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

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

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

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

Qualifications systems are useful tools for modernising education and training. National qualifications frameworks are treated as one aspect of qualifications systems that is useful for improving education and training. The focus is on the reality of policy development in EU partner countries. After reminding the reader that education and training systems, and therefore qualifications systems, are always closely integrated with a country’s social and cultural priorities, this study gives evidence from a range of countries that proves learning can be enhanced by developing the recognition of learning through qualifications, and that the definition of qualifications levels can be useful. The fact that qualifications system reform is just one element of education and training reform is emphasised.

Starting with the complexity of qualifications systems in partner countries and problems facing modernisation, the publication sets out specific examples of how qualifications systems have been used to provide a strategic tool for improving the quality of provision and increasing levels of learning. Examples of these strategies include the creation of qualifications bodies; new legal frameworks; the separation of assessment and certification from providers of training; development of NQFs and moves towards an increased use of learning outcomes in curricula; and qualifications and descriptors for framework levels.

The purpose of this research is to give a voice to nameless and countless stories that represent the personal lived experiences of Sub-Saharan African immigrants in the US. The authors believe that telling our own stories from our own perspectives is important and empowering because when others tell our stories there are omissions and misrepresentations and a lot of stereotyping. 

This book seeks to produce a more specific description of Sub-Saharan African immigration in the US by recording our reflections, experiences, and strategies of coping, as well as those of the participants. We hope that the insights gained from the research in this book will be used by immigrant communities, academic institutions, and governmental agencies in advocating for immigration policies that positively impact the lived experiences of Sub-Saharan African immigrants, and in planning support interventions. 

Their voices are heard as they narrate their experiences, which are presented in the book under major themes that emerged from the interviews. These include how and why Sub-Saharan Africans immigrate to the United States of America (USA), their perceptions before, during and after the process of immigration, the challenges they face as they adjust, adapt, and settle in the USA, and the coping strategies they devise. The authors argue that issues of identity and lack of platforms where they can express their concerns as Sub-Saharan African immigrants and be heard are lacking. The authors are also using a phenomenological qualitative approach of collecting and interpreting participants’ personal narratives and their lived experiences

Coolitude is both an intellectual interpretation of and a poetic and artistic immersion into the world of the vanished coolie. This collection of previously unpublished texts, poems and sketches captures the essence of the Indian plantation experience and deconstructs traditional depictions of the status of the coolie in the British Empire.

The concept of 'coolitude' encompasses the experiences of first generation workers together with those of their descendants spread across the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean islands today. The symbolic value of the word lies in both the scope it gives us to interpret the specificities of the coolie experience and its use as a comparative tool. The book embraces 'coolitude' in its various incarnations: the shared experience of the voyaging migrants, the walk from village to port town and the weeks spent on board ship. All Coolies, irrespective of whether they went to Fiji, South Africa, the West Indies or the Indian Ocean islands, underwent an exile from their Indian homeland. 'Coolitude' emphasizes their shared history.

The articles in this book have been selected for their importance to the reform movement and for their accessibility to the general reader. Intelligibility is one of the movement's two keystones. "Real economic problems" concern real people, so their analysis must be made intelligible to an educated general public if real democracy is to function.

The second keystone of the post-autistic movement is pluralism. All analysis proceeds on the basis of concepts that admit only a partial view of the economy, thereby predetermining the set of possible conclusions. This requires economists to begin to develop an ethos of honesty regarding the limitations of their chosen approaches. In engaging and thought-provoking prose, the 66 chapters of this book bring these and other conflicts out into the open and place them in the context of the major issues of the 21st century.

In ‘Reclaiming Nature’, leading environmental thinkers from across the globe explore the relationship between human activities and the natural world. The authors draw inspiration and lessons from diverse experiences ranging from community-based fishery and forestry management to innovative strategies for combating global warming.  They advance a compelling new vision of environmentalism, founded on the link between the struggle to reclaim nature and the struggle for social justice. This book advances three core propositions: first, humans can and do have positive as well as negative effects on the natural environment.  By restoring degraded ecosystems and engaging in co-evolutionary processes, people can add value to nature's wealth.  Second, every person has an inalienable right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. These are not privileges to be awarded on the basis of political power, nor commodities to be allocated on the basis of purchasing power -- they are fundamental human rights. Third, low-income communities are not the root of the problem.  Rather they are the heart of the solution.  In cities and the countryside across the world, ordinary people are forging a vibrant new environmentalism that is rooted in the defense of their lives and livelihoods.

‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ explores under-examined relationships between poetry and historiography between 1760 and 1790. These were the decades of Hugh Blair’s ‘Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal’ (1763) and ‘Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres’ (1783), Thomas Percy’s ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry’ (1765), Adam Ferguson’s ‘Essay on the History of Civil Society’ (1767) and Lord Monboddo’s ‘Of the Origin and Progress of Language’ (1774). In these texts and many more, verse is examined for what it can tell the historian about the progress of enlightened man to civil society. By historicizing poetry, these theorists used it as a lens through which we might observe our development from savagery to ‘polish’, with oral verse often cited as proof of the backwardness or immaturity of man from which he has awoken.

‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ deepens our understanding of the relationship between poetry and ideas of progress with sustained attention to aesthetic, historical, antiquarian and prosodic texts from these decades. In five case studies, this volume demonstrates how verse was employed to deliver deeply ambivalent reports on human progress. In this pre-‘Romantic’, pre-‘Utilitarian’ age, those reading verse with an eye to what it could convey about the journey towards the Enlightenment Republic of letters were in fact telling stories as subtle and ambiguous as the rhythms of the verse being read. Rather than focusing on a limited set of particular poets, ‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ pays close attention to the theories of versification which were circulating in the later anglophone eighteenth century. With numerous examples from poems and writing on poetics, this book shows how the poetic line becomes a site at which one may make assertions about human development even as one may observe and appreciate the expressive effects of metred language.

The central contention of ‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ is that the historians and theorists of the time did not merely instrumentalize verse in the construction of historical narratives of progress, but that attention to the particular characteristics of verse (rhythm and metre, line endings, stress contours, rhyme, etc.) had a kind of agency – it crucially reshaped – historical knowledge in the time. ‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ is a sustained assertion that poetry makes appeals to what was known as one’s ‘taste’, exerting aesthetic forces, and by so doing mediating one’s understanding of human development. It claims that this mediation has a special shape and force that has never undergone sufficient exploration.

Over ten seasons since 2011, the television series American Horror Story (AHS), created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, has continued to push the boundaries of the televisual form in new and exciting ways. Emerging in a context which has seen a boom in popularity for horror series on television, AHS has distinguished itself from its ‘rivals’ such as The Walking Dead, Bates Motel or Penny Dreadful through its diverse strategies and storylines which have seen it explore archetypal narratives of horror culture as well as engaging with real historical events. Utilising a repertory company model for its casting, the show has challenged issues around contemporary politics, heteronormativity, violence on the screen, and disability to name but a few. This new collection of essays approaches the AHS anthology series through a variety of critical perspectives within the broader field of television studies and its transections with other disciplines. 

The book includes sections on the industry context for the making of American Horror Story, the intertextual territory upon which the anthology series has been built, the societal and spatial aspects of American Horror Story, as well as its broader but specific relationship to otherness. The book accounts for the broad narratological sweep of AHS which crosses different times and locations while playfully exploring and openly acknowledging its internal linkages. 

Procreation, the forgotten basis of population dynamics, and its macrohistorical results, are at the center of this book seen through the lenses of world-system analysis in a nondogmatic way that includes the work started by Jack Goldstone on agrarian-bureaucratic states and their population cycles between 1250 and 1850. Procreation and Population presents population theories, especially those that give a proper place to the demand for labour, generally not considered by professional demographers. Criticizing the intellectual division of labour that separates demography from the unique historical social science that world-systems analysis is building up, the book shows that the commonplaces of the demographic discipline are just a self-celebratory view of Western industrial society.

Attentive to gender relations, the book brings importance to the very base of history (“the weight of number”, in the words of Fernand Braudel) and boldly tracks “the big picture” of population dynamics in times of postmodernist taboos on generalizations and on the search for the historical laws of human society. Complete with data, estimates and sources about the current population trends, this interdisciplinary effort sheds light on the historical paths leading to the current unprecedented numbers of humans on the globe: the forecasted and impossible perennial population growth would be just what capitalism needed to perpetuate its D-M-D spiral.

China has made nationalism central as the country seeks to achieve a “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The new wave of consumer nationalism in China reached a fever pitch in recent years. This book will be the first book that systematically analyzes the different waves of consumer nationalism in China, the types of its nationalistic consumer actions, and the critical impact of the new wave which has increased the possibility of a consumer base that could turn hostile at any moment. It argues that the outbursts of nationalist consumer outrage has become an increasing risk for businesses in China or businesses dealing with Chinese markets, and that as China faces growing diplomatic challenges abroad, multinational companies need to operate with extreme caution when dealing with the world’s second-largest economy.

The book argues that interest in buying and personal pleasure is the most common feature of Chinese modern life. It provides a historical context for Chinese consumers’ nationalism and characteristics of each wave. It answers questions of how Chinese nationalism has changed in recent years and what consequences would the emerged new wave lead to. It looks at the different type of consumer nationalistic actions in China and their

consequences with cases. It argues that China’s emergence as the world’s number two economy carries

political implications that complicate the ambitions of multinational businesses. It discusses some major consumer nationalistic actions in China in the past five years, and proposes a number of pragmatic strategies that could have been taken by some companies in terms of reputation management. The book concludes that the rise of nationalism and governments that interfere in markets pose a threat to the global economic system.

The two volumes on Wittgenstein and AI aim to trace and suggest Wittgensteinian influences in some of the most cutting-edge areas of research in Artificial Intelligence (such as Computation, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and the use of automation in legal settings). The collection is driven by an essentially interdisciplinary approach, featuring articles from philosophers, computer scientists and legal scholars, writing on a broad range of topics in AI.

The chapters across these two volumes are grouped into two sets of themes: Mind and Language and Value and Governance. These themes correspond to two major areas of research in the philosophical study of AI: the computational mind and the ethics of artificial intelligence. These volumes make a significant and unprecedented contribution to the question of what Wittgenstein’s philosophy can offer to the ever-growing field of AI. It aims to provide insight for both philosophers and non-philosophers alike, offering reflection on the significance of Wittgenstein’s work for AI, and on the implications of advancements in AI technology for Wittgenstein’s philosophy and philosophy influenced by Wittgenstein.

VOLUME II: Wittgenstein and AI (Volume II): Value and Governance. This volume includes chapters on ethical AI, rules in AI, rules and the law, human-AI interaction, the moral implications of robotics and the status of AI art.

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

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

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

As is well known, the horror film generally presents a situation where normality is threatened by a monster. From this premise, this book argues that scary movies often create their terrifying effects stylistically and structurally through a radical break with the realism of normality in the form of monstrous theatricality. Theatricality in the horror film expresses itself in many ways. First and foremost, it comes across in the physical performance of monstrosity; the over-the-top performance of a chainsaw-wielding serial killer who performs his nefarious acts to terrify both his victims within the film and the audience in the cinema. Theatrical artifice can also appear as a stagy cemetery with broken-down tombstones and twisted, gnarly trees, or through the use of violently aberrant filmic techniques, or in the oppressive claustrophobia of a single-room setting reminiscent of classical drama. All these are examples of the cinematic theatricality of horror. Any performative element of a film that flaunts its ‘difference’ from what is deemed realistic or normal on screen might qualify as an instance of theatrical artifice, creating an intense affect in the audience. The artificiality of the frightening spectacle is at the heart of the dark pleasures of horror.

The ultimate goal of ‘Theatricality in the Horror Film’ is to suggest that the theatricality of horror cinema echoes the genre’s roots in ancient tragedy. Like Greek tragedy, horror cinema allows spectators to confront their deepest fears within the safe space of the auditorium, thus affording the audience a cathartic experience. In addition to catharsis, the horror film’s dichotomy between the stable status quo of normality and the shockingly disruptive moment of horror also rehearses tragedy’s genealogy famously articulated by Nietzsche: the terrifying carnal pleasures of Dionysian excess formalized through a dialectic confrontation with the static Apollonian principles of order, civility and normality. Tragic theatricality, this book contends, is the essence of horror cinema.

“Jane Austen’s Families” discusses the fictional families – such as the Bennets and the Bertrams – whose dynamics are crucial both to Austen’s plots and to her explorations of ethical complexities. The study focuses upon the central characters’ interactions with their own families and (to a lesser extent) with other family groups in an exploration of how emotional and moral development is both hindered and fostered by these interactions. Significantly, Austen chooses not to write about the orphaned heroines so often preferred by novelists of the period; rather, for a writer who cares intensely for what is natural and probable in fiction, the most common early experience of surviving the pains and pleasures of family life provides the richest material for her work.  

This study is historically grounded, reading Austen in the context of contemporary writing and visual culture in an exploration of her treatment of the relations between parent and child.  It examines Austen’s heroines as their parents’ daughters, responding to and resisting their upbringing, and shows how family interactions shape their courtships.  Inevitably this concern involves a consideration both of the ethics of parenthood and of the ethics these heroines acquire from their parents, through adaptation, imitation and resistance to what they are taught, directly and indirectly. Interactions between parent and child affect both the daughter’s experience and her active moral life.

Caroline Norton’s forgotten novel, which has remained unpublished until now, tells of the perils of courtship facing a naïve young girl Alixe, who has been launched onto the London social season. Her encounters with both a worthy and an undesirable suitor open an intriguing window onto the fashionable society of the 1820s in which Love in 'the World' takes place. Caroline was able to draw upon her own experiences of the bon ton and those of her elder sister, Helen. The time in which the novel was set coincides with their entrée to society in the mid-1820s. It was then that Caroline burst upon the scene with all her beauty and brilliance, later recalling “the night upon which she made her début, coming down dressed to the room where her mother and aunt were awaiting her.” She added, “I came out […] to find all London at my feet.”

She believed that London, “where the cry of the drowning suicide is lost in the hum of gathered multitudes restlessly pursuing the pleasures or the business of life,” could be as callous as the metropolitan social scene might prove treacherous, and in alerting the reader to the dangers of fashionable society she made ample use of her own observations as a debutante at her first London season. In a highly readable and coherent narrative with an indeterminate ending, which throws a spotlight onto her life and times, the plot of Love in “the World” initially follows a pattern broadly representative of Norton’s own experience, before developing in unexpected and surprising ways.

It also anticipates the dilemmas faced by Norton's young heroine Beatrice Brooke in her later novel, Lost and Saved (1863). Indeed the novel compares well with any of Norton’s finest narrative writing, such as The Wife and the autobiographical sections of her pamphlets. It is hoped that Love in ‘the World’, finally in print after almost two centuries, might achieve comparable recognition and inspire a wider reappraisal of Caroline Norton’s novels and stories. Edited by the team who recently published Caroline Norton’s correspondence, the book also includes a Preface by Diane Atkinson, a distinguished historian and biographer of Norton.

This book is an inquiry of how the reading of imaginative literature may be experienced as life changing. Previous research has shown that many readers have found a particular work of fiction to be of significant help to them in dealing with personal issues. Furthermore, experimental studies reveal that readers experience self-modifying feelings during the act of reading. Research in psychological aesthetics indicates that the hitherto neglected phenomenon of being moved may be central to transformative experiences with art, and may be a more productive point of departure than emotion-based approaches. How may transformative aesthetic experiences produce lasting change and become integrated into the person’s life-story, and how is such subjective change related to the experience of being moved? The aim of this book is, through interviews with readers who have experienced life-changing encounters with particular works of fiction, to present new knowledge about transformative reading experiences and the relationships between life-crises, affective modes of transaction with literary works, and qualitative change experiences. Such knowledge will contribute to our understanding of the affective aspects of reading and life-stories of change. This theoretical knowledge may also have practical application for the intermediation of literature. The investigation has a trans-disciplinary orientation towards reader response studies, literary scholarship, psychological aesthetics and narrative psychology.

The method developed, intimate reading, is a hermeneutically oriented narrative inquiry. The process of data production is envisaged as subservation, using a form of open interview which combines facilitating the participant’s relating their experience with a shared reading of selected significant passages of the work in question. Furthermore, it involves presenting the participant’s narrative in full. The logic of inquiry rests on anteroduction, which is argued as a particular circular mode of inference implicit in modern hermeneutics. The collected data were subjected to a critical selection process in which the construct of life-changing fiction-reading experiences was determined through comparative narrative analysis. Five narratives are presented and interpreted in-depth. These interpretations are structured around the tripartite division into life-crisis, transaction with literary work (affective realisation and mode of engagement) and resolution.

The works that have changed the participants in this inquiry are highly diverse; this confirms previous research. The present inquiry contributes new knowledge about the kinds of life-crises that may be resolved through transformative encounters with fiction, and the kinds of qualitative changes that may result. The mode of engagement was found to be one that combines bodily and affective aspects, in which metaphors related to nourishment and the heart were prominent. Accordingly, I have named this transaction reading by heart, or lexithymia. These qualitative descriptions add to our knowledge of the affective aspects of reading, and can serve to expand the critical vocabulary for discussing affection. From this understanding of varieties, commonalities and typical characteristics of life-changing reading experiences I have, through a process of abduction, sought to develop a theory of transformative affective patterns that combine life-crises, aesthetics and literary protogenres to form a comprehensive and exhaustive system of transformative relations. The inquiry concludes that the transformative reading experience is one of being deeply moved, and being moved is a catalyst for altering aspects of the self. The subjective change is thus a reflective process of integrating the alteration into the self-concept and may subsequently be experienced as ‘shaping’ the life-story.

Explores Byron’s borrowings from Thomas Moore, Torquato Tasso, Percy Shelley, and so on, and transformations as they manifested themselves in his reading.

Byron concealed himself in various literary disguises, a process he called “mobility.” In this study of influences on Byron’s verse and Byron’s European impact, I explore these borrowings and transformations as they manifested themselves in his reading. At issue is the very concept of romantic poetic voice. Framing himself in the tradition of the Irish yet cosmopolitan Thomas Moore, Byron adopted continental guises, imitating both Italian writers and political heroes, such as Dante, Machiavelli, and Tasso in such works as “The Lament of Tasso” and “Don Juan”. In establishing an Italian identity, Byron relied upon the Italian writers he translated (Boiardo, Pulci, Dante), Thomas Moore’s “Fudge Family in Paris,” and Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo,” as well as his transformation of Goethe’s “Faust” in “Manfred”. This Europeanization of Byron should not conceal the fact that Byron adopted poses from his predecessors, such as Walter Scott, in order to fashion himself as a Scottish poet who also happened to be English. Byron became the writers he read: Moore, Shelley, Wordsworth, Scott, Foscolo, Lady Morgan, and Madame de Staël. Those who imitated Byron, particularly Alexander Pushkin and Adam Mickiewicz, often read him in French translations, but became acute interpreters of his literary example. They explained how the European Byron was created in the nineteenth century, and what it meant to be a Harold in Muscovite Cloak, or a Polish Byron, or any national reincarnation of this complex, chameleon poet.

By borrowing from a wide eighteenth-century field, Byron showed how reading could become writing, fulfilling, for Pushkin and Mickiewicz, a mobile and chameleon definition of the epic, as a novel in verse or product of digressions and improvisations. I begin by examining Thomas Moore, whose “Fudge Family in Paris” helped shape the tone and style of Byron’s Don Juan, despite its more obvious European borrowings. Byron’s conversations with Madame de Staël encouraged him to “Stick to the East,” and he followed her example during his years in England. By examining the manuscripts and marginalia of Byron, the author shows the key influence of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, Ugo Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, and Lady Morgan’s Italy on Childe Harold I-II, Hebrew Melodies, and Childe Harold IV, and Don Juan.

In “The Ironic Mode in Politics,”the author considers Byron’s support for the Greek Revolution, which he cast in cynical terms. His political/poetic example led Pushkin to enlist and Adam Mickiewicz as well, the latter of whom died in Istanbul. The museums that honor them present narratives of Byron’s European impact, particularly his legacy in political liberalism. The book thus concludes by considering how scholarship on Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin transformed the epic into a novel in verse. Adam Mickiewicz's translation of "The Giaour" and his improvisations, which impressed Pushkin, draw on Byron’s digressive style. Their epics, Eugene Onegin and Pan Tadeusz, show the legacy of Byron’s poetic influence and his political support for freedom of speech.

Set against the backdrop of major developments in the nationalist movement in Bengal, this study focuses on the nature of the interaction between the Congress, which represented mainstream political nationalism, and popular social groups whose politics was largely disorganized. In particular, it assesses the imapct that this interplay had on the nature of the Congress and the extent to which the provincial Congress organization was able to match its aspirations to those of the people, as it matured from a loosely-structured institution to an organized politica party.

Research on the nationalist movement prior to the advent of Subaltern Studies has chiefly concentrated on the activities of the movement's elite and leadership. In recent years, subaltern historians have instead focused on the activities of subordinate classes and groups, whose form of politics has been described as autonomous and independent of the elite. However, both lines of enquiry have neglected the areas of interaction and interdependence between these two realms of political activity, especially during the phase of Gandhian nationalism. In examining the nature of the interaction between institutional politics as represented by the Congress and popular politics in Bengal between 1919 and 1939, this book is a significant and original contribution to current research in the field.

‘The Voice of the People’ presents a series of essays on literary aspects of the European folk revival through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its approach is both topical and generic, addressing not just the question of what purposes the folk revival served but also its many forms and genres. It focuses on two practices of antiquarianism, namely the key role that collecting and editing played in the formation of ethnological study in the European academy, and the business of publishing and editing that produced many 'folkloric' texts of dubious authenticity. Collecting and editing went hand-in-hand with plagiarism and forgery in the practice of many: much English, Scottish and Irish folk-song is of late-eighteenth century literary origin. Across Europe, too, national literary identities were often based on origins supposedly discovered in the people, but which were frequently the stuff of fiction. As was the case with Russian and Czech folklore, an interest in the folkloric was often successfully hybridised, with, for example, a continuing emphasis on classical patterns instructing the creation of vernacular art forms. In Germany, debate about the folk served the purposes of a radical writing in a time of successive political upheavals.

In addition to exploring these tendencies, 'The Voice of the People' also presents readings of various genres: epic, song, tale and novel. It contributes to the study of several crucial European literary figures, from Macpherson and Percy, Herder and Burns, to Heine, Pushkin, Moore and Morris. But most of all it concerns the great anonymous authors of the European folk tradition – in narrative and lyric art – and their relation to the cultural movements and imagined identities of the peoples of the emerging nineteenth-century European nation.

'The Voice of the People' offers an original take on folklore revivals through its attempt to integrate British examples of the literary and antiquarian uses of folk art with a strong account of comparable movements in Europe.

Constantine Sandis has been working on Wittgenstein’s approach to other minds for over a decade. This volume collects his best writings on the topic. It sketches a picture of Wittgenstein’s approach to understanding others which explains how his anti-scepticism with regard to the philosophical problem of ‘other minds’ is not only compatible with but also supported by his scepticism concerning the real-life difficulty of understanding others (and vice versa). 

While each individual essay focuses on particular issues in Wittgenstein (including philosophical anthropology, interpersonal psychology, communication theory, and animal minds), they collectively paint a picture of what he takes the real problem of other minds to be, how to overcome it, and the limitations of our understanding. 

The book not only offers a fresh exegesis of Wittgenstein’s public and private writings on these matters but also proceeds to show the relevance of Wittgenstein beyond the remit of philosophy and the academy as a whole. These include issues in ethology, anthropology, AI intelligibility, psychology, and intercultural studies.

Digital art is fundamentally digital; it is art which cannot happen without some contemporary media technology, some element of computation, some bit-based machine. Digital art goes by a lot of names – net art, electronic art, computational art, multimedia art, new media art, screen-based art – but generally, this is a domain in which the objects of discussion rely absolutely on modern and contemporary electronics to achieve their artistic purpose. 

This collection of essays explores digital art in Ireland, filling a major gap in the national media archaeology of Ireland by bringing together a collection of timely perspectives from scholars and practitioners engaged with screen-based expression. In no way is this book a true representative selection of forms and figures, but it is, hopefully, a small contribution to addressing what remains an intellectual void. 

Wonderfully creative things are happening with computers, screens and machines right across the spectrum of artistic practice, but through disciplinary isolation – by focusing only on fine art, literature or film – we are blinding ourselves to contemporary media art as a wider cultural upheaval. The intimate connections being formed between the digital and the expressive, and how such production is mediated through national contexts, will only be fully revealed when considered through an interdisciplinary gaze. This book, comprising contributions from EL Putnam, Anne Karhio, Ken Keating, Conor McGarrigle, Kieran Nolan, Claire Fitch, Kirstie North and Chris Clarke, attempts to do just that, treating what it means for art to be both digital and Irish.

‘A First Course in Functional Analysis: Theory and Applications’ provides a comprehensive introduction to functional analysis, beginning with the fundamentals and extending into theory and applications. The volume starts with an introduction to sets and metric spaces and the notions of convergence, completeness and compactness, and continues to a detailed treatment of normed linear spaces and Hilbert spaces. The reader is then introduced to linear operators and functionals, the Hahn-Banach theorem on linear bounded functionals, conjugate spaces and adjoint operators, and the space of linear bounded functionals. Further topics include the closed graph theorem, the open mapping theorem, linear operator theory including unbounded operators, spectral theory, and a brief introduction to the Lebesgue measure. The cornerstone of the book lies in the motivation for the development of these theories, and applications that illustrate the theories in action.

One of the many strengths of this book is its detailed discussion of the theory of compact linear operators and their relationship to singular operators. Applications in optimal control theory, variational problems, wavelet analysis and dynamical systems are highlighted.

This volume strikes an ideal balance between concision of mathematical exposition and offering complete explanatory materials and careful step-by-step instructions. It will serve as a ready reference not only for students of mathematics, but also students of physics, applied mathematics, statistics and engineering.One of the many strengths of the book is the detailed discussion of the theory of compact linear operators and their relationship to singular operators. Applications in optimal control theory, variational problems, wavelet analysis, and dynamical systems are highlighted.

This volume strikes the ideal balance between concision of mathematical exposition, and complete explanatory material accompanied by careful step-by-step instructions intended to serve as a ready reference not only for students of mathematics, but also students of physics, applied mathematics, statistics and engineering.

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

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

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

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

The Great Irish Famine claimed the lives of one million people, mainly from the lower classes. More than a million others fled the stricken land between 1845 and 1851. This catastrophe ranks among the worst famines to afflict pre-industrial societies, and it retains an important place in the psyche of the Irish people and the Irish diaspora to this day. In recent decades, its history has become the focus of considerable scholarly and popular attention. In particular, a tremendous amount of work has been undertaken on mortality, emigration, relief efforts and the wider political, social and psychological consequences of the calamity. Yet much remains to be retrieved and reconstructed, particularly at the level of the rural poor. This book intends to fill that gap. Astonishingly, there is a large volume of reports on social conditions in the Irish localities, emanating from within those localities, that has never been used systematically by historians. It bears the compelling title of the ‘Death Census’. Most historians are simply unaware of its existence. The outstanding feature of the Death Census is that it was authored by local clergymen who lived among the people they served, and were intimately involved with their lives. 

The census, which has never been published in composite form, is a unique store house of testimonies from near the base of society that awaits the attention of students of famine in Ireland. Ninety-nine clergymen from across Ireland, with marked concentrations in the worst affected parts of the country, contributed to the census. Some of these documents are coloured by politics, which in itself is revealing, but most aspire to more dispassionate representations of the horror facing a famishing people within the ‘little society’ of the parish, accompanied by appeals, explicit or implicit, to the humanitarian instincts of the wider society. In terms of wider significance, this is one of the great unstudied texts of modern Irish history. This book brings the Death Census together in composite form for the first time, and provides a detailed examination of its contents. The result is a new understanding of the Great Famine as it was experienced on the ground.

Pëtr F. Iakubovich was born in Novgorod Province to a noble family in 1860, during a period of upheaval in Russia called the Great Reforms. In 1884, he was arrested and convicted as a member of the terrorist organization the People’s Will. Iakubovich spent five years at a Siberian penal labor prison, followed by several more as a forced settler in Tobolsk Province. He began writing about his experiences while still in prison. The book he eventually produced is a quasi-fictionalized memoir loosely modeled on Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from a Dead House.”

Iakubovich represents himself through his protagonist Ivan Nikolaevich. For most of Volume One, Ivan Nikolaevich must deal, as an imprisoned nobleman, with a population largely comprised of violent criminals. As commoners, these are people with whom he barely interacted in his earlier life, but he is now living cheek-by-jowl with them. His conflicts and faux pas with Buzzy, Goncharov, the cousins Burenkov et al. are by turns comic and dreadful. Ivan Nikolaevich nevertheless manages to befriend several and to learn their life stories. Iakubovich uses these character vignettes to cast light on Imperial Russia’s underclass. Though his circumstances do not afford the privileges he previously enjoyed, Ivan Nikolaevich does enjoy unusual access to the lonely and jaded prison commandant, Luchezarov—better known to prisoners as “Six-Eyes.” But despite his verbal jousts with Luchezarov, Ivan Nikolaevich finds himself contemplating suicide.

Volume Two begins with the arrival at the prison of two fellow revolutionaries—Dmitrii Shteinhart and Valerian Bashurov. Ivan Nikolaevich is overjoyed to find himself with like-minded compatriots, and the three self-styled reformers take it upon themselves to undermine Luchezarov’s increasingly despotic management and to improve conditions for all the prisoners. Several conflicts emerge, and Iakubovich uses these to both parody and indict the penal justice system and Russian bureaucracy. Finally, Luchezarov is forced from office and the prison regime he installed is condemned by a superior. Soon after, Ivan Nikolaevich leaves prison for forced settlement. This much briefer section of the work concerns his difficulty in readjusting to life outside prison and his joy at being joined by his sister (in real life, she was Iakubovich’s fiancée). The book ends with a melancholy reflection on the human destruction wrought by the tsarist penal system.

Auguste Comte was a controversial but highly influential nineteenth-century figure, but his work and voluminous oeuvre were largely ignored, even in France, for most of the twentieth century. In the field of sociology, the science he claimed to have invented and the cornerstone of his positive philosophy, Comte became regarded more as an eccentric precursor to Durkheim than a real founder of the discipline, or even a significant contributor to its stock of ideas. Recently, however, Comte’s life and writings have begun to be searchingly re-examined together with the wider religious, social and political project of reform to which his intellectual labors were devoted. What has emerged is a much more complicated picture of his thought and its significance. ‘The Companion to Auguste Comte’ – with ten new critical essays by leading Comte scholars, sociologists, intellectual historians, social theorists and philosophers – contributes to this re-examination, providing a multi-faceted introduction to Comte’s thought and to current discussion about him.

Essays in the volume consider all the phases of Comte’s work, treat a wide range of key areas and provide a broad overview of those aspects most pertinent to sociology and related fields. Areas examined include: Comte’s philosophy of science, his concepts of the social and the political, the statics and dynamics of his sociology, positive religion, art and architecture, civic education and universities, gender and his culte de femmes, and his analyses of the ‘great crisis’, the metaphysical state and the coming positivist order.

Against views of Comte that minimize or distort his place in the modern intellectual tradition, a particular aim of the collection is to examine afresh the multifarious links of his thought and its legacy to other major figures and currents. These include Comte’s relation to the ‘second scientific revolution’, to conservative Catholic theology, to Durkheim and (post)classical socology, British Fabianism, (neo) liberalism and post-positivism, as well as to a host of figures from De Maistre, Saint-Simon, J. S Mill, Spencer, Eliot and Beatrice Webb to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Weber, Wagner, De Corbusier, Bourdieu and Foucault. The chapters move in emphasis from considerations of Comte’s context and formation, to influence and reception and finally to ways in which Comte’s long abandoned historical schema may hold renewed interest for understanding our own times.

‘Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field’ proposes and demonstrates a new digital approach to literary history. Drawing on bibliographical information on the Australian novel in the AustLit database, the book addresses debates and issues in literary studies through a method that combines book history’s pragmatic approach to literary data with the digital humanities’ idea of computer modelling as an experimental and iterative practice. As well as showcasing this method, the case studies in ‘Reading by Numbers’ provide a revised history of the Australian novel, focusing on the nineteenth century and the decades since the end of the Second World War, and engaging with a range of themes including literary and cultural value, authorship, gender, genre and the transnational circulation of fiction. The book’s findings challenge established arguments in Australian literary studies, book history, feminism and gender studies, while presenting innovative ways of understanding literature, publishing, authorship and reading, and the relationships between them. More broadly, by demonstrating critical ways in which the growing number of digital archives in the humanities can be mined, modelled and visualised, ‘Reading by Numbers’ offers new directions and scope for digital humanities research.

After his death Thorstein Veblen was hailed as ‘America’s Darwin and Marx’ and is normally portrayed as the perennial iconoclast. He severely criticised traditional economics and attempted to create an alternative approach based on a much more complex view of human beings. He is one of the most celebrated economists of our age and has been the inspiration for many books; the predatory version of capitalism we now again experience, the phenomenon of studying cultures of consumption and the darker sides of gilded ages can be traced back to Veblen.

A conference in Veblen’s ancestral Norway marked the 150th anniversary of his birth. The aim of the conference was to consolidate Veblen scholarship and evaluate his relevance for the problems of today. This collection offers the results of that endeavour; it is a milestone of Vebleniana which assesses all the most salient aspects of his life and influence. Many of its contributors also push into uncharted territory, examining the man and his work from new and necessary perspectives hitherto ignored by scholarship.

Journalist Takashi Hayami meets Ai Katsuragi, a member of a religious organization, Tenmu Jinshinko, which meets secretly at the tomb of the Emperor Nintoku. The group adheres to the nomadic way of life of its ancestors, which lacked family registers and fixed abodes, and flouts civic duties such as paying taxes, serving in the armed forces and compulsory education. Even when the government tries to crack down on a segment of the populace, they continue to discipline themselves in the way of living as ambulatory people. They rely on the company Ikarino to fund the various political, social and cultural activities they promote that protect their unique lifestyle. But when Ikarino becomes a giant conglomerate that destroys the forests and mountains that form the foundation of the Tenmu Jinkshinko, Hayami must join the group’s struggle to save their way of life. 

The Vanishing Indian Upper Class is a story necessary to the life, the times and the action as told and provides a basic narrative tension by what I refer to as an ethnographic excavation, because it begins to answer the basic question of how the story extend beyond the life history of one person. Sociologist Howard Becker considering the situation of the life history document in sociology stressed the “importance of presenting the actors subjective situation of the person’s experiences and on “giving context in which he undergoes his social experiences.” Becker recognized life history data as an important source for theory and a “means of testing concepts.” In this way life history data seen as material offering basic evidence about social interaction and process because it “offers a vivid telling of what it means to be a certain kind of person.”

 This book concerns issues of gender, the role of women, inheritance, male privilege, ruling elites, marriage, the caste system, poverty, greed and familial betrayal.The idea of betrayal-one of the central tenets of the human condition-is much on display in this text. At the core of the book is a fundamental question: to what extent does the chicanery involving a family inheritance tell a much larger story about modern Indian culture from the perspective of an Indian Muslim and the nation as a whole. 

 The story is about the family of Raza Muhammad Khan and its legacy of honor, compassion, love, sacrifice, betrayal and dividing up land. This is an engaging family history intertwined with the story of one person’s life and memories. As interlocutor I know a true-life history involves more than conversations and the material here provides other forms of personal documentations: letters, e-mails, photographs, illustrations, notes, poems, stories and accounts written by different family members, limited life histories, autobiographical accounts, and court records all as a source of knowledge. Oscar Lewis related similar sentiments when he wrote about The Sanchez Family in Mexico and sociologists William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s did the same in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. 

The most important early life history documents in sociology William Thomas and Florian Znaniecski. (1918). The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. University of Chicago, which was part of the early Chicago School tradition. Psychologist Gordon Allport argued that of the three main forms of life history writing: the comprehensive; the topical; the edited, with the former being the most difficult to pull off. And there are many studies of significance purported to be life histories. Clifford Shaw. (1930). The Jack Roller. University of Chicago Press; Edwin Sutherland. (1937) The Professional Thief. University of Chicago Press; The best life histories in the social science tradition; Oscar Lewis. (1963) The Sanchez Family. Vintage Books; Theodore Rosengarten. (1974) All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw. University of Chicago Press; Sidney Mintz. (1974) Cane Worker: The Life of a Puerto Rican. W.W. Norton Company; Leo Simmons. (1970) Sun Chief:The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian. Yale University Press.

Air pollution affects us all in a number of crucial ways, causing lasting damage to our health and our environment. Whereas primary pollution can result from local activities, the extent of the impact can be felt at spatial scales from the individual up to the whole planet, and temporal scales from minutes to decades. Consequently, pollution of our atmosphere remains a critical concern, warranting continued scientific investigation and the development of effective local and global solutions. ‘The World Atlas of Atmospheric Pollution’ clearly and engagingly summarises current understanding of the state of air pollution on city to global scales.

Using high-quality graphical illustrations, the Atlas begins with a historical perspective before addressing topics such as urban and global air pollution, long-range transmission of pollution, ozone depletion and the impacts of air pollution, as well as future trends. Each chapter provides an introduction to the topic and graphical representations of the spatial and temporal distributions of air pollutants. Wherever possible, the chapters give a world-wide view of the state of our atmosphere. The illustrations are supported by explanations and other background material, allowing the reader to gain an informed insight into emission sources, the resulting atmospheric concentrations of key pollutants and their associated impacts.

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

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

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

Whilst debates over secret agents and the public revelation of lists of former collaborators have fascinated both post-Communist societies and the wider world, it is surprising how little has been written either on the nature of Communist-era collaboration or the processes through which post-Communist societies have sought to make sense of what collaboration was, and how it should be dealt with in the present. This is surprising given the amount of work that has been produced on the themes of resistance and victimization.

Unlike more popular (and often lurid) accounts of collaboration, which naturalise the concept as an obvious and incontestable characterization of Communist-era behaviour, ‘Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe’ rather interrogates the ways in which Post-Socialist cultures produce the idea of, and knowledge about, ‘collaborators’. It addresses those institutions which produce the concept and examines the function, social representation and history of secret police archives and institutes of national memory that create these histories of collaboration. This work seeks to provide a more nuanced historical conception of ‘collaboration’, expanding the concept towards broader frameworks of cooperation and political participation in order to facilitate a better understanding of the maintenance of Eastern European Communist regimes.

This work contends that secret police files are too often used to provide a one dimensional historical account of the ‘mechanisms of oppression’. It demonstrates, through case studies, how secret police files can be used to produce more subtle social and cultural histories of the socialist dictatorships. Of particular importance is the focus on the microhistorical. Contributions here explore the motivations and moralities of becoming an agent, the personal decisions and social consequences such steps involved as well as the everyday milieus in which agents lived and were active. This book analyses communities of cooperation, with particular focus on local and mid-level party organizations, organs of the church organs and artist or intellectual networks. Ranging across differing categories of collaborators and different social milieux across East-Central Europe, this work provides a comparative account of collaboration and participation with a range hitherto unavailable.

This book reviews changes in attitudes to immigrants in Britain and the language that was used to put these feelings into words between 1841 and 1921. Using a historical and linguistic method for an analysis of so far for this purpose relatively unused primary sources, this book offers novel findings. It has found that changes in the meaning and use of the word ‘alien’ in Britain coincided during the period between 1841 and 1921 with the expression of changing attitudes to immigrants in this country and the modification of the British variant of the English language. When people in Britain in these years used the term ‘an alien’, they meant, most likely, a foreigner, stranger, refugee or immigrant. In 1841 an alien denoted a foreigner or a stranger, notably a person residing or working in a country who did not have the nationality or citizenship of that country. However, by 1921 an alien mainly signified an immigrant in Britain – a term, which as this book shows, had in the course of the years since 1841 acquired very negative connotations.

This book concludes that by 1921, in contemporary minds the word alien aroused utter hostility. Alien had first become a byname for immigrants, and then it was turned into a term of abuse, a badge of dishonour and a mark of danger – a comprehensively negative label that could be attached at will or unconsciously at any time to any group of immigrants.

Forget the traditional one-off, in-person event. Welcome to a new world, where event organizers no longer see themselves as pure organizers; rather their role is to facilitate – business, connections, education and advocacy. 

Events are all about building communities and nurturing customer relationships ‘all year round’ – with the use of event technology at its core. So much so, that digital platforms with already highly engaged communities are adding events as a seamless extension of their services. With more competition, it is imperative organizers help change the mind-set of their organizations. Are they in the business of events or value-adding community catalysts?

The authors Denzil Rankine and Marco Giberti have seen it all in their 30 years of consulting, operating and investing across the global exhibitions and events industry. Based on dozens of their interviews with senior executives, entrepreneurs and investors this book is packed full of practical case studies that will equip readers with new strategies, tools and insights they can apply back into their day-to-day roles. This book is a must-read for C-Level management, marketing and event professionals, or anyone looking to participate in the events industry.

This anthology explores the relationships and interdependencies between literary production and distinctions of taste by examining how the material aspects of literary texts, such as the cover, binding, typography, and paper stock, reflect or even determine their cultural status. In the nineteenth century, for example, the industrialization of printing made possible a wide range of cheap formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, and paperbacks, which made literature available to a mass reading public. The increased demand for new content effectively lowered the cultural entrance level, which resulted in a tremendous expansion of popular or trivial fiction. These developments were often perceived as a threat to traditional literary institutions, which increasingly relied on material distinctions as a way of preserving their cultural authority, and some publishers even attempted to mimic the conventions of exclusivity by creating deluxe editions that were designed to preserve the privileged status of so-called “highbrow” texts. In many cases, the distinctions between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” taste actually had little to do with the content of the texts themselves, as books more often functioned as markers of socioeconomic status, like clothing or home décor. At the risk of being provocative, one might even go so far as to say that the concept of literary taste was more closely related to fashion sense than critical judgment. The anthology seeks to address this claim by examining how the tensions between consumerism and prestige reflect fundamental historical changes with regard to the development of technology, literacy, and social power.

The individual chapters cover a wide range of historical periods, genres, and national literatures, and they are divided into four sections that focus on different ways in which the materiality of literature is related to cultural prestige. The first section, “Material Forms and Literary Publishing,” focuses on how writers and publishers used the material properties of books to enhance their symbolic value and to challenge the idea of literature as a mass-produced commodity. These material strategies thus served to reinforce traditional distinctions of taste, which were closely aligned with the power of the literary elite, as the consumers of deluxe editions often sought to acquire respect and admiration within their social spheres. The second section, “Material Distinctions in Popular Fiction,” examines how the publishers of popular texts also used the material properties of books to enhance their symbolic and economic value, as works that were perceived as less prestigious were often more marketable, yet they could appeal to different groups of readers in different ways based on an alternative set of cultural distinctions. Instead of using books to signify their socioeconomic status, for example, fans of popular genre fiction more often fetishize special editions as a way of gaining prestige within their own reading communities. The third section, “Cultural Prestige and Graphic Narratives,” focuses on how the material properties of visual texts were also used to signify the differences between “low” and “high” art. The graphic novel format, for example, often served to enhance the status of previously lowbrow content by presenting it as a durable work that was worthy of being sold in bookstores and preserved in archives. The fourth and final section, “Electronic Publishing and Reading Practices,” also focuses on how new forms of electronic display are currently transforming the status of literary texts. While some contributors argue that e-books are potentially more prestigious than printed books, as they are less dependent on the economic imperatives of the publishing industry, others argue that printed books continue to serve a crucial non-literary function as markers of socioeconomic status. As with the other sections, therefore, the contributors in this section agree that distinctions of taste are still largely dependent on the materiality of literature, as the material properties of literary texts continue to reflect and influence their cultural prestige.

Renaissance dance treatises claim that the dance is a language but do not explain how or what dancing communicates. Since the body is the instrument of this hypothetical language, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography problematizes the absence of the dancing body in treatises in order to reconstruct it through a series of intertextual readings triggered by Thoinot Arbeau’s definition of dance as a mute rhetoric in Orchesographie. This book shows that the oratorical model for Arbeau’s definition of the dance is epideictic and that although one cannot equate dance and oratorical action, the ends of oratorical action are those of dance: persuasion through charm and emotion.

The analysis of the rhetorical intertext opens the way to a sociological one. Through a reading of courtesy books as well as a chapter of Tuccaro’s L’Art de Sauter et Voltiger en l’air it is shown that dance and social behavior were not discontinuous in the Renaissance. Instructions for the body can be divided into the categories of the pose and movement. They are examined as a model for the most important and widely practiced dance of the Renaissance: the basse danse. The characteristic motion resides in an opposition as well as an interpenetration of stillness and mobility. This is developed through a reading of fifteenth-century dance theorists’ concept of misura and fantasmata. Stefano Guazzo’s La Civil Conversazione is used as a textual interpretant to ascertain the strategy of movement and the pose in the interaction between dancer and spectator. 

This text will examine U.S. Supreme Court cases which highlight, feature and illuminate some facets of natural law reasoning since the Court’s decree in Roe v. Wade. For most of our constitutional and legal history, there has been an exhilarating debate about whether natural law commands or encourages certain legal resolutions – even from the time of the Founders. Most would concur that the legal philosophy of Jefferson and other Founders favored a natural law basis for this republic and its corresponding rights. And while the proposed text accepts that the concept and understanding of natural law reasoning has both supporters and detractors in contemporary settings, earlier Supreme Court rulings on controversial subject matter used natural law language with regularity. Since the 1970s, the idea of a perennial, immutable and unassailable natural law has lost favor. And given the recent surge in controversial case law and conflicting decisions on highly charged topics, a return to first principles grounded in nature and natural law might be beneficial. Indeed, the proposed research hopes to gauge its current relevance, usage and reliance in more modern judicial cases.

This book sets out to probe, explore and evaluate the betrayal of anticolonial nationalism in Kenya. Contemporary Kenya’s emergence is rooted in the colonial enterprise, its deleterious effects and the subsequent decolonization spearheaded by a fierce anti-colonial nationalism that was embodied in freedom struggles at the cultural, political, and military levels. As a settler colony, the colonial settlers hived off millions of hectares of the best land in the highland areas of Kenya and appropriated them for themselves thereby generating a large mass of the landless. This land alienation constituted one of the most deeply felt grievances which, together with the exclusivist, exploitative and oppressive colonial system, inflamed anti-colonial nationalism that undergirded the struggle for independence. The expectation on the part of the masses was that independence would bring about social justice, restitution of the stolen lands, and a government based on the will and aspirations of the governed. Political developments soon after independence, however, demonstrated the extent of betrayal of the cause of anti-colonial nationalism, which has remained the reality to date. This book covers the extent of this sense of betrayal from the time of independence to the present. It begins by locating contemporary Kenya within the colonial context then proceeds to thematic issues of betrayal including the fall out between President Kenyatta and Vice President Odinga over ideology and issues of development, which constituted the first betrayal; the scourge of bureaucratic corruption and rent seeking; the question of land and associated historical injustices; and electoral malpractice since the return of multiparty politics in 1992 to the most recent elections of 2022. The implications of these dynamics for the future of the Kenyan polity are delineated and discussed.

This book is a contribution to the international trade and economic development literature and is based on a decade of joint research and collaboration on South–South economic relations. Given the increasing focus on the economic power of some developing countries, for example the 2013 Human Development Report’s “Rise of the South”, it is particularly appropriate and timely. [NP] The book’s findings are based on rigorous empirical examination of South–South trade and finance and it provides an even-handed assessment from the perspective of long-term development goals rather than mainstream welfare approaches or ideological/theoretical worldview. [NP] This work directly engages with the ‘new developmentalism’ literature that has challenged the neoliberal orthodoxy and its policy approach, which focuses on liberalization, privatization, and deregulation. It also engages with literature by examining whether the increase in South–South trade facilitates or inhibits the possibilities for developmentalist economic policy in developing countries. The book shows concrete and positive results from South–South trade particularly related to industrial development and also documents how South–South trade is dominated by large developing countries and that South–South trade liberalization may be counterproductive.

As countless alterations have taken place in medicine in the twenty-first century so too have literary artists addressed new understanding of disease and pathology. Dis/ability studies, fat studies, mad studies, end-of-life studies, and critical race studies among other fields have sought to better understand what social factors lead to pathologizing certain conditions while other variations remain “normalized.” While recognizing that these scholarly approaches often speak to identities with radically different experiences of pathologization, this collection of essays is open to all critical engagements with narratives of health in order to facilitate the messiness of cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinarity. As scientific advances provide insight into a wide range of well-being issues and help extend life, it is vital that we come to question the very categories of healthy and unhealthy. This collection brings together analyses of cultural productions which probe those categorizations and suggest new psychological and philosophical understandings which will help better apply and guide the knowledge being rapidly developed within the life sciences. “Right of health” is a widely accepted human right, but in applying a right to healthcare what care and what sort of health are less universally agreed upon. The contributors share an interest in addressing who controls answers to the questions of “how do we define a healthy body and a healthy life?” and “what are the political forces that influence our definitions of health?”

Although not all contributions take a feminist lens, feminist thought has questioned the medical community’s response to women’s bodies, contributed to the de-stigmatization of difference, and challenged gendered binaries. Consequently, many of the essays are informed by the possibilities enabled through the work of feminist scholars. Just as feminist writing positioned storytelling as a way of overcoming the way women’s bodies were defined as unfit and inferior, so too are literary and visual artists exploring how empowering personal and cultural expressions of dis/abled bodies, mad bodies, trans bodies, fat bodies, racialized bodies, and aged bodies among others can overcome pathologizing normative standards. 

The globalization of healthcare protocols has brought many advances but also challenges to traditional understanding of health within many cultures. This collection includes papers that examine narratives of health from all countries, cultures, and communities and is not limited to a North American or Western locus. Further, just as Edward Said problematized “travelling theory” this book hopes to bring together scholars who look at how literary works also show that medical interventions from a Western perspective need to be challenged when applied to communities whose voices are often not heard or deliberately undermined when those “treatments” are developed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For those captive to the broken world of late modernity, wherein ageing and dying persons become vulnerable to despair, this book offers a diagnostic of such despair. It also resources the practices of a realistic, humanising hope that might enable a strength for person to journey with and for others, together, through such despair. Thus, by addressing the aetiology of despair experienced by people confronting ageing, frailty and dying, and drawing upon the writings of Gabriel Marcel, among others, Ashley Moyse reveals the problematic life of a broken world with its functionalising metaphors, instrumentalising reasoning and objectifying desires that offer no hope at all. It is a broken world where despair generates behaviours that anticipate suicide or other, often tragic, outcomes that impede or greatly curtail or even completely inhibit human flourishing. Resisting despair, but living through it, Moyse presents the activity of the moral life, demonstrating a way persons might be resourced through an intersubjective and reflective pedagogy, with its habits or practices that enable a humanising hope, liberating human beings to become those readied to confront the actualities of human living and dying, and encouraged to grow and develop as ‘wayfarers’, hopefully.

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

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

The world is loaded with information. We enjoy immediate access to most of it through laptops, smartphones and the Internet. There is, however, a great deal of information that professionals cannot reach unless they talk to their clients, patients, job applicants and others. When the purpose is to obtain accurate, relevant and reliable information, no professional interpersonal encounter has been subjected to more systematic and critical research than police interviews of victims, witnesses and suspects of crime. Knowledge derived from this research has formed a novel, more effective way to gather information. The concept is known as Investigative Interviewing, and throughout Interviewing Techniques for Professionals, the authors demonstrate that research-based methodology is applicable and likely to advance professional interviews within a wide range of professions. Based on the extensive feedback the authors have received as advisors and trainers from a highly diverse group of clients and participants, including prosecutors, judges, journalists, investors, recruiters, physicians, researchers, NGOs, lawyers, HR employees, immigration- taxation- child protection- food and competition authorities, to name a few, it has become evident that the concept of Investigative Interviewing is of great utility value, far beyond police stations. 

The pressure to perform and conclude creates working environments vulnerable to errors related to decision making. These challenges are not unique to the police. Unfortunate consequences directly related to poor interviewing can be of a social, financial and human nature. Without professional interviewing techniques, including a methodology that stimulates open mindedness, physicians, head-hunters, intelligence personnel, finance analytics, journalists and others run the risk of confirming their premature assumptions. In worst case scenarios, resulting in deaths caused by wrong treatment, refugees are deported only to face torture or executions, bankruptcy and so on

The techniques presented by the authors were specifically developed to guide interviewers through a mental and practical process that will allow them to remain open-minded to all possibilities, mitigating problems associated with premature decisions. A growing body of research shows with consensus that interviews conducted by professionals without theoretical knowledge and a methodological approach can, at worst, lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, where the interviewer only succeeds in extracting information that confirms his or her premature conceptions, opinions or assumptions. Besides providing the reader with a methodology that stimulates open-mindedness, Interviewing Techniques for Professionals will provide the reader with question techniques developed to test the interviewer`s preconceptions. It will also provide an understanding of what kind of questions reveal the most information; which questions should be asked first; which questions ought to be avoided; how questions should be presented; and, in particular, which interpersonal communication principles stimulate rapport and mitigate communication breakdowns.

Guiding the emergence of a new green economy, based on a green industrial system and on green growth for its propagation, is the core challenge of our time. Efforts so far to switch to renewables in power generation have succeeded in partially transforming energy systems. Efforts to capture the process through imposition of carbon taxes or emissions trading schemes have fallen far short: these are policies based on simplistic comparative static economic frameworks involving changing prices but never engaging with the dynamic industrial drivers of change. A systemic perspective, focusing on the supersession of one technoeconomic system, based on fossil fuels, by another system, based on hydrogen, renewables and circular flows, is called for. The argument is developed that a new politics of energy is evolving from one based on fossil fuels to one where our industrial civilization is maturing and sees the manufacture of energy and energy devices as central to its continued survival.
In this book I construct an image of the green industrial revolution drawn from perspectives that are under-appreciated in conventional economics. Economic progress is viewed in terms of capture of increasing returns generated by manufacturing, with learning curves reducing costs as the market expands, in successive waves of circular and cumulative causation. Secondly, technoeconomic change is viewed as creative destruction, whereby competitive dynamics drive economic progress. And third, the economy is viewed as clusters of value chains replacing each other in a chain reaction of interactions propagating new chains and their interlinkages and eliminating incumbent chains. These perspectives, drawn from heterodox economics framed in disequilibrium, supplemented by a view of the emergence and diffusion of green hydrogen as a novel (sixth) technoeconomic paradigm surge, enable us to make sense of the dynamic green transformation emerging out of the matrix of the black fossil fuel system, where it is the future of our industrial civilization that is at stake.

Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture explores manifestations of the themes, forms and practices of high modernism in Irish literature and culture produced subsequent to this influential movement.

Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture closely examines how Irish writers and artists from the mid-twentieth century onwards grapple with the legacies bequeathed by modernism and seek to forge new modes of expression for modern and contemporary culture.

Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture brings together many of the most respected and renowned scholars in Irish and modernist studies, demonstrating the diversity of intellectual approaches to the Irish culture produced in the wake of high modernism.