Anthem Press

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.

Down the ages warriors have told the stories about their powers and their deeds. And some of their stories have made it into print––those of Black Elk, a Sioux shaman; Two Leggings and Plenty Coups, Crow Indians; Wolf Chief, the eagle hunter; Tukup and Tariri, shrinkers of heads; and others from North America, New Guinea, the island of Alor, the highlands of Luzon and even a Bedouin.

H. David Brumble’s ‘Street-Gang and Tribal-Warrior Autobiographies’ introduces readers to all these warrior autobiographies—and to the memoirs of warriors who live just down the block: Carl Joyeaux’s ‘Out of the Burning’, Colton Simpson’s ‘Inside the Crips’, Nathan McCall’s ‘Makes Me Wanna Holler’ and Sanyika Shakur’s ‘Monster’. Gangbangers, Brumble argues, have told life stories that are eerily like the life stories that come to us from warrior tribes. He suggests that gangbangers were so alienated from the larger society that they reinvented something very similar to the tribal-warrior cultures right in the asphalt heart of American cities.

Grisly, probing and resonant with the voices of generations of fighters, ‘Street-Gang and Tribal-Warrior Autobiographies’ is an unsettling work of cross-disciplinary scholarship.

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.

The diverse essays in this book reflect Jonathan Steinberg’s methodological pluralism and insatiable curiosity for historical questions which cross disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Animating students, colleagues, friends and wider audiences with his enthusiasm for ‘thinking about the past’ was his vocation, one that he pursued with unmatched enthusiasm. Through this collection of essays, the book hopes to convey something of the intellectual range, analytical purchase and moral purpose of his historical writing and teaching.

One feature of Steinberg’s inspiring and charismatic lectures was his unique ability to combine an analysis – always fresh, never pre-cooked – of big historical structures and trends with an acute awareness of the importance of individual personalities. Jonathan Steinberg also believed in contingency, the importance of chance, and was keen to reject any form of historical determinism. The third salient feature of his work was his sense of moral purpose. He understood history as a hermeneutic science and was appropriately cautious about the epistemological status of historical claims, but he nevertheless saw the correctness of historical arguments and the probity of historical claims to be moral as well as empirical questions. His ethical sensibilities, his openness to interdisciplinary work and the humane and nuanced understanding of human motivation equipped him to tackle some of the most difficult subjects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history.

“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.

This book re-appraises the concept and utility of state-funded, multi-platform international broadcasting as an instrument of statecraft, which offers cultural representation with the political purpose of contesting relations of power. This at a time when issues of transnational media, the credibility of news and the perils of disinformation and information warfare, figure worryingly in public discourse. The book reflects the perspective of middle power Australia, the circumstances and options of which differ from a great power. It dissects and evaluates the political purpose and efficacy of international broadcasting, its means as an instrument of inter-cultural communication and the variables that enable or impede its effectiveness. The author draws both on extensive scholarly research and his extensive professional experience in journalism, international broadcasting and media management in Australia and internationally.

Heriot proposes a model for the strategic analysis, application, organisational design and operation of multi-platform international broadcasting. Necessarily, the model is informed by an analysis that situates international broadcasting in relation to contemporary theories of soft/hard/smart power projection and inter-cultural communication. He applies the model to the contentious political history and performance of Australia’s international broadcaster, Radio Australia, during the late Cold War decades of the twentieth century and asserts the relevance of this approach to an increasingly media-dense – though asymmetric – international environment. The model eschews general or coded descriptions of purpose and identifies six specific functions appropriate to the circumstances and imperatives of Australia as a resident power in the Indo-Pacific region.

The flawed success of Radio Australia during the later years of the Cold War arose from the interaction of a broad range of external and internal variables to which it was exposed. These included geostrategic and national political factors; the formal prerogatives and constraints of the broadcaster’s mandate in pursuing defined objectives; institutional relationships across government; Radio Australia’s programming or editorial outlook, which determined information agendas and framed the coverage of issues; the production norms and socio-linguistic processes involved with inter-cultural communication; resource constraints and the effect of work design on the character and performance of the broadcaster; and the management of professional and cultural biases (including boundary work demarcations and in-group/out-group rivalry). 

Glimpsing an elderly man leading his blind daughter on a pilgrimage, Junoshin Kakiri, a ‘ronin’ or freelance samurai, swiftly kills him with his sword. Asked why he murdered such an innocent, Junoshin shares his concerns about the growing ‘Harahuhi Tou’ (Belly-shaking Party) cult to which the man was devoted, a fear which rapidly spreads through the Kuroae clan.

Alarmed by the cult, Shuzen Oura, the warlike leader of half this kingdom, soon hires Junoshin to rescue the Kuroae from the Harahuhi Tou but his studious power rival, Tatewaki Naito, cunningly pays the mercenary samurai to usurp Oura on his behalf.

Set in Edo-period Japan, ‘Punk Samurai Slash Down’ follows the power struggles which entangle Junoshin within the Kuroae clan, polarizing the kingdom between an academic leader unable to fight and an unlearned martial arts expert. Machida’s novel adopts a unique and arresting style, combining an often unconcerned approach to violent action with slapstick humour.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

This volume addresses, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the philosophical question of how to understand other cultures. In so doing, it brings into discussion Wittgensteinian and other cultural philosophical traditions, stemming notably from the West African Yoruba community, Japan, China, and India. The book is therefore not just about intercultural understanding, but also brings together, under the umbrella of Wittgensteinian philosophy, a plurality of cultural voices and philosophical cultures, and sets out to develop an approach to the question of intercultural understanding that emphasises the connection between its epistemological, ethical and political aspects. 

We propose that the Wittgensteinian tradition – spanning not only Wittgenstein’s own corpus but also the work of other prominent and up-and-coming philosophers directly influenced by Wittgenstein – is ideally suited to this task, insofar as it is already fully versant with the two central notions at play: the notion of culture and that of understanding. 

The book is divided into two parts, each of which includes six papers. Part I presents a series of new proposals on how best to model intercultural understanding. Part II examines a new set of challenges to intercultural understanding, stemming from relativism, the philosophy of disagreement and the problem of cultural othering, amongst others. The contributions to this volume build on a wealth of Wittgensteinian strategies and methodologies to develop an imaginative, fresh portfolio of philosophical responses to the intercultural question, as well as strategies for addressing the special challenges it poses.

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.

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/

‘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.

‘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.”

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Raymond Aron is an exceptional figure among twentieth-century sociological and political thinkers. The book focuses on the sociological work of this author of the century, who analyzed his age both in its grand-scale political and socio-economic traits and in the complex social ramifications of its day-to-day life.

Aron experts from a total of seven countries examine Aron’s sociology in detail starting with his road from philosophy to sociology not least under the impression of the Great Depression and its aftermath, especially the rise of National Socialism in Germany. His epistemological studies on the limits of objective knowledge in history and the social sciences in which he moves away from Durkheim's approach and instead adopts Max Weber's sociology of understanding are analysed. This acknowledgment of the limits of knowledge laid the foundations for Aron’s liberalism and humanism. His sociology of industrial society as an economy of economic growth in its market economy and planned economy versions, its social stratification, his criticism of the Marxist concept of social class, the structure of the ruling elites and the pluralistic and one-party, totalitarian political regimes are presented, as is Aron's analysis of the dialectic of modern society between the idea of equality and the authority structures in the state and the economic process. This is accompanied by Aron's lifelong criticism of those intellectuals above all in the pluralist and liberal democracies who hope that a messianic ideology will abolish all social contradictions. Aron’s sociology of international relations in the age of industrial society and globalization, which for Aron brought about the dawn of universal history, complete the overview of Raymond Aron's sociological work.

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.

William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake’s wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early works, and illuminates the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of philosophizing. Blake’s poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with eighteenth-century natural philosophical debates concerning the properties of the physical world, the nature of the soul, and God’s relationship to the material universe. This book traces the history of these debates, and examines images and ideas in Blake’s illuminated books that mark the development of the monist pantheism in his early works, which contend that every material thing is in its essence God, to the idealism of his later period, which casts the natural world as degenerate and illusory. The book argues that Blake’s philosophical thought was not as monolithic as has been previously characterized, and that his deepening engagement with late eighteenth-century vitalist life sciences, including studies of the asexual propagation of the marine polyp, marks his metaphysical turn. 

In contrast to the vast body of scholarship that emphasizes Blake’s early religious and political positions, William Blake as Natural Philosopher draws out the metaphysics underlying his commitments. In so doing, the book demonstrates that pantheism is important because it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of all material objects – not just humans – which in turn spurns hierarchical power structures. If everything is alive and essentially divine, Blake’s early work implies, then everything is worthy of respect and capable of giving and receiving infinite delight. Therefore, one should imaginatively and joyfully immerse oneself in the community of other beings in which one is already enmeshed. Often in the works discussed in this book, Blake offers negative examples to suggest his moral philosophy; he dramatizes the disastrous individual and social consequences of humans behaving as if God were a transcendent, immaterial, nonhuman demiurge, and as if they were separate from and ontologically superior to the degraded material universe that they see as composed of inert, lifeless atoms. 

William Blake as Natural Philosopher traces the evolution of eighteenth-century debates over the vitalist qualities of life and the nature of the soul both in the United Kingdom and on the continent, devoting significant attention to the natural philosophy of Newton, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Buffon, La Mettrie, Hume, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and many others. 

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.  

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.

‘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.

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

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

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

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.

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. 

This book explores the importance of sympathy as a central idea behind Victorian fiction, and an animating principle of novel reading generally. Sympathy, Brigid Lowe argues, deserves a much more important role as both a subject and a guiding principle for literary criticism.

Over the past thirty years, much literary theory has approached literature in general, and Victorian fiction in particular, in a spirit of suspicion. It has tried to purge criticism of the human subject, and of that distinctively human faculty, sympathy. Reading in a contrary, sympathetic mode, Lowe turns the tables on theoretical orthodoxy by submitting some of its central premises to the sympathetic suggestions of novels by Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte Yonge and Dinah Craik. Their explorations of such diverse issues as history, imagination, individual rights, family, and social responsibility, highlight sympathy as a cornerstone of human nature and humane conduct. Lowe argues that not only literary theory, but our culture more generally, would greatly profit by opening itself up to a sympathetic exchange of ideas with another age, and giving Victorian intimations of sympathy a sympathetic hearing.

Lowe’s exploration of sympathy as part of the dynamics of reading will be of interest to academics and students working on fiction in all periods, and especially to those concerned with aesthetic and critical theory. Her investigation of the role of sympathy in a range of nineteenth-century cultural debates, in particular in relation to gender and the family, should also interest cultural historians. The engaging argumentative momentum of ‘Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy’ will appeal to anyone interested in why we do, and should, go on reading Victorian fiction.

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.

’Transnational Crimes in the Americas’ emphasizes the importance of working within public, international organizations to combat transnational crimes. It documents the role of international institutions within the Americas to form a united effort against the proliferation of illicit drugs, human trafficking, weapons trafficking, money laundering and terrorism. Selected nation-states and regions in the Western Hemisphere are highlighted to illustrate how individual countries have tried a domestic policy of interdiction and failed to curtail transnational organized crime. Whether a nation is struggling to maintain public confidence in its institutions, or has substantial resources to combat crime beyond its jurisdiction, transnational crimes present a formidable challenge in the region.

Marshall Lloyd argues in ‘Transnational Crimes in the Americas’ that a regional response is the most viable means to combat transnational crimes. First, he demonstrates that the current Organization of American States (OAS) has led the way to orchestrate a united front against transnational crimes, adapting, modifying and expanding the mission of its existing organs. Moreover, the OAS has achieved some success by incorporating a sustainability model to combat illicit drugs among rural farmers. The analysis indicates that despite financial and institutional obstacles, the organization’s stainability programmes show promise in the global effort to combat drug trafficking in the Americas. 

Finally, Lloyd suggests the formation of a regional criminal court to prosecute the more egregious criminal organizations. Establishing an Inter-American Court of Criminal Justice requires some intrusion upon the sovereign powers of OAS members. Unlike the International Court of Criminal Justice, the jurisdiction of a regional tribunal is well established by existing agreements (both international and regional) that have defined transnational crimes discussed in the book. His ideas are timely, thought-provoking ideas that will have a compelling impact on legal and policy decisions about the role of the OAS and other regional organizations to combat what legal scholars have acknowledged is a crisis among all nation-states.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

Nikolai Gretsch's Travel Letters is a fully translated English edition of a three-volume account published by Nikolai Gretsch (1787–1867) in Russian in 1839.  In the original Russian, Gretsch describes his travels in post-Napoleonic England, France, and Germany in 1837 at the behest of the Russian Empire.  

Gretsch had been asked to travel into Western Europe to examine the educational systems and report his findings to the Russian government.  However, he was more than just a functionary.  He was a journalist, novelist, and philologist.  For nearly three decades, he published a journal called Son of the Fatherland, and he was able to convince many influential Russian thinkers of the time to contribute to the periodical.  Later, he would publish The Reader’s Library and then The Northern Bee.  The former was a short-lived magazine, but the latter was a newspaper that remained in circulation for almost three decades.  As these accomplishments suggest, Gretsch was an intellectual—a person who looked beyond the surface-level of his existence to seek deeper meaning.  

In consequence, as he travelled through England, France, and Germany, his sharp mind absorbed far more than just the details of the educational systems he had been sent to investigate.  He noticed the cultural norms in his surroundings, the history of each country, and the personal experiences of the people he met.  When he returned to Russia, Gretsch assembled his entertaining and often humorous personal observations into the three-volume edition that was published in St. Petersburg in 1839 — not long after Napoleon’s final defeat.  His astute observations provide a rich contemporary resource for information about the countries he visited.  The observations are all the more relevant since they come from the viewpoint of an outsider.  Additionally, as a result of his government position, Gretsch was able to move in social circles that would have been closed to many other people.  In England, he once found himself in the same room with the future Queen Victoria, for example, and in France, he had lunch with Victor Hugo.  Given the new historicist slant of modern literary and cultural studies, Gretsch’s observations offer a treasure-trove of contextual information that will be valuable to history and literature scholars as well as to general readers interested in cultural interactions during the nineteenth century.  This narrative has never before been translated into English in its entirety. 

'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.

This book seeks to identify the main threads of a resolutely complex course of thought which has contributed greatly to sociology. Although he founded no “school,” Raymond Boudon certainly made original contributions to the discipline in his own time, including his theory of rationality, his interpretation of the work of the founders of sociology, and his explanation of educational inequalities. He also presented convincing arguments about how the overly narrow utilitarianism of mainstream economists was incomplete and betrayed major theoretical gaps. It is true in any case that his thought laid the groundwork for many theoretical and empirical social studies. Through an analysis of the most important parts of this thought, each of the chapters will not merely demonstrate the scientific rigor which can be associated to his work, but also show how it remains relevant to our understanding of contemporary society and how it can hence be used for future research projects.

There can be no doubt, Boudon’s thought has for various reasons undergone new assessments. Chapters included in this book hence reflect a variety of points of view on how his work can be understood, criticized, and used for future research endeavors.

The authors of this book are from different horizons. The present collection of essays, as will be seen, includes contributors from no fewer than two or three generations of social scientists whose thinking is rooted in many different intellectual traditions. Yet, these scholars all share in common a special concern for how Boudon’s work can be seen as being of great importance for the proper understanding of social phenomena.

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.

‘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.

Youth Movements and Generational Politics, 19th–21st Centuries by Richard and Margaret Braungart is a collection of 19 of their previously published research articles on youthful political activism, generational conflict, and social change, from the first student movement in Germany in 1815 to the worldwide surge in youth movement activity in the 21st century. Representing more than 50 years of research, youth movements and generational politics are explored from historical, generational and global perspectives. These articles are theoretically grounded, empirically based, interdisciplinary and comparative. Exploring youth movements at individual, group, societal and international levels, a variety of methodological approaches for studying youth activism are illustrated in their research. In a concluding chapter, the Braungarts update youth movement activity in the 21st century and discuss how their previous research informs the new global increase in youthful mobilization over politics. The trends and changes in youth unrest and generational politics are assessed now and into the future.

The focus in the anthology is on young people's development and generational relations as a fundamental force for societal and political change. Drawing from both theory and research in sociology, social psychology, human development and history, the articles were chosen to help readers better understand young people by identifying their political attitudes and behavior and the commonalities they share in their movements for change. Based on an extensive survey of youth movements from 1815 to the 21st century, a number of articles identify the patterns and dynamics of youthful political behavior over time in each world region. It is hoped that by understanding youth movements in history, readers are better prepared to make sense of and respond to the expected global rise in youthful political unrest. Youth movements have toppled governments and revolutionized societies, always bringing with them the potential for greater democracy and societal reforms as well as injury, death and destruction.

Despite the rise in youth movement activity over the past 200 years and considerable discussion, media attention and research, it is difficult to formulate an accurate and balanced perspective on why young people mobilize during certain eras but not others, and why youthful political activism is often characterized by generational conflict and violence. Although there are excellent empirical studies on specific youth movements, the research tends to be fragmented into different disciplines and widely scattered among countries. As a collection, the articles selected for this anthology are interdisciplinary, comparative and provide a systematic study of the issues over which young people have mobilized. Common patterns of youth movement activity are identified from 1815 , and youth activism is examined from moral, ideological, generational and life-course development perspectives. Taking a variety of methodological approaches, the articles in this anthology demonstrate that to understand youth movements and generational politics in modern societies, it is necessary to appreciate (1) young people's developmental characteristics, needs and relationship to adults; (2) the historical and societal context in which they are coming of age; and (3) the reasons why youth are drawn to social change. The articles in this anthology address these issues.

‘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.

‘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.

‘The United States, the Soviet Union and the Geopolitical Implications of the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949’ postulates that the geopolitical interests and needs of the superpowers led to the configuration of the post-war international order. Taking a long-term approach to the evolution of the system of states, it describes how the United States and the Soviet Union deployed their hard and soft power resources to create the basis for the institutionalization of the international order in the aftermath of World War Two. The main idea advanced by this book is that the origins of the Cold War should not be seen from the perspective of a magnified spectrum of conflict but should be regarded as a process by which the superpowers attempted to forge a normative framework capable of sustaining their geopolitical needs and interests in the post-war scenario. This book examines how the use of ideology and the instrument of political intervention in the spheres of influence managed by the superpowers was conducive to the establishment of a stable international order.

‘The United States, the Soviet Union and the Geopolitical Implications of the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949’ postulates that the element of conflict present in the early period of the Cold War served to demarcate the scope of manoeuvring available to each of the superpowers. This state of affairs denotes the existence of diverging geopolitical interests, acknowledged through the presence of well-demarcated spheres of influence. The book examines the notion that the United States and the Soviet Union were primarily interested in establishing the conditions for accomplishing their vital geostrategic interests, which required the implementation of social norms imposed in the respective spheres of influence, a factor that provided certainty to the spectrum of interstate relations after the period of turmoil that culminated in the outbreak of World War Two. Drawing on the example of the friction that affected Soviet-American relations at the end of World War Two, this book examines the circumstances that give rise to the construction of sound international orders and the functional values that sustain their existence.

‘The United States, the Soviet Union and the Geopolitical Implications of the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949’ starts by examining the manner in which great power management has served as an instrument of the process of re-institutionalization, with special emphasis on the geopolitical elements that underpinned the intervention of the superpowers in their spheres of influence and how this state of affairs impacted on the stability of the system of states that emerged after World War Two ended. The book also examines the implications of the process of de-institutionalization that took place in the system of states since the emergence of a unified Germany and how it led to the disruption of interstate relations in the European political order. The settlement of the German Question provided the wartime allies with an opportunity to deal with the problems that stemmed from the process of de-institutionalization of the international order that the United States facilitated through the enforcement of its vital geopolitical interests in Western Europe. Emphasizing the central role of ideology in the deployment of American geopolitical power in the aftermath of World War Two the book examines the way in which the Soviet Union contributed to institutionalizing the international order by establishing the parameters of intervention that would regulate interstate relations. There will also be an emphasis on the role of ideology in the formulation of the Soviet foreign policy in the post-war era. The book also examines the special geopolitical culture of Russia and the concept of Eurasianism as the reasons behind the establishment of the spheres of influence system that operated during the Cold War. This book discusses how the process of institutionalization that took place following World War Two can teach us about the configuration of the geopolitical mechanisms needed for reconfiguring international and regional orders after a period of military conflict.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement’ presents Sara Coleridge’s religious writings to modern readers for the first time. It includes extracts from her important religious works which have remained unpublished since the 1840s. These writings present a forthright and eloquent challenge to the patriarchal hegemonies of Victorian religion and society. They represent a bold intervention by a woman writer in the public spheres of academia and the Church, in the genre of religious writing which was a masculine preserve (as opposed to the genres of religious fiction and poetry). The religious writings published by Sara Coleridge in the 1840s present the most original and systematic critique of the Tractarian theology developed by John Henry Newman, Edward Pusey, John Keble and their colleagues. Sara Coleridge advances against a theology which she regards as repressive, authoritarian and conceptually flawed, a radical Protestant religion of inward experience and reason, underpinned by a Kantian epistemology. The passages reveal Sara Coleridge’s concerns with the language of religious discourse, which drove her later developments in religious prose.

‘Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement’ also consists of passages selected from Sara Coleridge’s unpublished masterpiece ‘Dialogues on Regeneration’ (the equivalent of her father’s ‘Opus Maximum’), written in the last two years of her life. This collection of Socratic dialogues is quite remarkable, the most original and innovative religious work of the Tractarian era. Sara Coleridge recognized that the form and language of religious discourse was an essential consideration in determining the character of religious culture. In the period from 1833 to 1850, the monologic forms of treatise, sermon, tract and essay had fostered dogmatic and immoderate styles of expression, which had created conflict and division. Sara Coleridge therefore adopted and developed a form in which opposing views could be heard as well as stated, and which could facilitate dialectical progression towards new understanding: a medium in which division could be resolved. Sara Coleridge’s innovative use of Socratic dialogue is associated with a new ambiguity in her approach to Tractarianism. Through one of her women characters, she presents the devotional and aesthetic ethos of Tractarianism, and its practical, pastoral concerns, with sympathetic sensitivity. The passages from ‘Dialogues on Regeneration’ reveal Sara Coleridge to be a religious writer and thinker of unique originality and range, profoundly sensitive to the pressing needs of her times.

Owing to the pioneering work of William Sale and Keith Maslen, which produced a catalogue of printer’s ornaments belonging exclusively to Samuel Richardson’s business, we now have an invaluable method for identifying the many publications issuing from the Salisbury Court shop. This study adds a number of new titles to the Maslen catalogue and also examines stylistic evidence in supporting attributions of anonymous texts. A number of books from Richardson’s press are found to be unacknowledged digests of works already in print, and in some cases manuscripts of letters were appropriated as raw material for an essay or pamphlet.

From the beginning of his career as printer, Richardson consistently worked as an anonymous editor and compiler while manufacturing books from his press. While setting type for his many newspapers and journals, this major London printer was mainly concerned about generating a readership and thus invoked all the tricks of his trade to arouse interest in his readers. Without ever asserting himself as the author, Richardson produced many letters to the editor as a means of invoking a collective response without risking the responsibility of answering for the opinions expressed in his letters. It was a rhetorical strategy that worked very well for a printer who by profession had to publish many works that expressed opinions wholly in conflict with his own. His long experience as anonymous editor prepared him in launching fictional “histories” told through multiple voices that conceal or underplay a central author’s authority.

‘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.

At the turn of the 21st century, Australia witnessed a shift in the public debates related to the history of European settlement of the continent and settler–Indigenous relations. This historical moment was a result of revisionist history which made the violent settlement of the land and Indigenous dispossession more visible to the public, as well as the culmination of Indigenous activism and testimonial accounts. Consequently, the Australian White settler majority has experienced an unsettlement of their sense of belonging, resulting in what some scholars call “setter anxiety” (Slater 2019).
  This book analyzes how settler (un)belonging is narrativized in a particular literary genre, that of memoir, written by Australian public intellectuals, such as historians, artists, writers, and commentators, in the period after 2000. I call these narratives memoirs of settler belonging. Becoming a popular genre in Australia, they have one thing in common: they all ask and seek answers to the implicit question, how to belong as a white settler who bears witness to the legacy of violent colonization vis-à-vis continuing Indigenous dispossession? How to justify the settler presence and love of the land that was stolen from First Australians?
   The individual chapters examine various groups of memoirs produced by Australian public intellectuals who textualize their settler anxiety and their desire to belong ethically. The groups include historians’ memoirs, White women’s travel narratives, experimental place-writing, and eco- and landscape memoirs. The book advances an argument that throughout almost two decades, a shift can be traced in representing settler (un)belonging textually. While in the earlier memoirs setter anxiety was visibly thematized and an active approach to resolving the impasse of (un)belonging was sought, the more recent memoirs, particularly those morphing into landscape- and eco-memoir, have moved away from the critical reflection on settler anxiety as being generated by the continuing Indigenous dispossession, and replaced this anxiety of settler belonging with a new perspective which brings forward the concept of settler belonging based on an intimate historical and environmental knowledge of local landscapes, and on affective engagement with the Country.

The Modern State and Its Enemies considers the historical intellectual developments that provided the fundaments of the modern state, informed the key theoretical questions arising in the democratic context, and shaped the relationship between (state) sovereignty and (individual) liberty. The modern state as a nation-state is thus based on the relationship between its territory, its people and its sovereign authority. As a result, nationalism and minorities policy are issues that are key to the state’s self-conception. But historically, these have also been repeatedly used as weapons against the state, manifesting in separatism, irredentism and antidemocratic agitation. Both antisemitism and right-wing extremism have always stood in opposition to the democratic state and continue to do so. Antisemitism in particular is antithetical to modernity as it fundamentally rejects equality and individual liberty. This book presents its arguments in theoretical, historical and sociological terms, with a particular focus on examples from the German context.

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.

‘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.

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

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

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

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.

Mathew Carey’s long-neglected “The New Olive Branch” offers new insight into political economy as it really happened. This is the first-ever scholarly edition of Carey’s most important economic work. Like other volumes in Anthem’s “Economic Ideas that Built America” series, it gives the reader easy access to historical works that have been dropped from the modern economic canon because of their uncomfortable fit with contemporary conceptions of classical economics rooted in the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus.

In “The New Olive Branch,” Carey derided those so-called classical economists as visionary theorists with little grasp of real-world problems. Rejecting grand theories, Carey instead looked to historical examples and statistics to argue that government policy, and particularly the protection of manufacturers, was crucial to the development of a strong, independent American economy. In this volume, “The New Olive Branch” is accompanied by portions of Carey’s “Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry” (1822), which offer further insight into his rejection of classical economics.

While such views have long been out of fashion, overtaken by the popularity of classical economics, they were extremely influential in early America. Carey’s arguments illuminate how a large proportion of Americans thought about their economy while providing a corrective to the anachronistic overemphasis of the role of laissez-faire economics in early America.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness examines the role of embodied disablement in providing an important but often circumvented analysis of the explicit and implicit nature of the legitimate human body, its symbolism, and responses that such bodies elicit from diverse local through global social and cultural entities. The various sections of the book introduce the theoretical and historical foundations for analyzing humanness, and the role of the atypical body in determining membership, meaning and worth; examine embodied criteria of “humanness” and offending corporeal characteristics; describe and analyze how offenders are identified and depicted in diverse contexts; delve into how these bodies are met with praxis and axiological responses from revision through exclusion; and invoke contemporary post-postmodernist marriages of varied disciplines as frameworks for returning creative substance into rethinking disability within the textured fabric of humanness.

'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.

‘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.

Unfinished Austen is a scholarly monograph which examines four texts left incomplete by Jane Austen: Catharine, or the Bower (1792–-3), Lady Susan (1795?), The Watsons (1803–-4?) and Sanditon (1817). None was published till well after her death. They have never received nearly as much attention as the six novels that appeared between 1811 and 1817, and this is the first study to examine them in detail, and in relation to each other.

These unfinished texts are fascinating for several reasons. Since very little in manuscript form survives from the six famous novels, these four manuscript texts offer insight into the novelist in the process of creation. All of them feature alterations that show Jane Austen refining her language and demonstrating the orientation of her thinking. The unfinished works also problematize the romance plot salient in the published novels by presenting this in a nebulous or incipient state that underlines its artificiality. In doing so, these texts sometimes draw attention to how the romance plot is inflected by the financial condition in which young marriageable women can find themselves. 

Notable as well is the four texts’ handling of place and setting, which become especially prominent in The Watsons and Sanditon. The Watsons creates superbly the life of a small-town family at the edges of gentility, while Sanditon portrays a small seaside town being developed into a tourist resort—a new trend in Austen’s day. Moreover, the stories (other than Catharine) have aroused the interest of many later writers—including writers for theatre and screen—who are eager to complete or to amplify them. Developments on screen include Whit Stillman’s Love and Friendship (which is actually based on Austen’s Lady Susan), and Andrew Davies’s recent continuation of Sanditon. Completions may develop the stories to some kind of dénouement. Perhaps more intriguingly, however, these texts induce some writers to question the very enterprise of concluding an unfinished text.

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.

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.

The book is a full-length study of Indian celebrity culture, including fandom, celebrity philanthropy and celebrity activism, which are established features of life today and which constitute a major component of pop culture’s coverage of sports/film stars.

The collection of essays in the book moves from the largest domain of celebrity culture in India – Bollywood – through celebrity life writing and biopics and, finally, to the politics of and by celebrity culture. The book begins with an exploration of films made around women celebrity victims – Phoolan Devi, Bhanwari Devi, Jessica Lal and Kiranjit Ahluwaliato – and moves on to show how the vernacular cosmopolitanism of Bollywood stars’ philanthropic and humanitarian work enables their insertion into a global humanitarian project wherein the Bollywood campaigner for women’s rights, environmental causes or animal welfare generates a membership in the global citizenship of benevolence and charity. Celebrity charisma and its role in the current era of ‘post-truth’ are studied to show how Bollywood charisma as a form of mimetic capital generates a sensuous fidelity in the audience, inducing a certain cultural ignorance.

The book goes on to show how star memoirs reinforce star-value through the generation of an interart work, in which the life story is framed within the film history of the individual, and the films are framed by the life of the actor. The hagiographic biopics around cricket stars M.S. Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar, the criminal Charles Shobhraj and Neerja Bhanot, the air hostess killed by hijackers, make a case for an argument that the family and the nation remain nodal points in the representations of the lives and careers, and how these representations enable the making of certain aspirational models for the country. Reading cancer memoirs by Bollywood stars shows how these celebrity somatographies move outward, from a focus on the star’s body to the biosocial network. 

The final collection of essays are at the intersection of celebritydom and celebrity politics that starts with the examination of the genre of Indian writing in English as a celebrity within the context of literary festivals and the demand for the postcolonial exotic. The River Narmada as a cultural icon and its iconicity generates a whole new grammar of protest, having become a part of India’s collective cultural memory. Reading Arundhati Roy as a celebrity makes a case for her ‘insurgent celebrityhood’ created through her mobility into and across many public domains. The desacralization of the iconic Ambedkar statues, which occurs periodically in parts of India, is a mode of once again rendering the Dalit an ‘outcast’. Reading the websites of celebrity Indian authors, Ashok Banker, Devdutt Pattnaik and Amish, demonstrates how a certain self-fashioning by these authors occurs through a careful engagement with a Hindu ancestry and tradition. The self-fashioning is linked to, and manifests as, their literary location within a scriptural-mythological narrative.

'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.

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.

‘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.

Karl Mannheim is a classic of sociology. “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” helps us to accompany him in his open, experimental thinking, the generation of new questions, the recognition of thought experiments as well as the care for controlling evidence, and his negotiations with colleagues he encounters in his own searches. This is not simply to dismiss the elements brought together by earlier scholars into a challenging composite design, but there cannot be many authors recognized as classical who have characterized the work for which he/she is justly honored as a collection of experimental essays. Sociology of knowledge is a project, not a creed; and “Ideology and Utopia” is a documentation, not a scripture.

After a brief introductory overview of Karl Mannheim’s intellectual career, “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” offers fresh commentaries and explorations by an international and presently active group of scholars. As the institutionalized understanding of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge project was so long shaped by the synthetic reading by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton—a classic in his own right––the companion opens with a careful exposition and critique of that authoritative interpretation. It is followed by a close reading of the considerations that led Mannheim to move beyond the neo-Kantian epistemology of his earlier training to the project of a sociological understanding of critical knowledge. Next to come is a series of studies that marked by perspectives derived from intellectual strategies developed since the breakdown of consensus on the approaches examined in the previous section. In their variety, the studies capture a number of perspectives opened up or expanded by an understanding of Mannheim’s undertaking. The key terms are familiar: self-reflexivity, praxeological sociology, neo-realism, and dramatistic readings of world-views. The angles of vision differ, but they agree in projecting new and important light on Mannheim’s efforts. At the end, attention is focused on some unfamiliar links between Mannheim’s work and current interests: a study of Mannheim’s influence on Hannah Arendt, who knew him as teacher in Heidelberg and Frankfurt; an inquiry into Mannheim’s political thought from the standpoint of contemporary democratic political theory; and an examination of Mannheim’s attention to the status of women and of the work done on these matters under his tutelage by a group of talented women students.

The idea of “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” is by no means to dismiss the work for which Mannheim has been best known, but it is to put that work in its particular context, as a multisided agenda rather than as a finished doctrine, to be accepted or rejected. The aim is to learn from Karl Mannheim.

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.

Williams fought a good fight for a better democracy and the collective equal rights of African Americans. He was not just a revolutionary voice and internationalist leader and voice in the Black Power movement, and should not be forgotten or dismissed because he maintained other reasons for raging his grievance towards the policies and practices of democracy in the United States. Robert F. Williams neither should be reduced to the status of a tool of Cold War politics or to a study about armed self-defense. Rather, in his contesting the government’s refusal to defend the human rights of 22 million African Americans, Williams’ actions and uncompromising stance directly and affirmatively addressed the promise and rights guaranteed US citizenship and the constitutional rights of the members of that society. Williams critically questioned numerous unjust acts and human rights violations, and waged (often a one-family man) war against America’s inability to practice principles of freedom and democracy, when these mistreatments were ignored. Robert F. Williams was an independent thinker, a compassionate and intelligent man. He was a common man, and despite his lofty intelligence, he was an American, claiming his right to his American citizenship. He was acutely aware of the broken promises of the United States. Yet, he nonetheless remained fully invested in assuming all of the rights, privileges, and responsibilities the Constitution guaranteed American citizens of African descent. He was always focused on making sure Americans took full advantage of the tools available in society and/or in government to bring them to bear in their situation. He believed in the redress of government, and the citizen’s right to do that. He believed that the US Constitution should be abided by, and that that was the right of every citizen.  Robert F. Williams collaborated with leaders of two foreign countries in order to communicate his grievances against the United States government and its citizens who remained complicit in practices of racial injustice. His exile in China from 1966 to 1969 led to his being expunged from the memory of Monroe, North Carolina’s trumped up charges of kidnapping. In the South and the Black Diaspora of the Midwest, he was a local civil rights leader, pragmatist, and internationalist in twentieth-century world history.

‘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.