Anthem Press

An up-to-date book of quotations for executives, academics and anyone who wants to spice speeches and business presentations or simply reflect on some of the best things ever said on topics linked to management and business life in general. From “Aristotle” to “Mark Zuckenberg” and from “Action” to “Work”, this book is a formidable source of witty remarks and inspiration for all. Best of its kind, the book covers classic and modern topics such as “Bitcoins”, “Digitalization”, “Sustainability” or “Fake News. It introduces a large number of quotations never published before and includes an index of topics and authors that refers to thousands of classic and unique smart comments.

Subaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature is the first study of fiction written in Fiji Hindi. Its target texts are two extraordinary novels Ḍaukā Purān [‘A Subaltern Tale’] (2001) and Fiji Maa [‘Mother of a Thousand’] (2018) by the Fiji Indian writer Subramani. They are massive novels (respectively 500 and 1,000 pages long) written in the devanāgarī (Sanskrit) script. They are examples of subaltern writing that do not exist, as a legitimation of the subaltern voice, anywhere else in the world. The novels constitute the silent underside of world literature, whose foundational form – the picaresque – it adapts and interrogates. For postcolonial, diaspora and subaltern scholars, they are defining (indeed definitive) texts without which their theories remain incomplete. Theories require mastery of primary texts and these subaltern novels, ‘heroic’ compositions as they are in the vernacular, offer a challenge to the theorist.

The argument of the book takes off from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s well-known declaration (later modified) that ‘The subaltern cannot speak’. Through a close examination of the two novels – and with extensive translations of passages transliterated in the roman script – it is argued that the subaltern does speak but in her own language. The subaltern speech acts in the Fiji Hindi demotic (itself an amalgam of Hindi dialects with borrowings from English and Fijian) are both private and public: private in the sense that the language (which is not to be confused with Creole English or Patois French) is an outcome of a specific historically conditioned Fiji Indian plantation experience, and public in the sense that it can be read and understood by speakers and readers of standard Hindi.

Combining deep sensitivity to language and art, the book makes a very bold claim: these books are world literary texts to which the same kind of exhaustive criticism may be applied that one would with any other great work of literature. This book brings to the reader something that has never been done before. It challenges the subaltern theorist by stipulating (axiomatically) that to understand the subaltern, one must understand her own language and not depend on redacted accounts of their experiences in metropolitan or privileged languages be they French and English or Hindi and Arabic.

Poetics of race offers the readers a combined historical, political and aesthetic approach to the symbolic representation of race in Latin America in different periods and cultural regions. Chapters focus on issues of social conflict, identity politics and self-recognition by historically marginalized populations, such as indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and Asian immigrants. 

Literary texts, cultural practices and visual arts (painting, film) are analyzed as representative moments in the process of social and political recognition of subaltern subjectivities and non-dominant cultures, providing insightful studies of negritude, indigenous cultures and Japanese communities in Latin America. Through the exploration of different media and alternative critical categories, Poetics of Race proposes new avenues for the comparative and intersectional study of race, gender and class in postcolonial societies.

'Virtual Voyages' is a fascinating account of the European discovery of the elusive 'great south land' told through the literature of 'imaginary voyages'. Written at the height of the era of European maritime exploration, these bizarre and captivating tales, with their wildly imaginative visions of antipodean inversion and strangeness, reveal a hidden history of attitudes to colonization. By exposing the relationship between myth and reality in the antipodes, this book casts new light on the power of fiction to influence history.

In the post-colonial studies field, books about travel writing and empire have tended to focus on the high period of nineteenth-century imperialism and on the colonial settings of Africa and India. This book offers a fresh perspective by focussing on the eighteenth century, and referring to the geographical region of Australia and the Pacific, which has had far less attention. The book also breaks new ground by being the first to approach the genre of the imaginary voyage from a post-colonial perspective.

In addition to the new insights into European colonialism that it offers, the book illustrates many broader themes in eighteenth-century history and thought. These include connections between the rise of science and modern imperialism, the development of narrative history and fiction and the influence of romanticism, the evolution of the early novel in Britain and France, and the role of mythology in the development of national identity.

This volume addresses the current configuration of democratic politics in South Asia from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The essays seek to examine the larger questions of how democratic values are embedded in social and political institutions, and how localised and everyday political values inform the multiple ways in which democracy is understood and practised. One of the strengths of this collection is the fact that it does not seek to provide answers to these questions from within one academic discipline only, but rather brings together scholars with backgrounds in a variety of social science disciplines and the humanities.

A number of allied questions and engaging debates emerge throughout the book. How may we distinguish between democracy’s formal and less-than-formal dimensions in the context of South Asia? How do notions of kinship, kingship and community tie in with larger processes of democratic politics and deepening political mobilisation? How do people construe the political in a context where the sphere of the religious seemingly seamlessly overlaps with the political, where the political cannot be separated from the social, and where the boundaries between state and society are blurred? How do people practically engage with the political and with democratic processes at a local level – and what might democracy mean in the vernacular?

The contemporary business and human rights regime speaks almost exclusively to states and business entities. The absence of victim voices has been a consistent challenge within the field in general as well as within the various literature and policy proposals. This challenge is so widely recognized that, for the first time, the UN made affected communities’ access to remedies the central theme at the November 2017 Forum on Business and Human Rights.

“When Business Harms Human Rights” is timely, exploring many of the key themes from the forum and offers an in-depth analysis of business-related human rights impacts and the challenges experienced by rightsholders in accessing remedies. The volume relies on reported narratives of and qualitative data on various incidents where businesses have intersected with affected communities. It allows the voice of the rightsholders to be heard and presents initial ideas regarding best practices that governments and businesses can undertake when engaging with communities. Most importantly, however, this edited volume engages with a larger audience primarily from the perspective of affected rightsholders.

The volume stands as a first-of-its-kind. Indeed, of the scholarly books currently published within the field of business and human rights, none have provided narratives from rightsholders or made their perspectives the center of the narrative.

Against the backdrop of today’s renewed uncertainty over the present economic system, this timely volume presents Martin Luther’s contribution to the modern economic sciences, providing a detailed introduction and revised translation of his major pamphlet on economic matters, ‘On Commerce and Usury’ (‘Von Kauffshandlung vnd Wucher’, 1524). In his teachings on indulgences Luther picked up on the question of hoarding money, and was among the earliest voices in early modern Europe calling for an ‘ethical’ economics. Luther’s work prefigured many later contributions to modern economic theory, from the mercantilists and cameralists to the German Historical School.

Luther was, apparently, quite near to what the British economist J. M. Keynes developed as a ‘general theory’ in 1936, relating the power of spendthrift and a pro-active state which made people consume and invest in the economy. And Luther was always very clear about the basic fact that – in order for the economy to work well and society to flourish – markets need rules. Luther’s prescience and enduring relevance are brought to the fore in Philipp Robinson Rössner’s authoritative introduction and notes.

This publication provides - for the first time since the late 1800s - a comprehensive anthology of sonnets written by Victorian poets. Covering both canonical and largely forgotten poets, the coverage ranges from single sonnets to complete sonnet sequences. Rather than restricting itself to a small number of sonnets from a limited list of poets, as in general Victorian poetry anthologies, this five-volume set includes a representative selection of sonnets for each individual poet in order to display the diversity and innovation brought to the sonnet form by Victorian poets. More than one hundred poets and over three thousand sonnets are included.

The anthology fills an important gap in the field of Victorian anthologies by making available a large number of examples of a poetic form that was one of the most important in nineteenth-century poetry. The sonnets are ordered chronologically by date of publication. This enables the reader to trace developments over a period of seventy years, during which a fundamental re-appraisal of the sonnet, in both structural and thematic forms, occurred.

By the late 1960s, Harold Garfinkel had coined the term “ethnomethodology” as a neologism for the field of study, the study of “people’s methods,” that his seminal collection of pioneering studies – Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967) – was to make public. Up to the present day, the field has developed, both diversifying and deepening its research interests.

The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel brings together leading scholars and upcoming researchers in contemporary ethnomethodology to bring out the experimental character of Garfinkel’s legacy in the social sciences and beyond. Therefore, the Companion takes its cue from Garfinkel’s noted “breaching experiments,” enabling the reflexive investigation of “trust conditions” in situ, and asks how this research interest has been productively pursued and distinctively rearticulated, both within and beyond Garfinkel’s oeuvre. Whilst Garfinkel’s experimental legacy is often acknowledged, no systematic introduction to its distinctive outlook, tension-riddled diversification, and heuristic interest(s) is available to date. The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel both fills and reflects upon that “gap in the literature,” thereby articulating ethnomethodology’s experimental outlook, if not recasting its current research directions. The Editors’ Introduction charts the experimental outlook of ethnomethodology, spanning Garfinkel’s early experiments with “trust” and his later experimental interventions (e.g., via “tutorial problems”). The Companion’s Contributions range from exegetical to experimental studies and spell out Garfinkel’s experimental legacy in depth and detail, whilst showcasing its multifaceted development in and beyond ethnomethodology.

'Inclusive Growth, Full Employment, and Structural Change: Implications and Policies for Developing Asia' discusses policies to achieve inclusive growth in developing Asia, including agriculture, investment, certain state interventions, monetary, fiscal, and the role of the state as employer of last resort.

Felipe argues that full employment of the labor force is the key to delivering inclusive growth. Full employment is the most direct way to improve the well-being of the people, especially of the most disadvantaged. Since unemployment and underemployment are pervasive in many parts of the region, Asian leaders must commit to the goal of full employment. The book also analyzes the region's phenomenal growth in recent decades in terms of structural transformation. Accelerating it is vital for the continued growth of developing Asia. But efforts to achieve full employment might be held back given that structural transformation requires massive labor shifts across sectors, and these are difficult to coordinate. Moreover, the goal of full employment was abandoned in the 1970s, and governments and central banks have since concentrated on keeping inflation low.

‘Africa and Economic Policy: Developing a Framework for Policymakers’ aims to fill an important gap in the current literature on economic policy in developing countries. Despite its richness and sophistication, the current economic literature has not yet succeeded in developing a framework for economic policy that is clear and intelligible to economic policymakers, and which is capable of effectively delivering a sustained increase in citizens’ well-being – something that developing countries’ policymakers, particularly those in Africa, are striving for.

This ground-breaking study seeks to rectify this problem by suggesting a unique conceptual framework for designing and conducting policy in developing countries, and primarily presents its proposals in an African context. In doing so, the volume addresses one of the major shortcomings of developing country economic policy literature as it now stands.

Since the inception of cinema in the late nineteenth century, filmmakers have employed a wide array of precursory aesthetic strategies in the conception and creation of their disparate works. The existence of these traditional antecedents have afforded filmmakers a diverse range of technical and artistic applications towards the construction of their cinematic narratives. Furthermore, the socio-political and cultural contexts in which films are conceived often inform the manner in which particular aesthetic sensibilities are selected and deployed. Unfortunately, many creative artists – and audiences – remain unfamiliar with Aesthetics as a practical discipline and how it might apply to their own creative and/or interpretive pursuits.

‘Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative’ provides a concise historical survey of Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline and applies several of its underlying principles to the examination of filmic storytelling. The book’s four chapters codify working definitions of the relevant terms and concepts, employing specific case studies to illustrate how certain aesthetic stratagems govern a film’s structural design and execution. By drawing connections between the technical/creative decisions filmmakers must make and more time-honoured traditions regarding the nature of art, the structures of storytelling and the import of visual imagery, ‘Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative’ helps recontextualize film within a wider sphere of artistic/intellectual endeavour. The book is a useful and much-needed addition to the pre-existing canon for students of visual storytelling and for general readers.

‘The Art and Ideology of the Trade Union Emblem, 1850–1925’ is a ground-breaking book that considers trade union emblems and banners as art objects in their own right. It studies their commissioning, their designers and the social conditions and gender relations that they knowingly or unwittingly reveal. The volume celebrates working-class culture and shows how it could be both innovative and derivative. Annie Ravenhill-Johnson’s exploration of the artistry of the emblems – the art of and for the toiling masses – sets these images of labour in their historical, cultural and ideological context. Her introductory chapter explores the re-signification of Greco-Roman, medieval and Renaissance architecture, figures and symbols in the emblem tradition, and analyses how these images served as representations of the developing self-awareness of the growing industrial workforces during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The emblems of organized labour followed the traditions set out by Freemasonry and Friendly Societies that had adopted and adapted classical, biblical and medieval depictions of crafts and craftsmen to illustrate the antiquity of their trade and to lend solemnity and legitimacy to the tradition of forming associations for protection and benefits. Renaissance art, architecture and sculpture, the conventions of landscape painting and the more prestigious genres of mythical and biblical subjects all provided settings and structures that sanitized working conditions and idealized the workers themselves.

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

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

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

This book considers the presence of the supernatural and Gothic elements of the Western on screen. These dark and sinister undertones often exist in Western narratives to draw attention to the ever-present issue of death and its haunting resonance which characters encounter. This book examines this through key historic moments in Western film and its contemporary incarnations. The book detects imposing correlations in themes and currents between the Gothic and the Western relating to existential crisis and a loss of faith in ideologies and institutions. These themes represent the tensions between the old and the new, the deranged insistence on civility and order in a chaotic landscape, disillusionment and the shattering of faith in the natural order, and even nature and order themselves. The Western, just like the Gothic tale, reminds us that new frontiers are mired in the past, and optimism and survival are hunted down and haunted by guilt-ridden past and passed anxieties and traumas.

This book demonstrates and illuminates the uncanny coalition that can be seen between these two traditions epitomised in the tales of the spectral West. Take, for instance, the seminal psychological Western of the 1950s, The Searchers (1956), where the unspoken horrors of the past haunts the behaviour of the anti-hero, Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne) and is an omnipresent as well as a daunting presence which looms throughout the narrative of the film; or Sicario (2016) where a naive FBI agent (played by Emily Blunt) is horrified by the malevolence of inhumanity which haunts borders in conflict and makes a mockery of morality. But most important to both films, as well as to countless others, is the brooding presence of the landscape itself, which intrudes like a spectral entity.

This tension has often presented a dilemma in such a recognisable genre. As Steve Neale has suggested, there is a problem with the ‘central role of iconography in the Western’. It is as if, according to Neil Campbell, ‘by the very nature of its mythic representations’ there exists ‘a type of hyper-reality, a simulation reproducing images conforming to some already defined, but possibly non-existent, sense of West-ness’. And yet, as the book demonstrates, rather than being hyper-real, and by definition not ‘real’, these mythic ‘representations’ are ghostly or spectral revenants. Through that process, we may then be able to distinguish, not indeed a problem or a dilemma, but a more deeply felt connection between the past and the present, between nature, space and time and any hope of a worthwhile future.

The bushranger legend is an important component of Australia’s cultural history, with names like Ned Kelly and Ben Hall still provoking strong, if ambivalent, responses. Storytellers mobilize this legend in unique and exciting ways that reflect upon both the cultural and actual history of bushrangers, as well as speaking to contemporary concerns and driving debate on the national character. ‘A Cultural History of the Bushranger Legend in Theatres and Cinemas, 1828–2017’ is a multidisciplinary investigation into the history of cultural representations of the bushranger legend on the stage and screen, charting that history from its origins in colonial theatre works performed while bushrangers still roamed Australia’s bush to contemporary Australian cinema. It considers the influences of industrial, political and social disruptions on these representations as well as their contributions to those disruptions.

‘A Cultural History of the Bushranger Legend in Theatres and Cinemas, 1828–2017’ is a comprehensive cultural history of representations of bushrangers in cinema and colonial theatre. Beginning with the bushranger legend’s establishment, it explores the formative years of the representational tradition, identifying the origins of characteristics and the social and industrial mechanisms through which they passed from history to popular theatre. Tracing the legend’s development, the book interrogates the promotion of these characteristics from a contested popular history to an officially sanctioned national outlook in the cinema. Finally, it analyzes the contemporary fragmentation of the bushranger legend, attending to the dissatisfactions and challenges that arose in response to political and social debates galvanized by the 1988 bicentenary.

The cultural history recounted in ‘A Cultural History of the Bushranger Legend in Theatres and Cinemas, 1828–2017’ provides not only an into the role of popular narrative representations of bushrangers in the development and reflection of Australian character, but also a detailed case study of the specific mechanisms at work in the symbiosis between a nation’s values and its creative production. Bushrangers have had a heightened though unstable significance in Australia due to the nation’s diverse population and historical insecurities and conflicts over colonial identity, land rights and settlement. Community often defined the bushrangers in their stage and screen appearances, and the challenges that these marginalized communities faced were absorbed into the political and social mainstream. ‘A Cultural History of the Bushranger Legend in Theatres and Cinemas, 1828–2017’ is an insight into the process through which the bushranger legend earned its cultural resonance in Australia.

Starting in the 1970s, the collective work of revision and rediscovery of a ‘new Durkheim’ has begun unveiling the richness of Durkheim’s sociology, freeing his legacy from the limits of previous interpretations. For some decades now, researchers have begun confronting and revising the traditional image of Durkheim as a sociologist who has a strong epistemological continuity with positivism, who is ideologically conservative and whose abstract functionalism often lacks a proper historical understanding of political institutions. 

What links the contributions in this Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim is a shared conviction of the necessity of moving forward and contributing to a new phase characterized by a new vision of Durkheim’s theories. The contributions to this volume provide new insights into Durkheim’s classical texts and juxtapose them with the reconstruction of his lectures and lesser known writings to offer a wider understanding of his oeuvre. 

The Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim intends to offer different practical attempts to build on Durkheim’s legacy and investigate the issues and controversies that characterise contemporary societies and thus contribute to develop further this path of critical enquiry into ‘classical sociology’.

Portuguese and Amsterdam Sephardic Merchants in the Tobacco Trade is a history of the role of Portuguese and Sephardic merchants in the tobacco industry and trade of Amsterdam. It focuses on the contraband trade with Tierra Firme and Hispaniola in the early seventeenth century as documented in the Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection. 

The Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection is a unique archival collection for the purpose of research on the territorial conflict between the Spanish Habsburg Empire and the Dutch Republic in the context of the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648). Sluiter collected documents from archives around the world with a focus on trade and fiscal records which document the rise to commercial prominence of the Dutch Republic, the intricacies of Spanish and Portuguese trade and navigation, and the Contaduria which report revenues and expenditures of the Spanish Crown along with import and export duties. The documents in the collection relate mainly to Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese trade affairs in Europe and Spanish and Portuguese overseas territories but include references to English and French accounts of payments to Spain as well. The majority of the documents are in Spanish, transcribed, translated in English, and provided with notes by Engel Sluiter himself. The Caribbean Collection, including Tierra Firme and Hispaniola, contains documents on Dutch mercantile trade practices – mostly smuggling as Spain and the Dutch Republic were at war with each other – and Spanish trade regulations and efforts to block foreign access to trade goods. We thus learn a great deal about foreigners involved in illegal trade in which capture, corruption and bribery played an important role in particular with respect to the tobacco trade which was highly regulated under Spanish rule. 

Sometimes, when foreign vessels were captured and hauled into port, mariners or merchant smugglers were reported by name and port of origin and voyage details were recorded. We thus gain insight into the specifics of the merchants and their trading networks as well as the goods being smuggled. Concern about tobacco smuggling is referred to in several of the reports and resulted in plans to prohibit tobacco cultivation or allow cultivation with royal permission only. In several instances recommendations were made to undermine smuggling activities in specific coastal regions where tobacco cultivation occurred and where frequent contacts were made between Dutch mariners and merchants and coastal populations including Amerindians, Creoles, runaway Blacks and "Portuguese" present in coastal areas. Spanish documents display a concern about "Portuguese" in coastal areas as they were associated with Conversos, New Christians who often served as go-between in trade and finance in the Spanish Habsburg Empire. The same group was often thought to be in contact with English, French and Dutch smugglers, and the records suggest that Portuguese merchants were engaged in trade with Bayonne, London and Amsterdam through merchant networks that had been expanded and extended throughout the Atlantic world. 

Violence exploding in public spaces, corruption by political figures and economic elites, the will of the people thwarted in both elections and votes in the senate, military misadventures abroad, and rampant economic inequality at home diminishing a shared sense of the common good – in sum, a republic in disarray. These descriptions are not only familiar from ancient Roman political and social life but are also recognizable to any United States citizen who follows the news and American civic life. On the Republic proceeds chronologically through the fall of the Roman Republic beginning in 133 BCE and continuing down to around 14 CE, providing a continuous narrative of the fall of the Roman Republic juxtaposed with the contemporary political landscape of the United States.

On the Republic focuses on four constellations of lessons that represent the most significant things which the fall of the Roman Republic has to teach us at this time: the dangers of political violence, the inability of individuals and institutions to save us, the finality of the loss of freedom, and lastly the importance of civic virtue. In 20 short chapters, On the Republic explores how the United States now faces many of the same challenges that toppled the Roman Republic - political divisions, economic inequality, and creeping authoritarianism. How we respond to these challenges today will determine the future of American democracy.

On the Republic is not a book about the fall of ancient Rome to so-called barbarians overrunning the border. It addresses the fall of a democratic society (the Roman Republic) into an autocracy (the Roman empire). This is not a book about sexual debauchery and gluttony, but a serious reading of political events that had serious consequences. On the Republic offers modern readers lessons that, while sobering, can also empower them to participate in political life in new ways. History is a means not to predict the future, but rather to stir the civic imagination of its readers.

Although there have been over 700 illustrators of Poe’s work over the past two centuries, this book chooses to examine only the best of them.  Beginning with the French in the nineteenth century and tracing the great illustrators of Poe to the present, this book not only provides close analyses of individual visualizations but also seeks to supply an art history context to understanding their emergence.  The majority of the artists featured remain unknown, even to Poe scholars, although their artwork represents iterations inspired by the most famous of Poe’s poems and stories.  In some cases, the illustrations helped increase the visibility of particular Poe works and to make them part of the international Poe canon.  A few of the illustrators featured in this book (e.g., Manet, Doré, Redon, Beardsley) are recognized among the most famous artists in the world.  Others, such as Martini and Blumenschein, while remaining minor figures in art history, nevertheless produced immortal work based on Poe’s fiction and poetry.  While still other visual artists represented here (Rackham, Dulac, Clarke) achieved artistic fame as book illustrators based on homages to other writers and fairy tales in combination with their Poe studies; their work on Poe, however, helped to solidify their larger reputations as professional illustrators.  The last chapter extends traditional visualizations influenced by Poe to include his impact on twentieth- and twenty-first century filmmakers and cartoonists.  They, too, found in Poe’s writing either a source for direct re-creation or an inspiration for their own atmospheric excursions into the bizarre, the exotic, and the psychologically complex.  

While many of the artists included in the book are represented in important collections from libraries and art galleries around the world, Poe scholars (and art historians) have yet to explore both the range of these illustrations and analyze their significance in the context of how they enrich our understanding of Poe. Some of the questions this book seeks to answer are: What was there about Poe’s narrative and poetic art that impressed and continues to inspire illustrators and other visual artists?  What kinds of insights and understandings do these visual artists help readers of Poe to see and/or reconsider about his work?  Are there definite distinctions—e.g., stylistic, thematic, historical, etc.—that were more relevant to Poe illustrators from the nineteenth century compared to those from the twentieth?  How are these emphases reflective of the various art movements to which Poe’s illustrators were associated? And lastly, what do these illustrations reveal about changing attitudes and critical emphases toward Poe’s canon over time? 

'P. S. O'Hegarty (1879-1955)' provides a well-researched and engaging biography of a major figure within Irish nationalist politics. Standing at the epicentre of Ireland's revolution, this ardent separatist provided much original thinking on the central concerns of his day. Using O’Hegarty's fertile mind and prodigious literary works as a guide, this book explores the far-reaching political and cultural issues of early 20th century Ireland, such as what is meant by 'nation' and national identity, cultural and political tolerance, Republican Liberalism, and the nature (as well as the clash) of religion and the state. Of these and other important subjects still relevant today, O'Hegarty was a prolific writer and essayist, notably championing liberal and progressive ideas far ahead of his separatist contemporaries. Spanning Ireland’s cultural and political revolution in the early 20th century, his career offers interesting insights into this crucial period, as well as the social and political clime of the Free State.  His writings cast a keen and often iconoclastic eye on the developing Irish nation he helped create both as a noted Civil Servant and a social and literary critic.

Given that O’Hegarty is a name known to many Irish specialists, this full review of his separatist career will be a welcome addition to the growing canon of historical biographies of previously overlooked leading figures in this period. This biography also breaks new ground in revealing unknown aspects of this great figure's personality and life story. O'Hegarty has remained largely absent in the literature dealing with a revolutionary period to which he greatly contributed. O'Hegarty counted among his inner circle political heavyweights such as Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffith, IRB leader Michael Collins, and Bulmer Hobson, arguably the individual with whom he stood closest in political outlook. Despite sometimes quarrelling, O'Hegarty remained a source of wise counsel to all these men. Admired by both Griffith and Collins, O'Hegarty was privy to many private conversations and documents that reveal exciting new source material for the study of this crucial period relevant in shaping modern Ireland. Working within hugely influential movements such as Sinn Féin, the IRB, and the Gaelic League, P. S. O'Hegarty was often the thrusting sword from which the most stinging precise blows landed against the Irish Party and British rule in Ireland.

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. 

'Bulgaria and Europe: Shifting Identities' offers an in-depth analysis of Bulgaria’s relationship with the European continent. These essays examine how Bulgarian historiography and literature over the centuries have created differing conceptions of Europe and, in the process, shaped the country’s own shifting identity. Through such analyses, the essays provide the broader cultural context and historical perspective required in order to understand the country's EU accession process as well as its aftermath. This work ultimately addresses what has arguably been the key question facing Bulgaria in the post-Cold War period: 'Are we European?' This preoccupation with the question of Bulgaria’s European identity stems in part from the prospect of joining the EU and thus becoming part of Europe's mainstream, and equally from the wider political, economic and security vacuum in which the dissolution of the Communist bloc left the country at the beginning of the 1990s. The collection will therefore also examine Bulgaria's process of integration into the EU within the context of contemporary political and economic developments, raising questions about the costs that Bulgarians have incurred in order to join European structures. 'Bulgaria and Europe: ShiftingIdentities' charts the country's attempts to confront a problematic present while it struggles to escape from the past and its legacy of fears.

'Bulgaria and Europe' breaks new ground as the only published study to discuss the way that 'Europe' has been conceptualized within Bulgaria and how this has affected the relations between them. It is therefore the first analysis that focuses on the issue of Bulgarian national identity, how this identity has developed in relation to Europe and the way in which such a development has affected Bulgaria's relations with the European continent, including post-Cold War relations with the EU. This volume also represents an important addition to the limited amount of literature on Bulgaria available in the English language. 

‘The Collected Works of Ann Hawkshaw’ brings together Hawkshaw’s four volumes of poetry and republishes them together for the first time. Some two hundred years after her birth into a large family of Dissenters in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the publication of ‘The Collected Works’ reflects the growing interest in Hawkshaw’s poetry and life. As the span of three decades between the first and last examples of Hawkshaw’s writing suggests, her poetry offers an exceptional insight into the changing political and religious landscape of the mid-nineteenth century. The themes of death, religion, science, history and nation that run through Hawkshaw’s poetry demonstrate her capacity for extended critical thought, as she engages with subjects at the heart of nineteenth-century cultural and religious debates whilst challenging the work of established scholars and writers.

Writing in a strong, independent and perceptive voice, Hawkshaw makes a valuable contribution to the Manchester poetic revival of 1830s and 1840s, and to political debates over abolitionism and the Poor Law Amendment. Her defence of natural theology in light of scientific progress and her skilful use of the sonnet sequence to engage with nineteenth-century historiographies of the Anglo-Saxon period are also notable. Elsewhere, Hawkshaw draws on her experience as a mother to write tender and poignant elegies on childhood death, addressing several poems to her own children and grandchild.

As well as providing a biography of Hawkshaw, who was married to the leading Victorian engineer Sir John Hawkshaw and related by marriage to the Darwin-Wedgwood family, the editor’s introduction and notes draw attention to several of Hawkshaw’s most significant poems and their critical reception, making connections between her poetry and the work of Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wordsworth, Gaskell and Pater. 

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

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

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

Modern India is emerging as a global power within which the Indian state plays a critical role in delivering economic development and maintaining the integrity and unity of society. By drawing upon informed essays from scholars and researchers engaged in the field, this volume provides critical, empirical and conceptual insights into state-society relationships over issues as diverse as cable TV networks, urban planning, garbage collection, economic liberalization, coalition politics, provincial political rhetoric, individual rights and political participation and the management of village and municipal councils. In an era dominated by news of state failures in many Asian and African countries, the political institutions of the Indian state present an unusual combination of flexibility and stability. Within a democratic system, they enable the state to absorb and respond to popular pressures while winning public support for radical solutions to pressing social problems. Stretching from the centre down to the village, these institutions form a labyrinthine structure, occasionally harmonious but often the arena of intense economic, social and political conflict, the outcome of which will prove vital for India’s hopes of future growth and development. This book will be an invaluable reading for students across the disciplines of history, sociology, politics and government, as well as to development practitioners, policy makers, and readers keen to learn more about recent innovations in the theory and practice of governance in India.

A famous White European male named Eugen Sandow (1867–1925) toured colonial South Africa and South, Southeast, and East Asia in 1904–1905 during a period of European imperial anxiety and rising Asian confidence and nationalism. He was renowned as the world’s “perfect” and “strongest” man at the turn of the 20th century, and he was the British Museum’s model in 1901 for the ideal Caucasian male. Sandow’s tour of Afro-Asia might seem like a straightforward tale about a European strongman, entertainer, and entrepreneur bringing a supposedly superior, scientifically developed White body and British entertainment to Africa and Asia using modern rail, steamship, and telegraphic services, but there is much more to the story.

Looking beyond the exuberant “Sandow crazes” in large colonial cities such as Johannesburg, Calcutta, Singapore, and Hong Kong, the book highlights complex processes of cross-cultural exchange that were occurring. These were characterized by flows and counterflows of ideas and practices about exercise and health despite existing political, military, and economic power imbalances. Africans and Asians interested in fitness, physical culture, and male strength were able to ignore, challenge, or assimilate Sandow’s claims about the superiority of his system, his body and manliness, and his status as the world’s “perfect man.”

This study of Sandow’s 1904–1905 world tour uncovers and analyzes issues of representation and cultural exchange regarding physical culture, the body, gender, and race in a global imperial context. It also highlights some of the trials and tribulations of globalization in the early 1900s, and it reminds readers of the important history of “demimonde” showbusiness and entertainment initiatives (including music hall, variety shows, and the circus) in colonial Africa and Asia, as well as in the wider British Empire.

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

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

The written histories, built memorials and spoken narratives of settler descendants often reveal an absence of Aboriginal people in Australian settlers’ historical consciousness and a lack of empathy for those whose lands were taken over. This absence reflects an intellectual and emotional disconnect from Aboriginal people’s experiences and from recent national debates about reconciling contested pasts. The aim of ‘Memory, Place and Settler‒Aboriginal History’ is to understand the evolution and endurance of this disconnect. Drawing on archival research, interviews and fieldwork, Skye Krichauff fuses the methodologies and theories of historical enquiry, anthropology and memory studies to investigate the multifaceted processes through which current generations of rural settler descendants come to know the colonial era. Primarily focussing on analysing and comparing the historical consciousness of a specific group of settler descendants – namely those who have grown up on land in the mid-north of South Australia that was occupied by their forebears in the nineteenth century – this book is additionally informed by interviews and fieldwork conducted with Aboriginal descendants. In addition, as a fifth-generation settler descendant herself, Krichauff utilises her insider status to provide personal insights and reflections with her analysis.

Within spoken narratives and during site visits, settler descendants demonstrate that their consciousness of the colonial past has been formed by growing up in places surrounded by people and objects that provide continuous reminders and physical evidence of the lives of previous generations. This book argues that the primary and most powerful way through which this group knows the colonial past is through lived experience. A recognition that (and how) previous generations’ experiences transfer through the generations is crucial to any investigation into the past known and understood through lived experience. As such, this monograph investigates and contextualises the timing, speed and intensity with which rural districts were occupied, Aboriginal people were dispossessed, and the extent and nature of previous generations’ relations with Aboriginal people.

Included in this monograph is an analysis of public histories (local written histories and plaques, monuments and information boards) which demonstrates a settler-colonial historical epistemology that frames the way mid-northern settler descendants make sense of the past. Memories of personal lived experiences are remembered, understood and articulated – are composed and constructed – using the public language and the meanings available in the wider culture in which individuals live. Krichauff provides concrete examples which demonstrate how, amongst many settler descendants, the memories, family stories and lived experiences of Aboriginal presence and positive settler‒Aboriginal interaction (stories which fall outside the dominant epistemology) are ignored or neglected. While knowledge about the past learned through external sources (books, films, documentaries) can, to varying degrees, shape and inform settler descendants’ consiousness of the colonial era, Krichauff argues that it is the degree of connection with experience that is crucial to understanding the extent to which external knowledge is absorbed and remembered. By connecting Aboriginal people (past and present) with people and places known through everyday life, settler descendants are more likely to intellectually and emotionally connect their own histories with those of the victims of colonialism. This book concludes by demonstrating how it is possible to unsettle settler descendants’ consciousness of the colonial past in ways that enable a tentative connection with Aboriginal people and their experiences.

China is becoming ever more deeply integrated with global political economy. This book addresses critical issues in this process. The author examines the paradox of the global market economy that is presided over by 70 million members of the Chinese Communist Party, and analyses China’s policy of 'innovation in an open environment', attempting to nurture a group of globally competitive, large-scale companies.

In addition, the book analyses the challenges that China’s political economy faces in the twenty-first century, identifying the way in which China is attempting to resolve these contradictions by building on its rich historical experience to regulate market forces. It further examines the wider context of global capitalism within which Chinese development is taking place. Capitalism is the key propulsive force in technical progress. The recent period has seen an unprecedented liberation of this force. However, this force is a two-edged sword. The unprecedented advances have come hand-in-hand with unprecedented challenges that threaten the very survival of the human species.

Finally, it studies the relationship between the United States and China. Through cooperative behaviour, the US and China can help lead the world towards a sustainable future for mankind, with a global market economy regulated in the common interest of all human beings. In the absence of such a mechanism, the prospects for humanity are bleak.

Although Islam and integration are frequently seen as antithetical concepts in much of Europe, the Muslims of the Indian sub-continent in the USA are an example of a population who have succeeded. This is in great measure due to their high levels of education and economic success, which make them one of the most prosperous minorities in America. Now brought into sharp focus by the events of 11 September 2001 in New York, this study examines the regrouping of the religious community and the reinvention of group identity in first and second-generation immigrants. By transplanting many of their institutions to the US (particularly in New York), Muslim immigrants succeeded in establishing their presence in the American landscape without arousing significant concern in the host community. This study emphasizes that in spite of the stereotypes attached to Islam – which are as loaded in America as in Europe, and periodically incite reactions from the Muslims – the religion of Islam can actually play a stabilizing role in the same way that other minority religions (notably Catholicism and Judaism and more recently Hinduism) have done, and that Islam does not seem to compromise the ability of immigrants to participate in American society.

This collection of essays covers a broad range of disciplines to produce a work that rethinks relationships and divisions in gender, geography, class relations, culture and much more to create a true 'politics of the possible'.

Broadly emphasizing forms, ideologies and class relations, Sangari's essays crisscross and cohere around several themes: the politics of social location and the connection between local, metropolitan and colonial geographies as they bear on debates about the nature of knowledge; the transnational and regional production of ideologies such as altruism under the aegis of colonialism; ways of theorizing women's labour, literacy and consent to patriarchal arrangements and dominant ideologies.

Sangari's analysis of Indian English and the relationships between 'literature' and the non-literary change, the way we consider the divisions between the metropolitan and the sub-continental. In her discussion of capitalism and colonialism, her egalitarian feminist viewpoint opens up and questions issues of cultural autonomy and hybridity. She also critiques the impact of race, caste, class, religion and misogyny on patriarchal ideology and its effect on women.

The 'politics of the possible' mapped by these essays presents itself in several areas: as a more sensitive feminist historiography; as the social potential for secular activity in seemingly impossible situations; in the historical possibilities that were offered by situations not doomed to inevitable outcomes; and as the elements of resistance produced by the contradictions of different structures of oppression..

There are few more intimidating moments in an English teacher’s career than those in which they learn that they have been assigned ‘the survey’ for the first time. Distilling scores of years of literary history and thousands of pages of literary texts into a coherent semester can seem impossible at first. Add to this the fact that few teachers at the high school level receive in-depth instruction in literary history, whereas their counterparts at the college and university levels receive little preparation in syllabus construction, and the overdetermining force of available textbooks and antecedent examples tends to assert itself.

All anthologies worth their salt provide expansive biographical headnotes for individual authors and group all of the works written by those authors under their respective headnotes. Authors are typically arranged in chronological order by date of birth and their works usually appear in the order of composition and first publication. Most survey courses then faithfully reproduce this format by leading students through a series of classes, each devoted to the works of a single author. This approach has many advantages, not least that of ensuring that courses enjoy a degree of uniformity that allows for the transfer of credits between institutions. One conspicuous disadvantage of proceeding in this fashion, however, is that the intellectual distinctiveness of the period can be lost in the details of particular writers, who tend to seem rather disconnected from one another and from the historical moment of which they are a part. Put another way, and allowing for the dynamism of individual instructors and the devotion of individual readers, the knowledge gained is often enumerative rather than synthetic.

Written in response to this state of affairs, ‘A Handbook to Teaching Later British Literature’ ultimately advances a number of proximate, intermediate and more distant goals. Most immediately, it seeks to make individual texts of later British literature easier to understand by placing them in conversation and in context. In so doing, the book models repeatedly for new and experienced teachers the process of constructing a comparative, topic-based argument about multiple texts, something that many of them will then require their students to demonstrate in their formal papers for such courses. Through its use of culturally resonant themes grounded in specific historical events and intellectual trends, the book also seeks to make the literary periods of British Romanticism, Victorianism and Modernism more recognizable and distinct from one another, certainly, but also from other periods of Anglo-American literature. At the same time, by revealing how the themes of one period grow out of the themes of earlier periods, the book offers a synthetic reading of later British literature as a continuously developing whole. Finally, this book is intended to help instructors at the advanced high school and college levels of literature teaching to guide students into becoming critical readers for the rest of their lives, by providing a framework of topics and ideas that can be used to understand literary works as yet unread, perhaps even those as yet unwritten.

‘The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory’ offers a unique and progressive survey of screen theory and how it can be applied to a range of moving-image texts and sociocultural contexts. Focusing on the ‘handbook’ angle, the book includes only original essays from two primary sources: established authors in the field and new scholars on the cutting edge of helping screen theory evolve for the twenty-first-century vistas of new media, social shifts and geopolitical change. The main purpose of this method is to guarantee a strong foundation and clarity for the canon of film theory, while also situating it as part of a larger genealogy of art theories and critical thought, and to reveal the relevance and utility of film theories and concepts to a wide array of expressive practices and specified arguments.

‘The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory’ seeks to avoid the typical republishing of seminal film theory texts and, instead, to provide progressive chapters on major topics that offer a survey summary of the history of that subject in film theory, including references from major texts; put forward an accessible and clear illustration of how the theory can be applied to media texts and industries; and create a vision for the possible future horizon of that topic. It is at once inclusive, applicable and a chance for writers to innovate and really play with where they think the field is, can, and should be heading.

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

For the 2019 IVR World Congress of Philosophy of Law meeting in Lucerne, Switzerland, Drs. Barry W. Bussey and Angus J. L. Menuge organized a special workshop on the inherence of human dignity, featuring participation from philosophers, legal scholars, and legal practitioners from around the world. Many of the chapters in these volumes are the result of that invigorating two-day workshop. In addition, several new papers were solicited to round out each volume so that it offers broad coverage of the issues it addresses. 

The second volume, Law and Religious Liberty, explores the value of dignity as a foundation for law. It addresses the following questions. What context is necessary to create an understanding of the need to protect human dignity? Is dignity a useful legal concept or not? If it is, what difference does it make if dignity is recognized in a state’s constitution? Can we discover dignity by its de facto role in legal decisions? Should dignity be extended to groups? What are the practical, legal implications of various understandings of human dignity for international law, religious freedom cases and the permissibility of legal determination of religious doctrine?

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.

The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies comprises a diverse selection of essays that register the situated ness of critical theory and practice amid various intellectual, institutional, and cultural contexts. In recent polemics, postmortems or even celebrations, a number of prominent critics have suggested that “theory” is dead, that the heyday of literary or critical theory is past and its insights passé, and that other less speculative or abstract approaches to literature and literary criticism be embraced. At the same time, however, resistance to these trends in criticism has emphasized the degree to which modern critical theory remains essential for any proper analysis of the present condition. Today’s dynamic world-system, with its ever-shifting components in the age of globalization, presents new challenges to literary and cultural studies for which criticism and theory are ideally suited. That is because a fundamental virtue of critical and theoretical practice lies in its speculative vocation, as theory may offer novel vantages from which to view the past, present and future configurations, while disclosing fresh vistas of the world in which we are situated.

The Critical Situation emphasizes the need for, and the vibrancy of, theory today. The essays in this volume each address situations of critical theory and practice in various ways. Some are more methodological or analytical, others more historical, and still others more speculative, but all contribute to the argument in favor of theory as an essential part of literary studies in the present time. In the United States, the renewed resistance to theory has become somewhat tied to this or that conception of what have been labeled “method wars,” the battlelines of which indicate distinctive factions: those emphasizing historical investigations are then opposed by those insisting on the precedence of form or formalism, while others contest variations of both types of criticism in favor of some sense of unmediated or “surface” reading. These mostly parochial or academic debates have their counterparts in the broader culture, in which powerful forces determine the sense of what is worthy or not, what is real or what is fake or what is suitable for critical study or even attention. The reversal of the situation is, in a sense, built into the nature of the situation itself. At this point, theory enables the recognition that comes with the experience of peripety, an uncertain reversal of fortune which makes possible the suddenly novel perspective. 

The Critical Situation offers examples of situated criticism, which in turn are concerned with the ways in which literary and cultural criticism are and have been situated in relation to a variety of ideological and institutional structures, including those of world literature, American studies, spatial literary studies, cultural critique, globalization and postmodernity. These structures continue to influence the ways that criticism is practiced, and due recognition of their continuing effects seems to me to be crucial to the success of any meaningful critical practice in the twenty-first century.

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.

"Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture: Essays by Hamid Dabashi" is a collection of writings by the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar. A thorough Introduction rigorously frames chapters and identifies in Dabashi’s writings a comprehensive approach, which forms the criteria for selecting the essays for the volume. The Introduction also teases out of these essays the overarching theme that holds them together, the manner they inform a particularly critical angle in them and the way they cohere. The Introduction dwells on the work of one scholar, public intellectual and theorist of modern and contemporary arts to extrapolate more universal issues of concern to art criticism in general. These scattered materials and their underlying theoretical and critical logic are a unique contribution to the field of modern and contemporary arts.

'Economics for People and the Planet' brings together recent essays by James K. Boyce on the environment, inequality, and the economy.

Part One, Rethinking Economics and the Environment, challenges some common assumptions, including the beliefs that economic growth is incompatible with environmental sustainability, capitalist firms single-mindedly pursue profits, and human beings are inherently bad for nature.

Part Two, Environmental Injustice, opens with the author’s 2017 Leontief Prize lecture, and discusses how inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power shape both the distribution of environmental harm and the magnitude of environmental degradation.

Part Three, The Political Economy of Climate Policy, addresses the pre-eminent environmental challenge of our time, highlighting how progressive climate policies not only can benefit future generations worldwide but also can improve health and economic well-being today in the countries adopting them.

The audiobook version of Economics for People and the Planet features new chapters on the Green New Deal and the environmental costs of inequality. Foreword by Manuel Pastor.

The volume is the first outcome of an international project aiming towards a complete critical edition of the Kasikavrtti (7th c. CE) of Jayaditya and Vamana, the oldest surviving complete commentary on the Astadhyayi of Panini (ca. 4th c. BCE). The first phase, culminating in the critical edition of the Kasika’s initial section devoted to the Pratyaharasutras, the ‘rules for abbreviations’, was jointly coordinated by the editors together with Professor Saroja Bhate (Pune), a Paninian scholar of global renown. The first part of the volume presents the critical edition of the Pratyaharasutra section by Bhate, Haag and Vergiani, along with a description of the manuscripts collated, an annotated English translation by the editors, and the editors’ contributions dealing with the history of the Kasikavrtti’s editions and the currently available textual sources, as well as the methodology and results of the first phase of the project. In the second part, various authors discuss theoretical, historical and methodological topics ranging from the historical importance of the Kasika and its relation with the seminal Mahabhasya of Patanjali, to a comparison with the corresponding section in the Candavrtti, the evidence of Bhartrhari’s influence on the Kasika, and the copyists’ invocations and the incipit attested in the Kasikavrtti manuscripts.

After decades of isolation, Albania was catapulted into capitalism in 1991. Until then, ideological hardliners had run the country and denounced their former Soviet and Eastern Bloc allies as 'revisionists' for falling away from Stalinist principles. Yet after the collapse of socialism, Albania quickly embarked on an ambitious program of political and economic reform. The postsocialist governments created private ownership in land, liberalized markets, and opened the country’s borders to movements of goods, capital, and people. Such radical  measures stood out, even in comparison with other postsocialist countries. For instance, the postsocialist governments did not restitute collective farmland to pre-collectivization owners as elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe; instead farmland was distributed in equal shares to the current agricultural labor force, giving Albania the highest degree of individual land ownership found in Eastern Europe. Postsocialist market reforms were no less radical, and as a result of trade liberalization, Albania became inundated by imports. This caused more commercially-minded farmers to compete against highly subsidized EU production, while the majority of land users largely withdrew from agricultural markets. They turned instead to a mixed approach to farming characterized by a low degree of commercialization and high subsistence production. The constraints rural people faced in agriculture, together with the loss of off-farm employment due to the collapse of state-run rural industries, caused one of the world’s highest rates of emigration, reaching more than 40 per cent in some areas.

'Rent from the Land' examines the effects of these massive political and economic changes of postsocialism on rural society and environment in Albania. Stahl argues that the postsocialist transformations led to changes in the creation and distribution of resource rent, which shifted land users' incentives and productive decision-making and ultimately led to environmental change. The book brings together five years of research on Albanian transformation, and breaks new ground by discussing postsocialist transformation from a political ecology perspective.

In June 1992 the High Court of Australia ruled in favour of a claim by a group of Indigenous Australians, led by Eddie Koiki Mabo, to customary, “native title” to land. In recognising prior Indigenous occupation of the continent, the Mabo decision shook the foundations of white Australia’s belief in the legitimate settlement of the continent by the British. Indeed, more than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the Mabo decision challenged previous ways of thinking about land, identity, belonging, the nation and history. Now, more than a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book examines the broader impacts of this ground-breaking legal decision on Australian culture and select forms of cultural practice. If Mabo represents a “psychological” turning point (Behrendt), a “paradigm shift” (Collins and Davis) in Australian historical consciousness, if we are meant to be living in “the age of Mabo” (Attwood) or in a “post-Mabo imaginary” (Gelder and Jacobs), how is this shift or this contemporary imaginary being reflected, refracted and articulated in Australian film, fiction, poetry, biography and other forms of cultural expression? To what extent has the discussion and the practice of history, linguistics, anthropology and other branches of the humanities been challenged or transformed by Mabo? While a number of individual studies have focussed on Mabo’s impact on law, politics, film or literature, no single book provides an overview of the diverse impact and discursive influence of Mabo on various fields of artistic endeavour and cultural practice in Australia today. This book fills that gap in literary and cultural enquiry.

In considering the cultural legacies of the High Court’s landmark decision this book also engages in a critical dialogue with Mabo and post-Mabo discourse. While a number of Indigenous Australians have benefited, legally and politically from the Mabo decision, the majority of Indigenous peoples have gained nothing, materially, from subsequent native title rulings. In honouring Eddie Mabo’s achievement, then, the contributors also recognise that Indigenous sovereignty over the continent was denied by the High Court in Mabo, and that the struggle for the recognition of better and wider land rights recognition – indeed, of First Nations sovereignty, via a treaty, treaties or similar agreements – continues ‘beyond’ Mabo. 

Keeping such an acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty in mind, this interdisciplinary book offers a transnational perspective of Mabo’s cultural legacy by presenting the work of scholars based in Australia, continental Europe and the UK.

'Dialogics of Self, the Mahabharata and Culture: The History of Understanding and Understanding of History' explores the interrelationships between individual and cultural historical dynamics in interpreting texts, using key concepts from Bakhtin's theory of dialogics. This ambitious volume discusses the limits of fixed monologic discourses and the benefits of fluid dialogic discourses, and provides a cultural and psychological analysis of the epic Indian text the 'Mahabharata'. The problem addressed by 'Dialogics of Self, the Mahabharata and Culture' is not just how we understand and narrate history, but also how the very mechanism by which we understand and narrate history itself has a history. This volume is about the interplay of several histories – that of the individual, individual's past relationship to the text, which in turn is dependent on the nature of encounters they have had in the past, and the history of the text, and the very history of understanding.

“The Transformation of Capacity in International Development” examines the transformation of capacity as a concept within the global development agenda through an analysis of USAID projects and policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 1977 and 2017. It traces the evolution of donor discourses from the Cold War through the Global War on Terror, exposing the tensions within donor agendas between market, human rights and security-based narratives and discourses. As the global development agenda subsumes major areas of international debate defined by competing objectives, these tensions are absorbed, obscured and depoliticized with the transformation of capacity.

The transformation of capacity unveils donor approaches to building capacity as a form of statemaking, involving development projects as a tactic for building networks between centralized, national spaces (accessible and held accountable to the “international community” of states) and subnational environments harboring transnational militant threats to global security. Through an examination of the USAID example, this book exposes how the donor attempt to develop the capacity of “fragile” states and to manage transnational militancy reveals a fundamental struggle over the ownership and future of global governance and development.

As the US-led war in Afghanistan approaches 20 years, the failure of capacity development requires a fundamental reexamination of the priorities of the international community and development efforts in conflict zones. In exposing the transformation of capacity, the present volume contributes to our understanding of how human rights and security approaches to development have been obscured by the transformation of a popular concept within development. This transformation--involving shifts in policy and political agendas over time--reveals the fundamental tensions between donors and recipients as they work to build sustainable networks and institutions that ensure security, justice, greater access to opportunity and basic human rights of those caught in the crosshairs of global conflict. When we look at how the human rights agenda becomes warped in practice alongside the shifting tides of the global security objectives of the United States, we see the obscuring political power of major concepts of practice such as capacity. As scholars and practitioners consider the future direction of human rights approaches to development, this book informs alternative approaches to the failure of the status quo.

"Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography” examines theatrical biography as a nascent genre in eighteenth-century England. This study suggests a visible—but not impermeable—teleology from Thomas Davies to James Boaden in the development of theatrical biography as a professional enterprise. Chapter One explores Davies, the first significant biographer to throw off the shadows of anonymity and weld his own image to his subject, David Garrick. The second chapter traces three biographies of Charles Macklin written by biographers dueling amongst themselves for the right to tell Macklin’s story in the post-Davies competitive market. Finally, the third chapter tells the story of the serial biographer James Boaden’s attempts to build a professional reputation for himself as a biographer and prominent participatory character in the multiple “Lives” he tells, including those of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Elizabeth Inchbald. In each instance of producing a theatrical biography, the author is confronted not only with his duty to represent the actor, but the need to do so in an original, compelling manner that sets his account apart from other contenders and guarantees the permanency of his account as a treasured artifact of the stage rather than a disposable commodity.

The willful encouragement of viewing literary materiality as an antidote to ephemeral stage-business leads in turn to the absorption of prior biographical works and letters by authors, and reverberates in their readers’ quests to augment their copies of theatrical biographies through adding playbills, marginal notes, etchings, paintings, newspaper clippings, and even funerary souvenirs that not only testified to their interest in the stage, but secured their existence as well by evidence of participation. Thus, the author at once guaranteed the thespian’s legacy would live on while hitching his own likelihood of being remembered to the actor. The audience followed suit by adding their own personal touches, forming a palimpsest of participants. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews, and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or “scrapbooked” editions of the biographies, this book is invested in the ways that the increasing emphasis on materiality was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer’s authority.

The book provides an introduction to theatrical biography as an immensely popular genre in the eighteenth century that deserves more scholarly attention. Currently, theatrical biography is usually overlooked or encountered solely in excerpts offered to advance individual research goals; the texts are perceived as repositories of facts or the odd opinion, more akin to a reference work than anything innately artistic. This study’s contribution is to read these biographies in context, exploring their participation in a developing poetics of a new artistic subgenre, from the content of the works and the concerns of its authors to the responses that these biographies elicited from their readers.

Wittgenstein is acknowledged as one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth-century, but he is often considered to be difficult to read, let alone to understand. In this Beginner’s Guide, Peter Hacker, a leading authority on the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and author of a dozen books on the subject, introduces a selection of the leading ideas in Wittgenstein’s masterwork, the Philosophical Investigations. The Guide presupposes no philosophical knowledge, only curiosity and a willingness to shed prejudices. It presents a magisterial understanding of the Investigations in an accessible and witty form.

The approach is bold: the seventeen chapters alternate between authorial lecture and dialogue between the author and an imaginary interlocutor. It is both dialectical and didactic. The interlocutor challenges Wittgenstein’s ideas as presented by the lecturer, and his questions are answered, his qualms resolved, and his challenges rebutted. Innumerable objections are canvassed and patiently refuted or dissolved by comprehensive argument.

Nothing comparable to this exists in the literature on Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s revolutionary ideas are presented for the widest possible audience in all their profundity in a style that is both intellectually stimulating and entertaining.

Anthropology and philosophy have long been intellectual companions; the borders between the two disciplines have always been permeable. For example, anthropologies inspired by Durkheim are ultimately indebted to Kant; Evans-Pritchard’s ideas are stamped with R. G. Collingwood’s Hegelian philosophy; Gluckman was stimulated by Whitehead’s process philosophy; and Bourdieu drew inspiration from Wittgenstein and Pascal, amongst others. Yet the fuller history and implications of philosophical influences in anthropology are largely unaddressed.

In this volume, the contributors address the shifting effect philosophy has on anthropology. They investigate the impact of the philosophical presuppositions of anthropology, as well as the presuppositions themselves, using a comparative-cultural point of view – ethnography. Furthermore, by considering anthropologies in conjunction with philosophies, and philosophies with anthropologies, the volume helps illuminate the present trajectories of thought in postcolonialist, non-ethnocentric and creative directions that were previously ignored by the contemporary social sciences. As a cross-disciplinary study, the volume questions both the rigidity of intellectual and disciplinary boundaries and attempts to evade it by encouraging many different voices and perspectives to create a thought-provoking dialogue.

The original essays in ‘Philosophy and Anthropology: Border Crossings and Transformations’ discuss the three-fold division within the anthropological engagement with philosophy, the sources and history of philosophical anthropology, and its current applications and links with other contemporary intellectual movements. This volume seeks to engage with real social and humanitarian issues of the current age and create an innovative discipline: philosophical anthropology.

The literature that references personal data collection risks is growing amidst international scandals, notably the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook interference in the Brexit referendum and 2016 US Presidential election as well as other elections in countries throughout our world. Questions of fundamental importance to the study and practice of international relations are being asked as concerns are expressed, including the most pressing that speak to accountability, the ethics of use in local areas, and the impact on the vulnerable populations that information and communications technologies (ICTs) promise to serve. Yet, the editors observe that in key texts written to teach international relations, less mention is made of personal data collection risks in countries around the globe. This book addresses this significant omission in the literature. The editors and contributors to this volume consider the limitations of existing theories in international relations to address the present context, as personal data collection risks become more significant in a COVID-19 world.

Climate Chaos provides readers the latest consensus among international scientists on the cascading impacts of climate change and the tipping points that today threaten to irreversibly destroy the delicate balance of the Earth’s ecosystems. The book covers some controversial topics: that slavery in the American South is the origin of capitalism; the indigenous perspective on the environment (“Mother Earth” movement), international debates about the response to accelerating climate change, and the failure of the U.S. government to be part of the international effort to slow climate change.

The book argues that deregulation and an expansion of fossil fuel extraction have already tipped the planet towards a climate that is out of control. This crisis will cause massive human suffering when extreme weather, pollution and disease lead to displacement, food and water shortages, war, and possibly species extinction. 

The repression of science creates an existential crisis for humanity that has reached crisis proportions in the twentieth-first century. The scale of the crisis has prompted a call for geoengineering, large interventions into the climate by technological innovation. However, the history of colonialism and slavery make the technological and monetary elites untrustworthy to solve this humanitarian and planetary crisis. While the elites have always cast certain groups of humanity as expendable, the climate crisis makes a true humanist and egalitarian movement based in human rights and dignity not only aspirational but also existentially mandatory. The crisis demands that we remake the world into a more just and safe place for all the world’s people.

This volume brings together original and timely writings by internationally renowned scholars that reflect on the current trajectories of global capitalism and, in the light of these, consider likely, possible or desirable futures. Essays focus to varying degrees on developing distinctive theoretical frameworks and using them to clarify both the history of the present political economy and how progressive political economic trends might be extended from the present into the future. A distinctive feature of the collection is its effort to develop new mediations between theory and history, a deeply problematic relationship in the social sciences. These contributions offer original perspectives both to theory construction and to the use of theory in historical analysis. In short, this volume provides theory-informed writing that contextualizes empirical research on current world-historic events and trends with an eye towards realizing a future of human, social and economic betterment.

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

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

This book responds to the some of the twenty-first century’s most assuming problems of our times: global warming, sub-national terrorism, natural resource depletion, and economic, environmental and financial crises. It finds short- and long-term solutions to these global woes by looking to the city as the fulcrum for introducing sustainability around the world. Beginning with an outline of a robust strategy of sustainable cities—or sustainable city-regions—that has emerged out of over two-and-a-half decades of theoretical and practical work, the authors show why these portentous problems can best be addressed at the local-regional scale. In the process, this book cuts through the received wisdom and popular misunderstandings about sustainability and peels away the conceptual fog and ideological confusion about the meaning of sustainability.

Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in North America, Europe and Asia, the authors examine both strong and weak examples of sustainable city approaches that validate their distinctive urban sustainability strategy. They discover keen insights and important lessons in these case studies for sustainability practice across the globe, whether in small towns in the US and Canada, large cities in Europe or tiny Chinese villages in Asia.  Their concluding chapter argues that only the road less travelled holds real promise of creating sustainable city-regions around the world guided by the toolkit of ecological and technological conviviality.

The book provides a comprehensive discussion of the new humor that has appeared on the internet. The book is divided into five sections: First, the introduction, which explains the idea that humor has changed since the widespread adoption of the internet and social media. The introduction reviews the theoretical tools that will be applied throughout the book: a discussion of humor theory and memes and how they function. The discussion is kept engaging and readable but is nonetheless based on rigorous scholarship, presented clearly by a well-known humor researcher.

Part 1 collects several chapters on the new humorous genres that have appeared on the internet: the humorous meme, the compilation video, online digital cartoons, the “stuff white people like” phenomenon, Dogecoin, the joke crypto-currency, and of course satirical news, such as The Onion. The overall point is that many of these phenomena are completely native to the internet/social media or have been significantly affected by the distribution via the internet.

Part 2 considers in more detail a number of examples of humorous memes: they include the Cheryl She Shed meme, the BoatyMcBoatface incident in which the crowdsourcing of the name for a boat went awry, Pastafarianism, the joke religion, grumpy cats, and the Chuck Norris memes. Part 3 considers multimodal humorous genres: the Hitler rant, photobombing, embarrassment (“cringe”) comedy, rant-to-music videos, and music video parodies. Here too, these new genres can exist only due to the availability of platforms such as Youtube or TikTok. Part 4 looks at the dark side of internet humor, considering the use of humor by the alt. right on 4chan and 8chan, trolling, and related phenomena. The last chapter looks at humorous cartoon “mascots” such as Pepe the Frog and Kek, which have been appropriated by the right.

The first comprehensive guide to humor in the age of the internet and social media, this book will make you laugh (for the examples) and will enlighten you (for the analyses). Hopefully.

This book is a collection of 15 essays on important themes in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, divided into three sections. The first section is about philosophy of language, in particular Wittgenstein’s key idea of linguistic normativity: his conception of rules and grammatical propositions.

The second section is mainly concerned with important Wittgensteinian contributions to the philosophy of mind and action: his analysis of sensation language, the concept of understanding and the explanation of human behaviour by reasons, as opposed to causal explanations. There is also an essay on Wittgenstein’s famous discussion of aspect perception, and a critical discussion of the idea of ‘hinge propositions’ drawn from his remarks in On Certainty.

The final section focusses on questions of value, mainly in aesthetics, but also in ethics and religion. In particular, the book gives a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s account of aesthetic judgements as based on a ‘cultured taste’, informed by detailed knowledge of a certain genre of aesthetically interesting objects, a set of conventional rules and a certain consistency. Aesthetics is compared and contrasted with ethics and with psychological investigations. The final essay is on Wittgenstein’s distinctive account or religious belief.

‘Diagnosing the Indonesian Economy: Toward Inclusive and Green Growth’ commences with a broad overview of Indonesia’s development since the 1960s. The analytical frameworks for the study, which were developed at Harvard University and ADB, are then used in an attempt to identify the constraints that most severely bind the country’s development, and therefore the priorities for policy implementation and/or reform. The country’s macroeconomic management and monetary policy since the Asian financial crisis is reviewed. The challenges of Indonesia’s slow industrial transformation and small industry sector are described, as are their implications for poverty reduction efforts. The challenges Indonesia faces in developing its infrastructure are set out, e.g., the country’s diverse topography, archipelagic nature, and monopolies. Human capital, an essential element in both growth and poverty reduction, is analyzed for the country, including the improvements in enrolments and gender balance, and the limitations the poor face to accessing education. Indonesia’s record on poverty reduction is traced, as are the efforts to improve it. The links between employment creation and poverty reduction are presented, with a focus on the pressing issue of youth employment. The impact and status of the decentralization effort and efforts to fine-tune it are discussed. Last, the rather dismal status of the country’s environment and natural resources management and the emerging impacts of climate change are summed up.

Indonesia’s national development plan for 2005–2025 sets a vision of a country that is self-reliant, has a highly educated population with capable human resources, has no discrimination, and is prosperous enough to fulfil its population’s needs. This will require high levels of economic growth that is both socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable. The volume identifies that in order to overcome the binding constraints to this growth, Indonesia needs to improve its infrastructure, enhance the education system to provide a more capable workforce, revive its manufacturing sector to open up employment, and facilitate these efforts through substantially improved governance and institutions. Furthermore, this growth must be accomplished in a manner that is harmonious and not destructive to the environment and natural resource base.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflecting the turn toward cultural studies, the rich site for exploring issues of race, gender, and social injustices, the twenty-first century has seen most university presses publishing books focusing on multiple works by an array of authors. While I do not dispute the value and timeliness of such culture-centered publications, I would argue that the time has come for a fresh reading of Laurence Sterne’s greatest novel, one frequently cited as a precursor to the work of James Joyce and to twentieth- and twenty-first-century existential thought. Such book-length studies of Sterne’s TristramShandy appeared frequently in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; since then, Sterne studies have multiplied and prospered, but primarily in academic journals. While we can readily find chapters on TristramShandy in more recent books such as Patricia Meyer Spacks’sNovel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2006) and Ryan Stark’s Biblical Sterne: Rhetoric and Religion in the Shandyverse (2021), we find no books focused just on Sterne’s novel.

This book demonstrates, then, that, beyond the traditional objects of satire found in Sterne’s TristramShandy, Sterne has revised the satiric plot in developing what I call the “benevolent dullness” of Walter, Toby, and Tristram. I borrow this term “dullness,” of course, from Alexander Pope’s great satire The Dunciad, published in 1743, two decades before Sterne began publishing the first volumes of his novel.
The Shandys’ self-defeats derive, as thisbook will show, from generous instincts and from deliberate “moral characters” as well as from arrogant self-deceptions that typify traditional objects of satire, such as leaders in government, the military, the sciences, the arts, and literature—the intelligent but sinisterly self-absorbed dunces who populate Pope’s nightmarish poem and threaten collectively to “bury all” in a culture of “darkness.” Additionally, the book will show that this paradoxical blend of dullness and benevolence in Sterne’s characters generates an ambiguous moral condition that should stir both praise and blame in Sterne’s readers. The book will argue, further, that the reader’s ambivalent response to Sterne’s Shandean characters testifies to the operation of a fictional structure too dynamic in the conflicts it portrays to permit defining the novel’s plot as chiefly satiric, comic, or tragic, as many influential scholars have done.

The book will then conclude that Sterne revised the satiric action in his novel to draw the reader toward the standard of humble but active benevolence represented by Parson Yorick; Sterne did so by luring the reader first into the confused but laughing world of generous “true Shandeism.” If Sterne’s readers can see the nobility as well as the humor of the Shandys’ inevitable self-defeats, the reader will discover the difficulty of living the Yorick standard but also the possibility of escaping from the utter darkness of dullness.

The field of poster studies is vast, but it is surprising how little work has been done till date on the fundamental structures – semiotic and semantic – that underpin the visual messages posters produce. Most studies of posters focus either on their history; on specific themes – politics, travel, sport, cinema; or on their status as collectable items. Though such approaches are valid, they hardly account for the specificity of the poster’s appeal or for the complex semiotic and cultural issues poster art raises. This book sets out to tackle these latter issues since they are fundamental both to the deeper significance and to the wider appeal of the poster as a cultural form. 

In doing so it focuses on the field of airline travel posters which developed precisely in the period of the twentieth century (1920–1970) that coincided with the onset of mass travel. The romance and excitement of fast travel to exotic destinations stimulated some memorable poster images that today have lost none of their magic. Since posters are cultural signs, to understand better how they work and the value attached to them even after their commercial or political message has been communicated, it is useful to analyse them in terms of both their sociocultural histories and their semiological structures. What this book sets out to do is to combine these approaches in such a way as to enhance the viewer/reader’s understanding of both the cultural and the semiological aspects of the poster and to show how the interaction of these aspects produces the specific quality of its messages.

Although posters are essentially word/image constructs, little attention has been paid to this fundamental aspect of their semiological structures. While Roland Barthes (1964) and other structuralist semioticians of the 1960s and 1970s –in France in particular – have made inroads into what is at stake in the poster’s word/ image structure, this book pursues the implications of this for the rhetoric of persuasion that is activated by the poster in fulfilling its dual function as provider of information and agent of seduction. For the poster, from the start of the twentieth century, has established a conventional repertory of textual/visual motifs that it has applied across a wide range of communicative functions – political, commercial and artistic. The aim of this book is to analyse the way these motifs are structured since they reveal much about the way cultural messages are produced and the way the poster is able to promote both a specific, product-centred message and aesthetic pleasure through a multiplicity of connotations.

’Private Equity’ is an advanced applied corporate finance book with a mixture of chapters devoted to exploring a range of topics from a private equity investor’s perspective. The goal is to understand why and which practices are likely to deliver sustained profitability in the future. The book is a collection of cases based on actual investment decisions at different stages for process tackled by experienced industry professionals. The majority of the chapters deal with growth equity and buyout investments. However, a range of size targets and investments in different geographical markets are covered as well. These markets include several developed economies and emerging markets like China, Russia, Turkey, Egypt and Argentina. This compilation of cases is rich in institutional details, information about different markets, and segments of the industry as well as different players and their investment practices – it is a unique insight into the key alternative asset class.

Why is Robert K. Merton important? Many treatments of his work focus only on particular components whereas, in fact, his work is far wider and can be summarised for each of his decades of life and work: 1920s (childhood), 1930s (anomie, science, unanticipated consequences), 1940s (housing studies, mass communications, structural-functional analysis, professions, focus groups), 1950s (reference groups), 1960s (ambivalence), and later decades (structural analysis, sociological semantics, cultural sociology). 

Merton particularly contributed to sociology during a period when several specialties were being set up and yet his work spans both general and specialist sociologies. He is recognised as the father of anomie/strain theory; focus groups; sociology of science; role-set theory; analytical sociology; structural-functional analysis; ambivalence studies; and sociological semantics. Many commentaries on sociology lament the ways it has slumped into a wide range of threads with not much of a core holding it together. Merton’s work always endeavoured to keep the multifarious threads of sociology together, and we might usefully learn some of the ways he accomplished this. 

Merton stood at the junction of many other crossroads in sociology and moreover endeavoured to create bridges between these, but more importantly to help launch research programmes along some of these paths. His work links classical and modern sociology; American and European sociology; theory and research; philosophy of social science and applied sociology; pure academic sociology and applied sociology; cognitive and social; social sciences and humanities; and social sciences and science. This book examines and relates to each other. Because Merton’s work spanned so many paths not many sociologists were alert to the overall architecture of his work and perhaps its visibility thereby waned. His viability is relatively less because of an astute writing style. Several of the programmes he helped launch have continued since: for example, media studies, criminology, and science studies.  

Merton had a major effect on the baby boomer generation of sociology who joined the ranks of sociology at a time of great expansion of university positions across many developed countries. While other generations since have been less exposed to his work reading the book will provide many valuable insights.

Regional integration is gathering momentum in Asia. This study examines the diverse experience of regional integration of South and East Asian economies during the last two decades and offers lessons for latecomers. The global economic crisis is expected to merely dampen rather than halt the pace of Asian integration. Global recovery will give renewed impetus to Asian integration. East and South Asia include the world’s largest and most dynamic open economies alongside several least developed countries. Using a set of country cases based on a similar framework, the study addresses an important policy question: how can each country’s integration with its neighbors and more distant regional economies be improved? Of the eight country studies, five are from South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and three are from East Asia (the People’s Republic of China, Thailand, and Singapore). The country cases—which differ by per capita income, country size and location—provide fascinating insights on the relationship between regional economic performance and strategies for regional integration at the country level.

The struggle for Chechnya has come to international prominence in recent years through a string of high-profile atrocities such as the hostage seizures at Beslan and the Dubrovka theatre IN Moscow. For the first time, Western, Russian and Chechen perspectives on the conflict are brought together in a single, authoritative new volume, in which leading experts from all sides of the crisis provide a unique insight into its causes and contexts.

'Chechnya: from Past to Future' creates a historical framework against which the most pressing issues raised by the Chechen struggle are considered, including the rights and wrongs of Chechen secessionism, the role of Islamic and Western international agencies in defending human rights, the conduct of the war, changing perceptions of the war against the backdrop of international terrorism, democracy in Chechnya itself and the uncertain fate of democracy in Russia as a whole.

Raymond Federman (1928–2009) is known as a scholar of Samuel Beckett, postmodern theorist and avant-garde novelist. Like Beckett, he was also a self-translator, though unlike Beckett his first language was French and he composed his most significant works in English. In this sense, he took Beckett’s journey in reverse. Federman’s life was, in many ways, a Beckettian journey. He escaped deportation to Auschwitz, where all of his immediate family perished, thanks to his mother pushing him into a closet. Years of lonely wandering followed. Federman explicitly describes his own life in Beckettian terms, and his postmodern novels are thick with intertextual references, with Beckett as the main source. This book offers the first examination of these references, in light of Federman’s contribution to critical theory. 

This study is focused on Federman’s most significant novels, published between 1971 and 1982: Double or Nothing, Amer Eldorado, Take It or Leave It, The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras and The Twofold Vibration. Federman’s two tongues make for a doubled discourse, one in which the boundaries between English and French become porous. He uses fragments of Beckett, Joyce and others (including French poststructuralists) to undermine the gendered identity of his own autobiographical creations. Federman’s use of Beckett, his intertextual strategies and choices, highlight the queer potential of his master’s work. 

The Raymond Federman who passed away in 2009 was a beloved teacher, husband and father. This book is not about him. The characters, or rather creatures, in the first cycle of Federman’s novels are incapable of successfully inhabiting what Federman calls social reality. They are condemned to return ceaselessly to the closet, the site of their traumatic rebirth. The importance of the closet has been addressed in previous studies of Raymond Federman and is many times acknowledged and discussed by the author himself. This study demonstrates, through close reading and intertextual analysis, the importance of a second closet, one explicitly linked to queer identity. The homoeroticism present in Federman’s seventies novels is largely determined by the author’s relationship to Beckett. By guiding the reader through Federman’s intertextual peregrinations, this book explores his remarkable relationship with Sam.

A philosophical exploration of Kripke’s Wittgenstein: Examining Saul Kripke’s interpretation of the later Wittgenstein and the major responses to it since the 1980s.

Saul Kripke’s groundbreaking reading of Wittgenstein, set out in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), has sparked intense discussion for over forty years. This book provides a clear and comprehensive account of Kripke’s interpretation, guiding readers through the central ‘Sceptical Argument’, the ‘Sceptical Solution’, the ‘Problem of Other Minds’ and the major philosophical responses that have followed. It illuminates both the subtleties and the lasting significance of Kripke’s approach to meaning and rule-following. The work is organised in two parts: Part I focuses on Kripke’s Wittgenstein, while Part II examines the criticisms and responses that his reading has provoked.
• Part I explains the sceptical argument Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein, which challenges the classical realist view that there are facts about what speakers mean by words. It then explores the sceptical solution, showing how ordinary linguistic practices allow us to ascribe meaning and rule-following to one another. Attention is also given to the problem of other minds, highlighting the additional complexities that arise when we attempt to extend sensation concepts from ourselves to others.
• Part II surveys the principal responses from leading philosophers since the 1980s, including John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, Colin McGinn, Crispin Wright, Paul Boghossian, Philip Pettit, Barry Stroud, Hannah Ginsborg, Alexander Miller, George Wilson, Scott Soames, Noam Chomsky, Paul Horwich, as well as Norman Malcolm, Donald Davidson, David Lewis, Christopher Peacocke, Jerry Fodor, David Stern, Alex Byrne, Ruth Millikan, Hilary Putnam and John Searle. By systematically analysing these reactions, the book offers an accessible yet thorough reassessment of Kripke’s reading and its profound impact on debates about language, meaning and the philosophy of mind.

John Ruskin, whose bicentenary will be celebrated world-wide in 2019, was not only an art historian, cultural critic and political theorist but, above all, a great educator. He was the inspiration behind such influential figures as William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust and Mahatma Gandhi and his influence can be felt increasingly in every sphere of education today, for example, in debates about the importance of creativity, about grammar schools and social mobility, about Further Education, the crucial social role of libraries, environmental issues, the role of crafts as well as academic learning, the importance of fantasy literature, and the education of women. The current collection brings together ten top international Ruskin scholars to explore what he actually said about education in his many-faceted writings, and points to some of the key educational issues raised by his work. [NP] The volume is divided into three sections, covering the three major areas of Ruskin’s concerns, namely social reform, the arts and religion. Their titles suggest his dynamic effect in all three areas: A) Changing Society; B) Libraries and the Arts; C) Christianity and Apocalypse. Ruskin’s vision of education as both dividually and socially transformative is explored by Sara Atwood in Chapter 1. Among much else, he stresses the value of simplicity, one of many ideas he shared with his great admirer, Leo Tolstoy, a relationship explored by Stuart Eagles in Chapter 2. Ruskin believes too in the social and educational importance of dress, an idea developed by Rachel Dickinson in Chapter 3. Jan Marsh, in Chapter 4, examines Ruskin’s contradictory stance on female education. Though he was a great believer in the ‘separate spheres’, he also championed wider learning opportunities for girls. The dissemination of education, through libraries and through the arts, is one of Ruskin’s abiding concerns. Continuing his argument about the power of simplicity over artifice, he talks in the inaugural address of ‘the virtues of Christianity [being] best practised, and its doctrines best attested, by a handful of mountain shepherds without art, without literature, almost without language.’ In the history of Switzerland, he says, ‘The shepherd’s staff prevailed over the soldier’s spear.’ In Chapter 5 Emma Sdegno explores Ruskin’s Shepherds’ Library, his notion of book dissemination to such people, while in Chapter 6 Stephen Wildman examines another of his educational experiments, the use of photography to enable ordinary people to encounter the Old Masters and to ‘see clearly’. Paul Jackson in Chapter 7 breaks new ground in revealing Ruskin’s response to music, an art to which he responded deeply as a sensuous experience, while arguing that it could also act as an agent of moral improvement. In Chapter 8 Edward James examines Ruskin’s only explicit foray into fairytale, ‘The King of the Golden River’, and links this back to his imaginative use of the fantastic and of fairyland images throughout his social and political writing.

Ruskin was both a teacher and a preacher. His recollection in Praeterita of his first recorded speech, as a very small boy, ‘People, Be Good!’1 suggests the trajectory of his adult career. Keith Hanley and Andrew Tate in the final chapters of this collection explore the links between his aesthetic and his religious views. Hanley in Chapter 9 picks up the notion of the absolute centrality of this Christian worldview to Ruskin’s life and work and suggests the perils of ‘secularising’ him. In Chapter 10, Tate pursues Ruskin’s apocalyptic vision. Ruskin believed that ‘Every human action gains in honour, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come’; for him, therefore, ‘apocalypse’ meant, not an ending, but a revelation.

Many of the textbooks available for undergraduate and sub-degree students beginning to learn the concepts and practice of global supply chains are either too technical or too theoretical in nature. To fill this gap, ‘Managing Global Supply Chains’ includes chapters that cover traditional and contemporary topics (reverse logistics, logistics associations, logistics education, sustainability in supply chain management, operations in global supply chains and financial management). Globalization, advanced technology, organizational consolidation, the empowered consumer and government policy have contributed to the timeliness of the book.

The key topics of each chapter demonstrate a variety of fundamental issues in the supply chain industry: What are supply chain markets? What is the supply chain cost structure? What are supply chain strategies? How do supply chain firms design and implement strategies? What are the key roles of logistics service providers, logistics education operators and logistics associations? How should supply chain operations be managed? How is a sustainable and innovative supply chain structure created? Comparative practical case studies from Asia, North America and Latin America lend weight to the chapters.

This book discusses what it means to “perform the State,” what this action means in relation to the country of Iran and how these various performances are represented. The concept of the “State” as a modern phenomenon has had a powerful impact on the formation of the individual and collective, as well as on determining how political entities are perceived in their interactions with one another in the current global arena.

“Performing the State” refers to an individual (or a group of persons) who re-enacts rituals, ceremonies, customs, traditions and laws, or who dons certain guises, that either accomplish the State’s goals or rebel against them as a form of critique. This anthology examines various approaches to determining the Iranian State via the performativity of persons, with the intention of illuminating how social practices, ideologies and identities are shaped, represented, visualized, circulated and repeated – not only nationally but also worldwide. 

In Defense of Reason After Hegel builds upon and enlists the arguments of Hegel to refute the disempowerment of reason perpetrated by the peddlers of misinformation in public life and by analytic philosophy and postmodernism in the academy. Undermining their assaults on truth, In Defense of Reason After Hegel shows how the fundamental character of nature and of mind allow reason to be autonomous and allow us to enact a reality of freedom in accord with right and freely create works of fine art. The book examines how life and language provide the means for reason to be autonomous and how the autonomy of thought precludes natural evolution or bioengineering from enhancing our capacity for philosophical thinking. It unravels the perplexities of the logic of self-determination and to show how the will can achieve self-determination in the conventions by which agents engender the institutions of freedom. The book then unveils the limitations of the principle of contradiction, which bars the way to an understanding of how anything can be determinate and how thought and action can be free. Thereupon the paradoxes that arise in thinking time are resolved by liberating thought of the formality of the principle of contradiction. The revolutionary character of Hegel’s conception of consciousness is next explored to make intelligible how animals and young children can be conscious and self-conscious, as well as how philosophical thought can overcome the epistemological limitations of the opposition of consciousness. On this basis, the book draws upon Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind to show how language can originate and be an appropriate vehicle of autonomous reason. The book examines the structure of the institutions of freedom that talking animals can enact. It highlights the philosophical underpinnings of the fundamental shortcomings in the American constitution and American society and draws lessons from the author’s recent campaign to shed light on how the philosophy of right can be a guide to social reform. It also examines how the autonomy of fine art can be realized in sculpture, contrary to claims made by Hegel that would tie this individual art to the classical style.

Julia Wedgwood (1833-1913) was a leading Victorian female non-fiction writer who ventured fearlessly into the reserved territory of the Victorian “man of letters”, writing about the Classical world, Darwinism, German Biblical criticism, moral philosophy, theology and science as well as literature and history. Her successful debut as a novelist was halted by her father’s objections. Non-fiction proved a more congenial métier and she was a regular contributor to the Spectator, Contemporary Review and other upmarket periodicals. Her books include The Moral Ideal and The Message of Israel and biographies of John Wesley and her great grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood.

Based on her extensive correspondence this biography also considers the tensions in her family life, the challenges she faced in establishing an unconventional, independent household and the impact of her deafness. Her wide, eclectic circle of friends included Harriet Martineau, Mrs Gaskell, her uncle Charles Darwin and his family, Browning who might have married her, F.D. Maurice, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Arthur Munby, Mary Everest Boole, Richard Hutton and the young E.M. Forster. She also played a significant role in Victorian feminism. 

Amongst the many themes explored are the pioneering days of women’s higher education and first wave feminism, feminist theology and the significance of female friendships, Christian Socialism, Darwinism, idealism and Victorian agnosticism, spiritualism, antivivisectionism, periodical writing, perceptions of the Classical world, the impact of German Biblical criticism and the Wedgwood family’s sense of itself and its history.

“Decolonizing the Diet” challenges the common claim that native American communities were decimated after 1492 because they lived in “virgin soils” that were distinct from those in the Old World. Comparing the European transition from Paleolithic hunting and gathering with native American subsistence strategies before and after 1492, this book offers a new way of understanding the link between biology, ecology and history. After examining the history and bioarchaeology of ancient Europe, the ancient Near East, ancient native America and Europe during the medieval Black Death, this book sets out to understand the subsequent collision between indigenous peoples and Europeans in North America from 1492 to the present day. Synthesizing the latest work in the science of nutrition, immunity, and evolutionary genetics with cutting edge scholarship on the history of indigenous North America, this book highlights a fundamental model of human demographic destruction—Human populations have been able to recover from mass epidemics within a century, whatever their genetic heritage. They fail to recover from epidemics when their ability to hunt, gather and farm nutritionally dense plants and animals is diminished by war, colonization and cultural destruction. The history of native America before and after 1492 clearly shows that biological immunity is contingent on historical context, not least in relation to the protection or destruction of long-evolved nutritional building blocks that underlie human immunity.

“Decolonizing the Diet” cautions against assuming that certain communities are more prone to metabolic syndromes and infectious diseases, whether due to genetic differences or a comparative lack of exposure to specific pathogens. This book refocuses our understanding on the ways in which human interventions—particularly in food production, nutritional accessibility and ecology—have exacerbated demographic decline in the face of disease; both in terms of reduced immunity prior to infection and reduced ability to fight pathogenic invasion.

“Decolonizing the Diet” provides a framework to approach contemporary health dilemmas, both inside and outside native America. Many developed nations now face a medical crisis: so-called “diseases of civilization” have been linked to an evolutionary mismatch between our ancient genetic heritage and our present social, nutritional and ecological environments. The disastrous European intervention in native American life after 1492 brought about a similar—though of course far more destructive— mismatch between biological needs and societal context. The curtailment of nutritional diversity is related to declining immunity in the face of infectious disease, to diminishing fertility and to the increasing prevalence of metabolic syndromes such as diabetes. “Decolonizing the Diet” thus intervenes in a series of historical and contemporary debates that now extend beyond native America—while noting the specific destruction wrought on indigenous nutritional systems after 1492.

• Americans perceive the many political dilemmas in our society and corruption in our government, but few understand the causes of these problems. After explaining the constitutional roots of declining governing capacity in our federal system, this book sets out a comprehensive agenda of 25 amendments that can attract wide support across the political spectrum. The “top 10” proposals include reforms to make elections more competitive, reliable, and fair, such as ranked choice voting (“instant runoffs”); semi-open primary races with fixed dates rotating among all states; an anti-gerrymandering formula to make congressional elections more competitive; improved access to the polls through a national voter registry and voter rights; limits to campaign donations and political advertising. 
• Instead of considering them piecemeal, we should understand how the needed amendments form a systemic overhaul that includes major improvements to the House and Senate. This requires a ban on filibusters, creative ways to fix unequal representation in the House of Representatives, and restoring popular access to legislators. Improving the judiciary requires an 18-year term on the Supreme Court and appellate courts, firm deadlines for confirmation votes to reduce partisan pressures on the judiciary, and clarification of judicial review. A national civics education curriculum and fair-and-balanced requirements for mass media would make it much harder to manipulate people through misinformation campaigns.
• The book also argues for direct election of the president, Puerto Rico statehood, and ways to fix our current radical inequalities of voter influence in the Senate. Several common-sense “good government” reforms will reduce corruption. These include mandated financial disclosures; a requirement for federal legislators and officers to hold their assets in blind trusts; penalties for campaigns using stolen information; limits to the president’s pardoning powers; and clearer grounds for impeachment. Beyond the filibuster, there are further steps to break gridlock in Congress and fix the budget process. 
• Finally, we need to improve the amendment process itself, and clarify how a national convention should work as an alternative to Congress for proposing amendments for ratification. When called by 38 states, a convention can reach national compromise on a whole package of amendments to restore responsive, efficient, and effective government.

Since the Kyoto Protocol’s signing in 1997 the United States has been the world’s most prominent climate change outlaw. In the United States, air pollution policymaking starts and ends with the states, whose governmental units implement federal programs.

But we find ourselves in uncharted waters in the United States when it comes to state–federal relations in climate change: many states have developed climate change and renewable energy policies ahead of the national government, and lacking an overarching climate change law, the US Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to employ a little-used part of the Clean Air Act – which revolves around state plans rather than uniform national standards – to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from large stationary sources like power plants.

Taking on these challenges, Thomson proposes a framework for climate change policy in the United States called “sophisticated interdependence” that will help foster the coalition-building so desperately needed in the US climate change arena. This framework rests on a nine-state analysis of state-level economic and political forces in the United States and on comparative descriptions of climate change and renewable energy programs in Germany and Brazil, both strong federal democracies and key players in the global climate change policy arena.

In 1887, following several years’ imprisonment for his role in the People’s Will terrorist group, Ivan P. Iuvachëv was exiled with other political prisoners to the notorious Sakhalin penal colony. The penal colony emerged during the late 1860s and 1870s and collapsed in 1905, under the weight of Japan’s invasion of Sakhalin. The eight years between 1887 and 1895 that Iuvachëv spent on the island were some of the most tumultuous in the penal colony’s existence. Originally published in 1901, his memoir offers a first-hand account of this netherworld that embodied the extremities of tsarist Russian penality. A valuable historical document as well as a work of literature testifying to one man’s ability to retain his humanity amid a sea of human degradation, this annotated translation marks the first time Iuvachëv’s memoir has appeared in any language besides Russian.

Iuvachëv describes both colorfully and with journalistic objectivity fellow political prisoners as well as criminal exiles, corrupt prison wardens, well-intentioned administrators, and island aboriginals. As such, he is able to bring to life the many characters whose fate it was to live on Sakhalin, where, he writes, “This Sakhalin kaleidoscope is so complex in consistency it will hang before my eyes my entire life.” A man of many talents, Iuvachëv was employed by the island administration as a surveyor, navigator, hydrologist, meteorologist, engineer, choir director, and interior designer. He describes all these employs in detail and with humility. Dispatched as well on expeditions through the Tatar Strait and the Sea of Japan, he saw much of the region, and his observant eye and knowledge of nature allows him to paint wonderful portraits of the region’s flora, fauna, and natural wonders.

This book captures Iuvachëv’s wit, style, and sense of wonder, and has an introductory essay, explanatory notes, and a brief biography. The result is a comprehensive work that will prove especially useful to students of Russian and European history and literature, but that should also interest any reader desiring an inspiring story of one man’s survival against the odds. 

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

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

As cities in the U.S. and around the world are increasingly experiencing the impacts of climate change, many are starting to include climate considerations in their planning and policymaking processes. Cities are not only looking to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, industries, and transportation to prevent future climate change but are also looking to prepare for and manage climatic changes that have already been set in motion.

Urban climate adaptation to date has mostly focused on how cities can protect their physical assets from potential climate-related disasters, with an increasing emphasis on enhancing resilience, or creating places that can absorb and withstand climatic shocks. Scholars and practitioners have critiqued climate adaptation’s current emphasis on building physical resilience to climate change, pointing out that adaptation plans rarely incorporate equity or social vulnerability. Consequently, calls have emerged for climate adaptation to focus on human vulnerabilities instead.

To that end, this book is about why and how the health impacts of climate change should be given a more prominent role in climate adaptation efforts at the local level. While the lack of attention to climate-related health risks in adaptation plans and policies have been pointed out by many, this has not yet led to climate adaptation planning and policymaking processes that situate citizens’ health and well-being front and center. Therefore, cities will need new approaches to enhance awareness of and facilitate prioritization of climate risk management choices that will build human resilience to climate change.

As the age of social media progresses, the Asia Pacific, like the rest of the world, is experiencing an increase in cultural diversity and global connection. Those within the region are witnessing rapid social and cultural changes. As individuals and groups navigate through an increasingly mobile, transnational and multicultural ethnographic landscape, social media provides a sense of belonging for these networked communities.

Social media allows individuals and groups to map and redefine their evolving communal and national identities and thus form sometimes new, vibrant and necessary communities to help create individual and group belonging and agency. While creating a sense of belonging and agency in their respective homeland(s), individuals and groups are also able to connect to global networks. Recognising these layered and intertwined complexities governing societal and cultural cohesion, the authors in this collection each discuss the innate challenges of the social media era on culture, identity and social interaction. This original empirical work documents social media as a user platform for the expression of individual and collective identities.

“Science Meets Literature” analyzes and discusses Elias Canetti’s 1935 novel “Auto-da-Fé” (original German title, “Die Blendung”) as an example of the way in which literature can contribute to the scientific understanding of the human mind and human behavior. A growing number of scholars promoting “consilience” have argued that the humanities and the sciences can enhance one another and should not be considered separate domains of knowledge. Consistent with this view, Dario Maestripieri contends that literary fiction can be a source of ideas leading to the formulation of scientific theories and hypotheses about human nature.

Elias Canetti’s novel “Auto-da-Fé” has traditionally been difficult to interpret and his intentions in writing it have remained unclear. Arguing that “Auto-da-Fé” is a novel about human nature that illustrates the workings of the human mind and some universal aspects of human behavior and human social relationships, Maestripieri supports his interpretation through a careful analysis of Canetti’s autobiography as well as with a detailed textual analysis.

Maestripieri also maintains that the view of human nature presented by Canetti in the novel is essentially Darwinian and fully consistent with modern evolutionary views of the human mind and human behavior. He then shows that Canetti’s insights into the human mind, behavior and social relationships anticipated the scientific discoveries made by cognitive, social and evolutionary psychology beginning in the 1960s and up to the present day (and some of Canetti’s ideas have not yet been scientifically tested). Some of these insights and discoveries include the existence of “irrational” biases in human cognition (e.g., in perception, beliefs and decision-making); the strengths and limitations of human “theory-of-mind” skills (i.e., our ability to think about other people’s minds and “read” them); the establishment, maintenance and reversal of dominance in social relationships between two individuals (and how dominance is supported by perceptions, beliefs, emotions, motivation and behavior); and the role of dehumanization in harmful behavior.

Maestripieri holds that Canetti wrote “Auto-da-Fé” to illustrate the power of human nature and the potentially harmful consequences of power dynamics in human relationships. Canetti also intended to warn against the conviction held by some intellectuals that human nature can be denied, controlled, ignored or dismissed. He was persuaded that a writer has an important responsibility in producing and sharing knowledge of human nature, warn people of the potential dangers of the dark side of human nature and help humankind improve itself. Maestripieri examines Canetti’s use of particular narrative strategies in “Auto-da-Fé” because they are intimately linked to the goals the latter intended to accomplish with the novel as well as to his convictions about the biases of the human mind and the role of power in human relationships.

Finally, Maestripieri discusses Canetti’s approach in “Auto-da-Fé” as an original attempt at the integration of knowledge formation in sciences and humanities, which is generally not addressed in discussions of consilience, and also as an original expression of evolutionary ideas through literary fiction, which is generally not recognized in the field of literary Darwinism. He states that Canetti pointed the way for future successful attempts at the integration of evolution, cognitive science and literature, as well as for the broader integration of sciences and humanities.

Irish author (Eleanor) Norah Hoult (1898–1984) traveled in prominent literary circles and corresponded actively with some of the leading Irish authors of her time, including Brigid Brophy, Sean O’Casey, and Sean O’Faolain. Critics today compare her not only to O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor, but also to novelists Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien. Despite her reputation and a forty-four year publishing career, however, Hoult and her work remain surprisingly neglected.

This edition rectifies this critical oversight and introduces Hoult’s short story collection, 'Poor Women!', to a new generation of readers. 'Poor Women!' displays Hoult’s subtlety and humor as an author and her nature as a keen witness to human frailty. In these stories, Hoult unflaggingly highlights the restrictions imposed on her characters by society and its institutions: she thus provides a window into the social, literary and political milieu from which she hails.

Largely cited for its engagement with women’s and religious issues, 'Poor Women!' thus also displays a keen awareness of wider historical issues like the challenges of war and of cultural identity construction. Her incisive portraits capture the emotional paralysis of her characters and their self-delusions. Such thematic and stylistic emphases invite further comparison to better-known contemporary Irish literary giants like James Joyce and Mary Lavin.

‘Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers’ is an edited collection of essays from leading authorities in the field of Victorian literature and science, including Gillian Beer and George Levine. The academic study of the interpenetration of Victorian literature and science has grown to be one of the largest and most dynamic areas in Victorian studies: in this collection, leading exponents in the field consider recent developments. The major figures and exact contemporaries, Charles Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson are considered, in the company of John Ruskin, Thomas Huxley, Richard Owen, George Meredith, Oscar Wilde and others. Throughout, the stress is on the ways in which these writers read and were influenced by each other. Our current understanding of this complex cultural dialogue is illustrated here in a single accessible volume of essays by established scholars in this dynamic academic interdiscipline.

During the last 150 years, we have stressed the oceans, warmed the planet and overextended almost every natural resource. To create real change will require a generation of leaders and businesses that think and act differently. "Sustainability Is the New Advantage" identifies the skill sets, best practices, and new ideas needed to teach a new generation to start, grow, and manage sustainable organizations.

The shift to more sustainable business practices is the third act in the age of the corporation. Research tells us that during major market transitions, early adopters reign. That means only 15%–20% of businesses will make a bold transition to a sustainable business model during the next five to ten years. Everyone else will likely make incremental changes with less risk.

Transformation is a difficult process for any company and ‘Sustainability Is the New Advantage’ offers a straightforward process for sustainability champions to advocate for accelerated change. Each company that succeeds in becoming a sustainable business is a collective win for the business community as well as future generations. To paraphrase Gandhi, we each need to be the change we want to see in the world.

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).

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.

How did European colonization transform the organization of territory in South Asia? “Statemaking and Territory in South Asia: Lessons from the Anglo–Gorkha War (1814–1816)” seeks to connect two historical junctures at which the idea of the modern state as a geographically discernible and territorially circumscribed entity emerged in colonial South Asia.

The volume first examines the territorial disputes that emerged along the common frontiers of the Himalayan kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) and the English East India Company that eventually led to the Anglo–Gorkha War of 1814–1816. The volume argues that these disputes arose out of older tribute, taxation and property relationships that left their territories perpetually intermixed and with ill-defined boundaries. Following the war, the British sought to end this territorial illegibility by defining the joint boundary of the two states, rendering it linear and distinct.

Secondly, the volume also reveals the long-drawn-out process whereby the colonial state, through various cartographic projects and changes in administrative routines, attempted to rearrange its internal administrative divisions in an effort to create the geographical template of the modern state. This template would occupy a definite portion of the earth’s surface and with non-overlapping divisions and subdivisions.

Urban Crisis, Urban Hope resurrects the concept of the city and its neighbourhoods as a crucible for new ideas and a site of innovative action when cities in the UK are struggling with an unfolding crisis, exacerbated by a policy vacuum and lack of strategic vision about how to resolve a series of growing divisions, social problems and injustices. It celebrates what is being achieved against the odds. But it also recognises the desperate need for support, resources and complementary visions at urban and national scales, and sets out an agenda to meet this need.

The collection of essays brings together leading thinkers and doers from across the spectrum of policy and practice to present both critical analysis and an agenda for action. It seeks to reinvigorate a sense of the city as a space where more progressive and fairer futures can be imagined, planned and realised. It aims to challenge stultifying discourses of incremental bureaucratic devolution that frame and delimit current urban debates. It alerts policymakers and the public to the unfolding crisis that has been allowed to develop in our cities and rehumanises the debate on urban futures to focus on citizenship and wellbeing in an age of precarity.

A high school honors student with no police record encounters the police outside his home. He emerges from the confrontation bruised and beaten. The police charge him with serious crimes; he swears he did nothing wrong. When the story becomes public, an American city faces protests, deep division and a long quest for justice.

"A City Divided" tells the story of the case involving 18-year-old Jordan Miles and three Pittsburgh Police officers. The book takes an in-depth look at the opposing stories, and at race and the fear it incites, to find answers. What happened between the police and the teen, and what went wrong? Can the courts respond in a way that finds a just solution? And how can we prevent these tragedies in the future?

David Harris, a resident of Pittsburgh and the Sally Ann Semenko Chair at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, describes what happened, explaining how a case that began with a young black man walking around the block in his own neighborhood turned Pittsburgh inside out, resulted in two investigations of the police officers and two federal trials. Harris, who has written, published and conducted research at the intersection of race, criminal justice and the law for almost thirty years, explains not just what happened but why, what the stakes are and, most importantly, what we must do differently to avoid these public safety catastrophes.

The Varieties of Joycean Experience is a collection of ten essays that display the wide range and diversity of perspectives and critical approaches that can be drawn upon to enrich our readings of James Joyce’s works. With special attention to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, these essays explore an array of unorthodox problems that these notoriously demanding books pose for readers.

The first two essays offer new ways of tackling those persistent bugbear questions: “what kind of book is this?” and “what is this book about?” The first essay contemplates the relationship of Finnegans Wake to the avant-garde, both those experiments of its time and those that it has inspired since its first appearance. The second looks at the epistemological difficulties faced by anyone attempting to “summarize” Ulysses or the Wake. These essays are followed by two that turn to reconsidering how we understand Joyce’s methods of composition and revision.

The next five essays explore the Joycean ambiguities surrounding consciousness, death, scatology, and the weather to propose new understandings of these phenomena as key ways into Joyce’s works. The concluding essay examines what conceptual limits there might be to the variety of interpretations celebrated by this book: what makes a particular reading unreasonable – not simply debatable, as all readings are, but fundamentally unsound – and why do Joyce’s works seem to inspire far-fetched and even crackpot readings? The cautionary tales collected in this essay cue all readers to question the bases, logic, and agenda of their own experiences with Joyce.

The book looks at the turn of the century, when organized soccer began to be played in a systematic way by the European community of Rio and São Paulo, mostly by the British. It shows that the new sport was embraced by these people as a way to celebrate their culture, and to imitate the activities of the elite schools in Britain that became quite popular throughout Europe. Young Brazilians from the elite also embraced the sport as a way of sharing a popular European sport that was identified with what was respected as a white/upper class activity. In this way making a distinction from the lower and darker populations. Making this distinction was important in this moment of post-emancipation, affirming the superiority of the upper/white class. It was also important for the European residents of Brazil in order to distinguish themselves from Brazilians (colonial mentality). Football was one aspect of the modernity that these two cities were craving to achieve.

The book highlights the impact of European-based racial assumptions on the development of professional soccer. It provides a broad discussion on how the official discourse after 1930 was one of conciliation, claiming that Brazil was not European, but unique due to its racial mixing. This idea began to be promoted by artists and intellectuals as an attempt to Brazilianize the country, but it was soon embraced by politicians with the leadership of President Getulio Vargas in an attempt to create a unified national identity. In this context, futebol was also unique in relation to European football because of its mulatoism. Although this new attitude would influence social and racial barriers within football to fall, racism did not end, nor did Brazil become a racial democracy – as it has been claimed by many. 

This edited collection aims to contribute to the decolonial social and cultural analyses of global entangled inequalities by focusing on their local articulations. Drawing on empirical research conducted by scholars in Germany, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia and in Canada, the book engages with the conceptual framework of global inequalities and the methodological perspective on entanglement. It does so by approaching global inequalities and their local articulations: (a) global political economy, structural violence, entangled inequalities; (b) financial inequalities and state injustice; (c) inequality within and beyond race and ethnicity; (d) decolonial struggles against inequality; and (e) decolonial futurities. It is on these grounds that this edited volume aims to contribute to the analysis of entangled global inequalities by mobilizing a decolonial framework paying attention to the intersections of race, gender, labour, finances and the State.

This book presents the very first analysis of male homosexuality in modern rural Thailand that is based on sociological/anthropological research directly with 25 young same-sex attracted men. It explores changes in the way men view and describe their sexuality over time by interviewing them three times over a period of around 18 months. The men are followed during an important transition in their lives: the end of their high school years and the end (in most cases) of their life as a child with parents or extended family at a rural home. Nearly all decided to move to a city to continue their education or to find work. Some also had stints with sex work in one of Thailand’s well-known centers for prostitution. For nearly all men, this transition brought them into contact with new ideas about gender and sexuality, and many experienced an abrupt increase in their opportunities to have sex, leading to a readjustment of their moral universes. The young men in the study were still in the process of figuring out who they were/wanted to be, and many contradictions emerged in their narratives over the period of data collection. These contradictions, and the way they were resolved, presented an opportunity to critically explore the way the social structures in which these young men operate influence the way they think and explain their own sexual/gendered selves, and how changes in these social structures affect their sense of self.

A number of explanatory ‘lenses’ are used in the different book chapters that zoom in on different structuring/explanatory frameworks for making sense of gender and sexuality in Thai cultural contexts, as used and applied by the study participants. The first is Buddhism. Buddhist beliefs and traditional ideas about karma, fate, hierarchy, family, masculinity and femininity played important roles in the young men’s childhood understandings about homosexuality and same-sex relations–  especially in terms of their cause and morality. The second lens for understanding male homosexuality in Thailand is gender, where men are divided into feminine-oriented bottoms and masculine-oriented tops. A third lens is modernity/the desire to develop and grow, closely linked to Thailand’s globalizing economy and the increasing role of the Internet and social media. The Internet functioned as an important ‘playground’, a platform for trying-out different presentations of the self via Facebook and chat applications – and in many men this resulted in a rejection of their previous self-presentation as effeminate, which they gradually started to associate with being backwards, rural and ‘traditional’. The fourth lens is related to economy. Many of the young men in the study searched for romantic relationships based on complementarity and were looking for boyfriends who had something they did not have—money, a better position in society, or ‘wisdom’/the ability to guide. Most of the more effeminate men saw their sexuality as valuable, and several of the study participants described in this book – especially those coming from poor families – engaged in sex work and used their youth and beauty to find a wealthy long-term partner, in the hope of lifting their families out of poverty, towards a more prosperous future. The fifth lens is nationalism, or more specifically the concept of ‘being a good Thai’; gradually the young men learned that the Thai sense of self and the importance of performing one’s role as a ‘good’ son in public can be used as a strategy to cover-up private behaviors and desires. The sixth and final lens is family. Being ‘good’, respecting elders and elder siblings, financially supporting (grand-)parents, having good manners, meaning ‘acting appropriately in time and space’, gave the young men a way to retain the respect and support of elders and seniors, and determined how they dealt with (non-)disclosure of their sexuality to their families and others and explained their ability and desire to remain part of the mainstream of society. In the final chapter, a discussion about three critical concerns pertaining the health and wellbeing of same-sex attracted Thai men are discussed in the light of this proposed model: the ongoing HIV epidemic, mental health and LGBTI rights. 

Overall, this book presents significant new insights about the Thai sex/gender system, particularly on how it is affected by processes of globalization and the ascent of the Internet and mobile phones as tools for dating and romance.

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

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