations, it has also failed to support and promote sustainable human development and thus can be accused of generating anguish and deprivation. This has already resulted in growing civil unrest and, in some cases, contributed to armed conflicts in the developing world. However, peace and conflict research has hitherto somehow overlooked the influence of increasing globalization on the formation and management of such emerging conflicts. The study of globalization also tends to overlook a proven fact that the management of conflicts in the South has been invariably influenced by the global powers and their strategic politics. This impressive edited volume makes an attempt to assess the concrete that measures exist which can be effective in addressing the causes of conflict and building peace in an increasingly interdependent world.

In addition to providing the first English translation of ‘Kichaka-Vadha’, this volume offers the most detailed scholarly analysis to date of the anticolonial Marathi classic, drawing on a comprehensive range of archival documents.

The documentary material comes from colonial-era police, judicial, administrative, legislative, and newspaper sources. The commentary provides a broad overview of the formation of the modern Marathi theatre as well as a close reading of ‘Kichaka-Vadha’ itself. It illuminates the major events and personalities alluded to in the play and highlights the dramaturgic strategies used to advance a radical political agenda.

The play attracted immense audiences at the height of the Independence movement in early-twentieth-century India, making it extraordinarily influential, both politically and theatrically. Numerous playwrights sought to emulate its successful nationalist strategies and produced a significant body of political theatre in colonial India, while British authorities undertook several measures to minimize their impact.

This study of how anticolonial plays operated in an Indian context encourages fruitful comparisons with the resistance strategies employed by plays in other Asian and African countries facing various colonial mechanisms of regulation and suppression of public performances.

In addition to providing the first English translation of ‘Kichaka-Vadha’, this volume offers the most detailed scholarly analysis to date of the anticolonial Marathi classic, drawing on a comprehensive range of archival documents.

The documentary material comes from colonial-era police, judicial, administrative, legislative, and newspaper sources. The commentary provides a broad overview of the formation of the modern Marathi theatre as well as a close reading of ‘Kichaka-Vadha’ itself. It illuminates the major events and personalities alluded to in the play and highlights the dramaturgic strategies used to advance a radical political agenda.

The play attracted immense audiences at the height of the Independence movement in early-twentieth-century India, making it extraordinarily influential, both politically and theatrically. Numerous playwrights sought to emulate its successful nationalist strategies and produced a significant body of political theatre in colonial India, while British authorities undertook several measures to minimize their impact.

This study of how anticolonial plays operated in an Indian context encourages fruitful comparisons with the resistance strategies employed by plays in other Asian and African countries facing various colonial mechanisms of regulation and suppression of public performances.

‘Globalization, the Human Condition and Sustainable Development in the Twenty-first Century: Cross-national Perspectives and European Implications’ is a cross-national, 175 nation based exploration of the deep crisis in which Europe currently finds itself. Investigating the effects of dependency theory and world systems theory upon the global success of eight dimensions of development – including democracy, environmental sustainability, employment, social cohesion, high quality tertiary education and gender justice – this study argues that the current European crisis has been precipitated by the pro-globalist policies of the European Commission.

The comprehensive analysis of this study reveals the magnitude of Europe’s errors. Lowering comparative price levels and increasing dependency on large, transnational corporations, as correctly predicted by Latin American social science of the 1960s and 1970s, emerges as one of the most serious developmental blockades confronting Europe in global society, whilst increases in military expenditure, as proposed by Article 42.3 of the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty, are another large stumbling block against development. The harmful potential of these blockades is severe.

The book’s 175-nation investigation shows that Europe’s failure to develop its own MNC headquarter status in the global economy is a key factor that has hindered its developmental performance. This examination, which duly takes into account the control variables proposed by neoclassical economics and contemporary sociology/political science, also demonstrates the potential outcomes of several alternative scenarios, mainly those proposed by the political Left in Europe, and summarizes the effects of globalization on the environment and ecological vulnerability. What this analysis makes most clear is Europe’s need for change: without amending its pro-globalist policies, the continent will learn nothing from its current crisis – and is destined to compete in a destructive “race to the bottom”.

‘Globalization, the Human Condition and Sustainable Development in the Twenty-first Century: Cross-national Perspectives and European Implications’ is a cross-national, 175 nation based exploration of the deep crisis in which Europe currently finds itself. Investigating the effects of dependency theory and world systems theory upon the global success of eight dimensions of development – including democracy, environmental sustainability, employment, social cohesion, high quality tertiary education and gender justice – this study argues that the current European crisis has been precipitated by the pro-globalist policies of the European Commission.

The comprehensive analysis of this study reveals the magnitude of Europe’s errors. Lowering comparative price levels and increasing dependency on large, transnational corporations, as correctly predicted by Latin American social science of the 1960s and 1970s, emerges as one of the most serious developmental blockades confronting Europe in global society, whilst increases in military expenditure, as proposed by Article 42.3 of the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty, are another large stumbling block against development. The harmful potential of these blockades is severe.

The book’s 175-nation investigation shows that Europe’s failure to develop its own MNC headquarter status in the global economy is a key factor that has hindered its developmental performance. This examination, which duly takes into account the control variables proposed by neoclassical economics and contemporary sociology/political science, also demonstrates the potential outcomes of several alternative scenarios, mainly those proposed by the political Left in Europe, and summarizes the effects of globalization on the environment and ecological vulnerability. What this analysis makes most clear is Europe’s need for change: without amending its pro-globalist policies, the continent will learn nothing from its current crisis – and is destined to compete in a destructive “race to the bottom”.

This is one of the earliest books to present a collection of writings on the effects of globalization on India and Indian society. The very concept of globalization needs critical examination, and one productive approach is to focus specifically on the local impacts of globalization in its various guises through comparative ethnographic investigations. Such research also permits examination of the relative significance of globalization, as opposed to national, regional or local factors of change that may actually be more salient. Assayag and Fuller have assembled a team of eminent academics, who present a series of critical discussions about important issues of economy and agriculture, education and language, and culture and religion, based on ethnographic case studies from different localities in India. This challenging collection also includes a major study of the history of globalization and India that sets current trends in perspective.

This is one of the earliest books to present a collection of writings on the effects of globalization on India and Indian society. The very concept of globalization needs critical examination, and one productive approach is to focus specifically on the local impacts of globalization in its various guises through comparative ethnographic investigations. Such research also permits examination of the relative significance of globalization, as opposed to national, regional or local factors of change that may actually be more salient. Assayag and Fuller have assembled a team of eminent academics, who present a series of critical discussions about important issues of economy and agriculture, education and language, and culture and religion, based on ethnographic case studies from different localities in India. This challenging collection also includes a major study of the history of globalization and India that sets current trends in perspective.

Yoko teaches piano during the day, works at a bar at night and dreams of her disappeared lover every single minute. “Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I swear I will find you again”, he promised, and Yoko never stopped believing he would return. Her ten-year-old daughter Soko, born out of this brief passionate affair that marked her mother for ever, has had her life shaped by Yoko’s constant yearning, as the desperate search for the elusive man of her dreams means moving house more times than either of them can remember. The two travel through life on what Yoko calls “God’s boat”, moving from town to town, and for Soko from school to school, just as the narrative too shifts between the perspectives of the daughter and her mother, tracing them through the years as little by little the story of Yoko’s past emerges, and Soko tries to somehow build herself a future.

This haunting and sensitive novel combines the everyday patterns of the lives of mother and daughter, their rituals, their conversations, while always beyond these ordinary daily events lies what is hidden by Yoko’s seemingly unshakeable certainty: the spectre of madness and the indescribable pain of loss, so inextricably linked to the dazzling joy that only love can bring.

Gothic Appalachian Literature examines the ways contemporary Appalachian authors utilize gothic tropes to explore the complex history and contemporary problems of the region, particularly in terms of their representation of economic, environmental, and political concerns. It argues that across Appalachian fiction, the plight of characters to save their homes, land and way of life from the destructive forces of extractive industries brings sharply to bare the histories of colonization and slavery that problematize questions of belonging, ownership and possession.
• Robertson extensively considers contemporary manifestations of the gothic in Appalachian literature, arguing that gothic tropes abound in fiction that focuses on the impacts of extractive industries and the climate crisis that connect this micro-region with other parts of the Global North and Global South where the devastating impacts of extractive industries are also experienced socially, economically and environmentally. Across contemporary Appalachian writing the everyday is haunted by the specter of climate change. As a result, while Appalachian fiction contains an array of horror-fueled texts rife with the regional stereotypes common in the popular imagination, the monstrous in contemporary Appalachian fiction is commonly found in overflowing slurry pits, the nightmarish sight of fracking towers, floods, droughts and forest fires. Gothic Appalachian Literature proposes that Appalachian texts that expose readers to the sites and processes of fossil fuel extraction, and their contribution to the climate crisis, are inherently gothic.
• As Robertson explores both historic and contemporary forms of the gothic she covers a diverse range of voices and perspectives that reflect a complex micro-region where individuals and communities are more richly complex than the reductive stereotypes of Appalachia ever allow. To that end, Robertson engages with contemporary debates about race and LGBTQ+ rights in what she terms a post-Trump moment in Appalachian literature.

Cornwall as Strange Fiction is focused on written and visual culture that is made in, or made about, Cornwall and where there is affinity with Gothic. Cornwall and the Scilly Isles (known as ‘Kernow’ in the Cornish language) have a special relationship with Gothic, one that has been overlooked in the literature on regional Gothic. In 1998, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik coined the term ‘Cornish Gothic’ in relation to the work of Daphne du Maurier. Since then, however, there have been few discussions of the distinctive types of Gothic engendered by cultural and imaginative re-creations of Cornwall or where it has played a generative role within creative practice. Cornwall as Strange Fiction argues that a persistent imaginative romance with the peninsular has produced a specific and distinctive set of Gothic fictions and creative outputs that mark an exciting new departure in the discussion of regional and media-aware Gothic studies.

In his chapter on ‘Regional Gothic’, Jarlath Killeen cites the Celtic fringes as ‘Ireland, Scotland and Wales’ (2009, pp. 92-3). Cornwall is forgotten in this account, but it is this often continued absence of Cornwall that at least in part defines it as a Gothic space. Cornwall as Strange Fiction argues that Cornwall has a culturally acquired liminality, becoming a space of ambivalence, absence, excess and loss. Cornwall is too far away and yet at the same time too near (at least for British scholars of Gothic). It has an excess of history, mythic non-history and identity, uncanny light and sublime sculptural stones, all representing both creative plenitude and its lack. This book looks to the visual, the digital and to adaptation, to contemporary as well as traditional platforms, in pursuit of our argument that Kernow thrives as a dark economy for the creative imagination. We address the ways in which different platforms, the novel, film or painting, shape articulations of Gothic Kernow, alongside our attention to the threads of intertextual dialogue that weave among such diversity.

Central to our argument and method is the fact that Gothic Kernow is always situationally produced as a framework within which different aesthetic, psychological and social agendas sit. As we will show, the texts and artefacts that we discuss are shaped by a confluence of medial formats and aesthetic concerns, political and social contexts, all filtering through the perceived magics, mysteries and myths of Cornwall. We are therefore intent on demonstrating how, as both an imagined and real space, Cornwall becomes the subject of Gothic concerns, particularly in terms of otherness, animism and the sublime. Offering new insights into the relationships between place and Gothic, this book aims to engender and encourage greater debate through our argument that Cornwall plays a potent role in the landscape of regional Gothic and that it needs to be considered more fully as a major catalyst in the Gothic imagination. Most importantly, this book argues and demonstrates that Gothic Kernow needs to be considered as a powerful force in the development of Gothic grammar generally.

Gothic has often articulated fear as much through its depictions of weather, climate and landscape as it has through its typical monsters, and the relationship between geography, the environment and travel has been a persistent characteristic of the Gothic from its earliest moments. Gothic is an innately travelling mode of writing, and the literary fascination provoked by armchair travel is central to the navigation of cultural fears: ‘strangeness’ only becomes apparent once one exchanges the homely (Heimlich) for the uncanny in new or uncharted settings. This book will argue that what differentiates Gothic travel from all other kinds is the growing realisation that the terrain across which one journeys has become ‘haunted’ by what one finds there. At the same time, that encounter similarly transforms the traveller ‘for good’: whatever ghosts we encounter abroad follow us home and take root in our collective consciousness. This book therefore argues that Gothic literary travel plays a key role in giving expression to a range of very ‘real’ haunting anxieties. The strange and discomforting landscapes into which our reading propels us allow those anxieties to take form while, in turn, our experience of journeying through these landscapes enables us, in part, to confront the fears they provoke. 

This book argues that the process and experience of travel in Gothic literature provides a unique perspective on recurring cultural preoccupations from the late-eighteenth century onward, ranging from concerns about climate change or the presence of the unseen to the negotiation of cultural difference and the apprehensions produced by various modes of modern transport. The book follows travellers who take many fictional forms – tourists, commuters, walkers, explorers, as well as the ‘armchair’ tourist or reader – as they encounter fascinating, curious and often disquieting weathers, climates, landscapes and topographies. Gothic travel epitomises the wonder, excitement, suspicion or incomprehension that arises from journeys through familiar and unfamiliar terrain. While exposure to the wild, elemental or primitive could produce the elevation of the sublime in early Gothic, increasingly the experience of travel raised unsettling questions about people and environments that lay beyond established frames of knowledge. Gothic travellers are haunted, never alone, and the experience of journeying through these landscapes provokes fears that may shadow them even after they have returned to home ground.

One of the reasons why Gothic literature remains as popular in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as it has ever been, despite our lessening belief in the supernatural or the after-life, is because it continues to provide us with a mechanism for giving shape to otherwise formless but profound cultural concerns. The book questions, however, whether Gothic literature per se remains a source of fear (as it arguably was in its earliest phases), or whether it now provides a ‘homeopathic’ response to growing social, cultural and environmental anxieties which loom large in our consciousness. It tracks the ways in which Gothic literature, from the later eighteenth century to the present, has always propelled fictional travellers abroad into cultural landscapes which prove terrifying and unknowable, but also questions whether more recent literary portrayals ask different questions of their readers in relation to the environment, surveillance, (im)migration, the foreign and technological innovation, as viewed through the lens of travel. As this study will show, these expressions of fear speak loudly to our own time, and are manifested not only in contemporary Gothic literature but in the wider cultural discourse.

The expansion of Mumbai over the last four centuries has been documented in great detail by both contemporary writers and historians, yet this narrative stands out as an alternative, unique and authentic voice. Quite simply, it is a book about the city like no other. Govind Narayan’s ‘Mumbaiche Varnan’ was the first full account of Mumbai in any language, written just before the explosive growth and renovation of the city.

Guiding the reader on a tour of the sights and sounds of an emerging city struggling to shake off colonialism and wrestling with the formation of its own budding identity, Narayan’s beguiling book offers descriptions of Mumbai’s daily life, its people and its institutions: the parts of the whole that come together to create this diverse and vivacious place. In addition to a detailed structural overview, the author provides a ground level account of the street life and market places rife with gambling and criminal activity. In every sense, this valuable text is a rare and enthralling glimpse into a fascinating period and place otherwise lost to time.

Translated into English for the first time, and fully illustrated and with a detailed glossary and biography of the author, this edition does full justice to this remarkable historical document.

The expansion of Mumbai over the last four centuries has been documented in great detail by both contemporary writers and historians, yet this narrative stands out as an alternative, unique and authentic voice. Quite simply, it is a book about the city like no other. Govind Narayan’s ‘Mumbaiche Varnan’ was the first full account of Mumbai in any language, written just before the explosive growth and renovation of the city.

Guiding the reader on a tour of the sights and sounds of an emerging city struggling to shake off colonialism and wrestling with the formation of its own budding identity, Narayan’s beguiling book offers descriptions of Mumbai’s daily life, its people and its institutions: the parts of the whole that come together to create this diverse and vivacious place. In addition to a detailed structural overview, the author provides a ground level account of the street life and market places rife with gambling and criminal activity. In every sense, this valuable text is a rare and enthralling glimpse into a fascinating period and place otherwise lost to time.

Translated into English for the first time, and fully illustrated and with a detailed glossary and biography of the author, this edition does full justice to this remarkable historical document.

Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and Princess Isabel were two of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century; both are largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Elena Pavlovna was a German princess from the Kingdom of Wurttemburg who was selected to be the wife of Grand Duke Mikhail, the brother of Emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I. Princess Isabel was the daughter of the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II and heir to the throne. Both women were major players in the politics of emancipation in Russia in 1861 and in Brazil in 1888, respectively. Like many women, their political activities have been marginalized or completely written out of the historical record. This book chronicles the political lives of these two women, culminating in two of the most momentous emancipations of the nineteenth century. It does so in a way that sets the two women in the context of their societies. These societies were servile societies in the full sense of this phrase. Russia was the largest servile society in the world with over 40 million serfs at the time of emancipation while Brazil was the first slave society in the Americas and the last to free its slaves. 

The book emphasizes that the freeing of serfs in Russia and slaves in Brazil was part of the great wave of emancipations that began with the French Revolution. When that wave finally receded servile labor had been swept away from most countries in the world, including France (1789), Haiti (1793), Prussia (1807), the British Empire (1833), the Austrian Empire (1848), the Russian Empire (1861), the United States (1865), and ending with the freeing of slaves in Brazil in 1888. Too often, emancipation is looked at purely from a national view or one that is confined to the English-speaking world. Yet even from this truncated list it is clear that emancipation was a truly transnational phenomenon.

The book adopts an explicitly comparative approach. By detailing emancipation in the Russian and Brazilian empires, this book offers a broader understanding of that process, showing what they had in common as well as what differentiated them. Both empires were monarchies in which the emperors ruled as well as reigned, both excluded women from any political role and both were servile societies. Without denying the importance of the struggles of the oppressed themselves for freedom or the impact of economic changes, this book prioritizes high politics as an essential component of Monarchy, gender roles, and emancipation converged in the persons of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and Princess Isabel in ways that had a decisive impact on the course of emancipation and the form that it took. 

Grand-Gugignol Cinema and the Horror Genre traces important contributions of the Parisian Grand-Guignol theatre’s Golden Age as theoretical considerations of embodiment and affect in the development of horror cinema in the twentieth century. This study traces key components of the Grand-Guignol stage as a means to explore the immersive and corporeal aspects of horror cinema from the sound period to today. The book is a means to explore the Grand-Guignol not only as a historical place and genre, but theoretically, as a conceptual framework that opens up an affective mapping of Grand-Guignol attractions in cinema. 

In a broader theoretical sense, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare positions Grand-Guignol cinema in corporeal and affective terms as a way to discuss central themes from the Golden Age of the Grand-Guignol theatre as they figure within the framework of post-representational analysis in cinema studies. Post-representational analysis draws meaning out of matter, or the material intensities of films; here, making sense (representation and meaning) and also sensing (in a more corporeal, sensorial way) have political relevance that cut across gender, class, race and sexuality. The author deploys the Grand-Guignol as a conceptual tool to reveal its important influence on the horror genre by focusing on the dominant themes of the Grand-Guignol theatre that cinematic horror has taken up in its own immersive theatrics of the corporeal and sensorial.

This study’s restoration of a long Grand-Guignol tradition in cinema makes it a significant contribution to new theorizations of horror. It brings seemingly disparate traditions into conversation, as American, Canadian, French, and Italian cinema are all important sites for thinking through cinematic embodiment. These four countries have developed their own important genres and movements of Grand-Guignol cinema: the slasher, the “French Films of Sensation,” Canadian “body horror,” and the giallo. The Grand-Guignol famously operated in a dead-end of Chaptal Street, in the Pigalle district of Paris; this study offers affective and corporeal readings that open up new byways beyond the dead-end of psychoanalytic readings that continue to be dominant in horror genre scholarship.

Grand-Gugignol Cinema and the Horror Genre traces important contributions of the Parisian Grand-Guignol theatre’s Golden Age as theoretical considerations of embodiment and affect in the development of horror cinema in the twentieth century. This study traces key components of the Grand-Guignol stage as a means to explore the immersive and corporeal aspects of horror cinema from the sound period to today. The book is a means to explore the Grand-Guignol not only as a historical place and genre, but theoretically, as a conceptual framework that opens up an affective mapping of Grand-Guignol attractions in cinema. 

In a broader theoretical sense, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare positions Grand-Guignol cinema in corporeal and affective terms as a way to discuss central themes from the Golden Age of the Grand-Guignol theatre as they figure within the framework of post-representational analysis in cinema studies. Post-representational analysis draws meaning out of matter, or the material intensities of films; here, making sense (representation and meaning) and also sensing (in a more corporeal, sensorial way) have political relevance that cut across gender, class, race and sexuality. The author deploys the Grand-Guignol as a conceptual tool to reveal its important influence on the horror genre by focusing on the dominant themes of the Grand-Guignol theatre that cinematic horror has taken up in its own immersive theatrics of the corporeal and sensorial.

This study’s restoration of a long Grand-Guignol tradition in cinema makes it a significant contribution to new theorizations of horror. It brings seemingly disparate traditions into conversation, as American, Canadian, French, and Italian cinema are all important sites for thinking through cinematic embodiment. These four countries have developed their own important genres and movements of Grand-Guignol cinema: the slasher, the “French Films of Sensation,” Canadian “body horror,” and the giallo. The Grand-Guignol famously operated in a dead-end of Chaptal Street, in the Pigalle district of Paris; this study offers affective and corporeal readings that open up new byways beyond the dead-end of psychoanalytic readings that continue to be dominant in horror genre scholarship.

The approach of examining law through comics and other forms of popular culture has gained significant traction recently. The portrayal of phenomena in comics, TV series and movies reflects and shapes public perception, embedding these views in collective imagination. Popular culture, which mirrors and influences mainstream trends, plays a crucial role in how legal phenomena and figures – such as professors, students, lawyers, judges and police – are perceived by the public.
Comics are particularly effective in this context due to their popularity and imaginative nature. Legal reasoning itself often involves imaginative thinking, as illustrated by Justice Felix Frankfurter's advice to a young aspiring lawyer in 1954. He emphasised the importance of cultivating imagination through various forms of art, suggesting that engaging with pop culture can enrich legal understanding.
This collection seeks to utilise pop culture, specifically comics, to explain and teach complex legal concepts. This approach has been explored in fields such as law and film, and law and literature, but this book aims to be innovative by adopting a comparative and international approach.
By including scholars from diverse backgrounds and extending beyond Anglo-American perspectives, this book aims to provide a richer, more varied analysis of how law is depicted in graphic novels, manga and animated series, thereby filling an important gap in the literature.