Anthem Press

This book is about contemporary Brazilian fiction from the past two decades and concerned with the possibilities of literary intervention in the reality of the historical moment. Thus, an understanding of the actual role of literature is strategic in the definition of the contemporary, and the book shows an optimism among current writers and artists with respect to the aesthetic, ethical, and political role of literature and art in the twentieth century. 

In contemporary Brazilian prose, two simultaneous ambitions are often reconciled. The commitment to individual or social reality is a challenge that is assumed without thereby necessarily accepting and following the molds of the traditional search for national or cultural identities. This foundation is one of the constants of contemporary prose, without thereby eliminating the continuous existence of a formal experimentalism that is the clearest heir of the modernist project.

Recent literary studies of Brazil generally accept that there was a transformation in the 1960s and 1970s, from a narrative mainly situated in regional areas or the backlands, to the appearance of the big city as a contradictory scenario for national literature. Novelists and short story writers who are consolidated at that time encounter in the big cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro a reality that not only brought a promise of modernity, but also produced a civic marginality that came with extreme poverty, violence, and organized crime. In the 1990s and 2000s, a generation of writers appeared who revived programmatic principles of this urban prose and who began the new century with a new demand for the real. Such a demand included references from historical realism and at the same time preserved a desire to experiment aesthetically in search of effects and affects, through a performative writing that was articulated in the translation of the historical temporality, mainly in the exploration of a lived presence. The narratives discussed are situated in a spatial referentiality that abandons the imaginary construction of the nation, an important task of modern literature, in favor of stories that are globalized by exploring ways to include Brazilian culture and language in new international networks.

In recent decades, international legal constraints have shifted far beyond the national border. International lenders’ structural adjustment programs require states to slash budgets, privatize public enterprises and cut pensions. Trade agreements have shifted from locking in low tariffs to forbidding policies that today’s rich countries used to climb up the developmental ladder. This suite of neoliberal policies has been labeled the “golden straitjacket” for their supposed promise of unlocking economic growth. [NP] ‘Judge Knot’ explores a corollary to the straitjacket: investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), where foreign investors can sue host states out of national courts before transnational tribunals over government regulation. Since 1990, corporations have launched hundreds of cases against states over environmental conservation, financial stabilization and public service provision. In an era of Donald Trump, Brexit, Bernie Sanders, and Jeremy Corbyn, criticism of this system has grown enormously. Yet meaningful reform has been difficult. Even though neoliberal economics is on the wane, its legal underpinnings remain attractive to the corporations that demand investment law and the arbitrators who supply it.

Building off of an unprecedented set of interviews with the arbitrators who actually decide the cases, the interdisciplinary ‘Judge Knot’ brings together the best of political science, law and development economics scholarship to offer a historical institutionalist account of investment arbitration in an era of unprecedented judicialization of international affairs. The book offers concrete alternatives to ISDS that leverage what works about the system and discard what doesn’t, so that international law can be more supportive of democracy and development goals.

This book is a comprehensive review of the political career of Benjamin Disraeli, providing a thorough critical analysis of one of the most ambitious and controversial leaders in British history. 'Disraeli and the Art of Victorian Politics' explores the political journey of a man propelled by a tremendous self-belief and capacity for self-invention through the complex world of Victorian political life. Disraeli retains a powerful presence in contemporary political discourse; whether in terms of current debates concerning the direction and leadership within the Conservative party or in more general areas of social and political debate such as the nature of imperialism, the dangers posed by the centralization of government power, the scope for state intervention in the economy, the constitutional role of the monarch and the meaning of Judaism in British life.  Dr Ian St John discusses Disraeli’s Conservative ideology and its relationship to his identity and his practice as a politician. The author brings to life the often sharp historiographical debates surrounding Disraeli's career by reproducing within each chapter views from key historians – an effective way to introduce the student and general reader to the contested nature of historical understanding. This title will be a major addition to our understanding of both Disraeli and the dynamics of nineteenth-century politics.

“The Rise of Little Big Norway” delivers a wide-ranging topical exploration of the remarkable rise of Norway from poverty and Nordic peripherality to the global steward and Arctic frontliner of today. Drawing on an unusual range of scholarly and popular source material, it chronicles the developmental emergence of Norway while setting it variously in its Nordic, Arctic, European, transatlantic and global contexts. It astutely blends historical analysis and contemporary insight into a finely crafted study of a long-overlooked country that is now a quietly influential global force and an exemplar in areas as diverse as work-life balance, diplomacy and ethical investing.

Written by an experienced Scandinavianist, “The Rise of Little Big Norway” offers a textual mosaic befitting a geographically and historically fragmented land. It elaborates a connecting theme of mobility, which took Vikings across the Atlantic in open boats, created a worldwide diaspora, fueled an exploratory age, and makes today’s Norwegians the royalty of the skiing world and the most traveled people on the planet. It gives special attention to the overlooked northern dimension that makes Norway, with its front-row seat on the Arctic, an increasing touchstone for twenty-first-century debates over global warming and transitioning to a post-oil age. It posits Norwegians as grounded globalists and Norway as a country of unique elements, from its societal peculiarities to its polar identity and the Nobel Peace Prize, which contribute to its unique global profile.

“The Rise of Little Big Norway” is written in a lively, trenchant, essay-based style which can be appreciated by non-specialists, while its coverage of less familiar sides to the national story will be helpful to scholars seeking to extend their knowledge of Norway, Scandinavia and northern Europe. For all readers it delivers a wealth of specialized information, astute observation and comparative insight into the qualities that enabled Norway’s rise to prominence and which distinguish it from its Nordic neighbors. This book offers the kind of thoughtful, well-crafted, single-volume coverage that has long been missing and which fills an important gap in the English-language literature on Norway and northern Europe.

‘Britain in India, 1858–1947’ seeks to trace the last 90 years of British rule in the light of modern historical debates. The volume examines the ambiguities of British rule that followed from the post-Mutiny settlement: the tensions between an authoritarian bureaucracy and the promise of a liberal vision of the future, and between imperial interests and the growing coordination of Indian aspirations for self-rule. The volume analyses these tensions with reference to contemporary historical debates, and traces them through changing international relations and world wars to Indian independence and partition in 1947.

This book is a comprehensive review of the political career of Benjamin Disraeli, providing a thorough critical analysis of one of the most ambitious and controversial leaders in British history. ‘Disraeli and the Art of Victorian Politics’ explores the political journey of a man propelled by a tremendous and sometimes all consuming self-belief.

This study discusses Disraeli’s driving ideology and the extent to which he was able to stay true to these ideals in the face of fierce opposition during his six-year Premiership. The author uniquely recreates the atmosphere of lively debate by introducing competing arguments to punctuate each chapter, a novel and effective way in which to understand the political and social context for both the student and general reader alike.

Disraeli retains a powerful presence in contemporary political discourse – whether in terms of current debates concerning the unsure direction and leadership within the Conservative Party or in more general areas of social and political life such as the role and nature of imperialism, the declining presence of the monarchy and the meaning of Judaism in British life. This updated edition will be a major addition to our understanding of the dynamics of nineteenth-century politics.

In the context of China’s ascendancy, the world watches and listens. China wants to project a soft power image. One channel for its soft power communication – about its success and international cooperation – is international broadcasting. ‘Chinese Television and Soft Power Communication in Australia’ discusses China’s soft power communication approach and investigates information handling between China and its targeted audiences in the eyes of key influencers – intermediate elites (public diplomacy policy elites in particular) in China and Australia. Drawing on the case of the state-owned broadcaster CGTN – viewed by China as an essential soft power tool for framing its voice – the book examines empirically the reception to China’s soft power messaging by Australian audiences and the factors underpinning its reception.

The book provides a holistic, systemic evaluation of China’s soft power messaging seen as part of its power portfolio and what this means to the world order. Through media frame analysis of CGTN’s framing of China’s most ambitious and comprehensive initiative – the Belt and Road Initiative – and interviews with intermediate elites in China and the typical case of a Western target audience in Australia, it presents an in-depth theoretical discussion of the mechanisms of China’s communication approach through a soft power lens. It also reflects on an exploration of journalistic operations within CGTN (with staff from several professional cultures) and a systemic test of how successful/unsuccessful China’s soft power message projection is in terms of congruence between projected and received frames, as a pivotal factor of its power status.

This exciting addition to Dostoevsky studies deals with the religious dimension of the novelist's life and fiction. Malcolm Jones takes a fresh reading of Dostoevsky's representation of religion in his fictional world, that allows for both mystery and fear. The author argues that the spiritual map of human experience that Dostoevsky offers includes only the occasional small island of serenity in vast, turbulent oceans of doubt, rebellion, rejection, indifference and disbelief. Dostoevsky is also viewed as an artist, revealing glimpses of salvation through subversive narrative techniques and destabilized, vulnerable characters. Dostoevsky's fictional characters experience the dread of a meaningless void as well as a desperate longing for the restorative binding idea that religion offers. 'Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience' offers a balanced and authoritative argument. The book is structured through six clearly defined and self-reliant essays that take into account past and current criticism and offer a close textual analysis of Dostoevsky’s works, including  'The Double', 'Notes from Underground', 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', 'The Devils' and an in-depth study of 'The Brothers Karamazov'. This work is a major contribution to the study of Dostoevsky and Russian Literature in Europe, the USA, Russia and throughout the world.

In 21 short case studies, this short book examines the distinctive coincidental history of America, Britain, and various Asian countries during the twentieth century. It covers a wide range of historical events, from American expansion into the Pacific to the creation of the Soviet gulags in Siberia to the end of the Vietnam War. 

Each of the short case studies focuses on one set of coincidental actions. Were they linked in some way? Or completely random? The reader is allowed to decide for themselves. Often, the coincidental overlap is due to timing, with various events throughout history occurring on the same dates. For example, Great Britain’s controversial blockade of Venezuela began on December 7, 1902, the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy merged forces on December 7, 1917, and Japan attacked American and British naval bases on December 7, 1941. The author will suggest that these three actions were linked, but it is up to the reader to decide if it was really just a coincidence.

The main goal of this short book is to show how watershed historical events can often become layered or overlap each other, sometimes by intent but often merely by happenstance. As Ian Fleming once famously opined about actions in war: “Once is happenstance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

This collection of exercises compiled for talented high-school and undergraduate-level students encourages creativity and a deeper understanding of ideas when solving physics problems. This book features almost three hundred problems and solutions worked out in detail, dealing with classical physics topics such as mechanics, thermodynamics, electrodynamics, magnetism and optics. Posed in accessible language and requiring only elementary calculus, these problems are intended to strengthen students' knowledge of the laws of physics by applying them to practical situations in a fun and instructive way. These problems and solutions challenge students of physics, stretching their abilities through practice and a thorough comprehension of ideas.

This scholarly biography traces the life and art of Lebanese-American neo-expressionist, Nabil Kanso (1940–2019). It explores key moments across the artist’s transnational career by foregrounding his longest-running, internationally toured exhibition, the Journey of Art for Peace (1985–1993). More specifically, it traces the historical trajectory of his 10 × 28 mural-scale painting, Lebanon, from the circumstances of its production at the height of the Lebanese Civil War in 1983, through its short-lived exhibition history with the Split of Life series in the few years that followed. The book scaffolds an understanding of the artist as an activist and works toward offering distinctly spatial readings of his painterly practice, of which the act of bearing witness is highlighted as permeating the entirety of his oeuvre. It concludes with a contemporary recontextualization of Lebanon in the country’s current social, political, and cultural climate, and emphasizes the artist’s work as essential to the theorization of larger traditions of political and protest art.

The first of its kind and the result of a research fellowship wherein the author was invited to be the first to work through the artist’s unpublished archive, this book lays the groundwork for scholarship on the art of Nabil Kanso—an essential yet hitherto unstudied pioneer of the neo-expressionist art movement of the 1960s. It draws extensively on primary source material, including personal notes, diaries, sketchbooks, correspondences, paintings, watercolors, photographs, recorded interviews, and the like. To best animate that source material within the context of this publication, each chapter is prefaced with short narrative anecdotes inspired by the artist’s personal notes to better ground the subsequent research and scholarship in the artist’s own terms and experiences.

Born in Beirut, Kanso, like many of his generation, would seek sought refuge abroad from political instability in his home country. It is through this intrinsic proximity to, yet physical distance from, the cycles of violence and corruption in Lebanon that Kanso would go on to create his grandest greatest mural-scale series. This book, more than anything, explores the artist’s oeuvre as an attempt to bear witness and offer testimony to those moments, an inclination that would see the artist grapple with some of the most ferocious crimes against humanity committed throughout his lifetime. As such, this book pairs close readings of Kanso’s art and personal practice with both historical and contemporary context meant to animate the relevance of his vast yet never-before-seen artistic archive.

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

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

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

Despite its international influence, Polish theatre remains a mystery to many Westerners. This volume attempts to fill in various gaps in English-language scholarship by offering a historical and critical analysis of two of the most influential works of Polish theatre: Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Akropolis’ and Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘Dead Class’. By examining each director’s representation of Auschwitz, this study provides a new understanding of how translating national trauma through the prism of performance can alter and deflect the meaning and reception of theatrical works, both inside and outside their cultural and historical context.

Although theatre scholars have now gained familiarity with ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’, there remains little understanding of the complex web of cultural meanings and significations that went into their making – they remain broadly but not deeply known. Grotowski and Kantor both sought to respond to the trauma of the Holocaust, albeit through drastically different aesthetics, and this study develops a comparative critical language through which one can simultaneously engage Grotowski and Kantor in a way that makes their differences evocative of a broader conversation about theatre and meaning. Ultimately, this volume invites and engages with many questions: how is theatrical meaning codified outside its cultural context? How is it codified within its cultural context? What affects the reception of a theatrical work? And, above all, how does theatre ‘make meaning’?

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

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

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

This collection of poetry brings to life many of the important patterns of development in the verse of the late-Victorian period, and offers a fuller reflection of ‘decadence’ than those anthologies confined to the 1890s. ‘Major’ writers such as Tennyson, Browning, Hardy and Hopkins are presented alongside less well-known poets, fifty of whom are female, and other traditional figures such as Stevenson, William Morris and Christina Rossetti are given a fresh look. The book also contains a comparative chronology of prose 1872-1900 and of movements in the visual arts. Accompanied by an acclaimed critical commentary, the volume enables readers to discover poetry in the wider context of the literary, aesthetic and intellectual forces of the late-Victorian world as a whole.

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

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

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

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

To what extent should religion be taught in classrooms? Should lessons also cover non-religious beliefs? Should the teaching of religion be compulsory or should it be a matter of choice by the parents or the child? Should faith schools be allowed to teach their religious beliefs? Should religious worship be compulsory for all pupils?

Questions of how religion operates within schools prove controversial and divisive. This book explores radical changes that are being made in Wales and the lessons that can be learnt. The Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Act 2021 introduces a new curriculum for Wales and makes the teaching of religion, values and ethics compulsory for all. As the name of the new subject suggests, the study of non-religious beliefs will now be explicitly included and groups such as humanists will play a role in the writing of the curriculum. 

The 2021 Act will mean that the law on the teaching of religion in Wales will differ from England for the first time. In England, the rules developed in the 1940s continue to apply: these require religious education that must ‘reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian’ and daily religious worship which must be ‘wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’ subject to a parental opt out. Critics have pointed out that these laws are outmoded in today’s multicultural and largely secular society and that many schools fail to comply with them. This book will explore what can be learnt from developments in Wales to shape the law in England. It will explore reform suggestions in England and the Welsh law, potential shortcomings of the Welsh legislation and areas that the 2021 Act leaves untouched, namely the rules on religious worship. The book is written by a leading authority on the interaction of law and religion whose work fed into Welsh parliament debates on the 2021 Act.

The French Second Empire (1852-70) was a time of exceptionally rapid social, industrial and technological change. Guidebooks and manuals were produced in large numbers to help readers negotiate new cultural phenomena, and their concerns – including image-making, diet, stress, lack of time, and the frustrations of public transport – betray contemporary political tensions and social anxieties alongside the practical advice offered. French literature also underwent fundamental changes during this period, as writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Hugo and Zola embraced ‘modernity’ and incorporated new technologies, fashions and inventions into their work. Focusing on cultural areas such as exhibitions, transport, food, dress and photography, ‘Changing France’ shows how apparently trivial aspects of modern life provided Second Empire writers with a versatile means of thinking about deeper issues. This volume brings literature and material culture together to reveal how writing itself changed as writers recognised the extraordinarily rich possibilities of expression opened up to them by the changing material world.

In the field of literary and cultural studies, interest in nineteenth-century biology has been substantial for the last 20 years, yet the focus has been almost exclusively on evolutionary theory, neglecting other branches of nineteenth-century biology. This collection corrects that imbalance, shedding light on other discoveries in cell biology, physiology, neurology and virology. It examines the issue of authority in science, demonstrating the social 'embeddedness' of the natural sciences, and gender issues. It also shows how scientists and creative writers drew on a common imagination as well as narrative techniques and stylistic devices; indeed, often inspired by the same subjects. This important new book, including contributions from some of the most distinguished experts in the field, demonstrates that the relation between literature, culture and biology in the nineteenth century is far more complex than habitual references to Darwin would have us believe.

Horror films can be profound fables of human nature and important works of art, yet many people dismiss them out of hand. “Horror and the Horror Film” conveys a mature appreciation of horror films along with a comprehensive view of their narrative strategies, their relations to reality and fantasy, and their cinematic power. The volume covers the entire genre, considering every kind of monster in it – including the human.

After defining horror and thoroughly introducing the genre, the text offers a rich survey of all of the horror film’s subgenres, before concluding with a look at the related genres of horror comedy and horror documentary. International in scope, its survey extends from the first horror films (1896) to the present, discussing more than 350 movies. Through its comprehensive and detailed investigation of the genre, “Horror and the Horror Film” offers a compelling, insightful look at how the horror film frightens and revolts the viewer, its reasons for doing so, and the art of portraying and evoking fear, and will be a great asset to film scholars, horror enthusiasts and readers yet to be convinced of the importance of the genre.

'Lesser Breeds' focuses on racism as manifested in the popular culture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, exemplified by attitudes to the Chinese, Arabs, Blacks and Jews. This compelling book investigates the manifold expressions of prejudice in the popular arts of the period. Like Diamond's successful 'Victorian Sensation', this is a comparative exploration of how popular racism was naturalised, what issues it raised and fed off, and what this said about British people at the time. One of the author's key concerns is the way in which the popular media feeds on stereotypes, which go on to reinforce relatively uninformed cultural and social assumptions. The parallel to our own cultural and political climate is compelling. This fascinating title will be of interest given the current trend of tabloid racism; it will also appeal to a general and unfailing interest in the intriguingly vulgar British Empire.

If Marguerite Blessington (1788–1849) – the “most gorgeous lady” in Dr. Samuel Parr’s words – is ever remembered today, it is mostly for her famous literary salon and for her ‘Conversations of Lord Byron’ (1833 l–34), one of the poet’s early biographies. She is also infamous for the relationship with her step-daughter’s husband, the French dandy Count D’Orsay. Hardly anything, however, has been written on Blessington as a traveller and a travel writer. In 1820 she set off on a series of tours, in the course of which she kept journals which were then published as ‘A Tour in The Isle of Wight, in the Autumn of 1820’ (1822), ‘Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris in 1821’ (1822), ‘The Idler in Italy’ (1839) and ‘The Idler in France’ (1841).

Convinced that Marguerite Blessington merits scholarly attention as a travel writer, Aneta Lipska’s ‘The Travel Writings of Marguerite Blessington’ offers the first detailed analysis of Blessington’s four travel books. This book reveals that travelling and travel writing offered Blessington endless opportunities to reshape her public personae, demonstrating that her predilection for self-fashioning was related to the various tendencies in tourism and literature as well as the changing aesthetic and social trends in the first half of the nineteenth century. The book argues that the author constructed diverse images of herself, depending on the circumstances in which she found herself. The early travel accounts foreground the personae of a chaperoned woman traveller and a novice writer, allowing her admission to the genre of travel writing. The mature travel writings present her to the public as indeed the “most gorgeous lady” on the tour and a seasoned travel writer solidifying her position as a celebrity.

Since ancient times the exercise of individual freedoms has been inseparable from the expansion of the market, driven by the search for profit. This force, namely capitalism, has stimulated human creativity and aggression in ways that have produced immense benefits. As capitalism has broadened its scope in the epoch of globalization, these benefits have become even greater. Human beings have been liberated to an even greater degree than hitherto from the tyranny of nature, from the control of others, from poverty and from war. The advances achieved by the globalization of capitalism have appeared all the more striking, when set against the failure of non-capitalist systems of economic organization.

However, capitalist freedom is a two-edged sword. In an epoch of capitalist globalisation, its contradictions have intensified. They comprehensively threaten the natural environment. They have intensified global inequality within both rich and poor countries, and between the internationalised global power elite and the mass of citizens rooted within their respective nation. In this remarkable, expansive text, Peter Nolan explores the impact of the domineering economic phenomenon on our personal and social liberties.

Ralph Ellison and Cinema reveals the crucial role of cinema throughout Ellison’s career. In his most famous work, Invisible Man (1952), cinema is part of a cultural and institutional landscape; as such, it is integral to the way the novel’s protagonist feels and thinks. In Ellison’s critical essays, cinema is simultaneously a crystallization of racial prejudice, a vehicle of ideas about history, and an index of the variously illusory and the revelatory character of dreams. But it is in his monumental, unfinished second novel, posthumously published as Three Days Before the Shooting . . . (2010), that Ellison’s thinking about cinema is brought to its imaginative and theoretical peak. Here, Ellison gives full rein to a sensibility that is both cinephile and cine-sceptical; in the book, Ellison is as much concerned with cinematic form as he is with cinematic content. To chart the breadth and depth of Ellison’s cinematic interests, Ralph Ellison and Cinema discusses the author’s major works alongside private correspondence, Hollywood films in which Ellison took particular interest, and marginalia in the author’s personal library. Ralph Ellison and Cinema also provides a detailed account of the intellectual and social contexts in which Ellison’s works took shape.

‘How to Get into Medical School in Australia’ is the definitive guide on how to succeed in your application to medical school – and how to excel once there. The book provides comprehensive details of the admissions processes – both undergraduate and graduate – in an easy-to-digest, chronological format, to help you manage your application step by step.

This detailed handbook includes an overview of the admissions process and the career of a doctor, characteristics sought in potential medical students and how to optimise them, study techniques for high school and undergraduate students, information on how to prepare for the medical school entry exams (UMAT and GAMSAT), the pros and cons of undergraduate and postgraduate medical school, and timelines on when to begin preparing for each step of the application process.

The guide also features advice on special applications (for mature age, indigenous, rural and international students), non-traditional routes of entry, how to optimise your medical school application form (including sample resumés), and the all-important medical school interview – including how to prepare, how to dress and how to answer questions successfully on the day, as well as several pages of practice interview questions.

Once you have succeeded in gaining admission, the book also offers information on what medical school is like, and advice on how to excel and enjoy it (including a list of necessary textbooks). Additionally, the guide includes advice from people who have excelled in various parts of the process: those who aced their high school leaver’s exams, medical students, and junior and senior doctors. They describe their experiences and, most importantly, provide tips and guidance on how to succeed in getting into and studying at medical school. Also included are the profiles of every medical school in Australia, detailing entry requirements, contact details, fees, numbers of places for students and the focus and academic ranking of each individual school. 

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

The contemporary importance of A. N. Whitehead (1861–1947) lies in his direct yet productive challenge to the culture of thought inherent in modernity, a challenge that suffuses science, social theory and philosophy alike. Unlike some of the more destructive aspects of postmodernism and poststructuralism, Whitehead’s diagnosis of the conceptual fault lines of the modern era does not entail a passive relativism. Instead, he calls for a renewal of our concepts, offering a positive, philosophical approach based on becoming, relativity, and a reconception of subjectivity and the social. This book outlines Whitehead’s philosophy, using it to reorient a range of specific questions and topics within contemporary social theory, namely: the relation of language and the body; the relationship between the individual and society; sexual difference; conceptions of nature; the question of realism; the concept of the social; and capitalism as a process. It also provides detailed analyses and comparisons of Whitehead’s concepts with those of Judith Butler on materiality and the body, and of Luce Irigaray on nature, essentialism and sexual difference.

The overarching aim of “Structure, Agency, Biotechnology: The Case of the Rothamsted GM Wheat Trials” is to propose a way of filling the analytical gap found in the current literature by offering an original theoretical framework. This framework is able to assess both the content and context of the scientific field without resorting either to deterministic or to what theorists refer to as “conflationist strategies.” In order to demonstrate the heuristic value of the framework, the 2012 GM wheat field trials carried out by Rothamsted Research, often associated with the “second push” of agribiotech firms to bring Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) to the UK, areassessed, and key aspects of the experiment areunderscored. At the same time, the broader institutional arrangements, key ideological constructs and the social order are examined, and a reframing of the controversy which moves beyond the simplistic conceptualization of it being a case of science versus politics is suggested. The volume also proposes a clear set of guidelines, which stem from the methodological and theoretical deep structure of the suggested framework but do not demand prior theoretical knowledge, which can be used by a wider audience engaged with biotechnology. This audience can draw on the guidelines either for reasons of developing a critical understanding of particular situations or for initiating the process of sustained dialogue between involved parties. These two dimensions are of great significance for practical policy orientations.

Based on thorough and extensive research, this book examines in detail traditional status signals in the translation profession. It provides case studies of eight European and non-European countries, with further chapters on sociological and economic modelling, and goes on to identify a number of policy options and make recommendations on rectifying problem areas.

There are strong indications that traditional mechanisms of signalling the status of translators are no longer functioning as they should, and that new online mechanisms are  turning status into a readily available commodity. Despite demonstrating that some of the traditional status signals do still function relatively well, the book nevertheless finds that others appear to be failing for various reasons, and that this has resulted in a degree of market disorder. Such circumstances may cause good translators to leave the market, which is clearly an undesirable situation for all concerned.

The work was written by a team of eminent scholars in the field, with contributions from a host of other academics and professional translators, and includes five appendices providing very useful information on areas of specific interest.

This book provides the reader with tips and insights on how they can become better leaders themselves. These insights and tips will be explained by utilizing the context of dogs, with examples featuring various dog breeds used throughout the book. This will emphasize what we can learn from these various dogs’ traits and characteristics. Some of the topics that the book will cover include concepts like ‘resilience’, ‘courage’, ‘patience’, ‘(in)dependence’, ‘respect’, ‘kindness’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘trust’. The various chapters in this book will provide the reader with insight on why it is important for human leaders to embody these various concepts and qualities.

For instance, a concept like ‘resilience’ is of paramount importance for leaders, because not every single plan or decision will be successful, but it is important to stay the course, as a Bloodhound would on the trail of an escaped convict. The book adroitly mixes findings and insights from numerous scholarly sources on leadership and juxtaposes them with examples featuring various dog breed traits and characteristics. The book will be useful for improving one’s knowledge on how to be a better leader, and will also improve one’s knowledge about the numerous varieties and kinds of dog breeds. The book is easy to comprehend and the scholarly concepts in it are explained without any complicated jargon.

Defining what one means by the notion of ‘otherness’ is no mean feat. Typing the word into JSTOR results in no fewer than 39,000 citations. One can be overwhelmed with notions of what constitutes ‘otherness’.

To a great extent, the essays in ‘Notions of Otherness’ approach specific texts (e.g., Sarraute’s ‘Tropisms’) and philosophies (e.g., Lawrence’s ‘Ranamin’) as reflective of Simmel’s notion of the Stranger whose membership within the group, described in the Spring 2010 issue of ‘Social Research’, involves both being outside it and confronting it.

The entirety of the literary texts that have been written about (Cahan, Woolf, Schulz, Lawrence, Ionesco, Duras, Wittig and Maraini) have been addressed from the perspective of being ‘outside the group’ and ‘confronting’ the group both from a sociological perspective and an aesthetic one. Challenging male authority is one example of being outside the group; challenging traditional notions of writing fiction is another aspect of being outside the group; challenging one’s own loss of culture or being forced to do so is being outside the group and advocating a fascist form of living within a democracy is yet another aspect of being outside the group. Each of these texts challenges ‘codes of otherness’ and by so doing manifest notions of otherness in a distinctly unique manner.

This study examines America's Middle East area specialists and their experience over three critical decades of foreign policy, aiming to understand how they were trained, what they learned, what was their foreign policy perspective, as well as to evaluate their influence.  The book examines the post-1946 group and their role in the formulation and implementation of Middle East policy, and how this has shaped events in the relationship between American and the Middle East.

The book examines the worldview of these modern “Arabists” or Middle East hands.  It also examines their interactions with the peoples of the region and with American presidents through a series of case studies spanning the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. The Middle East Area Program (MEAP) was established at Beirut to train US Foreign Service Officers to communicate in Arabic and to understand the region and all its peoples.  Middle East hands replaced the old East Coast elite who had staffed the interwar Near East Bureau. The program promised rapid advancement, but required them to invest two years at the American University of Beirut in order to immerse themselves in language training and area studies.

Over three decades, the program recruited, selected and trained a corps of approximately fifty-three diplomats, who were a much more diverse, middle-class group than their predecessors. They were ambitious careerists who sought the fast track to the top, ultimately serving throughout the Arab world and in Israel, staffing the State Department’s area desks and advising presidents. Many were skilled political reporting officers; and almost all of them became ambassadors as America expanded its presence in the region during the period of waning British influence. The program transformed the core of the State Department staff, replacing the old network of Orientalists with this small corps of highly-trained professionals. Ultimately, despite their expertise and a realistic view of American interests, their advice was often overridden by external political concerns.

The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry is the first book-length study of the contemporary poetry industry. By documenting radical changes over the past decade in the way poems are published, sold, and consumed, it connects the seemingly small world of poetry with the other, wider creative industries. In reassessing an art form that has been traditionally seen as free from or even resistant to material concerns, the book confronts the real pressures – and real opportunities – faced by poets and publishers in the wake of economic and cultural shifts since 2008. The changing role of anthologies, prizes, and publishers are considered alongside new technologies, new arts policy, and re-conceptions of poetic labour.

The historical frame helps to understand the legacy of increased funding in the UK in the previous decade, which Tony Blair described as a ‘golden age’ for the arts two months before his resignation, and a year before the global financial crisis which succeeding governments used to justify major funding cuts. With this economic emphasis, the book challenges the historical perception of poetry’s market autonomy, for a period in which it has moved beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s view of it as ‘the disinterested activity par excellence’. Drawing on an emerging body of research into the newly defined creative economy, alongside materialist and sociological approaches, the book is structured around a range of case studies – from new publishing formats, new degree programmes and mentorship schemes, plagiarism scandals, to poems going ‘viral’ – emphasizing an underlying shift towards professionalisation and entrepreneurial rhetoric associated with new poetry. Ultimately, it argues that poetry’s continued growth and diversification also leaves individuals with more responsibility than ever for sustaining its communities.

“Economists and the Powerful: Convenient Theories, Distorted Facts, Ample Rewards” explores the workings of the modern global economy – an economy in which competition has been corrupted and power has a ubiquitous influence upon economic behavior. Based on an array of empirical and theoretical studies by a series of distinguished economists, this book reveals a stark and unpleasant truth: that the true workings of capitalism are very different from the popular myths that mainstream economics would have us believe.

By connecting the dots and coloring the resulting picture with real life examples, this work provides a groundbreaking account of the mechanics of capitalism, and demonstrates how different groups and elites consistently further their own economic interests at the expense of others. Journeys into economic history allow the reader to travel to the source of the political power enjoyed by our current-day financiers, and unveil a whole host of systematic problems – such as that our banks are the main beneficiaries of today’s unstable, debt-oriented monetary system, or that leading economists often play a role in helping CEOs massively inflate their salaries without improving their performance – that are today more pertinent, and prevalent, than ever.

To investigate these issues, “Economists and the Powerful” looks closely at the incentives pursued by economists, and explores the history of the economic doctrines supported in our current financial climate. Via this scrutinizing approach, the text approaches the most overlooked issue of all: the matter of how, when and why the questioning of power was erased from the radar screen of mainstream economics – and the influence this subversive removal has had upon the modern financial world.

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

‘Pashtun Identity and Geopolitics in Southwest Asia’ brings together Pakistan and Afghanistan as two inseparable entities by investigating areas such as the evolution and persistence of the Taliban, quest for Pashtun identity, the ambivalent status of the tribal region and the state of civic clusters on both sides. In addition to their relations with the United States and the EU, a due attention has been devoted to regional realties while looking at relations with India and China. The study explores vital disciplines of ethnography, history, Islamic studies, and international relations and benefits from a wide variety of source material. The volume takes into account the salient subjects including political Islam, nature and extent of violence since 9/11, failure of Western policies in the region, the Drone warfare, and the emergence of new regimes in Kabul, Islamabad and Delhi offering fresh opportunities as well as new threat perceptions.

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

Epic Ambitions in Modern Times joins an ongoing critical conversation about the persistence of the epic imagination. It has been written for an audience curious about the legacy of the ancient epics and the evolution of modern epic from its older prototypes. There are three interwoven premises in its twelve chapters ranging from Paradise Lost in the seventeenth century to the work of four feminist novelists in the twenty-first. One is that the epic impulse, the ambition to attempt the previously unattempted, never disappeared even after the vehicle of the long heroic poem came to seem old-fashioned or unrepeatable. Milton, far from annihilating future epics, left his fingerprints on the work of his successors. One subtheme of the book, inevitably, is the productive afterlife of Paradise Lost and Milton’s continuing relevance to an ongoing epic tradition. The second premise follows from the first: post-Miltonic epic is a mode of imagining that can take many forms other than the multi-book poem. The impulse to produce epic did not go extinct; it simply went underground after Milton and re-emerged in unexpected places. The epic imagination, so often waterlogged in bloated long poems, has flourished in a great variety of other forms and media: in novels, history-writing, drama and opera, film and music, painting, and fantasy and science fiction.

The third premise may perplex those who remember epic only as plodding translations of The Odyssey or unpronounceable excerpts from Paradise Lost imposed on unwilling high school students. Nevertheless, the third premise is that epic is a popular and populist kind of creation; not only do artists continue to aspire to epic, audiences still relish and even clamor for it. The most obvious cases for epic as popular art appear in the chapters on film, on Tolkien, and on twenty-first century feminist rewritings of the ancient epics. But nearly all the works discussed in this book were popular in their own day. Clarissa and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were eighteenth-century best-sellers; Wagner’s Ring had an immediate vogue in his lifetime and tickets to performances remain prized in our own day. Jacob Lawrence’s 60 Migration paintings caused a sensation when they were exhibited in New York in the 1940s and the whole lot was snapped up by the Phillips Collection and the Museum of Modern Art. The popularity of Tolkien—author of the century, as Tom Shippey declared him—needs no elaboration. Kushner’s Angels in America and Madeline Miller’s recent novels derived from the Iliad and the Odyssey have been phenomena of popular culture.

This book explores the pleasures and challenges of the epic imagination, the persistent appeal of epic creation for artists and of epic experience for audiences, and the scope of epic achievements in the past three centuries. Artists working in many genres and media have challenged convention and embraced newness while remaining rooted in the oldest of literary forms. These are artists who, thinking and imagining big, have produced unexpected creations. They appeal to readers fascinated by the creative process, by originality and how it is achieved, and by what lies behind and looms above the often casual and commercial epithet of “epic.”

Gevork Hartoonian presents a retrospective reading of the first edition of Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History, published in 1980. He provides novel insights into the significance of Frampton’s historiography of modern architecture and beyond. In exploring selected themes from Frampton’s ongoing criticism of contemporary architecture, this book leads us to a critical understanding of the past, the modernity of architecture’s contemporaneity. It unpacks classificatory modes governing the three-part organization of Frampton’s book, the constellation of which allowed him to hold on to an anteroom view of history amidst the flood of temporalities spanning the period 1980–2020. Contemplating Frampton’s book as an artifact stripped of temporality, this original work reads Frampton’s historiography in the intersection of selected epigraphs and three images illuminating the book’s classificatory mode. Hartoonian presents a valuable companion to Frampton’s A Critical History for readers interested in the successes and failures of contemporary architecture’s philosophical and theoretical aspirations.

Written primarily for undergraduate courses in criminal justice, constitutional law, and government, The Constitution: Major Cases and Conflicts offers the full text of many landmark Supreme Court cases, selected both for the combinations of constitutional issues they involve and for their continuing relevance today.

This text is of particular interest to criminal justice students because it includes civil cases as well. This is important because various situations involving First Amendment issues, such as protest, can give rise to criminal justice issues when protesters are arrested for disorderly conduct. Thus, this book exposes the criminal justice (and any other) student to both civil and criminal Supreme Court cases along with explanations of their social and historical importance.

The decisions in The Constitution: Major Cases and Conflicts, chosen from among the thousands available, involve multiple layers of legal conflict, so that by studying them, the student can come to understand converging ideals within the Constitution. They also offer insights into American culture that remain relevant to present-day society, and provide a road map through the evolution of the Supreme Court and its shifting reasoning on issues such as federalism, protest, the right to counsel, search and seizure, and civil rights.

This book is the product of an ongoing dialogue among 47 experts from a diverse range of expertise and backgrounds, including thought leaders from the ranks of policymakers, academics and civil society. These thought leaders and visionaries discuss the likely longer-range trajectories of South Asia’s future as a region, focusing particularly on current regional trends, possible futures and the key factors that will determine whether these trajectories are positive or negative for the region.

Will we even be talking about a “South Asian region” 50 years from now? And will the region still be seen as a threat to global stability? This future-oriented exploration tackles these questions whilst departing from a purely security-based analysis to include factors such as development and human well-being, seeking to shed light on a whole spectrum of current issues that will affect the region into the future.

The essays in this book organically inform the collection’s coherent and nuanced outlook on the region, which offers both an introspective and globally aware perspective of the outcomes of the region’s development. The volume fills the gap in studies on South Asia by exploring its regional identity, as well as the potential of present conditions to impact the future of South Asia and the rest of the world.

The historical schools of economics have been neglected within the arena of economic theory since the Second World War in favour of the now-dominant classical and neoclassical schools of economic thought. ‘Torkel Aschehoug and Norwegian Economic Thought’ offers a revaluation of the historical-empirical approach to economics that the Norwegian legal theorist and politician Aschehoug became renowned for during the last decades of the nineteenth century up to his death in 1909.

Fasting approaches Aschehoug’s economic thought in relation to his Norwegian colleagues, as well as the dominant international economists of the time. This comparison shows a theoretical affiliation with Gustav von Schmoller, in particular, through Aschehoug’s major work ‘Socialøkonomik’, as well as British economist Alfred Marshall’s marginal theory.

Fasting blends a historical account of the dominant economic models of the late 1800s with a review of contemporary theory through recent economic crises. This work argues that Aschehoug’s ‘Socialøkonomik’ is strikingly relevant to a present-day readership, revealing itself as a work which offers real insight into the reasons for economic collapse.  

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

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

Anthem's Travel Classics presents Thomas Holmes' masterpiece of early-twentieth-century social journalism: a quirky, engaging and witty look at London's criminal and social underworld of 1912. Holmes investigates the seedy intentions of the pickpockets, prostitutes, prisoners, drunks and murderers that comprise the capital's criminal element, all of whom he rather tends to admire! A more reflective and progressive theme also runs through this work, as the author considers the serious social problems faced by women, the disabled and the unemployed. Both a thrilling exposé and a considered anthropological review, 'London's Underworld' is driven by the author's conflicting feelings of admiration for the rebellious spirit which frees these criminals from the laws of reserved Victorian Society and also pity for the restless, violent attitudes which leave them stranded there alone. Introduced by a modern luminary, 'London's Underworld' is a revealing look at the crooked past of the great city.

‘National Systems of Innovation’ presents a new perspective on the dynamics of the national and the global economy. Its starting point is that the international competitiveness of nations is founded on innovation. Which role do different parts of the national system play in determining the long-term dynamics of the economy? What is happening to the coherence of national systems of innovation in an era characterised by far-reaching internationalisation and globalisation?

These and other issues are addressed in this volume. Available for the first time in paperback, the book is an invaluable resource for scholars and policy-makers.

Gulf Gothic moves through deep time across languages and borders, presenting haunted, secret-laden narratives that emerge from the gulfs between people all along the Gulf of Mexico and on both sides of the Rio Grande. Collaborating in an interdisciplinary manner, literary and cultural critics Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright chart the Gulf as a unified region and ground zero of North American (and global) transculturation.

The Gulf of Mexico has been inadequately appreciated as the dynamic transnational region that it is (taking in the Gulf states of Mexico and the U.S., as well as western Cuba), a cultural matrix that nourished the spread of maize agriculture and the rise of a two-thousand-year-old literary historical tradition that has responded to traumas of colonial conquest and plantation slavery. In this study, the Gulf signifies metaphorically and symbolically—as undead space of contacts and supposed impasses between peoples—as well as topographically. Its gothic modalities carry an urgent charge that demands to be addressed in holistic form

Gulf Gothic addresses modes of representing all that is blocked from free movement and aspiration. Here, the figure of La Llorona haunts boundary waters and shorelines, voicing much that has been occulted by colonial power and national narrative. La Llorona’s Indigenous prototypes, plantation/hacienda atmospherics, and heated storm patterns show up repeatedly in variations of an originary undeadness unconstrained by attempted quarantines and border walls. The authors turn to cinematic horror and the double gaze of ancient Maya texts, to folk-fable and legal documents and popular song, as well as to works by Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, William Faulkner, Carlos Fuentes, Vicente Riva Palacio, Jesmyn Ward, and Fernanda Melchor, to attend to forces unbound by traditional gothic modalities and their foundational gulfs. 

The main focus of 'The Sexual Imperative in the Novels of Sir Henry Rider Haggard' is Haggard's preoccupation in his fiction with the theme of the sexual imperative and the relationship between his fictional representations and his personal emotional geography and experiences. It illuminates and explores aspects of this theme primarily by detailed examination of ten of his novels but it also demonstrates that identically evolving considerations of the theme are apparent in his contemporary romances. The book fills an important gap in Haggard scholarship which has traditionally tended to focus on his early romances and to centre on their political and psychological resonances. It also contributes to wider current debates on Victorian and turn of the century literature.

The book adopts a chronological framework which spans the entirety of Haggard’s writing career and considers the novels and corresponding romances which he wrote at each stage in his literary development. It considers Haggard’s literary representations in the context of contemporary sexual behaviours and attitudes, and of other contemporary literary representations of sexuality. It notes Haggard’s deployment in his novels of contemporary literary genres, notably those of the Sensation Novel, the New Woman, and later Modernism, and it examines what he contributed to these genres and how his interpretation of them compared to that of his literary contemporaries.

This book traces Haggard's emotional investment in his evolving depictions of the destructive potential for the male of female sexuality and demonstrates that his focus develops, as his writing career progresses, from deeply personal renditions of sexual betrayal towards a proposal that the seeds of moral destruction are an integral part of the sexual imperative. It examines his sustained consideration in his novels of the issues of the position of women and of the marriage question and documents his exploration of whether an unsatisfactory marriage legitimises extra-marital sexual relations. It notes, as a measure of Haggard’s moral progressiveness, that despite his formal need to criticise this behaviour, he is in fact clear that it is both natural and morally irreproachable. The book also examines Haggard’s exploration of the merits of a love which is predominantly spiritual rather than sexual and his consideration of the virtues of sexual renunciation. It relates his treatment of these themes to that of contemporary novelists and spiritualist writers. It documents his final fiction which depicts the inescapable imperatives of the human situation and celebrates the overwhelming validity of sexual passion in a committed relationship. It considers the extent of Haggard’s modernity and proposes that although he remains careful and caveated in his moral statements, and conservative by contemporary literary standards, he does unquestionably endorse self-fulfilment over social duty. The book’s conclusion argues that Haggard’s novels and many of his romances represent a consideration of issues which he saw as at the root of being and that the consistency, balance and open-mindedness with which he pursued them suggest a generally uncredited integrity and weight to his fiction.

British Battles 493–937 is about war. Specifically, it offers solutions to the locations and other problems of battles in Britain between the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons and the age of the Vikings. It locates the victory of Mount Badon in 493 of the Britons over the West Saxons at Braydon, Wiltshire; the battles of the British hero Arthur (of the ‘King Arthur’ legend) in southern Scotland and the borders, with his death in 537 at ‘Camlan’ or Castlesteads, near Carlisle; ‘Degsastan’, the Northumbrian massacre of an allied Scots-Irish army in 603, at Dawyck on the Upper Tweed, Scotland, where a standing stone at Drumelzier is the Stan of the conflict’s ancient name; Maserfelth in 642, where King Oswald of Northumbria was killed and his head and arms nailed up as trophies, will be at Forden (near Welshpool), on the old Roman road into Wales; and Brunanburh of 937, where Athelstan crushed the forces of united Viking-Scots-Strathclyde invaders, at Lanchester in County Durham, above the Brune or River Browney.

The implications of the book are threefold. First, it will mean the rewriting of much early British and Anglo-Saxon history; knowing where battles took place means that we shall understand better the war-aims of those who won or lost them. The second is a benefit for battle archaeologists. They need not waste time seeking swords and spears at traditional locations for these battles, like Badbury in Wiltshire for 493 or Oswestry in Shropshire for 642 or Bromborough in Cheshire for 937 because they would be digging in the wrong place. The third is the indication of a method, as follows.

An analysis of early place-names in Old English or Middle Welsh or other languages lets us pin-point ancient battlefields. It allows us to show that the ‘Legionum Urbs’ of the Roman martyrs Julius and Aaron was surely not Caerleon in South Wales (as often said), but Legorum Urbs or Leicester, which is hence the scene of Britain's earliest Christian martyrdoms. Similarly, the birthplace of St. Patrick can be proved (following suggestions by others) as Bannaventa Tabernae or Banwell, Avon. St. Patrick will have been a Somerset man, brought up on a Roman villa near a low-lying coast open to the Irish pirates who enslaved him. British Battles 493–937 thus indicates techniques whereby future researchers may solve historical problems in Britain and beyond.

'South Asian Media Cultures' is a collection of essays that pulls together field-based audience and textual research in areas such as the politics of new media, contemporary television and film in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and their audiences. Through a careful analysis of the various media cultures and practices from across South Asia, this collection addresses pertinent issues such as how discourses on gender, nationalism, ethnicity and class are being expressed by mainstream media texts across South Asia, and how different groups within the public discern meanings from such discourses.

With this collection, Banaji aims to reduce the reliance on commercial Hindi cinema ('Bollywood') for reference on the politics and history of South Asian Media. Instead, key current research and theoretical debate are presented in an accessible manner. They are organised around three clear themes: 'Audiences, meanings and social contexts', which focuses on the responses of particular social groups to specific media formats, ideas or genres; 'Media Discourse, Identity and Politics', which discusses the complex links between media representations and socio-political identities; and 'Alternative Producers: New Media, Politics and Civic Participation', which describes and assesses the various civic practices and possibilities opened up in South Asia by digital and mobile communications.

‘Psychoanalytic Mythologies’ presents a collection of essays on the theme of what it is to be a human subject in a culture permeated by psychoanalytic imagery. The author disturbs the strongly-held belief of those in thrall to psychoanalysis that it is universally true, and this thesis forms the recurrent motif that binds these essays together. Instead he argues that psychoanalysis functions as something that is only ever locally true. These arguments are elaborated upon in a range of contexts, from night clubs, garages and trains to theme parks, magic circles and yoga, and the different strands are distilled into a cohesive thesis in the definitive final essay ‘Psychoanalytic Myth Today’.

The essays presented here were initially published in scattered newsletters and journals, and were written intermittently in a period stretching back over ten years. Ian Parker has written widely in this area, and these lively and innovative essays taken together form a searing manifesto against the accepted dogmas of psychoanalysis.

CSR and Sustainability promotes the need for social responsibility and sustainability and highlights their link with the big issues of society. It shows how science and positive thinking by humankind can prevent oft-vouched disasters due to human rights violation, global warming, growing income inequality (relative poverty), racism, gender discrimination and continuing absolute poverty. It looks at CSR in the US context and compares it with what has been going on in Europe, as well as elsewhere.

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

‘The Making of the Modern Chinese Navy’ includes 14 historical case studies that help to illuminate a number of special characteristics of the modern-day Chinese navy. The Chinese Navy embodies a number of special features that modern-day Chinese naval officers perhaps take for granted, including a belief in the Mandate of Heaven, tributary system, and the fear of ‘losing face’ either in a diplomatic setting or by risking valuable equipment in battle. Ethnic and language differences, regional loyalties, and political mistrust potentially exacerbate these problems. Special peculiarities include the Mongol dual-officer diarchy that led to the political commissar system utilized by the People’s Liberation Army. Outside influences, such as blockade, sanctions, and embargoes, can exert a profound impact on China, just as foreign intervention or, equally important, a decision not to intervene, can often determine the outcome of major maritime events.

The 14 case studies discuss many of these characteristics, while the Conclusion examines all case studies together and places them in a historical perspective. Do Chinese still worry about ‘face’, and in particular about ‘losing face’? What impact does the Mandate of Heaven have on modern Chinese? Will Han Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait go to war to determine which dynasty should rule all of China? Does the PLAN worry as much about mutiny as earlier dynasties? What is the impact of foreign intervention, foreign decisions not to intervene and secret diplomacy? ‘The Making of the Modern Chinese Navy’assesses which of these historical characteristics and peculiarities are still present in full force in China and which ones may no longer have as great an impact on the contemporary Chinese navy.

This volume of essays combines new analyses of two subjects of ongoing research in the field of humanities: cinema and the visual arts. Originally presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference 2010 in New Orleans, these collected papers have been expanded and extended from their original points of enquiry, and analyse films from the diverse cultural traditions of China, Germany, the United Kingdom, America, Northern Ireland and India. Subjects of examination include China’s ‘Shanghai Express’ and ‘The Goddess’, Fritz Lang’s ‘M’, and two films from the James Bond franchise, ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and ‘Casino Royale’. Other areas of investigation include films focusing on Northern Ireland, the depiction of the Indian film industry through Indian writers, and Hong Kong and East Asian cinema.

The focus of the volume then switches to the visual arts, with an explanation of how the classificatory order for the visual arts and art history has long been rigorous in its demand for juxtapositions and comparisons, followed by an examination of modernist abstract art with a specific analysis of the importance of Gertrude Stein’s still-lifes in ‘Tender Buttons’. Manuel Rivas’ use of cross-cultural textualization in ‘Mujer en el baño’ is explored using the concepts of montage and Benjamin’s dialectical image. Lastly Kara Walker’s controversial art that highlights racial pictography and violent imagery from the antebellum American South comes under close scrutiny.

In recent years growing numbers of investors have been joining the community interested in not only generating financial returns but also creating positive social and environmental value in the world. “The ImpactAssets Handbook for Investors” offers an introductory overview for those interested in investing their capital in a sustainable, responsible and impactful manner.

The handbook offers insights and approaches to developing strategy as well as an understanding of the issues and considerations of impact investors in practice. In addition to discussions of portfolio structure and strategy, the handbook offers an overview of due diligence necessary to assess potential investments, a discussion of communications and performance measurement issues and other factors key to managing capital for multiple returns.

With contributions from some of the field’s leading experts in impact investing, “The ImpactAssets Handbook for Investors” will provide the reader with both broad advice and specific guidance on how to become best positioned to engage in impact investing as an asset owner, both large and small. While not an “answer book,” the handbook offers practical insights and presents critical questions every investor should consider in creating an investment strategy and executing the deployment of investment capital.

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

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

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

This book is an authoritative and radical manifesto for changes that are urgently required in development cooperation. The book predicts that, unless radical steps are taken by the World Bank, the first decade of the century will witness a ever-widening gulf between poor and rich countries.

Jo Ritzen presents a picture of a world at a crossroads. One road leads to substantial ('radical') reform in the rich countries, in combination with a substantial push towards better governance in developing countries. The other leads to further increases in inequality between rich and poor countries. 'Millennium development goals' – such as achieving universal primary education by 2015 or reducing child mortality by two-thirds in 2015 – have had widespread support. They will not be reached if the world follows this road; unfortunately, the signs suggest that it has already started to do so.

'A Chance for the World Bank' provides an overview of the challenges faced by the World Bank, and explores how it has organized itself to accomplish its mission. This book proposes that the World Bank still has a chance to achieve its stated goals; in order to do so, it needs to take a number of radical steps: to create a level playing field in trade for the developing countries; to harmonize aid and save developing countries from the gigantic transaction costs of aid; and to promote governance in developing countries and to reduce rigorously induced corruption by multinationals.

‘Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators’ argues the need to move beyond the monolingual paradigm within Anglophone literary studies. Using Lyotard’s concept of post as the future anterior (back to the future), this book sets up a concept of post-multiculturalism salvaging the elements within multiculturalism that have been forgotten in its contemporary denigration. Gunew attaches this discussion to debates in neo-cosmopolitanism over the last decade, creating a framework for re-evaluating post-multicultural and Indigenous writers in settler colonies such as Canada and Australia. She links these writers with transnational writers across diasporas from Eastern Europe, South-East Asia, China and India to construct a new framework for literary and cultural studies.

This book provides an overview of concepts in the field of literary and cultural neo-cosmopolitanism, demonstrating their usefulness in re-interpreting notions of the spatial and the temporal to create a new cultural politics and ethics that speak to our challenging times. The neo-cosmopolitan debates have shown how we are more connected than ever and how groups and geo-political areas that were overlooked in the past need to be brought to the center of our cultural criticism so that we can engage more ethically and sustainably with global cultures and languages at risk. In her wide-ranging study of world writers, Gunew juxtaposes Christos Tsiolkas, Brian Castro and Kim Scott from Australia with Canadian writers such as Shani Mootoo, Anita Rau Badami and Tomson Highway, connecting them to other Europeans such as Dubravka Ugresic and Herta Müller. [NP] This book analyses diaspora texts within neo-imperial globalization where global English often functions as metonym for Western values. By introducing the acoustic ‘noise’ of multilingualism (accents within writing) in relation to the constitutive instability within monolingual English studies, Gunew shows that within global English diverse forms of ‘englishes’ provide routes to more robust recognition of the significance of other languages that create pluralized perspectives on our social relations in the world.

Australia is the planet’s sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this geography has shaped Australian history and culture, including its literature. Further, it shows how the fluctuating definition of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity. The book links the historical and geographical conditions of islands with their potent role in the imaginaries of European colonisation. It prises apart the tangled web of geography, fantasy, desire and writing that has framed the Western understanding of islands, both their real and material conditions and their symbolic power, from antiquity into globalised modernity. The book also traces how this spatial imaginary has shaped the modern 'man' who is imagined as being the island's mirror. The inter-relationship of the island fantasy, colonial expansion, and the literary construction of place and history, created a new 'man': the dislocated and alienated subject of post-colonial modernity.

This book looks at the contradictory images of islands, from the allure of the desert island as a paradise where the world can be made anew to their roles as prisons, as these ideas are made concrete at moments of British colonialism. It also considers alternatives to viewing islands as objects of possession in the archipelagic visions of island theorists and writers.

It compares the European understandings of the first and last of the new worlds, the Caribbean archipelago and the Australian island continent, to calibrate the different ways these disparate geographies unifed and fractured the concept of the planetary globe. In particular it examines the role of the island in this process, specifically its capacity to figure a 'graspable globe' in the mind.

The book draws on the colonial archive and ranges across Australian literature from the first novel written and published in Australia (by a convict on the island of Tasmania) to both the ancient dreaming and the burgeoning literature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the twenty-first century. It discusses Australian literature in an international context, drawing on the long traditions of literary islands across a range of cultures. The book's approach is theoretical and engages with contemporary philosophy, which uses the island and the archipleago as a key metaphor. It is also historicist and includes considerable original historical research. 

‘Iron Lazar’ is the first English-language biography of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalinist Russia’s leading deputies. With its focus on the political and personal relations of the Stalin group, this groundbreaking text offers a previously inaccessible insight into Kaganovich’s role in shaping policy during the Stalinist era.

The study begins by examining Kaganovich’s early political career and his ascent to power – a feat achieved via a distinguished role in the Civil War, which led to his elevation into the party Secretariat in Moscow. By 1930 he, Stalin and Molotov effectively constituted Russia’s ruling triumvirate, and for a period Kaganovich appeared to be the heir apparent to the Soviet Union. He played a crucial role in enforcing agricultural collectivization, in the reconstruction of Moscow, in railway and industrial administration and in carrying out the Great Terror. A very close associate of Stalin, and a major figure in promoting his cult of celebrity and establishing his dictatorship, Kaganovich subsequently fell out of favour.

Rees’s work strives to examine the personal and political dynamics shaping the Stalinist system. He notes that Kaganovich was a colourful figure – an orator as well as a forceful administrator – and that he was the most prominent Jewish figure in Soviet political life in this era. This unique biography charts the way in which these personal characteristics contributed to the development of the Stalinist system throughout Kaganovich’s career, how he was himself transformed by this experience, and the way in which he subsequently sought to rationalize his role.

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

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

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

Peter Hacker’s Insight and Illusion is a thoroughly comprehensive examination of the evolution of Wittgenstein’s thought from the Tractatus to his later ‘mature’ phase. This is a reprint of the revised and corrected 1989 edition, with a new foreword by Constantine Sandis. Hacker’s book is now widely regarded as the best single volume study covering both the ‘early’ and the ‘later’ Wittgenstein. Until this third edition, the book had been out of print for 25 years.

The portable guide takes the reader through the major themes and concepts in Wittgenstein’s works. In the name of exhaustiveness, these include: the so-called picture theory of meaning; the say/show distinction; the principle of verification; anti-metaphysics; anti-scientism; tautologies; the nature of mathematical propositions; ordinary language and nonsense; the law of the excluded middle; the Augustinian picture of language; knowledge and certainty; explanation and understanding; volition and the will; the relation of meaning to use; ostensive definition; ownership of experience; the first-person pronoun; the inner/outer; philosophical psychology; anti-solipsism; forms of life; the so-called private language argument; the autonomy of grammar; language games; and rule-following.

In so doing, Hacker gives us a picture of Wittgenstein's intellectual development: from his early conception of philosophy (influenced by thinkers as varied as the likes of Schopenhauer, Hertz, Boltzmann, Frege, and Russell), through the ‘middle period’, which began with his return to philosophy in 1929, to his later work—of which Hacker takes the Philosophical Investigations to be his masterpiece.

“Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance” examines expert committees established to provide science advice to multilateral environmental agreements. By focusing on how these institutions are sites of coproduction of knowledge and policy, this work brings to light the politics of science advice and details how these committees are contributing to an emerging global environmental constitutionalism.

Grounded in participant observation, elite interviews and document analysis, “Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance” uses the lenses of the body of experts, body of knowledge, and institutional body to focus on three features of design. Who are the experts being asked to provide advice? What types of knowledge are considered beyond the bounds of the committee and how is this determined? What rules and norms are developed to govern how the committee carries out its work?

The empirical chapters lay out three illustrations: controversy over the continued use of methyl bromide despite it being scheduled for a ban under the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, a series of votes by the Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Review Committee when determining whether the pesticide endosulfan should be banned under the Stockholm Convention on POPs and a decade of institutional innovation in an effort to revamp the provision of science advice to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

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

While Asia's growth record in recent decades is remarkable, it has been marred by rising inequality. Recognizing the potential negative economic, social and political consequences of rising inequality, more and more Asian countries are paying attention to the issue of equity and taking actions to make growth more inclusive. This book puts together papers arising from various studies on inclusive growth and its policy implications, as carried out at the Asian Development Bank. 'Poverty, Inequality, and Inclusive Growth in Asia' looks at recent trends of income and non-income inequalities in developing Asian countries; discusses their underlying driving forces; examines the concept of inclusive growth and its policy ingredients; proposes how inclusive growth can be measured and monitored; and provides in-depth analyses of the key policies of an inclusive growth strategy, including employment, public service delivery, social protection, gender equality, and governance and institutions. The book also presents a set of country studies with rich information on growth, poverty and inequality dynamics and the policy challenges that arise in marching toward inclusive growth in the People's Republic of China, Philippines, and Nepal.

‘Improvisations of Empire’ offers the first extended critical, biographical and historiographical account of the work of Thomas Pringle, a poet and writer who occupies a central place in the cultural imaginary of English-speaking, white South Africans. However, there has been, to date, no single study which attempts to encompass all the aspects of Pringle’s life and work, and, particularly, to examine his poetry in the ‘thick’ context of its different national locations and his importance as a transnational and not merely a local or colonial writer.

Using the methods of close reading, and combining these with an examination of the historical record (much of it archival material unknown to, or ignored by, previous scholarship), ‘Improvisations of Empire’ seeks to understand Pringle’s writing, particularly the poetry, within the layered histories of his Scottish Enlightenment background and his early literary exposure to both Scottish and English Romanticisms. It then traces how these formative influences are refracted, and fractured, by his colonial experiences in the Cape Colony, before undergoing yet another modification during his period of residence in London (1826–1834). It was during this final stage of Pringle’s career that most of his writing was published for the first time, and very little critical attention has been paid either to the retrospective character of these writings, or to how they are inflected by Pringle’s metropolitan status as a prominent abolitionist, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, an increasingly fervid evangelical and a prominent editorial figure in the world of the literary annuals so popular at the time. Matthew Shum additionally argues that, quite apart from his crucial importance to South African literature, Pringle can also be understood as a figure working at a revealing tangent to metropolitan paradigms. The study explores Pringle’s ‘improvisations’ of his imperial identity in various locations and suggests that his writing offers a limit case for mainstream literary paradigms as they press up against unfamiliar and often disturbing colonial conditions.

This book is about how new media, and in particular, digital and social media, has changed the world of sports forever. The way fans receive information, communicate and form communities now predominantly lives online.  

But perhaps even more significant is the evolution of the sports media industry, where digital media has impacted the broader media industry, stimulated new media organisations, changed old media organisations and altered old conventions of journalism in equal measure.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that new media has turned the sports industry on its head. The implications for this are profound – both exciting and disturbing. So too is the impact on the way we form communities, the quality of news created, the way we receive information and prioritise news and content – all fundamental to our democratic processes and social and political lives.

 This study draws on the expertise of academics, scholars, experts and professionals at the forefront of the sports, media, and journalism fields. Calling upon the worldwide appeal of the sporting industry, this book is a prevailing testament to the pure influence of digital media on ALL parts of society.

‘The Anthem Guide to Short Fiction’ contains 20 classic short stories by well-known and respected authors, some of which are rarely anthologized in the contemporary publishing market. Accordingly, this new selection provides a fresh perspective on each author and his or her place in the overarching literary canon, and will offer students both inspiration and guidance when thinking and writing about literature.

The guide offers works by a variety of acclaimed authors, including Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce and Edith Wharton. Features of the guide include individual biographical notes for each writer, a short introduction to his or her short story, and a critical “Thinking About the Story” section for each text – including incisive discussion questions formulated to help students respond to each story insightfully. Similarly, the guide’s creative activities have been devised to engage critical and imaginative thinking in the reader, as well as to offer an understanding of authorship and the creative process. A concise glossary of literary terms, designed for optimal and regular use, is also included.

This book offers a ground-breaking exploration of the aesthetics of poetic freedom. The range is broad, from antiquity to the present and from Europe and the Middle East into the poetry of the English-speaking world. Silent reading is shown as developing for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire into a fashionable way of reading, starting with the invention of the sonnet in the High Middle Ages. The social use of the word “we,” as when a society generalizes about itself, first appears in poetry in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In Goethe’s “Roman Elegies” anachronism becomes a literary device—also, it seems, for the first time—introducing a novel timelessness essential to modern affirmations of infinity.

Revealing questions about the elusiveness of poetic freedom—what does the term actually mean?—are repeatedly tested against the accomplishments of major poets such as Whitman, Dickinson, Rilke, Dante and Virgil, and their public yet intensely private originality. The result is a fresh, and well-nigh revolutionary, way of seeing literary and modern history, or an initiation into the more striking gift of aesthetic freedom.

With the seemingly unshakeable ground of literature having suffered a number of near-fatal hemorrhages due to the changing mediascape and the temblors of 2008 and 2020, the author suggests for the future of literary studies: Not Theory of Literature, but Literature as Theory. Not literary studies as putting on offer familiarity with a series of privileged literary texts and their prized cultural “meaning,” nor transmuting theory into one of those canonical texts, but literary studies as a kind of theoretical orientation, a series of modes of response or ways of doing things.

The external threats for literary study today are easy enough to recognize – the pressure from above exerted by downsizing administrators and neoliberal apologists who see literary study as frivolous at best, dangerous to the university’s new vocational mission at worst. The academic study of literature requires an elegy primarily because its object doesn’t unproblematically exist anymore: which is to say, we have to come to terms with the fact that there is not (and never has been) a way to locate what literature is, or what it can do, without the preexisting condition of a theoretical orientation. Literature as an autonomous object of inquiry is dead. Long live theory.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Western-style playhouses were found in every Indian city. Professional drama troupes held crowds spellbound with their spectacular productions. From this colorful world of entertainment come the autobiographies in this book. The life-stories of a quartet of early Indian actors and poet-playwrights are here translated into English for the first time.

The most famous, Jayshankar Sundari, was a female impersonator of the highest order. Fida Husain Narsi also played women’s parts, until gaining great fame for his role as a Hindu saint. Two others, Narayan Prasad Betab and Radheshyam Kathavachak, wrote landmark dramas that ushered in the mythological genre, intertwining politics and religion with popular performance.

These men were schooled not in the classroom but in large theatrical companies run by Parsi entrepreneurs. Their memoirs, replete with anecdote and humor, offer an unparalleled window onto a vanished world, where India’s late-colonial vernacular culture and early cinema history come alive. From another perspective, these narratives are as significant to the understanding of the nationalist era as the lives of political leaders or social reformers.

This book includes four substantive chapters on the history of the Parsi theatre, debates over autobiography in the Indian context, strategies for reading autobiography in general, and responses to these specific texts. The apparatus, based on the translator’s extensive research, includes notes on personages, performances, texts, vernacular usage, and cultural institutions.

‘Can We Live Forever?’ addresses the modern debate about the Life Extension Project that results from revolutions (actual and predicted) in bio-medicine, transplantation, cosmetic surgery, genetic counseling, stem cell research, cryonics, cloning and so forth that cumulatively promise to deliver eternal life or at least 'prolongevity'. In an engaging and thought-provoking work, the author traces the rise of the Life Extension Project and its claims against an intellectual background of recent analyses of 'waste', sustainable environments and complexity theory.

Although there has been much discussion of increasing life expectancy, this book looks at a range of additional issues: the religious implications of life extension; the psychological consequences, such as ennui; the negative global social and economic factors; the problems of intergenerational justice. The possible benefits and adverse consequences of living forever are fully explored in this illuminating text, offering substance to social scientists working on ageing and demographic change, philosophers interested in questions of continuity and identity, theologians concerned with secular changes in the life course, as well as the general reader.

This fascinating book exposes the movie industry as a key protagonist in the US strategy debate, through the production of films on national security across many genres, from comedy to thriller, from sci-fi to war movies. This timely volume also explores prevailing ideas of the 'threat' to homeland USA that are put forward by the national security network, a threat that is seen as the justification for and legitimization of America's military operations and strategic choices. Valantin reveals how in the last 20 years there has been a consistent collaboration between the US Department of Defense and film studios and enormous contracts have been exchanged between the two industries. This book shows how Hollywood is completely penetrated by the ideological and political thinking of Washington, which in turn appears to be directly inspired by the productions of Hollywood.

For more information please visit the book website:

http://greecesodiousdebt.anthempressblog.com/

Jason Manolopoulos combines his experience of the global financial system, European politics and Greek society to demonstrate how one of the EU’s smaller countries played a catalytic role in a crisis that threatens the future of the euro, and possibly even of the European Union itself.

He explores the historical legacy and psychological biases that have shaped an ongoing drama. While leaders of the European Union criticise ‘the markets’ for destabilizing the single currency, Manolopoulos interrogates the shared beliefs of the EU and the investment banking community – and how they colluded for a decade in the illusion that lending huge sums to peripheral eurozone countries was safe.

Policy and investment errors bear marked similarities with earlier financial crises – in particular the Exchange Rate Mechanism system and the Argentine debt crisis. This inability to learn history’s recent lessons begs fundamental questions of policy making, which this book discusses.

Greek society also comes under scrutiny, as shocking details of a kleptocratic political class and a wasteful public sector are revealed. Manolopoulos traces these developments back to dictatorship and civil war, but argues that there is no excuse for their continuation in a modern democracy.

Ragnar Nurkse (1907-1959) was one of the most important pioneers of development economics, and although his writings have been neglected in recent decades, leading development economists and international organizations such as the United Nations are now turning to Nurkse in search for new inspiration, due to the failure of neoclassical economics to adequately explain the experience of poor and developing countries. Yet Nurkse’s contribution to the field has never before been analysed before at book length.

The present volume, ‘Ragnar Nurkse (1907-2007): Classical Development Economics and its Relevance for Today’, contains a selection of papers that cast new insight on Nurkse’s thought, and discuss his relevance for today. The volume also celebrates the 100th anniversary of this profoundly important thinker’s birth.

'The Hidden Form of Capital' presents evidence from several parts of the changing world about how the realm of the spirit affects the economy. The idea that societies have economic cultures as well as aesthetic, literary, and artistic cultures is well-embedded in a number of major studies attempting to identify the origins of national wealth and progress. This book provides an original contribution to the debate, by discussing the relationship between religion and the economy not via further theoretical speculation, but through the presentation of analytical evidence from real-life case studies in Europe, Asia, Africa, Russia, and the United States.

There is currently a major re-assessment of assumptions about the foundations of societal progress, as the market rationality model is exposed for its moral weaknesses. The emergence of socio-economics as a scholarly field, as well as the embracing of complexity theory and the societal effect in economic analysis, brings the question of cultural effects to the forefront. This collection of studies offers more practical and tangible evidence, especially unique and useful for its comparative aspect. The book skilfully combines this comparative and descriptive character with an accessible writing style intended for a wide audience.

Doctors, engineers, lawyers, architects, designers, managers, artists, scientists, innovators, inventors, farmers and all other professions and walks of life have the immense possibilities of making it big. And such immense possibilities represent in terms of scale, value, excellence, and tremendous impact upon the larger society. However, quite often, it is observed that the efforts and impact of making it big fail to live up to the expectations of self and others and do not take off the way envisaged. 

Everyone has desires. Spiritual leaders too give up the mundane life. However, they carry the deeply rooted desire to attain insights and enlightenment, eventually. Irrespective of what life one leads, one core but common desire is to enjoy the autonomy to make decisions. However, life introduces one to several ups and downs resulting in both successes and failures. Nonetheless, one desires to be happy throughout and enjoy whatever is in possession. Also, one aspires to achieve all that one feels capable of achieving, thus driving oneself to take risks against the opportunities identified. 

In the backdrop, the present book is for every individual who is either an aspiring entrepreneur or serial entrepreneur, irrespective of the domain expertise or industry one represents. The book attempts to focus and address a pressing pain point of entrepreneurs: the pain point happens to be one of the major gaps towards successful and sustainable entrepreneurship in one’s life. 

A strong but subtle factor impacting in this context is the failure to achieve entrepreneurial success through great deals in all stages, at all levels of entrepreneurial journey. The present book attempts to bridge the gap through the power (soft) skill – ‘negotiation’ for entrepreneurs!

There are many books on screenwriting that suggest to writers there are “secrets of Hollywood” and guaranteed formulas for success. The implication is that with the right recipe and a little luck any student can whip out the script that will provide that triumphant red carpet walk toward financial success and global appreciation. It is rare for a book to tell aspiring writers that they may already know the secret of great stories nestled in their own experience: the people they encounter in life, their observations of events, and their personal reactions to them. The intentions of this book is to provide for the creativity writers already have, to help them see the stories waiting to be recognized, recovered, and shaped into the scripts of visual narrative. While the emphasis of this book is on creating scripts intended for production of moving image media, the guide can be adapted to the creativity of various types of storytellers working in a variety of media. One of the needs for art is the mirror, a reflection of human existence and what is glorious, tragic, wonderful, and funny about life. In an age of “post-truth,” where derivative and grotesquely bogus stories are abundant, globally networked, and digitally streamed, this book examines what it means to both artists and audiences when the mirror is consistently distorted, inaccurate, and biased. The book offers a guide for finding authenticity in fictional narrative, regardless of genre or form. The book is intended as a compass for writers to better understand and confront the truths they want to reveal through narrative stories and how to find legitimacy in the fictional characters and situations they create. One element that sets this book apart from others is the use of storyboarding to explain ideas. There are many books that teach fundamentals of writing and producing for the screen, promising the reader great success through formula. This book is a guide for writers in finding their own creative voice.

‘Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich’s “Sakhalin”’ is the first English language translation of the Russian journalist Vlas Doroshevich’s 1903 account of his visit to tsarist Russia’s largest penal colony, Sakhalin, in the north Pacific. Despite the publication of Anton Chekhov’s account of his visit to Sakhalin in 1890, many Russians remained unaware of the brutality and savagery of the 'devil island'. In 1897 Doroshevich, Russia’s most popular journalist, travelled to Sakhalin and spent three months touring the island, interviewing numerous prisoners and officials, and recording his impressions. The feuilletons he wired back to his publishers were eventually collected and published in book form in 1903, under the title 'Sakhalin' (Katorga).

Doroshevich’s book was enormously popular when it first appeared, and it continues to be published in Russia, as a historical record of the striking barbarity of late nineteenth century penal practices. Despite this popularity, it has never before been translated into English, and Doroshevich remains largely unknown outside Russia. This translation introduces English-language readers to an important writer and original stylist who defined journalistic practice during the years leading up to the 1917 Revolution, by way of a book which helps explain the causes for that revolution.

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

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

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

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

Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images argues that imagery of all kinds—from visual icons in social media, advertising, news broadcasting and political campaigns, in architecture and art through to more private realms such as dreams—has become a definitive force in the shaping of contemporary life. It has become a vital part, often a primary medium, in most of the many economies operative within contemporary societies, in commercial exchange, public politics, cultural contestation, and subject formation. They have become, substantially, iconomic. Yet this imagery is generated and flows, accretes, shifts, and swops, runs free or is managed, according to its inherent potentials and limits—that is, for all its immersion in wider economies, however much it saturates them, it is an economy of its own, an iconomy.

Part I traces conceptualizations of links between seeing and planning, images and economies, through Plato’s cave allegory, medieval iconoclasm, Marx’s theories of commodity, and Debord’s spectacle society, up to interpretations of the systemic saturation of contemporary imaginaries by images (mostly visual), ostensive performances, and exhibitionary exchanges deployed through widely shared yet intensely managed screen and surveillance technologies. 

The implicit politics of this economy become explicit in Part II, which explores the iconopolitics of (i) the (mis)management of imagery associated with SARS-CoV-19; (ii) the ubiquity, retreat and possible resurgence of the image regime centered on Donald J. Trump, along with the Biden response; (iii) the nature and impact of the video of the murder of George Floyd; (iv) the similarities and differences between the videos of the beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the killing of George Floyd in 2020; (v) BLM ignition of imagery around intersectional struggle; (vi) the war of images within the current civil war in the United States; (vii) the potentialities for building community while image wars rage; and (viii) the recent rise of “black aesthetics” within predominantly white artworlds. The book concludes with a reflection on usefulness, and the limitations, of iconomic analyses of contemporary societies. Having arrived at the term “iconomy” in the years just prior to 9/11, and tracking its growing relevance since, Smith argues that its study does not require a discipline serving nation state and globalizing capitalism but, instead, a deconstructive interdiscipline that contributes to planetary world-making. 

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

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

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

‘The WTO and its Development Obligation: Prospects for Global Trade’ presents a sound argument in favour of the WTO adhering to its long-standing development obligation. Ezeani goes further than merely highlighting the problems of developing country integration, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the underlying factors that are preventing developing countries from making meaningful gains through participation in global trade. She assesses the effectiveness of current 'development-based' programmes of the WTO as well as the DSB, and stresses the importance for developing countries of recognising the potential benefits of global trade.

Through an account of the beginnings of organised global trade, Ezeani strengthens the case against treating developing countries differently by examining the fundamental constraints of applying early economic principles to the modern environment.

The book is meticulously researched, drawing mainly on archives in the United States and Britain and includes previously unpublished photographs. It is in three parts. Part I begins with a reminder of the early days of American independence and the formation of the new nation and is a useful backdrop to the rest of the book. This was a period of rapid growth which saw the creation and development of the State Department and the Consular Service. Accounts are given of the frequent legislative changes, the major weaknesses of the early Consular Service, the Spoils System which ensured that political allies or presidential fundraisers were appointed as consuls, the calls for reform, how the Consular Service lost its separate identity in 1924 when it merged with the Diplomatic Service to form the unified Foreign Service, and the amalgamation of the State Department and the Foreign Service in 1954.

Parts II and III form the major section of the book. Part II concentrates on the consulates and the people who served in them in Britain and pre-independence Ireland and is an overview of the American consular presence from 1790 to the present day. Topics covered include the wide-ranging extent of the consular network, British nationals who served as American consuls, consular families, office accommodation, furnishings and equipment of consulates, espionage activities conducted by the consuls in Britain during the American Civil War, how Texas and Hawaii had consulates in Britain before they became States of the Union, inspections of consulates, the dangers faced by consuls during the First and Second World War blitzes, and the lengthy attempts by women to become consuls and diplomats.

Part III consists of detailed histories of consulates in fifteen towns. These include the dates on which the offices were operational, short biographies of staff who served in them and an indication of their routine activities, including a few noteworthy incidents or highlights. The accounts are of varying length reflecting the duration of the consulates’ presence. The extent and scale of the former consular network can be appreciated from the list of locations and categories of consular offices shown in the Appendix. The book concludes with a review of how the consular function has evolved and kept pace with changing demands and needs. Although the Spoils System now exists for only one consular appointment, at a post which is not in the UK but is within the London embassy’s remit, it still thrives in those embassies where career consuls and diplomats report to an ambassador who may be a political appointee. This is particularly the case in a number of European posts.

There is no lack of sensationalism in the period of Irish history 1800–1922. Large dramas played themselves out in small places. The last subsistence crisis of Europe would be enough to justify this judgement, but there is more: endemic levels of violence, the formation of the first state police force in the history of Britain, republican militancy, tithe and land wars, socialist protest, armed insurrection, war and civil war pockmark the era. The history of Ireland, particularly in its relationship to the imperial power of Britain, has been fraught to say the least. The so-called ‘Pax Britannica’ never became a genuine ‘Pax Hibernia’.

However, such an account needs to be balanced against other stories that emerge from the period. Ireland had its own ‘Victorian’ era and a more benign revolution in social mores, technology, communication and transport. Many features of twentieth-century political and social practice were then established: a system of public health, factory inspection, primary education, ordnance survey mapping, civic improvement and census taking. Sporting, musical and cultural traditions knew an intense phase of development. Moreover, Irish leaders and many of the middle-classes adapted to the Union’s constitutional arrangements and successfully exploited it to their advantage. In 1922, both north and south Ireland did inherit a certain institutional stability from the Union era.

Both of these stories need to be told together to reflect the recent scholarship on all areas of modern Irish history. This book is a historiographical synthesis, providing readers with an understanding of the nature of current arguments and debates about a past that is neither dead nor, in many ways, even past.

This new study looks at the crucial role played by audiovisual media in Hindu cultural nationalism. The application of new media technology in the context of the construction of 'Indianness' by Hindutva's main political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Party of the Indian People, BJP), is a fascinating example of in-house indoctrination and emotive mobilization that demands critical attention. At a time when public attention is focused on transnational, and mostly Islamicist, movements, 'Empowering Visions' argues that both transnationalism and nationalism have to be treated with equal attention, and to some extent ought to be seen as intertwined processes. This book is unique in its presentation and discussion of profound ethnographic data through interviews with a variety of spokesmen for the Hindutva movement. It also offers an in-depth analysis of visual and audiovisual material that has so far been unrecognized and unexplored in scholarly works.

The end of the Cold War brought new opportunities to explore the long tradition and myriad uses of humour through over two centuries of Russian literature and culture. 'Reflective Laughter' is the first book devoted to an overview of this subject. Bringing together contributions from a number of distinguished scholars from Russia, Europe and North America, this volume ranges from the classics of nineteenth-century literature through to the intellectual and popular comedic culture, both state-sponsored and official, of the twentieth-century, taking in journalism, propaganda, scholarly discourse, jokes, films and television. In doing so, it explores how our understanding remains distorted by the polarization of the East and West during the Cold War.

This comprehensive and entertaining book will be of relevance to undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Russian and comparative literature and in cultural studies, as well as a broader audience.

How much, and under what conditions, can the European Union affect democratization and democratic consolidation in prospective member states? What mechanisms does the EU employ to influence reforms in countries emerging from authoritarian rule? Focusing on Albania and Macedonia, two postcommunist countries with a legacy of internal conflict, “Conditioning Democratization” analyzes the relationship between EU accession conditionality and institutional reforms. It focuses on four sectors of reform that are often overlooked in other studies: constitutions, asylum, local decentralization and the judiciary system.

The volume critically reviews the theory of “consociational democracy,” often considered the key to stabilizing deeply divided countries, and reapplies it to the supranational institution of the European Union. In articulate, accessible prose, Ridvan Peshkopia builds on examples from multiple sectors in multiple countries to reconceptualize this theory and show that the EU can indeed use membership conditions as a tool to encourage and direct reform.

This book assesses the extent of the authority that the Organisation of American States holds over the key issues confronting its member states. It explores the extent and significance of the transformation of the OAS since 1991: its roots, the reasons for and extent of its emergence, and the role that the organisation currently plays in the promotion of regional governance in the two key issue-areas of security and the defense and promotion of democratic norms and principles of good governance. By assessing where the OAS has succeeded and failed, Horwitz provides an in-depth explanation of how cooperation and consensus works in the Inter-American system.

This study reports on indications that the OAS is looking for ways to act multilaterally in certain security issues, for instance trying to develop a drug regime. The OAS is also actively defending and promoting democratic norms and rules. Presently, the Western Hemisphere is at a crossroads and it is too soon to tell whether the OAS will adapt and succeed or whether the efforts to integrate OAS member states through specific common security policies and the democracy paradigm will add to the list of previous regional integration failures.

This book is an important contribution to the debate on the role of International Organisations in shaping the Inter-American system. By looking at specific cases such as the defence of democracy, where the OAS is working through specific agencies and promoting cooperation and consensus, we are able to discern the successes and failures of the OAS.

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

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

Advanced study in the humanities and social sciences discloses a deep ambivalence about Theory. Structurally, of course, the professionalization of young academics is approaching extinction. There are fewer and fewer secure jobs in academia, and thus fewer and fewer students embarking upon advanced study, and, in turn, fewer and fewer programs educating these students. What is offered the remaining students is instructive. Notably, students are expected by their future colleagues to be familiar with, maybe even conversant in Theory, but the structural logic of austerity prompts educators to wonder whether instruction in Theory is an efficient use of dwindling resources, especially now that academic publishing (with important exceptions) behaves as though this future, like the “last” wormhole, is collapsing. Given the Faustian articulation of publishing and promotion can advanced study in the humanities and social sciences even be justified today? Paradoxically, students are still expected to know what is less and less on offer. How is Theory to be “handled” (fingered, worked with, fashioned) under such circumstances?

A reading of Theory that in tracing when and where Theory arises in the event of reading proposes how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today. Arguing against those who propose to avoid Theory in the name of its putative obsolescence, this text sets out to challenge two aspects of this avoidance. On the one hand, Theory has been set aside in the name of identity politics, that is, the proposition that its intellectual pertinence has been overshadowed by a sense of political urgency construed as at odds with Theory. Theory itself has assumed an identity, a profile. On the other hand, implicit within the avoidance of Theory is a concept of “context” that calls for reflection. Resisting the tendency to treat context as either negligible or obvious, this text sets out to trace, in the when and where of Theory, the rudiments of a “sociographic” (think “historiographic”) account of context. In relation to it, the reading that is Theory can be usefully situated as part of a politics of higher education in the era of the global crisis of the university.

This argument is advanced through a series of readings that produce eccentric, sociographic accounts of important (some quite unusual) texts or performances of Theory. As such they enact an attention to reading that is advanced as an instance of “offering” as called for in the title.

The memoir Academia, Chernobyl, Expeditions and The Greeks: A Research Psychologist on the Move recounts memorable experiences over the course of the author’s career as an academic psychologist engaged in research on stress and coping in extreme environments. Throughout the memoir, the author presents short summaries of her research methods and findings; however, the focus of the book is on her personal experiences – the events, people, and the environment with its natural beauty or devastation that she encountered while conducting this research.

There is an array of events, some quite unique, that are detailed in the book, starting with Academia – challenges of teaching a psychology course at an American army base in Orleans, France; completing a doctoral degree at the University of Maryland while raising a family; academic activities and a 1972 sex discrimination complaint against Rutgers University, one of the first cases in the country following the passage of the Federal Title IX civil rights law; initial research as an assistant professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, including studies of Holocaust survivors and their families, and Vietnam nurses; The Russian Drama – continuing research on stress and coping through four trips to the Soviet Union/Russia during a period when an entire country disappeared and a new one was formed (travel to Chernobyl only six years after the disaster, Magadan in Siberia where the major gulags were/are located) and her sometimes rather unbelievable experiences during that time; Expedition Adventures as an analog for long-duration planetary missions – studies of single and mixed gender national and international civilian and military polar expedition teams to simulate aspects of long-duration lunar and Mars missions, studied on-site in the Canadian Nunavut Territories and during three trips to Danish military stations in Greenland; Greece Disaster Connections – psychosocial training workshops for disaster response and research on the aftermath of disasters through collaboration with colleagues from Athens and Cairo. The author’s activities with the NASA Human Research Program over the years also is summarized.

This book constructs an anthropological history of a subaltern religious formation, Mahima Dharma of Orissa, a large province in eastern India. Tracking the contingent making of a critical community over a hundred and forty year period, Religion, Law and Power explores the interplay of distinct expressions of time and history, innovative reformulations of caste and Hinduism and distinct engagements with state and nation. This serves to unravel the wider entanglements of religion, history, law, modernity and power. Ishita Banerjee-Dube provides a situated and critical analysis of the different trajectories of Mahima Dharma, bringing to the fore a clutch of empirical and theoretical issues. Understandings of the articulation and institutionalization of a subaltern religious order are not marked off from, but reveal the techniques and textures of, the modern state and dominant Hinduism. Such moves foreground subaltern and ascetic expressions and negotiations of modernity in institutional and everyday arenas, and further question widespread propositions of a singular Hinduism, especially in India today. ‘Religion, Law and Power’ should be of interest to historians, anthropologists and religious studies scholars as well as general readers interested in religion, politics, community and state. It will be of particular interest to students of South Asia concerned with Hinduism and religious sects, history and law, and power and resistance.

How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. Adopting a historical approach, Dr Chang finds that the economic evolution of now-developed countries differed dramatically from the procedures that they now recommend to poorer nations. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing counties from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used. This book is the winner of the 2003 Myrdal Prize, European Association of Evolutionary Political Economy.

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

‘The Ocean of God’conveys the proposition that the future of religions, if they will not want to contribute to the destruction of humanity, will become transreligious. Based on the assumption that the spiritual impulse of humanity cannot simply be eradicated, religiosity will persist in transreligious forms, as secularizations, naturalizations and transhumanist dreams only envision such transformations, but fall short in their ability to replace the force of spirituality to further civilized peace of human existence on Earth and its future in evolutionary, ecological and cosmological dimensions. In relating the contributions of religious pluralism to the concept of the unity of religions, which have arisen in this “new axial age” forovercoming the checkered history of religions in furthering peace, the program of a transreligious discourse, based on the insight of the fundamental relativity of (religious) truth and the special contributions of process philosophy and theology as well as the Bahá'í universe of thought, analyses and projects a new religiosity or spirit enabling religions to overcome their deepest motives of strife and warfare.

‘The Ocean of God’is the presentation of the power to envision and prepare for meaningful prospects regarding the future of religions, neither succumbing to their mere reduction to prophecies of disappearance, nor binding us to past appearances that have contributed to the current predicaments of humanity. With new instruments of analysis of the aporias of the plurality and unity of religions, namely, negotiations of the concept of “multiplicity” and its application to a pluralism of pluralisms and the differentiation between a horizontal (synchronic) and vertical (diachronic) pluralism as well as multiple world theories, it wants to demonstrate the potential to cope with the complex incommensurabilities of plurality of worldviews and their peaceful coinherence in temporal and spatial differentiation.

‘The Ocean of God’ expands the philosophical and religious discussion on multiplicity and unity to the ecological embeddedness, evolutionary relativity and the cosmological magnitude of the human story. With the less known minority voices such as process philosophy and theology as well as the new axial perspective of the Bahá'í religion, it situates humanity in cosmological patterns of becoming instead of fixed formations, of mutuality instead of external plurality, of relationality instead of reductionisms, of processuality instead of fixations on either past sedimentations or apocalyptic fatalisms. In the end stands the thesis that the future of religion will be transreligious, or there will not be either a humanity entertaining religion or a humanity entertained by the universe.

Contemporary understandings of inter-generational relations assume that the balance of power has shifted from adults towards children in recent years. The rise of children’s rights, the trend towards more child centred pedagogies and practices within schools and the incorporation of children within a global free market as consumers have all been interpreted as the loss of adult power and the consequent growth of kid power. 

This book critically examines these ideas and reframes the zero-sum conceptions of power implicit within these assumptions. It draws on Lukes’ three dimensions of power and Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge in advancing the view that kid power is inter-generational, multi-dimensional and distributed variably across the child population. The book illustrates this theory through selected themes, including children’s political activism with respect to climate change, the varied roles that children play within their families as mediators, the involvement of children in research and the rise of digital kid power. 

In a post-script, the theory of kid power within the current context of the global Covid-19 pandemic is examined. This final part of the book questions what the impact of the virus will be on the different manifestations of kid power and considers the implications of lockdowns and potential long-term social distancing measures for inequalities, inter-generational relations and our interpretation of kid power.

The Insider’s Secrets to Finding Your School Leadership Job: This practical 125-page self-help professional guide coaches school and district leadership candidates through the hiring process for their dream jobs in public education. It delves into the fabric of how the process really works from the inside. Every aspect of being a candidate is strategic. INSIDER’S SECRETS offers and instructs the reader to embrace a core of job-seeking strategies, including creating a resume that captures attention and interviewing tactics, that when applied will get you the job.

With fifty years of award-winning service as a public school educator, spanning school districts considered as high needs to those of high wealth, Dr. Laurence Aronstein has hired over a thousand school leaders and teachers in one of the most competitive and highest-paying regions in the country. This book is targeted at professionals who are school leaders and aspiring leaders. Some might be nearing the end of their graduate studies in school leadership certification or sitting in central office and school leaders who are seeking promotion or positions that pay better or classroom teachers looking to land their entry-level leadership positions.

The reader will find authentic personal stories which are written by real educators in their own words. These accounts are designed to personalize the journeys of these educators as illustrative successful examples of the strategies that are described in this book.

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

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

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

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

Have neoliberal policies truly yielded beneficial effects for India? ‘Two Decades of Market Reform in India’ presents a collection of essays that challenge the conventional wisdom of Indian market reforms, examining the effects of neoliberal policies enacted by the Indian government and exploding the myths that surround them.

The volume addresses three key areas. Firstly, it investigates how the high growth rate of the Indian economy has made it uneven, vulnerable and liable to poor employment generation and agrarian crises. The text refutes the hypothesis that growth in India has been driven by domestic factors, and argues against the notion that the Indian economy has remained unaffected by the global economic meltdown. The volume also investigates the reduced demand for food grain during the reform period, questioning whether it was indeed a result of increased income, as suggested by the government, or rather a consequence of increasing poverty and agrarian crisis. [NP]Secondly, the text counters the neoliberal myth that a fiscal deficit is essentially bad, and examines how the government’s focus on preventing a deficit caused a large-scale decline in development expenditures, which in turn had a negative impact on the well-being of the poor. Finally, the volume also argues that there is no evidence that supports denationalization as an effective way to reduce fiscal deficit, as the public sector, it argues, is not necessarily less efficient than the private sector.

Striving to hold India’s market reforms – and those responsible for their implementation – to account, ‘Two Decades of Market Reform in India’ bravely shines a light on the true implications of India’s neoliberal governmental policies. With its rich and insightful analysis, it provides a revealing indication of how policy reform since 1991 has, at times, detrimentally affected the Indian populace, and will serve as an invaluable resource for students, professionals, activists and policymakers interested in the socioeconomic future of the country. 

Multiculturalism has been a topic of scholarly exploration for almost fifty years. Most recently, these explorations have sought to respond to growing public sentiment that the multicultural ideal, borne out of Western liberalism, has failed. Indeed, ‘multiculturalism is dead’ has been a popular catch cry in Anglo- and Western-European countries for the past decade. Significantly, the continued discussion about the success or otherwise of multiculturalism registers the topic as alive as ever (albeit in a mode of crisis) and one that shows no signs of disappearing.

There are currently two main scholarly approaches to the so-called crisis of multiculturalism. The first approach retains the importance of multiculturalism by inflating and promoting its positive attributes. The second approach problematizes multiculturalism by retexturing its meaning and attempting to reconnect its political/theoretical domain with its ordinary manifestations. In some instances, the second approach renounces the concept of multiculturalism altogether, positioning it as a past phenomenon. Both approaches frequently mirror broader trends in cultural studies and artistic domains by turning to ‘the everyday’, using on-the-ground experiences as a tool to redefine the meaning of multiculturalism. But what work is done in the name of the everyday? Is ‘the everyday’ really a sanctioned, authentic space where cultural difference exists beyond the State? These are questions that neither approach takes seriously nor appropriately addresses. 

This modern book addresses this oversight by taking the everyday of everyday multiculturalism to task and doing so via the increasingly popular and everyday medium: digital storytelling. The ‘digital’ is an important node of analysis, not only because it has so far been overlooked in studies of everyday multiculturalism, but because its immateriality often affords it a distance from critical analyses pertaining to material effects. This book forefronts the materiality of digital storytelling by closely considering how the genre enables racialization to manifest at the level of the body. How does the genre compel the creators of digital stories to embody and/or reject racialized structures associated with concepts of multiculturalism? What do these stories tell us about the way multiculturalism is mediated and, importantly, how it might be re-mediated?

As we enter an era of unprecedented global mobility, discussions pertaining to cultural difference and the systems used to negotiate it become more frequent and more complex. This book makes a timely intervention into these discussions to both consolidate and reimagine the rocky terrain of multiculturalism, providing a valuable resource for scholars in cultural studies, media and internet studies, and ethnic and race studies. Additionally, the book provides a foundation for rethinking digital narrative production pertaining to cultural difference, giving it a practical purpose for educators and digital practitioners alike.