Anthem Press

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

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

Caroline Norton’s forgotten novel, which has remained unpublished until now, tells of the perils of courtship facing a naïve young girl Alixe, who has been launched onto the London social season.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

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

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

This book 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.

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

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

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

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

By borrowing from a wide eighteenth-century field, Byron showed how reading could become writing, fulfilling, for Pushkin and Mickiewicz, a mobile and chameleon definition of the epic, as a novel in verse or product of digressions and improvisations. As Peter Thorslev has shown, the Byronic hero was stitched together from works by Monbron, Radcliffe, Beckford, and other writers. I begin by examining Thomas Moore, whose Irish Melodies were a key influence on Hebrew Melodies, and whose Fudge Family in Paris helped shape the tone and style of Byron’s Don Juan. Byron’s conversations with Madame de Stael encouraged him to “Stick to the East,” and he followed her example during his years in England. By examining the manuscripts and marginalia of Byron, the author shows the key influence of William Beckford, Robert Southey, and Isaac Disraeli on the construction of “Vision of Judgment”; of John Moore’s Zeluco, Madame de Stael’s Corinne, UgoFoscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, and Lady Morgan’s Italy on Childe Harold I-II, Hebrew Melodies, and Childe Harold IV, and Don Juan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human life cannot be reduced to market transactions and human beings cannot only be treated as economic actors. When the power of the market increases, human beings will always try to protect themselves. Given the differences that exist in social and cultural traditions, these protective responses are likely to differ from one society to the other. This is why, even in a global market, diversity is always likely to persist. This book investigates the question of economic globalization - whether it is likely to lead to full convergence between political models and ways of life, or whether, even in a completely globalized world economy, there is likely to be scope for alternative solutions. But in a fully globalized world, how will we survive capitalism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was created by a group of atomic scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons. In 2007, it was set five minutes before the final bell, including for the first time the threat of climate change as well as new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology. This book aims at an analysis of the evolution of our present predicament throughout the Anthropocene Era beginning in 1763, making special reference to the history of the period, the study of the subject and major advances in the natural sciences.

Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson set out the basis for a scientific approach to the pre-industrial stages of historical development in the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, when the American and French revolutions created a vocabulary of modernity. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the industrial revolution unfolded in several stages, nationalism, imperialism and totalitarianism were among the phenomena impeding the update of the Enlightenment programme as well as the fulfilment of the aspirations of 1776 and 1789. Our present predicament demands a rigorous examination of its origins and an assertion of a scientific pandisciplinary approach involving history and other academic specialisations.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This book makes the case for the independence of Kosova – the former province of 'old Yugoslavia' and now temporarily a United Nations-led International protectorate – at a time in which international diplomacy is deeply involved in solving the contested issue of its 'Final Status'. Negotiations began in January 2006 under the auspices of a United Nations Special Envoy, and have been given renewed impetus by the international community’s determination to arrive at a solution.' The Case for Kosova' aims to contribute to these negotiations, by providing informed arguments for a different approach to the issue of Kosova's status beyond the limitations of current debates. Its aim is to counteract the anti-Albanian propaganda waged by some parties, but never to propose a counter-propaganda hostile to others or to the goals of a democratic Kosova. Debates on Kosova have largely concentrated on a specific aspect of the issue: either on ideology and myth construction (ignoring translations into practice); on geo-politics (missing the deep implications for stability and security); or on policy (lacking a conceptual understanding of both ideologies and processes). Until now, no book has linked these different fields in a persuasive manner. 'The Case for Kosova' fills this gap with an intellectually challenging and politically relevant commentary from key players in the debate.

This important collection tackles the failure of neoliberal reform to generate long-term growth and reduce poverty in many developing and transition economies. As dramatically demonstrated in the collapse of the WTO's Seattle talks, there is increasing dissatisfaction, in both developing and developed countries, with the emerging neoliberal global economic order. The resignations of Joseph Stiglitz and Ravi Kanbur from the World Bank emphasize that this disillusionment with the orthodoxy now exists at the very heart of the establishment. Yet the increasing demand for an alternative to this orthodoxy is not being met. Over the last few decades, the older generation of development economists have been edged out of most major universities, particularly in the USA. The situation in most developing countries is even worse: although there is more demand for alternatives to orthodox development economics, these countries have even less capability to generate such alternatives. 'Rethinking Development Economics' is intended to fill this gap, addressing key issues in development economics, ranging from macroeconomics, finance and governance to trade, industry, agriculture and poverty. Bringing together some of the foremost names in the field, this comprehensive and timely collection constitutes a critical staging post in the future of development economics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Mahatma Misunderstood” studies the relationship between the production of novels in late-colonial India and nationalist agitation promoted by the Indian National Congress. The volume examines the process by which novelists who were critically engaged with Gandhian nationalism, and who saw both the potentials and the pitfalls of Gandhian political strategies, came to be seen as the Mahatma’s standard-bearers rather than his loyal opposition.

In doing so, the volume challenges the orthodoxy in postcolonial and subaltern studies which contends that nationalists and nationalisms use independence to bring to power a bourgeois elite, who produce a story about the nation that erases the unevenness of minority experiences and demands in favor of simplified, majoritarian citizenship. Instead ‘The Mahatma Misunderstood’ demonstrates that nationalist fiction (and by extension the nationalist political movement) was marked from the beginning by a deep ambivalence about the relevance of nationalist agitation and mainstream nationalist politics for minorities in colonial India, and sought to recast anticolonial politics through novelistic debates with the spokesman for Indian nationalism, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

The volume thus articulates a recuperative theory of nationalism in the Indian case, in order to move thinking about nationalism beyond the current impasse produced by postcolonial theory in an era of transnational capitalism that too frequently forgets, underestimates or represses the national in the transnational.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur Asa Berger’s Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errorsuses semiotics along with a psychoanalytic approach to offer a granular analysis of one of Shakespeare’s funniest and most interesting comedies.

It is distinctive in that it offers a discussion of the basic techniques found in comic literature of all kinds and applies these techniques to events in the play. It also offers a discussion of the basic theories of humor and a syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the play.

It provides an overview of the theories of humor, what the author calls why theories, to provide a general understanding of how humor works. This is contrasted with his 45 techniques which deal with what makes people laugh.

Sociology as a discipline has a history of two centuries which has varied between countries. Its presence across the world is felt now more than ever. Over the years, sociology has been established as a discipline and contributed to the advancement of knowledge about society through scientific research. This facilitated the development of knowledge in other areas and disciplines as well. What sociology is doing globally, the contributions it has made to our knowledge of society and social phenomena, and the direction in which it is moving are of interest to both academics and the general public. There are many books that describe the
global character of sociology, but a fully research-based empirical work is yet to arrive on the market. This book fills that gap. It is about sociologies around the world. Viewed from a global perspective, this research-based study examines the world of sociology and its global features and trends. Specifically, the book deals with the trends in sociology; the broad and general areas of fields, subfields and research areas; the prominent, flourishing, emerging and/or declining areas of sociology; the origin of sociological knowledge; geographical regions and countries; the characteristics of global sociology in terms of language, research methodology, disciplinary backgrounds, interdisciplinarity and authorship; the relationships between the country of affiliation of authors and research areas; the effects of gender of the author and its interrelationships with the discipline, department, research areas and collaboration. The book will be an important resource for students, teachers, practitioners, researchers and the public. - The aim of this book is to examine the world of sociology and its global features and trends. It is viewed from a global perspective and exercises sociologies in different parts of the world which are integral. More specifically, the study examines sociology through sociological research, across countries where the discipline exists. The book deals with themes such as sociologies in the world, major research areas in sociology, collaboration and interdisciplinarity, and contemporary challenges, pertinent issues and debates. The book has eight chapters. - The topics the book deals with include the trends in sociology as inferred from sociology publications; the broad and general research areas that are evident in sociology at the global level; the prominent, flourishing, declining and/or emerging areas of sociology; the origin of sociological knowledge—geographical regions and countries; the characteristics of global sociology in terms of language, research methodology, disciplinary backgrounds, interdisciplinarity and authorship; the relationships between the country of affiliation of authors and research areas; the differences in the departmental affiliation and disciplinary backgrounds of authors; the gender of the author and its interrelationships with the discipline, department, research areas and collaboration; the effect of gender, discipline and collaboration of authors on the impact of sociology; and the key outlets and the location of the outlets of sociological research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if a conservative girl falls in love with a secular young woman?

The novel discloses the codes of cultural differentiation in 21st century Turkey as it focuses on the details of the two young women’s lives, their families, and their emotional and sexual lives.

Esin is an attractive, happily married Turkish woman with a modern, Western-oriented outlook and a successful career hosting business meetings in Istanbul. She would normally have nothing in common with Kubra, a conservative religious girl she met at college in the States. Kubra wears the Islamist headscarf and lives with her parents.

As Esin and Kübra form an intimate friendship, the chapters of the novel open out onto each woman’s emotional and sexual experience in turn. The cultural divisions of contemporary Turkey are dramatized through their personal lives and the dynamics within their families.

Each woman’s curiosity about the other’s mysterious world gradually takes on a boldly erotic character. At first interested in the external trappings of each other’s lives, they embark on a journey of spiritual and sensual discovery whereby each woman comes to know 'The Other.'

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

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

‘From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood and Popular Television’ is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to key debates concerning the representations of motherhood, motherwork and the maternal role in contemporary television programming. The volume looks at the construction of motherhood in the ostensibly female genre of soap opera; the mother as housewife in the domestic situation comedy; deviant, desiring and delinquent motherwork in the teen drama; the single working mother in the contemporary dramedy; the fragile and failing mother of reality parenting television; the serene and selfless celebrity motherhood profile; and the new mother in reality pregnancy and childbirth television. ‘Motherhood and Popular Television’ examines the depiction of motherhood in this wide range of popular television genres in order to illustrate how the maternal role is being constructed, circulated and interrogated in contemporary factual and fictional programming, paying particular attention to the ways in which such images can be seen to challenge or conform to the ideal image of the ‘good’ mother that dominates the contemporary cultural landscape.

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

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

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

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

'The Bengal Borderland' constitutes the epicentre of the partition of British India. Yet while the forging of international borders between India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma (the 'Bengal Borderland') has been a core theme in Partition studies, these crucial borderlands have, remarkably, been largely ignored by historians. While South Asia is poorly represented in borderland studies, the study of South Asian borderlands appears indispensable because here a major and intensely contested experiment in twentieth-century border making took place. Without direct reference to the borderlands as a historical reality it is not possible to understand how post-colonial societies in South Asia developed, the extent to which South Asian economies actually became bounded by borders, or the ways in which national identities became internalized. In examining this crucial region, Willem van Schendel challenges existing assumptions about the nature of relationships between people, place, identity and culture, and raises particularly urgent questions in the context of globalization, with its predictions of the 'end of geography' and a borderless homogenous world. This book will interest historians, geographers, political scientists and economists, as well as South Asianists and migration experts, and will appeal to academics, students and practitioners.

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

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

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

In ‘Consumption, Cities and States: Comparing Singapore with Asian and Western Cities’, Ann Brooks and Lionel Wee focus on the interrelationship of consumption, citizenship and the state in the context of globalization, calling for greater emphasis to be placed on the citizen as consumer. While it is widely recognized that citizenship is increasingly defined by ‘gradations of esteem’, where different kinds of rights and responsibilities accrue to different categories and subcategories of ‘citizens’, not enough analytical focus has been given to how the status of being a citizen impacts the individual’s consumption. The interface between citizen status and consumer activity is a crucial point of analysis in light of the neoliberal assertion that individuals and institutions perform at their best within a free market economy, and because of the state’s expectations regarding citizens’ rights and responsibilities as consumers not just as producers. In this remarkable comparative study, the authors examine these relationships across a number of cities in both Asia and the West.

Undisciplined is concerned with questions of the transformative effects of crisis in architecture as a discipline. This concern is addressed through the critical examination of a hybrid body of practice-based work, which, although founded on the discipline of architecture, results from its contingent amalgamation with other fields, including contemporary art, politics, and theory. The book reflects on projects developed in contexts of profound sociopolitical instability (i.e., corruption, violence, poverty, and exile), including informal settlements in Venezuela that provide the background to the discussion of projects undertaken elsewhere. In this process, the book interrogates the volatility of the crisis refrain, articulating a framework to propose an undisciplined form of architectural and spatial practice. 

This framework not only advocates for working across different fields, but also, for practicing rebelliously and nomadically. To practice rebelliously is to exercise the practice of architecture as an act of resistance. In other words, it is to engage with the problem of space from a skeptical point of view, defying architecture’s entrenched structures of power and questioning its notions of authority, expertise, and specialization. Likewise, to practice nomadically suggests the condition of being constantly on the move, not only physically but also intellectually. It is the quality of practicing architecture as anything but as an architectural expert, drawing from experience working in overlooked social and cultural contexts, and infiltrating disciplinary fields located in its periphery. 

As such, Undisciplined questions pre-established disciplinary categories and develops unorthodox methodologies that facilitate the construction of new and increasingly necessary architectural narratives. The book provides examples of such narratives, including speculative and realized projects that illustrate this claim. These examples also provide evidence of how an undisciplined approach is necessary, especially in times when the precepts established by architecture’s intelligentsia and some of its associated structures of disciplinary control need to be questioned and challenged. 

The book collects almost thirty-two opinion pieces, essays, and two poems written by the author on a wide variety of public policy topics and published in books, magazines, and online between 2006 and 2022. The author, a self-described “militant moderate,” draws on his participation as a commentator in these and many other public debates.

The articles are grouped into six parts, topical groupings that range widely: the growing need for moderate voices in policy debates, the nature of American exceptionalism, the challenge of civic discourse, the depredations of the Trump years, the role of campus debates in the formation of public ideas, and policies concerning immigration, citizenship, and refugees.

In each of the essays (and poems), the author's distinctive voice is resonant. It is militant, emphasizing the major values at stake and explaining why he would resolve them in particular ways. But it is also moderate in patiently but firmly rejecting extreme factual and normative claims. The form and content of these writings model civic engagement in its highest sense: respectful of differences, reasonable in its reliance on sound evidence, appealing to civic virtue, and rejecting the extreme claims of left and right.

'The Bengal Borderland' constitutes the epicentre of the partition of British India. Yet while the forging of international borders between India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma (the 'Bengal Borderland') has been a core theme in Partition studies, these crucial borderlands have, remarkably, been largely ignored by historians. While South Asia is poorly represented in borderland studies, the study of South Asian borderlands appears indispensable because here a major and intensely contested experiment in twentieth-century border making took place. Without direct reference to the borderlands as a historical reality it is not possible to understand how post-colonial societies in South Asia developed, the extent to which South Asian economies actually became bounded by borders, or the ways in which national identities became internalized. In examining this crucial region, Willem van Schendel challenges existing assumptions about the nature of relationships between people, place, identity and culture, and raises particularly urgent questions in the context of globalization, with its predictions of the 'end of geography' and a borderless homogenous world. This book will interest historians, geographers, political scientists and economists, as well as South Asianists and migration experts, and will appeal to academics, students and practitioners.

China preoccupies us; yet its recent past is still relatively unfamiliar. No country has undergone a greater period of sustained and turbulent change than China in the twentieth century, but it has emerged again as a leading global power. It is, therefore, more important than ever to understand the society it has become and its rise to such influence. This timely study uses recent research to explore how China has been transformed from an economic and political backwater at the start of the twentieth century to its current pre-eminent position one hundred years later.

During this convulsive period, China experienced a multitude of political systems: from the final years of the Qing dynasty, it entered a democratic phase in the 1920s when central government was weak and local warlords ruled supreme. As the Nationalist Government struggled to maintain control in the 1930s, the country was subject to invasion and partial occupation by Japan. At the end of the Second World War, the country was again torn apart in a struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists under Mao Zedong. Finally, a new People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, but early social and economic advances were thrown away as Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution. These experiments brought the country to the brink of ruin. It was not until the death of Mao in 1976 and the subsequent reforms of Deng Xiaoping that the emphasis finally turned to practical change and the revival of the economy. Uniquely, subsequent success has been achieved through the adoption of capitalist enterprise in a one-party communist state – a fusion which has defied Western scepticism.

This study tackles all these major social, economic and political developments. In the process, it explores regional variation, cultural change and philosophy, as well as contrasting interpretations of Chinese history, the fluctuating role of women and the family and the challenges for the world’s most populous nation as it enters the twenty first century. It portrays a resilient people whom we must understand, for their future is also ours.

World leaders have made a forceful statement that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. However, little progress has been made in implementing policies to address climate change. In Climate Uncertainty and Risk, eminent climate scientist Judith Curry shows how we can break through this stalemate. This book helps us rethink the climate change problem, the risks we are facing and our response. It helps us strategize on how we can best engage with our environment and support human well-being while responding to climate change. Climate Uncertainty and Risk provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the climate change debate. It shows how both the climate change problem and its solution have been oversimplified. It explains how understanding the uncertainties helps us to better assess the risks. It describes how uncertainty and disagreement can be part of the decision-making process. It provides a road map formulating pragmatic solutions that can improve our well-being in the 21st century. Judith Curry brings a unique perspective to the debate on climate change. She has engaged extensively with decision makers in both the private and public sectors on a range of issues related to weather and climate. She engages with scientists, activists and politicians on both sides of the climate change debate. In her search for wisdom in this debate, she incorporates the philosophy and sociology of science, ethics, risk management and politics. Climate Uncertainty and Risk is essential reading for those concerned about the environment, professionals dealing with climate change and our national leaders.

The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world.  Each essay analyses an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three prominent Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. This volume is particularly valuable in that its main focus is placed on the perception of Chekhov's art by those who existed on the border between literary criticism and philosophy. This is complemented by a literary critique of their accounts, and therefore remains faithful to Chekhov's poetics.

The collection thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that we now refer to as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections between Chekhov's legacy and the Russian culture of that period. Through its stress on the philosophical perception of Chekhov, this book offers a thematically consistent and systematic revelation of new dimensions to Chekhov's creative heritage. The essays are supplemented by biographical accounts of Rozanov, Merezhkovskii and Shestov.

Slovakia has never been a major destination for refugees or migrants and follows a strictly anti-refugee politics. Like other formerly socialist countries in Central Europe which are now EU member states—especially its fellow Visegrád countries Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—Slovakia fiercely rejected refugee redistribution during the “long summer of ’migration” in 2015–2016. Meanwhile, the few refugees living in Slovakia face restrictive authorities and deficient support infrastructures. Building on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2017 and 2019 and focusing on those often-overlooked actors who do support refugees as NGO employees or volunteers, this book provides an empathetic and ethnographically rich account of their everyday efforts to accommodate ’refugees’ needs and state ’authorities’ expectations.

The book explores those engagements not as negotiation of political or ideological positions, but primarily as emotional and moral practices. It argues that moral codes and emotional templates shape the implementation of refugee support, structuring encounters and clashes between refugees, helpers, and bureaucrats. They generate lasting formal or informal solutions and even inform new policies in refugee care. Closely connected to this observation is a second finding, namely, that moral dilemmas and conflicting emotions often cause more distress and greater complications than the political controversies surrounding the topic. Actors on opposite ends of the political spectrum—like liberal NGO employees and state bureaucrats—experience the same conflicts of conscience and adopt the same indecisiveness.

These findings challenge the common characterization of the Slovak and other post-socialist societies as being divided between hegemonic populist, illiberal and xenophobic forces on one hand, and a much smaller and less influential liberal and cosmopolitan discourse on the other. Rather, actors blur or adapt their visions of what migration policy should ideally look like while engaging in the complicated practice of refugee care. The dynamics described in this book can increasingly be observed in western European countries as well, as mainstream political and public discourse has become more hostile towards refugees and the utterances from opponents and proponents of refugee solidarity have grown more alike since 2015.

A powerful love story set in the class-conscious Tsarist Russia of the early 19th century. It embraces every level of that society – serf, provincial, aristocrat – in verse which is by turns beautiful, witty, wickedly perceptive and always readable.

It traces the lives of two young people from childhood to maturity. Yevgeny, the fashionably disillusioned young man who knows everything about love except the most important thing; Tatiana, whose only experience of love comes from romantic novels but who knows how to love till the end.

This is essential reading for anyone with a love of Russian literature, because this is where it all began. There is little pre-history to that golden age of 19th century novels. Lomonosov, a fisherman’s son turned scholar, took church Slavonic, peasant Russian, mixed in a few ‘Loan translations’ and gave a French-speaking aristocracy a literary language; Pushkin was the first truly great poet to use it; Eugene Onegin is his greatest work.

Over the last two decades, Eastern Europe has experienced extensive changes in geo-political relocations and relations. Attempts to establish liberal democracies, re-orientations from planned to market economics, and a desire to create ‘new states’ and internationally minded ‘new citizens’ has left some in poverty, unemployment and social insecurity, leading them to rely on normative coping and semi-autonomous strategies for security and social guarantees. Such processes testify to a paradoxical situation between the political attempts to create well-functioning, modern civil societies, and the reliance on normative laws on the margins of society.

This anthology explores aspects of everyday uncertainty, which are defined as ‘grey zones’. Within anthropology, grey zones have been conceived of in relation to political corruption and zones of ambiguity related to violence. Yet, the authors propose to expand the term to include situations where uncertainty and ambiguity have become part and parcel of everyday life and where the indefinable defines the situation. This book views these various grey zones not merely as legacies of socialism but as something in and of themselves; thus it deploys the notion of grey zones in order to find new ways of approaching and conceptualizing current situations in Eastern Europe, ways that are not preconfigured in terms of post-socialism or transition.

The gothic is a dark mirror of the fears and taboos of a culture. This collection brings together a dozen chilling tales of the nineteenth-century American South with non-fiction texts that illuminate them and ground them in their historical context. The tales are from writers with enduring, world-wide reputations (Edgar Allan Poe), and others whose work will be unknown to most readers. Indeed, one of the stories has not been reprinted for nearly a hundred years, and little is known about its author, E. Levi Brown.

Similarly, the historical selections are from a range of authors, some canonical, others not, ranging from Thomas Jefferson and the great historian and sociologist W. E. B. DuBois to the relatively obscure Leona Sansay.  Some of these readings are themselves as disturbingly gothic as any of the tales. Indeed, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are tenuous in the gothic South. It is our contention that southern gothic fiction is in many ways realistic fiction, and, even at its most grotesque and haunting, is closely linked to the realities of southern life.

In America, and in the American South especially, the great fears, taboos, and boundaries often concern race. Even in stories where black people are not present, as in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The System of Professor Tarr and Dr. Fether,” slavery hangs in the background as a ghostly metaphor. Our background readings place the fiction in the context of the South and the Caribbean: the revolution in Haiti, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the realities of slavery and the myths spun by its apologists, the aftermath of the Civil War, and the brutalities of Jim Crow laws.

In ‘Consumption, Cities and States: Comparing Singapore with Asian and Western Cities’, Ann Brooks and Lionel Wee focus on the interrelationship of consumption, citizenship and the state in the context of globalization, calling for greater emphasis to be placed on the citizen as consumer. While it is widely recognized that citizenship is increasingly defined by ‘gradations of esteem’, where different kinds of rights and responsibilities accrue to different categories and subcategories of ‘citizens’, not enough analytical focus has been given to how the status of being a citizen impacts the individual’s consumption. The interface between citizen status and consumer activity is a crucial point of analysis in light of the neoliberal assertion that individuals and institutions perform at their best within a free market economy, and because of the state’s expectations regarding citizens’ rights and responsibilities as consumers not just as producers. In this remarkable comparative study, the authors examine these relationships across a number of cities in both Asia and the West.

The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world.  Each essay analyses an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three prominent Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. This volume is particularly valuable in that its main focus is placed on the perception of Chekhov's art by those who existed on the border between literary criticism and philosophy. This is complemented by a literary critique of their accounts, and therefore remains faithful to Chekhov's poetics.

The collection thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that we now refer to as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections between Chekhov's legacy and the Russian culture of that period. Through its stress on the philosophical perception of Chekhov, this book offers a thematically consistent and systematic revelation of new dimensions to Chekhov's creative heritage. The essays are supplemented by biographical accounts of Rozanov, Merezhkovskii and Shestov.

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. 

This engaging two-volume study pursues a balance between theoretical and practical sociology. The authors are aware of the impasse often deliberately created by the self-conscious language of sociological theory. The primary concern of the applied sociologist is to adapt theoretical knowledge to actual human situations, using it to formulate social policy, investigate domestic and international social problems and create a pragmatic ‘sociology of possibility’.

Volume II, subtitled ‘Practising Perspectives’, provides workable guidelines for social scientists, policymakers, planners, administrators and social activists. The reader is also introduced to the sophisticated research methods employed in the social sciences. Emphasizing cross-cultural experiences and a global perspective, the essays study social problems using inductive and deductive approaches, measurable concepts and quantitative analysis. Modern crises precipitated by war, terrorism, anarchy and poverty are examined in practical and realistic terms.

My basic message can be put in a straightforward way: humanities scholars should improve their way of asking questions. Their questions about the human condition need to be as clear and simple as possible in order to enable unambiguous answers. Simple without being simplistic, nuanced without being embroiled – that is the ideal. Unambiguous answers (not to be confused with irrefutable answers) are much wanted, although not always possible to attain. Moreover, if one wants the questions to be highly significant for the understanding of the human condition, there should not be too many questions. Even in this respect, there is much to be wanted in today’s humanities research. Instead of gathering around a limited set of profound questions and holding on to them until the answers begin to appear, generally the humanist guild scatters its scientific energy on too many disparate things – replacing them far too often with hundreds of new questions, ‘perspectives’ and ‘problematisations’. In its turn, such a research culture may hamper a cumulative growth of knowledge, the possibility of which, moreover, is regrettably often denied or even viewed with suspicion.

In this book, I am doing two things to redress the current problems in the humanities world-wide. Firstly, I present and discuss a set of big but still insufficiently addressed topics that humanities researchers should focus over a sustained period of time, such as what explains that some kinds of knowledge are widely accepted whereas other kinds of knowledge are rejected, or what explains the widespread diffusion of inequality paralleled by a gradual emergence of egalitarianism over the centuries, et cetera. Secondly, I discuss in general terms what the humanities are or should be, as well as what they are not or should not be. Basically, humanities researchers should consider their field as an integral part of science, although uniquely dealing with humans a decision making, meaning seeking and self-reflecting agents.

World leaders have made a forceful statement that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. However, little progress has been made in implementing policies to address climate change. In Climate Uncertainty and Risk, eminent climate scientist Judith Curry shows how we can break through this stalemate. This book helps us rethink the climate change problem, the risks we are facing and our response. It helps us strategize on how we can best engage with our environment and support human well-being while responding to climate change. Climate Uncertainty and Risk provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the climate change debate. It shows how both the climate change problem and its solution have been oversimplified. It explains how understanding the uncertainties helps us to better assess the risks. It describes how uncertainty and disagreement can be part of the decision-making process. It provides a road map formulating pragmatic solutions that can improve our well-being in the 21st century. Judith Curry brings a unique perspective to the debate on climate change. She has engaged extensively with decision makers in both the private and public sectors on a range of issues related to weather and climate. She engages with scientists, activists and politicians on both sides of the climate change debate. In her search for wisdom in this debate, she incorporates the philosophy and sociology of science, ethics, risk management and politics. Climate Uncertainty and Risk is essential reading for those concerned about the environment, professionals dealing with climate change and our national leaders.

“No Size Fits All” is a book that will break the public policy deadlock over federal education standards in the United States. American debates about education policy are focused at the moment on two big policy disputes.

The first big dispute concerns the Common Core testing standards, which force American students into a dreary routine that makes millions of children hate school for no good reason. The second big dispute concerns the proposal of Education Secretary Betsy De Vos to siphon federal public school funding into “vouchers” that parents could use to send their children to private schools. Critics complain that this proposal is inherently a threat to the hard-won right to a tuition-free public education at the elementary and secondary levels.

The politics of federal education policy has devolved into an all-or-nothing fight between defenders of a status quo that its critics condemn as oppressive and proponents of a school choice reform that its critics condemn as subversive. “No Size Fits All” interrupts this all-or-nothing argument with a humane and sensible alternative––one that could lay the groundwork for broad new consensus on federal education policy.

“An Introduction to Changing India: Culture, Politics and Development” provides a comprehensive view of today’s rapidly changing India in a way that is both reader-friendly and scholarly, without requiring prior knowledge on the subject from its readers. It investigates Indian culture, politics, economics and technology, as well as population and environmental issues. Gender issues are also discussed throughout the book. The authors provide a balanced picture of the emerging India’s many triumphs, as well as its lingering problems and the ongoing battle for more inclusive growth. By drawing on anthropological fieldwork in rural and urban India, the authors give ordinary Indians a voice by exploring their aspirations for change, while also describing macro-level changes.

The study draws from extensive reading of research reports and fieldwork by the authors, who have carried out anthropological research on kinship, gender issues, politics, class and caste, population issues and the appropriation of information technology in India since the 1990s.

“No Size Fits All” is a book that will break the public policy deadlock over federal education standards in the United States. American debates about education policy are focused at the moment on two big policy disputes.

The first big dispute concerns the Common Core testing standards, which force American students into a dreary routine that makes millions of children hate school for no good reason. The second big dispute concerns the proposal of Education Secretary Betsy De Vos to siphon federal public school funding into “vouchers” that parents could use to send their children to private schools. Critics complain that this proposal is inherently a threat to the hard-won right to a tuition-free public education at the elementary and secondary levels.

The politics of federal education policy has devolved into an all-or-nothing fight between defenders of a status quo that its critics condemn as oppressive and proponents of a school choice reform that its critics condemn as subversive. “No Size Fits All” interrupts this all-or-nothing argument with a humane and sensible alternative––one that could lay the groundwork for broad new consensus on federal education policy.

Informed by fourth-wave feminism, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo presents a compelling and timely reading of crime fiction in the age of #MeToo. The book explores five major fourth-wave feminist topics, #MeToo, rape culture, toxic masculinity, LBGTQ+ perspectives, and transgender. These topics have been the subject of intense feminist scrutiny and campaigning, and the book demonstrates how this attention is reflected in contemporary crime fiction and its generic and thematic preoccupations. The book opens with a chapter presenting an overview of existing critical perspectives and feminist debates, demonstrating how fourth-wave feminist ideas and debates are inspiring innovations in the genre, as well as generating fresh ways of reading past and present crime fictions. Providing an overview and context for both fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement, the chapter establishes the critical and cultural framework for its analysis. The chapter also outlines the book’s methodology and approach, detailing the contents of the chapters. Each of the five subsequent chapters uses critical vocabulary and concepts from feminism and the #MeToo movement to reassess canonical works and present new readings of contemporary crime fiction, producing compelling analyses of gender and genre. Canonical authors whose works are discussed include Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Josephine Tey, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Val McDermid. Examining selected contemporary novels and short stories, the chapters in Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo provide fresh readings of both well-known and lesser-known crime authors. The contemporary authors whose work is examined are Lauren Henderson, Susan White, Jennifer Haigh, Allison Leotta, Y.A. Erskine, Heather Fitt, John Harvey, Dorothy Koomson, Pekka Hiltunen, Nekesa Afia, Michael Nava, Stella Duffy, Alex Reeve, V.T. Davy, and Dharma Kelleher.
Through its critical examination of crime fiction, Crime Fiction in the Age of #MeToo offers a powerful feminist analysis of the genre which draws links between literature and ongoing urgent social and cultural debates such as the #Metoo movement and fourth-wave feminism.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic “The Secret Garden,” but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist, and writer of children’s stories. Born in 1849 in Manchester, England, Burnett settled in Tennessee with her mother and siblings at sixteen after her father’s death. She began writing stories to supplement her family’s income. With the acceptance of the story “Surly Tim’s Trouble” by “Scribner’s Magazine” in New York and the subsequent publication of her first novel “That Lass O’Lowries” in 1877, the critics hailed Burnett as a new voice in American fiction comparing her favorably to Charles Dickens.

Burnett’s early novels were written in the years prior to and immediately after the death of George Eliot in 1880, their form very much in the Victorian tradition of realism. Her first two novels were social problem novels set in a mining and manufacturing district in Lancashire and they deployed the local dialect to great effect. Even in those early traditional novels, the contours of Burnett’s unique conception of her later female characters can be discerned. After her industrial novels, she published a short American regional novel about rural life in North Carolina and an English village novel modelled on Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford” with this difference: Burnett’s heroine in that tale is a young, vibrant American woman. With the publication of her Washington novel “Through One Administration,” which critics compared to Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” as fine examples of the “new fiction,” Burnett’s career as a novelist was firmly established. Thus, the early chapters of this book read Burnett’s novels alongside those of Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry James as a way to demonstrate her place is the changing literary field of the time.

After her Washington novel, she turned away from realism and the psychological minuteness of the new fiction to experiment with both traditional and popular novel forms. She next published two historical novels “A Lady of Quality” and “His Grace of Osmonde,” the first a tale of her most challenging heroine Clorinda Wildairs and the second a tale of the man Clorinda ultimately marries. Taken together the two novels tell the same tale from a woman’s and a man’s point of view. “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett” places those novels in the context of theories of the Victorian historical novel and in relation with Victorian narrative deployment of multiple points of view.

She next published a pair of transatlantic novels roughly modelled on a pattern she sketched out in her children’s classic, “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” The novels engage with issues related to the “new woman” novel of the period, especially in relation to fears of cultural degeneration and the responsibility of women to redress those fears. Her last two novels appeared after the Great War in which she wrestled with the crisis of meaning for Anglo-American culture in the wake of the war. The final chapter of this book, then, places those last novels in relation to Great War novels written by women and frames a reading of Burnett’s engagement with the Great War through T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Read as a body of literary fiction, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

My basic message can be put in a straightforward way: humanities scholars should improve their way of asking questions. Their questions about the human condition need to be as clear and simple as possible in order to enable unambiguous answers. Simple without being simplistic, nuanced without being embroiled – that is the ideal. Unambiguous answers (not to be confused with irrefutable answers) are much wanted, although not always possible to attain. Moreover, if one wants the questions to be highly significant for the understanding of the human condition, there should not be too many questions. Even in this respect, there is much to be wanted in today’s humanities research. Instead of gathering around a limited set of profound questions and holding on to them until the answers begin to appear, generally the humanist guild scatters its scientific energy on too many disparate things – replacing them far too often with hundreds of new questions, ‘perspectives’ and ‘problematisations’. In its turn, such a research culture may hamper a cumulative growth of knowledge, the possibility of which, moreover, is regrettably often denied or even viewed with suspicion.

In this book, I am doing two things to redress the current problems in the humanities world-wide. Firstly, I present and discuss a set of big but still insufficiently addressed topics that humanities researchers should focus over a sustained period of time, such as what explains that some kinds of knowledge are widely accepted whereas other kinds of knowledge are rejected, or what explains the widespread diffusion of inequality paralleled by a gradual emergence of egalitarianism over the centuries, et cetera. Secondly, I discuss in general terms what the humanities are or should be, as well as what they are not or should not be. Basically, humanities researchers should consider their field as an integral part of science, although uniquely dealing with humans a decision making, meaning seeking and self-reflecting agents.

Transforming the Politics of Mobility and Migration in Aotearoa New Zealand is an edited collection that explores avenues for transformational epistemologies and practices leading to a more just and ethical politics of mobility and migration. At a time of heightened securitization, rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and populism as well as increasingly exclusionary migration regimes internationally, this book presents a timely intervention. It takes a national case-based approach, focusing on Aotearoa New Zealand, where, over the past two decades, migration policy settings have created a raft of inequities and differential rights between citizens, non- and sub-citizens as well as among immigrants. The Covid-19 pandemic response has both exposed and exacerbated these issues, providing an opportune moment to appraise current policy settings and encourage transformative change.

The collection brings together leading and early career scholars, whose chapters are based on original state of the art research, and insights from practitioners in the migration sector who advocate for migrant rights. The contributors to the book critically analyse how migration management regimes (re-)produce inequities and precarities for and within migrant populations as a starting point for formulating alternative paradigms for the politics of mobility and migration. Collectively, the contributions seek to combine discussions of macro-level political processes with empirically rich insights into the intersections between migration regimes and migrant lives, aspirations and capabilities.

The multidisciplinary contributions to each part engage with the book’s central remit from particular angles (including research on a range of particular migrant populations), lending both breadth and depth to the discussion. While focused on Aotearoa New Zealand, all authors consider their insights in relation to international developments, especially in the Asia Pacific region, settler societies and other Western nations.

The collection aims to advance conceptual knowledge in migration studies and fills a gap in the sparse literature on the politics of migration in Aotearoa New Zealand. While theoretically engaged and of value to the research community, the book also follows recent calls to better communicate the complexities of migration to the public and policy makers with accessible chapters that address a range of issues that will speak to a wide audience.

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes is a comprehensive and updated critical discussion of Hughes’s contribution to sociology and his current legacy in the social sciences. A global team of scholars discusses issues such as the international circulation of Hughes’s work, his intellectual biography, his impact on current ethnographic research practices and the use in current research of such Hughesian concepts as master status, dirty work and bastard institutions. This companion is a useful reference for students of classical sociology, practitioners of ethnographic research and scholars of sociology in the Chicagoan tradition.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic “The Secret Garden,” but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist, and writer of children’s stories. Born in 1849 in Manchester, England, Burnett settled in Tennessee with her mother and siblings at sixteen after her father’s death. She began writing stories to supplement her family’s income. With the acceptance of the story “Surly Tim’s Trouble” by “Scribner’s Magazine” in New York and the subsequent publication of her first novel “That Lass O’Lowries” in 1877, the critics hailed Burnett as a new voice in American fiction comparing her favorably to Charles Dickens.

Burnett’s early novels were written in the years prior to and immediately after the death of George Eliot in 1880, their form very much in the Victorian tradition of realism. Her first two novels were social problem novels set in a mining and manufacturing district in Lancashire and they deployed the local dialect to great effect. Even in those early traditional novels, the contours of Burnett’s unique conception of her later female characters can be discerned. After her industrial novels, she published a short American regional novel about rural life in North Carolina and an English village novel modelled on Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford” with this difference: Burnett’s heroine in that tale is a young, vibrant American woman. With the publication of her Washington novel “Through One Administration,” which critics compared to Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” as fine examples of the “new fiction,” Burnett’s career as a novelist was firmly established. Thus, the early chapters of this book read Burnett’s novels alongside those of Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry James as a way to demonstrate her place is the changing literary field of the time.

After her Washington novel, she turned away from realism and the psychological minuteness of the new fiction to experiment with both traditional and popular novel forms. She next published two historical novels “A Lady of Quality” and “His Grace of Osmonde,” the first a tale of her most challenging heroine Clorinda Wildairs and the second a tale of the man Clorinda ultimately marries. Taken together the two novels tell the same tale from a woman’s and a man’s point of view. “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett” places those novels in the context of theories of the Victorian historical novel and in relation with Victorian narrative deployment of multiple points of view.

She next published a pair of transatlantic novels roughly modelled on a pattern she sketched out in her children’s classic, “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” The novels engage with issues related to the “new woman” novel of the period, especially in relation to fears of cultural degeneration and the responsibility of women to redress those fears. Her last two novels appeared after the Great War in which she wrestled with the crisis of meaning for Anglo-American culture in the wake of the war. The final chapter of this book, then, places those last novels in relation to Great War novels written by women and frames a reading of Burnett’s engagement with the Great War through T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Read as a body of literary fiction, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

This is a comprehensive book about the three significant African American women dramatists whose plays illustrate the debilitating effects of racism, sexism, and classism on African Americans in general and African American women in particular. The book explicates the novel ideas about the African American women who have been oppressed by the men (both white and black); however, they launch a rebellion against the oppressive hegemonic white culture, African American patriarchy, and white materialistic ideology. This book offers an exhaustive background of the social, economic, political, and cultural history of African Americans in general and how the social, economic, political, and cultural history of African American women is different than that of white men, white women, and African American men in particular. The book also discusses how the images of African American women in American mainstream theater and African American male theater are different than the images of African American women in African American women’s dramas. 

The themes of the book are the African American women as warriors or militants. African American women playwrights have transformed and re-invented American theater by writing plays for African American theater which focus on African American concerns, delineation of blackness, challenging the racial and gender authorities, projection of black womanhood, and production of African American history. African American women were truly and genuinely excluded from American mainstream theater because they were projected as stereotypes in American mainstream dramas and theater. Therefore, these women dramatists carried out the African American women’s voice on the African American stage by telling the story of their race, history, African identity as well as being a woman. In their plays, they voice against the brutal treatment meted out to them by the white patriarchal social order and also by the African American patriarchy.

African American women dramatists depict social violence, rape, suicide, domestic violence, racial violence, verbal abuse, child molestation, and so on. In most cases, black women are the victims of the violence and are portrayed as mere objects in a discourse of domination that African American women playwrights challenge. The main characters in the plays are not presented as mere objects, passive victims who endure subjugation; they are surrounded by brutal behavior and they use violence too. This shift in identification and focus is clearly influenced by the playwrights’ adherence to African American feminist thought.

The gothic is a dark mirror of the fears and taboos of a culture. This collection brings together a dozen chilling tales of the nineteenth-century American South with non-fiction texts that illuminate them and ground them in their historical context. The tales are from writers with enduring, world-wide reputations (Edgar Allan Poe), and others whose work will be unknown to most readers. Indeed, one of the stories has not been reprinted for nearly a hundred years, and little is known about its author, E. Levi Brown.

Similarly, the historical selections are from a range of authors, some canonical, others not, ranging from Thomas Jefferson and the great historian and sociologist W. E. B. DuBois to the relatively obscure Leona Sansay.  Some of these readings are themselves as disturbingly gothic as any of the tales. Indeed, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are tenuous in the gothic South. It is our contention that southern gothic fiction is in many ways realistic fiction, and, even at its most grotesque and haunting, is closely linked to the realities of southern life.

In America, and in the American South especially, the great fears, taboos, and boundaries often concern race. Even in stories where black people are not present, as in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The System of Professor Tarr and Dr. Fether,” slavery hangs in the background as a ghostly metaphor. Our background readings place the fiction in the context of the South and the Caribbean: the revolution in Haiti, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the realities of slavery and the myths spun by its apologists, the aftermath of the Civil War, and the brutalities of Jim Crow laws.

As the Bretton Woods institutions enter their sixtieth year, they face a number of challenges. Some are the result of changes that have occurred in the world economy while others are the outcome of their approaches to the problems of stabilization and development, and of their own governance structure. 'The IMF and the World Bank at Sixty' presents a selection of essays prepared for the Group of Twenty-Four Developing Nations (G24), by some of the foremost authorities in their fields, which address these challenges and suggest the need for reform in several areas. Ariel Buira's introduction presents a critical overview of the functioning of the IMF and the international monetary system, underscoring a number of shortcomings that could be remedied to make it more supportive of development through changes in governance. The other essays focus on two areas: financial issues, particularly the prevention of financial crises; and secondly, the policies of the Bretton Woods institutions. These essays have onefundamental aim: to improve the functioning of the global economy and to better enable the developing countries to share in the gains in prosperity of recent decades.

How do you make abstract historical interpretations authentic? This question troubled communist party leaders and propaganda historians in Hungary following the restoration of dictatorship after 1956. Accordingly, this book investigates the crooked history of the retrospective state revisions of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic between the years of its 30th and 40th anniversary, 1949 and 1959.

In recent decades the study of memory has become central to the historical discipline as a powerful conceptual tool to assess both the political-ideological implications of social constructions of the past and the writing of history itself. Yet, most of these investigations focus on postdictatorial situations, and suggest ways to understand how these societies confront their controversial and often traumatic pasts. In this volume, Péter Apor takes an in-depth look at a particular phenomenon – the First Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 – to illustrate how a dictatorship and a communist state remembers. Unlike other works analysing social memory, this book concentrates on authenticity as the crucial concept in establishing the success or failure of memory constructions, integrating the broad range of processes – political, scholarly, artistic – through which history is sought to be rendered authentic.

The essays in this volume explain how financial inflation shifts banking and financial markets towards more speculative activity, changing the financial structure of the economy and corroding the social and political values that underlie welfare state capitalism. The essays begin with an article that was published in the Financial Times that highlights the problems of excess debt, which emerges when financial inflation exceeds the rate at which prices and incomes are rising.

Subsequent essays examine the consequences of this for money and international financial, and for financial and accounting techniques such as financial innovation, goodwill and leverage. Among them are critical essays on the role that finance theory has played in covering up the problems caused by finance. These include a portrait of the pioneer of modern finance theorist Fischer Black. Further essays discuss the role of finance in economic inequality, fostering a new political, social and economic divide between the asset-rich and the asset-poor as the housing market (and asset markets in general) become the new 'welfare state of the middle classes'.

A final group of essays looks at how financial inflation finally broke down and financial crisis broke out. A previously unpublished essay examines the limitations of central banks in securing financial stability, while two concluding essays discuss the role of international business in transmitting the crisis around the world, and how developing countries become affected by the crisis.

This remarkable anthology features 101 modern Japanese poems by 55 poets, including Shuntarō Tanikawa, Minoru Yoshioka, Taeko Tomioka, Nobuo Ayukawa, Tarō Kitamura, Ryūichi Tamura, Hiroshi Yoshino, Noriko Ibaragi, Gōzō Yoshimasu and Yōji Arakawa, carefully selected by the renowned poet and literary critic Makoto Ōoka to ensure that the chosen poems express each poet’s special character. The collection provides a superb introduction to Japanese poetry from the immediate postwar period to the mid-1990s, and through these works one can sense the movement in poetry that reflected the challenging transitions and dizzying transformations occurring in postwar and contemporary Japan. Selected for inclusion in the Japanese Literature Publishing Project (JLPP) by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, this first-ever English edition has been translated by Paul McCarthy with both empathy and artistic felicity, and also includes a critical introduction by the Japanese poet and essayist Chūei Yagi. Suitable for both the student/scholar of modern Japanese literature and the general reader with a passion for poetry, the 101 poems in this authoritative collection will delight and inspire.

Over the past decade India has witnessed a number of new land wars that have centred crucially on the often forcible transfer of land from small farmers or indigenous groups to private companies. Among these many localized and dispersed land conflicts, the land war that erupted in Singur, West Bengal, in 2006, went on to make national headlines and become paradigmatic of many of the challenges and social conflicts that arise when a state-led policy of swiftly transferring land to private sector companies encounters resistance on the ground.

‘Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India’ is about the movement of Singur’s unwilling farmers to retain and reclaim their farmland. The book analyses the practical, representational and political work that the unwilling farmers engaged in as they have sought to mobilize public opinion; represent and justify their claims to land to a larger public; forge useful political alliances; engage and manoeuvre the legal system; navigate internal differences and discrepant interests; and simply keep the movement together on the ground. How did Singur’s unwilling farmers frame their movement to save the farmland? Which notions of development and justice did they draw on? How did they navigate everyday social cleavages and conflicts along the lines of caste, class and gender? Who led, who followed, and who was silenced? By engaging these questions through the prism of everyday politics, ‘Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India’ makes an important empirical and ethnographic contribution to the still-limited anthropological understanding of the localized dynamics of India’s new land wars.

Today, high-end inequality in America and peer countries is at Gilded Age levels. These matters are too important and complicated to be left just to economists. A broader sociological and humanistic approach is necessary. Great works of literature, such as those by the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton, are among the resources that can help us to better understand high-end inequality’s broader, culturally contingent, ramifications – not just in the authors’ own eras but today.

Daniel Shaviro’s Literature and Inequality offers a unique and accessible interdisciplinary take on how a number of great and beloved works from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries help shed light on modern high-end inequality. In particular, Shaviro helps us to understand the relevance both of cultural differences between America and peer countries such as England and France, and of cultural commonalities between America’s First Gilded Age in the late-nineteenth century and its currently ongoing Second Gilded Age.

How do you make abstract historical interpretations authentic? This question troubled communist party leaders and propaganda historians in Hungary following the restoration of dictatorship after 1956. Accordingly, this book investigates the crooked history of the retrospective state revisions of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic between the years of its 30th and 40th anniversary, 1949 and 1959.

In recent decades the study of memory has become central to the historical discipline as a powerful conceptual tool to assess both the political-ideological implications of social constructions of the past and the writing of history itself. Yet, most of these investigations focus on postdictatorial situations, and suggest ways to understand how these societies confront their controversial and often traumatic pasts. In this volume, Péter Apor takes an in-depth look at a particular phenomenon – the First Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 – to illustrate how a dictatorship and a communist state remembers. Unlike other works analysing social memory, this book concentrates on authenticity as the crucial concept in establishing the success or failure of memory constructions, integrating the broad range of processes – political, scholarly, artistic – through which history is sought to be rendered authentic.

This book traces the often sharply differing perspectives historians have formed with regard to the key incidents in the careers of the two foremost politicians of the Victorian age – Gladstone and Disraeli. Following the parallel careers of both men, it focuses upon such contentious questions as why Disraeli opposed Corn Law repeal in 1846, if and when Gladstone became a Liberal, why Disraeli oversaw the 1867 Reform Act, how successful a Chancellor of the Exchequer was Gladstone, whether Disraeli was ever an Imperialist, and why Gladstone took up the cause of Irish Home Rule. In each case it juxtaposes the various interpretations of events historians have advocated, guiding the reader through the often complicated and nuanced debates. Motivating this approach is the conviction that history is a continually evolving subject in which finality is not to be looked for. Every generation poses new questions, or reformulates answers to old ones, and nowhere has this been more apparent than in our understanding of the Victorian age, which has retained the capacity to both challenge and provoke us, and whose legacy continues to actively shape our present and future. It is this very fluidity and contestability of key historical doctrines that gives the subject its perennial attraction and ensures that every student must confront the issues for themselves, and weigh up the sometimes bewildering array of theories and explanations, so as to come to their own conclusion. This book provides a uniquely rich and comprehensive guide through the historiographical terrain of Victorian Britain and will be an invaluable asset to any student grappling with the rivalry between Gladstone and Disraeli and the issues that formed both them and the Victorian age of which we are the heirs.

Military power has long been a serious obstacle to a sustained democracy in Pakistan. The authors investigate the Pakistani military’s retrogressive agrarian interventions in the Punjab, and outlines a change, as recognised by society, in the military’s rightful function within the economy.

Set against the social resentment instigated by the military’s agricultural land grabbing, and a burgeoning resistance to the military’s overbearing and socially unjust role in Pakistan’s economy, this book supplements a larger body of work detailing the military’s hand in industrial, commercial, financial and real estate sectors. Any gain in economic autonomy wielded by the military makes it less answerable to civilian oversight, and makes it more likely to act to protect its economic interests.

The survival of civilian rule in Pakistan, which is critically important for the foreseeable future, requires a fundamental reordering of the balance of power between state institutions, and between state and society. Pakistan, long encumbered by the military yoke, has witnessed its first peaceful transition from one political administration to another; and in a move congenial to the consolidation of this democratic process, ‘The Military and Denied Development in the Pakistani Punjab’ exposes the nefarious nature of the military’s predation, and signals a move for the military to be contained to its constitutionally mandated role – defence.