Anthem Press

This is the first republication of Rheta Childe Dorr’s book Inside the Russian Revolution (1917), accompanied by the editor’s research introduction and comments. Dorr (1866–1948) was a leading suffragette from Nebraska, studied at the University of Nebraska, before moving to New York as a journalist and first editor of The Suffragette. Living on the lower East Side, she became a socialist. She visited Russia during the first Russian revolution (1905–1907) and later covered the February Revolution of 1917 for the New York Evening Mail.
Her book Inside the Russian Revolution (1917) depicts the overthrow of the tsar as a positive, democratic move with hope of a Russia following the American path to constitutional democracy. The evolution of revolutionary Russia from February to October changed not only Dorr’s perception of the Russian revolution as a phenomenon but her vision of socialism as well. In this sense, she was among the American radicals who contributed to American phenomenology of the 1917 Russian revolution but were not satisfied with its results. Being a prominent figure in the U.S. political and social life of her time, Rheta Dorr expanded the horizons of the Americans’ identity.
Dorr is also known for other publications. In 1922, she assisted Anna Vyrubova, a lady-in-waiting, the best friend and the confidante of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, with the writing of Vyrubova’s memoir, My Memories of the Russian Court. Thereafter, Dorr wrote her own memoir, A Woman of Fifty, published in 1924. Dorr moved from her autobiography to a biography of Susan B. Anthony, published in 1928, and completed her publishing activity in 1929 with a tome on the question of prohibition.

In a little over twenty years, New York–-based fashion designer Thome Browne has decisively and permanently changed the fashion industry. Through his clothes that are rooted in America’s distinctive preppie style, he has challenged age-old conventions of tailoring by altering proportions and blurring gender boundaries. The cropped trouser, which has become a staple of people’s wardrobes around the world, owes much to Browne’s pioneering reinterpretation of the suit. Through highly choreographed catwalk shows, he has enlivened the presentation of fashion, creating soulful spectacles that variously critique and cherish common themes in human lives.
Browne’s influence within the fashion industry has been recognised through various awards. The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) has named him ‘Menswear Designer of the Year’ on three occasions, in 2006, 2013, and 2016. Since 2023, Browne has served as the CFDA’s Chair. In May 2023, Browne dressed nine celebrities to honour Karl Lagerfeld at the annual gala hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This book considers Browne’s position as a fashion auteur by focusing on four collections that enable detailed consideration of his innovative clothing designs and catwalk presentations, situating them within their historical and social context and drawing out what makes them distinctive and influential.

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

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

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

This book presents a new theater play, For Three Refrigerators and a Washing Machine, along with a thorough introduction that provides historical context and theoretical framing. The play with the enigmatic title tells the poignant and forgotten stories of international child adoptions from Greece in the 1950s and the 1960s. It offers an in-depth exploration of the first postwar mass international adoption movement, unveiling the emotional and even existential challenges faced by those involved. Based on an authentic playscript, the book creates awareness about what has not been said, should be said, but still cannot be said about the losses involved in the permanent uprooting of children and teenagers. It tackles the primal questions of “Where do I come from?” and “What happened to the child I relinquished for adoption abroad?” And why did nobody foresee that adopted children become adopted adults who ask critical questions about origins, procedures, and aftercare?
Thus, the book boldly reflects on the complexities and profound losses associated with displacing children and perpetuating taboos. Also, it reveals multiple connections to similar adoption movements worldwide, which include countries (and histories) of origin such as Ireland, South Korea, Vietnam, and several states in Central and South America. This thought-provoking book poses critical questions about identity and belonging that far exceed the Greek setting and continue to be relevant today.

Explores the demarcation of secular and sacred spaces in early modern English drama, analysing four lesser known plays alongside Shakespeare and Marlowe to examine significant historical and geographical sites.

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

This book illustrates how different forces shape ideas, knowledge traditions, policies, processes, institutions and everyday lives to domesticate both people and the planet in pursuit of profit. It examines the myriad ways in which contemporary ruling and non-ruling elites influence politics, culture, economy and religion and shape our daily interactions, emphasising their impact on individuals, families, communities, democratic praxis, societal structures and nature. The book portrays power structures that are skewed in a manner that marginalises many while upholding the interests of a few. It depicts numerous contradictions inherent in capitalism and the state, while also presenting alternative ideas drawn from the everyday experiences of working people.
State and capitalism territorialise and deterritorialise lives and livelihoods. It destabilises social, cultural and economic relationships. Everyday crises are manufactured, and conflicts are designed to divert the masses from exploring alternatives to capitalism. This strategy aims to maintain the status quo by ensuring that attention and resources are consistently focused on the accumulation of wealth and prosperity for a few, thereby preventing widespread consideration of alternative and egalitarian systems and processes for mass welfare.

This book will provide an exploration of how popular songs have been analysed in the past, before detailing how an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to appreciate the multimodal format of the medium. Beginning by examining what we can gain from staying ‘inside’ the song, it will explore the role the listener has in determining meaning within a song, before moving on to how, through their lyrics, songwriters can persuade their audience to react in the desired ways. Lyrical storytelling will also be analysed, in terms of the narratives we find within individual songs, but also through ‘song sequences’ where the story spans multiple songs across different projects, and also the ‘concept album’ format. As we move ‘outside’ the song, we see what can be offered in terms of cultural significance, the difference between real events and their lyrical representations, how the format we listen to music in influences our readings, and to what extent visual materials affect our relationships with songs.

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

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

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

According to Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, Śambūka was practicing severe acts of austerity to enter heaven. In engaging in these acts as a Śūdra, Śambūka was in violation of class- and caste-based societal norms prescribed exclusively by the ruling and religious elite. Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa epic, is dispatched to kill Śambūka, whose transgression is said to be the cause of a young Brahmin’s death. The gods rejoice upon the Śūdra’s execution and they restore the life of the Brahmin. The developmental history of the Śambūka narrative begins with the appearance of this story as a late addition to the core of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa in the first few centuries of the common era, a period of immense revision to and consolidation of an idealistic political Brahminism. The Śambūka story, with its hardline depiction of varṇa-dharma, fit quite well within this project of widely asserting Brahmanical dominance. Subsequent Rāmāyaṇa poets almost instantly recognized the incident of Śambūka’s execution as a blemish on Rāma’s character and they began problematizing this earliest version of the story by adjusting the story to suit the expectations of their audiences. Such adjustments included a more sympathetic view of Śambūka that exhibited a concern for his afterlife in the form of Rāma granting Śambūka salvation, albeit through their deadly contact. This particular narrative took hold especially in medieval India when Rāma became the object of fervent religious devotion. More pointed departures from Vālmīki’s Śambūka narrative developed within Jain Rāma texts and involved a complete overhaul in its exposition whereby Śambūka’s death occurs accidentally and at the hands of Rāma’s brother, Lakṣmaṇa. As a figure who embodies Jain ideals, Rāma could not participate in any act of violence, so Jain poets removed him from any involvement in Śambūka’s execution. In a display of intercommunal exchange, this motif of Śambūka’s accidental death is also found in some Hindu Rāmāyaṇas of the medieval period. 

In the modern era, author-activists find that the story of Śambūka as known in Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa leaves out some critical details—that Śambūka was a revolutionary leader who peacefully advocated for equal access to education for India’s oppressed populations and the abolishment of the caste system. Creators of new works on Śambūka seek to enter these details into the record of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, thus correcting what they see as centuries of misrepresentation.

‘Turkey’s Water Diplomacy’ first delineates the institutional and legal foundations of transboundary water policy-making in Turkey. In doing so, major actors of water diplomacy at national, regional and international levels are identified and scrutinized. Specific attention is paid to the evolution of transboundary water politics in the Euphrates–Tigris river basin since Turkish water diplomacy and its basic principles have been largely shaped through practices in this strategically important river basin. Situated at the crossroads of the Middle East, the Caucasus and Europe as the country is, Turkey’s transboundary water policy has also been shaped by geographical determinants. Interestingly, Turkey has reflected her experience in one region (i.e., Europe) on practices in other regions. ‘Turkey’s Water Diplomacy’ analyses how Turkey’s harmonization with the European Union has impacted the transboundary water policy discourses and practices, and how these changes have been reflected in its relations with its Middle Eastern neighbours. A historical account of transboundary water relations in the ET basin is enriched with the analysis of the current state of affairs in the region, such as the Syrian civil war and its repercussions on water issues.

It is striking that Turkey was one of the three countries that rejected the UN Watercourses Convention in 1997. The book elaborates on the reasons why Turkey voted against the UN Watercourses Convention. Yet, since the voting of the convention in 1997, there have been changes in Turkey’s stance vis-à-vis international water law, which the book examines and focuses on.

Turkey’s water diplomacy embodies complex water management problems, which can be best understood as a product of competition, feedback and interconnection among natural and societal variables in a political context. Hence, the book adopts the Water Diplomacy Framework with its key elements in making policy-relevant recommendations specifically for Turkey’s water diplomacy.

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

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

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

Wittgenstein’s May–June 1913 critique of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgement (or MRTJ) marked a crucial turning point in the lives of two great twentieth-century thinkers. But it was also a watershed moment within the history of analytic philosophy itself. The critique led Russell to abandon his 1913 Theory of Knowledge manuscript and left a significant breach within his epistemology. It represented an important milestone within Wittgenstein’s philosophical development and marked the point at which he emerged on the scene as an independent philosophical force. It inaugurated the linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy which would dominate the course of analytic philosophy throughout the early and middle part of that century. For these and other reasons, it is worthy of careful study and deep understanding.

Yet scholarly consensus around a satisfactory interpretation of the nature of the critique, the extent of and reasons for its impact on Russell, along with the role it played within Wittgenstein’s developmental trajectory have remained elusive. This partly reflects the fact that a correct interpretation of Wittgenstein’s critique depends upon a satisfactory resolution of several other, related exegetical controversies within the interpretation of Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s respective philosophies.

With these facts in mind, this book aims to accomplish four interrelated goals. The first is to develop a compelling reading of Wittgenstein’s May–June 1913 critique of Russell’s MRTJ. For reasons which will become clear over the course of the book, this reading is called the ‘logical interpretation’ (or LI). The second main objective of the book is to defend LI against its most prominent competitors in the scholarly literature. These include interpretations of Wittgenstein’s objection offered by Nicholas Griffin and Steven Sommerville, Gregory Landini, Graham Stevens, Peter Hanks, Christopher Pincock, Rosalind Carey, Fraser MacBride and Samuel Lebens. Third, the book aims to situate Wittgenstein’s critique of the MRTJ and Russell’s reaction to it, within the broader context of each of Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s respective philosophical developments. While much scholarship has focused on probing the role played by the objection within the evolution of Russell’s thought, much less has been done to explore the impact on Wittgenstein’s development. Still less, if any scholarship has been devoted to highlighting the significant traces of Wittgenstein’s critique which can be found latent within his later philosophical viewpoint. This book seeks to fill these lacunae in the scholarship on Wittgenstein while also adding to the high-quality work on Russell which has already been done in this area. Fourth and finally, the book aims to introduce students and scholars of early analytic philosophy to and familiarize them with the historical events, textual evidence, scholarly controversies, letters, notes and diagrams, consideration of which is integral to constructing a plausible reading of Wittgenstein’s objection. To that end, it brings together a broad selection of relevant materials and information in a clear, accessible and organized way into one, relatively concise source.

‘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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oral traditions and creative oratures have been celebrated in African studies over the years, specifically from the 1950s, as the most important and viable correspondence, aside from material artifacts, between social “archeologists” attempting to penetrate the African preliterate past and the social-political and economic productions of that same past.

In the memoirs chosen for this book, oral traditions are braided with personal experiences in the formation of the self, providing the basis of some African literary outputs and championed as having the ability to engineer the African knowledge system in global academe. In this regard, this work stressesthe concept that most memoir writing scholars feel that the production and presentation of the autobiographical self aredependent on the categories of individualism and relationality.

The memoirists depict their own identities in their tales as not simply a part of their society but also one strongly impacted by prominent persons in their many lived settings. The bookdiscusses an approach that enables West African memoirists to review their cultural backgrounds in the light of living in other spaces and acquiring different experiences.

This monograph explores the relationship between philosophy and painting, showing how thinkers such as Hegel and Merleau-Ponty developed their key concepts through direct engagement with specific artworks. Unlike traditional surveys that often treat philosophical ideas as abstract, Colors of the Concepts: Philosophers on Paintings emphasises how these ideas were shaped by concrete encounters with visual art. Each chapter discusses how the philosophical frameworks of these thinkers were influenced by their experiences with paintings, uncovering the often-overlooked link between visual art and philosophical thought.

By examining the work of eight major philosophers, the book traces how visual experiences contributed to the development of their ideas, offering new insights into the history of philosophy. The approach taken in this monograph bridges aesthetics with other branches of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, demonstrating how visual art has influenced the course of intellectual history. This method not only highlights the importance of painting in philosophical discourse but also shows how visual art has shaped abstract reasoning.

Colors of the Concepts provides a fresh perspective on familiar philosophical ideas by revealing the significant role that painting has played in their development. The book offers both scholars and general readers a chance to explore the deep connection between visual art and philosophical thought, underscoring the ongoing relevance of these engagements with art in contemporary discussions of aesthetics and the broader history of ideas.

Good Trouble will show the strong connection between the Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Catholic Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland – specifically the influence of the Montgomery to Selma march on the 1969 Belfast to Derry march through oral history, based on numerous interviews of events leading up to both marches and afterwards. This is close to the author’s heart as both of his parents marched to integrate lunch counters and movie theatres in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1963 as college students. His mother was at the 1963 March to Washington where Martin Luther King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
Award winning author Julieann Campbell (On Bloody Sunday) wrote the introduction for Good Trouble, looking back at her times growing up in Derry, in the heart of the Catholic Civil Rights Movement. Jones travelled to Dublin, Belfast and Derry to conduct interviews for the book. In all, he did fifteen interviews with people who were involved in the movement in Northern Ireland (including Billy McVeigh – featured in the BAFTA winning documentary, Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland) and in the United States (including Richard Smiley and Dr. Sheyann Webb-Christburg – both were at Bloody Sunday in Alabama and on the Selma to Montgomery march among others). Jones was also able to talk with Eamonn McCann (he took part in the Belfast to Derry march in 1969; he was the John Lewis of Northern Ireland).
Unlike most books on Northern Ireland, this goes into detail about the connection and the influence between the two movements. Also, most focus on Bloody Sunday and not the pivotal incidents at Burntollet Bridge and the Battle of the Bogside. Building off of unprecedented access and interviews with participants in both movements, Jones crafts a gripping and moving account of these pivotal years for both countries.

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

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

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

Hidden Heroes offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the lives of ordinary North Koreans through a collection of short stories by renowned DPRK authors. Spanning from the 1980s to the present, these works explore the theme of the “hidden hero,” a popular moniker in the DPRK to describe the average citizen who navigates the complexities of daily life with quiet dedication for their work and country.
The anthology is divided into three thematic sections—Identities, Communities, and Power—showcasing a diverse array of characters and settings. Readers will encounter factory managers juggling work and family responsibilities, neighbors bonding during friendly outings, university deans resisting corruption, and diasporic Koreans in Japan grappling with questions of belonging. Through these relatable human experiences, the stories challenge simplistic notions of North Korean society and reveal a more nuanced reality.
While elements of propaganda and state ideology are present, as is typical in all officially sanctioned DPRK literature, the focus in the text is rather on the personal struggles, relationships, and aspirations of the characters. By highlighting these universal themes, Hidden Heroes invites readers to look beyond geopolitical tensions and connect with the shared humanity of North Koreans. For anyone seeking to expand their understanding of this often-misunderstood country, this anthology provides an engaging and thought-provoking literary journey into the everyday lives of North Korean citizens.

Gayle DeLong was a well-known activist in the autism community, the ‘Warrior Mom’ of two autistic daughters. She worked closely with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on vaccine injury issues. This book is a record (based largely on her diaries) of her happy marriage to Jonathan Rose, from their first date in 1994 to her untimely death from breast cancer in January 2022.

Love in the Age of Autism does not sugarcoat the stresses and heartbreak of raising autistic children: it is more honest about that than most other books on the subject. But it is also an inspiring love story, which can help autism parents find profound joys in spite of all the pains. It offers practical advice and models for sharing the burdens and pleasures of life, based on a strong sense of family values. Many autism moms give up their careers to care for their children, but Gayle was a determined professional woman, and her arrangements with Jonathan allowed her to continue working.

She also refused to give up one of her favourite sports – sex. This book frankly (and with an earthy sense of humour) illustrates how autism parents can continue to enjoy passionate, monogamous physical love – and it also explains how to provide sex education for autistic girls (who can easily be taken advantage of). In this book, the girl dies in the end, as she often does in love stories, but the tale is intensely romantic and life-affirming.

Asia’s legendary playwright- director Stan Lai has written one of the unique works of our time, explaining that the mysterious act of creativity is actually a traceable function of mind, and there is a path to learn creativity through un-learning many of our habits picked up in life. His special map, as well as tailor-made exercises, lays out an awe-inspiring yet practical guide from a lifetime of creative work, revered in Asia by artists and business leaders alike. Through his extensive experience, the greatest living Asian playwright shows us how to cultivate a ‘creative app’ that works within us.
Matthieu Ricard says: “Stan Lai teaches us, how to see and how to do.” Praised by Jack Ma, Ang Lee and other luminaries, this book is a rewrite by the author of his book that is the most prominent work on creativity in China, having sold over 700,000 copies. Robert Wilson calls the work “foundational support for arts and culture.” Stan Lai is uniquely qualified to write on creativity, because he not only has four decades of creative experience, widely acclaimed as the greatest playwright in the Chinese language, but is also a dedicated educator. Shannon Jackson calls the work “A must-read from an internationally renowned artist.”
Can creativity be taught? Most of the books and training in this area deal with skills for jumpstarting alternative thinking, brainstorming and other exercises, but do not deal with creativity itself. They don’t tackle the obvious question: What is creativity and how can I get it? As one of the world's leading artists, Lai explains that the reason we don’t think creativity can be taught is that we don’t really understand what happens in the mysterious process. By slowing down the moment of inspiration, Lai lets us see exactly the elements involved in this complex process that lasts only an instant. Then he shows you how to prepare for this moment, through his unique Map of Creativity. This is a whole path of training in creativity, which he explains clearly and humour and compassion, and tailor-made exercises. Travis Preston says “Stan Lai guides us to the center of the creative moment and the ultimate unity of the spiritual and physical worlds.”
Creativitry is a milestone in understanding and learning the creative act. Born in America, raised in Taiwan, with a career spanning the Chinese diaspora, Lai believes that we are all born creative, but the source to creativity has been blocked, by life. How to take down the barriers that are blocking the source from us is a task of un-learning many things that have become habits and put us into a so-called non-creative mode. Taking his cue from his Buddhist training that wisdom and method are both needed for success in any endeavour, he explains how ‘wisdom’ has mysteriously vanished from education systems all over. Most teaching in creativity focuses on method, which one learns in one’s art. But we need another type of training, more urgently, the training for wisdom, which can only happen in the domain of life. To do, you must first be. To discover your creativity, you must first discover yourself. Octavian Saiu says, “This book is not a manual, but a statement of belief, an enduring message about how each of us can go beyond our limits.”

William Hazlitt had concluded in 1815 that a Quaker poet would be ‘a literary phenomenon’ – how could a marginal sect renowned for their plain dress, sober ways and proscription of pleasures produce imaginative literature? To conceive such a writer would be a paradox. Yet the career of Bernard Barton, a prolific poet of the 1820s and 1830s, presented the Romantic era with just such a phenomenon. Instantly recognisable to his contemporaries as the Quaker poet, Barton drew on the styles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century – Cowper, Wordsworth, Crabbe – to fashion verse under a Quaker muse. His diverse poetic output is unified by a tender emotional warmth, a picturesque love for the Suffolk countryside and a self-consciously modest but nevertheless sophisticated authorship. 

This is the first ever modern edition of Barton’s poetry, providing freshly edited texts from the original print sources and a comprehensive scholarly treatment encompassing critical commentary, detailed notes and textual variations. Capturing the full range of his career from the 1810s to 1840s, it includes generous selections of nature poetry, religious verse, texts of sociability and friendship, ekphrastic compositions, political writings and a long extract from his radically pacifist elegy to Napoleon. The book also includes a selection of invaluable contextual material, such as periodical reviews and Barton’s own prefaces, as well as a substantial essay introducing Barton and his times.

In a time when the nineteenth-century literary canon is in a continual process of expansion and revision, this unusual and striking poet, working from the position of a religious minority and yet fully engaging the mainstream poetic traditions of his day, deserves to be rediscovered, and this edition achieves precisely this.

Renu’s Recipes: Delicious and Diabetic-Friendly Dishes
Discover a culinary journey where health meets indulgence with Renu’s Recipes. This all-in-one cookbook is your gateway to diabetic-friendly cuisine that doesn’t compromise on flavour or simplicity. Perfect for home cooks of all levels, this book curates a diverse selection of easy-to-make dishes from various global cuisines.
Key Features:
Diabetic-Friendly: Savour delectable dishes designed to meet the dietary needs of persons with diabetes, packed with flavours they crave but thought they couldn’t have.
Comprehensive and Accessible: From breakfast to desserts, including mains, sides, salads, snacks and special categories such as recipes for grandchildren.
Learn and Explore: Master diverse cooking techniques such as baking, steaming and stir-frying. Discover a variety of herbs and enjoy wholesome salads that make every meal nutritious.
Benefits:
Unlock the joy of cooking with recipes that are both healthy and enticing. Renu’s Recipes empowers you to bring the richness of home-made meals to your table, ensuring every bite is as nourishing as it is delicious.
Why Choose Renu’s Recipes?
This cookbook is your go-to resource for achieving culinary excellence while prioritising health. Whether you are managing diabetes or simply embracing a healthier lifestyle, Renu Sood’s expertly crafted recipes promise to elevate your cooking experience.
Join Renu Sood on a journey of flavour and wellness. Embrace wholesome cuisine and enjoy the satisfaction of home-made goodness with every meal.

This book groups together three kinds of experience: the experience of the sublime, of 'epiphany' which is generally a profound experience of something ordinary, and the feeling of 'thrills' which can be a shiver down the spine or sudden tears. 

These 'strong experiences' have been extensively studied, but almost always separately from one another, and in a variety of disciplines, and so this is the first major attempt to bring them together under a relatively simple psychological account. The book reviews some of the work on the sublime and epiphanies, including life-changing epiphanies, in the literary critical, philosophical and psychological literature. It explores how we can feel that we know things which are deeply important without being able to put what we know into words, and it also offers an introduction to some basic psychological ideas about knowledge. The book focuses on the physical aspects of the experience, and their relation to emotions, and looks in detail at what the body actually does when we feel goosebumps and similar sensations. It continues to outline some of the simple psychological notions which support this account of strong experiences, including how surprise works, and other related notions such as curiosity, attention and empathy, and why ordinary things can sometimes be perceived as though they are sources of profound insight.

The final section briefly summarises various devices in literary texts which can be used to trigger strong experiences in a reader. It concludes by noting that our strong experiences of literary texts and other aesthetic objects are related to our more general aesthetic experience.

After completing his studies in Spain’s La Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts), the artist Ahmed Amrani (b. 1942) returned to a newly independent Morocco, where he spent a demanding period creating murals and posters for the Rif Revolts of 1958. After Morocco’s independence in 1956, local citizens of the Rif, a region in the northeast of Morocco, resisted the central government’s policies, leading to a brutal clash between civilians and the royal army. Although invigorated and hopeful following independence, Amrani was negatively affected by the uprisings, which led to the newly autonomous Moroccan government to brutally punish those involved. Amrani used his artistic practice to express his anxiety over the oppressive national politics of the time. None of the murals or posters exist and no photo documentation remains of these ephemeral political gestures. Resisting from the Margins: Ahmed Amrani’s Protesta (1969) explores the only artwork from this period that remains: a politically charged oil-on-paper painting from 1969 titled Protesta that depicts an impassioned mass of protestors chanting and raising their fists in the air.
Amrani’s artistic production during this time, including the painting Protesta, has a ‘strong goyesque expressivity’, referring to the late-18th- and early 19th-century Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya (1746–1828). In 1961, Amrani moved to Madrid to continue his formal fine arts training at La Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts), where he would remain until completing his degree in 1965. According to Amrani and art historian Clara Miret Nicolazzi, he frequented numerous galleries and museums in Spain such as the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. He discovered new tendencies and trends in fine arts and was particularly attracted to Goya, who would become a major influence on his practice throughout the 1960s. Amrani was struck by Goya’s stylistic liberty and ability to illustrate his relationship with the historical moment in which he lived. With Protesta, Amrani accomplished the same: he solidified himself as one of the most politically active artists from Tetouan’s art school during the modern period of the 1950s and 1960s and formally diverged from his peers with his use of expressive brushstrokes and a combination of figurative and abstracted imagery.
Composed of an introductory chapter, three body chapters and a concluding chapter, Resisting from the Margins is a project that comprehensively explores the socio-political context in which Protesta was made, specifically, the Rif Revolts of the late 1950s. In addition to exploring this political moment, this title will demonstrate how social, political and cultural marginalisation affected the arts community and the artistic pedagogy of Tetouan’s art school, today known as L’Institut National des Beaux Arts (The National Institute of Fine Arts, INBA). Amrani’s Protesta provides an avenue for exploring this understudied moment in Morocco’s post-independence history. This project will also discuss the present-day reception of the artwork, which was exhibited for the first time in 2021 at the Reina Sofía as part of the exhibition Moroccan Trilogy: 1950–2020. The title’s author was the curatorial assistant for the exhibition and selected the artwork on behalf of the show’s curators. Out of over seventy artworks, Protesta was one of only a handful of artworks exhibited by a Tetouani artist. Visitors found the work incredibly impactful and relevant to the contemporary Hirak Rif Movement (2016–), a recent uprising in the Rif that traces its roots to the original Rif Revolts. The painting, once an avenue for Amrani to express his frustration with the Moroccan state, today serves as a poignant reminder of the resilience of and resistance by the Rif’s civilians against oppression.

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

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

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

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

Richard Washburn Child was an American author and diplomat who served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy between 1921 and 1924 during the rise of fascism in that country. Earlier, however, Child visited Russia on the eve of the revolution and was greatly impressed with what he saw. He praised the Russians for their spirit and independence. He optimistically believed that Russia was a dormant force ready to liberate itself from its feudal past and spring forward into modernity. He describes Russia’s resources, both natural and human, and attempts to explain the Russian mindset.
Child acknowledged rumours of a stirring revolutionary mood, but he did not believe they were accurate. Reading his observations, given what we know would soon happen, is both fascinating and poignant. Child would later go on to be a huge supporter of Mussolini and editor of the dictator’s autobiography.
Child urged the United States to establish partnerships with Russia and create opportunities with this powerful nation before other countries beat them to it. He believed that Great Britain was already taking steps to invest in Russia. Child also emphasised the importance of sending representatives to Russia who actually understood the customs and spoke the language.

Karl von Dalberg (1744–1817) was the scion of a prominent aristocratic family in the Holy Roman Empire. He served as the Empire’s last Reichskanzler (1802–1806) before its dissolution by Napoleon, and subsequently as Prince-Primate of the Confederation of the Rhine (1806–1813), implementing Napoleonic reforms in the Rhineland. In the 1790s, he had been active as a political theorist and a member of Friedrich Schiller’s intellectual circle in Jena. Dalberg’s early text of 1793, ‘Von den wahren Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats’ [‘The True Limits of the Effectiveness of the State’], published anonymously but securely attributed, defends Christian Wolff’s perfectionist theory of the state against Kantian critiques, especially as these were formulated in 1792 by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). The confrontation between Dalberg and Humboldt illustrates the early reception of Kant’s moral, political and juridical thought, and varying German responses to the French Revolution. Dalberg offers an insightful defence of the older perfectionism, while distinguishing it from new liberal and republican approaches.
Dalberg himself had encouraged Humboldt to publish his largely Kantian reflections on the role of the state. Humboldt’s text, Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen [An Attempt to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State], was published in part in 1792, truncated by Prussian censorship, and the complete work appeared posthumously only in 1851. Humboldt advocated a minimalist state, which he took to be consistent with Kant’s repudiation of Wolffian perfectionism in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) as inimical to the self-determination of persons. The state was to be the agent of freedom and not of happiness. Dalberg responded with a critique of the minimalist state. He defended Wolffian enlightened absolutism, bolstering Wolff’s position with anthropological arguments about indolence and co-ordination to support the view that without broad state intervention and guidance, society stagnates, and perfection, or happiness, becomes unattainable. Dalberg’s response retains a strongly reformist orientation, differentiating him from other contemporary offshoots of Wolffianism, such as the staunchly conservative Historical School of Law. Dalberg is thus a representative of Enlightened absolutism in the context of the French Revolution, and his subsequent political career exemplifies this position.

The World of Wu Zhao is a carefully curated set of more than 120 translated stories—all annotated and contextualized—on a range of topics from Zhang Zhuo’s 張鷟 eighth century collection of miscellany, Collected Records of Court and Country (Chaoye qianzai 朝野僉載). The book provides English readers with a sense and feel for the empire during the reign of Wu Zhao 武曌 (624–705, also known as Empress Wu and Wu Zetian), China’s first and only female emperor. 

The World of Wu Zhao moves outward from the female sovereign’s personal and intimate domain of the inner palace. The text includes chapters on a number of different themes and topics: the female emperor’s male favorites, the culture of the court , cruel officials, as well as sections on flora and fauna, the common folk, artisans and craftsmen, Buddhist and Daoist monks, the military, spirits and the supernatural, the borderlands, and local officials. Chapters are introduced through “speaking artifacts” such as saddles, swords, bronze tallies, porcelain figurines of camels and grooms, official tallies, Buddhist cave paintings and funerary monuments—contemporary to the reign of the female emperor. This lively and fresh perspective on medieval China will amuse and shock readers, prompting them to recalibrate everything they think they know about medieval China.

Self-Presentation and Self-Praise in Open Communication Digital Enterprises presents the findings of an interdisciplinary study of the ‘self-entrepreneurial self’ and, in particular, the rationale behind its need to self-present under the current socio-economic and business conditions. It addresses the complex landscape of the levels, typologies, categories, triggers, as well as both internal and external factors impacting self-praise in the context of a digital workplace (with the focus on enterprise social media) and professional networking platforms. 

In order to reflect the complexity of the topic at hand and interconnectivity of the constructs addressed, insights from such fields as socioeconomics, sociology, social psychology (specifically identity studies), software and services (IT sector), business intelligence and business analytics, digital media communication, organisational behaviour or corporate communication are thus combined with a mixed qualitative-quantitative methodological approach utilised to provide an in-depth exploration of the evolving constructs.

From the broader socio-economic perspective of hyper globalisation, the impact of the neoliberalism economy on workplace relations, and ultimately on employee behaviour, are considered first to lay the background and introduce the relevant concepts. 

Self-presentation and in particular self-praise are considered in their multiple forms against the backdrop of precarious work relations dictated by neoliberalism, leading, among other things, to self-exploitation, but also to putting self-interest above anything else.

The focus is placed on the triggers and manifestations of the social self (how a person thinks the others perceive them) and the situational self (a person’s self-image in a specific situation) in the digital workplace, where individual (cultural) values are frequently overridden by those dictated by a given corporate culture, as aligned with the prevailing market conditions. These in turn impact workplace or employee identity. 

This exploratory and explanatory study contributes to a rather limited number of research endeavours on self-praise, conducted within narrow disciplines and specific frameworks, with the particular research gap being a lack of studies on self-presentational and self-praise activities in the corporate environment, which can primarily be observed in the virtual context of enterprise social media (ESM) and such tools of remote communication as conference calls or collaboration software, but also on professional networking platforms. Here situational antecedents (broadly what occurred before) and the audience (with their reactions) to such self-promotional activities serve as main prerequisites, thus completing the frame of analysis.

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

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

Medieval intellectuals were fascinated to compare their culture with others, often, though not always, looking at differences in religion. They did so using a number of different genres, among them dialogues between representatives of different ‘laws’ (i.e., religions), travellers’ stories, geographies, philosophical treatises and ethnographic reports.

The main focus will be on the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and on Western European Christian writers, including Peter Abelard, Ramon Llull, William of Rubruk, John of Piano Carpini, Gerald of Wales, Marco Polo and Roger Bacon. But it will also discuss some Jewish writers, such as Judah Halevi and Maimonides, and some Islamic ones such as Ibn Fadlan and al-Idrisi.

Historians have greatly underestimated the sophistication and variety of this facet of medieval intellectual life, because it does not fall neatly into one of our current subject divisions (such as history of philosophy or history of literature) and because anthropology and comparative religion are usually presumed to be modern disciplines, without medieval precedents. The aim of this book is to show that there existed a medieval ancestor to these disciplines, in which the similar questions to those that interest specialists today were discussed, but within a different context and with different aims. By studying a series of outstanding texts in this field, the study thus aims to establish Cultural Comparisons as an independent branch of medieval studies.

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.

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.

Bringing together the ideas of many philosophers, among others Hegel, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Derrida, the book aims to give a coherent synthesis of ideas about change and aims to see how one can take a process view of various features of humanity, such as knowledge, relations between people, language and morality, and how, vice versa, that might contribute to process philosophy. Beginning with evolution and moving on to consider knowledge in its dynamic aspect of learning, the book takes a process view of the individual and society.

Generalised Darwinism is discussed not only in terms of biology but also in economics, organisation, language and science in terms of interactors and replicators. The key processes of variety generation, selection and transmission are fundamentally different from those in biology. Therefore, a theory of knowledge and its change is presented that in some ways is similar to evolution but also different in important ways. This theory discusses neural Darwinism. It proposes how discovery might work, in a cycle of discovery, in an interchange of stability and change, and how differences in cognition work in the combination of different sources (cognitive distance). This theory is applied to knowledge, organisations and science. The discussion explains and applies the notions of entropy and organisational focus. Recognising that absolute, objective truth is problematic, it discusses the notion of warranted assertion. The notions of sense and reference are discussed in an explanation of meaning, and the notions of order and variety in terms of langue and parole, and the role of parole in poetry. The change of meaning is further developed in terms of the hermeneutic circle to deal with order and change of meaning. It uses the notion of a script and the hypothesis of an object bias.

Ethics and morality are explored by how the individual constructs their identity and develops in their tension between authenticity and conformity in society. Aristotle’s multiple causality of action is employed to discuss power and sources of dependence and ways to deal with them. Networks as a source of identity and the decentralisation of governance to communities are discussed along with the notion of restorative justice. The concluding chapter considers the historical development and the different forms of ethics and morality, in relation to institutions, and how in evolution an instinct for benevolence has developed and is related to the intrinsic next to extrinsic value of relationships.

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

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

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

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

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

It has been suggested that, if CARICOM nations wish to accelerate their development, they should embrace laissez-faire economic policies. However, laissez-faire economic policies have reinforced the very economic and social structures that have contributed to their low level of development; furthermore, laissez-faire economic policies ignore social attitudes that can greatly influence a nation’s development. Moreover, low-skilled labor-intensive production processes, which once propelled growth in CARICOM nations, will no longer perform a similar role because production processes are becoming more and more knowledge-skills intensive, and nations wishing to attract foreign manufacturing investment or high-tech services may not be able to do so without an adequate pool of the necessary knowledge skills. CARICOM nations must therefore try to accumulate a pool of knowledge skills that can help their economies become internationally competitive.

The book presents the first integrated study of the relationship between official Islamic leadership (muftiship), non-official Islamic authorities, grassroots Muslim communities and the state in post-Communist Eurasia, encompassing Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, the Volga-Urals, Crimea, the North Caucasus, Azerbaijan and ex-Soviet Central Asia. Its analysis is positioned within the current secularism/de-secularisation debate. The book is based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including the author’s interviews with Islamic official and popular leaders and authorities, which she conducted over two decades in various parts of Eurasia. The book employs a history-based perspective and compares the nature and role of official Islamic leadership and the state-Muslim relations across Eurasia with those in both the Middle East and Western Europe. It argues that in most of the post-Soviet lands, the official Islamic leadership and its relations with the state have largely retained their particular national and broader Eurasian character, which distinguishes them from what prevails in the Middle East and Western Europe. At the same time, the increasing political ‘Europeanisation’ of Lithuania and Ukraine since 2014 and, to some extent, Belarus, has accounted for their divergence towards the Western model of state-Muslim relations. In conclusion, it analyses the impact of globalisation and the advance of global Salafism, in particular, on Islamic leadership and state-Muslim relations across post-Soviet Eurasia. 

The book has an introduction outlining the conceptual framework that gives meaning to the six collected texts that follow. This framework derives from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. He stated that ‘everything is social,’ which means that all discourses have to be understood in their own terms (as ‘structured structures’) and in relation to the social conditions in which they developed (‘structuring structures’). As social individuals we are constrained by the structures defining our situation but we also have the capacity to alter those structures. With particular reference to the ‘field’ of politics, the Introduction considers theoretically the nature of the ‘presentation of self’ (Goffman) of citizens and the nature of parliamentary democracy as ‘presentation’ or ‘representation’ (as discussed in Habermas: The structural transformation of the public sphere).

The six main chapters reproduce texts written or spoken about politics at intervals in the period from 1960 until 2020. Brief introductions to each chapter will contextualise these texts both in terms of their significance in my developing awareness of political discourse and also in terms of the historically changing nature of the field of politics itself in the United Kingdom. Having an a-political upbringing, the author suggests that he gradually acquired a political competence but, equally, developed the view that the domination of political discourse has become exclusive and that there is now a need to reassert social relations in society and to recognize the extent to which political activity sustains the social control of a privileged minority.

The book has an Epilogue which considers some recent arguments about ‘populism’ and also reflects on the extent to which the ‘new normal’ heralded by some for a post-Covid future has the capacity to circumscribe the influence of politics. The author reflects on whether deployment of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’ - the process by which the attitudes of the few are imposed on the many – might lead to the possible resurgence of social movements which are sceptical about political power. The author suggests that there may be a need for a new ‘quietism’ as advanced by Fénelon in the court of Louis XIV at the end of the 17th century and as considered by Richard Rorty in “Naturalism and quietism” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 2007. 

The essays in Logos and Life, the earliest written in 2001 but mainly dating from 2014 and later, cover topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, ethics and philosophy of language. There are discussions of the voluntary and the involuntary; reasons for action; the idea of an ‘inner state’; pleasure; the nature of ethics; justice; necessity and possibility; and a number of other topics. Numerous strands connect these four areas, which Roger Teichmann highlights: in this sense the collection exhibits thematic unity as well as diversity.

Several of the essays take as their starting points the ideas and philosophical methods of Wittgenstein and of Elizabeth Anscombe, and so will be of interest to anyone studying those philosophers. Anscombe was a friend and pupil of Wittgenstein, and Teichmann was fortunate enough to be a friend and pupil of Anscombe. He is now a leading authority on her philosophy.

A newly written Introduction serves to indicate the main themes and arguments of the book, and provide an overall statement of Teichmann’s philosophy. 

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a technological breakthrough that will revolutionize human life. Advancements in the area of AI are happening all across the globe and this technology is not only reshaping business and government and also being applied in the daily lives of individuals. 

AI has been integrated in many industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, retail and consumer, technology, communication and entertainment, energy, transportation and logistics. The application of AI in these industries has helped in not only making processes more efficient but also reducing cost. There are many applications of Ai which are yet to be researched and put into practice. A lot needs to be done to capitalize the full potential of this technology. Companies are, therefore, investing a plenty of funds in R&D activities to harness its maximum benefit.

International Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence is an effort to engage the practitioners, researchers and users in a discussion on AI and also to provide snapshots of the status of AI in different parts of the world. 

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

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

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

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

Explores play as a transgressive expression that disrupts the modern city

Insurgent Play: Social worlds of urban disruption explores play as a transgressive expression that counters the existing urban order (neoliberal, authoritarian, militarised). Insurgent play is disruptive, yet through disruption it brings social worlds into being, undergirds global subcultures and overcomes hostile urban environments characterised by ever-diminishing spaces for free expression. Acts of insurgent play are claims on space lasting from brief moments to years, animating patches of the city designed for commercial, industrial and logistical imperatives. Even in public spaces designed for leisure and play, insurgent play brings different expressions at different speeds, transgressing designated uses and bodily expectations. Through insurgent play people find belonging in the city, especially for those excluded from other spaces based on race, class, sexuality and citizenship. As such, stories of insurgent play are stories of alternative ways of inhabiting cities stemming from the widespread human desire and need for play, for joy and for sociality.
Insurgent Play draws upon examples from street skateboarding. Street skateboarding disrupts the city in the pursuit of play, enlivens patches of space through temporary claims, and initiates encounters with authorisers, property owners and citizens gravid with hostility with instants of wonder. Insurgence is a way of being, and the desire for insurgent play cannot be placated by better urban planning or formal expertise. Nor will multiplying designated play spaces, creative precincts and ‘flexible’ public spaces stop people seeking out space to create their own worlds of disruption.
The book makes four arguments. First, insurgent play is bodily expression that can challenge, disrupt and transgresses dominant ways of city-making. Second, insurgent play takes us to parts of the urban landscape that we might not otherwise go, politics we might not otherwise recognise and encounters we might otherwise overlook. Third, claims on the city made through insurgent play enliven urban space through transformative power. In this way, these claims territorialise patches of the built environment intended for other uses. Last, insurgent play space is generated from below, never above. Insurgent play shapes, and is shaped by, identities that position adherents in opposition to prevailing urban orders.

A collection of essays rather than a single, continuously argued monograph, Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World collects together the essays Professor Colacurcio has written on Hawthorne since the publication of his ground-breaking Province of Piety, elaborating and refining his analyses of how Hawthorne’s most memorable early tales “do history,” but proceeding then to explore the later productions of that author’s distinguished career. The result, in Colacurcio’s patient analysis, is something like Hawthorne’s history of his own times. To be sure, The Scarlet Letter returns to the rich theme we know as “the matter of the Puritans,” but rides up from a moment, and clearly implies, the vibrant but troubled women’s movement; and, imagining the world Hester Prynne as good as predicted, The Blithedale Romance deepens the sensitive but cautious inquiry. Contemporaneous too is the subject of The House of the Seven Gables which, stopping just short of discovering that property is theft, dares to inquire into the murky sources of aristocratic wealth and privilege in his present New England. From the moment between the early tales and the three American romances, the tales and sketches written at the Old Manse in Concord reveal Hawthorne’s fascinated and troubled response to that swirl of contemporary reform movements which historians know as “Freedom’s Ferment”; several encounter Emerson explicitly, and even more question the life-implications of “idealism as it appears in 1842,” as Emerson had defined his Transcendentalism.  From the so-called “Last Phase” of Hawthorne’s career, Colacurcio presents, along with some remarks “Chiefly About War Matters” (1862) and, more briefly still, the unfinished romances, a major reading of the work Hawthorne called Our Old Home (1863); growing out of the Notebooks the author kept while serving as American Consul to Liverpool in the mid-1850s, this now nostalgic, now fierce mix of excursion and critique reveals a great deal about Hawthorne’s social intelligence, and about his biases. Finally, Colacurcio offers a patient but somewhat resistant reading of The Marble Faun, a major effort to identify the “puritanic” element in the developing American identity but revealing, at the same time, an unsteady Narrator’s increasing hesitance about the epistemology of the “Romance.”  Literary genius beginning to doubt its gift.

This book contains fifteen chapters organized thematically around key themes but in a non-cumulative way. This means readers can randomly sample topics and sections of the book or dive into a single essay covering one specific issue in more detail (such as biases, mistakes, strategy, foresight, talent or teams). Either way, readers can assess if they agree with the approaches offered or perhaps favor different perspectives. If the latter, they may wish to discuss the issues with some colleagues informally during a break or examine the case more formally  in team building exercises to raise the organization’s strategic IQ.

Sampling the collected sub-sections and chapters (whether in small bites or as one read-through) will help managers refine their own approaches to strategic thinking and leadership. Also, it will help align them better with colleagues or partners who come from different backgrounds, functional responsibilities or cultural orientations. It will soon become apparent to readers that the overall approach to business problems presented is very much behavioral. This means that each essay or case starts by identifying important management problems in some realistic business settings. Before offering any conceptual perspectives or prescriptive advice, each essay seeks to better understand the behavioral context of the problems addressed.

This varied case approach seeks to provide practical insights, tips or even full solutions, but not until the essence of the problem and its broader organizational and cultural settings are sufficiently understood. Offering prescriptions without first getting well-grounded behavioual descriptions tend to result in failed interventions. Normative advice that is drawn from text books rather than real slices of life often amount to  boxing with shadows on the wall rather than solving the real issues. As such, this book aims to illustrate for managers and leaders how to frame thorny management issues by (i) clearly defining a distinct business problem, (ii) viewing it through multiple lenses and (iii) creatively exploring pragmatic solutions for the short and long runs.

First published in 1851, Henry Murger’sScènes de la vie de bohèmebrought together the stories he had written for a small arts newspaper in Paris. These semi-fictionalized tales, drawn from the daily lives of Murger and his friends, portray the struggles and celebrations, the loves and losses, of young writers and artists as they eked out an existence on the impoverished margins of society. While the nineteenth-century Parisian setting is fascinating in itself, the stories have retained their contemporary relevance as the continuing popularity of Puccini’s opera adaptation (La Bohème) and the Broadway success of Jonathan Larson’s Rent—both based on Murger’s stories—have demonstrated. 

Life in bohemia continues to attract young people in great numbers, just as it has done for almost two centuries, and it is Murger’s bohemia, with all its energy and eccentricities, that underlies that appeal. Balancing humor and despair, and optimism and desperation, Murger’s characters, much like today’s bohemians, manage to confound landlords and bill collectors, endure cold and hunger, find love and lose it, party without restraint and confront the devastating deaths of friends and lovers. 

With this new translation, readers can once again encounter the point of origin for the bohemian cultures that have flourished ever since, not only the source for Puccini’s and Larson’s phenomenally popular musical works as well as for numerous films and songs over many decades but also a classic work of literature that will re-introduce English readers to Rodolphe and Mimi, Marcel and Musette, Schaunard and Colline, after too long an absence.

This book is divided into three sections.
The first section examines the political relationships/structures of Somalia’s clans with focus on the pre–Siad Barre era. Somalis are largely one people further linked by one religion (Sunni Islam). Establishing their connectivity is crucial in view of this project’s contention that Indigenous methods of conflict resolution that have so far worked in the north (Somaliland and Puntland) can work in the south-central regions where conflict still pervades.
The next section examines the conflict in Somalia from events leading to the exit of Siad Barre (the point where the conflict really begins) and the growth of the Aristocratic/Gerontocratic system of government in the north to address the situation. It will capture the rise of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in the south-central areas whose aim was the stability of the regions under their control. The gains, gaps and setbacks of these Indigenous systems will also be discussed in this section.
The third section captures the intervention of Ethiopia and the United States in Somalia’s conflict and how the African Union (AU) was drawn into the fray to legitimize this intervention. Here the book deals with the following (research) question: Should the AU have gone ahead with the intervention plans of the US/Ethiopia that were directed at debilitating the ICU, or, should focus have been directed at supporting local structures put in place by the ICU to foster stability as had been done in the north by the clan elders? This section discusses the current state of affairs in view of what was forfeited.

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

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

For more than four centuries, Britons have been dominating and colonising other peoples and territories. Britain’s Empires tells that story without flinching from the oppressive and exploitative side of the imperial mission that shaped world history. It also aims to tell the story of the colonial past as one marked by change and reinvention, where each new era was embarked upon as a break with the past.

This is history of the many different British Empires – the Old Colonial System (1600-1776), the Empire of Free Trade (1776-1870), the New Imperialism (1870-1945), Decolonisation (1945-1990) and the era of humanitarian intervention (1990-2020).

As well as explaining the importance of ‘primitive accumulation’ to kickstarting British capitalism in the Old Colonial Era, Heartfield shows that the New Imperialism of the 1880s was in large part a response to economic exhaustion in the mother country, and an attempt to find a new purpose in the colonies. Britain’s Empires also explains the dynamics of decolonisation in the post-war era, the rebalancing of Britain’s relation to the world that allowed it to create an arm’s length relation to newly independent ex-colonies, while carrying on extensive military interventions overseas. The book concludes with an assessment of the post-Cold War resurgence of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the less developed world, in an important retrospective account.

Britain’s Empires explains how imperial policy dominated andskewed the history of societies across the world, from Canada and the West Indies to Ireland, from Africa to the Middle East, from India to China and into Australasia; but also how the peoples of those territories imposed themselves on Britain, challenging slavery, standing up to colonial overlords and eventually overthrowing them.The book explains how the reinvention of Britain’s Empire reworked its critics protest to reinvent colonisation as a struggle against slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, and a civilising mission at that century’s end. The capacity of Empire to foster local native allies helped stabilise a polity of extraordinary reach. But as Heartfield explains, the subordination of a quarter of the world’s landmass was often a defensive reaction to internal limitations and other imperial challenges. The history of Britain’s Empires, explains Heartfield, is one of constant challenge and change, where vanquished become victors, and heroes often turn out to be villains.

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

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

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

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

To date, masculinity has tended to be presented in cinema studies as a monolithic category that serves the interests of a hegemonic, normative patriarchy. This book demonstrates how the art-house film, in the form of personal cinema and its exploitation of the melodramatic mode, tells a different story, presenting a vision of masculinity that is sexually fluid, fragmented, unstable, and often incapacitated to the point of paralysis, being undermined not only from within, but also by external circumstance. Hollywood, in the form of “male weepies,” offered preliminary insights into this failing masculinity, but it is with the flowering of Post-World War II art film and its subsequent movement into the “indie” waves of the late 20th century and the early 21st century that cinema more profoundly realizes its potential to serve as a vehicle for the exploration of men’s interior lives, developing what might be termed the “male melodrama,” the correlative of the woman’s film. 

The present volume offers a series of essays that reassess the role of melodrama in a number of touchstone films in the art-cinema tradition that explore the subjective experience of a male protagonist, announcing the emergence of a genre that has progressively proliferated in contemporary cinema. While these films, made by such notable auteurs as Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luca Guadagnino have been frequently discussed as outstanding examples of art films, to date, with a few exceptions, they have not been examined in terms of their representation of gender and subjectivity, which has left a lacuna in accounts of screened masculinities.

This is a book about dying, or, more accurately, about the representation of dying in the theatre. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. It deals with the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes towards death in their cultures. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the practice of acting.

Before the nineteenth century, when death began to be confined behind closed doors, it was widely available as a spectacle. Death and the suffering that preceded it were in plain sight; no effort was made to hide the diseased and moribund. The absence of medical means of alleviating pain or of hygienic measures meant that the most distressing and abhorrent aspects of dying were out in the open. The contempt for human life shown by the law-courts and the death penalty for the slightest offence occasioned frequent and enthusiastically attended public executions. In addition, the Church and religion generally hoped, through elaborate rites and ceremonies, both before and after death, to invest it with an edifying value that could be extended for the greater good. The sacred and social ceremony makes a transition into an aesthetic and political performance, marking a more modern frame of mind.

Neoclassic decorum eschewed such displays; and, after a heyday of spectacular dying on the nineteenth-century stage, critics again began to insist on more moderate displays. This conformed to the growing emphasis on mental processes and psychological complexity. However, it runs counter to the theatre’s need for high color, extreme situations and fanciful invention. Denied house-room in literary drama, these desiderata found a welcome haven in the various manifestations of performance art.

Palaces, villas and churches. These were the highlights of my first visit to Italy. I took a lot of photos and looked forward to sharing them with friends and family. Back home, though, I found that I didn’t recall much about the places that impressed me. Although I had the benefit of a half-day guide in Rome, Florence and Venice, I sometimes had difficulty hearing what was said on crowded streets and busy interiors. The guides were capable but had only enough time to mention a few major features. As a rule, they skimped on actually describing buildings that intrigued me. And so they were not especially helpful in providing the insights I wanted. Upon my return, I found myself wondering: Where did the architects actually find their ideas? What did they want to accomplish? And what do their choices tell us about their time? My sojourn in Italy would have been more satisfying if I had come away with a fuller account of what I had seen. What I most needed was context. This book supplies that context.
Contemplation of antiquity and the exchange of views among architects released a surge of intellectual energy not seen for a millennium, a development that would never have happened so quickly were it not for Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type. This development, in turn, led to architects’ heightened self-awareness of their collective enterprise. They read what their fellow architects wrote and thereby gained in sophistication. They were no longer merely masons. They became architects in the modern sense. They took pride in their achievements and shared a conviction that the visual culture they created was far superior to that of the previous thousand years.
Their embrace of classical civilisation had a visceral urgency. Rome, after all, was a culture with a storied past, peopled by larger-than-life figures. To learn what the ancients had created in word or stone could supply a shortcut to wisdom. And emulating the Romans would provide new models of aesthetic excellence. This endeavour became known as the Renaissance, or rebirth. The Reformation, however, changed everything. Martin Luther brought to issue a quandary: How exactly was Christianity to be reconciled with the pagan past, if at all? Could one source of inspiration be sustained without compromising the other? Religious reform questioned the aesthetic achievements of the previous hundred years. The story of Renaissance architecture represents the effort to find an accommodation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining Hybrid Heroes: The Leadership Spectrum from Scoundrel to Saint defines the hero (and his or her journey) from a hybrid perspective, exploring the spectrum from scoundrel to saint. It utilizes a more dynamic and situational outlook, regarding heroism not only as a personal characteristic, but also as a series of heroic acts within a given situation.

The book examines the hybrid hero from several distinctive points of view, e.g. through lenses dominated by fiction, business, politics and psychology, and paints a new, more complex portrait that takes full advantage of the authors’ varied backgrounds. Inge Brokerhof has an academic background in psychology and has studied the impact of narrative fiction on workplace variables, such as career identity, employability and moral leadership. Stephan Sonnenburg has studied Joseph Campbell and the impact of the hero’s journey on creativity and innovation management. Greg Stone is a communications consultant who teaches executives and professors how to explain their work in clear and compelling language..

This book will be at once theoretical and practical, with a combination of substantial intellectual content to satisfy an academic audience and a series of specific recommendations to meet the needs of thinking managers seeking to improve their leadership skills. In the “real world” of business, leaders are often both scoundrel and saint. They are role models and anti-models at the same time. The authors show how they can make these warring traits work for them and how academics can gain a new perspective on approaching leadership and management.

Embark on a new exploration of power dynamics through the book. The book challenges traditional notions of power, introducing a contemporary model that empowers ordinary individuals to wield power. Delving into the intricacies of human behavior, it presents a compelling contrast to the Machiavellian approach, providing readers with actionable insights and strategic principles to navigate and thrive in complex social landscapes.
As the narrative unfolds, engaging stories illustrate the transformative potential of the new power model. Ordinary individuals become protagonists in their journey to gain power, showcasing the applicability of these principles in real-life scenarios. The book skillfully weaves together theory and practicality, offering a roadmap for readers to enhance their personal and professional lives by embracing a more authentic and impactful approach to power.
The book is a refreshing perspective that challenges traditional norms, providing a compass to navigate the evolving terrain of power. Whether in business, relationships, or personal growth, this paradigm shift promises to empower individuals, fostering a new era where ideology and principles take center stage.

This book draws together an oral and visual art history of a country that is extremely rich in culture and history but that is often overlooked or underestimated. By observing the country’s history and visual culture and the artistic practices of select artists from the UAE, it considers the development of contemporary art from the UAE. This will increase accessibility to art by Emiratis and underline its wider relevance.
There is a dearth of literature on contemporary art by Emiratis, and this may be one of the reasons contemporary art from the UAE is under-represented globally. In order to help the reader better understand art from the UAE, this book traces the country’s historical make-up, its culture and contemporary art tradition through oral histories based on interviews with a wide variety of artists and people working in the art industries. It also explores this development using global art discourses that are relevant to art produced in the UAE today.
This book also considers how cultural and artistic identities are formed and explores the political and socio-economic interests in the country that have stimulated art practices and appreciation. For so long, an exclusively Western narrative has dominated Art, and popular media portrays the Gulf’s accomplishments in development and modernity with suspicion. Thanks to the UAE’s espousal of the Internet and online communities over the last decade, this book is particularly timely. Following the pandemic, a wider understanding of global art discourses, values and perceptions are increasingly welcomed. Art from the UAE bridges the local and the global, giving a voice and a visual presence to a country’s contemporary art tradition that has been widely overlooked.
The UAE has a distinct visual arts tradition that relates to a broader and inclusive understanding of art centered on development and change.

Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in the site of Aztec Mexico? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Was Baja California really an island or a peninsula—and did romances of chivalry contain the answer? Were Amazon women hiding in Guiana and where was the location of the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of so-called books of the brave conquistadors, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature. 

The chapters in this book represent separate case studies regarding the use of romance strategies and tales of love and arms more generally in the imperialist myth-making of early modern England against the threat of imperial Spain, particularly those which were first used by Spanish authors to justify Spain’s own imperialist designs. With interwoven readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the English colonial mindset developed through a concerted conversation with the reality of Spain’s presence in the colonial world, particularly in the historically contentious sites of Mexico, Peru, Guiana, California and Australia, producing emergent discourses of English nationalism and proto-imperialism as contextually contingent responses to the Spanish problem. By uncovering long-neglected Spanish romantic influences on canonical English works, this book also tracks for the first time the unique social, political and cultural circumstances of English hysteria with Spanish romance that primed the success of Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.

This book is unique in its dedicated tackling of the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard. Through new readings of his work, juxtaposed with philosophical (Schopenhauer, Kant) and artistic (Jeremy Millar, Ron Mueck) examples along with films (Norte, the End of History; Ida), the book makes so patently clear the importance of Baudrillard’s tendency to poeticize, his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry, and others, and his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Stratagem of the Corpse is less a making sense of death and more a transcript of what occurred when death made sense of us, a reverse thanatology in which death delineates the variant forms of our encroachment, not so much death as seen by Baudrillard but Baudrillard as seen by death.

Examples of Baudrillardian simulacra, depersonalization, detachment, violence, obscenity, Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘perfect crime’, and nihilism are incisively discussed. The book makes a compelling case for why Baudrillard is relevant and necessary.

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

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

 “Media Sociology and Journalism: Studies in Truth and Democracy proposes an accurate reading on ‘fake populism’ regimes. Greg Nielson navigates on the fruitful and relevant tradition on media and power relationships to highlight the contributions of professional journalism to the fragility of democracy” — Fábio Pereira, Chair of Scientific Journalism, Université Laval.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern Persian, Elementary Level is a textbook of the Persian language spoken in Iran. It is intended for university-level learners and features material for two consecutive semesters of elementary Persian. The textbook aims to facilitate the implementation of the most recent trends in language instruction by emphasizing the basic tenets of flipped learning and practicing the communicative language teaching methodology with the student-centric approach to language instruction. With its real-world topics; high-frequency structures and vocabulary; thematic presentation of material; a plethora of engaging speaking activities in each chapter; dedicated listening, reading and writing sections; and integration of cultural material, this textbook is an integrated, straightforward and culture-conscious way to acquiring functional proficiency in spoken and written Persian. Complete with a companion website, over 300 audio and video presentations, answer key, a searchable audio dictionary and a special appendix for instructors that features classroom activity materials for the entire year, this textbook makes for an innovative and modern language-learning resource that is available in print and in an E-book format. Extra features and accompanying online resources make this textbook an effective option for those who wish to learn the language on their own.
The theoretical framework and underlying linguistic philosophy of the book, its methodology and practical approach to language instruction, format, and learning objectives are based on the latest trends in foreign language instruction defined by the Modern Language Association and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The material of the textbook also reflects the 5 Cs of National Standards in Foreign Language Education.

Modern Persian, Elementary Level features all the attributes necessary for the implementation of modern practices in foreign language instruction such as context-based teaching for real-world objectives, integrated approach toward all language skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), thematic presentation of material, differentiation between proficiency and competence, and student-centred classrooms. The curriculum, lessons plans, exercises and activities that inspired the material of the chapters have been tested at Cornell University for several years with groups of students from beginners with no background in Persian to Persian-heritage students, undergraduate and graduate students, and even faculty members from other fields. Feedback from students has been considered and incorporated in the development of the textbook. Modern Persian, Elementary Level is inspired by the author’s extensive years of experience in designing and teaching less-commonly-taught language programs and is informed by the experiences, research, and data across various modern languages. The textbook is intended to train literate Persian speakers and teaches familiarity with both colloquial pronunciation and written spelling as practised naturally by Persian native speakers.

Do translation theorists observe what translators do and develop theories based on that? Do translators gain ideas and tools from studying theories? Or does it go both ways? Or is it neither, and translation scholars are completely separated from practising translators?

In my own translation practice, academic work, and teaching, I find that translation theories, far from being scary and distant from what I do as a translator on a day-to-day basis, actually provide beneficial concepts and strategies that can help me make translatorial decisions. The work of translators like me, in turn, comes to influence the way academics understand and write about what translators do.

I summarise a wide range of translation theories, from across different time periods and parts of the world, and I then follow this by suggesting ideas that stem from these theoretical concepts and that can be of practical use to translators.

Eight American military veterans of the Vietnam/Cold War era describe their service and its influence on their lives since leaving active service in this book. Their stories are preceded by a concise history of America's methods of raising its military forces from colonial days to today. Particular focus is given to the 34 years in which the nation relied on the possibility of mandatory service (the draft, Selective Service) from young men. Drafted service was essential to America's role in World War I, World War II, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Special emphasis is given to Congressional acceptance of drafted service in World War I which shaped the remaining uses of the draft until 1973.

The largest part of the book provides the author's recollections of their service in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard in the United States and overseas. Their service was compelled or stimulated by the presence of the draft. Their military service then shaped the next half-century of their working lives.

The final section of the book provides the author’s collective recollections of their military service as seen from the third decade of the 21st century and half a century after the end of the military draft. They reflect on the challenges faced by the current American military and the possibilities of a return to some form of drafted military service.

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

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

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

The early modern period witnessed the rise of impressive empires in the Eurasian context, in Europe and not less so in the east – The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires. The construction of large and stable empires necessitated the constructions of unprecedented power mechanisms. History of law and legality in the early modern period was playing a crucial role in these changes.

Born in Spain and joining his family as refugees from the great expulsion from the Iberian peninsula, heading east to the Ottoman Empire, Karo, as the rest of Sephardi intellectuals, was deeply acquainted with both European [Canon law, ius comune] and Ottoman [Shari'a, Kanuname] legal traditions, and their transformative processes during the early modern period.

The codes of law, in the short and long version, composed by R. Karo mark a watershed turn, and they were never superseded until the present. In composing them, Karo intended to respond to the global changes in law, and to update Jewish Halakhah to current political and cultural circumstances. The books suggest both a global reading of Jewish law, and a sociological perspective of Halakhah. It adds a further dimension on modernization of Jewish culture. 

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.

A short, but highly relevant, history of the Cold War, 1919–1994, and its significance today. The 75-year Cold War pitted the Anglo-American world against the Soviet Bloc, with China, the ultimate prize. Chapter A will examine the creation of the Anglo-American Special Relationship, the end of World War I, 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty, and the lead-in to World War II. Chapter B will examine the Bolshevik revolution, 1919 Comintern creation, 1924 Soviet Bloc creation, the tumultuous 1930s, World War II, plus Soviet competition with America and England through 1949. Chapter C will discuss a China torn between West and East, finally joining the Soviet bloc in 1949 but by 1979 rejoining the West, and cooperating to destroy the USSR from 1979 to 1994, when the final Russian troops left Germany. In the Conclusion, the Cold War’s impact and strategic significance today will be discussed.
From 1979 to 1994, the U.S. government attempted to use its relations with China to exert diplomatic, economic, and military pressure on the USSR. Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, China began to import high-technology equipment from the United States to fill key sensor and weapon roles. With the end of the Cold War, in particular, the Soviet navy was eliminated almost overnight as the world’s second most powerful naval force; Russia’s Pacific fleet is now so poorly supplied and equipped that it rarely leaves port.
This unprecedented reversal of fortunes has created a maritime vacuum throughout East Asia that China hopes to fill. In recent years, however, the former Sino-U.S. cooperation has changed as rising Chinese-sponsored tensions in the South China Sea have led to many possible points of alliance between Beijing and Moscow. Joint Sino-Russian Naval Exercises are just one example. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping appear to once again be combining against the Anglo-American-led West. Will history “rhyme” as Mark Twain says, allowing the Anglo-American West to win Cold War II, or will events turn out differently this time.

In sixteen chapters devoted to avant-garde contemporary American poets, including Kenneth Goldsmith, Adeena Karasick, Tyrone Williams, Hannah Weiner, and Barrett Watten, prolific scholar and Purdue University professor Daniel Morris engages in a form of cultural repurposing by “learning twice” about how to attend to writers whose aesthetic contributions were not part of his education as a student in Boston and Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s when new formalism and post-confessional modes reigned supreme.
Morris’s study demonstrates his interest in moving beyond formalism to offer what Stephen Fredman calls “a wider cultural interpretation of literature that emphasizes the ‘new historicist’ concerns with hybridity, ethnicity, power relations, material culture, politics, and religion.” Essays address from multiple perspectives—prophetic, diasporic, ethical—the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics—the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the singular, private human voice across time and space—to an individual reader, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as both opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.

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

Hinge epistemology is a rising trend in epistemology. Drawing on some of Wittgenstein’s ideas in On Certainty, it claims that knowledge always takes place within a system of assumptions, or “hinges”, that are taken for granted and are not subject to verification and control.

This volume brings together thirteen papers on hinge epistemology written by Annalisa Coliva, the coiner of the term and one of the leading figures in this trend, and published after her influential monographs Moore and Wittgenstein. Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense (2010), Extended Rationality. A Hinge Epistemology (2015). By mixing together Wittgenstein scholarship and systematic philosophy, they illuminate the significance of hinge epistemology for current debates on scepticism, relativism, realism and anti-realism, as well as alethic pluralism, and envision its possible extension to the epistemology of logic. 

Along the way, other varieties of hinge epistemology, such as Moyal-Sharrock’s, Pritchard’s, Williams’ and Wright’s are considered, both with respect to Wittgenstein scholarship and in their own right.

Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory is a contemporary evaluation primarily of Ali in African-American and African diasporic memory, based on the field of Africana studies’ updated critical tools for considering inheritance, mythological structure, memorialization, epic intuitive conduct, hero dynamics, immortalization philosophy, and resistance-based cognitive survival. In terms of how Muhammad Ali, as an historical actor, has left an heroic legacy that bequeaths to us a sort of inheritance, the critical task at hand is to systematically explore this historical actor’s life, feats, philosophy, grit, worldview, and even his folkloric antiheroic, to decipher his Africana cultural memory value. At the core of this edited collection is a commitment to enhance the cultural storytelling about Muhammad Ali and to critically itemize the lessons we garner from his life as allegory. The ancestral life is one that is remembered and recalled. The contributors’ research uncovers Ali’s local, national, and global encounters that are legacy worldviews. These perspectives give us direction for mining the critical depth of Ali’s encounters which map his memory in terms of culturally sustaining confidence, self-esteem, reinvention, immortalization, and empathy. These are the fertile seeds of Africana cultural memory which bloom into powerful markers and monuments of an epic life of hyperheroic activity relevant to cultural memory, sports, history, politics, health, and aesthetics.

This book is the product of an endless individual and collective process of mourning. It departs from the author’s mourning for her parents, their histories and struggles in Germany as Gastarbeiter, while it also engages with the political mourning of intersectional feminist movements against feminicide in Central and South America; the struggles against state and police misogynoir violence of #SayHerName in the United States; the resistance of refugees and migrantized people against the coloniality of migration in Germany; and the intense political grief work of families, relatives, and friends who lost their loved ones in racist attacks from the 1980s until today in Germany. Bearing witness to their stories and accounts, this book explores how mourning is shaped both by its historical context and the political labor of caring commons, while it also follows the building of a conviviality infrastructrueof support against migration-coloniality necropolitics, dwelling toward transformative and reparative practices of common justice.

Trailblazing women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945-1975 offers a compelling new perspective of Australian radio and television history. It chronicles how a group of female producers defied the odds and forged remarkable careers in the traditionally male domain of public-affairs production at the ABC in the post-war decades. Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage were ambitious and resourceful producers, part of the vanguard of Australian broadcasters who used mass media as a vehicle for their social and political activism. Fiercely dedicated to their audiences, they wrote, directed and produced ground-breaking documentaries and current affairs programs that celebrated Australian life, while also challenging its cultural complacency, its racism and sexism. They immersed themselves in the ABC’s many networks of collaboration and initiated a range of strategies to expand their agency and authority. With vivid descriptions of life at the ABC, it traces their careers as they crossed borders and crossed mediums, following them as they worked on location shoots and in production offices, in television studios, control rooms and radio booths. In doing so it highlights the barriers, both official and unofficial, that confronted so many women working in broadcasting after World War II.

Former candidate in the race for his Party’s designation, Ron DeSantis is a rising star of the GOP. Despite his withdrawal from the tense campaign trail against Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, he is one of America’s best-known governors with a promising future.

The governor of Florida showcases an outstanding academic career, Yale then Harvard, and an exemplary military record. His consistency reassures both middle-class voters and big donors. Spokesman for the anti-woke culture war in the United States, he benefits from a strong republican and far-right electoral basis. A serious man with a clear vision on what he wants to do, he advocates deregulation, and the reduction of federal taxes and public debt.

Florida is the American dream, the blueprint for America in the next century, and DeSantis believes it is replicable across the country. Among his other assets are his youth, his image of a model family father, and his secret weapon—his wife Casey DeSantis. She allows him to soften his image of a calculating politician.

Aged 45, DeSantis therefore brings a breath of fresh air to the Republicans. He is a character to follow in Washington and in Florida in the next decade. We are witnessing the emergence of a new strongman in America.

Accomplished public speakers know that just a few enduring principles govern the key to success. James O’Rourke, a distinguished professor of management, has gathered 52 basic truths about confident presenting, organized into ten easily mastered categories.
Each of these principles is based on scientific evidence and years of careful observation of highly successful public speakers. Current relevant examples and specific instructions of how to apply these truths form the centerpiece of each brief chapter. Everything you need is right here from audience research to topic selection, organization patterns, forms of evidence, principles of persuasion, delivery techniques, nonverbal mannerisms, anxiety, and event management.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The book fills a gap since there is no quick reference in comparative law and economics at the moment. The book can be seen as a short introduction to comparative law and economics, a helpful guide to additional reading and a textbook for a short course or seminar. Comparative law and economics is a growing field in the interaction between law, economics and comparative political science. It includes both strands of the traditional literature, namely the role of legal families and microeconomic analysis of legal rules in a comparative perspective.

The book opens with a short introduction about the method and the standard discussion between common law and civil law. It brings in the debate over the legal origins’ theory and its consequences in terms of economic growth. It presents the study of courts at the global level and the importance of comparative judicial politics to stimulate a better understanding of comparative law and economics. The book also covers microeconomic analysis of legal rules with a few applications (titling of property, cost-shifting rules, plea-bargaining) and additional reading recommendations to the reader (for additional examples). The book then focuses on lawyering, with an emphasis on varying regulation of the legal profession around the world. The book concludes with a short summary of possible research developments in the next few years, namely behavioral and empirical advancements.

Previously unexploited postal data provides a good proxy for economic activity in the nineteenth-century United States, disaggregated down the area served by each post office for each two-year period. Compensation paid to every employee of the United States Government, including postmasters, was published for each two-year period from 1816 in the Official Register, of which only a few complete sets survive. Postmasters were compensated according to the volume of business at their post office, in an era where mail was the principal means of communication and postal money orders played a crucial role in the payments systems. Because the formula according to which postmasters were compensated changed repeatedly, earlier historians were unable to go from the compensation of postmasters to the revenues of their post offices. We have been able to determine what the compensation formula at each time and so can back out the volume of business in each post office in each period from the compensation paid to the postmaster. This provides us with a proxy for economic activity that is much more disaggregated in space and time than previously available estimates.
We use this measure of economic activity to study economic fluctuations by region and to investigate how regions differed in their sensitivity to national business cycles in the nineteenth-century United States. The data also make it possible to follow, at a finer level of disaggregation than was previously attainable, the effect of the expanding railway network on economic activity. We use data on postal money orders to explore the flow of funds between states as well as between states and foreign countries.
We use data on postmasters and their compensation to illuminate issues of social mobility and status, with particular attention to female and African American postmasters and to the transmission of postmaster positions within families. This book draws the attention of historians to a previously neglected treasure trove of quantitative information on the economy and society of the nineteenth-century United States.

The book begins with rich descriptions of the experience of despair, drawn from real life case studies from the author’s clinical practice, and a review of current evidence of suicide prevalence, risk and protective factors. A review of theories about suicide highlights two contemporary explanatory models: Integrated Motivational-Volitional (IMV) model, with focus on perceptions of defeat and entrapment; and Interpersonal Theory (IPT), with focus on thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness. The book provides an overview of recent analyses of how literary and poetic texts confront the dilemma of existence in the face of grief and loss, and how literary readings can act as points of transformation.

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

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

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

Climate change and the intertwined extinction crisis lend themselves to political economy. Joseph Henry Vogel has constructed an argument for bringing the carbon-rich but economically poor countries through the bottleneck of a cowboy economy and into the 'cap and trade' Annex I countries of the Kyoto Protocol. Ecuador serves as the example. ‘The Economics of the Yasuní Initiative’ is a counterpoint to ‘The Economics of Climate Change’ by Sir Nicholas Stern on many levels. At the most basic level, Vogel argues that Stern is wrong for his failure to recognize the nature of climate change as thermodynamic, thereby missing the point of Northern appropriation of the atmospheric sink. The switch to thermodynamics brings into focus the legitimacy of a 'carbon debt’ that starts to tick with the first report of the IPCC in 1990. Through the lens of economic theory, the understandable intransigence of poor countries to assume the 'cap' in 'cap and trade' is a distortion to the economic system. But by that same economics, one distortion can justify another. That other distortion is the payment Ecuador seeks for not drilling in the Yasuní Biosphere. Heeding the call of Deirdre (formerly Donald) McCloskey that economics needs more humor, Vogel has written a scathing critique of economics-as-usual which also entertains.

Local communities are now, more than ever before, experiencing environmental change. These changes draw attention to the discrepancy and conflict between their own views and the views of the initiators of development, such as governments and multilateral organizations. The main thesis of the book unfolds around the idea that under changing environmental conditions, sustainable development can only be achieved when communities can overcome the view conflict and are free to set their own goals.

Using a case study of the Trio indigenous peoples in Suriname, the book presents an “inside” view of a community on the path towards sustainable development when facing climate change. It introduces a new framework, called VIEW, to comprehensively analyze the views of the Trio community when progressing through the different stages of development. The community apparently goes through a process of judging climate change against their own values, followed by creating a meaning about it and ultimately making a decision on how to act.

This book will take the reader beyond examining a few examples from the field. It discusses the position of a researcher in community development and presents several tools and indicators to effectively work with communities. The book lays out a set of principles for researchers to engage in ethical, effective and valid research. Only with the right mindset, a researcher can look through the eyes of the community in a respectable manner and implement a truly bottom-up approach in sustainable development.

‘Leadership’ is crucial to contemporary business, politics, and organizations of every type, including the corporate, non-profit, educational, and government sectors. While modern leadership theorists suggest various models, traits, and approaches to leadership behavior that purport novelty, Ecclesiastes just may have been right that ‘There is nothing new under the sun’. The biblical figure of Moses – a familiar name both to adherents of the Western religious traditions and to people who are not – provides an exemplary model of effective leadership that is broadly applicable. Moses is depicted in the Bible as exhibiting ‘heroic’ and ‘charismatic’ tendencies. He was certainly empathic. Yet Moses also shows ‘transactional’, ‘transformational’ and ‘visionary’ leadership qualities. A leader of good character, Moses exhibits features similar to the Yiddish term, ‘mensch’ – someone showing responsibility and integrity, knowing right from wrong.

Though few might think of Moses as a ‘leader’ or a ‘manager’ in the contemporary sense, Moses not only holds a firm place among the most significant leaders in Western civilization but is arguably the quintessential example of leadership from whom much can be learned by people entering and occupying leadership positions. While current leadership and management vocabulary might differ from the Hebrew Bible, many of the traits, behaviors and actions advocated by modern leadership theorists appear to emulate those of Moses. Wolak contrasts contemporary leadership ideas with biblical and rabbinic sources that show Moses’ leadership qualities, Moses serves as an ancient model with current relevance for what modern leadership theorists argue make for an effective leader.

‘Religion and Contemporary Management’ discusses and compares original and critical biblical and rabbinic sources with current business leadership and management literature, revealing what leadership theorists’ advocate today largely emulates what the Bible depicts as effective leadership through Moses’ example. Hence, Moses’ influence on current leadership trends in Western culture appears pervasive, even if contemporary leadership theorists do not typically cite Moses as an important source for leadership precedent.

Knowledge is more than information but instead the organizing of information into theories and practices that allow us to do things and accomplish goals. The first stage of knowledge creation depended upon creative scientists and entrepreneurs, but the second stage required research laboratories and teams. Now cooperation between organizations is necessary to solve individual, organizational, institutional, and global problems that face us today.

Individuals presently are raised in four kinds of social contexts: traditional, modern, post-modern, and anomic. These contexts explain partisan divides as well as the inability of some to succeed in society. Post-modern contexts produce individuals who are cognitively complex, creative, critical but have empathy towards others. The acceleration in knowledge creation is caused by not only the growth of more post-modern individuals who are creative but organizational innovation and innovative regions. Organizational structures that discourage radical innovations are contrasted with those that facilitate it. Similarly, the histories of three innovative regions--Silicon Valley, Kistra in Sweden, and Hsinchu in Taiwan—are contrasted with the failure of Rt. 128 near Boston.

During the second wave of knowledge creation, social structures were differentiated vertically. Now in the third wave, the differentiation process is horizontal. In the stratification system this means different capitalist classes and work logics rather than social classes with super salaries, thus increasing social inequality. In the study of organizations, this translates into missionary and self-management forms where post-modern individuals obtain meaningful work and ask for customized service. In the study of networks it means the rise of systemic coordinated networks replacing supply chains.

Given the growing inefficiencies of labor markets, product/service markets, and public markets (elections), systemic coordinated networks are proposed as a solution. Furthermore, we need a national corps of individuals with special skills in sectors with shortages who can then be assigned to work in disadvantaged areas. Pre-school, primary school, and secondary school need to be reinvented to facilitate more upward social mobility. Agriculture and industry also require radical new innovations. To build a new civil society, governments have to encourage participation in programs that help others.

Based on the 2014 DP Biology course, the ‘IB Biology Revision Workbook’ is intended for use by students studying at any stage of the two-year course. Teachers and tutors will also enjoy using this workbook with their students. A wide variety of revision tasks are included covering topics of the Standard Level Core, Additional Higher Level and each of the four Options.

The tasks include skills and applications taken directly from the guide, as well as activities aimed at consolidating learning. Students are asked to draw, label, colour or annotate diagrams; sketch or analyse graphs; complete concept maps and Venn diagrams; answer examination-style questions; fill in summary tables; and connect related ideas.

A section on preparation is included to assist students prior to the examinations, along with exam-answering techniques and helpful tips to answering questions. A glossary of key terms and summary of prefixes and suffixes also assists student revision.

Duplicity and deception were essential ingredients in a comedy, and though they were not morally acceptable they reflect what happened in real life; the putting of personal obsession and private will before social and Christian responsibilities. But here, the excess of evil is there from the start and simply increases. There is little light-heartedness. It is all one sustained bitter snarl about humanity’s corruption. The tension between what people should do and what they actually do creates dramatic conflicts not just for the characters but also for the audience who may be torn between enjoying the dextrous scamming of Mosca and Volpone yet feeling they ought to be condemned and must be punished in the end. And the questions remain; should they be laughing at any of it and how can they not laugh at such a mad mixture of mistakes, such crass stupidity and such evil greed?

The fox is a creature of the night, a predator, a thief. He is a border raider, crossing from wild nature into man’s domestic domain. Nightstalker, elusive, devious, he is embedded deep in the European psyche as a trickster and deceiver. This persona goes back to ancient Greek times when the various fox fables of Aesop mix with other beast tales. The linking of humans to animal characteristics is part of the language: snake in the grass, wolf in sheep’s clothing, brave as a lion, timid as a mouse, busy as a bee, slimy toad, whoreson dog. At the most practical level, for a world almost entirely rural, he is the enemy of farmers and shepherds and individual poor households rearing just a few chickens; the feared killer who could annihilate a henhouse or ravage a warren. He was thus a food burglar, stealing vital nourishment before it could be put on the table and as such a threat to the family’s economy and perhaps even a threat to its survival.

Tragedy is as old as human misery and comedy is its not-quite-identical twin, for laughter is as old as tears. One mask may smile, the other cry, but the faces are similar and in many respects so are the two genres, though their outcomes are different. Man’s folly, his potential for evil, his potential for good, his ability to misunderstand the true values of life are common to both forms. One achieves correction of mistakes through disaster, pain, misery, the other through tears turning to laughter as folly is mocked and humiliated and order is restored.

The ‘IB Music Revision Guide 3rd Edition’ includes analyses of all the prescribed works of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme music course through to 2021. It also includes a comprehensive overview of all the musical styles and cultures that are examined during the course, practice questions and answers that allow students to check their knowledge, as well as a glossary to help ensure key terms are understood. There are also revision tips and advice on exam technique that will help students prepare for the IB listening exam with confidence. Suitable for Standard and Higher Level.

‘Aboard the Democracy Train’ is about politics and journalism in Pakistan. It is a gripping front-line account of the country’s decade of turbulent democracy (1988-1999), as told through the eyes of the only woman reporter working during the Zia era at ‘Dawn’, Pakistan’s leading English language newspaper. In this volume, the author reveals her unique experiences and coverage of ethnic violence, women’s rights and media freedoms. The narrative provides an insight into the politics of the Pak-Afghan region in the post 9-11 era, and exposes how the absence of rule of law claimed the life of its only woman prime minister.

The book is set during Pakistan's decade of turbulent democracy, which began when President Gen. Zia ul Haq's military rule abruptly ended with his plane crash. Then, as the only woman reporter at the nation's leading newspaper 'Dawn', the author was closely associated with late Benazir Bhutto's bid to become and remain the nation's first woman Prime Minister.

The book comes full circle from the Cold War era, when the events of September 11 forced Pakistan's military leaders to re-enter the U.S. orbit of influence. It is an account of why Benazir Bhutto fell victim to terrorism while her widower Asif Zardari is described as having taken on of the world's most daunting tasks of negotiating between a superpower and the military, amid a ferocious resurgence by the Taliban.