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The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00This book is the first collection of unified interviews with the great figures of the golden age of American celebrity literary and cultural critics. While many of these celebrity critics have been interviewed elsewhere, this collection is different. The 18 critics interviewed here are all asked the same questions, whereas usually interviews are one-offs, each one unique and incomparable. By contrast this collection shows that theorists, when commenting on the same issues, actually range widely and express a remarkable diversity of opinions.
The book also presents a vivid portrayal of the ways in which literary theory affected the lives of these individuals. All 18 people interviewed lived what might be called, without exaggeration, a life of theory. Their work and lives were jostled by seismic dislocations. New criticism was overwhelmed by postmodernism, deconstruction reigned and then succumbed to new historicism and the politics and criticism of identity. Race and gender burgeoned as fundamental topics. Critics and scholars experiences these ruptures differently and reacted in different ways. This book of interviews offers 18 exemplary instances. Instead of the unity they are often assumed to have, these figures reveal how incredibly diverse they actually were.
Finally, the collection offers a coherent summation of this richly turbulent and intellectually powerful era. The introduction to the volume and the brilliant afterword by Professor Heather Love offer cogent assessment of this remarkably varied era of American intellectual life. They make sense of a disruptive and puzzling past. The book includes 23 illustrations highlighting some of the key points and themes.
Bryan S. Turner
War and Peace
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00This collection of original essays examines the complex historical relationships between religion, war and peace. Taking Tolstoy’s famous novel as its title, the book is divided into two sections. In the first, four chapters explore examples of religion and violence. These include a famous case of violence against Polish Jews by their neighbors, messianic movements in West Papua in response to external cultural and military threats, the American Protestant response to the violence of the Civil War and the ultimate defeat of the Confederate forces, and finally the religion and violence among Plains Indians within the framework of a sociological debate about “civilization.” The second section examines the Quaker doctrine of nonviolence and resistance to war taxes, the diverse attempts to understand the atomic bombing of Japan and the construction of a tourist industry around Hiroshima, the role of religious identity in the laws that influence sectarian tensions in Lebanon, and finally the notion of love in the countercultures of the 1960s that were inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In his introduction and conclusion, Bryan Turner, reflecting on the analysis of the futility of war in Tolstoy’s novel, looks at various explanations of the role of religion in political violence. These include the idea of a clash of civilizations, the tensions between majorities and minorities, the role of the state in promoting communal violence, and the struggle between different religious worldviews against a background of secularization.
Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00Northeast Asia, a major region in Asia covering China, Korea (South and North Korea), Japan, Mongolia, and the Southeast corner of Russia, is economically one of the most vibrant areas in the world, with a rich array of economic opportunities. Yet, it is simultaneously one of the world’s most politically and militarily unstable regions, creating a global security risk. This risk was made apparent by North Korea’s nuclear crisis, which was followed by a series of its nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches from 2016 to 2017. Although the worst-case scenario may have been avoided by a summit meeting between the heads of South and North Korea on April 27, 2018, and another summit between the United States and North Korea on June 12, 2018, substantial uncertainty and the risk of a major military conflict remains.
Although less dramatic and visible to the outside world, other political and military tensions among constituent countries in Northeast Asia, with their deep historical origins dating back centuries, are also significant. These tensions have been demonstrated by persistent territorial disputes, lack of reconciliation on the question of war crimes during World War II, increasing disparities in political influence and military power among Northeast Asian countries as a result of China's ascension, and increasing uncertainty in the region due to the potential instability of North Korea. These problems create a risk of destabilizing Northeast Asia with a substantial global impact.
Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia examines the causes of these complex tensions in Northeast Asia and their underlying political, historic, military, and economic developments. It further discusses their political-economic implications for the world and explores possible solutions to build lasting peace in the region. This book offers a unique approach to these important issues by examining the perspectives of each constituent country in Northeast Asia: China, South and North Korea, Japan, and Mongolia, and their respective roles in the region. Major global powers, such as the United States and Russia, have also closely engaged in the political and economic affairs of the region through a network of alliances, diplomacy, trade, and investment. The book discusses the influence of these external powers, their political and economic objectives in the region, their strategies, and the dynamics that their engagement has brought to the region. Both South Korea and North Korea have sought reunification of the Korean peninsula, which will have a substantial impact on the region. The book examines its justification, feasibility and effects for the region. The book also discusses the role of Mongolia in the context of the power dynamics in Northeast Asia. A relatively small country, in terms of its population, Mongolia has rarely been examined in this context; Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia makes a fresh assessment on its potential role.
Antonio Rigopoulos
The Mahanubhavs
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00The ascetic, devotional sect known as the Mahanubhavs – ‘Those of the Great Experience’ – arose in 13th century Maharashtra. The Mahanubhavs initially experienced a fairly rapid expansion, particularly across the northern and eastern regions of Maharashtra. However, by the end of the 14th century their movement went underground as they sought a defensive isolation from the larger Hindu context, and they withdrew to remote areas and villages. Although the prominent leaders of the early Mahanubhavs were Brahmans (often converts from the prevailing advaita vaisnavism), their followers were and are mostly non-Brahmans, i.e. low caste people and even untouchables. Thus the Mahanubhavs were met with prejudice and distrust outside their own closed circles, and this isolation continued until the beginning of the 20th century. This volume offers an overview of the origins and main religious and doctrinal characteristics of the Mahanubhavs, with a particular focus on the aspects that reveal their difference and nonconformity.
Emerging Dynamics in Audiences' Consumption of Trans-media Products
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Television as a traditional medium has been changing for a number of years due to the development of a complex scenario characterized by the growing proliferation of platforms across which multiple forms of media are deeply interconnected. In this multi-modal environment, traditional and modern media platforms have started to combine, revolutionizing both the technology and the manner in which audiences engage with media content of interest. Indeed, the progressive digitization of media content and the fragmentation of television delivery and reception have been affecting the ways in which media are accessed and consumed to the point that the construction of textual boundaries has shifted from producers to media consumers.
The research in the book is structured as a comparative study between two distinct countries: Italy and New Zealand. These two countries have been chosen as reference contexts for the investigation of audiences’ consumption behaviors because they represent non-dominant media markets, both Anglophone and non-Anglophone, that remain to be properly studied and explored. Although they tend to be conflated in generic audience studies, national audiences represent strategic markets for the circulation of international fiction. In investigating the consumption modes that characterize the distribution of American television programs in these cultural contexts, the aim is to provide insights into the culturally specific similarities and differences that distinct audiences disclose in consuming the same texts.
Game of Thrones and Mad Men have been selected as case studies because they are substantial examples of trans-media narratives that tell multiple stories over multiple platforms that together tell one big pervasive story, attracting audience engagement. The methods employed for gathering useful data for the comparative analysis were both quantitative and qualitative. The first phase of data collection consisted in the production of four online surveys: two in English for Game of Thrones and Mad Men, respectively, and two in Italian. The second phase of data production consisted of the organization of the focus group sessions in, respectively, the city of Milan (Italy) and city of Auckland (New Zealand).
Fundamentals of Planning Cities for Healthy Living
Regular price $35.00 Save $-35.00Current planning and design modes of dwellings and neighbourhoods are facing challenges of both philosophy and form. Past approaches no longer sustain new demands and require innovative thinking. The need for a new outlook is propelled by fundamental changes that touch upon environmental, economic and social aspects.
The depletion of non-renewable natural resources, elevated levels of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change are a few of the environmental challenges that force designers to reconsider conceptual approaches in favour of ones that promote a better suitability between communities and nature. Consideration of overall planning concepts that minimize the development’s carbon footprint, district heating, passive solar gain, net-zero residences and preserving the site’s natural assets are some of the contemporary strategies that architects, planners and builders are integrating into their thought process and residential design practice.
Increasing costs of material, labour, land and infrastructure have posed economic challenges with affordability being paramount among them. The need to do with less brings about concepts that include denser places, adaptable and expandable dwellings, and smaller-sized yet quality designed housing. Also, the need to reduce utility costs gave rise to better insulation, which benefits both the environment and the occupant.
Social challenges are also drawing the attention of designers, builders and homeowners. As the “baby-boom” generation plans for retirement, housing an elderly population will take priority. Walkable communities, ageing in place and multigenerational living are some of the concepts considered. In addition, live-work environments have become part of the economic reality for those who wish to work from home – which has become possible through digital advances.
The need to think innovatively about neighbourhoods led to the idea to write this book. The intention is to offer information on contemporary community design concepts and illustrate them with outstanding international examples.
The Cædmon Manuscript
Regular price $195.00 Save $-195.00The Cædmon Manuscript is one of three extant anthologies of English Christian poetry produced in England before 1000 CE. It is formally known as Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11.
The Cædmon Manuscript was given this name in earlier critical literature because of its assumed association with the cowherd Cædmon, who miraculously received the gift of extemporaneous poetic creativity as described in Bede's Ecclesiastical History IV.24. Bede describes the subjects of the poems created by Cædmon, which corresponded closely to the content of this manuscript, leading earlier scholars to regard this anthology as a remarkable discovery of the earliest surviving religious literature from Anglo-Saxon England.
It is a collection of four religious poems in Old English based on Biblical materials. They have the editorial names Genesis, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan. This edition consists of an Introduction, Bibliography, Codicological and Paleographical Analysis, an Art-Historical Commentary and an edition of the four poems.
Self-Presentation and Self-Praise in the Digital Workplace
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Self-Presentation and Self-Praise in Open Communication Digital Enterprises presents the findings of an interdisciplinary study of the ‘self-entrepreneurial self’ and, in particular, the rationale behind its need to self-present under the current socio-economic and business conditions. It addresses the complex landscape of the levels, typologies, categories, triggers, as well as both internal and external factors impacting self-praise in the context of a digital workplace (with the focus on enterprise social media) and professional networking platforms.
In order to reflect the complexity of the topic at hand and interconnectivity of the constructs addressed, insights from such fields as socioeconomics, sociology, social psychology (specifically identity studies), software and services (IT sector), business intelligence and business analytics, digital media communication, organisational behaviour or corporate communication are thus combined with a mixed qualitative-quantitative methodological approach utilised to provide an in-depth exploration of the evolving constructs.
From the broader socio-economic perspective of hyper globalisation, the impact of the neoliberalism economy on workplace relations, and ultimately on employee behaviour, are considered first to lay the background and introduce the relevant concepts.
Self-presentation and in particular self-praise are considered in their multiple forms against the backdrop of precarious work relations dictated by neoliberalism, leading, among other things, to self-exploitation, but also to putting self-interest above anything else.
The focus is placed on the triggers and manifestations of the social self (how a person thinks the others perceive them) and the situational self (a person’s self-image in a specific situation) in the digital workplace, where individual (cultural) values are frequently overridden by those dictated by a given corporate culture, as aligned with the prevailing market conditions. These in turn impact workplace or employee identity.
This exploratory and explanatory study contributes to a rather limited number of research endeavours on self-praise, conducted within narrow disciplines and specific frameworks, with the particular research gap being a lack of studies on self-presentational and self-praise activities in the corporate environment, which can primarily be observed in the virtual context of enterprise social media (ESM) and such tools of remote communication as conference calls or collaboration software, but also on professional networking platforms. Here situational antecedents (broadly what occurred before) and the audience (with their reactions) to such self-promotional activities serve as main prerequisites, thus completing the frame of analysis.
Peter Nolan
Transforming China
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00At the end of the 1970s, China was a poor country with a huge population, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. The domestic economy was organized through direct administrative instructions and was isolated from the international economy. After a quarter of a century, China has been transformed beyond imagination. In the course of this transformation, China's policymakers have faced enormous challenges.
The essays in this book address different aspects of those challenges. The 'development' challenge involved devising policies that would raise the mass of the Chinese people out of poverty and avoid the disasters that had, in the worst cases, caused millions of deaths through famine. The 'transition' challenge involved, firstly, resolving the relationship between changes in the economic and political systems; and secondly, finding the correct sequence and nature of reforms necessary to improve economic performance. The 'globalization' challenge involved identifying the best way in which to integrate China’s economic system with the international economy at a time of revolutionary change in the global business system. These essays seek both to enhance understanding of China's immense success in meeting these challenges in the past and to provide an indication of the challenges that still lie ahead. China's system reforms have been described as 'groping for stones to cross the river'. The journey across the river is far from over, and the other bank is only dimly visible.
Critical Perspectives on Further Education and Training
Regular price $160.00 Save $-160.00This book responds to and informs, the rapid growth in adult, community, and further education in Ireland and beyond. Across 11 chapters, academic and practitioner insights are explored. There are chapters that focus on policy trends across the topics, some of which focus on current trends in policy and practice and some of which focus more deliberately on everyday practice.
The book opens with perspectives from some further education students who comment on some of the themes raised. These lead into an introduction which describes the landscape of a complex, heterogeneous FET sector and outlines what the authors mean by critical perspectives on adult, community and further education in Ireland.
This is followed by the philosophically oriented chapter one, written by Camilla Fitzsimons, that provides practical examples of possibilities for ‘engaged pedagogy’ amidst curricula that, on the surface appear far removed from the dimensions of power and privilege the book lays bare.
In chapter two, experienced further and higher education practitioner, Sarah Coss offers a practical and thought-provoking account of the challenges of working creatively and dialogically with FE curricula whilst at the same time attending to the many bureaucratised demands of accreditation and quality assurance frameworks.
Chapter three, written by Lilian Nwanze, builds a case for the importance of discussions about racism and white privilege in FE and proposes concrete actions to embody and anti-racist approach, the last of which is an emphasis on love.
In chapter four, Jane O’Kelly presents a reflexive exploration of neurodiversity in adults and prompts us to consider whether their needs are recognised and accommodated in further education and training settings.
In chapter five, Bríd Connolly explores ways in which a feminist egalitarian groupwork stance, can draw from social movements, adult and community education to create an FE pedagogy that challenges the status quo of education as a social institution.
In chapter six, Eilish Dillon reflects on why a critical approach to global citizenship education (GCE) is important and introduces some debates about the meaning and implementation of GCE.
In chapter seven, Jerry O’Neill’s partially-poetic chapter demonstrates a creative and critical approach to individual and group reflexive practices which, he argues, is core not just to the ongoing professional development of all FET practitioners and the sector itself, but can also be seen as form of practitioner-based creative research in itself.
Leo Casey follows in chapter eight by exploring some of the overlooked connections between adult learning and digital literacy and argues for a policy balance between models of human capital and the interests of big technology and how teaching and learning for Digital World Literacy can value lifelong learning.
In chapter nine, primary research by Eve Cobain, Suzanne Kyle and Susan Cullinane link community education to social movement theory and Ireland’s community development, anti-poverty movement of the 1980s and 1990s. They analyse the experiences of practitioners as they navigate the very different neoliberal oriented contemporary landscape.
In chapter ten, Brendan Kavanagh, Francesca Lorenzi and Elaine Macdonald explore the process of teacher identity and (trans)formation of what they term ‘second career teachers’ within further education colleges.
In chapter eleven, Camilla and Jerry highlight the very real challenges facing educators working in a field that is characterised by high levels of precarity and argue that realising a high-quality critical and sustainable, distinct professional pathway for emerging educators must become a policy priority for any government that is serious about recognising the value and potential of the FET sector.
In the methodological spirit of adult education, this contribution closes with a group dialogue between authors from across these chapters as we look forward to the work to be done and consider our hopes for the future of FET.
Fundamentals of Planning Cities for Healthy Living
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Current planning and design modes of dwellings and neighbourhoods are facing challenges of both philosophy and form. Past approaches no longer sustain new demands and require innovative thinking. The need for a new outlook is propelled by fundamental changes that touch upon environmental, economic and social aspects.
The depletion of non-renewable natural resources, elevated levels of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change are a few of the environmental challenges that force designers to reconsider conceptual approaches in favour of ones that promote a better suitability between communities and nature. Consideration of overall planning concepts that minimize the development’s carbon footprint, district heating, passive solar gain, net-zero residences and preserving the site’s natural assets are some of the contemporary strategies that architects, planners and builders are integrating into their thought process and residential design practice.
Increasing costs of material, labour, land and infrastructure have posed economic challenges with affordability being paramount among them. The need to do with less brings about concepts that include denser places, adaptable and expandable dwellings, and smaller-sized yet quality designed housing. Also, the need to reduce utility costs gave rise to better insulation, which benefits both the environment and the occupant.
Social challenges are also drawing the attention of designers, builders and homeowners. As the “baby-boom” generation plans for retirement, housing an elderly population will take priority. Walkable communities, ageing in place and multigenerational living are some of the concepts considered. In addition, live-work environments have become part of the economic reality for those who wish to work from home – which has become possible through digital advances.
The need to think innovatively about neighbourhoods led to the idea to write this book. The intention is to offer information on contemporary community design concepts and illustrate them with outstanding international examples.
Edited by Veronika Makarova
Russian Language Studies in North America
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Russian Language Studies in North America: New Perspectives from Theoretical and Applied Linguistics’ offers a unique collection of research papers representing current directions in Russian language studies in Canada and the United States. Traditionally, Slavic and Russian studies in these countries have centered around literature, history, politics and culture. This volume reflects recent changes in Russian studies by focusing on language structure, language use and teaching methodology. The volume brings together several generations of scholars, from young promising researchers to those with long-established reputations in the field.
John Miller
Empire and the Animal Body
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction’ explores representations of exotic animals in Victorian adventure fiction, mainly in works by R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, G. M. Fenn, Paul du Chaillu, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan. These primary texts are concerned with Southern and West Africa, India and what is now Indonesia in the period 1860–1910, an era which comprises imperial expansion, consolidation and the beginnings of imperial decline. Representations of exotic animals in such literary works generally revolve around portrayals of violence, either in big-game hunting or in the collection of scientific specimens, and draw on a range of literary sources, most notably romance, natural history writing and ‘penny dreadful’ fiction.
This study investigates how these texts’ depictions of forms of violence complicate the seemingly fundamental distinction of humans from animals, and undermines the ideological structures of imperial rule. Rather than an innate and hierarchical opposition, the relationship of humans with their animal others emerges in this context as a complex interplay of kinship and difference. This argument both continues the postcolonial dismantling of empire’s logic of domination and develops the recentering of the nonhuman in environmentally focused criticism. Most vitally, it also signals the relation between these fields: the necessary interdependence of human and nonhuman interests, environmental activism and global social justice.
Jonathan Corpus Ong
The Poverty of Television
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Based on an extensive ethnographic study of television and audiences in class-divided Philippines, this is the first book to take a bottom-up approach in considering how people respond to images and narratives of suffering and poverty on television. Arguing for an anthropological ethics of media, this book challenges existing work in media studies and sociology that focuses solely on textual analysis and philosophical approaches to the question of representing vulnerable others. Current questions in media ethics, such as whether to portray sufferers as humane and empowered individuals or show them ‘at their worst’ have so far used textual and visual analyses to convey the researcher’s own moral position on the matter. In contrast, this book, inspired by the anthropology of moralities, accounts for the different interpretations and moral positions of audiences, who are positioned in various degrees of social and moral proximity to those they see and hear on television. Winner of the 2016 Philippine Social Science Council Excellence in Research Award.
Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White
Regular price $79.95 Save $-79.95‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ details the rejection of two Patrick White plays by the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia in the early 1960s. In 1961 the board of governors rejected a proposal to include the world premiere of White’s first major play ‘The Ham Funeral’ for the 1962 festival. In 1963 it rejected a proposal to premiere a subsequent play ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ for the 1964 festival. These two rejections were taken up in the press where the former was referred to as the ‘affaire “Ham Funeral”’ and the latter was greeted as ‘here we go again’. ‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ documents the scandal that followed the board’s rejections of White’s plays, especially as it acted against the advice of its own drama committee and artistic director on both occasions.
Denise Varney and Sandra D’Urso analyze the two events by drawing on the performative behaviour of the board of governors to focus on the question of governance. They shed new light on the cultural politics that surrounded the rejections, arguing that it represents an instance of executive governance of cultural production, in this case theatre and performance. The governing body was a self-appointed private board comprising wealthy men, who were representative of an Adelaide establishment made up of business, farming, newspaper and military interests.
The central argument of ‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ is that aesthetic modernism in theatre and drama struggled to achieve visibility and acceptability, and was perceived as a threat to the norms and values of early to mid-twentieth-century Australia. The authors argue that when modern drama entered the stage, its preference for aesthetic experimentation over commercial considerations challenged regimes of value based on the popular appeal of musicals, touring productions and overseas imports. The resistance to that prevailing theatre culture and the provocation of Patrick White’s plays provide a prime example of Australia in transition between its colonial heritage and modern future. The 1960s set the scene for the confrontation between modernist experimentation and arts governance, and between aesthetic and commercial values.
Planting the Seeds of Research
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00‘Planting the Seeds of Research’ explores why by the beginnings of the twentieth century the United States dominated agricultural production worldwide. The thesis is that the ultimate investments made by the United States Department of Agriculture and State governments created the research structure that made American agriculture spectacularly successful. The social commitment, by business, government and farmers built the productive capabilities that generated sustainable prosperity in American agriculture. The ultimate investment in agriculture enabled Americans over time to spend less of their disposable income on food and more on other goods and services, and compete in international agricultural markets.
Land and Agrarian Transformation in Zimbabwe
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00This book demonstrates that redistributive land reform can transform the lives of poor peasants by removing distortions in the land ownership structure which allows them access to land and other natural resources which are critical for their social reproduction strategies and livelihood security. Furthermore, it shows that the benefits of land reform go beyond gaining access to land in order to farm; off-farm activities such as artisanal gold mining are a key part of rural livelihoods as they provide capital for further agricultural investments. The fact that a large number of peasants engaged in off-farm activities who utilize income gained from such activities to further agricultural investments demonstrates that off-farm activities are inextricably linked to future agrarian investments.
The book further demonstrates that the land reform was a process underpinned by many dynamics which were often localized in character. This means that any analysis of its outcomes must take into account this diversity of experiences. Overall, important lessons can be drawn from the Mhondoro Ngezi case study presented in this book. First, land reform can address historical injustices in the land ownership structure by allowing landless peasants to access land and other natural resources formerly enclosed under the previous agrarian structure. However, the process is not without challenges; a large-scale resettlement of people requires the provision of social infrastructure and other support such as farming inputs. Without such support, it is difficult for land beneficiaries to quickly make investments on their land. Second, and this is linked to the first point, the benefits of land reform are long term; their impact is likely to take longer to realise. Third, redistributive land reform has the potential to radicalize poor peasants, to demand their rights and entitlements to land and natural resources previously enclosed under an unjust land ownership structure and socio-economic relations. Fourth, a radical transformation of property rights in favour of peasants, such as the one undertaken in Zimbabwe, is likely to attract an international backlash from global capital as it is seen as a direct challenge to the neo-liberal regime of property rights.
The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00This book is the first collection of unified interviews with the great figures of the golden age of American celebrity literary and cultural critics. While many of these celebrity critics have been interviewed elsewhere, this collection is different. The 18 critics interviewed here are all asked the same questions, whereas usually interviews are one-offs, each one unique and incomparable. By contrast this collection shows that theorists, when commenting on the same issues, actually range widely and express a remarkable diversity of opinions.
The book also presents a vivid portrayal of the ways in which literary theory affected the lives of these individuals. All 18 people interviewed lived what might be called, without exaggeration, a life of theory. Their work and lives were jostled by seismic dislocations. New criticism was overwhelmed by postmodernism, deconstruction reigned and then succumbed to new historicism and the politics and criticism of identity. Race and gender burgeoned as fundamental topics. Critics and scholars experiences these ruptures differently and reacted in different ways. This book of interviews offers 18 exemplary instances. Instead of the unity they are often assumed to have, these figures reveal how incredibly diverse they actually were.
Finally, the collection offers a coherent summation of this richly turbulent and intellectually powerful era. The introduction to the volume and the brilliant afterword by Professor Heather Love offer cogent assessment of this remarkably varied era of American intellectual life. They make sense of a disruptive and puzzling past. The book includes 23 illustrations highlighting some of the key points and themes.
Self-Presentation and Representative Politics
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00The book has an introduction outlining the conceptual framework that gives meaning to the six collected texts that follow. This framework derives from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. He stated that ‘everything is social,’ which means that all discourses have to be understood in their own terms (as ‘structured structures’) and in relation to the social conditions in which they developed (‘structuring structures’). As social individuals we are constrained by the structures defining our situation but we also have the capacity to alter those structures. With particular reference to the ‘field’ of politics, the Introduction considers theoretically the nature of the ‘presentation of self’ (Goffman) of citizens and the nature of parliamentary democracy as ‘presentation’ or ‘representation’ (as discussed in Habermas: The structural transformation of the public sphere).
The six main chapters reproduce texts written or spoken about politics at intervals in the period from 1960 until 2020. Brief introductions to each chapter will contextualise these texts both in terms of their significance in my developing awareness of political discourse and also in terms of the historically changing nature of the field of politics itself in the United Kingdom. Having an a-political upbringing, the author suggests that he gradually acquired a political competence but, equally, developed the view that the domination of political discourse has become exclusive and that there is now a need to reassert social relations in society and to recognize the extent to which political activity sustains the social control of a privileged minority.
The book has an Epilogue which considers some recent arguments about ‘populism’ and also reflects on the extent to which the ‘new normal’ heralded by some for a post-Covid future has the capacity to circumscribe the influence of politics. The author reflects on whether deployment of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’ - the process by which the attitudes of the few are imposed on the many – might lead to the possible resurgence of social movements which are sceptical about political power. The author suggests that there may be a need for a new ‘quietism’ as advanced by Fénelon in the court of Louis XIV at the end of the 17th century and as considered by Richard Rorty in “Naturalism and quietism” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 2007.
Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Regular price $17.95 Save $-17.95The book presents the text of Edward FitzGerald’s three main versions of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in an easily accessible form, together with a non-technical commentary on the origins, role and influence of the poem. The reader is given a chance to evaluate each of FitzGerald’s alternative texts as a whole and to examine how the poet presented his texts to the public and annotated the verses. The commentary discusses the lives and work of Khayyám and FitzGerald, and recounts the fascinating story the publication of the Rubáiyát and its rise to great fame and popularity, including a look at the wide-ranging spin-offs the poem has generated in art, music and other fields. The editors use the latest research to analyze the poem’s worldwide influence during the 150 years since its first appearance and the continuing relevance of the poem in the world of the 21st century.
Land and Agrarian Transformation in Zimbabwe
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00This book demonstrates that redistributive land reform can transform the lives of poor peasants by removing distortions in the land ownership structure which allows them access to land and other natural resources which are critical for their social reproduction strategies and livelihood security. Furthermore, it shows that the benefits of land reform go beyond gaining access to land in order to farm; off-farm activities such as artisanal gold mining are a key part of rural livelihoods as they provide capital for further agricultural investments. The fact that a large number of peasants engaged in off-farm activities who utilize income gained from such activities to further agricultural investments demonstrates that off-farm activities are inextricably linked to future agrarian investments.
The book further demonstrates that the land reform was a process underpinned by many dynamics which were often localized in character. This means that any analysis of its outcomes must take into account this diversity of experiences. Overall, important lessons can be drawn from the Mhondoro Ngezi case study presented in this book. First, land reform can address historical injustices in the land ownership structure by allowing landless peasants to access land and other natural resources formerly enclosed under the previous agrarian structure. However, the process is not without challenges; a large-scale resettlement of people requires the provision of social infrastructure and other support such as farming inputs. Without such support, it is difficult for land beneficiaries to quickly make investments on their land. Second, and this is linked to the first point, the benefits of land reform are long term; their impact is likely to take longer to realise. Third, redistributive land reform has the potential to radicalize poor peasants, to demand their rights and entitlements to land and natural resources previously enclosed under an unjust land ownership structure and socio-economic relations. Fourth, a radical transformation of property rights in favour of peasants, such as the one undertaken in Zimbabwe, is likely to attract an international backlash from global capital as it is seen as a direct challenge to the neo-liberal regime of property rights.
Quandaries of Belonging
Regular price $32.95 Save $-32.95A lot of contemporary discourse, both in the academy and beyond, is predicated on essentialized notions of gender, class, and ethnic identity. In critiquing the either-or polarizations that characterize identity thinking, Jackson emphasizes human plurality as entailing both difference and identity. The assumption here is that, as a species, human beings share the same evolutionary history and confront similar existential dilemmas, yet no two individuals are alike, and very different adaptive strategies and worldviews have emerged in the course of human history. To speak of the human condition, therefore, is to imply not only that existence is replete with contradiction and conflict but characterized by ongoing struggles to resolve, accept, or overcome them.
The chapters of this book touch on a variety of issues, including the ambiguity of belonging, the struggle for indigenous rights, expatriate experience, the ethics of genetic engineering, experiments in communal living, and intercultural dialogue. These issues have both local and global relevance, and Jackson addresses them as an expatriate and an ethnographer who has discovered that the anxiety that springs from being an outsider is often compensated for by an ability to see the world from a novel point of view. Moreover, as an outsider, one is sometimes consoled to find that one’s dilemmas are not unique. While one may be struggling to adapt to new customs, learn a new language, or cope with bizarre customs and inhospitable surroundings, one’s new neighbors may be suffering social exclusion, embroiled in family feuds, fighting prejudice, or coming to terms with the effects of a Pandemic, climate-change or economic collapse. Indeed, it is often through such critical experiences that people from diverse backgrounds come to realize that they share a common world.
Wil van den Bercken
Christian Fiction and Religious Realism in the Novels of Dostoevsky
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00This study offers a literary analysis and theological evaluation of the Christian themes in the five great novels of Dostoevsky - 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', 'The Adolescent', 'The Devils' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'. Dostoevsky's ambiguous treatment of religious issues in his literary works strongly differs from the slavophile Orthodoxy of his journalistic writings. In the novels Dostoevsky deals with Christian basic values, which are presented via a unique tension between the fictionality of the Christian characters and the readers' experience of the existential reality of their religious problems.
This study is based on a balanced method of literary analysis and theological evaluation of the texts, avoiding free theological association as well as hermeneutical mixing with the non-literary writings of Dostoevsky. The study starts by discussing the main recent studies of Dostoevsky's religion. It then describes Dostoevsky's original literary method in dealing with religious issues - his use of paradoxes, contradictions and irony. 'Christian Fiction and Religious Realism in the Novels of Dostoevsky' ultimately deconstructs Dostoevsky as an Orthodox writer, and reveals that the Christian themes in his novels are not ecclesiastical or confessionally theological ones, but instead are expressions of a fundamentally Christian anthropology and biblical ethics.
Planting the Seeds of Research
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘Planting the Seeds of Research’ explores why by the beginnings of the twentieth century the United States dominated agricultural production worldwide. The thesis is that the ultimate investments made by the United States Department of Agriculture and State governments created the research structure that made American agriculture spectacularly successful. The social commitment, by business, government and farmers built the productive capabilities that generated sustainable prosperity in American agriculture. The ultimate investment in agriculture enabled Americans over time to spend less of their disposable income on food and more on other goods and services, and compete in international agricultural markets.
Edited by Enamul Choudhury and Shafiqul Islam. Complexity of Transboundary Water Conflicts
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘Complexity of Transboundary Water Conflicts’ seeks to understand transboundary water governance as complex systems with contingent conditions and possibilities. To address those conditions and leverage the possibilities it introduces the concept of enabling conditions as a pragmatic way to identify and act on the emergent possibilities to resolve transboundary water issues.
Based on this theoretical frame, the book applies ideas and tools from complexity science, contingency and enabling conditions to account for events in the formulation of treaties/agreements between disputing riparian states in river basins across the world (Indus, Jordan, Nile, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Colorado, Danube, Senegal and Zayandehrud). It also includes a section on scholars’ reflections on the relevance and weakness of the theoretical framework.
The book goes beyond the conventional use of the terms ‘complexity’, ‘contingency’ and ‘enabling conditions’ and anchors them in their theoretical foundations. The argument distinguishes itself from the conventional meaning and usage of the terms of necessary and sufficient conditions in causal explanations. The book’s focus is to identify conditions that set the stage to move from the world of seemingly infinite possibilities to actionable reality. Three enabling conditions – active recognition of interdependence, mutual value creation through negotiation and adaptive governance through learning – are identified and explored for their meaning and function in specific transboundary water disputes.
Edited by Veronika Makarova
Russian Language Studies in North America
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘Russian Language Studies in North America: New Perspectives from Theoretical and Applied Linguistics’ offers a unique collection of research papers representing current directions in Russian language studies in Canada and the United States. Traditionally, Slavic and Russian studies in these countries have centered around literature, history, politics and culture. This volume reflects recent changes in Russian studies by focusing on language structure, language use and teaching methodology. The volume brings together several generations of scholars, from young promising researchers to those with long-established reputations in the field.
Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00The longest-running war is the battle over how women should behave. “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” examines six centuries of advice literature, analyzing the print origins of gendered expectations that continue to inform our thinking about women’s roles and abilities. Close readings of numerous conduct manuals from Britain and America, written by men and women, explain and contextualize the legacy of sexism as represented in prescriptive writing for women from 1372 to the present.
This book presents a unique trans-historical approach, arguing that conduct manuals were influenced by their predecessors and in turn shaped their descendants. While existing period-specific studies of conduct manuals consider advice literature within the society that wrote and read them, this book provides the only analysis of both the volumes themselves and the larger debates taking place within their pages across the centuries. Building on critical conversations about literature’s efforts to define and construct gender roles, this book examines conduct manuals’ contributions to the female ideal prevalent when they were published, as well as the persistence or alteration of that ideal in subsequent eras.
Combining textual literary analysis with a social history sensibility while remaining accessible to expert and novice, this book will help readers understand the on-going debate about the often-contradictory guidelines for female behavior.
Edited by Gary Morris, with a Foreword by Jonathan Rosenbaum, and an Introduction by Bert Cardullo
Action!
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran’ presents nineteen outstanding interviews with directors past and present, from around the world, working in a variety of genres and budgets and production environments from major studios to indie and DIY. The result is a vibrant group portrait of the filmmaking art, a kind of festival in words that explores everything from the enormous creative and personal satisfactions of filmmaking to the challenges and frustrations that range from meddlesome studio heads to state censorship. These articulate auteurs include iconic figures Fellini and Truffaut (in his moving final interview), avant-garde masters Otto Muehl and the Brothers Quay, social critics Barbara Kopple and Allie Light, mainstream mavericks Robert Wise and Douglas Sirk, and eleven others. While their work (and working methods) varies widely, these directors share the status of pioneer and subversive, fighting – sometimes against great odds – to put their unique vision onscreen.
Edited by Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann
Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia
Regular price $99.00 Save $-99.00‘Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia’ demonstrates how the civilizing mission can serve as an analytical rubric with relevance to many themes in the colonial and postcolonial eras: economic development, state building, pacification, nationalism, cultural improvement, gender and generational relations, caste and untouchability, religion and missionaries, class relations, urbanization, NGOs, and civil society.
While some chapters investigate civilizing initiatives that were driven by the British Raj or Indian postcolonial state, the book also considers many examples of nongovernmental undertakings. For example, examining the role of missionary educational endeavours shows how missionary bodies could operate in an ambivalent space between Indians and the colonial state. Moreover, analysis of Indian civilizing efforts carried out by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the nationalist movement or postcolonial Indian states gives us interesting opportunities to scrutinize how the civilizing mission could be internalized as a form of 'self-civilizing' by Indians. Some papers also show the global linkages of civilizing efforts in the British Empire, while others examine long-term continuities through broad comparative analyses covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This takes us into the postcolonial era (beyond 1947, into the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries), and such 'transgressions' across the colonial divide give this volume added appeal.
The Anthem Companion to Erving Goffman
Regular price $165.00 Save $-165.00The purpose of the volume – as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press ‘Companion to Sociology’ series – is to provide a comprehensive overview of Erving Goffman’s continued importance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines. The book will engage with some of the major themes and continuing concerns of Goffman’s sociology. Chapters have been selected based on their scope and their thematic content covering significant aspects of Goffman’s life and work, and authors have been selected based on their longstanding interest in and extensive knowledge of Goffman’s work.
Improvisations of Empire
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00‘Improvisations of Empire’ offers the first extended critical, biographical and historiographical account of the work of Thomas Pringle, a poet and writer who occupies a central place in the cultural imaginary of English-speaking, white South Africans. However, there has been, to date, no single study which attempts to encompass all the aspects of Pringle’s life and work, and, particularly, to examine his poetry in the ‘thick’ context of its different national locations and his importance as a transnational and not merely a local or colonial writer.
Using the methods of close reading, and combining these with an examination of the historical record (much of it archival material unknown to, or ignored by, previous scholarship), ‘Improvisations of Empire’ seeks to understand Pringle’s writing, particularly the poetry, within the layered histories of his Scottish Enlightenment background and his early literary exposure to both Scottish and English Romanticisms. It then traces how these formative influences are refracted, and fractured, by his colonial experiences in the Cape Colony, before undergoing yet another modification during his period of residence in London (1826–1834). It was during this final stage of Pringle’s career that most of his writing was published for the first time, and very little critical attention has been paid either to the retrospective character of these writings, or to how they are inflected by Pringle’s metropolitan status as a prominent abolitionist, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, an increasingly fervid evangelical and a prominent editorial figure in the world of the literary annuals so popular at the time. Matthew Shum additionally argues that, quite apart from his crucial importance to South African literature, Pringle can also be understood as a figure working at a revealing tangent to metropolitan paradigms. The study explores Pringle’s ‘improvisations’ of his imperial identity in various locations and suggests that his writing offers a limit case for mainstream literary paradigms as they press up against unfamiliar and often disturbing colonial conditions.
Picturing Shakespeare
Regular price $35.00 Save $-35.00This study investigates the capacity of Shakespeare’s texts – obviously destined for stage performances – to generate images and mental colours in the readers’ and in the spectators’ minds. Such notions as Ut pictura poesis and the paragoneare discussed in the first part of this book, along with the function and nature of colours. After discussing the sets of correspondences and the major differences between texts and images, the author presents and analyzes some of his own illustrations of Shakespearean characters. Jean-Louis Claret, both a university professor specialized in Shakespeare’s theatre and an illustrator, proposes to shed light on the process that led him from the perusal of the written text to the visualization of visages. The voice of poets is unconventionally called upon to shed light on the complex mechanisms he describes.
The second part of this book deals with an analysis of the author’s illustrations. As a university scholar, Jean-Louis Claret has naturally fed on literary criticism, but he tries nonetheless to put forth original approaches to Shakespeare. The use of poets’ voices in his demonstration contributes to the development of an original and innovative contribution to Shakespearean criticism. The illustrator traces in the texts the sparks that his mind fanned into mental images which he strove in turn to make into visual pictures. He tries to determine how textual elements (the mention of colours, details, names, etc.) can generate visions, and he devotes special attention to the effect of sound correspondences and prosody.
Poetry is given pride of place in this book that focuses on the power of words and on the mechanisms of evocation that affect both readers and theatregoers.
Edited by Gary Morris, with a Foreword by Jonathan Rosenbaum, and an Introduction by Bert Cardullo
Action!
Regular price $27.95 Save $-27.95‘Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran’ presents nineteen outstanding interviews with directors past and present, from around the world, working in a variety of genres and budgets and production environments from major studios to indie and DIY. The result is a vibrant group portrait of the filmmaking art, a kind of festival in words that explores everything from the enormous creative and personal satisfactions of filmmaking to the challenges and frustrations that range from meddlesome studio heads to state censorship. These articulate auteurs include iconic figures Fellini and Truffaut (in his moving final interview), avant-garde masters Otto Muehl and the Brothers Quay, social critics Barbara Kopple and Allie Light, mainstream mavericks Robert Wise and Douglas Sirk, and eleven others. While their work (and working methods) varies widely, these directors share the status of pioneer and subversive, fighting – sometimes against great odds – to put their unique vision onscreen.
By James S. O'Rourke, IV
The Truth about Confident Presenting
Regular price $89.95 Save $-89.95Accomplished public speakers know that just a few enduring principles govern the key to success. Based on scientific evidence and years of careful observation of highly successful public speakers, James O’Rourke has gathered 51 basic truths about confident presenting, organized into ten easily mastered categories in ‘The Truth about Confident Presenting’. Current relevant examples and specific instructions on how to apply these truths form the centrepiece of each brief chapter. Everything you need is right here – from audience research to topic selection, organization patterns, forms of evidence, principles of persuasion, delivery techniques, nonverbal mannerisms, anxiety and event management.
Edited by Tiziana Pontillo and Maria Piera Candotti
Signless Signification in Ancient India and Beyond
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00The collected essays in this book are the result of a series of workshops held at the University of Cagliari in Italy. In this work, the authors aim at reconstructing the evolution of a key concept of traditional Indian grammar: Pāṇini’s zero. The book investigates how certain patterns of description account for exceptions in the currently presupposed one-to-one symmetry between the semantic and the phono-morphological level of language. This work also deals with some powerful mechanisms of rule extension, which are valuable for different contexts of rule arrangement, such as the ritual model. The interpretative model laid down in the introduction proves strong and suggestive enough to allow subsequent articles in the book to make incursions into other traditions and cultures. The potentialities of aniconic expression in the artistic field are explored, together with the outcomes of this theory.
Edited by Edward Fullbrook
Real World Economics
Regular price $29.95 Save $-29.95The articles in this book have been selected for their importance to the reform movement and for their accessibility to the general reader. Intelligibility is one of the movement's two keystones. "Real economic problems" concern real people, so their analysis must be made intelligible to an educated general public if real democracy is to function.
The second keystone of the post-autistic movement is pluralism. All analysis proceeds on the basis of concepts that admit only a partial view of the economy, thereby predetermining the set of possible conclusions. This requires economists to begin to develop an ethos of honesty regarding the limitations of their chosen approaches. In engaging and thought-provoking prose, the 66 chapters of this book bring these and other conflicts out into the open and place them in the context of the major issues of the 21st century.
Juko Nishimura, translated by Jeffrey Hunter
Lost Souls, Sacred Creatures
Regular price $34.95 Save $-34.95A stock boy is found to have made an expensive Matsusaka cow vanish from the cattle house right before shipment. But the question remains: How and why did the boy make a 700kg cow disappear?
Jukichi is a seasoned fisherman who can row a fishing boat with proficiency and catch an abundance of fish in the traditional way – until he comes across “naméso,” a sea beast. What will be the fate of the old fisherman, who has been on the sea for 80 years?
With its bright red pincers kept high above its head, a crab called Aka moves slowly along the highway. Can Shinichi, a lonely boy, help Aka reach the sea?
Irako, a cruel and heartless woman, murders a philandering and neglectful doctor by radiation exposure, thereby sealing her own fate. In her dying days, an unusual group of animals gather around Irako to provide solace as she fades away. Can their uncanny companionship transform her demon heart?
“Lost Souls, Sacred Creatures” features four stories written by award-nominated author Juko Nishimura.
The Craft of Professional Writing
Regular price $37.95 Save $-37.95‘The Craft of Professional Writing’ is the complete book ever written about the real-life work of writing for a living. It not only provides an in-depth description of every important job in professional writing, from PR and advertising to technical writing to journalism and fiction and non-fiction book authorship, but also includes extensive practical advice and hacks on how to report, prepare, pitch, edit and invoice your work – as well as how to successfully conduct a writing career. There also are extensive models of actual products in each of these fields.
For the student, this is the most wide-ranging and practical textbook on the subject. It is designed to be an instructional text for producing professional-level work – but also a survey of the various writing professions to enable budding writers to make career decisions. The goal is to empower graduates to hit the ground running – and to quickly establish themselves in the professional writing world.
For the professional, this book, written by an author who has been successful in almost every writing discipline, is the ultimate reference work – offering practical tips to their current field, as well as a guide to other writing professions. ‘The Craft of Professional Writing’ also offers these experienced writers work advice they can return to again and again to help them through various phases of their career.
Edited with an Introduction by S. E. Gontarski
On Beckett
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.
More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century – countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. “On Beckett” brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amount of scrutiny that has been lavished on the man; in addition to widely read essays there are contributions from more obscure sources, viewpoints not frequently seen. Together they allow the reader to enter the world of a writer whose work has left an impact on the consciousness of our time perhaps unmatched by that of any other recent creative imagination.
The contributors include the names of most of the minds of the twentieth century who have grappled in print with the meaning of the Beckett phenomenon. Among them are many of the artists who had a major role in bringing Beckett’s work to the stage and who worked side-by-side with Beckett, such as Alan Schneider, Roger Blin, Herbert Blau and Jackie MacGowran. Also included are some of the foremost writers of our time, whose encounter with the work of Beckett has produced lasting commentary, such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Martin Esslin. Among the noted Beckett scholars found here are Ruby Cohn, Walter D. Asmus, and James Knowlson. An interview with Susan Sontag and William S. Burroughs completes the book.
Animals and Plants in Chinese Religions and Science
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00In ancient China, the tradition of observing nature is combined with Yin-Yang and the Five-Phase theories, which were later incorporated into the ancient arts of divination, including the technique of predicting weather changes by observing the behavior and health of animals. The observation of the close connection between animals and weather developed into the worship of animals, that is, what can be called the cult of animals. Plant science and technology in medieval China cannot be separated from the developments in agriculture, economics, and medicine, as well as cultural practice. The Chinese empire ruled most of East Asia in the medieval period. Numerous species of plants were observed, cultivated, harvested, and used in the vast land of China that spanned a wide range of biomes from boreal through to temperate and tropical, with most regions classed as subtropical. Besides indigenous plants, many plants from West, Central, South, and Southeast Asia were introduced into China and East Asia in general. Numerous zoomantic practices appeared in two sets of textual documents in the premodern Chinese bibliographical system, namely official documents and popular documents. Official documents were often compiled by government officials and served political governance objectives. These documents included official histories, annals, and institutional documents, as well as Confucian classics. The authorship or editorship of these documents was often explicit. Popular documents included strange writings, tales, legends, and religious documents from Buddhism and Daoism, which were often not compiled under the sponsorship and support of the court or government. They might be compiled by literati but lost original authorship. They did not serve political motivations and objectives, reflecting how people understood and interpreted correlative cosmology by observing animal behaviors at the local or non-bureaucratic level.
Pëtr Filippovich Iakubovich, Translated with an Introduction by Andrew A. Gentes
In the World of the Outcasts
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Pëtr 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.
Emerging Dynamics in Audiences' Consumption of Trans-media Products
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Television as a traditional medium has been changing for a number of years due to the development of a complex scenario characterized by the growing proliferation of platforms across which multiple forms of media are deeply interconnected. In this multi-modal environment, traditional and modern media platforms have started to combine, revolutionizing both the technology and the manner in which audiences engage with media content of interest. Indeed, the progressive digitization of media content and the fragmentation of television delivery and reception have been affecting the ways in which media are accessed and consumed to the point that the construction of textual boundaries has shifted from producers to media consumers.
The research in the book is structured as a comparative study between two distinct countries: Italy and New Zealand. These two countries have been chosen as reference contexts for the investigation of audiences’ consumption behaviors because they represent non-dominant media markets, both Anglophone and non-Anglophone, that remain to be properly studied and explored. Although they tend to be conflated in generic audience studies, national audiences represent strategic markets for the circulation of international fiction. In investigating the consumption modes that characterize the distribution of American television programs in these cultural contexts, the aim is to provide insights into the culturally specific similarities and differences that distinct audiences disclose in consuming the same texts.
Game of Thrones and Mad Men have been selected as case studies because they are substantial examples of trans-media narratives that tell multiple stories over multiple platforms that together tell one big pervasive story, attracting audience engagement. The methods employed for gathering useful data for the comparative analysis were both quantitative and qualitative. The first phase of data collection consisted in the production of four online surveys: two in English for Game of Thrones and Mad Men, respectively, and two in Italian. The second phase of data production consisted of the organization of the focus group sessions in, respectively, the city of Milan (Italy) and city of Auckland (New Zealand).
Economic Development and Financial Instability
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Jan A. Kregel is considered to be “the best all-round general economist alive” (G. C. Harcourt). This is the first collection of his essays dealing with a wide range of topics reflecting the incredible depth and breadth of Kregel’s work. These essays focus on the role of finance in development and growth. Kregel has expanded Minsky’s original postulate that in capitalist economies stability engenders instability in international economy, and this volume collect’s Kregel’s key works devoted to financial instability, its causes and effects. The volume also contains Kregel’s most recent discussions of the Great Recession beginning in 2008.
Betwixt and Between
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00When biographers write about a person’s life, they prioritize what is important to themselves: What interests them, what resonates with them, what helps them, what teaches them, what makes sense to them, and, most significantly, what advances their own political agendas. Their research is filtered through these lenses. Even if their biographical goal is to learn and present enough about their writers to better analyze a certain canon, literary critics usually construct life stories through their own theoretical positions. Certainly, readers should be aware that biographies bend according to their authors’ psychological makeup, cultural encoding, historical agency, and political penchants. Furthermore, biographies often reflect the age in which they are written, more so than the age in which their subject lived. This is not always a negative outcome, but it always imbues the portrait of the “biographee” with its own qualities so that the facsimile is never unadulterated. [NP] Betwixt and Between is an investigation of the biographical corpus of Mary Wollstonecraft, starting with Godwin’s Memoirs (1798) and ending with Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (2015). It identifies the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, and gaps that have run rampant, many of them incomprehensively left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. The myriad, often contradictory renditions of her life and thoughts have given us such a distorted view of Wollstonecraft that she has evolved into varying degrees of heroine and villain, an everywoman for every cause.
Religion, Supernaturalism, the Paranormal and Pseudoscience
Regular price $200.00 Save $-200.00At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century people in the United States live in a scary and confusing post-truth era of disinformation, fake news, counter-knowledge, weaponized lies, conspiracy theories, magical thinking and sheer irrationalism. In this intellectual climate where many people lack the rudimentary skills to distinguish between contending claims to knowledge or differentiate between fact and opinion, there is a proliferation of purveyors of supernaturalism, pseudoscience and alternative forms of knowledge whose ideas are an affront to the intelligence and sensibilities of rational people. At the same time, here and around the world oppressive religious fundamentalism and violence are on the rise. The merchants of superstition and paranormalism almost in unison are broadcasting with bluster and hubris that science is now defunct and are offering their own truths and ways of knowing as better substitutes. Even our highest government officials are flagrantly declaring that it is impossible to distinguish between fact and opinion, that for every fact there is an alternative fact, and that truth is whatever people want it to be.
By posing a direct challenge to science and rationality, the advocates of supernatural and paranormal modes of thought have made their own central epistemological and ontological premises legitimate subjects for critical scrutiny in accordance with the tradition of systematic skepticism. “Religion, Supernaturalism, the Paranormal and Pseudoscience” provides a comprehensive rejoinder to the challenges posed to science, scientific anthropology, evolutionary theory and rationality. Moreover, scientific anthropological answers are offered for several important questions: Why do humans have the proclivity for the supernatural and the paranormal thinking? Why has humanity remained shackled to sets of ideas inherited from a violent past that have no basis in reality, bestow an illusionary solace, inspire endless cruelties and fervent hatreds, and have come at a high cost? Why have ancient superstitions been maintained as sacred, inviolate truths while other aspects of the archaic belief systems of which they were a part have long been discarded? Why have not humans outgrown religion and paranormal beliefs?
This study draws upon the author’s scientific anthropological background and ethnographic field research of supernatural and paranormal beliefs and practices in several cultures over the course of the last 30 years. It also relies upon the works of numerous skeptics; critical historians; scientific anthropologists; cognitive, evolutionary, experimental and anomalistic psychologists; philosophers of science; scientists in various fields; and many theologians.
Critical Perspectives on Further Education and Training
Regular price $46.95 Save $-46.95This book responds to and informs, the rapid growth in adult, community, and further education in Ireland and beyond. Across 11 chapters, academic and practitioner insights are explored. There are chapters that focus on policy trends across the topics, some of which focus on current trends in policy and practice and some of which focus more deliberately on everyday practice.
The book opens with perspectives from some further education students who comment on some of the themes raised. These lead into an introduction which describes the landscape of a complex, heterogeneous FET sector and outlines what the authors mean by critical perspectives on adult, community and further education in Ireland.
This is followed by the philosophically oriented chapter one, written by Camilla Fitzsimons, that provides practical examples of possibilities for ‘engaged pedagogy’ amidst curricula that, on the surface appear far removed from the dimensions of power and privilege the book lays bare.
In chapter two, experienced further and higher education practitioner, Sarah Coss offers a practical and thought-provoking account of the challenges of working creatively and dialogically with FE curricula whilst at the same time attending to the many bureaucratised demands of accreditation and quality assurance frameworks.
Chapter three, written by Lilian Nwanze, builds a case for the importance of discussions about racism and white privilege in FE and proposes concrete actions to embody and anti-racist approach, the last of which is an emphasis on love.
In chapter four, Jane O’Kelly presents a reflexive exploration of neurodiversity in adults and prompts us to consider whether their needs are recognised and accommodated in further education and training settings.
In chapter five, Bríd Connolly explores ways in which a feminist egalitarian groupwork stance, can draw from social movements, adult and community education to create an FE pedagogy that challenges the status quo of education as a social institution.
In chapter six, Eilish Dillon reflects on why a critical approach to global citizenship education (GCE) is important and introduces some debates about the meaning and implementation of GCE.
In chapter seven, Jerry O’Neill’s partially-poetic chapter demonstrates a creative and critical approach to individual and group reflexive practices which, he argues, is core not just to the ongoing professional development of all FET practitioners and the sector itself, but can also be seen as form of practitioner-based creative research in itself.
Leo Casey follows in chapter eight by exploring some of the overlooked connections between adult learning and digital literacy and argues for a policy balance between models of human capital and the interests of big technology and how teaching and learning for Digital World Literacy can value lifelong learning.
In chapter nine, primary research by Eve Cobain, Suzanne Kyle and Susan Cullinane link community education to social movement theory and Ireland’s community development, anti-poverty movement of the 1980s and 1990s. They analyse the experiences of practitioners as they navigate the very different neoliberal oriented contemporary landscape.
In chapter ten, Brendan Kavanagh, Francesca Lorenzi and Elaine Macdonald explore the process of teacher identity and (trans)formation of what they term ‘second career teachers’ within further education colleges.
In chapter eleven, Camilla and Jerry highlight the very real challenges facing educators working in a field that is characterised by high levels of precarity and argue that realising a high-quality critical and sustainable, distinct professional pathway for emerging educators must become a policy priority for any government that is serious about recognising the value and potential of the FET sector.
In the methodological spirit of adult education, this contribution closes with a group dialogue between authors from across these chapters as we look forward to the work to be done and consider our hopes for the future of FET.
Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00The Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature traces the aesthetic and political development of the Gothic genre in Colombia. Drawing on works like José Asunción Silva´s poetic “Nocturnos,” Caliwood’s films and Mario Mendoza’s novels, Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodriguez shows how Gothic tropes appear in the works of Colombian writers and filmmakers. However, he argues that what results ultimately is not just the Gothic in Colombia, but rather the Colombian Gothic—a new form of the genre with its own agenda and aesthetics.
To identify a form of the Gothic as “Colombian” is, in one sense, to demonstrate how thinkers from that nation have reconfigured and laid claim to tropes often regarded as the purview of Europe and the US. The Colombian Gothic pays homage to but also pokes fun at the Gothic of figures like Poe, Bronte, Hawthorne and Stoker. In the hands of Colombian writers and filmmakers, Gothic tropes are taken to their extremes to reflect particularly Colombian issues, like the ongoing armed conflict in the country since the 1950s as various left wing guerillas, government factions and paramilitary groups escalated violence. In this Colombian Gothic, traditional tropes like distorted familial relations appear as open fratricide and incest. Such transformations address the real-life horrors of violence wrought within the supposed protections of shared nationality.
In another sense, the Colombian Gothic does not just define itself apart from the US and European Gothics—it also challenges the centrality of Bogota-centered perspectives of Colombian politics and conflict. By the 1970s and 1980s, cities such as Cali suffered particularly extreme levels of violence, when the war among the drug cartels added another layer to the already complicated conflict. At the same time, Cali had one of the strongest filmmaking traditions in the country. The “Cali group” of writers and filmmakers seized the Gothic to challenge not just Europe and the US as the centers of the genre, but also to challenge Bogotá as the center of the country—and as the most “logical” place to set a Gothic narrative with its colder, gloomier, darker urban ambience. The Colombian Gothic of Cali addresses the topics of conflict, but within an unapologetically tropical setting that reflects the hotter climate in the region surrounding Cali. The effort of these Cali-based writers and filmmakers became so dominant in shaping the Colombian Gothic that the twenty-first-century Colombian Gothic—now mainly composed in Bogotá—follows the lead of these creators, continuing to create a Gothic that uniquely reflects the aesthetics and politics of Colombia.
The Science Communication Challenge
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Current knowledge societies tend to be based on an understanding of science as an all-purpose problem-solver and include the expansion of scientific methods and frameworks of thought to ever more areas of life. Such development is less pragmatic and down-to- earth than it may appear at first glance. It is accompanied by a relentless expansion of the domain of a logic of universal truth and its technical equivalent: correct solutions, and is tied to a general understanding of science communication as a didactic enterprise aimed at disseminating scientific ways of thinking and responses to problems to a lay public of non-knowers.
Potentially, it seems, science can provide answers to all questions. Disagreement appears as no more than a symptom of immature science and has no place within the didactic science communication paradigm. As a consequence, democratic knowledge societies are challenged as political entities in the classical, pluralist sense, characterized by continuous discussion among different points of view and ways of reasoning on societal issues and using disagreement as a vehicle for discussions, negotiations and compromises.
Against such a background, ‘The Science Communication Challenge’ suggests that the didactic approaches to science communication be supplemented with a political category of science communication, suited to practical-political issues and featuring citizens on an equal footing – some of them scientists – who represent different points of view and ways of reasoning and share responsibility for public affairs. The possible gain, it is argued, may be the maintenance of knowledge societies as political entities with room for a civil society of multiple positions and perspectives that has served as a fertile ground for the development of science as an intellectual endeavour and as a body of knowledge and rational methodology.
Drawing on insights from an array of academic fields and disciplines, ‘The Science Communication Challenge’ explores the possible origins of the didactic paradigm, connecting it to particular understandings of knowledge, politics and the public and to the seemingly widespread assumption of a science-versus-politics dichotomy, taking science and politics to be competing activities that are concerned with similar questions in different ways. Inspired by classical political thought it is argued that science and politics be seen as substantially different activities, suited to dealing with different kinds of questions – and to different varieties of science communication.
American Literary Naturalism
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00The four initial essays in the “Specific Writers and Works” section display Pizer’s critical style in its characteristic varied and incisive form. The initial essay, an exercise in cross-discipline analysis, discusses the ways specific works by Crane, Dreiser, and Steinbeck reveal their author’s response to specific contemporary visual art works and reportage. The seconds offers a novel way of interpreting the naturalism of London’ archetypal story “To Light a Fire” by pointing out the weaknesses in Lee Clark Mitchell’s reading. The third centers on the usefulness of Norman Mailer’s essay on American Naturalism not only in its refutation of Lionel Trilling’s attack on the movement but in sharing with Trilling and others a misunderstanding of the central thrust of Theodore Dreiser’s work. And the fourth is a close reading of Dos Passos over the course of three works of his experience of the 1931 Harland Coal Strike to clarify his thinking of the best means for the artist both to represent and participate in the struggle for social justice in America.
Edited with an Introduction by S. E. Gontarski
On Beckett
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.
More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century – countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. “On Beckett” brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amount of scrutiny that has been lavished on the man; in addition to widely read essays there are contributions from more obscure sources, viewpoints not frequently seen. Together they allow the reader to enter the world of a writer whose work has left an impact on the consciousness of our time perhaps unmatched by that of any other recent creative imagination.
The contributors include the names of most of the minds of the twentieth century who have grappled in print with the meaning of the Beckett phenomenon. Among them are many of the artists who had a major role in bringing Beckett’s work to the stage and who worked side-by-side with Beckett, such as Alan Schneider, Roger Blin, Herbert Blau and Jackie MacGowran. Also included are some of the foremost writers of our time, whose encounter with the work of Beckett has produced lasting commentary, such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Martin Esslin. Among the noted Beckett scholars found here are Ruby Cohn, Walter D. Asmus, and James Knowlson. An interview with Susan Sontag and William S. Burroughs completes the book.
Scenes of Bohemian Life
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00First published in 1851, Henry Murger’sScènes de la vie de bohèmebrought together the stories he had written for a small arts newspaper in Paris. These semi-fictionalized tales, drawn from the daily lives of Murger and his friends, portray the struggles and celebrations, the loves and losses, of young writers and artists as they eked out an existence on the impoverished margins of society. While the nineteenth-century Parisian setting is fascinating in itself, the stories have retained their contemporary relevance as the continuing popularity of Puccini’s opera adaptation (La Bohème) and the Broadway success of Jonathan Larson’s Rent—both based on Murger’s stories—have demonstrated.
Life in bohemia continues to attract young people in great numbers, just as it has done for almost two centuries, and it is Murger’s bohemia, with all its energy and eccentricities, that underlies that appeal. Balancing humor and despair, and optimism and desperation, Murger’s characters, much like today’s bohemians, manage to confound landlords and bill collectors, endure cold and hunger, find love and lose it, party without restraint and confront the devastating deaths of friends and lovers.
With this new translation, readers can once again encounter the point of origin for the bohemian cultures that have flourished ever since, not only the source for Puccini’s and Larson’s phenomenally popular musical works as well as for numerous films and songs over many decades but also a classic work of literature that will re-introduce English readers to Rodolphe and Mimi, Marcel and Musette, Schaunard and Colline, after too long an absence.
Classical Edinburgh
Regular price $39.95 Save $-39.95This work is both a family history and asocial history of Scotland with a particular focus on Edinburgh. The families are traced from their roots in the seventeenthcentury into the twentieth. However, all their wandering and failures, and births and marriages, are in themselves of no importance – they are merely the actions of helpless actors (one not so helpless) caught in the midst of changing worlds and realities. The book embeds their lives into the larger forces shaping the Scottish culture, climaxing in the creation of the New Town of Edinburgh, one of the eighteenthand nineteenth century’s most extravagant romantic fantasies. It was a reality shaped by the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment to give identity to a capital of a nation in name only, after the closing of the Scottish parliament with the Union of the Crowns in 1707.
This New Town became a vast idealised reality, which could only have been achieved in a Scotland that was and remains essentially feudal. All the lands surrounding the walls of the old city were the inherited properties of a few aristocratic families who were able, free of constraint, to sustain a succession of developments for over 80years, creating a continual stream of wealth for the landowners and their successors, and in the process producing extreme poverty for those left behind.
By the mid-nineteenth century, a very different reality emerged out of the need to accommodate the poor and the rising workforce in the city’s new industries. This resulted in street after street of monotonous, identical tenements, a joyless demeaning world in stark contrast to the lively grandeur of the housing in the New Town. The medieval tenements of city’s old High Street were once called ‘slums built to last a thousand years’, and in many ways the extensive tenements of the industrial city from the nineteenth and twentieth century can equally be said to represent the prospect of people divided for a thousand years. It will be argued that such division are unavoidable and can be found in many cities, but it is the extent and the willfulness of the planning that makes the Edinburgh example so potent.
Waltraud Ernst
Mad Tales from the Raj
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Mad Tales from the Raj’ is an extensively researched study of mental illness within the context of British colonialism in early nineteenth-century India. The author challenges the assumption that western medical psychology was impartial and highlights the extent to which it reflected British colonial ideology and practice. This long overdue reprint makes available in easily accessible form an authoritative assessment of western, institution-based psychiatry during the East India Company’s period. It includes a fully revised introduction that locates the work in relation to recent scholarly discourse in the field of history of colonial medicine as well as additional material on the treatment of the 'native insane'. The book provides the first comprehensive account of official attitudes and practices in relation to both Indian and European patients at a time when the dictum of the 'civilising mission' guided colonial social policy towards the colonized, and mental illness among the colonizers was seen to tarnish the prestige of the ruling race. Based on archival sources and reports by medical experts, the book provides a highly readable and illuminating account of contemporary psychiatric treatment and colonial policies. It will be fascinating reading not only to students of colonial history, medical sociology and related disciplines, but to all those with a general interest in life in the colonies.
Betwixt and Between
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00When biographers write about a person’s life, they prioritize what is important to themselves: What interests them, what resonates with them, what helps them, what teaches them, what makes sense to them, and, most significantly, what advances their own political agendas. Their research is filtered through these lenses. Even if their biographical goal is to learn and present enough about their writers to better analyze a certain canon, literary critics usually construct life stories through their own theoretical positions. Certainly, readers should be aware that biographies bend according to their authors’ psychological makeup, cultural encoding, historical agency, and political penchants. Furthermore, biographies often reflect the age in which they are written, more so than the age in which their subject lived. This is not always a negative outcome, but it always imbues the portrait of the “biographee” with its own qualities so that the facsimile is never unadulterated. [NP] Betwixt and Between is an investigation of the biographical corpus of Mary Wollstonecraft, starting with Godwin’s Memoirs (1798) and ending with Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (2015). It identifies the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, and gaps that have run rampant, many of them incomprehensively left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. The myriad, often contradictory renditions of her life and thoughts have given us such a distorted view of Wollstonecraft that she has evolved into varying degrees of heroine and villain, an everywoman for every cause.
Susan Kippax and Niamh Stephenson
Socialising the Biomedical Turn in HIV Prevention
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00This 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.
Edited by Kristian Stokke and Jayadeva Uyangoda
Liberal Peace In Question
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00The present book examines the internationally facilitated peace process between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in order to provide critical insights on contemporary attempts at crafting liberal peace in intrastate conflicts. The general argument is for a broadened political perspective on conflict resolution, extending the focus from the narrow confines of formal peace negotiations and elitist crafting of liberal peace, to the contextual politics of state reforms for group rights and power-sharing and the associated politics of economic reforms for neoliberal development. In examining the contextual politics of state and market reforms in Sri Lanka, the book highlight the tensions between liberal peace and Sinhalese and Tamil nationalisms, demonstrated in the contestations over political exclusion vs. inclusion in peace negotiations, individual human rights vs. group rights, territorial power sharing vs. state sovereignty and neoliberal development vs. social welfare.
Genocide: A Thematic Approach
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00The purpose of this volume is not simply to compile yet another wearying chronicle of the horrors that have been committed by our fellow human beings. Most students who register for a course on Genocide assume that it will focus, perhaps exclusively, on the Holocaust—the only case with which they are familiar. Many of them have read Elie Wiesel’s eloquent masterpiece Night in secondary school, and some may have read The Diary of Anne Frank. A few students might even know that a genocide occurred in Rwanda or Darfur. Like most people, however, they equate genocide simply with mass killing, and assume that genocide must by definition entail millions of deaths. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”—meaning “to kill a people”— originally defined it “a colonial crime of destroying the national patterns of the oppressed and imposing the national patterns of the oppressors.” This was a process, Lemkin said, that was intended to destroy a people’s culture thatcould sometimes but not necessarily always result in mass murder. Students need to know that after World War II the great powers undermined and co-opted the process of writing the1948 Genocide Convention at the UN. It was written very carefully to remove from the definition of genocide the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada; racial lynching and Jim Crowism in the US; the “elimination of backwards people to protect human progress” in pre-apartheid South Africa, New Zealand and Australia; the mass murder of colonial subjects and repression of racial minorities at the hands of European security forces the world over; the mass murder of political opponents in Latin America; the mass murder of “economic” or social groups in the Soviet Union; and the blanket removal of any mention of famine and sexual violence as acts that could constitute genocide. Instead, they simply used the Holocaust as a template and succeeded in distorting what Lemkin originally meant by “genocide”—the murder of a people by destroying their social and cultural connections.
Students should also know that Lemkin’s ideas were most strongly supported at the UN by member states that were former colonies—namely Egypt, India, Pakistan, China and the Philippines—and by women within many of the delegations that were working to prevent the UN from succeeding in outlawing genocide, such as those from the US and the UK. When students learn this history can begin to think critically about what international law is and which systems of power international law serves. However, they also need a textbook that guides them to think critically and imaginatively about genocide and the 1948 UN Convention without reducing genocide and the UN Genocide Convention to a crude and cynical analysis of global power struggles. In other words, they need a book that is honest and that resists the temptation to spin ahistorical morality tales.
H. L. Seneviratne
The Anthropologist and the Native
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘The Anthropologist and the Native’ is a collection of twenty essays by internationally known scholars of different persuasions, honouring the distinguished anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Obeyesekere’s writings include ‘Land Tenure in Village Ceylon’, ‘Medusa’s Hair’, ‘The Cult of the Goddess Pattini’, ‘Work of Culture’, ‘The Apotheosis of Captain Cook’, ‘Imagining Karma’, ‘Cannibal Talk’, (with Richard Gombrich) ‘Buddhism Transformed’, and the forthcoming ‘The Awakened Ones’. Professor Obeyesekere’s contribution to South Asian studies and to anthropology is vast, and the rich variety of topics and approaches that marks this volume reflects his wide-ranging interests, constituting an apt tribute to his voluminous and inspiring work.
The authors featured in this collection are internationally known scholars from a variety of disciplines, including literary and textual studies, Indology, religion, history, social theory, art and anthropology. Reflecting Obeyesekere’s wide interests, the volume is arranged into six sections dealing with the Indian tradition and its representation; caste, kinship, land and community; renunciation and power; Buddhism transformed; the enigma of the text; and lastly a section entitled ‘The Anthropologist and the Native’, a discussion of aspects of anthropological fieldwork that evokes Obeyesekere’s extensive and intensive work dealing with his own society of Sri Lanka.
Waltraud Ernst
Mad Tales from the Raj
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘Mad Tales from the Raj’ is an extensively researched study of mental illness within the context of British colonialism in early nineteenth-century India. The author challenges the assumption that western medical psychology was impartial and highlights the extent to which it reflected British colonial ideology and practice. This long overdue reprint makes available in easily accessible form an authoritative assessment of western, institution-based psychiatry during the East India Company’s period. It includes a fully revised introduction that locates the work in relation to recent scholarly discourse in the field of history of colonial medicine as well as additional material on the treatment of the 'native insane'. The book provides the first comprehensive account of official attitudes and practices in relation to both Indian and European patients at a time when the dictum of the 'civilising mission' guided colonial social policy towards the colonized, and mental illness among the colonizers was seen to tarnish the prestige of the ruling race. Based on archival sources and reports by medical experts, the book provides a highly readable and illuminating account of contemporary psychiatric treatment and colonial policies. It will be fascinating reading not only to students of colonial history, medical sociology and related disciplines, but to all those with a general interest in life in the colonies.
Jason A. Kirk
India and the World Bank
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00'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.
Edited by Enamul Choudhury and Shafiqul Islam. Complexity of Transboundary Water Conflicts
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Complexity of Transboundary Water Conflicts’ seeks to understand transboundary water governance as complex systems with contingent conditions and possibilities. To address those conditions and leverage the possibilities it introduces the concept of enabling conditions as a pragmatic way to identify and act on the emergent possibilities to resolve transboundary water issues.
Based on this theoretical frame, the book applies ideas and tools from complexity science, contingency and enabling conditions to account for events in the formulation of treaties/agreements between disputing riparian states in river basins across the world (Indus, Jordan, Nile, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Colorado, Danube, Senegal and Zayandehrud). It also includes a section on scholars’ reflections on the relevance and weakness of the theoretical framework.
The book goes beyond the conventional use of the terms ‘complexity’, ‘contingency’ and ‘enabling conditions’ and anchors them in their theoretical foundations. The argument distinguishes itself from the conventional meaning and usage of the terms of necessary and sufficient conditions in causal explanations. The book’s focus is to identify conditions that set the stage to move from the world of seemingly infinite possibilities to actionable reality. Three enabling conditions – active recognition of interdependence, mutual value creation through negotiation and adaptive governance through learning – are identified and explored for their meaning and function in specific transboundary water disputes.
Antonio Pietrangeli, The Director of Women
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Antonio Pietrangeli once stated that “women are the protagonists” of his time, the postwar period in Italy. In a society in upheaval, on the cusp on the sexual revolution which brought both legislative and lifestyle changes for both genders, he posed the question to himself and his collaborators, how do we represent the reality of women in Italy today?
Pietrangeli’s commitment to realism should not come as a surprise since his roots in cinema formed at the Centro Sperimentale, working alongside directors and screenwriters such as Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Sergio Amidei, to name only a few. In the choral atmosphere of the postwar period in Italian cinema, Pietrangeli’s voice was uniquely feminine.
This volume begs the question, to what degree can we call Pietrangeli a feminist? Is it enough to represent women or should the spectators expect more from a feminist representation of women? Through this examination of his career as a film critic as well as his ten feature films and two shorts, in Antonio Pietrangeli, The Director of Women we will dissect the tension between the male director and the female protagonist to investigate the claim that Pietrangeli was, in fact, a feminist. With varying degrees of success, Pietrangeli shows himself to be an ally to the women he represents on screen.
The Peterborough Chronicle, Volume 1
Regular price $195.00 Save $-195.00The present volume addresses the long-felt need for a full critical edition, with translation and commentary on The Peterborough Chronicle, together with an overview of critical writings published up until 2021. It is also the first edition to include a detailed examination and transcription of the early-modern annotations in E and on its interleaves, as well as a systematic analysis of the manuscript's complicated structure. The book consists of three parts: I. Introduction, including the history of research, detailed paleographical and codicological analysis, and discussion of the other Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscripts, and their textual relations; II. The Critical Edition, presenting the text in its immediate seventeenth-century manuscript context, with notes; III. The Modern English Translation, including detailed historical and philological notes. A bibliography, indices, and extensive comparanda complete the book. This edition, translation, and commentary greatly enhance the accessibility and research potential of one of the most important primary sources for the history, language, and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. No one to date has given attention to the 'seventeenth-century manuscript context' of The Peterborough Chronicle. William L'Isle, the manuscript's owner at that time, had the manuscript disbound and interleaved throughout with larger watermarked paper sheets on which he transcribed variant passages from other witnesses to the Chronicle, primarily from witness A, now in the Parker Library, Cambridge. He and other readers also made annotations on the manuscript itself, including Archbishop Parker (†1575), who did so in red chalk. Each of these interventions has been recorded and analyzed in the commentary on the Text presented in this edition. Extensive historical annotations accompany the Translation and bring current scholarship to bear on it. This edition also provides for the first time a set of ninety-five comparanda so that readers can review the evidence for the paleographical analysis found in the Introduction.
Marina Carter and Khal Torabully
Coolitude
Regular price $27.50 Save $-27.50Coolitude is both an intellectual interpretation of and a poetic and artistic immersion into the world of the vanished coolie. This collection of previously unpublished texts, poems and sketches captures the essence of the Indian plantation experience and deconstructs traditional depictions of the status of the coolie in the British Empire.
The concept of 'coolitude' encompasses the experiences of first generation workers together with those of their descendants spread across the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean islands today. The symbolic value of the word lies in both the scope it gives us to interpret the specificities of the coolie experience and its use as a comparative tool. The book embraces 'coolitude' in its various incarnations: the shared experience of the voyaging migrants, the walk from village to port town and the weeks spent on board ship. All Coolies, irrespective of whether they went to Fiji, South Africa, the West Indies or the Indian Ocean islands, underwent an exile from their Indian homeland. 'Coolitude' emphasizes their shared history.
Edited by Jean-Marc Castejon, Borhène Chakroun, Mike Coles, Arjen Deij and Vincent McBride
Developing Qualifications Frameworks in EU Partner Countries
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Qualifications systems are useful tools for modernising education and training. National qualifications frameworks are treated as one aspect of qualifications systems that is useful for improving education and training. The focus is on the reality of policy development in EU partner countries. After reminding the reader that education and training systems, and therefore qualifications systems, are always closely integrated with a country’s social and cultural priorities, this study gives evidence from a range of countries that proves learning can be enhanced by developing the recognition of learning through qualifications, and that the definition of qualifications levels can be useful. The fact that qualifications system reform is just one element of education and training reform is emphasised.
Starting with the complexity of qualifications systems in partner countries and problems facing modernisation, the publication sets out specific examples of how qualifications systems have been used to provide a strategic tool for improving the quality of provision and increasing levels of learning. Examples of these strategies include the creation of qualifications bodies; new legal frameworks; the separation of assessment and certification from providers of training; development of NQFs and moves towards an increased use of learning outcomes in curricula; and qualifications and descriptors for framework levels.
Sub-Saharan African Immigrants’ Stories of Resilience and Courage
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00The purpose of this research is to give a voice to nameless and countless stories that represent the personal lived experiences of Sub-Saharan African immigrants in the US. The authors believe that telling our own stories from our own perspectives is important and empowering because when others tell our stories there are omissions and misrepresentations and a lot of stereotyping.
This book seeks to produce a more specific description of Sub-Saharan African immigration in the US by recording our reflections, experiences, and strategies of coping, as well as those of the participants. We hope that the insights gained from the research in this book will be used by immigrant communities, academic institutions, and governmental agencies in advocating for immigration policies that positively impact the lived experiences of Sub-Saharan African immigrants, and in planning support interventions.
Their voices are heard as they narrate their experiences, which are presented in the book under major themes that emerged from the interviews. These include how and why Sub-Saharan Africans immigrate to the United States of America (USA), their perceptions before, during and after the process of immigration, the challenges they face as they adjust, adapt, and settle in the USA, and the coping strategies they devise. The authors argue that issues of identity and lack of platforms where they can express their concerns as Sub-Saharan African immigrants and be heard are lacking. The authors are also using a phenomenological qualitative approach of collecting and interpreting participants’ personal narratives and their lived experiences
The Whole Durn Human Comedy: Life According to the Coen Brothers
Regular price $16.95 Save $-16.95The Coen Bros. have attracted a wide following and have been rewarded with Oscars and other honors. Some of their films such as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men are cult favorites and box office hits. Yet this team of filmmaking brothers remains misunderstood in some critical circles, partly because, like John Ford, they mischievously refuse to explain themselves to interviewers, preferring to let their work speak for itself. Ethan and Joel Coen also delight in unsettling cinematic conventions and confounding audiences while raising disturbing questions about human nature.
Mixing film genres and styles, playing with narrative in postmodernist ways, the Coens’ films display shocking tonal shifts as they blend comedy and drama and, most controversially, comedy and violence. This potent mélange of themes and stylistic approaches makes the Coens’ films adventurous, unpredictable probes into social anxieties and reflections on the omnipresence of evil in the modern world. In their trenchant satire, these brilliant writer-directors are heirs to Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, and as satirists tend to do, the Coens sometimes provoke audience anger and incomprehension along with enjoyment of their penchant for black comedy.
Film historian and critic Joseph McBride jousts with the Coens’ detractors while defining the filmmakers’ freshness and originality. The quirkily individualistic Coens are the kind of personal filmmakers the increasingly conglomerated American cinema rarely fosters anymore, a distinction partly attributable to their following in Europe and their partial financing by European sources. This critical study goes beyond the often-superficial and confused nature of Coen criticism to illuminate their artistic personalities and contributions to cinematic culture.
Marina Carter and Khal Torabully
Coolitude
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Coolitude is both an intellectual interpretation of and a poetic and artistic immersion into the world of the vanished coolie. This collection of previously unpublished texts, poems and sketches captures the essence of the Indian plantation experience and deconstructs traditional depictions of the status of the coolie in the British Empire.
The concept of 'coolitude' encompasses the experiences of first generation workers together with those of their descendants spread across the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean islands today. The symbolic value of the word lies in both the scope it gives us to interpret the specificities of the coolie experience and its use as a comparative tool. The book embraces 'coolitude' in its various incarnations: the shared experience of the voyaging migrants, the walk from village to port town and the weeks spent on board ship. All Coolies, irrespective of whether they went to Fiji, South Africa, the West Indies or the Indian Ocean islands, underwent an exile from their Indian homeland. 'Coolitude' emphasizes their shared history.
Edited by Edward Fullbrook
Real World Economics
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00The articles in this book have been selected for their importance to the reform movement and for their accessibility to the general reader. Intelligibility is one of the movement's two keystones. "Real economic problems" concern real people, so their analysis must be made intelligible to an educated general public if real democracy is to function.
The second keystone of the post-autistic movement is pluralism. All analysis proceeds on the basis of concepts that admit only a partial view of the economy, thereby predetermining the set of possible conclusions. This requires economists to begin to develop an ethos of honesty regarding the limitations of their chosen approaches. In engaging and thought-provoking prose, the 66 chapters of this book bring these and other conflicts out into the open and place them in the context of the major issues of the 21st century.
Edited by James K. Boyce, Sunita Narain, and Elizabeth A. Stanton
Reclaiming Nature
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00In ‘Reclaiming Nature’, leading environmental thinkers from across the globe explore the relationship between human activities and the natural world. The authors draw inspiration and lessons from diverse experiences ranging from community-based fishery and forestry management to innovative strategies for combating global warming. They advance a compelling new vision of environmentalism, founded on the link between the struggle to reclaim nature and the struggle for social justice. This book advances three core propositions: first, humans can and do have positive as well as negative effects on the natural environment. By restoring degraded ecosystems and engaging in co-evolutionary processes, people can add value to nature's wealth. Second, every person has an inalienable right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. These are not privileges to be awarded on the basis of political power, nor commodities to be allocated on the basis of purchasing power -- they are fundamental human rights. Third, low-income communities are not the root of the problem. Rather they are the heart of the solution. In cities and the countryside across the world, ordinary people are forging a vibrant new environmentalism that is rooted in the defense of their lives and livelihoods.
Changes in the Higher Education Sector
Regular price $24.95 Save $-24.95The book begins with a background reference to the importance and impact that both teaching and research activities have traditionally had on a university’s status in terms of its reputation and standing. It focuses on the political changes in the United Kingdom and highlights how the shifts in political thinking in recent years has changed the demographics of students entering higher education. Higher education is funded and the shift from being state funded to the student-funded model has meant that focus has shifted for higher education institutes to one in which the student is now being viewed as a fee-paying customer seeking value for money. As a consequence, universities are expected to be held more accountable to the service they are providing.
With the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in the United Kingdom, the importance and status of teaching is being raised by attempting to rebalance the dominance of research and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) which for so long has been the main focus of higher education Institutions. The book explores the potential controversy that has arisen around the assessment of teaching quality used as a metric from the TEF outcomes to allow higher education institutes to increase tuition fees for students. The book explores a range of student-centered approaches to teaching and learning that are proving to be very effective in enhancing the overall student teaching experience and also examines the argument that a one-size-fits-all model does not necessarily work well in higher education. With the ever more advances in digital technology, the book considers ways in which this technology can assist academics in helping to enhance the teaching and learning in the classroom as well as in cases of emergency scenarios such as the shutdown of education institutions in March 2020 due to COVID-19.
Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–90
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ explores under-examined relationships between poetry and historiography between 1760 and 1790. These were the decades of Hugh Blair’s ‘Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal’ (1763) and ‘Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres’ (1783), Thomas Percy’s ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry’ (1765), Adam Ferguson’s ‘Essay on the History of Civil Society’ (1767) and Lord Monboddo’s ‘Of the Origin and Progress of Language’ (1774). In these texts and many more, verse is examined for what it can tell the historian about the progress of enlightened man to civil society. By historicizing poetry, these theorists used it as a lens through which we might observe our development from savagery to ‘polish’, with oral verse often cited as proof of the backwardness or immaturity of man from which he has awoken.
‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ deepens our understanding of the relationship between poetry and ideas of progress with sustained attention to aesthetic, historical, antiquarian and prosodic texts from these decades. In five case studies, this volume demonstrates how verse was employed to deliver deeply ambivalent reports on human progress. In this pre-‘Romantic’, pre-‘Utilitarian’ age, those reading verse with an eye to what it could convey about the journey towards the Enlightenment Republic of letters were in fact telling stories as subtle and ambiguous as the rhythms of the verse being read. Rather than focusing on a limited set of particular poets, ‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ pays close attention to the theories of versification which were circulating in the later anglophone eighteenth century. With numerous examples from poems and writing on poetics, this book shows how the poetic line becomes a site at which one may make assertions about human development even as one may observe and appreciate the expressive effects of metred language.
The central contention of ‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ is that the historians and theorists of the time did not merely instrumentalize verse in the construction of historical narratives of progress, but that attention to the particular characteristics of verse (rhythm and metre, line endings, stress contours, rhyme, etc.) had a kind of agency – it crucially reshaped – historical knowledge in the time. ‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ is a sustained assertion that poetry makes appeals to what was known as one’s ‘taste’, exerting aesthetic forces, and by so doing mediating one’s understanding of human development. It claims that this mediation has a special shape and force that has never undergone sufficient exploration.
Edited by James K. Boyce, Sunita Narain, and Elizabeth A. Stanton
Reclaiming Nature
Regular price $29.95 Save $-29.95In ‘Reclaiming Nature’, leading environmental thinkers from across the globe explore the relationship between human activities and the natural world. The authors draw inspiration and lessons from diverse experiences ranging from community-based fishery and forestry management to innovative strategies for combating global warming. They advance a compelling new vision of environmentalism, founded on the link between the struggle to reclaim nature and the struggle for social justice. This book advances three core propositions: first, humans can and do have positive as well as negative effects on the natural environment. By restoring degraded ecosystems and engaging in co-evolutionary processes, people can add value to nature's wealth. Second, every person has an inalienable right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. These are not privileges to be awarded on the basis of political power, nor commodities to be allocated on the basis of purchasing power -- they are fundamental human rights. Third, low-income communities are not the root of the problem. Rather they are the heart of the solution. In cities and the countryside across the world, ordinary people are forging a vibrant new environmentalism that is rooted in the defense of their lives and livelihoods.
American Horror Story and Cult Television
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00Over ten seasons since 2011, the television series American Horror Story (AHS), created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, has continued to push the boundaries of the televisual form in new and exciting ways. Emerging in a context which has seen a boom in popularity for horror series on television, AHS has distinguished itself from its ‘rivals’ such as The Walking Dead, Bates Motel or Penny Dreadful through its diverse strategies and storylines which have seen it explore archetypal narratives of horror culture as well as engaging with real historical events. Utilising a repertory company model for its casting, the show has challenged issues around contemporary politics, heteronormativity, violence on the screen, and disability to name but a few. This new collection of essays approaches the AHS anthology series through a variety of critical perspectives within the broader field of television studies and its transections with other disciplines.
The book includes sections on the industry context for the making of American Horror Story, the intertextual territory upon which the anthology series has been built, the societal and spatial aspects of American Horror Story, as well as its broader but specific relationship to otherness. The book accounts for the broad narratological sweep of AHS which crosses different times and locations while playfully exploring and openly acknowledging its internal linkages.
Mike King, with a Foreword by Sir Adrian Cadbury
Quakernomics
Regular price $19.95 Save $-19.95This book explores Quaker enterprises from 1700 to the twentieth century as examples of an ethical capitalism, and tests them against prominent economists and their concern for economic justice. King offers ‘Quakernomics’ as a model for corporate social responsibility in the modern world, exploring Quaker businesses which combine commercial success with philanthropy and social activism.
The volume offers an exploration of the theory and practice of Quaker enterprise through the centuries, set against the ideas of prominent economists such as Smith, Marx, Marshall, Schumpeter, the Austrian School, Keynes, Friedman, Krugman, Stiglitz and Sachs. It also analyses the role that Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman have had in leading to what King underlines as the largely unethical capitalism of today.
Covering the work of Quaker chocolatiers, iron masters and bankers, ‘Quakernomics’ presents a historical account of the Quakers’ practice of a ‘total capitalism’, which King argues we should regard not as an antiquated nicety but as an immediately relevant guide for today’s global economy.
Procreation and Population in Historical Social Science
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Procreation, the forgotten basis of population dynamics, and its macrohistorical results, are at the center of this book seen through the lenses of world-system analysis in a nondogmatic way that includes the work started by Jack Goldstone on agrarian-bureaucratic states and their population cycles between 1250 and 1850. Procreation and Population presents population theories, especially those that give a proper place to the demand for labour, generally not considered by professional demographers. Criticizing the intellectual division of labour that separates demography from the unique historical social science that world-systems analysis is building up, the book shows that the commonplaces of the demographic discipline are just a self-celebratory view of Western industrial society.
Attentive to gender relations, the book brings importance to the very base of history (“the weight of number”, in the words of Fernand Braudel) and boldly tracks “the big picture” of population dynamics in times of postmodernist taboos on generalizations and on the search for the historical laws of human society. Complete with data, estimates and sources about the current population trends, this interdisciplinary effort sheds light on the historical paths leading to the current unprecedented numbers of humans on the globe: the forecasted and impossible perennial population growth would be just what capitalism needed to perpetuate its D-M-D spiral.
Consumer Nationalism in China
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00China has made nationalism central as the country seeks to achieve a “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The new wave of consumer nationalism in China reached a fever pitch in recent years. This book will be the first book that systematically analyzes the different waves of consumer nationalism in China, the types of its nationalistic consumer actions, and the critical impact of the new wave which has increased the possibility of a consumer base that could turn hostile at any moment. It argues that the outbursts of nationalist consumer outrage has become an increasing risk for businesses in China or businesses dealing with Chinese markets, and that as China faces growing diplomatic challenges abroad, multinational companies need to operate with extreme caution when dealing with the world’s second-largest economy.
The book argues that interest in buying and personal pleasure is the most common feature of Chinese modern life. It provides a historical context for Chinese consumers’ nationalism and characteristics of each wave. It answers questions of how Chinese nationalism has changed in recent years and what consequences would the emerged new wave lead to. It looks at the different type of consumer nationalistic actions in China and their
consequences with cases. It argues that China’s emergence as the world’s number two economy carries
political implications that complicate the ambitions of multinational businesses. It discusses some major consumer nationalistic actions in China in the past five years, and proposes a number of pragmatic strategies that could have been taken by some companies in terms of reputation management. The book concludes that the rise of nationalism and governments that interfere in markets pose a threat to the global economic system.
Wittgenstein and Artificial Intelligence, Volume II
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00The two volumes on Wittgenstein and AI aim to trace and suggest Wittgensteinian influences in some of the most cutting-edge areas of research in Artificial Intelligence (such as Computation, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and the use of automation in legal settings). The collection is driven by an essentially interdisciplinary approach, featuring articles from philosophers, computer scientists and legal scholars, writing on a broad range of topics in AI.
The chapters across these two volumes are grouped into two sets of themes: Mind and Language and Value and Governance. These themes correspond to two major areas of research in the philosophical study of AI: the computational mind and the ethics of artificial intelligence. These volumes make a significant and unprecedented contribution to the question of what Wittgenstein’s philosophy can offer to the ever-growing field of AI. It aims to provide insight for both philosophers and non-philosophers alike, offering reflection on the significance of Wittgenstein’s work for AI, and on the implications of advancements in AI technology for Wittgenstein’s philosophy and philosophy influenced by Wittgenstein.
VOLUME II: Wittgenstein and AI (Volume II): Value and Governance. This volume includes chapters on ethical AI, rules in AI, rules and the law, human-AI interaction, the moral implications of robotics and the status of AI art.
The Lure of Economic Nationalism
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00The Lure of Economic Nationalism addresses an important topic, namely, the continued appeal of economic nationalism. It places economic nationalism in both historical and contemporary contexts. It begins with a historical consideration of mercantilism and the writings of Friedrich List, considering both from multiple perspectives in economic history and policy and international relations. It then turns to the political psychology of zero-sum thinking, its role as a heuristic device but also its significant limitations.
The book considers both the aggressive trade policy of the Trump Administration in the United States and the Brexit process in the United Kingdom. It also advocates for the alternative to economic nationalism in the form of a rules-based, multilateral trading system and the World Trade Organization. It argues that going beyond zero-sum outcomes is better suited to address current problems. It considers the rising tides of ethnonationalism and the alternative of civic nationalism. It even addresses economic nationalism in the recent COVID-19 pandemic and multilateral approaches to pandemic preparedness.
The Lure of Economic Nationalism is written in an accessible manner and draws deeply from research in economics and political science. It will be of interest to policymakers, economists, political scientists and to the informed public.
In the World of the Outcasts
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Pëtr 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.
June Sturrock
Jane Austen's Families
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00“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.
Theatricality in the Horror Film
Regular price $79.95 Save $-79.95As is well known, the horror film generally presents a situation where normality is threatened by a monster. From this premise, this book argues that scary movies often create their terrifying effects stylistically and structurally through a radical break with the realism of normality in the form of monstrous theatricality. Theatricality in the horror film expresses itself in many ways. First and foremost, it comes across in the physical performance of monstrosity; the over-the-top performance of a chainsaw-wielding serial killer who performs his nefarious acts to terrify both his victims within the film and the audience in the cinema. Theatrical artifice can also appear as a stagy cemetery with broken-down tombstones and twisted, gnarly trees, or through the use of violently aberrant filmic techniques, or in the oppressive claustrophobia of a single-room setting reminiscent of classical drama. All these are examples of the cinematic theatricality of horror. Any performative element of a film that flaunts its ‘difference’ from what is deemed realistic or normal on screen might qualify as an instance of theatrical artifice, creating an intense affect in the audience. The artificiality of the frightening spectacle is at the heart of the dark pleasures of horror.
The ultimate goal of ‘Theatricality in the Horror Film’ is to suggest that the theatricality of horror cinema echoes the genre’s roots in ancient tragedy. Like Greek tragedy, horror cinema allows spectators to confront their deepest fears within the safe space of the auditorium, thus affording the audience a cathartic experience. In addition to catharsis, the horror film’s dichotomy between the stable status quo of normality and the shockingly disruptive moment of horror also rehearses tragedy’s genealogy famously articulated by Nietzsche: the terrifying carnal pleasures of Dionysian excess formalized through a dialectic confrontation with the static Apollonian principles of order, civility and normality. Tragic theatricality, this book contends, is the essence of horror cinema.
June Sturrock
Jane Austen's Families
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00“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.
A Critical Edition of Caroline Norton's Love in "The World"
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00Caroline 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.
Socialising the Biomedical Turn in HIV Prevention
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00This 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.
Literature and Transformation
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00This 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.
The European Byron
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00Explores Byron’s borrowings from Thomas Moore, Torquato Tasso, Percy Shelley, and so on, and transformations as they manifested themselves in his reading.
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 such works as “The Lament of Tasso” and “Don Juan”. In establishing an Italian identity, Byron relied upon the Italian writers he translated (Boiardo, Pulci, Dante), Thomas Moore’s “Fudge Family in Paris,” and Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo,” as well as his transformation of Goethe’s “Faust” in “Manfred”. 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 Staël. 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 nineteenth century, 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. I begin by examining Thomas Moore, whose “Fudge Family in Paris” helped shape the tone and style of Byron’s Don Juan, despite its more obvious European borrowings. Byron’s conversations with Madame de Staël 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 Madame de Staël’s Corinne, Ugo Foscolo’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 Onegin 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 Onegin and Pan Tadeusz, show the legacy of Byron’s poetic influence and his political support for freedom of speech.
Literature and Transformation
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00This 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.
Srilata Chatterjee
Congress Politics in Bengal 1919-1939
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00Set 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.
Edited by Matthew Campbell and Michael Perraudin
The Voice of the People
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘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.
Jason A. Kirk
India and the World Bank
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00'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
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘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.
Wittgenstein on Other Minds
Regular price $110.00 Save $-110.00Constantine 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.
Erik Ringmar
Surviving Capitalism
Regular price $29.95 Save $-29.95Human 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?
Rabindranath Sen
A First Course in Functional Analysis
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00‘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 in Ireland
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00Digital 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.
Minutes to Midnight, 2nd Edition
Regular price $24.95 Save $-24.95In 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 Filippovich Iakubovich, Translated with an Introduction by Andrew A. Gentes
In the World of the Outcasts
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Pëtr 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.
Rabindranath Sen
A First Course in Functional Analysis
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00‘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.
Art and Design in 1960s New York
Regular price $125.00 Save $-125.00When 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.