‘Russian Language Studies in North America: New Perspectives from Theoretical and Applied Linguistics’ offers a unique collection of research papers representing current directions in Russian language studies in Canada and the United States. Traditionally, Slavic and Russian studies in these countries have centered around literature, history, politics and culture. This volume reflects recent changes in Russian studies by focusing on language structure, language use and teaching methodology. The volume brings together several generations of scholars, from young promising researchers to those with long-established reputations in the field.

The longest-running war is the battle over how women should behave. “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” examines six centuries of advice literature, analyzing the print origins of gendered expectations that continue to inform our thinking about women’s roles and abilities. Close readings of numerous conduct manuals from Britain and America, written by men and women, explain and contextualize the legacy of sexism as represented in prescriptive writing for women from 1372 to the present.

This book presents a unique trans-historical approach, arguing that conduct manuals were influenced by their predecessors and in turn shaped their descendants. While existing period-specific studies of conduct manuals consider advice literature within the society that wrote and read them, this book provides the only analysis of both the volumes themselves and the larger debates taking place within their pages across the centuries. Building on critical conversations about literature’s efforts to define and construct gender roles, this book examines conduct manuals’ contributions to the female ideal prevalent when they were published, as well as the persistence or alteration of that ideal in subsequent eras.

Combining textual literary analysis with a social history sensibility while remaining accessible to expert and novice, this book will help readers understand the on-going debate about the often-contradictory guidelines for female behavior.

‘Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran’ presents nineteen outstanding interviews with directors past and present, from around the world, working in a variety of genres and budgets and production environments from major studios to indie and DIY. The result is a vibrant group portrait of the filmmaking art, a kind of festival in words that explores everything from the enormous creative and personal satisfactions of filmmaking to the challenges and frustrations that range from meddlesome studio heads to state censorship. These articulate auteurs include iconic figures Fellini and Truffaut (in his moving final interview), avant-garde masters Otto Muehl and the Brothers Quay, social critics Barbara Kopple and Allie Light, mainstream mavericks Robert Wise and Douglas Sirk, and eleven others. While their work (and working methods) varies widely, these directors share the status of pioneer and subversive, fighting – sometimes against great odds – to put their unique vision onscreen.

‘Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia’ demonstrates how the civilizing mission can serve as an analytical rubric with relevance to many themes in the colonial and postcolonial eras: economic development, state building, pacification, nationalism, cultural improvement, gender and generational relations, caste and untouchability, religion and missionaries, class relations, urbanization, NGOs, and civil society.

While some chapters investigate civilizing initiatives that were driven by the British Raj or Indian postcolonial state, the book also considers many examples of nongovernmental undertakings. For example, examining the role of missionary educational endeavours shows how missionary bodies could operate in an ambivalent space between Indians and the colonial state. Moreover, analysis of Indian civilizing efforts carried out by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the nationalist movement or postcolonial Indian states gives us interesting opportunities to scrutinize how the civilizing mission could be internalized as a form of 'self-civilizing' by Indians. Some papers also show the global linkages of civilizing efforts in the British Empire, while others examine long-term continuities through broad comparative analyses covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This takes us into the postcolonial era (beyond 1947, into the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries), and such 'transgressions' across the colonial divide give this volume added appeal.

The purpose of the volume – as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press ‘Companion to Sociology’ series – is to provide a comprehensive overview of Erving Goffman’s continued importance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines. The book will engage with some of the major themes and continuing concerns of Goffman’s sociology. Chapters have been selected based on their scope and their thematic content covering significant aspects of Goffman’s life and work, and authors have been selected based on their longstanding interest in and extensive knowledge of Goffman’s work.

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

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

This study investigates the capacity of Shakespeare’s texts – obviously destined for stage performances – to generate images and mental colours in the readers’ and in the spectators’ minds. Such notions as Ut pictura poesis and the paragoneare discussed in the first part of this book, along with the function and nature of colours. After discussing the sets of correspondences and the major differences between texts and images, the author presents and analyzes some of his own illustrations of Shakespearean characters. Jean-Louis Claret, both a university professor specialized in Shakespeare’s theatre and an illustrator, proposes to shed light on the process that led him from the perusal of the written text to the visualization of visages. The voice of poets is unconventionally called upon to shed light on the complex mechanisms he describes.
The second part of this book deals with an analysis of the author’s illustrations. As a university scholar, Jean-Louis Claret has naturally fed on literary criticism, but he tries nonetheless to put forth original approaches to Shakespeare. The use of poets’ voices in his demonstration contributes to the development of an original and innovative contribution to Shakespearean criticism. The illustrator traces in the texts the sparks that his mind fanned into mental images which he strove in turn to make into visual pictures. He tries to determine how textual elements (the mention of colours, details, names, etc.) can generate visions, and he devotes special attention to the effect of sound correspondences and prosody.
Poetry is given pride of place in this book that focuses on the power of words and on the mechanisms of evocation that affect both readers and theatregoers.

‘Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran’ presents nineteen outstanding interviews with directors past and present, from around the world, working in a variety of genres and budgets and production environments from major studios to indie and DIY. The result is a vibrant group portrait of the filmmaking art, a kind of festival in words that explores everything from the enormous creative and personal satisfactions of filmmaking to the challenges and frustrations that range from meddlesome studio heads to state censorship. These articulate auteurs include iconic figures Fellini and Truffaut (in his moving final interview), avant-garde masters Otto Muehl and the Brothers Quay, social critics Barbara Kopple and Allie Light, mainstream mavericks Robert Wise and Douglas Sirk, and eleven others. While their work (and working methods) varies widely, these directors share the status of pioneer and subversive, fighting – sometimes against great odds – to put their unique vision onscreen.

Accomplished public speakers know that just a few enduring principles govern the key to success. Based on scientific evidence and years of careful observation of highly successful public speakers, James O’Rourke has gathered 51 basic truths about confident presenting, organized into ten easily mastered categories in ‘The Truth about Confident Presenting’. Current relevant examples and specific instructions on how to apply these truths form the centrepiece of each brief chapter. Everything you need is right here – from audience research to topic selection, organization patterns, forms of evidence, principles of persuasion, delivery techniques, nonverbal mannerisms, anxiety and event management.

The collected essays in this book are the result of a series of workshops held at the University of Cagliari in Italy. In this work, the authors aim at reconstructing the evolution of a key concept of traditional Indian grammar: Pāṇini’s zero. The book investigates how certain patterns of description account for exceptions in the currently presupposed one-to-one symmetry between the semantic and the phono-morphological level of language. This work also deals with some powerful mechanisms of rule extension, which are valuable for different contexts of rule arrangement, such as the ritual model. The interpretative model laid down in the introduction proves strong and suggestive enough to allow subsequent articles in the book to make incursions into other traditions and cultures. The potentialities of aniconic expression in the artistic field are explored, together with the outcomes of this theory.

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

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

A stock boy is found to have made an expensive Matsusaka cow vanish from the cattle house right before shipment. But the question remains: How and why did the boy make a 700kg cow disappear?

Jukichi is a seasoned fisherman who can row a fishing boat with proficiency and catch an abundance of fish in the traditional way – until he comes across “naméso,” a sea beast. What will be the fate of the old fisherman, who has been on the sea for 80 years?

With its bright red pincers kept high above its head, a crab called Aka moves slowly along the highway. Can Shinichi, a lonely boy, help Aka reach the sea?

Irako, a cruel and heartless woman, murders a philandering and neglectful doctor by radiation exposure, thereby sealing her own fate. In her dying days, an unusual group of animals gather around Irako to provide solace as she fades away. Can their uncanny companionship transform her demon heart?

“Lost Souls, Sacred Creatures” features four stories written by award-nominated author Juko Nishimura.

‘The Craft of Professional Writing’ is the complete book ever written about the real-life work of writing for a living. It not only provides an in-depth description of every important job in professional writing, from PR and advertising to technical writing to journalism and fiction and non-fiction book authorship, but also includes extensive practical advice and hacks on how to report, prepare, pitch, edit and invoice your work – as well as how to successfully conduct a writing career. There also are extensive models of actual products in each of these fields.

For the student, this is the most wide-ranging and practical textbook on the subject. It is designed to be an instructional text for producing professional-level work – but also a survey of the various writing professions to enable budding writers to make career decisions. The goal is to empower graduates to hit the ground running – and to quickly establish themselves in the professional writing world.

For the professional, this book, written by an author who has been successful in almost every writing discipline, is the ultimate reference work – offering practical tips to their current field, as well as a guide to other writing professions. ‘The Craft of Professional Writing’ also offers these experienced writers work advice they can return to again and again to help them through various phases of their career.

“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.

More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century – countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. “On Beckett” brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amount of scrutiny that has been lavished on the man; in addition to widely read essays there are contributions from more obscure sources, viewpoints not frequently seen. Together they allow the reader to enter the world of a writer whose work has left an impact on the consciousness of our time perhaps unmatched by that of any other recent creative imagination.

The contributors include the names of most of the minds of the twentieth century who have grappled in print with the meaning of the Beckett phenomenon. Among them are many of the artists who had a major role in bringing Beckett’s work to the stage and who worked side-by-side with Beckett, such as Alan Schneider, Roger Blin, Herbert Blau and Jackie MacGowran. Also included are some of the foremost writers of our time, whose encounter with the work of Beckett has produced lasting commentary, such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Martin Esslin. Among the noted Beckett scholars found here are Ruby Cohn, Walter D. Asmus, and James Knowlson. An interview with Susan Sontag and William S. Burroughs completes the book.

In ancient China, the tradition of observing nature is combined with Yin-Yang and the Five-Phase theories, which were later incorporated into the ancient arts of divination, including the technique of predicting weather changes by observing the behavior and health of animals. The observation of the close connection between animals and weather developed into the worship of animals, that is, what can be called the cult of animals. Plant science and technology in medieval China cannot be separated from the developments in agriculture, economics, and medicine, as well as cultural practice. The Chinese empire ruled most of East Asia in the medieval period. Numerous species of plants were observed, cultivated, harvested, and used in the vast land of China that spanned a wide range of biomes from boreal through to temperate and tropical, with most regions classed as subtropical. Besides indigenous plants, many plants from West, Central, South, and Southeast Asia were introduced into China and East Asia in general. Numerous zoomantic practices appeared in two sets of textual documents in the premodern Chinese bibliographical system, namely official documents and popular documents. Official documents were often compiled by government officials and served political governance objectives. These documents included official histories, annals, and institutional documents, as well as Confucian classics. The authorship or editorship of these documents was often explicit. Popular documents included strange writings, tales, legends, and religious documents from Buddhism and Daoism, which were often not compiled under the sponsorship and support of the court or government. They might be compiled by literati but lost original authorship. They did not serve political motivations and objectives, reflecting how people understood and interpreted correlative cosmology by observing animal behaviors at the local or non-bureaucratic level.

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

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

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

Television as a traditional medium has been changing for a number of years due to the development of a complex scenario characterized by the growing proliferation of platforms across which multiple forms of media are deeply interconnected. In this multi-modal environment, traditional and modern media platforms have started to combine, revolutionizing both the technology and the manner in which audiences engage with media content of interest. Indeed, the progressive digitization of media content and the fragmentation of television delivery and reception have been affecting the ways in which media are accessed and consumed to the point that the construction of textual boundaries has shifted from producers to media consumers.

The research in the book is structured as a comparative study between two distinct countries: Italy and New Zealand. These two countries have been chosen as reference contexts for the investigation of audiences’ consumption behaviors because they represent non-dominant media markets, both Anglophone and non-Anglophone, that remain to be properly studied and explored. Although they tend to be conflated in generic audience studies, national audiences represent strategic markets for the circulation of international fiction. In investigating the consumption modes that characterize the distribution of American television programs in these cultural contexts, the aim is to provide insights into the culturally specific similarities and differences that distinct audiences disclose in consuming the same texts. 

Game of Thrones and Mad Men have been selected as case studies because they are substantial examples of trans-media narratives that tell multiple stories over multiple platforms that together tell one big pervasive story, attracting audience engagement. The methods employed for gathering useful data for the comparative analysis were both quantitative and qualitative. The first phase of data collection consisted in the production of four online surveys: two in English for Game of Thrones and Mad Men, respectively, and two in Italian. The second phase of data production consisted of the organization of the focus group sessions in, respectively, the city of Milan (Italy) and city of Auckland (New Zealand).

Jan A. Kregel is considered to be “the best all-round general economist alive” (G. C. Harcourt). This is the first collection of his essays dealing with a wide range of topics reflecting the incredible depth and breadth of Kregel’s work. These essays focus on the role of finance in development and growth. Kregel has expanded Minsky’s original postulate that in capitalist economies stability engenders instability in international economy, and this volume collect’s Kregel’s key works devoted to financial instability, its causes and effects. The volume also contains Kregel’s most recent discussions of the Great Recession beginning in 2008.

When biographers write about a person’s life, they prioritize what is important to themselves: What interests them, what resonates with them, what helps them, what teaches them, what makes sense to them, and, most significantly, what advances their own political agendas. Their research is filtered through these lenses. Even if their biographical goal is to learn and present enough about their writers to better analyze a certain canon, literary critics usually construct life stories through their own theoretical positions. Certainly, readers should be aware that biographies bend according to their authors’ psychological makeup, cultural encoding, historical agency, and political penchants. Furthermore, biographies often reflect the age in which they are written, more so than the age in which their subject lived. This is not always a negative outcome, but it always imbues the portrait of the “biographee” with its own qualities so that the facsimile is never unadulterated. [NP] Betwixt and Between is an investigation of the biographical corpus of Mary Wollstonecraft, starting with Godwin’s Memoirs (1798) and ending with Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (2015). It identifies the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, and gaps that have run rampant, many of them incomprehensively left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. The myriad, often contradictory renditions of her life and thoughts have given us such a distorted view of Wollstonecraft that she has evolved into varying degrees of heroine and villain, an everywoman for every cause.

At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century people in the United States live in a scary and confusing post-truth era of disinformation, fake news, counter-knowledge, weaponized lies, conspiracy theories, magical thinking and sheer irrationalism. In this intellectual climate where many people lack the rudimentary skills to distinguish between contending claims to knowledge or differentiate between fact and opinion, there is a proliferation of purveyors of supernaturalism, pseudoscience and alternative forms of knowledge whose ideas are an affront to the intelligence and sensibilities of rational people. At the same time, here and around the world oppressive religious fundamentalism and violence are on the rise. The merchants of superstition and paranormalism almost in unison are broadcasting with bluster and hubris that science is now defunct and are offering their own truths and ways of knowing as better substitutes. Even our highest government officials are flagrantly declaring that it is impossible to distinguish between fact and opinion, that for every fact there is an alternative fact, and that truth is whatever people want it to be.

By posing a direct challenge to science and rationality, the advocates of supernatural and paranormal modes of thought have made their own central epistemological and ontological premises legitimate subjects for critical scrutiny in accordance with the tradition of systematic skepticism. “Religion, Supernaturalism, the Paranormal and Pseudoscience” provides a comprehensive rejoinder to the challenges posed to science, scientific anthropology, evolutionary theory and rationality. Moreover, scientific anthropological answers are offered for several important questions: Why do humans have the proclivity for the supernatural and the paranormal thinking? Why has humanity remained shackled to sets of ideas inherited from a violent past that have no basis in reality, bestow an illusionary solace, inspire endless cruelties and fervent hatreds, and have come at a high cost? Why have ancient superstitions been maintained as sacred, inviolate truths while other aspects of the archaic belief systems of which they were a part have long been discarded? Why have not humans outgrown religion and paranormal beliefs?

This study draws upon the author’s scientific anthropological background and ethnographic field research of supernatural and paranormal beliefs and practices in several cultures over the course of the last 30 years. It also relies upon the works of numerous skeptics; critical historians; scientific anthropologists; cognitive, evolutionary, experimental and anomalistic psychologists; philosophers of science; scientists in various fields; and many theologians.

This book responds to and informs, the rapid growth in adult, community, and further education in Ireland and beyond. Across 11 chapters, academic and practitioner insights are explored. There are chapters that focus on policy trends across the topics, some of which focus on current trends in policy and practice and some of which focus more deliberately on everyday practice.

The book opens with perspectives from some further education students who comment on some of the themes raised. These lead into an introduction which describes the landscape of a complex, heterogeneous FET sector and outlines what the authors mean by critical perspectives on adult, community and further education in Ireland.

This is followed by the philosophically oriented chapter one, written by Camilla Fitzsimons, that provides practical examples of possibilities for ‘engaged pedagogy’ amidst curricula that, on the surface appear far removed from the dimensions of power and privilege the book lays bare.

In chapter two, experienced further and higher education practitioner, Sarah Coss offers a practical and thought-provoking account of the challenges of working creatively and dialogically with FE curricula whilst at the same time attending to the many bureaucratised demands of accreditation and quality assurance frameworks.

Chapter three, written by Lilian Nwanze, builds a case for the importance of discussions about racism and white privilege in FE and proposes concrete actions to embody and anti-racist approach, the last of which is an emphasis on love.

In chapter four, Jane O’Kelly presents a reflexive exploration of neurodiversity in adults and prompts us to consider whether their needs are recognised and accommodated in further education and training settings.

In chapter five, Bríd Connolly explores ways in which a feminist egalitarian groupwork stance, can draw from social movements, adult and community education to create an FE pedagogy that challenges the status quo of education as a social institution.

In chapter six, Eilish Dillon reflects on why a critical approach to global citizenship education (GCE) is important and introduces some debates about the meaning and implementation of GCE.

In chapter seven, Jerry O’Neill’s partially-poetic chapter demonstrates a creative and critical approach to individual and group reflexive practices which, he argues, is core not just to the ongoing professional development of all FET practitioners and the sector itself, but can also be seen as form of practitioner-based creative research in itself.

Leo Casey follows in chapter eight by exploring some of the overlooked connections between adult learning and digital literacy and argues for a policy balance between models of human capital and the interests of big technology and how teaching and learning for Digital World Literacy can value lifelong learning.

In chapter nine, primary research by Eve Cobain, Suzanne Kyle and Susan Cullinane link community education to social movement theory and Ireland’s community development, anti-poverty movement of the 1980s and 1990s. They analyse the experiences of practitioners as they navigate the very different neoliberal oriented contemporary landscape.

In chapter ten, Brendan Kavanagh, Francesca Lorenzi and Elaine Macdonald explore the process of teacher identity and (trans)formation of what they term ‘second career teachers’ within further education colleges.

In chapter eleven, Camilla and Jerry highlight the very real challenges facing educators working in a field that is characterised by high levels of precarity and argue that realising a high-quality critical and sustainable, distinct professional pathway for emerging educators must become a policy priority for any government that is serious about recognising the value and potential of the FET sector.

In the methodological spirit of adult education, this contribution closes with a group dialogue between authors from across these chapters as we look forward to the work to be done and consider our hopes for the future of FET.

The Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature traces the aesthetic and political development of the Gothic genre in Colombia. Drawing on works like José Asunción Silva´s poetic “Nocturnos,” Caliwood’s films and Mario Mendoza’s novels, Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodriguez shows how Gothic tropes appear in the works of Colombian writers and filmmakers. However, he argues that what results ultimately is not just the Gothic in Colombia, but rather the Colombian Gothic—a new form of the genre with its own agenda and aesthetics.

To identify a form of the Gothic as “Colombian” is, in one sense, to demonstrate how thinkers from that nation have reconfigured and laid claim to tropes often regarded as the purview of Europe and the US. The Colombian Gothic pays homage to but also pokes fun at the Gothic of figures like Poe, Bronte, Hawthorne and Stoker. In the hands of Colombian writers and filmmakers, Gothic tropes are taken to their extremes to reflect particularly Colombian issues, like the ongoing armed conflict in the country since the 1950s as various left wing guerillas, government factions and paramilitary groups escalated violence. In this Colombian Gothic, traditional tropes like distorted familial relations appear as open fratricide and incest. Such transformations address the real-life horrors of violence wrought within the supposed protections of shared nationality. 

In another sense, the Colombian Gothic does not just define itself apart from the US and European Gothics—it also challenges the centrality of Bogota-centered perspectives of Colombian politics and conflict. By the 1970s and 1980s, cities such as Cali suffered particularly extreme levels of violence, when the war among the drug cartels added another layer to the already complicated conflict. At the same time, Cali had one of the strongest filmmaking traditions in the country. The “Cali group” of writers and filmmakers seized the Gothic to challenge not just Europe and the US as the centers of the genre, but also to challenge Bogotá as the center of the country—and as the most “logical” place to set a Gothic narrative with its colder, gloomier, darker urban ambience. The Colombian Gothic of Cali addresses the topics of conflict, but within an unapologetically tropical setting that reflects the hotter climate in the region surrounding Cali. The effort of these Cali-based writers and filmmakers became so dominant in shaping the Colombian Gothic that the twenty-first-century Colombian Gothic—now mainly composed in Bogotá—follows the lead of these creators, continuing to create a Gothic that uniquely reflects the aesthetics and politics of Colombia.

Current knowledge societies tend to be based on an understanding of science as an all-purpose problem-solver and include the expansion of scientific methods and frameworks of thought to ever more areas of life. Such development is less pragmatic and down-to- earth than it may appear at first glance. It is accompanied by a relentless expansion of the domain of a logic of universal truth and its technical equivalent: correct solutions, and is tied to a general understanding of science communication as a didactic enterprise aimed at disseminating scientific ways of thinking and responses to problems to a lay public of non-knowers.

Potentially, it seems, science can provide answers to all questions. Disagreement appears as no more than a symptom of immature science and has no place within the didactic science communication paradigm. As a consequence, democratic knowledge societies are challenged as political entities in the classical, pluralist sense, characterized by continuous discussion among different points of view and ways of reasoning on societal issues and using disagreement as a vehicle for discussions, negotiations and compromises.

Against such a background, ‘The Science Communication Challenge’ suggests that the didactic approaches to science communication be supplemented with a political category of science communication, suited to practical-political issues and featuring citizens on an equal footing – some of them scientists – who represent different points of view and ways of reasoning and share responsibility for public affairs. The possible gain, it is argued, may be the maintenance of knowledge societies as political entities with room for a civil society of multiple positions and perspectives that has served as a fertile ground for the development of science as an intellectual endeavour and as a body of knowledge and rational methodology.

Drawing on insights from an array of academic fields and disciplines, ‘The Science Communication Challenge’ explores the possible origins of the didactic paradigm, connecting it to particular understandings of knowledge, politics and the public and to the seemingly widespread assumption of a science-versus-politics dichotomy, taking science and politics to be competing activities that are concerned with similar questions in different ways. Inspired by classical political thought it is argued that science and politics be seen as substantially different activities, suited to dealing with different kinds of questions – and to different varieties of science communication.

The four initial essays in the “Specific Writers and Works” section display Pizer’s critical style in its characteristic varied and incisive form. The initial essay, an exercise in cross-discipline analysis, discusses the ways specific works by Crane, Dreiser, and Steinbeck reveal their author’s response to specific contemporary visual art works and reportage. The seconds offers a novel way of interpreting the naturalism of London’ archetypal story “To Light a Fire” by pointing out the weaknesses in Lee Clark Mitchell’s reading. The third centers on the usefulness of Norman Mailer’s essay on American Naturalism not only in its refutation of Lionel Trilling’s attack on the movement but in sharing with Trilling and others a misunderstanding of the central thrust of Theodore Dreiser’s work. And the fourth is a close reading of Dos Passos over the course of three works of his experience of the 1931 Harland Coal Strike to clarify his thinking of the best means for the artist both to represent and participate in the struggle for social justice in America.

“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.

More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century – countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. “On Beckett” brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amount of scrutiny that has been lavished on the man; in addition to widely read essays there are contributions from more obscure sources, viewpoints not frequently seen. Together they allow the reader to enter the world of a writer whose work has left an impact on the consciousness of our time perhaps unmatched by that of any other recent creative imagination.

The contributors include the names of most of the minds of the twentieth century who have grappled in print with the meaning of the Beckett phenomenon. Among them are many of the artists who had a major role in bringing Beckett’s work to the stage and who worked side-by-side with Beckett, such as Alan Schneider, Roger Blin, Herbert Blau and Jackie MacGowran. Also included are some of the foremost writers of our time, whose encounter with the work of Beckett has produced lasting commentary, such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Martin Esslin. Among the noted Beckett scholars found here are Ruby Cohn, Walter D. Asmus, and James Knowlson. An interview with Susan Sontag and William S. Burroughs completes the book.

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

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

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

‘Mad Tales from the Raj’ is an extensively researched study of mental illness within the context of British colonialism in early nineteenth-century India. The author challenges the assumption that western medical psychology was impartial and highlights the extent to which it reflected British colonial ideology and practice. This long overdue reprint makes available in easily accessible form an authoritative assessment of western, institution-based psychiatry during the East India Company’s period. It includes a fully revised introduction that locates the work in relation to recent scholarly discourse in the field of history of colonial medicine as well as additional material on the treatment of the 'native insane'. The book provides the first comprehensive account of official attitudes and practices in relation to both Indian and European patients at a time when the dictum of the 'civilising mission' guided colonial social policy towards the colonized, and mental illness among the colonizers was seen to tarnish the prestige of the ruling race. Based on archival sources and reports by medical experts, the book provides a highly readable and illuminating account of contemporary psychiatric treatment and colonial policies. It will be fascinating reading not only to students of colonial history, medical sociology and related disciplines, but to all those with a general interest in life in the colonies.

When biographers write about a person’s life, they prioritize what is important to themselves: What interests them, what resonates with them, what helps them, what teaches them, what makes sense to them, and, most significantly, what advances their own political agendas. Their research is filtered through these lenses. Even if their biographical goal is to learn and present enough about their writers to better analyze a certain canon, literary critics usually construct life stories through their own theoretical positions. Certainly, readers should be aware that biographies bend according to their authors’ psychological makeup, cultural encoding, historical agency, and political penchants. Furthermore, biographies often reflect the age in which they are written, more so than the age in which their subject lived. This is not always a negative outcome, but it always imbues the portrait of the “biographee” with its own qualities so that the facsimile is never unadulterated. [NP] Betwixt and Between is an investigation of the biographical corpus of Mary Wollstonecraft, starting with Godwin’s Memoirs (1798) and ending with Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (2015). It identifies the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, and gaps that have run rampant, many of them incomprehensively left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. The myriad, often contradictory renditions of her life and thoughts have given us such a distorted view of Wollstonecraft that she has evolved into varying degrees of heroine and villain, an everywoman for every cause.

This book concerns HIV prevention.  The authors argue that until the world focuses its attention on the social issues carried and revealed by AIDS, it is unlikely that HIV transmission will be eradicated or even significantly reduced. Currently we are witnessing the remedicalisation or the continuing biomedicalisation of HIV prevention, which began in earnest in 1996/7 after the development of successful HIV treatment. This biomedical trajectory continues with the increasing push to use HIV treatments as prevention, and it appears to have undermined what has been – at least in many countries – a successful prevention response.

This book’s argument is that at least until such time as biomedicine develops an effective prophylactic vaccine and a cure for HIV, the world must rely on the everyday responses of people and communities to combat the virus. Effective HIV prevention hinges on communities and the social practices forged by these communities that reduce the risk of HIV-transmission (primarily safe sexual and safe drug injection practices); people’s willingness to be identified as infected with HIV (HIV testing practices); and, for people living with HIV, people’s commitment to keeping AIDS at bay (HIV treatment practices).

Combating HIV also relies on governments to ensure access to HIV prevention tools, including condoms and sterile needles and syringes, as well as to biomedical prevention technologies including those derived from successful antiretroviral treatment (ART) – pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), microbicides and post exposure prophylaxis (PEP), and male circumcision.  It requires that governments develop robust health infrastructures to support and enable regular HIV testing and provide access to treatments for those living with HIV. Effective HIV prevention needs governments to adopt pragmatic policies that are not deflected by moralistic or conservative ideologies. Effective responses to HIV, on the part of communities, health professionals and governments are all underpinned by public discussion about sex, sexuality and drug use. More broadly, combating HIV depends on civil society resisting HIV stigma and discrimination against those infected and affected by HIV, and enabling people and communities to discuss sex, sexuality and drug use in ways that promote the development and adoption of safe sexual and drug injection practices.

The present book examines the internationally facilitated peace process between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in order to provide critical insights on contemporary attempts at crafting liberal peace in intrastate conflicts. The general argument is for a broadened political perspective on conflict resolution, extending the focus from the narrow confines of formal peace negotiations and elitist crafting of liberal peace, to the contextual politics of state reforms for group rights and power-sharing and the associated politics of economic reforms for neoliberal development. In examining the contextual politics of state and market reforms in Sri Lanka, the book highlight the tensions between liberal peace and Sinhalese and Tamil nationalisms, demonstrated in the contestations over political exclusion vs. inclusion in peace negotiations, individual human rights vs. group rights, territorial power sharing vs. state sovereignty and neoliberal development vs. social welfare.

The purpose of this volume is not simply to compile yet another wearying chronicle of the horrors that have been committed by our fellow human beings. Most students who register for a course on Genocide assume that it will focus, perhaps exclusively, on the Holocaust—the only case with which they are familiar. Many of them have read Elie Wiesel’s eloquent masterpiece Night in secondary school, and some may have read The Diary of Anne Frank. A few students might even know that a genocide occurred in Rwanda or Darfur. Like most people, however, they equate genocide simply with mass killing, and assume that genocide must by definition entail millions of deaths. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”—meaning “to kill a people”— originally defined it “a colonial crime of destroying the national patterns of the oppressed and imposing the national patterns of the oppressors.” This was a process, Lemkin said, that was intended to destroy a people’s culture thatcould sometimes but not necessarily always result in mass murder. Students need to know that after World War II the great powers undermined and co-opted the process of writing the1948 Genocide Convention at the UN. It was written very carefully to remove from the definition of genocide the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada; racial lynching and Jim Crowism in the US; the “elimination of backwards people to protect human progress” in pre-apartheid South Africa, New Zealand and Australia; the mass murder of colonial subjects and repression of racial minorities at the hands of European security forces the world over; the mass murder of political opponents in Latin America; the mass murder of “economic” or social groups in the Soviet Union; and the blanket removal of any mention of famine and sexual violence as acts that could constitute genocide. Instead, they simply used the Holocaust as a template and succeeded in distorting what Lemkin originally meant by “genocide”—the murder of a people by destroying their social and cultural connections.

Students should also know that Lemkin’s ideas were most strongly supported at the UN by member states that were former colonies—namely Egypt, India, Pakistan, China and the Philippines—and by women within many of the delegations that were working to prevent the UN from succeeding in outlawing genocide, such as those from the US and the UK. When students learn this history can begin to think critically about what international law is and which systems of power international law serves. However, they also need a textbook that guides them to think critically and imaginatively about genocide and the 1948 UN Convention without reducing genocide and the UN Genocide Convention to a crude and cynical analysis of global power struggles. In other words, they need a book that is honest and that resists the temptation to spin ahistorical morality tales.

‘The Anthropologist and the Native’ is a collection of twenty essays by internationally known scholars of different persuasions, honouring the distinguished anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Obeyesekere’s writings include ‘Land Tenure in Village Ceylon’,  ‘Medusa’s Hair’, ‘The Cult of the Goddess Pattini’, ‘Work of Culture’, ‘The Apotheosis of Captain Cook’, ‘Imagining Karma’, ‘Cannibal Talk’, (with Richard Gombrich) ‘Buddhism Transformed’, and the forthcoming ‘The Awakened Ones’. Professor Obeyesekere’s contribution to South Asian studies and to anthropology is vast, and the rich variety of topics and approaches that marks this volume reflects his wide-ranging interests, constituting an apt tribute to his voluminous and inspiring work.

The authors featured in this collection are internationally known scholars from a variety of disciplines, including literary and textual studies, Indology, religion, history, social theory, art and anthropology. Reflecting Obeyesekere’s wide interests, the volume is arranged into six sections dealing with the Indian tradition and its representation; caste, kinship, land and community; renunciation and power; Buddhism transformed; the enigma of the text; and lastly a section entitled ‘The Anthropologist and the Native’, a discussion of aspects of anthropological fieldwork that evokes Obeyesekere’s extensive and intensive work dealing with his own society of Sri Lanka.

‘Mad Tales from the Raj’ is an extensively researched study of mental illness within the context of British colonialism in early nineteenth-century India. The author challenges the assumption that western medical psychology was impartial and highlights the extent to which it reflected British colonial ideology and practice. This long overdue reprint makes available in easily accessible form an authoritative assessment of western, institution-based psychiatry during the East India Company’s period. It includes a fully revised introduction that locates the work in relation to recent scholarly discourse in the field of history of colonial medicine as well as additional material on the treatment of the 'native insane'. The book provides the first comprehensive account of official attitudes and practices in relation to both Indian and European patients at a time when the dictum of the 'civilising mission' guided colonial social policy towards the colonized, and mental illness among the colonizers was seen to tarnish the prestige of the ruling race. Based on archival sources and reports by medical experts, the book provides a highly readable and illuminating account of contemporary psychiatric treatment and colonial policies. It will be fascinating reading not only to students of colonial history, medical sociology and related disciplines, but to all those with a general interest in life in the colonies.

'The World Bank needs India more than India needs it.' So goes an emerging consensus on both sides of the relationship between the Bank and its largest borrower. This book analyzes the politics of aid and influence, explaining but also challenging this insider view, while at the same time arguing against the popular perception that the Bank imposes its neoliberal agenda on a retreating Indian state. The Bank, struggling to remain relevant amid India's recent rapid growth and expanding access to private capital, has been caught up in a complex federal politics of economic reform and development. India's central government - far from being in retreat - has been the main driver of dramatic changes in the Bank's assistance strategy, leading toward a focus at the sub-national state level. Yet the closer the Bank's engagement with India's States, the more apparent their political, institutional, and developmental differences become. The Bank has vacillated between a 'focus States' strategy to encourage successfully reforming States, and a 'lagging States' strategy to give special assistance to those left behind by recent growth. The Indian government itself has encouraged this uncertainty, as its interests have evolved from a political strategy of selective support to reformers, to a renewed concern for regional inequalities. This timely study will be of interest to scholars, development practitioners, and engaged observers of globalization and the nation-state.